|
|
This is only a preview of the paper
Click here to register and get the full text.
Existing members click here to login
|
|
|
In the years 1719 to 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote three novels -- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and The Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana -- which are generally considered the first examples of the modern novel. ... Where many fictions by his contemporaries read today as generalised and remote, Defoeís narrators emphasise the plain description of events and pragmatic or moral reflection on their implications in a form which makes their experiences and their responses seem remarkably modern even to this day.
The concrete immediacy of Defoeís writing is complemented by a content that is intriguingly distant to most readerís experiences. ... In the case of Defoe, as in the case of many later realists, the slight remoteness of the content is domesticated by the common-sensical nature of the charactersí mentalities, by their desire to explain themselves and judge themselves in terms of Christian ethics, and by their choice of story and incident which will take the reader close to concerns which continue to have political and moral relevance. Describe the moral dilemmas of a woman who must choose between starving or selling her body to a man, as Defoe does in Moll Flanders and Roxana, and you describe a basic moral crux of societies which place absolute moral burdens on individuals who have limited means to alter their material conditions. ...
Part of the appeal of Defoeís narratives is therefore that they represent general experiences, but another part is that they represent these experiences in extremis ñ for example, on a desert island, or in the criminal low life of London, or whoring with kings and princes. It is in these exotic settings where middle class patterns of thought are not normally found that Defoe stages a subjectivity which is typically Protestant, middle class and aggressively capitalist: his heroes and heroines are obsessionally self-regarding, self-reliant individuals who see the world as an alien system governed by economic self-interest. ... The same historical forces also gave rise to the genre of commercial advice to which Defoe himself contributed several pamphlets and a major two-volume work, The Complete English Tradesman (1726). ... Where later writers addressed a book-buying market which had diverse and sophisticated expectations, Defoe worked at a time when the novel was barely distinguishable from the latest crime report hawked around the public hangings at Tyburn or sold in the form of quasi-factual news papers that poured from the printing presses of the burgeoning capitalist society. The range of Defoeís output is probably unparallelled in the history of English letters, extending in prose and verse through overt and covert political propaganda, highly technical commentary on how to fund public debt, satires on the excesses of stock market speculators, advice books on sexual morality, newspaper interviews with prominent criminals, biographies of famous pirates, works of contemporary history, a maritime atlas, a history of the devil. Defoeís ability to turn his hand to so many genres indicates his wide-ranging talent, but it is also symptomatic of the expanding and as yet relatively undifferentiated nature of the print market, and of Defoeís view of writing as a form of commercial manufacture. ... Many of Defoeís contemporaries derided him as a ëGrub Street Hackí. ... But in Defoeís times, for a writer to shift allegiances like this posed questions that were very troubling. ... He educated his son at the most famous Nonconformist academy of his day, Charles Mortons in Newington Green, and it is probable that Daniel was trained for the Presbyterian ministry. ... But, as in his novels, Defoe was able to recover his position and five years later we find him owning a factory at Tilbury which makes the bricks and tiles for Greenwich hospital (todays Royal Naval College and National Maritime Museum), and drawing a salary as Commissioner for the Glass Tax. ...
When William fell from his horse and died in 1702, Defoe lost his patron and protector and was soon imprisoned for seditious libel (see ëThe Chronology of Defoeís Timesí in this edition.) Bankrupted whilst in prison, the only way Defoe could extricate himself from the political and economic mire was to become a paid propagandist in the Tory cause, a role he was to occupy until 1714 when the incoming Whigs imprisoned him in turn, but then let him out on condition he would continue to write for the Tories but take the edge off their attacks. ... Defoe was henceforth frequently criticised as a man without honesty, but whilst he wrote on behalf of a conservative tendency with which he did not sympathise, he never betrayed his Dissenting and democratic sentiments, and the world-view he offered was a consistent development of the Lockeís contractarian premises. The insufficiencies of this ideology are therefore at the root of Defoeís problems with the world; they are among the driving forces of his novels, each of which can be seen as trying to achieve a satisfactory imaginative solution to a contradiction between what Locke proposes and the reality his class is constructing. ... Defoeís problem is that in Moll Flanders as in Roxana they are deadly serious and protracted beyond plausibility, a formal failure which escapes notice only because the whole text treats all human relations exclusively as trading relations: ëWhat do I get out of it? ...
When one reads Roxana in relation to such other works by Defoe as Conjugal Lewdness (which despite its saucy title is a long moral exhortation in favour of monogamy and proper sexual morality inside marriage), one can observe a systematic pattern of representation which originates in the teaching of moral philosophy in Charles Mortonís academy where scholars were taught to argue casuistically about how one could square Christian ethics with actual behaviour in situations of duress. An example of this teaching to which Defoe often referred was the dilemma of people besieged for a long time ñ could they legitimately eat the bodies of their fallen friends? Defoe maintained that they could and should, and generally held that such sins could be palliated by necessity. ... As a Christian moralist who understands the harshness of economic reality, Defoe probably wanted his readers to consider this issue very seriously. ... And, as a merchant, Defoe thought that the best index of honesty was trading fairly. ... There are no doubt many reasons which motivate this refusal - Defoeís need to maintain the excitement of his scandalous narrative chief amongst them - but the reasons which Roxana actually gives are very revealing:
I told him . ... Defoe, as the propagandist for fair and unambiguous contracts, was always ready to point out where a legal situation was insufficient, and always fierce in his condemnation of double standards and economic inefficiency. Defoe, as the proponent of mercantile rationalism, was committed to individual economic independence as the basis for moral probity and as a prerequisite for political rights. ... This episode reinforces another theme of the novel - the destructive influence of a parasitic aristocracy - which is often rehearsed by Roxana (speaking very clearly in Defoeís voice) when she criticises the Prince for wasting large amounts of time and money on her when he should be devoting these resources to his wife and family. ... The novel here runs parallel to an argument which Defoe conducted in an exchange of pamphlets with Bernard de Mandeville on the question whether aristocratic expenditure on luxuries was of benefit to society in general or was a waste of the substance of the ruling class, and how wage costs should be related to circulation. Economic theory at this time saw the circulation of goods and money as the cause of wealth, rather than the manufacture of goods, and Defoe himself believed that the more money circulated, the more everyone benefited.
Roxanaís third refusal - which in the event is quickly over-come by the Dutchman - also embroiders a theme often found in Defoeís economic and commercial writings. ...
This argument about clean and dirty money parallels yet another aspect of Defoeís writing about trade - his famous pamphlets such as The Villainy of Stock-Jobbers Detected (1701) in which he castigated those who spread rumours to depress the price of a stock in order to buy cheap and then sell at a profit when the rumour was discovered to be false. Defoe should really have been the inventor of the phrase ëthe unacceptable face of capitalismí for whilst his critique of capitalist behaviour focuses on many evils which, like stock market manipulation, have proved systematic and unchangeable, Defoe thought they could be cured by applying Christian ethics and more rigorous social regulation. Indeed, Defoeís ideal world seems to have been a world of calculation and perfectly passionless reason, rather like the land of the Houhynhms satirised by Swift in Book Four of Gullierís Travels. For Defoe and his class it was crucial to defend the idea that capitalism could be perfectly rational because if that argument failed, then so did their claim to superior political authority. ...
Here is one of many moments where Defoe distinguishes the good and the bad, this one from The Complete English Tradesman which was published two years after Roxana:
Trade is not a ball, where people appear in mask, and act a part to make sport; where they strive to seem what they really are not, and to think themselves best dressed when they are least known; but it is a plain, visible scene of honest life, shown best in its native appearance, without disguise; supported by prudence and frugality; and, like strong, stiff clay land, grows fruitful only by good husbandry, culture and manuring. ... Her life actually seems of a type with Defoeís own experiences, in that for many years Defoe lived under a variety of masks (notably when spying for the Government in Scotland), wrote under various pseudonyms, and when young showed a propensity for sinking other peopleís money in foolish investments and styling himself a gentleman long before he had a patent to do so.
Approximate Word count = 8021
Approximate Pages = 32.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
|
|
|
|
|
|