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The Ottoman Influence in Robinson Crusoe: Failures of English Imperial Identity

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The Ottoman Influence in Robinson Crusoe: Failures of English Imperial Identity CHAPTER THREE THE OTTOMAN INFLUENCE IN ROBINSON CRUSOE: FAILURES OF ENGLISH IMPERIAL IDENTITY In his work promoting government interests, such as the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland or the War of Spanish Succes- sion, Daniel Defoe presents a fairly stable vision of English identity and overseas expansion. His novels do not follow this pattern. Identity in these texts is fluid. In Captain Singleton (1720), the titular hero moves between identifying categories from his childhood with an adoptive gypsy mother to his career of his pirate to his eventual financial rise as a merchant. Throughout Moll Flanders (1722), his heroine lacks a fixed identity: she enters life in mainstream Protestant England after an infancy with transient gypsies, takes on multiple identities as a maid, pickpocket, cross-dressed housebreaker, prisoner, and respected colo- nist. Colonel Jack (1722) charts the path of a slave turned plantation owner turned French soldier fighting against his native England until he learns his true heritage and repents. Although the narratives tend to return the protagonists to a financially and socially stable position in English society, each points to English colonial expansion as leading to failure and decay: Singleton turns to piracy, Jack is enslaved, and Flanders enters into an incestuous marriage when she leaves England for North America. The seemingly happy endings of Defoe’s novels are also ambigu- ous. For example, his last novel, Roxana (1724), ends with the heroine wealthy, outwardly religious, and entering a marriage based on mutual affection. Yet, the closing line undercuts this positive ending with the reminder that Roxana’s success may be based on her daughter’s murder: Here after some few Years of Flourishing, and outwardly happy Circum- stances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, . the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl [Roxana’s estranged and presumably dead daugh- ter], by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime.1 1 Daniel Defoe. Roxana (1724), ed. Melissa Mowry (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview, 2009), 326. Interestingly, Roxana’s undoing originates from an 56 chapter three The portrayal of English identity as unstable and the recurring theme of overseas disaster run throughout the major novels and has its ori- gins in Defoe’s first novel, Robinson Crusoe. Published in 1719 and set in the mid-seventeenth century, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe resonates with the anxieties over English imperial insecurity of his later works while contrasting it with the threat of Ottoman might and influence. The first half of the novel focuses on the economic uncertainty created by English captivity in Ottoman North Africa. Crusoe’s predicament extends seventeenth-century fears of apostasy into the eighteenth century. Since converts to Islam were known to return to England without disclosing their conversions, this opens up the possibility that English readers would have seen Crusoe’s Christian identity at least tested during his captivity and then seen the tension between his outward non-English appearance and his inner spiritual conformity as connected to that captivity. One of the novel’s first reviewers, Charles Gildon, attacked its “faulty view of Church and State, the impiety of Crusoe’s reflections, and, most significantly, ‘making the Truths of the Bible of a piece with the fictitious Story of Robinson Crusoe.’”2 Gildon’s concerns focus on Defoe himself and the tension between truth and fiction. These issues quickly fell by the way- side as the narrative took on a mythic quality independent of author or physical text. Gildon also commented—with no small amount of disdain and trepidation—on the popularity of Defoe’s novel and its acceptance as a solidly Protestant text: in an imaginary dialogue between Crusoe, Defoe, and Friday, the author attempts to pacify his characters, flattering Crusoe that “there is not an old Woman that can go the Price of it, but buys the Life and Adventures [of Robinson Cru- soe], and leaves it as a Legacy, with The Pilgrims Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God’s Revenge against Murther.”3 The association between Robinson Crusoe and English Protestant values, though satirical here, became second nature as the popularity of the text grew. Ottoman source. She attempts to leave her nationally and sexually ambiguous past behind her and present herself as a conventional English Protestant. She is unable to let go of the Turkish outfit that marked her rise as an exotic, desired mistress outside of England. Her inability to shed her Ottoman dress leads her estranged daughter to recognize and pursue her. Finally, Roxana send her servant to silence the daughter, which, the text implies, may have resulted in murder. 2 Joseph Bartolomeo, A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 38. 3 Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D---- de F--, of London (London, 1719), ix–x..
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