sold; his life of wandering seems predetermined by this upbringing. Similarly, Colonel Jack wanders in search of gentility partly because 'my Nurse told me my Mother was a Gentlewoman.' Roxana and Moll both abandon families and children, although Moll rediscovers her son by her brother in Virginia, and Roxana is eventually hounded by one of the children she has abandoned.
In shedding or escaping familial ties, characters seem constantly to be inventing and reinventing themselves. The strain of invention is marked in part by the completeness of Captain Singleton's and Colonel Jack's ignorance of Christian truths (in religious terms, both characters are blank slates who must make themselves); in part by a common obsession to render the self genteel, as if to defy a social category that was conventionally inherited, not made, in the century before Defoe's; and in part by the fact that Defoe invents characters whose relationship to male Protestant English society after 1688- the Whig settlement Defoe recommends-is or becomes quite tangential. Two narrators are women; it transpires that Robinson, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack become Catholics; Colonel Jack participates briefly in the 1715 rebellion; though a royalist, the cavalier comes to admire Fairfax as a model commander (and by implication magistrate); and H. F. operates under dire circumstances that render all social relations eccentric and strange: here the plague functions as one of those scenes of erasure that permit us to reimagine how a society could construct itself out of whole cloth. And though Roxana and Crusoe know their family background, they are foreigners: Roxanais the daughter of French Huguenots, and Crusoe the son of a German, Kreutznauer, born in Bremen.
Given Defoe's obsessions with money and commerce, it is also -45- unsurprising that characters come to operate as public counters within a system of exchange, and if they accumulate value in the process of time it is not in psychological but in fiscal terms. Not only do the characters usually make money in the course of things, but they themselves also operate as monetary units that gain value merely by having circulated around the world the way goods were supposed to do in Defoe's mercantilism. Thus Captain Singleton begins badly, but well, by being sold as a baby. Roxana constantly makes money, but also becomes, crucially, a prince's 'Idol,' by which epithet she realizes how as a sexual creature she is using herself as a commodity. Of the prince, she says, 'I had… perfectly engrossed him'; and she writes, 'Thus far am I a standing Mark of the Weakness of Great Men, in their Vice… [for] they raise the Value of the Object which they pretend to pitch upon, by their Fancy.' Here the term «Mark» conflates public and narrative signs with the public nature of currency, so that dressing up is an attempt to raise one's value in both economies. Similarly, Moll circulates both at home and in the colonies, which constantly increases her value. As for Colonel Jack and Robinson Crusoe, early investment in the colonies continues to increase their wealth even as their local fortunes fluctuate, and the narrative «end» is signaled by the return on those investments. In a less dramatic way this is also true of Captain Singleton, who places some of his spoils at the disposal of a gentleman who ensures that they earn interest. And because for Defoe London is the hub of commerce, London exercises a pull for all-except the cavalier, whose concerns are exclusively political.
Finally, how do the narratives prove political? We have seen that Memoirs of a Cavalier recommends a figure like Sir Thomas Fairfax, and it seems from other texts that Defoe favors a kind of benevolent patriarchy, which he carefully opposes to the tyranny he associates with late Caroline culture. To promote the values of such patriarchy, which would ensure a cooperative society, he also develops not only a language of contract but of gratitude and sentiment that will provide the means for understanding. The importance of contracts is reinforced by Defoe's emphasis on the graphic or writing: for example, Moll negotiates her marriage to her brother (as it transpires) by conducting a dialogue on a windowpane with his diamond ring, then on a sheet of paper. Her jeweler-landlord shows Roxana 'a Contract in Writing' to engage her in marriage; and the genuineness of her bond to her last husband, the Dutch merchant, is proven by a mutual exchange of accounts. He -46- brings to her boxes 'full of Books, and Papers, and Parchments, I mean, Books of Accompts, and Writings'; she in turn produces proofs of her investments in real estate; and he seals his love for her by returning 'all my Writings into my own Hands again.'
We have already seen, in other narratives, how instrumental literacy is to the self's dealings with the world. If contracts are seen as graphic documents, one problem that emerges is anthropological: what constitutes a contract with nonliterate or preliterate societies? This is obviously of concern to Robinson, but it is of special interest in Captain Singleton, where the wanderings in Africa are not only the occasion for depiction of the exotic, but for testing the conditions under which the explorers can feel safe in their dealings with African tribes. Early on, the text reminds us of the Hobbesian postulate about the state of nature: after realizing that not all «Savages» are cannibals, Captain Singleton remarks however that they are 'only civil for Fear.' Captain Singleton himself becomes the contractual magistrate of his group, just as he remarks that another tribe is 'brutish,' using a term with an unmistakably Hobbesian ring. There is a fascination henceforth with the signs that either the party or the Africans make to indicate peaceful intentions: thus at one point, 'one of our Company remember'd the Signal of Friendship which the Natives made us from the South Part of the Island, viz. of setting up a long Pole, and put us in Mind, that perhaps it was the same thing to them as a Flag of Truce was to us.' Later, the party wounds and then heals a «royal» African prisoner, who swears an oath of loyalty to Captain Singleton by breaking an arrow in two and setting the point against his breast; and he subsequently becomes known as 'the Black Prince.' He in turn ensures that the natives voluntarily submit to enslavement by the Europeans, and it also becomes their task to convey the appropriate 'Signal of Peace' to those other tribes whose dialects they do not know. In his career as a pirate, the question becomes for Captain Singleton whether he can trust the hoisting of the white flag, and in Ceylon he is betrayed, since 'I thought all Nations in the World, even the most savage People, when they held out a Flag of Peace, kept the Offer of Peace made by that Signal, very sacredly.' Thus Defoe reminds us of the necessity for some bonding fiction between peoples, but characteristically leaves the answer up in the air.
Defoe's social prescriptions are rendered perhaps more clearly than elsewhere in A Journal of the Plague Year, which in some ways is Defoe's -47- most satisfying book. The general strategy is to ask us to imagine a circumstance in which ordinary human life comes to a standstill (a plague, which I think Defoe presents as a metaphor for the South Sea Bubble that had ruined thousands the year before Defoe's book appeared) and thus to reimagine the terms by which we bond to survive. Two features stand out. First, Defoe incorporates a long digression involving three men-John, Thomas, and Richard — who succeed in saving a group of refugees from the plague-stricken city by illegally leading them outside the city confines to Epping. The group does not survive, however, by communal effort alone, for it is forced ultimately to rely on the benevolence of a local magistrate. Defoe's polity is not as republican as it seems at first, but rather prescribes a benign magistrate of the kind Colonel Jack exemplifies by his benevolent treatment of his slaves in Virginia: the carrot substitutes for the stick, Whig for Tory hegemony.
Second, more clearly in this book than elsewhere, Defoe begins to sketch the possibilities for a kind of affective and sentimental means of knowing others. As the plague progresses, the space of the book is filled with gestures and cries, there being some experiences for which mere words are inadequate. And in circumstances that emphasize the special distress of suffering families, Defoe presents the possibility that a gestural and lachrymose rhetoric of the body may transcend language. In a key episode, H. F. visits Robert the Waterman, whose family is locked with the plague inside their house. Robert weeps as H. F. asks why he has abandoned them, to which Robert replies:
'I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and blessed be the Lord, I keep them from want'; and with that I observed that he lifted up his eyes to heaven, with a countenance that presently told me I had happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious, good man.
One man struck with grief dies of a broken heart; another man's head literally sinks between his shoulders. This is hardly realism, any more than are similar moments in Smollett and Dickens; but it all amounts to a gestural and sentimental rhetoric that begins to cordon the family off from the larger concerns of the polity and anticipates the private and sentimental worlds of Sterne and The Man of Feeling.
Richard Kroll -48-
Selected Bibliography Backscheider Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
