Daniel Defoe Flashcards
Defoe - about
D.1731. Prolific writer and printer - 500 books. Involved in Monmouth’s rebellion - puritan background and a close ally of William III. Was a merchant and imprisoned for debt at various times.
Defoe - key works
Robinson Crusoe (1719) Moll Flanders (1722) The true-born Englishman (1701) Shortest way with dissenters
Defoe - Key ideas
Accused of inconsistency in ideas. Interest in motives/self-examination, spiritual/physical movement (reflection in changes of clothing), self-presentation (motives?)
Robinson Crusoe - about
- Inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk. Intended to “instruct and delight”. Mix of allegory, sensation, and adventure?
Crusoe - key themes
Allegory. Religious salvation/finding faith. Travel, resourcefulness, fate. God vs. Nature - which provides for him? Free will vs. Providentialism. Autobiography/realism. Male companionship/slavery.
Crusoe - Religious/faith quotes
“Without asking god’s blessing, or my fathers… I went on board a ship”
“You ought to take this for a plain and visible token” or providence. “Born to be my own destroyer”.
Corn: “I must confess, my religious thankfulness to god’s providence began to abate too, upon the discover that all this was nothing but what was common”.
“reason, as it were, expostulated with me… ‘well, you are in a desolate condition it is true, but pray remember, where are the rest of you?’” Considers that he “provoked the justice of God” by being disobedient.
Thankfulness: “I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life.”
Seeing footprint: “thus my fear banished all my religious hope. All that former confidence in God…now vanished…”
Crusoe - Nature quotes
Money: “o drug!”
Destructive effect: lion “shot him in the head”
“I built me a little kind of a bower” (with a surrounding fence) “I fancied I now had my country house and my sea-coast house”.
“mounted to the top of the hill” with a “perspective glass” to see the cannibals
Crusoe - Friday quotes
“His very affections were tied to me, like those of a child to a father”
“I seriously prayed to God that he would enable me to instruct savingly this poor savage.” “Though I was now an old man, yet I was but a young doctor”
“Is it a real man, or an angel?” (Marooned men on beach)
Crusoe - critics
Hunter: origins of the novel: from early C18 writing such as diaries/crime literature/biographies.
Baines - Defoe heavily influenced by Selkirk’s narrative and travel literature - thus the language of profit and loss and a bookeeping mentality.
Blewett - story has a “rhythm of imprisonment and deliverance”. “Crusoe’ self-conversion is mirrored and expanded in his conversion of Friday”
Crusoe - contemporary crossovers
Baines woods’ narrative on Selkirk - “I must needs quit these Reflections, which are more proper for a Philosopher and Divine than a Mariner”.
Moll Flanders - about
- “Picaresque novel” (adventures of roguish hero are described in humorous/satirical prose, often depicting everyday occurrences).
Moll Flanders - key ideas
Criminality, travel, gender, marriage/love/convenience, commodities/commerce, repentance & morals. Cloth trade. Sense of “London”. Female solidarity/companionship.
Moll Flanders - critics
Backscheider - moll’s deliverance depends on her repentance. Money is presented as a “necessary consequence” of structure of contemporary heterosexual relationships.
Baines - doesn’t feel like it is going to turn into allegory, like Crusoe does. She is a “psychologically subtle case study”
Moll Flanders - religious quotes
Moral claims - “there is in this story abundance of delightful incidents, and all of them usefully apply’d”
“The diligent devil… resolv’d I should continue in his service” “I had an evil counsellor within” (in/external prompting uncertain…)
After being caught and imprisoned “then I repented heartily of all my life past, but that repentance yielded me no satisfaction… I seem’d not to mourn that I had committed such crimes… but that I was to be punish’d for it”
“spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence, for the wicked lives we have lived” (lancs. husband in America]
Moll Flanders - gender quotes
Men: “my Lancashire husband”; “the captain” (half-brother)
“I played this lover as the Anger does with a trout” (lancs)
“I liv’d therefore in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest wife” “three year more” (ie. not too guilty…) (finds him later “almost blind”)
Woman without a man: “jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer”.
“governess” “unwelcome burthen of a child clandestinely gotten”
Power of female gossip: “it was the chat of the tea-table” (saving a woman from rejection - female alliances)
Rapaciousness of London banker suitor: “I must not be deny’d, I won’t be deny’d, I can’t be deny’d” “well well, said I, giving him a slight kiss, then you shan’t be deny’d” “then it occurr’d to me what an abominable creature am I!”
