Robinson Crusoe ( PDFDrive )

name only the most striking arguments: Crusoe as economic man, Crusoe’s
island as a prison, and Crusoe as a scientist. It has also been argued that the
narrative as a fact-based account tells us something definitive about the nature of
the novel itself. In what follows, however, I want to focus on three aspects of
Robinson Crusoe that I think go a long way toward explaining why and how the
book has worked so powerfully on readers and on other artists over the last three
hundred years, and, especially, why and how it continues to have such force in
our own time. These three elements of the novel are isolation, technique, and
race, and I will discuss these issues by looking at the reception accorded Defoe’s
novel, principally in works for the screen.

Robinson Crusoe is a story about loneliness. The hero of the book, the original
title page informs us, lives on his island for twenty-eight years. It is only two-
thirds of the way through the book that Crusoe is finally joined on the island by
another human being, Friday. Crusoe emphasizes the pain of isolation when he
draws up the balance sheet that summarizes his situation on the island. The first
three items on the ‘‘Evil’’ side of the ledger all have to do with his loneliness: ‘‘I
am cast upon a horrible desolate island’’; ‘‘I am singled out and separated, as it
were, from all the world’’; and ‘‘I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one
banished from human society’’ (pages 67-68). At the end of his second year on
the island, Crusoe gives thanks for ‘‘the many wonderful mercies’’ that have
been bestowed upon him by God but at the same time he makes it clear that his
‘‘solitary state’’ is a continuing source of suffering (page 114), and he later
observes that the period after he saves Friday’s life is ‘‘the pleasantest year of all
the life I led in this place’’ (page 216).

It must be said that a good deal less attention is paid in the novel to the
psychic toll of loneliness than a reader in a world shaped by the rise of
psychology might expect. Virginia Woolf once observed that one of the most
surprising features of the book is that in it ‘‘there is no solitude and no soul.’’ But
readers have often emphasized the book’s representation of isolation and the
desolation that accompanies it; in the eighteenth century the critic James Beattie
observed that the book ‘‘fixes in the mind a lively idea of the horrors of
solitude,’’ and Poe saw it as offering an unprecedented look at ‘‘the idea of a
man in perfect isolation.’’ Many twentieth-century responses to the book
emphasize Crusoe’s loneliness and its terrible cost. In two of the best films based
on the novel, the hero essentially goes mad because of his ‘‘solitary state.’’
Buñuel reports in his memoirs that what interested him about the story was
Crusoe’s solitude, and his film highlights the hero’s psychic torment. In one
sequence (not based on anything in the novel), Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy), in a
drunken waking dream, hears the voices of former companions singing a song

that reflects Crusoe’s own state of mind: ‘‘Down among the dead men, down
among the dead men, . . . down among the dead men, let them lie.’’ When the
singing suddenly stops, Crusoe looks bereft and weeps. Later, we see him
running into the ocean in a frenzy, crying, ‘‘Help! Help!’’ and then talking to two
insects, calling them ‘‘my little friends,’’ feeding them an ant, and relishing their
eating. Similarly, in Cast Away, Chuck Noland (Hanks) tries to commit suicide
and in the latter stages of his stay on the island talks to and even quarrels with
‘‘Wilson,’’ a volleyball that takes on human qualities when the impression of
Noland’s bleeding hand imprints something like a human face on it. When
Noland finally escapes from the island on a raft that he has constructed, he loses
Wilson and is shown weeping inconsolably before apparently resigning himself
to his own death by throwing his paddles overboard.

How does Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe avoid the madness that overtakes the
heroes of the films by Buñuel and Zemeckis? He works, and therein lies a major
key to the book’s enduring appeal. Crusoe informs the reader that he is ‘‘very
seldom idle’’ (page 116); as a result of his constant labor, he, a man who ‘‘had
never handled a tool’’ in his life, becomes a ‘‘master of every mechanic art’’
(page 69). He works at everything: animal husbandry, baking, architecture,
farming, pottery, building boats, and making things: clothes, an umbrella, butter,
cheese. More than one critic has pointed out that Crusoe’s experience
recapitulates the economic history of mankind in that Crusoe, on the island,
masters the skills necessary to both agriculture and industry and creates his own
world of things. Woolf argues that the book, above all else, shows how ‘‘serious’’
and ‘‘beautiful’’ it is ‘‘to dig, to bake, to plant, to build.’’ Crusoe himself reflects
on what he learns about the complex process of growing and making things.
‘‘’Tis a little wonderful, and what I believe very few people have thought much
upon,’’ Defoe’s hero observes, ‘‘the strange multitude of little things necessary’’
for the production of ‘‘one article of bread’’ (page 119). Crusoe describes the
steps necessary to producing a loaf of bread: plowing or otherwise turning the
earth, sowing, building a fence to protect the crop, harvesting and threshing,
milling the grain, and building an oven. After his first harvest, he sets himself
the task, in ‘‘the next six months to apply myself wholly by labour and invention
to furnish myself with utensils proper for the performing all the operations
necessary for the making’’ of bread (page 120). Thus, in the same century in
which Adam Smith, the first great theorist of capitalism, published The Wealth of
Nations (1776) and in which the industrial revolution began in England,
Robinson Crusoe laid out the idea of the division of labor so important both to
Smith’s theory and to the industrial revolution generally. And Defoe’s readers
watch admiringly as Crusoe acquires one new skill after another.

On television, the series Survivor attends to this theme. Before that series
begins to focus almost entirely on group dynamics—who gets voted off, who
remains— it shows participants attempting to acquire survival skills, especially
those associated with finding food. Films based on Robinson Crusoe have been
particularly interested in Crusoe’s struggle to master new skills. Buñuel’s
Robinson Crusoe is, of all the major films based on Defoe’s novel, in many ways
the most faithful, and this is particularly evident in the film’s representation of
Crusoe’s growing mastery of a wide range of techniques. We see him fashioning
the famous umbrella and goatskin clothes, raising wheat and baking bread,
building a stockade, and making his own pots. In Cast Away Noland’s progress
on the island is registered chiefly by his acquisition of various skills. Early in the
hero’s ordeal, he exults when he manages to build a fire (‘‘I have made fire!’’),
but the overweight businessman is very inept when it comes to fishing or
providing himself with shelter. After four years on the island, however, Noland
expertly throws a spear to catch a fish; now remarkably slim, he meets with ease
the physical challenges of life on the island. (His transformation seemingly
begins when he manages to extract an aching tooth; a four-year gap in the
narrative opens after Noland passes out after the painful operation.) And in the
end, Noland manages to build the raft that gets him off the island and carries him
to safety and home. Robinson Crusoe films, then, like readers since 1719, have
responded with fascination to the novel’s description of how, by endless
‘‘experiment,’’ the hero becomes ‘‘master of my business’’ (page 107).

Another form of mastery, one that takes us to the book’s most troubling
aspects, is seen in the relationship between Crusoe and Friday. Shortly after
Defoe’s Crusoe rescues Friday, the basis for their dealings with each other is
unmistakably established. Crusoe relates that shortly after being saved, Friday
comes to him and ‘‘lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets
my other foot upon his head’’ and makes ‘‘all the signs to me of subjection,
servitude, and submission imaginable. ’’ Crusoe lets Friday know that he is
‘‘very well pleased with him’’ (pages 208-9). Crusoe also names Friday, teaches
him, and converts him, and he clearly regards Friday as naturally submissive:
‘‘never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant than Friday was to me;
without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged’’ (page
211). Just after this assessment of Friday, Crusoe reflects at length on the ways
of Providence—how God ordains different conditions and fates for different
kinds of men—and the text thereby suggests that Friday and his whole race were
created as natural servants of European man.

Such beliefs were, of course, part of the rationale for European imperialism,
and some of Robinson Crusoe’s mythic force, at least for a long time after the

book first appeared, was undoubtedly due to its presentation of a non-European,
nonwhite ‘‘other’’ readily embracing ‘‘subjection, servitude, and submission’’ as
his natural stance in respect to white European man. This element of the book,
happily, has become its most problematic aspect for those who imitate, adapt or
otherwise rework Defoe’s novel. Coetzee’s Foe raises the problem of Friday by
presenting him as a man whose tongue has been cut out and whose true story, as
a result, may not be told. Similarly, most of the films based on Robinson Crusoe
treat Friday in such a way as to critique the racial politics of the original.
Buñuel’s Crusoe at first treats Friday (Jaime Fernández) quite cruelly but the
Englishman then undergoes a transformation. At one point he begs Friday to
forgive him and declares, ‘‘I want you to be my friend.’’ Man Friday (1975), a
British film directed by Jack Gold, represents Crusoe (Peter O’Toole) as a
diseased racist and Friday (Richard Roundtree) as morally and spiritually
superior to the Englishman. In the American film Crusoe (1988), directed by
Caleb Deschanel, there is, strictly speaking no Friday; rather, the Crusoe (Aidan
Quinn) of that film, a nineteenth-century American slave trader, has an
encounter with a black man identified in the film’s credits as ‘‘the Warrior’’ (Ade
Sapara). Their meeting leads to Crusoe’s moral transformation. The Warrior
saves Crusoe when he falls into quicksand, and when the two quarrel over whose
language they will use, Crusoe finally accepts the warrior’s meat and also uses
his word for it: ‘‘jala.’’ The two establish a rough equality, and at the end of the
film when the Warrior is taken captive by anthropologists, Crusoe frees him.
Afterward Crusoe is seen on the ship that will take him home as clean-shaven,
clear-eyed, and, we are meant to see, spiritually renewed. That Zemeckis’s Cast
Away does entirely without Friday, and replaces him with Wilson, undoubtedly
has to do partly with the fact that the film is set in our own time; the filmmakers
may well have thought that imagining an island visited by non-European
‘‘savages’’ in a postcolonial, globalized world was simply impossible. But the
substitution of Wilson for Crusoe’s other is also an implicit acknowledgment that
Friday is the book’s most problematic element. Still, the erasure of Friday is not
without its own troubling aspects. In Cast Away, after all, Crusoe’s ‘‘companion’’
on the island has been turned into a true object, something thrown away, tied
down, and finally lost without any real consequence. Seen in another light,
Noland’s island might represent the world beyond the reach of the United States
(and FedEx) as unpeopled and therefore as open to the West’s occupation and
use. No matter how we view Wilson in Cast Away, however, the films based on
Robinson Crusoe from 1952 onward make it clear that race, unlike the
representation of loneliness or the fascination with technique, is one element of
the original Crusoe narrative that must be radically revised in contemporary

refashionings of Defoe’s novel.
In closing, it seems worthwhile to point out that when American television has

turned its attention to Robinson Crusoe, it has done so in important part by
turning the story inside out. Survivor and Lost make the experience of being cast
away into a story of a group stranded on an island together. That story cannot be
about loneliness; nor is it particularly about either technique or race. Rather it
becomes a story of renewal as the result of the experience on the island. In Lost,
particularly, all of the major inhabitants have pasts that they regret (lives of
crime, familial conflicts, drug addiction, crippling wealth), and the island seems
to offer them all an opportunity to start their lives over again. On Survivor, too,
the contestants are presented with the chance of achieving great wealth and as a
result the ability to start a new life. These shows, again particularly Lost, suggest
that life back home is the problem and that the island offers at least the
possibility of a solution to that problem. The ‘‘castaways’’ in Lost and Survivor,
one could argue, share with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe the possibility of
transformation as a result of their ordeal, but, in a way that is not true of Defoe’s
novel, the television shows also embody a critique of the society from which the
islanders have come. Still, although different in crucial ways from Defoe’s story,
these offerings of contemporary American television, like the films made over
the last sixty years as well as the literary reimaginings published almost from the
moment Robinson Crusoe appeared, all testify to the continuing adaptability and
enduring power of Defoe’s novel.

—Robert Mayer

Selected Bibliography

Works by DANIEL DEFOE

An Essay upon Projects, 1697
The True-Born Englishman, 1701 Poem
The Shortest Way with Dissenters, 1702 Prose Satire
A Review of the Affairs of France; A Review of the State of the British Nation,
1704-13 Periodical
The True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, 1706
The History of the Union of Great Britain, 1709 History
The Secret History of the October Club, 1711 Secret History
Robinson Crusoe, 1719 Novel
The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, 1720
The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton, 1720
Novel
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders , 1722 Novel
The History and Remarkable Life of . . . Colonel Jacque, 1722 Novel
A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722 Novel
Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress, 1724 Novel
A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724-27

Selected Biography and Criticism

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989.
Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind
in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Caldwell, Tanya. ‘‘Sure Instinct: Incest, Politics, and Genre in Dryden and
Defoe.’’ Genre XXXIII (Spring 2000): 27-50.
Hunter, J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest
for Form in Robinson Crusoe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.

Mayer, Robert. Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.

———. History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to
Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Moore, John Robert. Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe—Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

————. ‘‘Gender Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of
Defoe.’’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12 (2-3) (January-April 2000): 239-51.

Richetti, John J. Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures . Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975.

Rogers, Pat, ed. Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1998.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Starr, George A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1965.

Sutherland, James R. Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971.

———. Defoe. Writers and Their Work, No. 51. London: Longmans, Green,
1965.

Swaminathan, Srividhya. ‘‘Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual.’’ Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 15.2 (2003): 185-206.

Vickers, Ilse. Defoe and the New Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Zimmerman, Everett. Defoe and the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975.

1
A tropical fever.
2
Ensign; banner.
3
Grain.
4
Food; feed.
5
Perplexity; bewilderment.
6
Come suddenly.
7
Revealed; made known.
8
Did not fail.
9
Lack.

Table of Contents

About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Preface
I Go to Sea
I Am Captured by Pirates
I Escape from the Sallee Rover
I Become a Brazilian Planter
I Go on Board in an Evil Hour
I Furnish Myself with Many Things
I Build My Fortress
The Journal
I Sow My Grain
I Travel Quite Across the Island
I Am Very Seldom Idle
I Make Myself a Canoe
I Improve Myself in the Mechanic Exercises
I Find the Print of a Man’s Naked Foot
I See the Shore Spread with Bones
I Seldom Go from My Cell
I See the Wreck of a Ship
I Hear the First Sound of a Man’s Voice
I Call Him Friday
We Make Another Canoe
We March Out Against the Cannibals
We Plan a Voyage to the Colonies of America
We Quell a Mutiny
We Seize the Ship
I Find My Wealth All About Me
We Cross the Mountains
I Revisit My Island
Afterword
Selected Bibliography