Defoe's Major Fiction: Accounting for the Self by Elizabeth R. Napier (review)

Several scholars, including Homer O. Brown and David Marshall, have explored Defoe's presentation of self and selves, and Ms. Napier's earlier book, Falling into Matter (2012), includes a chapter touching briefly on the construction and revelation of self in Robinson Crusoe. Defoe's Major Fiction pursues the topic more broadly, to examine Defoe's treatment of "moral accountability and self-definition." Ms. Na-pier assumes "[t]he array and coherence of Defoe's narrative experiments" and argues for Defoe's introduction of "inwardness and interiority" as each novel's focus; she accords the most discussion to Roxana, with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders also receiving significant attention, and A Journal of the Plague Year, probably the least.

Ms. Napier skillfully analyzes self-presentation and self-creation in the novels. Her methodology often involves taking a detail and asking what principle of self-characterization it prompts a reader to formulate. For example, she explores at length "changeableness," the transition from "self" to "self," but by analogy to an object: hence she notes about Moll's governess melting the silver tankard that Moll stole, "Characters in Defoe's novels are always melting and reforming in this way … they are protean, shape-changing, liquescent." With this comparison Ms. Na-pier introduces an idea that will be pursued throughout her study, as when she later notes Moll's "ability to 'melt' into the crowd."

The effectiveness of the four chapters lies in Ms. Napier's decision to organize them around a topic, rather than a novel (or two), allowing freedom to compare and contrast the novels thematically. For example, H.F.'s protest, "I can go no farther here," leads to a comment by Crusoe in Serious Reflections, and then to Ms. Napier's proposition that some events are impossible to narrate and that the past can be "irretrievable." Similarly, in her discussion of motives, she moves gracefully from the Prince, in a dark corner, hurting Roxana when fastening a necklace about her neck, to the episode when Moll steals a child's necklace "in the alley, an act that inspires, as if by mere proximity to the neck and a setting of darkness, homicidal thoughts." Yoking these scenes together, Ms. Napier speculates about self-assertion (in Moll's case) and self-destruction (in Roxana's), noting that Roxana's "tone here suggests that she feels she deserves such a fate," that is, being choked.

Ms. Napier often divides Defoe's narrators by gender and points out their (or society's) differing notions of masculine and feminine selves. Women are said to have "decreased mobility and agency," spending much time creating and concealing themselves from a relatively stable group of associates, while men can literally or figuratively just sail away. Ms. Napier suggests that the plight of Defoe's women strengthens our grasp of the plight of hu-mankind regarding both "agency and accountability," particularly since, for women, the very act of "[seizing] agency" may be considered criminal. Gender also drives the discussion of doubles, with Ms. Napier arguing that female doubles "are significantly less salubrious, as if friendships between men … may release one to genuine affection, with bonds between women redressing primarily issues of (patriarchal) power."

Defoe's Major Fiction contains few stylistic impediments or irritants. Ms. Napier writes clearly and manages the comparison and contrast of various novels effectively, avoiding the repetition into which her chapter organization might have fallen with less competent writing. This brief book disappoints primarily in what it fails to discuss. Especially disappointing is the second chapter, in which Ms. Napier explores the visual and theatrical as they affect or stop narrative progress, particularly the devices of physical distance, tableaux, disguise, and gaming. "Native persons," for instance, "whose alterity tends to be represented from a (grateful) distance, through perspective glasses or from a boat at sea … act in dumb show, as if what they are doing were divested of significant or shareable—or in the case of...