Eighteenth-Century Studies

Turley, Hans.
Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton
Eighteenth-Century Studies - Volume 31, Number 2, Winter 1997-98, pp. 199-214

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Hans Turley - Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton - Eighteenth-Century Studies 31:2 Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.2 (1997-98) 199-214 Piracy, Identity, and Desire in Captain Singleton Hans Turley Daniel Defoe's novel Captain Singleton (1720) is the most important of his pirate works and particularly significant in a history of the novel that emphasizes psychological realism and domestic subjectivity. Usually ignored or dismissed in Defoe studies and histories of the novel, Captain Singleton portrays a fictional hero quite different from the title character of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Captain Singleton seems difficult to pin down for twentieth-century readers precisely because depictions of transgressive sexuality have been ignored in Defoe criticism. The standard view of the novel as lacking realistic psychological development fails to take into account the unspoken desires of the central figure as they exist within the framework of piratical transgression; instead, criticism focuses on Singleton as homo economicus within Defoe's metanarrative of trade and mercantilism. In such a reading the novel seems unfocused and contradictory; Robinson Crusoe is favored as a successful negotiation of the complex relations between the rise of capitalism and the rise of the psychological subject. Arguably we can see Crusoe embodying the attributes of a middle-class hero in the first volume of Crusoe because he profits economically and spiritually from...