| The title refers to the following novels: Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, and The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro---all novels of empire. The principal argument of the dissertation is that an intertext of influence and reference exists among these novels and centers on the subject of slavery. By positing Defoe's Crusoe as an urtext, I argue that each subsequent novelist incorporates, comments upon, and supersedes the previous work's treatment of the topic. The argument of the first chapter is that a language of slavery, present in Crusoe, performs an ideological erasure of the historical reality of chattel slavery as it simultaneously substitutes a myth of contractual slavery willingly assumed by the subaltern figure. The second chapter explores how Defoe's representation of slavery enters the lower social strata of Britain's social formation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries via the reading habits of its lower classes. Wilkie Collins crafts a literary example of this phenomenon in The Moonstone. I examine his fictional representation of a butler, of lower class origins, who is also a devoted reader of Robinson Crusoe. I argue that the character, Gabriel Betteredge, depicts a class specific manner of reading Crusoe that interpellates him as willing servant and sometime slave of empire. Lastly in the third chapter, by noting similarities of character construction and expansion upon minor thematic material in Collins's text, I argue that Ishiguro's novel is indebted to the nineteenth-century work for the psychological construction and overriding predicament of its protagonist, Mr. Stevens. In short, the dissertation traces an ideological representation of slavery in Robinson Crusoe through a fictional representation of that novel's reception in The Moonstone. I then look at a postcolonial reprise of the same issues against the historical backdrop of the Nazi regime's forced and slave labor policies. A central claim of the dissertation is that Collins and Ishiguro employ servant characters in representative capacities to show that empire's free citizens, particularly members of its lower classes, can become unwitting slaves for empire. |
