Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

Introduction

An exotic novel of travel and adventure, Robinson Crusoe functions primarily as Defoe's defense of his bourgeois Protestantism. Crusoe's adventures—the shipwrecks, his life as a planter in South America, and his years of isolation on the island—provide an apt context for his polemic. A political dissenter and pamphleteer, Defoe saw as his enemies the Tory aristocrats whose royalism in government and religion blocked the aspirations of the middle class. Like Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels (1726), Defoe in his novel also presented a religiously and politically corrupt England.

Discussion

As Crusoe says, “Mine was the middle state,” which his father “had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition and envy of the upper part of mankind.” Its virtues and blessings were those of “temperance, moderation, quietness, health [and] society” (Defoe, 52).

Robinson Crusoe owes at least part of its long-lived popularity to the universality of its themes. On the surface, the novel deals with travel and adventure, one man's survival in a potentially hostile—yet fecund—environment. On another level, the novel can be interpreted in two different ways: as an allegory of the soul's journey from spiritual estrangement to salvation or as an apologia for eighteenth century English optimism, ingenuity, materialism, and imperialism. Robinson Crusoe is at once realistic and fantastic, didactic and entertaining, religious and materialistic (McKeon, 74).

The title character, who dominates the narrative by telling his own story in retrospect, is the personification of many of the story's major themes. Throughout his travels to Africa and South America, and later during his sojourn on the uninhabited island, Crusoe embodies the spirit of adventure and ...