Robinson Crusoe, Virginal Hero of the Commercial North

A Man is to be executed for Sodomy; Nature and the Laws of God require it.

—Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness (1727)

The new gay reading of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719) treats Daniel Defoe's famous novel as a case history of homosexual repression. According to Hans Turley, the death of Friday—killed by Caribs who shoot him with arrows after six of them moon him—is a scene of murderous gay-bashing: replete with choral expression of anti-sodomitical contempt, it is symbolically staged as such in Robinson Crusoe's "guilty" subconscious mind ("mooning natives are a striking image"). And subsequently, Crusoe's pent-up but now certainly unobtainable desire to penetrate Man Friday fuels his vandalism of the Tartar pagan idol near Nerchinsk, asserts Turley.¹ Srinivas Aravamudan claims that Crusoe's likely homosexual orientation was muted by a prudent Defoe, who reminded himself that "once at the pillory was sufficient" and explored, rather, theoretical links between homosexual lust and capitalist enterprise. In a contemporary French illustration of Crusoe's astral space-travel in the sequel Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), Aravamudan finds the artist's discerning projection of a visionary Crusoe who looks narcissistically to the sun as he "floats with gay abandon in the plasma of outer space," surrounded by angels, devils, and cherubim vogueing "alternative sexualities."²

These recent perspectives on Crusoe opened by queer studies offer an answer to the old question of why Defoe's novelistic rendering of subjectivity seems to exclude Crusoe's sexual desire. Although posed to comic effect in the pornographic send-up The Secret Life of Robinson Crusoe (Paris: Olympia, 1962), the question was tendered with thought-provoking intent in Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). But, too, the era of the High Sixties saw its uptake in the academy, most notably by John J. Richetti and Michael McKeon, both Columbia University Ph.D.'s interested in early popular fiction's ties to Protestant roots of modern capitalism.³ Seeming to follow the lead of Ian Watt in embracing a Weberian understanding of the disjunctive spheres of economic individualism and sexual rewards-and-punishments in the Protestant worldview, these scholars held that psychosocial realism in Crusoe is limited to the representation of Crusoe's problematic moralization of his upward class mobility.⁴ Hans Turley has now directly challenged this view by positing, first, that Crusoe's sexual desire must exist, then recognizing, secondly, that its depiction could not have patently exceeded heterocentrist bounds in any popular early English novel. In line with this counterfactual logic, he sees the work's mimed subjectivity comprehending Defoe's inexplicit representation of transgressive and repressed sexuality—hence Crusoe queered.⁵

In this essay, I show that Crusoe's sexual identity is aligned with the novel's focus on his mercantile exertions and their Christianization by Defoe, but in a way which bears no logic of correspondence with an alleged representation of homosexual desire. As we will see, Crusoe embodies Defoe's beliefs that early modern commerce's highest roles are (1) controlled by Providence, (2) performed by Germanic cultivators of New World riches and of trade in the East, and (3), as befits their status of sacred, cosmically privileged Christian offices, most justly occupied by virginal men, that is, male sexual neuters who suffer no distractions of fornication or the marriage-bed. Crusoe is this commercial paragon, and as such he is a vehicle by which Defoe promotes the cause of English international trade, which is portrayed throughout the novel as entailing the benefit of urban wealth and splendor. In large measure, my argument will rely on evidence gleaned through historical contextualization and by attending to the ludic subtleties of Defoe's verbal art.

While in this essay I hope to refute the gay reading of Robinson...