Revelle.robinson Crusoe Power Point

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Exploring the ‘New World’



Colonizing the Americas



The Slave Trade



The Middle Passage



Olaudah Equiano (1745-97)



Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)



Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)



Daniel Defoe



• From “Foe” to “Defoe” – a touch of class?

• Dissenter = Protestant who does not conform

to state religion of Church of England

• Jailed for bankruptcy and dissenting religious

views

• Pilloried



Pillory



• Shame culture vs guilt culture

• E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational

(1951)

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)



Defoe

• Merchant – made and lost fortunes

• Writer – published on almost everything –

informed, opinionated, polemical

• Novels: Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe

•

published late in life – ca 1719 – 1720s – enormous impact



Modern myths

• Robinson Crusoe

• Faust

• Frankenstein



French version



German adaptation



In Japanese



• ‘baroque’ title = long and detailed

•

Picaresque novel – (Cervantes, Don Quixote)

• Adventure story

–

(Homer, Odyssey )• Religious autobiography

– (Augustine, Confessions)



• Literature of exploration, encounters with the

exotic –

– Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’

– Shakespeare, ‘The Tempest’

– Aphra Behn, ‘Oroonoko’



• Robinson’s youth – the third son

• ‘the middle station’ (6) –the middle class hero

• Guilty adventurer – (cf Faust)

• Colonial Capitalist – from England to Africa to

Brazil to desert island – 1659-1686



Robinson Crusoe and Slavery

• enslaved in Morocco

• ‘At this suprising change of my circumstances,from a merchant to a miserable slave, I wasperfectly overwhelmed’ (17)

• Escapes, sells companion Xury

• Arrives in Brazil: “I bought me a Negro slave, anda European servant also” (31)



Remorse about Xury?

• African boy, sold for 60 Pieces of Eight, “which

I was loath to take, not that I was not willing

to let the Captain have him, but I was very

loath to sell the poor boy’s liberty, who hadassisted me so faithfully in procuring my own”

(28-29).



But not about slavery

• Plans to acquire more slaves illegally, directly

from Africa

William Blake,Illustration from

Steadman’s Expedition

Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam



Shipwrecked!



Salvage

• “money, O Drug! Said I aloud, what art thou

good for?’ (47)



• History of money; increasing abstraction

• coins, clippers, and counterfeiters

•

• multiple currencies

• ‘Quid’ British slang for one pound - £ - from

‘quiddity’ = the real nature of the thing



• Robinson Crusoe as anti-capitalist utopia

• Combined with religious distrust of wealth

• Jesus said, “I tell you this: a rich man will find

it hard to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Irepeat, it is easier for a camel to pass through

the eye of a needle than for a rich man to

enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:23-24).



Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and

the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)



John Calvin (1509 – 1564)

• Election by grace

• Am I one of the elect?

• To find out: work at your ‘calling’ (not just a

job) – work in the world a religious duty

• vs monastic retreat to contemplation

•

vs aristocratic display of wealth, status• vs worldly pomp – hard work, plain clothes,

plain churches



• Weber replaces material explanation of capitalism with a religious one:

• Puritans and Calvinists don’t work to earn money

• they work to reassure themselves that they are

saved

• Material prosperity a by-product of spiritualstriving

• Success in business as sign of election



Ambivalence remains

• Money – reassuring sign of possible

redemption;

• tempting source of worldly pleasure

• Complicates link of Enlightenment with

secularization – religious motivation for

certainty of salvation can lead to secular

success



Crusoe and religious autobiography

• Conversion experience

• Paul, Acts of the Apostles 9:4 “Saul, Saul, why doyou persecute me?”

• Augustine, Confessions, book 8 “tolle, lege” “takeit and read”

• ‘dark night of the soul’

• Tobacco ‘cure’ – recovery – renewed piety



Puritan / Protestant introspection

• Look within – when was I saved?

• Then tell the story

• Increasing subjectivity in literature• - Shakespeare’s soliloquies

• - Montaigne, “Of Experience”

•- Letter-writing

• - Secular autobiographies

• Crusoe’s diary



Back to work

• Home improvement - shelter, crops,

domesticated animals

• Island utopia “it was now that I began sensibly

to feel how much more happy this life I now

led was, with all its miserable circumstances,

than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I ledall the past part of my days” (90)



The conquest of paradise

• Rejects wealth (money as exchange value) for theuse-value of tools, things: “all the good things of this world, are no farther good to us, than theyare for our use” (103)

• Use value vs exchange value

•

And civilizes, conquers his island – as Godcommanded: Genesis 1:29 – ‘Be fruitful andmultiply, fill and earth and subdue it’



‘King’ Robinson

• “to think that this was all my own, that I was king

and lord of all this country … as completely as

any lord of a manor in England” (80)

• “I was lord of the whole manor; or if I pleas’d, I

might call my self king, or emperor over the

whole country which I had possession of. Therewere no rivals. I had no competitor” (103)



• On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond,

Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond …

• “ I’m ruler”, said Yertle , “of all that I see.

But I don’t see enough. That’s the trouble with

me.



Well, that was the end of

the Turtle King’s rule!

For Yertle, the King of all

Sala-ma-Sond,

Fell off his high throne and

fell Plunk! in the pond!



• And today the great Yertle, that Marvelous he,

Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.

And the turtles, of course… all the turtles are

free As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.



A footprint!



• “I was exceedingly surprised with the print of

a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was

very plain to be seen in the sand” (122)

• Satan?

• My own?



Cannibals!

• “the savage wretches had sat down to their

inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their

fellow-creatures” (130-31)



Crusoe’s reactions to cannibalism

• disgust

• violence: “I could think of nothing but how Imight destroy some of these monsters in their

cruel bloody entertainment” (133) • Cultural relativism: “What authority or call I

had, to pretend to be judge and executionerupon these men as criminals” (135)

• Blame the Spanish: “they destroyed millionsof these people … a bloody and unnaturalpiece of cruelty” (136)



• Years pass

• Crusoe lives in fear

• Conceals shelter

• Carries guns

• Builds boat

•

Dreams of a companion, servant, slave



Closer encounters

• Crusoe plans “to get a savage into my possession

… nay, two or three savages, if I had them so as to

make them entirely slaves to me” (157-58)

• Finally: escaped prisoner flees to Robinson

Crusoe: he “kissed the ground, and … taking me

by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, itseems, was in token of swearing to be my slave

for ever” (161)



• “I made him know his name should be Friday,

which was the day I saved his life; I likewise

taught him to say Master, and then let himknow that was to be my name” (163)

•



Robinson Crusoe on Mars



Civilizing the Savage

• Friday puts on clothing

• becomes Christian;

• stops eating people;

• learns English

•

Homi Bhabha on “colonial mimicry” – “almostwhite, but not quite” (The Location of

Culture)



The ‘willing slave’ = Friday

• critique of Spanish

• Genuine friendship? “I began really to love the

creature” (168)

• “his very affections were tied to me, like those

of a child to a father” (165)

• Violent vs benevolent conquest

• ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Rudyard Kipling,

1899



Getting off the island

• 17 Europeans stranded among Friday’s people

• Canoes with captives on island

• “none of my business” (183)

• “to butcher the poor Christian” (184)

• Crusoe directs rescue operation

•

Grants religious tolerance



• Mutineers arrive! (the plot thickens …) will

stay on island

• Mutineers hanged, “whipped and pickled”

(218)

• Off the island – 1686; back in England 1687

• To Portugal; sells thriving plantation in Brazil

• Adventures in the Pyrenees



• Returns to island, promises to send women

• Married (briefly) with children

• “I marry’d, and that not either to my

disadvantage or dissatisfaction” (240)

• Litotes = understatement: ‘not bad’; ‘not

unhappy’; ‘I don’t dislike you …’



• Defoe’s Robinson – the absence of romance,

sexuality

• But plenty in the sequels



Robinson – all all alone – but no



Robinson all, all alone but no

lasting side effects

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