Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling by Larissa Behrendt

Author:Larissa Behrendt [Behrendt, Larissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Australia & New Zealand, Literary Criticism, Australian & Oceanian
ISBN: 9780702256318
Google: u_YtCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Published: 2016-01-27T00:17:00.131523+00:00

Robinson Crusoe: the dread of falling into the hands of savages and cannibals

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist and spy, and one of the founders of the English novel. He was a prolific writer, penning over 500 books, pamphlets and journals on topics including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural. But it is his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which became an enduring classic.

Robinson Crusoe, an adventurer with recurring bad luck, is shipwrecked while trying his hand at the slave trade. He is the sole survivor, washed ashore on a deserted island where he has to live in a ‘State of Nature’ to survive. He uses what he finds on the island and salvages from shipwrecks to stay alive and develop his own fiefdom on the land.

During his time at sea, before the shipwreck, Crusoe assumes that cannibals inhabit the shores he sails past. He lives with the fear that ‘where we could ne’er once go on shoar but we should be devour’d by savage Beasts’. Now stranded, he lives in the shadow of fear.

Defoe’s narrative is not simply one of tall-tale adventure. It is also a spiritual biography, a religious allegory in the spirit of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Crusoe is a physical and spiritual castaway. With missionary undertones, his story is one of rebellion, punishment (for irreligion and for disobeying his parents), repentance and deliverance. During his solitary time on the island, Crusoe has time for reflection and undergoes spiritual conversion. He comes to view his situation as one that allows him to find and commune with God.

Crusoe’s proprietorship over the island that he is living on comes quickly. The island is established as his domain so that he – the outsider – becomes the ‘owner’ and the savages, who have long been visiting the island, become the intruders. He works the soil in the Hobbesian manner and it is therefore his. While the savages come and go, proving they have no permanent attachment to the land, Crusoe uses the land productively, keeping the threatening savages at bay with his overwhelming firearm power. Against this force, the savages just fade away – disappear. But after five years of solitary living, Crusoe comes across a ‘Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore’, a reminder of the danger of the savages to which he is becoming complacent. His fears are renewed.

Crusoe later discovers that the dreaded cannibals are regular visitors to the island, landing on the side away from where he has established himself. They use the island to partake of cannibalistic feasts that resemble and evoke Spanish depictions of bloody orgies. These were based on the beliefs of Defoe’s contemporaries as to how cannibalistic rituals were performed in these godforsaken parts of the world. Crusoe comes across the aftermath of one such event. The scene, filled with ‘the Horror of the Degeneracy of Humane Nature’ creates physical and spiritual revulsion in Crusoe. He gives thanks to God that he was ‘distinguish’d from such dreadful Creatures as these’.

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