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2.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
Life:
Defoe was born i n
London, a butcher’s son. After studying in one of the best dissenting
academies at Stoke Newington, Defoe plunged himself into the business
world. He began as a small merchant and took many commercial trips at
home and abroad. He met several bankruptcies, and, once or twice, was
even imprisoned for debt. Yet he never gave up and was always able to
overcome the setback and reemerge with some new successful projects.
Defoe was always interested in politics. In 1698, he published a book
entitled An Essay upon Projects, in which he made many “modern”
suggestions for improved roads and for bankruptcy laws, etc. In 1701,
Defoe wrote a satirical poem “The True-Born Englishman” to defend King
William who was sneered at as a foreigner and racially inferior. In
1702, Defoe was arrested and sentenced to stand three days in pillory
in public because of his seditious pamphlet “The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters”, which ridiculed the religious intolerance and persecution
of the petty bourgeois dissenters by the High Church. From 1704 to 1713,
he published a periodical, “The Review”, a political and literary paper
coming out 3 times a week. In 1719, he published his well-known novel,
Robinson Crusoe, which was followed by a number of other novels, including
Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel
Jacque (1722), Roxana (1724), and A Journal of the Plague
Year (1722). He died in 1730.
Robinson Crusoe
There are in fact three parts in “Robinson Crusoe”,
among which only the first part is widely known and read. After the
immediate success of the first part in 1719, Defoe published a second
part in the same year, and then the third part in 1720.
The story was based on the experience of a Scottish
Sailor named Alexander Selkirk who had been marooned on a desert island
off the coast of Chile and lived there in solitude for four or five
years. After his return to Europe, his adventures became known. Defoe
wrote this novel in the first person singular.
This novel begins with Crusoe’s career as a
sailor and a merchant, and then as a plantation owner and a slave trader.
On a voyage to Africa to buy slaves he meets with the most unfortunate
shipwreck. Then he finds himself cast by the sea waves upon the shore
of an uninhabited island. He has to state there alone and manage the
livelihood for himself. First of all, he gets back some food and clothes,
a few guns and some ammunition from the wretched ship. He builds a shelter
to protect himself. Then he grows barley and rice, domesticated goats
and fight against cannibal savages coming from the neighboring islands,
later he saves a savage from death and named him Friday, who becomes
his faithful servant. In the hope of returning to Europe, he builds
a boat. Finally an English ship comes and takes him back. Thus Robinson
Crusoe ends his twenty-eight years’ life in the deserted island.
The last twenty pages of the novel deal with
the hero’s adventures after he left this island and ends up with Crusoe
sending women and supplies to the island to establish a regular colony
there.
The second part contains a series of the hero’s adventures in different
parts of the world.
This novel shows Robinson Crusoe’s great self-awareness.
Thought he is abandoned on the isolated island , Crusoe never loses
the consciousness of himself but rather deepens his self-awareness because
he withdraws from the external social world and turns inward. Crusoe
keeps a careful reckoning of the state of his own soul which is a key
Presbyterian doctrine. Crusoe’s shabby calendar does not simply mark
the passing of days, but more egocentrically marks the days he has spent
on the island. It is about him, a sort of self-conscious or autobiographical
calendar with him at its center. He spends several months to teach his
parrot to say the words, “Poor Robin Crusoe, Where have you been?”,
which voice his own innate feeling. From this, we can sense Crusoe’s
impulse toward self-awareness.
In this novel, Defoe created the image of a
true empire-builder, a colonizer and a foreign trader, who has the courage
and will to face hardships, and who has determination to preserve himself
and improve his livelihood by struggling against nature. There is also
a glorification of labor, which enables the hero gradually to produce
a favorable condition for himself. His resourcefulness in building a
home, dairy, grape arbor, country house, and goat stable from practically
nothing is clearly remarkable, which is applauded by Swiss philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This image is a criticism of the lazy and parasitic
feudal nobles and a praise of the bourgeois.
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