How to place a novel whose impact on the Western psyche has been so immense? There can be few novels more famous than Crusoe, and the image of a man alone on his island has invaded the consciousness of every British child growing up, perhaps, since it was written.
Atomisation - Crusoe is the Garbo of imperialism. He wants his own island, but he wants to be left alone on his island. Long before he reaches the island, Crusoe is a loner. He quits his family, takes to the sea, is captured by Moors, escapes, returns to the sea, goes to Brazil, lives a solitary life on his own plantation there. He simultaneously laments his solitude but also relishes it. Even in the final chapter, when he supposedly finally acquires a family on his return to England after over thirty years, he soon ups and leaves again. He’s a restless soul who is also a progenitor of Mersault, the original anti-social man. In spite of the famous idea of Crusoe and Friday, Friday only actually appears as a fleeting figure in the book, alone with Crusoe for little more than a chapter. Above all, what emerges is the vision of a man who it comes to feel hasn’t ended up in isolation by accident. There’s a dangerously strong urge in the modern psyche, an urge assisted by technology, to break away from society and construct a world where the individual is lord and master, freed from the chains of social relationships. Crusoe isn’t actually all that far from the mainland (he can see it from his island), and it isn’t until the island begins to become overrun by visitors (cannibals, mutineers, Spaniards etc) that he finally commits to leaving.
Globalisation - Crusoe is the son of immigrants who settled in Hull. He inhabits an expanding world. South America, Africa and Europe are all inter-connected, with the slave trade one aspect of this. Trade is booming and Crusoe ends up rich, not as a result of the treasure he finds on board the Spanish galleon that founders off his island’s coast, but the investment in his sugar plantation in Brazil. This is not a closed, inwards looking society. Even on his island, he finds himself visited by people of various races and cultures.
Slavery - The great underpinning motor of the story is the slave trade. Crusoe himself is a slave at one point, in West Africa, before he escapes. He ends up on his island because he agrees to go on a slaving expedition to get labour to work the sugar fields of Brazil. When he comes across Friday, he instantly assumes that Friday will become his servant, as he does. Said’s Orientalisim detailed the significance of the Orient as underpinning British literature, but in Crusoe, it’s the driving winds of trade, and specifically the slave trade, which lure the protagonist to his shipwrecked destiny.
Shipwrecks - Shipwrecks were the sliding door of the day. As in Shakespeare, with the Tempest, Pericles and Winter’s Tale, the shipwreck is the deus ex machina, the hidden hand of fate, which permits a character to undergo transformation. In this sense, for much of the world, little has changed. People are still risking their lives on the seas in search of another life, which is at the mercy of the lottery of the tides. There are so many shipwrecks in Crusoe it’s hard to keep up. They provide a religious dimension to the narrative, the hand of god.
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