Well I'm glad that the prophetic claims of Crusoe's father and the first ship captain were wrong in the end. I found Crusoe appealing because of his initial ambivalence over his own wants vs. those of others. Somewhere I started rooting for Robinson Crusoe although in my current reflection I think the only reason is because I have a tendency to empathize with the suffering of believable characters. However, I did not enjoy the conclusion of Robinson Crusoe. I think it was too neatly packaged and too beneficiary to a character that (from my modern perspectives) was simply mediocre in his values.
If he advocatated human capability and was enveloped in recurring "fits" which brought him to understandings of culpability, then I think he should have had more conviction when he returned home. Maybe I need to read the sequel, but honestly I felt the admonitions of slave holding were putrid and do not even get me started on the assassination of the bear. The way he came back to the island and immediately acceded to become the owner over it was a detestable advocation of the mentality of colonizers who thought they could own anything that they set their fingers upon. And twenty-eight years on a deserted island and the man needed no adjustment time to be able to delve right into matters of law, politics and appropriations? C'mon. Maybe we should send Bush away and see what he'll be able to do when he gets back. Oh, and I shouldn't leave out that at least there was one woman in the whole story - virtuous or spendthrift, whichever you choose - who got some attention, that is of course besides his wife who bore three children, but only got one sentence's recognition.
The story's ending left a dry taste in my mouth viz. all one needs to do is conform to the cultural standards of the time, while using some level of humanism, hard work and reasoning so that life will grant you gold bouillion in multitudes.
2 comments:
Novelist James Joyce eloquently noted that the true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe: "He is the true prototype of the British colonist… The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity".
I finished reading the book and went to Wikipedia to see if maybe the original was different from my Signet edition. Nope! Found the above quote and thought it pretty well summed up what I think about the book. Defoe was certainly a product of his times and his writing reflects it. Never mind the first novel, this was the beginning of the English colonial/imperial theme that permeates much of what comes after, VIZ Rudyard Kipling, ETC.!
Crusoe has been one of the key texts for critics interested in studying the creation of the ideology of colonialism. Joyce's remark is extremely insightful, and gets at some of the ambivalence of our response to him, evident in Nancy's comment--we admire him, his resilience, persistence, that inner strength (that Defoe gets us to believe in) that prevents him from going crazy or wallowing in self-pity or giving up or being lazy--any of the things that would happen to us if we were alone for a week.
But these strengths--along with a basic sense of self-righteousness and a conviction of personal decency--would enable generations of middle-class Britons to face hostile climates and hostile peoples to build the "empire." It was the contradictions that made this possible--they were successful in part because they were mostly not monsters. Defoe has left us a remarkable record-I am still shocked that the novel was published in 1719.
Post a Comment