'I made him know his name should be Friday': Naming and sexuality in 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Foe'

Critics typically treat the subjects of naming and sexuality in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as mutually exclusive. This project explores and complicates the relationship between Crusoe's supposed repressed sexuality and his ability and willingness and inability and unwillingness to name things on the island. I will use Lacan's psychosexual model of development as a theoretical lens in order to suggest that Crusoe goes through a metaphorical rebirth and is caught in a liminal space, vacillating between what Lacan calls the imaginary and the symbolic, and that his time on the island is spent looking for ways to transition further into the symbolic, or the realm of language and signification. In order to do this, he must locate what Lacan posits as the transcendental signifier -- the phallus -- by attempting to de-sex the island through this decision to name certain things on the island and not others. Put another way, when Crusoe does not have the ability to name things, or when he chooses not to name items on the island, he is doing so in order to disallow a feminine liaison between himself and the symbolic realm, or language. After all, the sea (feminine) is what delivers him on the island that is void of a phallogocentric system of signification, and so before he can use language assertively, he must first locate a transcendent, phallic conduit to bind the imaginary and the symbolic. Crusoe locates the phallus, then, in and through his governing discourse and his choice to name the Island of Despair and Friday -- two sexless, gender-neutral names. Interestingly, the two things he chooses to name on the island are the two things that threaten his masculine power and ability to locate a phallic instrument: the feminine island and a potentially-competitive male. Any gendered presences on the island would be a threat to his privileged, masculine ontology (and economy, as Watt points out) and corresponding ability to control how and to what degree the imaginary and the symbolic interpenetrate one another. By naming, taming, and de-sexing the island and Friday, Crusoe eliminates the threats they pose to his ability to discover and exploit a phallic centerpiece in order to transition away from the imaginary and into the symbolic realm. Of course, I am not suggesting that the relationships Crusoe has with the island and Friday are not erotically-charged -- they are. Instead, I am trying to point out what Crusoe's motivations are for choosing to name certain things on the island and not others, and how these motivations relate to issues of sexuality.;At the end of the essay, I will use Lacan as a theoretical link to connect Robinson Crusoe and J.M. Coetzee's Foe. Coetzee's postmodern novel is a revision -- a queer reproduction -- of Robinson Crusoe that calls for new ways of thinking about generational, cultural transmission and recollection. In it, Coetzee queers the relationship between originality and imitation, and in doing so, asks us to use his narrative as a way of (re)understanding Defoe's novel. He queers the relationship between "original" and "copy" by asking us to reverse the temporal sequence of the two in order to see how his narrative can impact Defoe's. More specifically, Coetzee comments on and revises the relationship between naming and sexuality that Defoe presents for us, and in its place, offers us a new understanding of the relationship -- one that pushes Lacan and French feminism further and one that is relevant for the new sociopolitical context in which he is writing. But Coetzee's recasting of this relationship should not only be used to understand a postmodern sociopolitical context. Instead, through his own play with time and space throughout the novel, he seems to be insisting upon a transhistorical interpretation, one that uses his revisions as a way to better understand the eighteenth-century sociopolitical context(s) in which Defoe's narrative was anchored.