Individual And Society In Defoe’s Texts

Defoe’s novel occupies an important position of study on novel as a genre and study on history of English novel. In domestic studies, it is always believed that Defoe was a radical bourgeois writer, and his characters, particularly Robinson Crusoe, were typical individualists or representatives of capitalism in the rising period. These creeds, however, could not be supported by the historic social and cultural context of Britain in the early18th century, nor Defoe’s writings themselves. Therefore, in order to get new understanding of Defoe’s novel, this essay will set Defoe and his novels back to their social and cultural context and scrutinize three texts as cases in point-Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and Roxana-with methods of text scrutiny, culture study, ideology analysis, ethical literary criticism, etc.The whole essay will be divided into five parts, including the Introduction, Chapter Ⅰ, Chapter Ⅱ, Chapter Ⅲ and the Epilogue. The Introduction will set the questions which the essay will answer, give a brief review to studies of some important scholars on Defoe’s novel, and analyze some terms which will be used in Chapters followed.Chapter Ⅰ will discuss on the position of Defoe and his novels in the social and cultural context of Britain in the early18th century. As a professional writer of his time and facing to the rise of the reading public, Defoe must write for public and make his works to the readers as close as possible. This had made the two incompatible and undividable conceptions-the individual and the society-involved in Defoe’s identity as a writer, and his writings had become a representative of ambiguous self-fashioning-on one hand, he decorated and represented his self; on the other hand, he concealed and effaced his self at the same time. His popular fictions were the most dramatic and aesthetic form of his self-fashioning.According to the discussion in Chapter I, Chapter Ⅱ will give a scrutiny on the auto-biographical form of Defoe’s novels and the contents of them. As popular fictions, Defoe’s novels needed little personality, but he disguised them to true auto-biographies. In the Prefaces of his novels, Defoe promised the reality of the stories at the first time, and then obscured the reality by usefulness of religion or morality. This action had represented the writer’s undertaking of ethic responsibility and his shirking of narrative responsibility, and shown his compromise and insincerity to the ideological system. Under this disguise, the real materials the novels contended were vivid social scenes, so as to satisfy the reading public’s requirement of interest. Therefore, his characters had to experience the difficulty of lives. And in these processes, the psychological depth of individual was lost, and the individual had become a container of social scenes. And hence there were rips between Defoe’s promises and his texts, and between the form of texts and the contents.Follows Chapter II, Chapter III will give a close reading of the rip in characters’ self-consciousness. In Defoe’s novels, the rip was represented by the question of sincerity and authenticity to which the characters were made to face. Sincerity was a new moral element born in Renaissance in the western world, and the typical idea of Britain in the early18th century. In Defoe’s novels, sincerity always means the steady social order and the conformity between individual and society, and contrarily, authenticity means the division between individual and society. Under the repression of both the pressure of sincerity and the anxiety of authenticity, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders chose a road to ambiguous self-fashioning by effacing their authenticity or transforming it into sincerity; For Roxana, however, the rip between her sincerity and authenticity was too huge so that she could only chose to efface her authenticity with extreme measures, and left her with endless torture at last.By concluding the whole essay, the Epilogue will review the four parts above, and extract some new understandings of Defoe’s novel:In all levels of Defoe’s novel-including the writing life of the writer, the texts and contents, the self-consciousness of the characters-the two conceptions and elements, individual and society, were reconciled ambiguously, and this made Defoe’s novel at his time a role of adhesion agent between ideology and utopia, and between individual and society as well.