Sexless Survivor (Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe)

Name: MALU

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Product:	Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Date:	13/05/07 (717 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the whole story

Disadvantages: odd traits of the main character

Frankenstein‘s Monster, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe et al have left the confines of the book covers and become icons of our cultural heritage. Robinson Crusoe is the most successful of the lot, I‘ve read that the novel is more widespread than the bible, it has been translated into 110 (!) languages.

I know that you know the basic facts of the story and that there isn‘t the danger of my spoiling the plot for you - after all the novel is told in the first person and only a survivor can tell it - but have you actually read the original? The nearest I ever got was an abridged and simplified (language-wise) version for pupils, I‘ve always wanted to find out what the whole book contained and what had been omitted and I also wanted to learn why the story has had such a universal appeal.

I bet you didn‘t know that Robinson‘s father was a German and his surname was Kreutznaer “but by the usual corruption of words in England we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name “Crusoe“. This was certainly a good idea of Defoe‘s (who, by the way, changed his name from Foe to Defoe), I‘m sure a Robinson Kreutznaer wouldn‘t have conquered the world!

Robinson‘s father ‘designed him for the law‘, but the boy‘s only desire is to go to sea. He defies his father‘s warnings and runs away, during his first voyage he experiences such a horrible storm that he thinks he‘ll die, the captain tells him he shouldn‘t be a seafaring man. Yet Robinson is ashamed to go home and ventures out again. He‘s captured by pirates and made a prisoner in Sallee, ‘a port belonging to the Moors.‘ One day he and two servants, also Moors, go out in a small vessel to fish for the master, Robinson throws one of them overboard and escapes with the other.

He‘s rescued by a Portuguese ship to whose captain he sells his boat and his faithful servant. He lands in Brazil where he eventually becomes a successful planter. He convinces his fellow planters that they should get Negroes from Africa as slaves to work on their farms. He tells them “. . . how easy it was to purchase upon the coast, for trifles (such as beads, toys, knives, scissors, hatchets, bits of glass, and the like) not only gold dust, guinea grains, elephants‘ teeth, etc., but Negroes for the service of Brazil, in great numbers.“

It is on this voyage that Robinson’s ship is wrecked and he’s thrown onto the shore of an island as the sole survivor of the crew. He succeeds in retrieving many goods from the wreck and then sets out to create a shelter and provide for food. In my opinion it is what he *does* during the following 26 years that has made this fictitious character immortal (the abridged version for pupils contains only this part of the book).

He begins to develop skills and talents he never used before and didn’t know he possessed, he 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. It’s understandable that being able to survive against all odds has universal appeal and watching Robinson recreate things we all know, use and take for granted arouses our sympathy. Karl Marx sees in him an example of the pre-capitalist man producing goods because they’re useful and producing only as much as is useful to him without seeking profit.

Robinson has been seen as the true prototype of the British colonist, I’ve found a review on the net (no author’s name given) which stresses the Anglo-Saxon spirit he incorporates: “the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the practical, well-balanced religiousness, the calculating taciturnity.”

Robinson’s indifference to sex has struck me as rather odd, he’s 26 years old when he comes to the island, one could assume he’d miss female company to say the least. First I thought that the fact that Defoe wrote the novel when he was sixty years old was responsible for his fictitious character’s peculiarity, but no, he makes Robinson reflect on what he’s got and what he misses on the island and makes him think that indeed he does not miss women. When he’s back home he marries at the age of 56, we get to know about this at the very end of the story in one sentence “I married, and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction”. Conveniently(?), his wife dies a short time later.

Another reviewer who sees Robinson as a budding capitalist interprets the insignificance of sex/women as a reflection of the nature of capitalism, which emphasizes individual self-interest, and sees personal as well as group relationships, and especially those based on sex as potential menaces to the individual’s rational pursuit of economic ends.

I’m sure you’re waiting for Friday [who isn’t? :-)], he appears much later than I imagined, Robinson and Friday spend only three years together. He’s a cannibal taken to the island by a rival cannibal tribe to be slaughtered and eaten, he can escape and is saved by Robinson. At last Robinson has someone to talk to but not for a moment does he see Friday as a mate, he teaches him English and makes him call him master. Whenever he thinks of him it is in terms like ‘poor savage’, ‘poor wretched soul’ or ‘savage creature’, the White Man’s domination over native populations couldn’t be better demonstrated than in this relationship.

Friday isn’t taught only English but also Christianity, Robinson discovered religion when he rescued also some bibles from the shipwreck. I must say that if I were asked what book I’d like to take with me to a lonely island, I’d also think of the bible (after the Encyclopaedia Britannica, though) because of the many stories which would keep me occupied for some time, but in Robinson’s case we get the full programme of religious education. He sees the hand of Providence in his fate and learns to accept whatever happens to him. Defoe’s piles it on really thick so that I went back to the introduction on Defoe’s biography which I had read cursorily, I remembered that he had had many different jobs, had he also been a preacher? No, he hadn’t, either he was really a devout Christian or he thought that his book would sell well if he filled it with sermons. On the other hand, one can’t imagine how Robinson could have stayed sane if he had quarrelled with his fate.

One thing I can’t understand and I haven’t found an explanation for anywhere is why Defoe made Robinson stay on the island for so long. The sailor Alexander Selkirk whose story Defoe knew had stayed alone on an island for four years, when he was rescued he could hardly speak which is understandable. Why did Robinson have to stay on the island for 26 years? It doesn’t heighten the effect of the story but only makes it less probable in my opinion.

I find the ending of the novel strange to say the least, not only concerning Robinson’s marriage, we follow him on some journeys, on one he encounters wolves in the Alps (?!) and learn about his wealth that has accumulated in Brazil, he visits *his colony* on the island again where he had allowed some Europeans to settle, back in Europe “beside other supplies, I sent them seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them.” Women as supplies, I ask you! The sympathy I had felt for Robinson the castaway dwindled to zero when I read about Robinson back home again.

All in all I found reading the original novel enlightening in a way I hadn’t imagined.

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Penguin Popular Classics
298 pages
Cover price 2 GBP
(first published in 1719)

Summary: the full Robinson Crusoe story