Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe

Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe Maximillian E. Novak Let me begin by saying that I am writing as à defender of Defoe's place in what has sometimes been called "the rise ofthe novel." A few years ago, at a meeting of the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, I heard a diatribe against Defoe and his creation Moll Flanders as an example of male usurpation. By assuming the voice of a female narrator, so the argument went, Defoe had insulted women in general. The work was not so much writing as ventriloquism, and Defoe was simply exploiting the character of Moll and womankind to make money and for some obscure nefarious purposes. This attack resembled, but went far beyond, the accusations against Defoe in Madeleine Kahn's Narrative Transvestism ; Defoe's writing amounted to narrative villainy.1 Shortly thereafter, I read a book which advocated replacing Robinson Crusoe with what was apparently a much more satisfying work—Charles Martin's Passages from Friday—that is, replacing a book that has maintained an audience throughout the world for 280 years with a work having a more appropriate message for us. Who, after all, would want to read a work that is clearly prejudiced against cannibals and opposed to vegetarian principles (among 1 Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kahn's section on Defoe (pp. 57-102) concentrates on reminding us that Defoe is always the masculine creator behind Moll Flanders and Roxana and that his position as a writer is manipulative. The notion that Defoe experienced both "fear and envy" in assuming the voices of these characters is extremely interesting. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the charges levelled against Crusoe were that he eats the goats on his island and appears to feel a distinct dislike for the Caribs who use what he had come to think of as his island for the purpose of devouring the natives of other tribes)? That the cannibals would most willingly hack his body into pieces with their wooden swords and indeed, eventually, engage in an attack upon the nascent colony in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is not seen as an excuse. What is most at issue here is the vicious mind of the colonialist which must be castigated against all common sense.2 The basic notion behind this attack appears to be that there is no real value in Robinson Crusoe as a work of literature, that only the myth is interesting, and that we have the right to select a version of the myth that better suits our modern mind-set. Michel Tournier's Vendredi and J.M. Coetzee's Foe are not to be seen as wonderful commentaries on Defoe's original, through which we can measure the ideas ofthe eighteenth century with those of our own, but rather as salubrious replacements for a flawed view of the world.3 Some scholars are dropping Defoe from discussions of the novel. That Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel (1996) mentions Defoe a scant three times strikes me as an historical aberration in a work claiming to offer a "true" history of the novel. How comfortable should we feel about replacing the realities of literary history and criticism with autobiographical fantasies?4 Similarly, William Beatty Warner's Licensing Entertainment, while denying any counter-hegemonic intentions, clearly wants to replace the usual Defoe-Richardson-Fielding paradigm for the origins ofthe novel with a Behn-Manley-Haywood-Richardson-Fielding pattern.5 2 Patrick J. Keane, Coleridge's Submerged Politics: The Ancient Mariner and Robinson Crusoe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). See esp, pp. 117-23 on Martin's Passages from Friday; and Charles Martin, Passagesfrom Friday, in Steal the Bacon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 21-50. 3 Notable as these works are, they lack the combination of creativity and imagination that made Robinson Crusoe an inspirational work for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Vincent Van Gogh. 4 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story ofthe...