Robinson Crusoe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Daniel Dafoe and L. J. Swingle

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   Widely regarded as the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’sRobinson Crusoe is one of the most popular and influential adventure stories of all time. This classic tale of shipwreck and survival on an uninhabited island was an instant success when first published in 1719 and has inspired countless imitations.

In his own words, Robinson Crusoe tells of the terrible storm that drowned all his shipmates and left him marooned on a deserted island. Forced to overcome despair, doubt, and self-pity, he struggles to create a life for himself in the wilderness. From practically nothing, Crusoe painstakingly learns how to make pottery, grow crops, domesticate livestock, and build a house. His many adventures are recounted in vivid detail, including a fierce battle with cannibals and his rescue of Friday, the man who becomes his trusted companion.

Full of enchanting detail and daring heroics, Robinson Crusoe is a celebration of courage, patience, ingenuity, and hard work.

L. J. Swingle is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Kentucky, where his primary field of study is the intellectual contexts of British Romanticism as reflected in the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and novelists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411433052

Daniel Dafoe

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was an English author, journalist, merchant and secret agent. His career in business was varied, with substantial success countered by enough debt to warrant his arrest. Political pamphleteering also landed Defoe in prison but, in a novelistic turn of events, an Earl helped free him on the condition that he become an intelligence agent. The author wrote widely on many topics, including politics, travel, and proper manners, but his novels, especially Robinson Crusoe, remain his best remembered work.

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Table of Contents

FROM THE PAGES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE

Title Page

Copyright Page

DANIEL DEFOE

THE WORLD OF DANIEL DEFOE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE

Introduction

THE PREFACE

ROBINSON CRUSOE

THE JOURNAL

ENDNOTES

INSPIRED BY ROBINSON CRUSOE

COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

FOR FURTHER READING

FROM THE PAGES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE

Being the third son of the family, and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts. (page 5)

I consulted neither father nor mother any more, nor so much as sent them word of it; but leaving them to hear of it as they might, without asking God’s blessing, or my father’s; without any consideration of circumstances or consequences, and in an ill hour, God knows, on the ist of September 1651, I went on board a ship bound for London. (page 9)

He prepared to attack us again, and we to defend ourselves; but laying us on board the next time upon our other quarter, he entered sixty men upon our decks, who immediately fell to cutting and hacking the decks and rigging. We plied them with small-shot, half-pikes, powder-chests, and such like, and cleared our decks of them twice. (page 18)

One of our men early in the morning cried out Land! and we had no sooner run out of the cabin to look out in hopes of seeing whereabouts in the world we were, but the ship struck upon a sand, and in a moment, her motion being so stopped, the sea broke over her in such a manner, that we expected we should all have perished immediately. (page 37)

The sea having hurried me along as before, landed me, or rather dashed me, against a piece of a rock, and that with such force, as it left me senseless, and indeed helpless, as to my own deliverance. (page 40)

I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which I called the Island of Despair, all the rest of the ship’s company being drowned, and myself almost dead. (page 61)

I could not tell what part of the world this might be, otherwise than that I knew it must be part of America, and, as I concluded by all my observations, must be near the Spanish dominions; and perhaps was all inhabited by savages, where, if I should have landed, I had been in a worse condition than I was now; and therefore I acquiesced in the dispositions of Providence, which I began now to own and to believe ordered everything for the best; I say I quieted my mind with this, and left afflicting myself with fruitless wishes of being there. (page 93)

One day about noon, going towards my boat, 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. (page 130)

I was now entered on the seven-and-twentieth year of my captivity in this place; though the three last years that I had this creature with me ought rather to be left out of the account, my habitation being quite another kind than in all the rest of the time. I kept the anniversary of my landing here with the same thankfulness to God for his mercies as at the first. And if I had such cause of acknowledgement at first, I had much more so now, having such additional testimonies of the care of Providence over me, and the great hopes I had of being effectually and speedily delivered; for I had an invincible impression upon my thoughts that my deliverance was at hand, and that I should not be another year in this place. (page 191)

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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719. This text replaces the long s with a modern, short s.

Published in mass market format in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,

Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading. This trade paperback format published in 2005.

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright @ 2003 by L. J. Swingle.

Note on Daniel Defoe, The World of Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe,

Inspired by Robinson Crusoe, and Comments & Questions

Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Robinson Crusoe

ISBN 1-59308-360-2

eISBN : 978-1-411-43305-2

LC Control Number 2004112692

Produced and published in conjunction with:

Fine Creative Media, Inc. 322 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10001

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

Printed in the United States of America

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FIRST PRINTING

DANIEL DEFOE

Secret agent, political provocateur, merchant, rebel, and writer, Daniel Defoe led a life as fascinating and enduring as those he recounted in his novels. He was born in London in 1660 to James Foe, a candle merchant and butcher of Flemish descent. In his childhood Daniel survived a deadly resurgence of the bubonic plague in 1665 that killed thousands of Londoners, and he witnessed the Great Fire of London in 1666. As a Dissenter—a Protestant who did not belong to the Church of England—Defoe was excluded from studying at Cambridge or Oxford; instead he received an excellent education under the Reverend Charles Morton, who would become one of the first administrators of Harvard College.

By his early twenties Defoe had established himself as a merchant, selling all manner of goods, including hose, tobacco, wine, and the secretions of civet cats used in perfumes. He married Mary Tuffley, daughter of a wealthy merchant, in 1684; the couple had eight children during their long marriage, which ended with Defoe’s death forty-seven years later.

Defoe’s great interest in politics entrenched him in the political turmoil of his times, and he soon earned a sizable reputation as a pamphleteer. His wildly popular poem The True-Born Englishman (1701) challenges English sentiment against Dutch-born King William III of Orange; his most famous pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), is a response to the attacks launched against Dissenters when William died and Queen Anne took the throne. The tract landed Defoe in Newgate Prison, which he would faithfully depict in Moll Flanders, and upon his release he went into service as a pamphleteer and information-gatherer for a moderate and influential member of government, Robert Harley. In 1704 Defoe launched The Review, a highly regarded political journal that he wrote and edited until 1713. He emerged as a novelist with the publication in 1719 of the well-received account of a castaway The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and he appeased the appetites of his reading public by publishing three novels in a single year, 1722: Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and A Journal of the Plague Year. He published one more novel, The Unfortunate Mistress: Roxana, in 1724, then turned his hand to nonfiction again, with works that include the three-volume A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published between 1724 and 1727. Daniel Defoe died, in debt and mired in legal battles but widely respected as a writer and political thinker, in April 1731 in a London boardinghouse.

THE WORLD OF DANIEL DEFOE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE

INTRODUCTION

People who have never actually read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe often think of it as a children’s book. It is a tale, so they suppose, that belongs on the shelf upstairs in the playroom alongside Lassie, the Hardy Boys books, and Charlotte’s Web. But to discover the fallacy of this notion we need only sit down with a child and start trying to read the book. Reading Robinson Crusoe to a child usually turns out to be a different, somewhat less amiable adventure than telling the child about Robinson Crusoe in our own words. The child can eagerly attend to our retelling of the Crusoe story, relatively inept storytellers though we may be. The experiences of a man shipwrecked alone on a desert island—his initial fears, his efforts to escape, his struggle to secure food and shelter, his discovery of a footprint in the sand—all these things take powerful hold on a child’s imagination. But if plunged into Defoe’s original narrative of Crusoe’s experiences, a child immediately senses that the waters of storytelling have suddenly gotten uncomfortably deep, that the exciting shallows of the story as Mom or Dad would tell it at bedtime have been left behind, that many things going on around the margins of the adventure story in Defoe’s book are not attractively adventurous. How can a person possibly wade through this strange book that pretends to be Robinson Crusoe? Some sort of incomprehensible adult trickery must be going on here.

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is a novel for grown-up minds that has been kidnapped for, though obviously not by, the kids. In this respect it’s interestingly akin to another supposed children’s book that would be published midway into the next century, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Like Crusoe, Alice presents us with the story of a person transported from our own familiar world into foreign territory that offers opportunity for exciting adventure, obviously, but also for an encounter with some complex intellectual issues. A child, responding eagerly to the adventure but brought up short by the intellectual issues, is likely to sense immediately that neither Crusoe nor Alice is a book for the playroom. Both belong in the library downstairs, where adults retreat to contemplate the shadowy mysteries of their own minds and experience.

Once we adults rescue Robinson Crusoe from the playroom and begin thinking about its significance for ourselves, it is helpful to consider some things we might expect to find in the novel that either do not appear there at all or that appear in unfamiliar forms. Writing Robinson Crusoe in the early years of the eighteenth century, Defoe reveals himself to be in several important respects not quite of our mind. True, he’s an intellectual precursor of the modern mind and, as such, some aspects of his basic interests and values are relatively close to our own. Rudiments of the Crusoe story exert considerable contemporary popular appeal, and not just to small children. Many movie adaptations have been made of the story. In the last few years alone, for example, we’ve had Aidan Quinn play Crusoe in a 1988 film of that name; we’ve had Pierce Brosnan, of James Bond fame, play Crusoe in the 1996 Robinson Crusoe; we’ve had Tom Hanks play a rather interesting loose translation of Crusoe as a plane-wrecked Federal Express man in the 2000 film Cast Away. The name Robinson Crusoe itself has entered the public domain; like Gatsby, Tarzan, Superman, and Mickey Mouse, it has become a useful shorthand term in contemporary popular thought, meaningful to people who have never encountered the literary source.

But if we go back to the novel Robinson Crusoe and see what Defoe made of the story in 1719, we run into some intriguing basic differences from common inclinations of thought in more recent centuries. These differences constitute an important part of what makes Robinson Crusoe not simply entertaining—occasionally almost more puzzling, or even more irritating than entertaining—but thereby greatly worth reading for the mind’s sake.

Thinking about these shades of difference, we might begin by looking a little deeper into dissimilarity between Crusoe and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century story Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into an unfamiliar world populated by creatures who think and act in very strange ways—or, more precisely, ways that seem very strange to her: Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. ‘I don’t quite understand you,’ she said, as politely as she could (Alice, chap. 7). Alice, earnestly polite, brings to Wonderland the lessons she has so carefully learned in her aboveground world, only to find that they no longer seem to apply. It’s as if she’s a well-schooled amateur soccer player who suddenly has been dropped into the middle of a professional tennis match. The ball looks different; the playing field has changed; the rules of play seem very odd: "‘Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Alice: ‘three inches is such a wretched height to be.’ ‘It is a very good height indeed!’ said the Caterpillar angrily" (Alice, chap. 5). Beyond the obvious humor that arises from such confrontations, Carroll is pursuing serious issues—problems that had come to be of anxious concern for nineteenth-century minds engaged in early struggles with the suspicion that, put baldly, we might always think differently—so very differently, with difference grounded in such fundamental contrariety of premises, that it becomes hard to make confident statements about how the mind ought properly to think. The familiar rallying cry of the late revolutionary period, We hold these truths to be self-evident, begins to look uncomfortably indecisive. If we’re simply holding some truths as self-evident, does that mean the enemy, those other people out there, might be holding on to other truths with equal fervor, even claiming opposite truths to be self-evident? Could the standard of truth, then, boil down merely to a question of which party holds on to its truths harder? Truth goes to the bidder with the strongest grip?

Our minds happen, let’s say, to be working within the confines of Euclidean geometry. But might there be non-Euclidean geometries within which we could also work? Work just as well? Better? Could a proposition that’s valid within Euclidean geometry be invalid in some non-Euclidean geometry? Let’s say there are Proverbs of Heaven. But then, perhaps there are also Proverbs of Hell. Would Heaven’s proverbs be evil, untrue, mad to Hell, and Hell’s proverbs just as evil, untrue, and mad to Heaven? The Romantic poet William Blake had proposed this to be so in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793). In Blake’s poem, Hell’s philosophy holds that it was Heaven’s creatures that fell; and Hell accordingly holds on confidently to its own truths—as: Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius (plate 10).

Lewis Carroll, writing for a later Victorian generation, dramatizes the Proverbs of Alice running up against the contrary Proverbs of the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts. Alice’s main problem in Wonderland is other minds, minds that persistently operate in ways foreign to those Alice herself has learned to understand and value. Ought Alice to change her mind? Ought she hold firm, waving aside those foreign orientations of thought as mad or erroneous? These are deeply persistent nineteenth-century questions (and ones that under the vague heading relativism we uneasily continue to struggle with today). Alice, running headlong into the alien mentality of a Caterpillar perched on a mushroom, is a sister to Charles Dickens’s Pip encountering the pale young gentleman in Miss Havisham’s garden who announces, for no apparent reason Pip can grasp, Come and fight (Great Expectations, chap. II). Alice is a grandchild of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813), who finds to her bewilderment that her good friend Charlotte Lucas has agreed to marry a man odious to Elizabeth, Mr. Collins. Accordingly, Elizabeth pronounces that Charlotte’s action is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable! (vol. 2, chap. I). But Jane Austen is getting at the point here that every view covers more territory than the innocent Elizabeth has ever dreamt of in her single-minded philosophies. As Charlotte herself tells Elizabeth, I am not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home (vol. I, chap. 22). Charlotte’s you know is erroneous. Elizabeth emphatically does not know. She knows no more than Alice knows that three inches is a very good height indeed! Anticipating uncomfortable encounters we continue to have today with patterns of culture that refuse to collapse meekly into some one pattern, preferably our own, right-thinking characters in nineteenth-century literary works are forever to their puzzlement colliding with left-minded, contrary thinkers like Charlotte Lucas and the Caterpillar.

In Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe does not deliver Crusoe or us into the perplexities raised by such confrontation between systems of thought. Crusoe finds himself washed up onto solid ground. Literally solid ground. And his primary problem is to learn how to cultivate that ground—again literally. He needs to find good shelter. He needs to gather food, and later he needs to learn how to grow crops and herd animals. In the process, he needs to figure out how to make fire, how to make a pot, how to produce tools. The primary problem of mind in Robinson Crusoe narrows in upon Crusoe’s own mind; he must train himself to think in useful ways: I now began to consider seriously my condition, and the circumstance I was reduced to, and I drew up the state of my affairs in writing ... and as my reason began now to master my despondency, I began to comfort myself as well as I could (p. 56). Defoe is interested in having us observe Crusoe as he learns how to attend carefully to his business. Like a good merchant keeping track of the state of his commercial affairs, Crusoe distances himself from the immediate welter of events, draws back in his mind to reflect and, seeking to gain some sort of orderly perspective on the situation, finds himself on the island. He determines to set the good against the evil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse; and I stated it very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered (p. 56). Adding up his credits, discovering that they seem to outweigh his debits, Crusoe gets control of himself. Thus, gradually, he also gets control of the island.

We should note that Crusoe’s story could readily have accommodated an excursion into our more modern preoccupation with opposed systems of thought and value. Midway into the novel Crusoe, famously, comes upon the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck (p. 130). Once he has controlled his fears about this unexpected intrusion, Crusoe successfully works out his plan to get a savage into my possession (p. 165). The man Crusoe names Friday enters the story.

The initial description Crusoe provides of Friday as he watches the poor creature sleeping includes interesting details:

He was a comely, handsome fellow, perfectly well made, with straight strong limbs, not too large, tall and well shaped, and as I reckon, about twenty-six years of age. He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but seemed to have something very manly in his face; and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled (p. 171).

Defoe does not make Friday look alien to Crusoe, some creature akin to Frankenstein’s monster. Instead, in Crusoe’s eyes Friday looks very much as he himself looks, comfortably familiar, European, and good-looking at that. It seems as if Crusoe has gotten lucky. The modern reader, though, is accustomed to the idea that looks often betray and a good countenance may not equal an agreeable essence. Crusoe’s happy portrait of Friday may well appear designed by Defoe to signal impending trouble.

Trained by later literature to anticipate the unexpected behind the lovely surface—some dangerous Mr. Wickham, as in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, some La Belle Dame Sans Merci, as in Keats’s 1884 poem of that title—the modern reader’s eye is likely to linger upon the word seemed in Crusoe’s description of Friday: "not a fierce and surly aspect; but seemed to have something very manly in his face (emphasis added). It appears we may be on the brink here of a narrative in which Crusoe, perhaps to his peril, at least to his puzzlement and discomfiture, will discover he really does not have this creature he’s named Friday in his possession after all. When Friday wakes up, or perhaps when Crusoe eventually goes to sleep, the possession may turn nasty, wild, and decide to become possessor. Friday may reveal himself to be less sweetly European and more like Alice’s irritable Caterpillar or, raising the stakes, more like the Cheshire Cat: The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth" (Alice, chap. 6). There’s a good opportunity here for Defoe to turn Robinson Crusoe toward confrontation between opposed mind-sets and value systems, perhaps toward hard questions about how the mind can (even whether it ever can) discern the alien, potentially dangerous workings of another mentality that seems similar to one’s own. Can we afford to trust the Wild Thing that purrs?

Defoe does not take this direction. Except in the curious matter of Crusoe’s abortive effort to provide Friday with religious instruction (concerning which, more later), Friday proves to be just as amiable a possession, as European, as he first seems to be: for never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me; without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very affections were tied to me, like those of a child to a father (p. 174). As the narrative progresses, we do not find Crusoe’s mind working according to the premises of Euclidean geometry while Friday’s mind veers off toward some wild (to Crusoe and us) non-Euclidean geometry. Crusoe and Friday, it turns out, are essentially of one mind; and they work profitably together. Defoe is not interested in taking up our more modern preoccupation with encounter with the Stranger.

Nonetheless, even if we set the Stranger aside, Defoe’s treatment of Friday remains one of those cruxes in Robinson Crusoe that can provoke a modern reader, particularly the reader sensitive to issues of race and class, to find the novel curious, even objectionable. It can be tempting to propose, for example, that Defoe ought to have let Friday be his own man rather than make him a blandly unironic anticipation of My Man Friday. Are the oppressed races actually happy picking cotton for the Man in the Big House on the Hill? Or, a different version of a similar basic riff, does the working stiff labor with joy in the capitalist’s sweat-shop? Reading Robinson Crusoe today, contemplating its depiction of Friday as the faithful savage companion who I believe ... loved me more than it was possible for him ever to love anything before (p. 178), we might well hear Marx and Engels whispering in our ear. Or, even back in the eighteenth century itself, William Blake depicting the plaintive songs of a hapless working class: Because I am happy, & dance & sing, / They think they have done me no injury, / And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery (Songs of Experience [1794]: The Chimney-Sweeper, lines 9-12).

Numerous passages in Robinson Crusoe dwell lovingly upon Friday’s doglike devotion: I pointed to him to run and fetch the bird I had shot; which he did, but stayed some time; for the parrot, not being quite dead, was fluttered a good way off from the place where she fell; however, he found her, took her up, and brought her to me (p. 177). This sort of thing can tempt our present-day consciousness to indict the novel, hence Defoe, hence also, for good measure, the entire early-eighteenth-century British and even European frame of mind in general, for sins of racism, of rampant colonialism—perhaps also, once we’re fully caught up in the spirit of prosecutorial fervor, of blindness to the travails of the noble working class. If we thought carefully, of course, we’d find ourselves in some difficulty on that last charge at least, given that Crusoe himself appears not unacquainted with labor: This tree I was three days a cutting down, and two more cutting off the boughs, and reducing it to a log or piece of timber. With inexpressible hacking and hewing I reduced both the sides of it into chips till it began to be light enough to move; then I turned it, and made one side of it smooth (p. 98).

If we’re striving to get at what Robinson Crusoe has to offer us, of course, we’d probably do best to cultivate a willing suspension of pronouncements about what Defoe ought to have done in his novel. We should direct our mental energies more toward thinking about things Defoe did do in the book, things that did interest him, and toward contemplating how these things may set themselves off from inclinations of thought and value that are more familiar to us today. Robinson Crusoe can thereby help us get some perspective on ourselves.

Stay a moment more with Friday. A further interesting issue that hovers about the margins of Defoe’s presentation of Friday concerns the fact that he chooses to make Friday male. A basic twist in many subsequent revisionings of the castaway story has been to provide versions of Crusoe with a Girl Friday. In the Romantic period, for example, Lord Byron depicts the first sensations his shipwrecked hero Don Juan experiences as he returns to consciousness upon the sandy shores of a Greek island:

His eyes he open’d, shut, again unclosed,

For all was doubt and dizziness; he thought

He still was in the boat and had but dozed,

And felt again with his despair o’erwrought,

And wish’d it death in which he had reposed;

And then once more his feelings back were brought,

And slowly by his swimming eyes was seen

A lovely female face of seventeen.

(Don Juan, canto 2 [1819], stanza 112)

Byron’s Juan, a solitary castaway, is washed up on shore only to find himself swept into the eager arms of the maiden Haidée: Haidée was Nature’s bride, and knew not this; / Haidée was Passion’s child, born where the sun / Showers triple light (canto 2, stanza 202). Part of Byron’s aim here, granted, is comic, carrying on his revisionary joke that Don Juan (a stand-in for Byron himself) was a guiltless, innocent fellow endlessly besieged by women. Juan can fall into the hands of a woman, and a very young and lovely one, even on a seemingly deserted island. But Byron’s sexualized revision of the Crusoe story amounts to much more than this. In the Romantic period we enter border territories of an age of thought, extending fervently on into our own time, for which a principal concern of human life is exploration of and anxiety about the nature of the relationship between men and women. Human life is not just about men, not just about women. It’s about—at least it’s most interestingly about—men and women in relation to each other.

Modern preoccupation with male/female issues does not come down merely to obsession with varieties of sexual experience—that’s obviously long been with us. It has more to do with the intricate psychology of male/female mental relations in the context of the premise that male and female are fundamentally attracted to each other but also fundamentally opposed—and not humorously so, as in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (c.1593). It’s the sort of concern that leads William Blake to subtitle his 1797 epic poem The Four Zoas The torments of Love & Jealousy in The Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man, and to fill his earlier prophetic poems with such passages as the following: But Los saw the Female & pitied / He embrac’d her, she wept, she refus’ d / In perverse and cruel delight / She fled from his arms, yet he follow’ d (The Book of Urizen [1794], plate 19). It’s a concern that bleeds into territories of artistic thought where one might not expect to encounter it. For example, when William Wordsworth writes of Nature in his 1798 poem Tintern Abbey that I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity (lines 88-91), he’s setting his dramatic stage for a later passage: and this prayer I make, / Knowing that Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her (lines 121-123). Dramatically, Nature is suddenly revealed to be a her for the poem’s male speaker. With this artful move a Wordsworthian poem about love of Nature abruptly delivers us as it nears its climax into murky questions about love and betrayal, emphatically denied but significantly thereby posed, expressed through the heightened emotional context of a male consciousness claiming, seeking to reaffirm, refusing to question loving commitment to a feminized object.

Byron’s Don Juan, in which a Crusoe refigured as the shipwrecked Don Juan finds a Haidée instead of a Friday, represents only one of many Romantic variations of this preoccupation, not simply with the sexual but with the psychological relations between male and female—relations that often lead, unfortunately, in the direction plotted by Blake’s studies of the torments of love and jealousy. This preoccupation clearly remains with us today, as is eminently apparent to any avid modern moviegoer. On the relatively insignificant sexual periphery of film variations upon the Crusoe story, we’ve got glossy, breathless productions like The Blue Lagoon of 1980 and its hopeful child, the 1991 Return to the Blue Lagoon. More seriously, we’ve got films like Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 film Swept Away ... by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August and Nicolas Roeg’s 1987 Castaway. In such movies, we watch recent versions of Crusoe coming to terms—or not—with a female Friday who provokes thought about the war between the sexes, the competing spheres of Mars and Venus, fond antique fantasies of resolving the torments of love and jealousy.

But Defoe, writing Robinson Crusoe in 1719, is remarkably uninterested in introducing women at all, let alone such complex male/female relations, into his narrative of Crusoe’s adventures. Crusoe’s mother is given a starkly uncomplimentary bit part in the opening exposition of the novel, when the young Crusoe seeks to secure his father’s permission to go to sea: I took my mother, at a time when I thought her a little pleasanter than ordinary, and told her that my thoughts were so entirely bent upon seeing the world ... and my father had better give me his consent than force me to go without it (p. 8). The widow of the old sea captain who had been Crusoe’s early benefactor, though she’s kept offstage, gets a few pleasant nods toward the end of the novel: My principal guide and privy counsellor was my good ancient widow, who, in gratitude for the money I had sent her, thought no pains too much or care too great to employ for me (p. 251). On page 252, seven paragraphs from the close of his adventures, Defoe has Crusoe mention that he eventually married and that he had by this wife two sons and a daughter. But in that same paragraph Defoe kills off Crusoe’s wife; and the daughter receives no further mention. The last reference to the female half of the human race in Robinson Crusoe is in connection with Crusoe’s decision to send a ship with goods and more people to the folk who remained on his island after his departure: Besides other supplies, I sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them. As to the Englishmen, I promised them to send them some women from England, with a good cargo of necessaries, if they would apply themselves to planting.... I sent them also from the Brazils five cows, three of them being big with calf, some sheep, and some hogs (p. 253). Defoe’s Crusoe, yet more vehemently than Jane Austen’s Charlotte Lucas, is not romantic, you know.

Reading Robinson Crusoe today, it may be difficult to avoid thinking of Defoe as a raving misogynist—either that or to decide that he must have been intent upon developing a scathing parody of Crusoe’s mind. But here again we probably ought to suspend for the moment our own habitual manner of thinking and ponder the possibility that, instead, the book takes us into unfamiliar mental territory that is worth exploring. Defoe’s indifference in his novel toward the complexities of male/female relations that we ourselves find so absorbing—his depiction of Crusoe’s utter lack of interest in women as sexual, let alone spiritually inspiring, beings, in fact his general lack of interest in women as human beings at all apart from their function as supplies—seems an aspect of a vision of human life that extends into other realms of experience as well, one that Defoe displays in Robinson Crusoe for serious, straightforward reasons.

The curious attitude toward women in Defoe’s novel also has much in common with the way the natural world is depicted. It never would occur to Crusoe—nor does Defoe offer any hint that it would occur to him, either—to exclaim along with Wordsworth’s speaker in Tintern Abbey, Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her. Anthropomorphic, emotion-laden visions of Nature capitalized, attitudes toward Nature that strain to replace normal human relations or to satisfy spiritual yearnings and so displace conventional religious forms, are as foreign to the world Defoe creates in Robinson Crusoe as are the loving or yearning or lustful attitudes toward women that we might expect to encounter in the book. Just as Robinson Crusoe brings us nowhere near either the ecstatic passions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) or the bawdy play of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), it also resolutely keeps its considerable distance from loving attitudes toward nature familiar to us by way of any number of passages in Wordsworth’s poetry: Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, / The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; / And ‘tis my faith that every flower / Enjoys the air it breathes (Lines Written in Early Spring [1798], lines 9-12). We’ve been enticed, perhaps by Wordsworth, perhaps by authors who read Wordsworth, to dream of vacating our city walls and heading for the vegetation: In this lone, open glade I lie, / Screen’d by deep boughs on either hand; / And at its end, to stay the eye, / Those black-crown’d, redboled pine-trees stand! (Matthew Arnold, Lines Written in Kensington Gardens [1852], lines 1-4); I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade (William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree [1893], lines 1-4); "Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. / I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, / And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk / Toward heaven (Robert Frost, Birches" [1916], lines 52-56). This tenderly sanctified attitude toward the natural world—in company with scornful antagonism to the human city and its anxious getting and spending—is something we might naively expect to encounter in the tale of Crusoe’s removal to the natural beauties of a tropical island. But Defoe takes us in a very different direction of thought about nature.

We come upon moments in Defoe’s novel when Crusoe seems about to wax enthusiastic about the beauties of nature:

I walked very leisurely forward. I found that side of the island where I now was much pleasanter than mine; the open or savanna fields sweet, adorned with flowers and grass, and full of very fine woods. I saw abundance of parrots, and fain I would have caught one, if possible, to have kept it to be tame, and taught it to speak to me. I did, after some painstaking, catch a young parrot, for I knocked it down with a stick, and having recovered it I brought it home; but it was some years before I could make him speak (p. 93).

As the climax of this passage strikingly indicates, however, Crusoe’s interest in the natural world is aggressively utilitarian. To Crusoe a bird is not at all what it would later become in Wordsworth’s poetry: The birds around me hopped and played, / Their thoughts I cannot measure:—/ But the least motion which they made / It seemed a thrill of pleasure (Lines Written in Early Spring, lines 13-16). Crusoe is not interested in contemplating a parrot’s thrill of pleasure. Spotting a bird, he thinks immediately about how to capture it for his own use.

This attitude toward the natural world may well make some of us acutely uneasy, calling to mind popular depictions of the unpleasantly acquisitive instincts that lurk beneath the cracking foundations of south Florida real-estate development:

I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure ... to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as completely as any lord of a manor in England. I saw here abundance of cocoa trees, orange, and lemon, and citron trees ... (p. 85).

Delicious is an interesting word in this passage. For a modern mind, Crusoe’s cheerful descriptions of trekking through his land of natural plenty are marked by hints of devastation that cry out for enactment of endangered-species laws: I was exceedingly diverted with this journey. I found in the low grounds hares, as I thought them to be, and foxes; but they differed greatly from all the other kinds I had met with, nor could I satisfy myself to eat them, though I killed several (p. 93).

Many of us today, even if we acknowledge stern scientific pronouncements about Nature’s indifference, cling eagerly to fond childhood visions of Nature’s friendly doings. We were brought up listening to the wind in the willows, attending to the adventures of Bambi and Thumper. Crusoe, if he spotted Bambi and Thumper in lyric scamper through his delicious vale, would think immediately about having them for dinner. Many of us today have embraced a philosophy that promotes the pleasant idealism of leaving Nature alone, whether it be friendly, bloody, or simply indifferent, because of our fears about unbalancing the ecosystem. We root for the trees rather than the shopping malls. We happily read such modern literary works as John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), a book that turns upside down the old tale of Beowulf. Gardner’s novel invites us to root for the monster Grendel, creature of the raw, nonhuman wilds, rather than for Beowulf, who starts to look suspiciously like a brute soldier of fortune in the pay of a loud, drunken human rabble that has built its tacky mansion Heorot upon Grendel’s primal natural landscape. Readers brought up on such modern literary visions may understandably balk at Defoe’s depiction of Robinson Crusoe’s triumph on (or over?) the tropical island he comes to view as his own: 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 looked. First of all, the whole country was my own mere property; so that I had an undoubted right of dominion. Secondly, my people were perfectly subjected; I was absolute lord and lawgiver (p. 201). For a contemporary mind that believes the categories of Capitalist and Conqueror are inhabited by unadmirable people, Robinson Crusoe can be a problematic book. It may well seem to such a mind that Defoe ought to have devoted his writerly talents to exposing Crusoe’s failings. At the least, Defoe might have shaded his depiction of Crusoe’s triumphs with subtle, undercutting irony.

To Defoe’s mind, though, when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, the dragon that needed slaying was not Crusoe. Now, it could well be true that, after due consideration, we might decide to disagree with Defoe’s judgment on this point. But before we set out on a campaign of disagreement, before we drown