Daniel Defoe

1660-1731
No account of the rise or origin of the English novel can neglect the prose narratives
of Defoe - seven major narratives
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720)
Captain Singleton (1720)
Moll Flanders (1722)
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Colonel Jack (1722)
Roxana (1724)
Life
born in London in 1660
son of a successful tradesman & merchant
turbulent period of English history (struggle to establish new frameworks for political & religious authority)
family of Flemish descent - Dissenters, a Protestant sect that refused to conform to the doctrines & organization
of the Church of England
educated at a Dissenters academy
embarked on a career as a merchant - typical of the new kind of man reaching prominence in England in the 18th
century self-reliant, industrious, possessing a strong notion of personal and moral responsibility

In his own time - reputation based on NONFICTION PROSE

known primarily as a journalist, pamphleteer, & social commentator
(father of modern journalism)
during his lifetime he was associated with 26 periodicals supporter of civil &
religious liberty
numerous essays on diverse topics (religion, politics, history, trade, crime, &
marriage)
pioneering work in the field of periodical publication
Defoe's writing career was a natural outgrowth of his commercial, political, &
religious activities - several political pieces & pamphlets & satiric poems criticized James & the Church of England & later defended William & the
importance of British commerce
1703 - The Shortest Way with Dissenters - satire in support of religious freedom expose the extremism & bias of Church of England officials - charged with libel,
found guilty, heavily fined, & imprisoned
1704, created the journal, A Review of the Affairs of France, with Observations
on Transactions at Home (known as the Review) - forum for Defoe's views on
contemporary politics, economics, religion, morality, & journalism - exploring the
issues of the day through reporting & commentary (also poetry, letters to the
editor, advice columns, & schedules for local events)

modern literary reputation - "father of the English novel" - turned in 1719 to

writing long narratives (a development that is hardly surprising in the career
of an enterprising journalist)
Ian Watt - The Rise of the Novel: Defoes innovation
"formal realism"
appreciation of psychological characterization (religious introspection)
Defoe, says Watt, is perhaps the first writer of fiction to embody the "circumstantial
view of life," presenting with some degree of success what claims to be the actual,
authentic experience of an individual
[up to then: narrative had more or less aimed to represent characters and situations that
tended to have a general rather than a particular validity literary narrative moved
away from particular, merely individual reality to the higher truth available only in the
typical -- influence of traditional philosophy, which located truth in general ideas] -- emergence of the novel = in part of symptom of the philosophy and psychology that
emerged in the 17th century in the works of thinkers like Descartes and Locke, who
argued that individual experience and perception were primary, the foundation of
all knowledge
Defoe's fiction "is the first which presents us with a picture both of the individual life in
its larger perspective as a historical process, and its closer view which shows the
process being acted out against the background of the most ephemeral thoughts and
actions."
Defoe's novels: "a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being
changed by the flow of experience." (Watt)

Defoes great novels not published under his name but

as authentic memoirs intention of making his readers
believe that his fictions were true
obsession with HISTORY as a mode of knowledge, as a mode of
writing, & as a setting for character & action
self-reflexivity: incorporates statements about the kind of narratives
he is to present in several of his prefaces
preface to Moll Flanders, "The World is so taken up of late with
Novels & Romances that it will be hard for a private History to be
taken for Genuine"
Robinson Crusoe - "though allegorical, is also historical," - all
its details "are all histories & real stories" & "are all historical
& true in fact"
All in all: insistence on verisimilitude, credibility, authenticity of his
narratives legitimising his fictions as factual
adopts role of an editor who collects authentic documents, then
editorialises them so as to provide them with a unified moral and
formal structure/coherence

1719, The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures

of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner
considered the first English novel
draws on many traditions:
narratives of voyages and discoveries which were then so popular (travel literature)
spiritual guides and manuals of right living - biographies of puritan converts
tales of providential escape from natural hazards (pseudo-autobiography of a shipwrecked
sailor surviving on a deserted island)
story of a castaway on an island off the northern coast of South America - widespread appeal - age
of sea voyages to distant lands - stories of marooned voyagers (e.g. germ of the story - life of
Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor - marooned after a disagreement with his captain on an island off
the coast of Chile reverted to a state of nature - rescued some years later celebrity back in London)
episodic narrative - apparently arbitrary narrative arrangement - Robinson Crusoe - son of a
successful English merchant - rejects the life of his family - life of adventure at sea - violent storms,
captured by pirates, sold into slavery, escapes, struggles to survive & to cope with his isolation on
an island
Crusoe = meticulous reporter + patient observer and experimenter
what Crusoe attempts on his island is much more than survival; he tries to duplicate the
civilization from which he has been separated and he recapitulates European society's
technological transformation of nature
ontogeny repeats phylogeny
origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult //
evolutionary development and history of a species - symbolic representation of human
development on the level of politics, economics, social life, and education
Necessity forces him to seek food and shelter, bake bread, make furniture, and fashion pottery
so that he can bake and boil - his experiments seem to reenact the trial, error, and accident by
which technological progress has taken place since primitive times

travel narrative grafted on SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Defoe used certain Puritan conventions

Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders - in their various ways, learn to spiritualise
their otherwise mundane & secular existence
Robinson learns, in the course of his exile on his island, increasingly to ascribe
providential meanings to his experiences
Moll, having repented of her life of crime when faced with the gallows in Newgate,
rediscovers wealth, her son, & her happiness in Virginia before she returns to
England
Crusoe insists

his story demonstrates how God saved him physically and spiritually
spiritual or didactic: confessional literature, recounting the salvation of an
erring soul (Defoe was a Dissenter - religious allegory was central to the
Puritan experience)
Crusoe goes to sea against his father's wishes - ``original sin''
refers to himself after the first storm as a ``true repenting prodigal''
On the island Crusoe, fighting off despair, decides that Providence has ``ordered
everything for the best'':
His stranding Fall
An ``Enthusiastick'' vision converts him to ``born-again'' status just nine months
after his landing, opening the Bible at random for guidance, ecstatic testimony,
instructs Friday in Christianity etc.

IAN WATT - Crusoe embodies the archetype of homo economicus - supports a

materialist ethic - one of the merchant adventurers who were then helping to found
the expanding British Empire

leaves homeland to seek his fortune

gains a foothold on the coast of new territory
establishes agriculture and a fortified base
subdues or converts the heathen
eventually departs
consolidates Englands colonial commerce on the basis of slavery
book's purpose was to stir interest in establishing an English settlement in that part of
the world, pictured as fertile paradise - Defoe's colonial propaganda- cultural
archetype, the civiliser type - a representative of European imperial expansion
novel contains these disparate elements
Puritanism was a fusion of economic and religious impulses
(~~ Max Weber's ``PROTESTANT ETHIC'': the pious will prosper, and prosperity
requires piety)
Defoe's mirroring of the Protestant bourgeois world
(novel alternates physical adventure and spiritual introspection)
THEME OF ISOLATION (insulation, confinement to an ISLAND)
Defoe persuades us to see ... the solitude of the human soul (Virginia Woolf)
On the island he learns to progress from spiritual ignorance to psychic integration
- psychological appeal of his narrative

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of

the Famous Moll Flanders
masterpiece of characterization a novel of character (E. M. Forster)
Moll Flanders most positive qualities are the same as Crusoe's, a restless, amoral and strenuous
individualism (Ian Watt)
origins in criminal biography (popular for its mixture of moral disgust and fascination)
PICARESQUE novel (autobiographical) novel with a picaroon (Spanish, picaro, picara: a rogue or
scoundrel, trickster figure) as its hero or heroine, usually recounting his or her escapades in a retrospective,
first-person narrative marked by its episodic structure and realistic low-life descriptions
(loosely structured as a sequence of episodes united only by the presence of the central character, who is often involved
in a long journey the abstract, spiritual quest of romance)
picaroon - often a quick-witted servant who has several employers, experiences the ups and downs of fortune
picaresque novel records the picaros moral or religious reflections giving the final views of the repentant sinner
typical, panoramic social background of the picaresque involves a corrupt, disintegrating world in which traditional
values are breaking down - instability of the social structure permits the picaro, a person of low birth or uncertain
parentage, an outsider, to be carried by his adventures from innocence to experience, from social anonymity to social
recognition
picaresque novel - affinities with the Bildungsroman (two essential experiences, sexual maturation and imprisonment
erotic + carceral), but: picaro = fixed character: while s/he learns survival techniques from his adventures, there is
little inward change: remains faithful to his/her healthy instincts of survival without questioning the larger order of things.
Pressured by circumstances to choose between integrity and survival, the picaro makes the pragmatic choice.
picaro may be accompanied by a foil, a double, an initiator figure into the secrets of human nature
true Spanish picaresque novel - anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) & Mateo Aleman's more widely influential
Guzman de Alfarache (1599-1604); Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

modification of the picaresque pattern: version of spiritual autobiography,

depicting in Moll a process of spiritual "hardening" -- true repentance in
Newgate
scattered, episodic quality of the narrative = unified by a gradual, systematic
development of the heroine's spiritual condition

episodic structure: roughly chronological sequence

(born in Newgate prison - kidnapped by gypsies - adopted by an upper middle-class
family - becomes a servant, absorbs privileged education the daughters receive records her sexual awakening and betrayal - seduced by the elder brother of the
house, she is married off to the younger - has her moments of excitement and selfdiscovery - her story turns on the problems of accumulating capital - bent upon
survival and prosperity, learns to use sexuality as a means to those ends, no longer
the helpless prey of her emotions provides regular accountings of her financial
condition - embarks on a tangled set of adventures, in all of which her object is to
marry profitably (incest, bigamy) - acquires skills at survival and manipulation
her life - series of free choices and coercive circumstances - incarceration in
Newgate prison (career as a thief) - plunged into fear, self-scrutiny - transformed,
loses the identity she thought she had)

Defoes narratives challenge the notion of simple or stable identity

characters record the fluid and dynamic nature of personality,
identity = a matter of changing roles, wearing masks, responding to circumstances, and discovering new
possibilities of self-expression
acts of deception +++ involuntary transformation
event that restores Moll to self-consciousness = her spiritual conversion, the true repentance that is the
climax of her spiritual autobiography
(Condemned to death, repents out of concern for having offended God, blames herself for his taking to a life
of crime) - Reprieved from execution and ordered "transported" to Virginia, owner of a plantation
success of the mercantile class --- social distinctions, previously based on hereditary rank, became open to
the influence of money --- fluid social identities (wealth could bring power and prestige)
Moll's social identity unfixed, fluid
uses it in a system of trade, selling sex, affection, or the goods she steals
moves through social degrees (prostitute, wife of a banker, successful plantation owner) not primarily in order
to gain respect, but to accumulate capital and finally to attain her goal of financial security
conflict between absolute Christian morality and the conventional ethics of bourgeois pragmatism
Moll Flanders a bourgeois picara inspired by the spirit of profit and investment
acquires the fortune and experiences the reformation necessary for her prosperity in the New World

novel: blurs distinctions between autobiography and novel, and between fact and fiction
opening lines: `The World is so taken up of late with Novels and Romances that it will be hard
for a private History to be taken for Genuine....''
true record
narrator asks readers to accept the story as Moll's own, as told by her, but freely admits to having
made some alterations in the text, the location and extent of which he does not disclose
Moll presumably tells her story to an editor
double narrative time scheme retrospective narration
gap between Moll the novels protagonist and Moll the novel's narrator
difficult to accurately identify whom the narrative voice belongs to
older Moll who does the narrating (and who frequently, and emphatically, regrets her former immoral
activities, but just as often she ignores or excuses them) often seems to be inconsistent with her younger
self who enacts the adventures
novelistic innovation - process of interpretation old Moll brings to her narrative
simply a record of a character in action
= process of remembering and interpreting that action
Molls character is revealed and developed in complex ways through the act of narration itself

who actually writes the story of Moll Flanders?

double perspective which Defoe has built into his novel: that of Moll and that of her editor

Selected Sources:
Watt, Ian (1968) The Rise of the Novel. Studies in
Defoe, Richardson and Fielding Hammondsworth
Keymer, Thomas & Jon Mee (eds) (2004) The
Cambridge Companion to English Literature 17401830 Cambridge University Press
McKeon, Michael (2002) The Origins of the
English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore Johns
Hopkins University Press, (pp.1-22)
Richetti, John (ed) (1996) The Cambridge
Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Cambridge University Press (pp. 41-87)