Defoe's Subversion And Containment Of The Dominant Discourse In A Journal Of The Plague Year

Daniel Defoe is better known as a radical politician than a famous novelist in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century. After Defoe published his novel A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, it gained an unprecedented critical and popular success. Like all Defoe's propaganda, the book obviously supports the ship quarantine and some of the medical measures in the 1721 Quarantine Act. And Defoe's accurate narratives raise a lot of issues upon which we are still pondering in the historical crisis:the ultimate principles of political obligation, the weakness of human nature, and the conflicting pressures of self-preservation and compassion. The book records a history of London's "victory of life over death", while as his contemporaries, Defoe witnessed the historical moment when the religious certainty gave way to the scientific rationalism in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century. It is somewhat strange that during the course of collecting materials for this thesis, the present writer finds the fact that in China few researches have been done upon the book. And there exists an emptiness of analyzing Plague from perspective of the subversion and containment of the rational mainstream. From the perspective and methodology of Freud's behavior psychology and Greenblatt's New Historicism, the present writer is bent on the exploration of the underlying force that ultimately accounts for Defoe's dissociated thought in Plague.Defoe first endeavors to enter the dominant discourse by introducing his narrator's agonizing problem of whether to flee the plague city or to remain. The 18th century is a historical period with the Enlightenment rationalism as its cultural background. Like most rationalists of that period, Defoe's narrator is largely influenced by Newton and Locke, who venerates empirical observation and scientific doubt more than traditional religious certainty. Defoe then embarks on subverting the dominant discourse through the vivid descriptions of the disordered city:ruthless God, irrational conduct, restricted freedom. Rather than rational and idealistic, the British society in plague is represented as an irrational unity with intrinsic disorder. However, from the New Historicist point of view, Defoe's subversion seems to be contained in a reasonable sphere, in which implemental rationalism, utilitarian rationalism and self-fashioning of new Christians rise. Henry Foe, the narrator chosen by Defoe, to some degree, possesses the characteristics of rationalism. Lingering on infected streets, he at great pains explained the origin of plague through scientific methods with a complicated attitude to doubt the rationality of God. In addition, the hero vividly depicted in the novel, in a sense, abating the overspread of plague, is nullified as the utilitarian in Defoe's eyes, for the motivation of his struggle is nothing more than the money and bread for survival. The discrepancy between Defoe and his hero in the book leads to a sustained irony between disordered society and rational multitude. And this discrepancy is finally resolved towards the end of the novel as the heroes resort to various self-salvations, ultimately, achieving their reconstructions with the spirit of humanism.Furthermore, this dissociation of narrator in the book is due to the conflict in the author's belief and the decentralizing design in the text. Defoe's belief is constituted of religious faith, natural science, and empiricist philosophy, which influences him and all his contemporary philosophers and scientists in a long term. In fact, this dissociation represents a prevailing view, reflecting the conflicting opinion about Christian duty and scientific value in time of plague. From the textual view, Foucault's "Decentralization of Author" unfolds the hiding voices among the words and lines of text.Finally, Defoe's subversion of the dominant discourse neither touches its deep structure nor infringes the groundwork of rational rule at all. Although the underlying force of Defoe's dissociated thought is counted as the incompatible tension between religious certainty and scientific rationalism, the narrator strives to achieve his reconstruction with the spirit of humanism as a New Christian.