The Columbia History of the British Novel

person at another is his or her history, and in Defoe that history is largely rendered in terms of events and actions rather than states of mind.

Thus, although characters in all the tales speak autobiographically, they do so as if able to observe themselves from without, and with the awareness that their identity derives in part from being seen or described by others within a public space. Part of this phenomenon may follow from the fiction that the narratives are written, edited, or published some years after the events described. Part of it stems from the fact that the narrators tell their tales at some physical distance from the scenes they describe. As one critic puts it, exile is often the condition of narrative-a point that Colonel Jack himself makes about his own 'Exile'-and the same insight arises more oddly in Robinson's famous moment of encountering the footprint in the sand, because he wonders whether 'this Foot might be the Print of my own Foot': the self is briefly constituted by a displaced imprint of part of the body. And part of the phenomenon also emerges from the narrators' tendency to paint themselves as emblems or moral devices for their readers to contemplate: Robinson speaks of himself as an «emblem»; Moll calls herself a «Memento»; Roxana uses the phrase 'a standing Monument'; and -41- Colonel Jack depicts himself and a partner in crime as 'something like the Cock in the Fable,' displacing identity into a predetermined dramatic scene. Similarly, characters remember that their names are the product of the reputation they have earned: this is obviously true of Captain Singleton, and Moll remembers that the way her circumstances are described is as important as some other actuality. Thus Moll says at one point that she is 'a single Person again, as I may call my self'; and later, she describes a traveling companion as 'my Friend, as I call'd her.'

One critic sees the habit of converting the self into an emblem as proof of Defoe's «Puritan» habits of representation. But the «self» that emerges operates at some distance from the speaking «I» for other, perhaps less logical reasons as well. The self seems oddly disjointed in other ways: Captain Singleton says in a telling moment, 'I had nobody to vouch for me what I was, or from whence I came.' Likewise, no character, apart from Robinson Crusoe and H. F., is known by his or her true, or essential name, and H. F.'s name is nothing if not cryptic (though Defoe had an uncle Henry Foe). All the other characters are defined by arbitrary, usually generic or titular names: Colonel Jack is only given that title to distinguish him from two other «Johns» who are designated «Captain» and «Major» according to their respective ages. «Singleton» is reputedly Captain Singleton's surname, but the «Captain» comments in advance on what he becomes by action and reputation in the course of his tale; «Bob» is an arbitrary first name-'it seems they never knew by what Name I was Christen'd'-so in signing himself «CAPTAINBOB» at the end of the entire narrative, the narrator has finally shed any trace of his natural origins. Moll Flanders is not Moll's true name; it is the name by which Moll becomes notorious in criminal gossip (the name thus becomes at once a kind of linguistic currency and a purely public feature of identity), and refers synecdochically to Moll's trade as a prostitute (moll), and to her propensity for stealing cloth (Flanders being a source of cloth as well as reputedly of the best prostitutes). Very early in her story, Moll falls in love and sleeps with the elder brother in the family that has sheltered her. She feels that her position renders her truly his wife no matter how her position is socially constituted. This mistake about essence carries with it a real pathos, and if there is one growth in Moll's consciousness, it comes in her recognition of her essentially social identity. She says to her seducer, 'if I have been perswaded to believe that I am really, and in Essence of the -42- Thing your Wife, shall I now give the Lye to all those Arguments, and call myself your Whore, or Mistress, which is the same thing?' But later, she has learned to assume a range of roles to manipulate her circumstances: in her role as a criminal, 'generally I took up new Figures, and contriv'd to appear in new Shapes every time I went abroad.'

As one critic has phrased it, Defoe characteristically renders the self as 'displaced.' He tends to depict characters' propensity to discover aspects of themselves in others, or others' tendencies to assume, as if by osmosis, the narrator's qualities. In Roxana, Amy shares and manages Roxana's plot to the extent that even their sexual histories are intertwined: in a reversal of the usual anthropological model, female bonding is secured by trading in men. Amy's management of Roxana's reputation by manipulating gossip is also a participation in Roxana's identity since that identity is inseparable (until the end) from her public value. Moll develops a symbiotic relationship with her «governess» or fence; Robinson has Xury at the beginning (whom he sells) and Friday at the end (whom he has effectively enslaved), almost as if they play the fool and Edgar to Robinson's Lear. The episodes in Robinson Crusoe conclude with Friday committing daring exploits in the Pyrenees, defeating wolves and a bear. These incidents are curiously at odds with the story as a whole, although we could read Friday's action as Crusoe's projected desire for dramatic activity after years of enforced domesticity on the island. Moll, Roxana, and Captain Singleton also develop relationships with Quakers, who represent a community that itself was tangentially related to English society as a whole. Like the Jews in European intellectual life, these characters have a peculiar perspective on a society in which they participate and yet in some sense resist; and Quaker pacifism (in Captain Singleton) and honesty (in Moll Flanders and Roxana) differentiate these figures from a world in which the narrators would otherwise find only projections of their worse motives.

Roxana is also a name that clothes an identity with a certain reputation, one that both she and Amy are keen to manipulate and censor: the issue is often a question of how Roxana is known or said to be known, so that gossip as a form of social advertising assumes a high value. Significantly, the truth about Roxana's private identity and her past surfaces in the figure of her long-abandoned daughter who tenaciously pursues her; and it is equally significant that only at this point in the plot do we learn that Roxana's true name is the same as her daughter's, Susan. (Roxana reports this as if there were an identity linking her with -43- her daughter: 'She was my own Name,' she writes [my emphasis].) Here, true identity comes as a threat both to the narrator and to the continuity of narrative itself: Roxana breaks off soon after the protagonist flees to Holland to escape the potential consequences of discovery. True identity presents an equally significant threat to Moll, since it is by such knowledge that she learns that she has married her own brother: few themes could better threaten social and narrative development than incest. Roxana's real name also threatens her politically, since she has earlier enjoyed the changeability of public and conventional definition, such that even her gender becomes fluid: she tells the merchant who proposes to her, 'I wou'd be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou'd die so.' (She elaborates elsewhere by writing, 'while a Woman was single, she was a Masculine in her politick Capacity.')

I have suggested that the abiding question seems to be how the individual enters both a political and fiscal economy. Defoe's narratives appear to pose it by more than one device: like the individual in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan or John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, the character begins life as a social minimum, a kind of atom that only becomes defined as a character and a social or political agent by virtue of accumulating experience in the public world. The obligations individuals develop are not the most obvious or natural ones, so that, as in Hobbes's contract by which such individuals yield up their powers to the sovereign, we are made conscious of the artifice by which those individuals deal with the world and with others. The emphasis on the artifice necessary for the construction of a viable social economy explains in part why narrators dissimulate even to those they love, and why characters are often obsessed by clothing, since they are conscious of how they are seen and marked from without: in the last part of her story, Roxana becomes increasingly defined by the fact that she has on occasion donned a Turkish costume; and her daughter intuits the truth about her precisely because that costume has become a public and forensic sign of who Roxana is. One symptom of Moll's economic and social confidence at the end of her story is the fact that she dresses her husband James in finery 'to make him appear, as he really was, a very fine Gentleman.' The preface to Roxana appropriately speaks of tale-telling as a form of dressing up: the editor will not dress up 'the Story in worse Cloathes than the Lady.'

In contrast to the Victorian hero or heroine, Defoe's characters become less rather than more essentially themselves. They always have -44- tangential relations to their own family histories-or have none-and often they abandon the family obligations they do develop, as if to render the construction of social bonds as strenuous as possible. Robinson deliberately defies his father; H. F. remains in plague-stricken London while his brother escapes (much as the fickle Restoration court escapes to Oxford). Although the cavalier retains an important tie to his father, it is clear that the paternal role is assumed by Gustavus Adolphus, the ideal king and military commander, virtues the cavalier subsequently imputes to Fairfax. Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack only have pasts and families by hearsay: thus Captain Singleton has a gypsy woman 'whom I was taught to call Mother,' only after he has been stolen and