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A common interpretation of Crusoe is as
economic man. His relationships with others are based primarily–some
would say entirely–on their use for him; they are commodities who
(which?) exist for his economic advantage. He forms a friendship with
the English captain immediately upon being offered free passage on his
ship. Despite Xury's bravery and loyalty, Crusoe sells him back into
slavery--and for less than the boat they escaped in (sixty pieces of
eight versus eighty pieces of eight). He regrets the loss of Xury
twice, as a worker both on his Brazil plantation and on the island. It
is on the island that Crusoe discovers an economic system of value
based on an item's use; nevertheless, he keeps all the money he
recovers from his expeditions to the two wrecks and from the corpse of
the drowned boy. No social pressures or laws limit Crusoe's freedom to
act in his own interests, so he functions with total laissez faire.
On the island, he is the prototypical self-made man (or is he? He does,
after all, rely on goods he retrieves from the two vessels).
As economic man, Crusoe has been
specifically identified with capitalism, particularly by Marxist
critics. His solitary state on the island, his limited relationships
with others, including his own family, and the insignificance of
sex/women reflect the nature of capitalism, which emphasizes individual
self-interest. Because of the primacy of the individual, capitalism
tended to diminish the
importance of personal as well as group relationships, and especially
of those based on sex; for sex, as Weber pointed out, being one of the
strongest non-rational factors in human life, is one of the strongest
potential menaces to the individual's rational pursuit of economic
ends... (Ian Watt, The Rise of the Modern Novel)
If you think about it, isn't Crusoe's
closest and most meaningful relationship to a woman with the English
captain's widow? She provides him with money in his early days and
faithfully takes care of his money while he is a castaway. Of his own
wife, all he has to say is that his marriage was not "to my
disadvantage or dissatisfaction" (298). And the unimportance of women
could not be clearer than in the list of goods he sends the colonists,
"besides other supplies, I sent seven women" (299). They are merely one
type of commodity.
Briefly, other basic capitalistic
elements in the novel are the importance of contractual relationships,
the economic motive, the drive to accumulate, venturing in search of
economic opportunity, utilitarianism, and the weak connection to
community and country. Ian Watt notes that money elicits the strongest
emotion from Crusoe. When Crusoe learns how faithfully the Portuguese
captain attended to his affairs, Crusoe is moved to tears and
immediately writes a receipt for the 100 moidores the captain gives
him. When his wealth arrives from Brazil, Crusoe becomes so ill with
emotion that he believes he would have died if not for being bled by a
physician.
Karl Marx (1818-1883), in Das Kapital
(1867), uses Robinson Crusoe as a favorable example of the
pre-capitalist man producing goods because they are useful and
producing only as much as is useful to him and not seeking a profit.
Because Marx's theories are complex, I have summarized only as much of
his theory as applied to the passage in which
he refers to Crusoe A more personal reason is that I found his
prose unbelievably heavy and boring and didn't want to read any more of
Das Kapital than I had to.
Marx points to the sixteenth century as the beginning of
the bourgeois economic system of capitalism. In Marx's interpretation
of capitalism, the laborer adds value to a product by transforming it
so that it has a use. The capitalist takes the product produced by the
laborer and sells it; he adds no value to the product and pays the
laborer less than the value added by the laborer. Suppose the laborer
worked ten hours, he is paid only for five; the capitalist takes the
difference, i.e., makes a profit. In this system, the laborer is
separated from the product.
The exchange of goods reduces them to commodities. This transformation
of goods into commodities allows for their exchange; over time,
commodities are produced for exchange, and the exchange grows into
commerce. Under capitalism, the producers in general relate socially to
one another by treating the goods they produce as commodities and
values; as a consequence, their private individual labor is reduced to
a generic or homogeneous human labor and their connection to the
product is hidden and becomes "a mystery." By "mystery," Marx means
that people who buy a product give no thought to the amount of work
needed to produce it or how well the laborer who made it was paid. To
clear up this mystery, Marx looks at other forms of production. It is
to illustrate this point that Marx discusses Robinson Crusoe as well as
three other forms of production: feudalism, which is based on dependent
cooperation; the peasant family, which involves common or directly
associated labor; and his ideal, a community of free individuals who
produce goods together.
The owners of the means of production control labor, and
the productivity of labor either makes the capitalist richer or
contributes to the expansion of capitalism itself. Marx's solution to
the exploitation of labor by capitalism is "production by freely
associated men... consciously regulated by them in accordance with a
settled plan." Let the worker control the means of production, Marx
asserts, not capitalists. (The prototypical capitalist is, in Marx's
words, a man for whom "enjoyment is subordinated to capital, and the
individual who enjoys to the individual who capitalizes." Does this
definition apply, in your opinion, to Crusoe?)
Marx also refers to Crusoe in Grundrisse; there
he sees in Robinson Crusoe not "a reaction against
oversophistication and a return to a misunderstood nature life" but
"rather the anticipation of ‘civil society.'"
Crusoe's conversation with his father about
leaving home and his leaving home can be interpreted from an economic
perspective as well from a religious
perspective.
The father, in urging Crusoe to stay in the comfortable
position (the middle class) where God placed him to, represents an
older view of a man's duty, which is to accept the lot God assigned him
in a society where social class is essentially fixed and in a class
which is stable. Crusoe, on the other hand, represents a modern social
and economic ideal; his desire to venture forth and his aspirations to
make more are the hallmarks of capitalism. Ian Watt transforms Crusoe's
"original sin" of restlessness and disobedience into economic motive:
"Crusoe's ‘original sin' is really the dynamic tendency of capitalism
itself, whose aim is never merely to maintain the status quo, but to
transform it incessantly."
In Watt's view, religion has little effect on Crusoe.
Despite all his references to Providence and punishment, he ends richer
than his father; moreover, Crusoe experiences no real retribution for
his "original sin" (without discounting Watt's main point, I believe
that spending 25 years totally alone qualifies as a terrible
punishment).
There are objections to seeing Crusoe as
economic man. He is, after all, a man alone on an island; does that
make him an economy of one person? Can an economy exist if there is no
society? Diana Spearman asserts, "no one in his senses would choose the
story of a man cast alone on an uninhabited island to illustrate a
theory which only applied to the exchange of goods and services."
In order to keep expanding,
capitalism requires a cheap source of raw materials and markets for
finished products. Colonies serve both functions for the mother
country. So though capitalism and colonialism are not identical, they
are closely associated. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth century,
colonialism and imperialism were generally synonymous; today the terms
are still often interchanged, though they are not truly identical. In
colonialism, one nation controls the territory, the economy, and the
political structure of another country; in imperialism, one nation
extends its empire or its dominion over another nation. Thus,
colonialism is one form that imperialism may take in extending its
domination of other lands; today, however, imperialism is more likely
to consist of a wealthy, powerful nation coercing or threatening weak
or poor nations to control them politically and/or economically.
Crusoe acts as a colonizer in
assuming complete dominion over the island and any people he
encounters. The land and all its products belong to him. Several times
he notes the abundance of trees suitable for making masts (the British
navy and merchant ships looked to the American colonies to meet their
need for trees to make masts). Crusoe's actions as an individual
duplicate those of nations in claiming land for colonies. When Crusoe
leaves the island, he leaves behind English and Spanish sailors as
colonists. An absence of years does not diminish his ownership. The
chapter which narrates his return to the island is titled "I Revisit My
Island" (italics added for emphasis). He visits "my" colony on the
island (298) and gives some land to the Europeans, keeping title to the
whole island for himself. In return, they agree not to leave the island
(do they have any choice, since Crusoe has the only boat?).
As an embryo imperialist, Crusoe
sees himself as king and others as his subjects, including his pets. He
creates, not a democracy, not a republic, but a kingdom He imposes his
will on others, most obviously Friday, but also on the worst of the
English mutineers, whom he forces into staying on the island. For James
Joyce, Robinson Crusoe is "prophetic," forecasting English imperialism:
The true symbol of
British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who, cast away on a desert island,
in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a
knife grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a
saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. He is
the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave
who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. 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 practical, well-balanced
religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.
 Crusoe as imperialist-conqueror is not a twentieth
century invention, as Jules Fesquet's 1877 illustration of a heroic
Crusoe demonstrates. Fesquet presents Crusoe as Hercules with a nude
muscular body, Hercules's trademark lion's skin, and a sword. His
sovereign rule is suggested by the orb he holds and the abject
submission of the native. This picture asserts European domination over
native populations, whose inferiority is expressed not only in the
caannibal's submissive posture but in a somewhat less muscular body.
The limitlessness of Crusoe's/the white man's power is suggested by the
absence of a frame around the original illustration. An aside: do you
think the prone figure is Friday?
I suggest that this drawing also
shows how adaptable Robinson Cursoe is, how different time periods,
with contemporary values, can still find in this novel a meaningful and
even profound significance. This is why I discussed that Crusoe as a
mythic or an archetypal figure.
| Day 1 (W, Sept. 4) |
Introduction |
| Day 2 (M, Sept. 9) |
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,
“Preface” - "I Build My Fortress"
Overview of Daniel Defoe
Overview of Robinson Crusoe
The Sources of Robinson Crusoe
Alexander Selkirk |
| Day 3 (W, Sept. 11) |
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, "The
Journal" - "I Am Very Seldom Idle"
Puritanism
Increase Mather, Remarkable
Providences
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| Day 4 (T, Sept. 17) |
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, "I Make Myself a
Canoe" - "I See the Wreck..."
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| Day 5 (W, Sept. 18) |
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, "I Hear the First
Sound..." - "We Quell..."
Religion in Robinson
Crusoe
Web paper due
(1-2 pages)
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| Day 6 (M, Sept. 23) |
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, "We Seize the
Ship" - "I Revisit My Island"
Robinson Crusoe as Economic
Man
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