Interpreting Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Secondo me, the most convincing interpretation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is that of colonialism, Christianity, and civilization.

By the time Robinson Crusoe was written, various European nations, including England, had acquired for themselves well-established (and in some cases, vast) empires Asia, Africa, and South America. There were also many written records of the experience of various colonizers by that time, which, no doubt, Defoe would have been familiar with.

The English settlers in North America were attempting to create something new, something different from the old world in Europe. This would have been possible only if the settlers were in absolute control of the place. In the novel, Crusoe realizes the same about his role in the island and goes about attempting to become its governor, ruler, authority, and sole power. With this, the well-established colonial image of the white man, establishing rule and dominion over the natives, comes to the fore. Trader becomes potentate in a strange, faraway land – a colonial story that has repeated itself over and over again in history.

Just like European colonialism in real life, Defoe’s dominion over the island originated as a fantasy of power and control, in a daydream, as we can see in the following excerpt:

My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in Subjects, and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made. How like a King I look’d….My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute Lord and Law-giver; they all owed their Lives to me, and were ready to lay down their Lives, if there had been such an occasion for it, for Me.

Again, just like European colonialism in real life, Defoe worked hard to make his dream come true. Crusoe, who had just dreamt of himself as a potentate, proceeds to dominate the whole island and his newly-acquired servant, Friday.

It’s noteworthy that Crusoe chooses to name the man that he meets, and acquires as servant, as he sees fit. Friday is called Friday because that’s what Crusoe decided his name would be, regardless of what Friday might have called himself in the past. This was domination in its most complete form. Crusoe doesn’t stop there, however. He goes on to give Friday a new identity altogether, a Christian one. The so-called civilizing mission of the white man is on full display here. The images of the cannibalistic natives who need to be either killed off or subjected to a civilizing mission completes the picture of European colonialism.

After Crusoe has completely conquered the island, and subjugated the natives, he views himself as the sole wielder of power and authority, and dispenser of rule and justice. In the eleventh year of his stay on the island, he speaks of himself thusly:

Lord of the whole Manor, or, if I pleased, I might call myself King, or Emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals. I had no competitor, none to dispute sovereignty or command with me.

The language of dominance is loud and clear, similar to the real-life European colonizers who brooked no dissent. Crusoe, like the colonizers, believed he had an undoubted right to govern and dispose of the natives as he thought fit, by any means and measures necessary.

The Form and Style of Richardson's Pamela

Samuel Richardson wrote the entire story of Pamela in the form of letters that the eponymous protagonist writes and hides. The writing style is intimate and it helps the author present Pamela’s point of view as a first-person account. Therefore, we can call this an epistolary novel.

The author meant for Pamela to be an advice book, meant to “cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes.” The book and the heroine were meant for the ethical edification of female readers, who, when they contemplated on the heroine’s many lovely virtues, could become like her.
Pamela works very well as a book of advice because it uses character types that symbolize good and bad human strengths and frailties. There is Mr. B, “a fashionable libertine, who allowed himself in the free indulgence of his passions.” We also have Lady Davers, who exhibits “a deformity of unreasonable passion.”

Pamela, on the other hand, has numerous virtues that the author suggests are worth emulating. Among other things, she is shown to be obliging to her equals, possessed of generosity and a forgiving spirit, meek and kind, prudent and charitable, betrothed to her God, and restrained in her feminine passions.

To buttress his claim that the book is based on a true story, the author employs the realist technique, describing events in extensive detail, and characterizing people and situations with clarity and elaborateness. He forms our opinions of his characters both through direct commentary as well as through their own revelatory actions.

In other places in the novel, the author also uses the melodramatic and sentimental novel forms to drive home his agenda.

The Novel's Differences from the Romance, Allegory, and Epic

We could define the novel as a chronicle of quotidian life. The rise of the novel as a mainstream literary form is marked by the shift of focus in storytelling from romance and courtly love to ordinary life. Traditionally, the novel has been traced to the early part of the 18th century, to Daniel Defoe’s realist narratives in Robinson Crusoe.

The Romance, on the other hand, is usually a tale of love, danger, courage, and chivalry. The hero goes through various trials and tribulations before attaining his heroine or rescuing her from some horrible circumstance. The trials usually test his virtue and resolve, but ultimately, the hero’s love and faith triumph and help him win  the battle against evil and temptation.

The Romance dealt with character types (stubborn king, devious villain, and so on) and stock figures (rakes, fops, and so on) and situations (battles, rescues, and so on). It involved improbable events that featured gods, angels, demons in a world that was remote and far removed from that of the readers.

Beowulf and Brut are prime examples of the Romance tradition in English. Both of them explored themes of faith, love, courage, valor, fidelity, moral uprightness, and so on.

Then we have the Allegory, a literary form that worked on multiple levels – the superficial level and the deeper level. Allegorical writers used this form to deliver a message to and instruct attentive readers. John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, traces the journey of one individual, Christian, which stands for the journey of all true Christians that are wedded to God. Bunyan sought to, through Christian’s life, create a model of Christian piety for all believers.

Finally, we have the Epic, which was traditionally a genre of poetry, but whose scope has now expanded to novels plays, and other literary forms. The Epic is centered on heroic characters and traces actions that take place on a majestic scale. Epics, typically, explore themes of war, valor, and death, and martyrdom set against the backdrop of grand struggles that last over very long periods of time.

Examples of the Epic genre include Heroides by Ovid, Aeneid by Virgil, and Illiad and Odyssey by Homer. Brut by Layamon and Beowulf can be considered as examples of the Epic genre in English.

An Examination of the Restoration "Comedy of Manners" Genre

The “comedy of manners” genre is a form of comedy that lampoons the life, manners, and pretensions of upper class society. The characters in this genre use social artifice with each other while revealing to the audience their true intentions. This genre was usually characterized by a flamboyant display of bawdy, ribald dialogues, sharp repartee and ripostes, bedroom intrigues, double entendre, sexual innuendoes, foppishness, and rakish, sexually promiscuous behavior.

Our first exhibit of this remarkable genre is William Wycherley’s The Country Wife—a delightful tale about the hostile, May/December marriage between Margery and Bud Pinchwife, and Margery’s affair with local rake, Harry Horner. Horner, a married man, pretends to be impotent to get close to wives of his friends. His friends don’t mind, since they consider him to be impotent, while is he cuckolding them at the same time, including the aforementioned Bud Pinchwife.

The Country Wife embodies all the characteristics of the comedy of manners genre. It uses absurd, over-the-top wordplay to achieve these characteristics. Consider the following question by Lady Fidget to Horner (Scene II, Act I, Lines 658-64):

…cou’d you be so generous? so truly a Man of honor, as for the sakes of us Woman of honor, to cause yourself to be reported no Man? No Man! and to suffer your self the greatest shame that could fall upon a Man, that none might fall upon us Women by your conversation

The much-married Lady Fidget has had a sexual affair with Horner, but now preposterously demands that he confirm to her and to the world that he is truly impotent, so that her reputation may be untarnished! Note the author’s use of the innocuous word “conversation” to mean sex!

Another outstanding example of this genre is William Congreve's The Way of the World, where we have Mirabell, a witty and ironic man-about-town who is in love with and who is loved back by Millament, the ward of vain, crusty, and formidable Lady Wishfort—an old bat with pretensions to beauty. To be able to marry Millament, Mirabell must first win over her aunt. To this end, he embarks on a seduction of Lady Wishfort who returns his sexual advances in kind. When Mrs. Marwood, a woman whose love for Mirabell was not returned, threatens his scheme, Mirabell reveals one of Mrs. Marwood’s past indiscretions to Lady Wishfort – Mrs. Marwood was Lady Wishfort’s son-in-law Fainall’s mistress. Lady Wishfort becomes eternally indebted to Mirabell for saving her daughter from the scandal of a divorce and consents to Mirabell’s marriage to Millament.

This play excellently documents the hypocrisy, double standards, and the two-facedness of the English upper class from the period. Take the following claim made by Lady Wishfort about having raised her daughter to hate men (Act V, Scene V, Lines 161-169):

…I chiefly made it my own care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to impress upon her tender years, a young Odium and Aversion to the very sight of men….she’d never look at a man in the face but her own father, or the chaplain.

But, in reality, Lady Wishfort herself is in active pursuit of a man to marry, despite her many protestations to the contrary! Despite her projected self-righteousness, she has no moral qualms about being predatory and ruthless to further her own marital interests. At one point, she tells Mrs. Marwood, “what’s Integrity to an Opportunity”!

In this manner, we see how both The Country Wife and The Ways of the World both embody and epitomize the many wonderful characteristics of the “comedy of manners” genre.

Neoclassicism and the "Mock Heroic" Form

The term “mock heroic” refers to the most prominent poetic style of Augustan poetry. Mock heroic poems imitated the epic poetry of classical Greek and Roman poets such as Homer, Virgil, and Ovid.  However, instead of the epics’ heroic themes of war, valor, and death, and martyrdom, Augustan poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope used the form to discuss mundane, quotidian things like family politics, quarrels in a marriage, fashion, and so on. The mock-heroic form of poetry used the elevated epic form to describe (sometimes, ridicule) inconsequential themes.

The mock-heroic form is closely related to the term “neoclassicism,” a Western movement in literature and other art forms that drew inspiration from the classical works of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Writers in the neoclassicism form sought inspiration from what they considered to be classical virtues – balance, order, restraint, and so on – to produce prose, poetry, and drama. Neoclassical writers asserted their intentions in clear, detailed, and often magnificent prose. Some neoclassicists even believed that the only way for writers of their time to become great, even unparalleled, was to imitate the ancients. 

Dryden's Use of Imagery to Satirize Shadwell in "MacFlecknoe"

John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell were contemporaries and rival poets during the Restoration. They disagreed on almost everything: the heritage of the poet Ben Jonson, their preferred styles of wit, the purpose of comedy, and so on. They also had diametrically-opposite political leanings: Shadwell was a Whig, while Dryden was an avowed monarchist.

All of these many differences gave great cause to Dryden to lampoon Shadwell. This he did to spectacular effect in his groundbreaking satirical mock epic, MacFlecknoe (1682). The name of this satire was based on the real-life poet Richard Flecknoe, whom Dryden associated with poetic dullness.  By comparing Flecknoe with Shadwell, Dryden, with extraordinary success, used Flecknoe as a stalking horse from behind which he assailed Shadwell.

As stated earlier, MacFlecknoe is a mock epic. Like a good mock epic, it uses the elevated style of classical Greek and Roman poems to ridicule the object of the author’s contempt. All heroes of classical poems had one defining characteristic: cunning is Odysseus’, wrath is Achilles’, and in the case of Flecknoe (and by extension, Shadwell’s), it was dullness. In one quick, sweeping blow, Dryden appropriates and then subverts the concept of a defining characteristic by assigning to Flecknoe, and Shadwell, a negative defining characteristic as his sole virtue.

The poem works as well as it does because of the sophisticated juxtaposition of the lofty, classical literary style with the Easter egg-like quality of the negative nouns and adjectives used to describe the mock hero.

Dryden also used literary inversion and absurdity with extraordinary effect to attack Shadwell indirectly, as demonstrated in the following lines:

                  The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
                  But Sh------ never deviates into sense.

By accusing other poets of pretending to be meaningful, Dryden seems to be damning them. In the next line, Dryden deploys his skills in inversion to devastating effect: he says that Shadwell is unlike them, with no such vice of pretension to make meaning. Shadwell just never makes sense!

This satirical bait-and-switch is a recurring theme throughout the poem, as we later see Dryden channeling Flecknoe in the following line:

                  Sh------ alone my perfect image bears

A key aspect of satire is to use praise as a way of criticizing, damning with faint praise, as Alexander Pope would put it. Dryden’s opinion of Flecknoe is as clear as daylight: Dryden thinks Flecknoe is dull and stupid! And by using fanciful language and sentence construction to let us know that Flecknoe believes Shadwell to be his literary heir, Dryden delicately lets us know that he thinks Shadwell is equally dull and stupid too!

Restoration Comedy and its Significant Features

The term Restoration refers to the return of monarchy to England with the crowning of Charles II in 1660. However, the restored monarchy was constitutional in nature, which meant that the newly-installed Parliament introduced checks and balances to the previously-untrammelled powers of the monarchy. The Restoration immediately followed a period of social and political upheaval and a short-lived “Protectorate” under Oliver Cromwell.

The most well-known literary genre of the Restoration was drama, especially comedy drama, although it must be said that a large number of tragedy dramas were also staged during this time.
Restoration comedy was usually based in and around London and specialized in lampooning upper class pretensions. Restoration comedy was multifaceted and included three main sub-genres: comedy of manners, humor, and intrigue.

The leading group of 5 comic playwrights of the Restoration period, popularly known as the Big Five, included George Etherege, William Congreve, William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Sir John Vanbrugh. The primary aim of the Big Five was to rip the mask off the English upper classes and expose the rank hypocrisy, immorality, and corruption that festered within. Their comedies contained a great number of intrigues, especially concerning marriage and morality. Satire was used to great effect, as were character types, such as the innocent widow or the gullible young man. Stock social situations such as cuckoldry and amorous pursuits were par for the course, as were adultery and gossip.