Defoe and the Whig Novel: A Reading of the Major Fiction (review)

Leon Guilhamet proposes an alternative story of origins for the eighteenth-century English novel, one that considers “Whig culture” to be the most important influence on the development of the form, and one that considers Daniel Defoe to be the key figure in its rise. Even after his withdrawal from direct political activity, Guilhamet argues, Defoe maintained his commitment to Whig revolutionary principles, but “transferred his political, cultural, and social concerns to the realm of fiction.” Taken together, Defoe’s major works of fiction “create a series of Whig myths, which helped to form British culture in the early eighteenth century and influenced it far beyond that time” (15).

At the same time that he pursues a reconceptualization of the rise of the novel, Guilhamet wants to demonstrate that Defoe was a more accomplished writer of fiction than he has sometimes been given credit for. Though he often wrote in haste, Guilhamet insists, Defoe displayed a consistent sense of purpose in his novels. Charges that he advanced contradictory ideas as occasion (or financial need) demanded stem, in large measure, from the confused state of the Defoe canon after a half-century of “irresponsible and impressionistic additions” to it. Then, too, Guilhamet suggests, critics who dismiss Defoe’s prose as slipshod are losing sight of the author’s skill in adapting his style to fit the voice of his narrators. Guilhamet aims to provide a firmer basis for recognizing Defoe as (in Maximillian Novak’s phrase) a master of fictions by bringing “a more careful application of hermeneutics” to Defoe’s work (16). The major fiction holds a privileged place in Guilhamet’s account not simply because he sees it as Defoe’s most mature and accomplished work, but also because those novels are widely accepted as being genuinely by Defoe.

Following his introduction, Guilhamet offers two chapters that serve as background for his use of broad terms like “Whig culture.” In a framing chapter on “The Whig Revolution,” Guilhamet seeks to bring into view “a pantheon of ideals and structures ... [that] formed the basis of Whig intellectual and emotional attachment to the multi-faceted cause of democracy” (21). The headings under which he ranges his discussion (namely, “Liberty,” “Property,” “Captivity,” “Trade, Commerce, and Imperialism,” “Education, Feminism, and Marriage,” “Sincerity,” “The Dutch Model,” “Whig Heroes,” and “Repentance”) are sensible enough, and they establish themes to which he returns in his readings of the novels. At an average of two pages per heading, however, none of the topics comes as fully or as sharply into view as one might wish, given the scope of the arguments meant to rest upon them.

The second of Guilhamet’s background chapters, “Defoe and the Whigs,” revisits the same list of headings in order “to indicate some of the links between those ideas and Defoe’s attitudes prior to the creative period when his major fiction evolved” (46). Guilhamet has certainly read his Defoe: he cites both Defoe’s poetry and his non-fiction prose (with forays into the novels as well). With its somewhat fragmented sprint through Defoe’s pre-1719 works, however, the chapter does not quite arrive at a fully persuasive account of the Whig principles that are supposed to provide the thread that readers are to see running through Defoe’s thought and writings in Guilhamet’s subsequent discussion.

The remainder of the book is devoted to chapters on Robinson Crusoe (that is, the first of the Crusoe novels), Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, Colonel Jack, and Roxana. These chapters are, on the whole, more satisfying in their execution than the early chapters establishing the Whig context. There is some special pleading: Crusoe’s Farther Adventures and Serious Reflections are excluded because they “do not advance the development of the Whig novel in a substantial way” (93), while Captain Singleton is elevated to “major” novel status because...