This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received ® 8-15,343 KROPF, Carl Raymond, 1939- DEFOE AS PURITAN NOVELIST.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modem

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan

Copyright by

Carl Raymond Kropf

1 9 6 8 DEFOE AS PURITAN NOVELIST

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Carl Raymond Kropf, B.A., M.A,

The Ohio State University

1 9 6 8

Approved by

t Adviser Department of English VITA

December 7, 1939 B o m - Canton, Ohio

1961 ...... B.A., Otterbein College, Westerville, Ohio

1961-1962 . . . Teacher, Cleveland Public Schools, Ohio

1962-1963 . . . Teaching Assistant, Kent State University Kent, Ohio

1963 ...... M.A., Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

1963-1965 . . . Assistant Instructor, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1965-1968 . . . Teaching Assistant, Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

1968 ..... Ph.D., Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Major Field: Eighteenth-Century English Literature TABLE OF CONTENTS

Vita...... ii

Introduction...... 1

Chapter

I. Defoe and Puritan. Metaphors...... 4

II. Robinson Crusoe...... 35

III. Colonel Jack...... 76

IV. Roxana...... 103

V. Moll Flanders...... 142

VI. Conclusions...... 176

List of Works Cited...... 100 INTRODUCTION

The following discussion is the third book-length treatment of the relation of Defoe's major novels to con­ temporary Puritan beliefs. The first, G.A. Starr's Defoe

and Spiritual Autobiography, treats the novels as they use

conventional events, metaphors, and themes commonly found

in Puritan diaries and autobiographies. The second is

J. Paul Hunter's The Reluctant Pilgrim, which deals exclu­

sively with Robinson Crusoe and the importance of the Bibli­

cal allusions and metaphors in that work. VTherever possible

I have avoided duplicating these authors' works, and the

reader should consult them for additional discussion of the

importance of Puritan conventions to Defoe's fiction.

My own treatment is concerned with_the way Puritan

theories of sin and salvation determined the psychology of

Defoe's characters. According to Puritan theories, the psy­

chologies of the sinner and saint were distinctly different,

and I think that those theories furnish the key to much

that is superficially confusing in the novels. For example,

the point of view from which the novel is written neces­

sarily depends on the psychology of the narrator and is

therefore determined by his spiritual condition. Accor­

dingly, it is impossible to resolve the question of point

of view in Moll Flanders without understanding how contem- porary readers would have conceived of the psychology of a woman in Moll’s spiritual condition. The following chap­ ters are devoted to these and related problems.

I have limited my discussion to Defoe's four major novels because it seems to me that in them Defoe's primary purpose was to dramatize the effect of sin and salvation on

Character. Perhaps this is least true of Colonel Jack, for

Jack's character is no doubt illustrative of the temporal nature of a gentleman as well as of spiritual goodness.

The most clearly spiritual of these novels is Roxana, for the extensive moralizing in the novel inevitably places em­ phasis on spiritual matters. More importantly, throughout her career Roxana conforms to the Puritan conception of a fallen woman, and contemporary readers would almost cer­ tainly have read the novel primarily as a study of sin and only incidentally as another of the popular criminal bio­ graphies.

It might have been interesting and profitable to have included in this study some of Defoe's other well known works such as A Journal of the Plague Year or Captain

Singleton. These have been excluded because their focus, as in Plague Year, is not- on character development, or be­ cause they dramatize the character primarily as a temporal

instead of a spiritual being. Secondly, they have been

omitted because, as I suggest in my final remarks, the four novels examined are distinctly related in both theme and structure and therefore form an easily managed and logical unit for critical discussion.

A note shovild be added here on the terms used in the following chapters. I have used the label "Puritan” to in­ clude. all those who believed that the Anglical Church re­ tained too much of Catholicism to warrant their loyalty.

Among this group were many sects and shades of belief, but those distinctions are not relevant to my purposes here. I am also aware that "spiritualizing" was by no means pecul­ iar to Puritans. The Anglican Robert Boyle, for example, wrote a volume of meditations in which he spiritualized events. But what is important in the following discussion is that Puritans were well known for their habit of spirit­ ualizing and that Defoe, himself a Puritan, read and wrote literature in that tradition. CHAPTER X

Defoe and Puritan Metaphors

In 1670 John Eachard bemoaned in print the current contempt of the clergy and among other things charged:

The first main thing, I say, that makes so many sermons so ridiculous, and the preachers of them so much disparaged and undervalued, is .SH inconsiderate use of frightful Metaphors: which making such "a remarlcable impression upon the ears, and leaving such a jarring twang be­ hind them, are oftentimes remembered to the discredit of the Minister as long as he contin­ ues in the parish. I have heard the very children in the streets, and the little boys close about the fire, re-, fresh themselves strangely but with the repiti- tion of a few of such far-fetched and odd sounding expressions.

If the metaphors used in sermons were anywhere near what

Eachard indicates, they must have been dreadful indeed.

One minister, Eachard recalls, had discovered that a "man’s

Soul was like an Oyster. For, says he in his prayer,

’Our souls are constantly gaping after thee, 0 Lord! yea, verily, our souls do gape, even as an oyster gapeth! ’

T.3. /John Eachard7, "The Grounds & Occasions Of The Contempt of The Clergy and Religion Enquired into" (London, 1670), in An English Garner, ed. Edward Arber (London 1877- 83), VII, 271.

2VII, 275. J. Goodman, The Penitent Pardoned, (London, 1679), p. 13, complains that the" misuse of metaphors has

A 5

Even the conversation of the common people is filled with the indiscriminate use of metaphors:

...as for the common sort of people that are addicted to this sort of expression in their discourses; away presently to both the Indies! rake heaven and earth! down to the bottom of the sea! then tumble over all Arts and Sciences! ransack all shops and warehouses! spare neither camp nor city, but that they will have them! So fond are such deceived ones of these same gay words, that they count all discourses empty, dull, and cloudy; unless bespangled with these glitterings.

Perhaps one should allow for a trifle of ecclesias­ tical exaggeration in these complaints, but they indicate one of the features of Defoe's audience which is too fre­ quently ignored. Eachard*s complaints are directed only at the abuse of metaphor, not at its use in general, for by his time metaphorical expression was a respected and deeply entrenched habit in religious literature and in sermons.

For his contemporary readers Defoe’s novels must have been far richer in meaning than they are for us, for Defoe him­

self grew up in the Puritan tradition and made free use of the metaphors which were part of it. This study is an

attempt to explicate some of the novels by as nearly as

possible recovering the conventions of Puritan religious

literature and the point of view of Defoe*s contemporary

introduced questionable doctrine in the church, and that some ministers have '’gone a pitch beyond all sober sense'1 in their use.

3V1I, 272. 6 reader. In the process perhaps I can suggest some solu­ tions to the knotty problems of point of view, irony, and meaning in Defoe’s major novels which puzzle modern readers.

There were many reasons for the popularity of meta­ phor in religious literature, but most obvious among them are the Puritans’ sense of the immediacy of God and the re­ sultant concept of the nature of reality. Speaking of man’s relationship to God, Thomas Goodwin writes:

God is the Father of all Spirits: and of the Spirits of his own Children upon a double Creation. And if the Fathers of our Bodies corrected us, and had Power to do it with bodily Punishment, and bodily Instruments; do we think that our Souls which lie naked before God (Heb. 4. 13.) are not as imme­ diately subject and exposed to his Correc­ tion, as a Father of Spirits ? And if so, that then~he may and doth sometimes chuse to correct even his own Children with no other Rods but of his own? which are the immedi­ ate Emanations, Streamings and Dartings of his own Displeasure: which when they feel, they wax pale and wan, and wander up and down, like unto Ghosts in Hell, as if they were cut off by his Hand.

Th analogy drawn here between earthly and heavenly fathers

is a common one and has interesting implications for

Robinson Crusoe, who makes a great point of the sinfulness

of his rebellion against his father. More immediately in­

teresting is that Goodwin regards God as a direct force in

human affairs. Life on this earth was regarded as extremely

^The Works of Thomas Goodwin, P.P. in 4 vols (London, 1681-97), III, 566. Future references are given in the text. hazardous, full of all sorts of dangers both physical and spiritual, and if one managed to avoid most of them, it was only because of God’s special protection. One author ad­ vised that the devout keep a journal and put into it

all deliverances from dangers, vouchsafed to you or yours. And indeed, what is our whole life, but a continued deliverance? We are daily delivered, either from the violence of the creature, or the rage of men, or the treachery of our own hearts; either our houses are freed from firing, or goods from plun­ dering, or our bodies from danger, or our names from reproaches, ox- our souls from snares.5

Defoe himself, in his Serious Reflections, wrote that an l eternal God ’’guides by His providence the whole world, which He has created by His power,” and ’’that this Provi­ dence manifests a particular care over and concern in the governing and directing man, the best and last created creature on earth.”® In A Journal of the Plague Year the

< Sadler, one of Defoe’s most devout characters, attributes to divine providence the preservation of the charity workers who went among the plague victims, the destruction of the blasphemous young men of the Pye-Tavern, and the sudden

abatement of the disease itself. "Nothing, but the imme-

5j/ohn7 B/eadle7, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (London, 1656), p. 55.

^Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, ed. George A. Aitken (London, 1895), III, 178. Future references are given in the text. diate Finger of God, nothing but omnipotent Power could n have done it. . .

For the devout, those who kept spiritual journals and wrote pious works, events themselves were not so im­ portant as what the events indicated about God's presence and his attitude toward his worshippers. Reality was there­ fore to be found in the spiritual interpretation of an event, not in its simple physical characteristics. The clearest evidence of this concept of reality is to be found in the spiritual autobiographies which form a large part of

Puritan literature.® Rev. Oliver Heywood's works are typi­ cal. Among the most interesting of Heywood's writings is a

series of autobiographical notes he entitles "Objects and

Observations" in which he records some incident and then

interprets it as a providence and discusses its moral. In

one entry he narrates the story of one of his neighbors who, deeply in debt to his landlord and other creditors, is

finally evicted and ruined. Heywood reflects:

Oh my soul what use wilt thou make of this

7Xy 298. All references, except to Serious Reflec­ tions, are to The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Viriti'ngs of Daniel Defoe (Oxford, 1927-28)

^For the relationship of this literature to Defoe’s novels see George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobio­ graphy (Princeton, 1965), pp. 3-50. Perry Miller in his Introduction" to Images or Shadows of Divine Things by Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1943), gives an interesting account and explanation of the spiritualizing literature in America. 9 providence, its sad indeed for the poor man and his afflicted family, that haue lived in good fashion (some thought too well for their rank and gettings) trading decayed, they borrowed as long as they could, shifted, and shuffled off, till credit was gone, and estate, Lord pitty them .... how do per­ sons run on, run on upon the score without bethinking themselves how it must be paid, shifteing still, on ways, haue gripes, but they are stifled, go on still, regard not to get scores wiped off, sin grows bold, harts grow harder, convictions wear off, and poor sinners spend at a sad rate, and at last grow desperate, only natural conscience (gods best freind in a carnal heart) makes a faint motion that the great land-lord may haue his right, and he is glad to destrain for his rent, gets something though agt sinners will...."9

Several things are of interest here. First of all, Heywood thought the incident worth recording only because it seemed to him to contain a moral, not because of humanitarian or dramatic qualities. Secondly, he slips into the metaphori­ cal interpretation without warning or transition, indicating

that nothing could be more natural or common. The individ­ ual event furnishes an example of debt; debt brings to mind what sinners owe to Christ for free grace which in turn

leads to a short sermon. The process is simply one of ab­

straction. If to the modern reader Heywood's interpreta­

tion seems a bit strained, it would not have seemed so to

his contemporaries. In the hands of the Puritans any dis­

aster furnished opportunities for discussions of man's fall

9J. Horsfall Turner, ed., The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. 1630-1702; His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books; Illustrating the General and Family History 10 and the fallen state; any battle between two forces could become a battle between good and evil by the merest twist

of words; any mercy a reflection of God’s mercy; any debt

a man's debt to God for free grace. Kence almost any situa­

tion could become grist for the homiletic mill. Heywood

and his fellow biographers furnish thousands of examples

of finding sermons in the most unlikely places. When a

glead carries off one of the baby turkeys Mrs. Heywood is

raising, her husband writes in his journal, "Oh my soul, is

there nothing for thee to learn from this object? surely

thou hast herin a notable discovery of the fall of man. .

• • t»10

The device of seeing events as metaphors was not

just a way of keeping God in one's thoughts. It was an in­

dication of spiritual salvation and, in fact, a Christian

duty. Thomas Gouge, writing a handbook of primary reli­

gious duty, exhorts his readers to learn

to Spiritualize all outward Objects and Occurrences, by raising Matter of Heavenly Medxtatxon from the same. There is no Creature in which there are not manifest Footsteps of the Power, Wisdom and Good­ ness of God; every Flower, or Spire of

of Yorkshire and Lancashire (Brighouse, 1872-85), IV, 46-7.

10IV, 44. 11

Grass, every Worm or Fly, declares the Power of our Great Creator . . . .

The process which Gouge recommends and which Heywood practices was based in a well known theory of knowledge and psychology. The fall of man had beclouded human reason with sin so that unregenerate man, one who had not been thor­ oughly converted and received the spirit of God, could rea­ son with data based only on his five senses. This sort of knowledge is only human, and it is accordingly less to be desired than what Calvin called the knowledge of faith.

Forstman explains Calvin's theory as well as anyone:

Calvin uses the Latin word cognitio for the knowledge of faith, but he explains it in such a way that it is clearly not cognitive in the same way other matters are said to be cognitive in the present day. "'.'Then we call it knowledge (cogrtitionem), we intend not such a comprehension (comprehensionem) as men commonly have of those things which fall un­ der the notice of their senses. For it is so superior, that the human mind must exceed and rise above itself, in order to attain to it. Nor does the mind which attains it comprehend (assequitur) what it perceives (sentit), but being persuaded (persuasum) of that which it cannot comprehend "(capit), it understands more by the certainty of this persuasion (plus ' ipsa persuasionis certitudine), than it would comprehend of any human object by the exercise Of its natural capacity."*-^

■^The Young Man's Guide through the Wilderness of this World to the Heavenly"Canaan, Showing him How to carry him- self Chri'stian-1 ika*~thr ough the Whole Course olT'his Life Boston, 1742), p. 75. First ed., London, 1680.

Jackson Forstman, Word and Spirit: Calvin's Doc- trine of Biblical Authority (Stanford, 1962), p. 101. See 12

Later popularizers of Calvin’s theory put it in simpler terms. Goodwin writes of the unregenerate man: "The first spiritual Defect in Man's Understanding, is that Blindness and Unability to know and discern spiritual things spiritu­ ally, as a regenerate Man doth" (III, 135). Even though an unregenerate man may know things intellectually, he may not know them spiritually, just as Paul knew the laws of the church, but not until after God removed the scales from his eyes did he understand them spiritually. Later Goodwin mentions specific ways in whichthe unregenerate man's men­ tal processes may be distinguished. All such men are unable to spiritualize events; they "cannot turn the Eyes of their

Minds inward, but as Solomom / s i c / says, they run through the ends of the Earth, Prov. 17. 24. Wisdom is before him that hath understanding; but the Eyes of the Fool are in the ends of the Earth" (III, 185).

In Judging and esteeming of what is good, and profitable for themselves they are deceiv'd by many false Rules. And folly, or false Judging of things is called in the general by Christ, and Paul, judging according to the appearance. . . , that is according to what things outwardly seem to be, John 7. 24. Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous Judgments (III, 187).

In short, unregenerate men mistake appearance for reality.

also Edward A. Dewey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (New York, 19527, passim. 13

As we will see, this is precisely Roxana’s trouble. In contrast to Roxana, the sadler in A Journal of the Plague

Year advises his reader to be particularly sensitive to providence during a time of disaster:

. . .he should keep his Eye upon the par­ ticular Providences which occur at that Time, and look upon them complexly, as they regard one another, and as altogether regard the question before him, and then I think, he may safely take them for In­ timations from Heaven of what is his un- question’ d Duty to do in such a case. . . . (X, 12).

Clearly this theory of knowledge and salvation im­

plies that the saint and sinner possess entirely different

ways of seeing reality and totally different personalities.

The importance of the terms sin and salvation for the

Puritan is analogous to the terms Id and superego for mod­

ern psychologists. The predominance of either led to a

clearly identifiable personality, and a man's reaction to

events readily furnished indications to the knowledgable of

his spiritual condition. To this extent one's entire life

becomes a metaphorical comment on his spiritual condition,

for the Puritans were constantly on the alert for telling

”signsM of their spiritual state. As might be expected,

book after book in the religious literature of the peri''*1’

dealt with the most common signs. This helps explain the

popularity of Arthur Dent’s The Plaine-Mans Path-Way To

Heaven, in which the author advertises that one of the main

attractions of his book is that it "sheweth the marks of 14 the Children of God, and of the reprobates: together with 13 the apparent signes of Salvation and Damnation." The signs are simply events in a man’s life which could be in­ terpreted as God’s approval or disapproval, or reactions to events which could be interpreted as typical of Christian or unregenerate behavior. In other words, events become metaphors.

All this is of crucial importance for understanding

Puritan fiction. Events are important as signs, not as units in an organic structure, and psychological consis­ tency is unimportant compared to spiritual development of the central character. As we will see in greater detail later, this goes far in explaining Defoe's method and in­ tentions in his novels. That he was aware of the signs is indicated by an abundance of evidence. To cite only a few examples here, Colonel Jack immediately recognizes that his

Virginia pedagogue is a true convert because the tutor does not so much lament his physical condition of slavery as he does his spiritual sins before his transportation. Many of the incidents in Cruso.e indicate the hero’s spiritual condition. For example, before his conversion Crusoe in­ terprets the scriptural promise of deliverance to mean de­ liverance from his island, a purely physical deliverance.

> .

^London, 1635 ("the three and twentieth Edition"), A4r . 15

Immediately after his conversion he interprets the same scripture to mean spiritual deliverance of his soul from sin and hell. The incident is a perfect illustration of carnal knowledge as contrasted with the knowledge of faith in the regenerate which we have discussed. In the preface to Roxana Defoe speaks of the proper use of the "figures1' in the novel, and as we will discover, that novel is a study of a gradual fall and the progressively worsening signs of

Roxana’s spiritual condition as she moves further and fur­ ther from God. Moll frequently speaks of the lack of any

signs of true repentance during her long career.

The theory of the knowledge of faith, the ability to

spiritualize events, and the most common of metaphors were

all taken from scripture, and especially from the popular

parables. Francis Bampfield sums up very nicely:

The LORD Jesus doth delight himself in teaching of his people the useful knowledge of the V/orks of Creation in his written Word; for every Creature should lead us to him, and leave us with him; and by his holy Spirit in the Scripture, he doth often set out Spirit­ ual Truths, and things by Created Beings, and Natural Powers, teaching by Similitudes, and Parables, by which under some apt resem­ blances by things incurring into the out­ ward senses, and such as were familiarly and well known amongst men, somewhat of an higher nature and meaning was propounded, figured and represented; Christ’s teaching was much after this manner of Parables: Thus were the hidden Mysteries of Christ’s Spiritual Kingdom made the more easily in­ telligible to plain understandings, and the greatest Truths became familiar to mean 16

capacities of profiting Disciples, who were taught two Lessons at once.1**

The scripture furnished a lesson in how to spiritualize events, and served as both precedent and source for meta­ phors. Many writers felt compelled to cite scripture for metaphors they used. Robert Abbott, for example, likens the Christian family’s structure to the building of a house and then justifies the metaphor by claiming

So to build signifies whatsoever contributes to rise up, and enlarge a Family by honest, and good means; as an helpful wife, hopefull children. faithful servants. and well gotten goods, and inheritances. Thus God is said to make the Aegyptian midwives houses, and to build David an house, over, and over a g a l K ^ ------

By far the most popular type of metaphor which derives authority from scripture is the expanded metaphor or, as it was frequently called, the "parabolical history."

Benjamin Keach discussed and defined this sort of metaphor with authority and at length.

We define or describe a parable thus; a parable is a similitude or comparison, by which some certain affair or thing is feigned, and told, as if it were really

All in One. All Useful Sciences and Profitable Arts in one Book of Jehovah Aelohim, Copied out, and Commented upon In Created Beings, Comprehended and discovered. In the Fulness and Perfection of Scrpture-Knowledges /sicAn.p.« 1677), p. 47.

Christian Family Bvilded by God, Directing all Govemours of Families how to act TLondon, 1652) , p .2. transacted, and is compared with some spirit­ ual thing, or is accomodated to signify it. A parable differs from an history, (1.) with respect to the object; for history is a narrative of things really done; but a parable only of a thing feigned, and adapted to instruct, which yet is not a lie. . . . And if fables, accomodated to teach or in- struct, are not lies, much less are parables.

Other authors defended the use of parables in less

sophisticated terms which fast became trite. Thomas Taylor i opens his explication of the parable of the sower and the

| seed with the usual defense of their use: they are particu­

larly useful

| In respect of the manner- of teaching: which being once vnderstood, doth delight the vnder- standing, helpe the memorie, mooue and strike the will, by collating spirituall things with sensible, and winde themselues secretly into the heart to conuince modestly, but strongly, and to draw confession from euill-dooers against themselues: as David was conuinced by Nathan in that Parable, 2.Sam.12. 7

The process employed in interpreting the parables, then,was

precisely the one used to spiritualize events by such

authors as Heywood, by "collating spiritual things with

sensible."

Typology, like the parables, furnished yet another

scriptural source and precedent for metaphors. Also like

^ Tropoligia; A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors, In Four Books (London, 1856), p. 239. First published, 1676.

*-7The Parable of the Sower and of the Seed (London, 1621), p."10. Cf. Goodman, pp. 5-12. 18

the parables, the Old Testament types were thought to have been used for didactic purposes, Thomas Taylor and 18 Benjamin Keach both wrote popular typologies, and both

regarded the Old Testament as one great metaphor which fore­

shadowed the events of the New Testament and which was de­

signed to teach the early church the elements of Christian

living, Taylor writes:

The nonage and infancie of that Church, which was not capable of such high mysteries, but was to bee taught by their eyes as well as their eares, ^icjZ&nd therefore it pleased God to put the ancient Church (even newly out of the cradle) under Tutors, Gal. 4.2. and appointed diverse types and ceremonies, as rudiments and introductions, verse 3. fitted to the grosse and weake sences of that Church, which was to be brought on by little and • little, through such shadows and figures, to the true Image and thing signified, who in our Text calleth himselfe truth, in opposition to all those shadowes. ^

Such an approach to the Old. Testament was simply a "col­

lating spiritual things with sensible," and it is inter­

esting that J. B,, in his instructions on how to keep a

journal, cites typology and the Old Testament as precedent.

He uses Exodus as an example of a spiritual journal, and

employs"typology to interpret the history in it as a spirit-

•^Keach’s Tropologia would have been available to Defoe’s readers in the editions of 1676, 1682, 1683 (marked "7th impression"), 1694, 1700., 1702, 1709; Taylor’s Christ Revealed: or The Old Testament Explained (London, 1635), was not as popular but was reprinted until 1816.

•^Christ Revealed, pp. 2-3. ual pilgrimage: 11 . . . the very Land of Canaan was a type of heaven, and was not their voyage a type of our pilgrim­ age? their journey from AEgypt to Canaan, a signe of our passage from bondage to liberty, from darknesse to light, from a vale of tears to thee joyes of heaven?” He then goes on to enumerate specific types in the Exodus story.

They were brought out of Egypt, we are brought out of sin by free grace; they had physical enemies, we have spiritual ones; they had a Red Sea, we have persecutions; they had grapes, we have communion; they kept a journal, “and why 20 not we a Diary of all Gods gracious dealings with us?"

The same process can be seen here that we found in Heywood’s observations'. The author has abstracted the event from its specific circumstances and made it a metaphor of spiritual progress.

If some of Defoe’s potential readers missed the use of metaphors in religious literature, they could hardly have missed their ubiquitous use in sermons. In her study of the art of preaching, Ruth Bozell has found that figura­ tive language and extended metaphors were a staple of most

seventeenth-century sermons. In particular, preachers used natural symbols to convey spiritual thoughts. "The sea,

storms, boats, fish, the body, the garden, the house, the

city water system of conduits, all served as symbols of

20 Journal, pp. 11-13 20

Christ’s teaching and his relation to men,” and ministers 21 were specifically advised to use such similes in sermons.

There were a number of collections of standard allegories available for consultation. John Spencer’s Things New and

Old: or, A Storehouse of Similes, Sentences, Allegories,

Apophthegms, Adages, Apologues, Divine, Moral, Political,

&c., With Their Several Applications, for example, cites everyone from Cicero to Thomas Taylor and other contempor- o o ary divines. Bunyan, of course, defended the use of meta­ phors, and even suggested that to question the propriety of their use borders on blasphemy:

But must I needs want solidness, because By metaphors I speak? Were not God’s laws His gospel laws, in olden time held forth By shadows, types, and metaphors? Yet loth Will any sober man be to find fault With them, lest he be fotmd for to assault The Highest Wisdom! No, he rather stoops, By calves and sheep, by heifers and by rams, By birds and herbs, and by the blood of lambs, God spealceth to him; and happy is he That finds the light and grace that in them be.

The evidence accumulated thus far indicates several important matters for the critic of Defoe. First of all,

Defoe was writing for an audience highly trained in the in-

21"English Preachers of the Seventeenth Century on the Art of Preaching,” unpbl. diss., (Cornell, 1939), p.274.

2^2 vols. (London, 1869). First ed., London 1658. For a discussion of this and similar works see Bozell, ”Fig- urative Language,” pp. 275-83.

^"’Henry Stebbing, ed. , The Sntire Works of John Bunyan, 4 vols. Toronto, n. d.), II, 10. 21 terpretation of metaphors, especially ones drawn from such

popular scriptural passages as the parables or Old Testament

stories. Furthermore, the literature and sermons had at­

tached to these metaphors certain widely accepted interpre­

tations so that Defoe could count on an allusion to set off

a train of associations. For example, the frequent use in

Robinson Crusoe of the term ''wilderness" would have indi­

cated to Defoe’s readers the point in a spiritual pilgrim­

age at which the hero, like the Israelites, had been

rescued from slavery to sin, but had not yet found his way

to God. Crusoe’s isolation in his island wilderness there­

fore precisely defines his spiritual condition. The same

is true of Colonel Jack. With Moll the case is different,

for she buys off her wilderness experience and lives in

comfort and luxury. rivhat this says about Moll's character

and Defoe’s intentions in that novel will be examined in

greater detail later, but Moll’s experience is clearly not

spiritually significant in the same way Crusoe’s is.

Just as Defoe’s Puritan background furnished a method

of characterization and personality structure, it also

provided a theory and recognizable structure for his novels.

We have already seen that because of the Puritan preoccu­

pation with spiritual qualities, the term reality was

applied to the abstract quality of an event and not to the

event itself. It is this concept of reality which Keach

had in mind when he defended the use of parables. Parables 22 cannot be considered as lies since they place emphasis on reality, the spiritual significance of the story, a theme which appears over and over in Puritan allegories. One J.

S., in the preface to his allegorical work The Conviction of Worldly-Vanityt complains that travel literature and romances are Mmeer Idea's of Fancy, Coyn’d on purpose to

Divert and Amuse. . . . But of his own work he writes,

"Though the Discourse be throughout Allegorical, be as­

sured here is nothing Romantick, nothing Fictitious; but

Substantial, and Important. R o m a n c e s in other words, are to be concemned not because they are fictional,

but because they are unreal. That is, they deal wholly with the physical instead of the spiritxial; the events have

no metaphorical dimension.

In light of these definitions Defoe's preface to the

Serious Reflections is not as perplexing as it appears on

first reading. It seems to me that what Defoe is saying

here is that the story of Robinson Crusoe is admittedly

imaginary but that it is not unreal as his critics have

charged, for it deals with.spiritual matters. This is per­

haps what is meant by the often quoted, "there is not a

circumstance in the imaginary story but has its just allu­

sion to the real story, and chimes part for part and step

2^London, 1687, sig. A2V .

25sig. A3V . 23 for step with the inimitable Life of Robinson Crusoe"(pp. xi-xii). This assertion has frequently been interpreted to mean that the novel is an allegory of Defoe’s life, but that misses the point. The preface is clearly written by

"I, Robinson Crusoe," not by "I, Daniel Defoe," and it is even signed "Robinson Crusoe." Later in the preface another similar statement of the author’s intentions appears: the incidents of the story are "real facts in my history, what­ ever borrowed lights they may be represented by" (p. x).

And later appears yet another statement which is the clear­ est declaration of all.

• . .when in these reflections I speak of the times and circumstances of particular actions done, or incidents which happened, in my soli­ tude and island-life, an impartial reader will be so just to take it as it is, viz., that it is spoken or intended of that part of the real story which the island-life is a just allusion to;. . . . All these reflections are just history of a state of forced con­ finement , which in my real history is repre­ sented by a confined retreat in an island; and it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to rep­ resent anything that really exists by that which exists not (p. xii).

What "exists not" here is the physical fact of

Robinson Crusoe; what "really exists" is the problem with which the novel deals, the problem of sin and salvation.

Given the Puritan definition of reality, I believe the con­

clusion is inescapable that Defoe is saying that Robinson

Crusoe is a fictional work which deals with spiritual

reality and therefore cannot be classified as a romance. 24

Perhaps this is why the author of the ’’Publisher’s Intro­ duction” to the Serious Reflections writes, ’’The riddle is now expounded, and the intelligent reader may see clearly the end and design of the whole work” (p. xv). Later Defoe is led to another interesting pronouncement which further reveals his intentions. He strongly condemns lying, but makes one major exception:

The selling or writing a parable, or an allusive allegoric history, is quite a different case, and is always distinguished from this other jesting with truth, that it is designed and effectually turned for instructive and up­ right ends, and has its moral justly applied. Such are the historical parables in the Holy Scripture, such "The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and such, in a word, the adventures of your fugi­ tive friend, "Robinson Crusoe” (p. 101).

There is abundant evidence to indicate that Defoe derived this and similar statements from the Puritan meta­ phorical traditions we have been tracing. John Robert Moore has pointed out that Defoe was intensely interested in in­ terpreting storms and other natural phenomena as the work of divine providence. In 1704, for example, Defoe published

The Layman * s Sermon upon the Late Storm, one of the many re­ ligious explanations and discussions of the serious wind

and thunderstorm that hit London in November and December

of 1703. And in July of 1704 he published The Storm, on

the same subject, and used for his motto for the volume the words of the prophet Nahum: "The Lord hath his way in the

Whirlwind, and in the Storm, and the Clouds are the dust of 25 his Feet.’* Defoe's account furnished all sorts of exam­ ples of God’s judgments, mercies, and providences for ser­ mons in the following years.

Like his Puritan forefathers, Defoe looked to the

scriptures for justification of his use of metaphor. Speak­

ing of the national sickness of the desire to be entertained

Defoe writes,

By the Doctrine of Idea's it is allow'd, That to Describe a Thing, Ugly, Horrid and Deform'd, is the best way to get Abhorrence in the Minds of the People -- and this was the Method of the great Men in the East, in the Ages of Hieroglyphicks, wheu /sic/ Things were more accurately described by Emblems and Fig­ ures than VJords; and even our Savior him­ self took this Method of Introducing the Know­ ledge of himself into the World, (viz.) By Parables and Similitudes.2? ;

In Serious Reflections Defoe indicates that to overlook God's

attempts to teach through emblems and figures is itself a

sign of a sinful state.

I take a general neglect of these things to be a kind of practical atheism, or at least a living in a kind of contempt of Heaven, regardless of all that share which His in­ visible hand has in the things that befall us (p. 191).

Defoe is simply echoing the standard Puritan doctrine that

unregenerate man is incapable of spiritualizing, and that

^Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Mode m World (Chicago, 1958), p. 153.

^Defoe's Review Reproduced from the Original Editions (New York, 1938), VII, 25. 26 that inability is an indication of his spiritual condition.

Immediately after this passage Defoe drives the point home by citing the example of Crusoe who ignores God’s warning in the first storm in the novel. Crusoe’s actions are a sign of his sinful condition.

To appreciate fully the way Defoe’s fiction resulted from the Puritan traditions we have been discussing, it is necessary to explore the way earlier writers of pious lit­ erature prepared the way. Two of the most popular stories from the Bible were the Exodus and the Prodigal Son. The two were usually treated together, for the Prodigal Son par­ able was commonly regarded as the New Testament version of the Exodus story. J. Goodman, for instance, in discussing the attractiveness of the Prodigal parable says that in it the reader -’’will find in the general, that herein is traced out the journey from ASgypt (a state of servitude) to the

Land of Promise, through a troublesome and disconsolate wilderness; or the passage from the brink of Hell to the gates of Heaven.Whole books were devoted to explicat­ ing the Prodigal parable in which the authors constructed elaborate but well defined theories of the steps through which man became a hardened sinner, came to repent, and fi­ nally was saved. So popular were the metaphors drawn from these two stories, that almost any author, not just Furitans

Penitent Pardoned. p. 3. 27 used them during the Restoration period. Writing primarily for cavaliers, Thomas Blount described the adventures of

Charles II in England after the Battle of Worcester. In his preface addressed to the King, he says that his work is de­ signed to tell

All the world, the History of those miracu­ lous Providences that preserv’d You in the Battle of Worcester, conceal’d You in the Wilderness at Boscobel, and led You on Your way towards a Land, where You might safely expect the returning favours of Heaven; which now, after so long a tryal, have gra­ ciously heard our Prayers, and abundantly crown’d Your Patience."^*

The explications of the parables were all similar,

for each succeding author depended on those who had written

before him; hence, incidents of the story each had a spe­

cific and commonly recognized spiritual connotation. In

Blount's statement, for example, the wilderness as a place

of temptation and time of trial is associated with the com­

monwealth era and is the author’s disparaging comment on

Cromwell and his regime. There were, of course, minor dis­

agreements among the explicators of the parables. Samuel

Willard, for instance, frequently pauses in his discussion

to consider whether by the younger and older sons are meant

Boscobel: Or, The History Of His Sacred Majesties Most miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester, 3 Sept. 1651 (London, 1660), sig. A3V . 28 the Jews and Gentiles, of the Scribes and Pharisees.3® As

this example suggests, no detail of the parable was con­

sidered too trivial for lengthy treatment. It takes Willard

a hundred and seventy-two pages to explicate the parable to

the point where the Prodigal son is poverty stricken. On

the single fact that the son becomes hungry Willard writes

two pages explaining that hunger in the story can be asso­

ciated with ’'those that hunger and thirst after righteous­

ness" and numerous other passages of scripture.^ As might

be expected, hunger passed into common usage as a metaphor

for the desire for salvation.

Willard's dwelling at length on details is far from

extraordinary. In his explication of the parable of the

sower and the seed Taylor proceeds line by line, word by

word. Nowhere does he say anything about the overall

meaning of the parable, although, of course, that is obvi­

ous. What receives the emphasis, however, is the signifi­

cance of the single detail as it relates to the overall

problem of Christian salvation, not as it is related to

whAt comes before or after. Slearly this mode of explica­

tion reflects a reading habit which Puritans brought to

Samuel Willard. Mercy Magnified on a Penitent Prodigal (Boston, 1684), p. 7.

31 p. 172 29 literature that had religious implications. If so,' then perhaps we have another possible explanation for the appar­ ently episodic nature of Defoe’s novels. The relation of any single incident to the one before or after it is unim­ portant; the details and events are significant only as in­ dividual metaphorical signs of the main character’s current spiritual condition. The theory at least justifies a very close reading of Defoe’s novels to discover just how many of the frequently mentioned ’’realistic details” may have been included in the novels because they had definite spir­ itual connotations, and not because Defoe particularly loved

’’realism.”

Puritan commentators did not hesitate to add color­ ful details to scripture itself in an attempt to reach and

interest their audience. The paraphrasing of scripture

offered irresistable opportunities for imaginative embroi­

dery. These paraphrases were usually printed with wide

margins in which the author placed a verse of scripture and

expanded it. In a paraphrase of Jobt for example, when he

expands the verse "And he tooke him a potsheard to scrape

himself withall; and he sate downe among the ashes”' the

author writes that Job was covered with sickening boils

In so much that every one lothed him, nor would any endure to lend him their helping hand, wherefore being destitute of all other meanes, hee himselfe was forced (being driven to that poverty, and enduring that misery) to take for want of better, a piece of a broken pot, from off the dung­ 30

hill, and there (as unfit for any other place) to sit dome, and scrape the abundant filth from off his body.

This reads very much like a first, timid step toward the

realistically detailed sort of fiction which finally evolves

into Robinson Crusoe.

Perhaps a further step in the same direction might

be detected in the use of factual exempla which are closely

related to the parables. One such story is William Gouge’s

A Recovery from Apostacy. in which the author narrates the

true story of one Vincent Jukes, and English sailor who was

taken by the Turks in a sea battle, was forced to adopt

their religion, escaped to England, and repented of his nu­

merous sins. After relating Jukes’ story, Gouge goes on

Yee have here the Catastrophe or sweet close of a Parabolicall History, or Historicall Parable, which.- is full of trouble and con­ fusion throughout the greatest part of it, but endeth with a joyfull issue.

The story reminds Gouge of the text ”He is lost, and is

found,” which in turn leads to the sermon on the Prodigal

Son:

The Place whereon it was represented, is the Church. For out of the Church did the Prodigall depart: Into the Church did he returne: And most of the memorable matters

52George Abbott, The \7hole Booke of lob Paraphrased, Or, Made easie for any to understand (London, 1640), p. 13. Deuel Pead does the same sort of thing in his explication of the parabl of Dives and Lasarus in The Wicked Man’s Misery and the Poor M a n ’s Hope and Comfort (London, 1699). 31

therein related, are related as performed in the Church.35

Such stories as Gouge’s seem to be transitional between simple scriptural explications and fictional stories with religious purposes. They stand somewhere between studies of typology and Defoe’s novels, but they clearly retain their interest in ’’spiritualizing" events. Juices himself is unimportant as a person; he is significant as a reminder of the Prodigal Son.

For Defoe’s readers, one of the most interesting parts of the explications of the parable of the Prodigal was the discussion of the signs of sin and salvation as Christ was thought to have revealed them in the story. William

Ames comes right to the point:

The state of man since the fall of Adam is twofold. A state of sinne, and of grace. . . . The state of sinne consists in the pri­ vation of spiritual life, and happinesse. From this estate therefore we are to fly, as from death and the greatest evill: Concerning this state of sin the first question is, how a man may discerne, whither he do still continue in it?-3^

^London, 1639, p. 7.

^ Conscience With The Power And Cases There of ^(London, 1643), p.4 (A2^). All references to this work will include both pagination and foliation; both are badly out of se­ quence in the work. Ames goes on in the work to develop at great length the various signs and steps. Lew Girdler, "Defoe’s Education at Newington Green Academy," SP, L (1953), 575, points out that Defoe read Ames, Baxter, and Charnocke while a student. The signs are indeed the first question, for the Puritan necessarily had to rely on his own knowledge instead of on an intermediary clergyman for assurance of his own salva­ tion. Hence the individual's knowledge of signs meant the difference between heaven and hell or at least between peace of mind and mental torture. Each of the signs also indi­ cated a particular degree of sinfulness or holiness, or a particular point at which the individual could be placed upon a seal running from the worst of hardened sinners at the bottom to the most angelic of the devout at the top.

These steps or signs were widely agreed upon among commen­ tators. Some add a few more detailed steps than others, and the terms frequently differ among the steps, but generally everyone agreed that a man's spiritual condition could accurately be ascertained by his behavior. To this extent, as in the parables themselves, what a man does is not so important as what his behavior signifies about his relation­

ship to God, Thus incidents which appear dramatically un­ important to an organic plot structure may take on signifi­ cant dramatic qualities if they are read as signs of the character's state of sin or salvation.

Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman is based

squarely on these principles. Attentive and V7iseman fre­

quently refer to the signs of Badman’s condition. For

example, Wiseman relates to Attentive the way in which

Badman appeared to repent during his first illness. Unfor- tunatley the repentance wore off shortly after the illness was ovei', Wiseman reports. To this information Attentive remarks,

I thought, as you told me of him, that this would be the result of the whole; for I discerned, by your relating of things, that the true symptoms of conversion were wanting in him, and that those that appeared to be anything like them were only such as the reprobates may have.33

That Badman stole from his parents without a guilty con- science indicates that

he fell directly under that sentence, "Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith it is no transgressio, the same is the com­ panion of a destroyer." (Prov. xxviii. 24.) And for that he set so light by them as to their persons and counsels, it was a sign that some judgment waited to take hold of him in time to come.36

This is typical of the speakers’ appraoch to the incidents of the narrative and to Badman’s life as a whole; all of the incidents are "spiritualized." For Defoe’s readers the story would have been a dramatic one, for it traces the greatest tragedy that could befall a man, the loss of his soul.

It will be noted that in the works we have examined there are three basic structural patterns. The first, de­ rived from the story of the Prodigal son contains a falling

35iv, 57.

36iv, 11. 34 and rising action as the sinner progresses through the steps toward damnation and then gradually rises to salva­ tion. The other two patterns are simple derivatives1 of the story. Some works, such as Badman, concentrate only on a gradually falling action and end in tragedy. Others, such as Pilgrim* s Progress, dramatize the upward steps to salva­ tion. As we will see, the four of Defoe’s novels studied here all conform to one of these patterns. His first novel, and the one in which he most closely adheres to the Puritan traditions, is based on the Prodigal story. CHAPTER IX

Robinson Crusoe

YJhat seems to me one of the most acute critical comments on Defoe’s novels was made fifteen years ago by

Jonathan Bishop. He suggests that in each of the novels

’’the soul progresses from primeval innocence through the depths of immoral experience to the point where it be­ comes aware of its sin, turns against its former life, and is reconciled to God." Each of Defoe’s heroes, "racapit- ulating the moral history of his race from primal innocence through the guilt of experience to salvation, starts as culpable Adam and ends redeemed by Christ. The artistic pattern of the novel is the same as the moral pattern of his­ tory according to Calvinist theory."1 As a generalization about all the novels, this is inaccurate since some of

Defoe’s heroes are lost souls. But Bishop’s statement goes far in detecting the theme and structure of Robinson

Crusoe. One of the clues to the meaning of the novel is its division into two major parts by Crusoe’s conversion.

The similarity of this structure to that of the Prodigal

lnKnowledge, Action, and Interpretation in Defoe’s Novels," JHI, XIII (1952), 5-16.

35 36

Son parable is apparent. Defoe invokes comparison with the parable by frequent allusions, one of which occurs early in the novel when after the first sea storm Crusoe says that had he returned home, his father, "an Emblem of our Blessed

Saviour's Parable, had even kill’d the fatted Calf for me"

(Vii, 14). Allusions to "my Father's House" and a journey

"in a far country" all reinforce the parallel between the two stories.^

The allusions and the Prodigal pattern in the novel are significant, for as we noted earlier, the Prodigal Son parable is an archetypal story of man's spiritual evolu­ tion from moral neutrality through the steps in sin to the point of despair and then his gradual rise through the steps of repentance to final holiness. The structure of the novel can best be understood, I think, by our tracing Crusoe through the various steps and interpreting the signs Defoe gives us of his psiritual condition along the way."5

Crusoe's revolt from his father is not so much a first step in sin as it is Defoe's way of indicating Crusoe’s

^J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Em­ blematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, 1966"), pp. 133-39 discusses the significance of Defoe's allusions to the Prodigal, Jonah and Adam.

■^Starr, pp. 105-25 does this in less detail than I do here, and Starr's appraoch is through the spiritual autobiography. I have tried to avoid duplicating Starr where possible. 37 spiritual condition and hence the psychology of his charac­ ter at the outset of the adventures. Crusoe is an unre- generate man, one whose soul is lost because he has not re­ pented of his "original sin." At least two recent commen­ tators have discussed this original sin. Novak believes

Crusoe*s original sin is primarily an economic one, a vio­ lation of social and economic order in the act’ of leaving one’s appointed station.^ Starr has suggested' that' Crusoe’s disobedience of his father is symbolic of the larger sin of pride and hot-headed rebellion.^ There is merit in both these suggestions, but the truth seems to lie somewhere in a combination of the two. When Crusoe speaks of his dis­ obedience as original sin, it is to be understood in both the theological sense, and in the chronological sense of its being the first sin in his career. Original sin in the theological sense means, simply, that the mere fact of one’s being a human makes him a sinner. "In Adam’s fall we sinned al" is one of the most trite of Puritan observations on the unregenerate man’s spiritual condition. Thomas Goodwin puts the doctrine in learned terms: original sin "is pro- prium peccatum, our own Sin; though not proprie / s i c / pperationis, of our proper committing; yea, this is also

^"Robinson Crusoe's ’Original Sin’," SEL, I (Stxmmer, 1961), 19.

^Starr, pp. 74-82. 38 our first sin"(III, 362). This is the nature of Crusoe's

"original sin." The revolt is not so much a sin in itself

(although it is that as Goodwin indicates) as a necessary

precondition for Crusoe's further life of sin, for it indi­ cates that he is heir to the first great sin and vice,

pride.

Furthermore, Defoe's readers would have’recognized

a son's’revolt against his father as a sign of the son's

sinful state and pride. Thomas Gouge maintains that

whatsoever Men may talk of Godliness, except it appear in a conscionable discharge of the duties of their Relations, all their talk and profession of Religion is to no purpose. Except the Servant be diligent and faithful to his Master, a Child dutiful to his Parent, a Wife loving and obedient to her Husband, all their profession of Religion is vain.”

Among the more literary the story of the rebellious' Phaeton

was given a Christian moral. Thomas Hall, in his Phaetons

Folly, Or, The downfall of pride, writes that "Children and

young persons must harken to the sage advice and counsel of

their superiours; Phaeton contemning his fathers precepts,

came to misery."7 The pride referred to in Hall's title

was commonly associated with original sin, for to break

God's laws is to assert the superiority of one's own intel-

; .1

®p. 186. The entire chapter, "Sheweth the Necessity of performing Relative Duties," 99. 185-195, is relevant.

7London, 1655, p.3. 39

lect ovei* that of God who made the laws. Stephen Gharnocke,

some of whose works Defoe read while a student in Morton's

academy, wrote:

The laws of God are highly Rational; they are drawn from the depths of the Divine Under­ standing, wherein there is no unclearness, and no defect. As his Understanding appre­ hends all things in their true Reason; so his Will enjoyns all things for worthy and wise Ends: His Laws are contrived by his Wisdom for the happiness of Man .... His Laws being the Orders of the Wisest Un­ derstanding, every breach of his Law is a flying in the Face of his Wisdom. All Human Lav/s, though they are enforced by Sovereign Authority; yet they are, or ought to be in the composing of them, founded upon Reason, and should be particular applications of the Law of Nature, to this or that particular emergency. The Laws of God then, who is summa ratio, are the birth of the truest reason. . • .

Hence Crusoe’s rebellion against his father, God’s agent in

the family was a clear sign of pride.

Defoe’s readers would have recognized Crusoe’s de­

sire to leave his station as a second sign of pride.

. Charnocke is emphatic on this point and insists that to as­

pire to a station above that into which one is b o m is a

violation of God’s law and therefore a sign of pride.

The Dominion of God is manifest, in ap­ pointing to every man his calling and station in the World. If the hairs of every mans head fall under his Sovereign care, the Cal­ ling of every man, wherein he is to glorifie God, and serve his Generation, which is of a

^Several Discourses upon The Existence And Attributes God (London, 1682), p. 400. 1

40

greater concern than the hairs of the head, falls under his Dominione. He is the Master of the great Family; and divides to every one his work as he pleaseth.

He that ordered Adam, the Father of mankind his work, and the place of it, the dressing the Garden. Gen. 2. 15. doth not let any of his posterity be their own choosers, without an influence of his Sovereign direction on them. Though our Callings are our work, yet they are by Gods order, wherein we are to be faithful to our great Master and Ruler."

The family image here is a commonone, and in light of its metaphorical significance, Crusoe's revolt against his father takes on much wider dimensions than a simple family disagreement. To try to change one's calling is to exer­ cise the same pride which Adam showed by eating the apple and which Satan showed in his revolt. One author wrote an entire book on the idea:

There is nothing that the Almight more abominates than Pride and Ambition; as ap­ pears by the Fall of the angels, mentioned in the beginning of this Discourse, who being happy in the Realms of Light, and cap­ able of injoying what might render them so Eternally Happy, they fondly chose to be greater than they were designed, and there- . upon growing discontented, proudly aspired to equality with their Maker, but soon found their folly. . . .

Thus too satan tempted Eve in the garden "with Promises of

9p. 747. 10R.L.S., The Danger of Pride and Ambition. With the Excellency of Humility & Obedience"(n . p., 1685), sig. Blv . 41 a more Transcendant Happiness." In Badman Bunyan also makes the association of pride, original sin, and aban­ doning one’s calling.^

The Prodigal son pattern on which Robinson Crusoe is based was explicitly associated with this pride, revolt, fall theme. The first two signs that Goodman sees in the

Prodigal Son are "1. He is impatient of the restraints of his Father's Family, and not being content with his provi­ sion, he therefore desires to be at his own disposal; which having obtain’d, 2. Then he departs from his Father’s house, and goes into a far Countrey.”3-2 And later Goodman adds that "this was the ruine of our first Parents, when man­ kind first turned Prodigal."

Crusoe’s original sin seems to be significant for a number of reasons. It indicates that he is heir to the universally accepted cause of original sin, pride. It sym­ bolically recapitulates the first revolt against the heavenly Father and therefore indicates that Crusoe is living

in a state of sin as an unregenerate man. And finally,

Crusoe’s discontent with his station is to be read as a

sign of the pride which Chamoclce sees as a revolt against

^IV, 33. See also Hunter,p. 37. Interestingly Adam and Eve were frequently regarded as the typical youngsters who did not know their place and tried to become what they were not meant to be.

12p. 02 42 divine reason. Unclear reasoning, as we will soon see, is one sign of Crusoe’s fallen state which is corrected after his conversion.

Two aspects of Crusoe’s punishment for this original

sin may be profitably examined here. In his discussion of

God’s reasonably ordering the affairs of men, Chamocke

proposes a divine division of labor. As the wisdom of God

appears in "his Government by his Laws, sc> it appears in

the various inclinations and conditions of Men.” He de­

velops his idea by analogy with the household which has

’’Vessels of Dishonour as we 11 as of Honour" and with the

church itself:

As the variety of Gifts in the Church is a fruit of the Wisdom of God, for the preser­ vation and increase of the Church, so the variety of Inclinations and Employments in the World is a fruit of the Wisdom of God, for the preservation and subsistence of the World by mutual Commerce.

By refusing to maintain his place in the divine scheme,

Crusoe violates this divine division of labor and conse­

quently is forced to take on all classes and divisions of

labor. He is everything from basket weaver and butcher to

king and governor on his island, the wilderness of his own

sin0 Only after his conversion does Friday appear to take

on the more menial tasks or does Crusoe’s life approach the

13p. 356. 43 comfort he enjoyed before his revolt. Earlier, in Brazil,

Crusoe had achieved the middle station which God seemed to have ordained for him, but there, as earlier in England, he became restless and ventured to raise his station too quickly.

The way Crusoe’s punishment evolves is interesting also in light of some common metaphors of the sea and the battles, calms, ships, and storms associated with it. The use of this metaphor by the author of The Danger of Pride and Ambition is particularly interesting, for he associates

Crusoe’s major sin and its punishment with sea metaphors.

Amongst all the Blessings that contribute to Mans felicity, there is nothing that ought to be more desirable, to make him truly happy in this World, and furnish him with an opportu­ nity to prepare him for the other than true content, humility, calmness of mind, and a resolution to be pleased, and sit down quiet, in what station soever God has appointed or allotted him, not to meddle or concern him­ self in other mens affaires, nor be emulous of Greatness, but in patience and meekness to undergo what ever shall befall hlim, not repineing. nor revileing, but rejoycing, not shaken by the Storms of adversity, nor swell’d with the Tide of prosperity, but remaining alwaies the same, rendering Honour, Obedience, and respect where it ought to be, and a civil behavior towards all men, living blameless, and in a Christian charity with y our /sic/ fellow -Creatures. Such a one (I say) lives in a perpetual calm, let the storm roar round him never so loud, and the waves dash never so much, having built his House upon a Rock: VJhen the restless and unquiet man is ever tossed in the Ocean of hazards and dangers; being every moment ready to split upon the 44

Rocks of misery, or strand himself on the Beach of Shame and disgrace.

This (unfortunately lengthy) passage is interesting for several reasons. It sounds very much like the advice Crusoe’s father gives Robinson, stable, sound and trite, so that

Defoe's readers would have recognized the opening scenes of the novel as typical. The punishment of pride described as a rough sea is clearly relevant to Crusoe's situation. He commits the sin of pride against which this author warns,

r and his sea of life gets very rough indeed, ^

By the time that Crusoe has rebelled against his father and is about to take his first excursion aboard ship,

Defoe's readers would have recognized that the novel has two clear levels of meaning and two plots. On the literal dramatic level, Crusoe is about to begin his adventures, and his characteristic interests and personality traits have been established. In addition, Puritan readers would have spiritualized the events, would have recognized the common father-son, rebellion-fall themes, and would be aware that

Crusoe is an unregenerate young man well on his way down through the steps of sin in the Prodigal Son tradition.

As unregenerate man, Crusoe has all the signs or

*-^sigs. A3r-A3v .

l^For the larger significance of this image in Crusoe see Starr, pp. 23-25, 56-59, 45 characteristics which Defoe’s readers would have recognized as typical of a sinner; in other words, just as the Puritan interpretation of the Prodigal Son provided the structure of the novel and its opening scenes, so too it provided the basis for the main character’s psychology. One of the com­ monly noted signs of a sinner was that his intellect was im­ paired. Goodman discusses the phrase ’’an d he came to him­ self” in the Prodigal Son parable and writes a chapter on sinning as a numbing of the senses and understanding. Sin, he remarks,

doth so deprave men’s natures and disable their powers, that there appears no hope of recovery to a sense of God and goodness, no more than of a man naturally dead, unless God be pleased to breathe into him the breath of life. He is drunk, the steams of lust have clouded and bespotted his understanding, and oppressed all his vital powers, that for the present he is not able to guide, nor fit to govern him­ self ; he hath rather the shape than the sense of a man. . .

Goodman seems to be glancing here at a well developed theory of mental illness. Because God is summa ratio as Charnocke observed, to disobey his lav/ must necessarily be evidence of faulty reason or a sort of insanity. Goodman accounts

for this phenomenon in physiological terras. This mental

distraction occurs, he writes,

when the Animal Spirits, by some accident or other, are so over-heated, that they become unserviceable to cool and sedate reasoning

16p. 122. 46

And then reason being thus laid aside, phansy gets the ascendent, and Phaeton like, drives on furiously and inconsis­ tently.1 '

The causes of this loss of reason are numerous, but it hap­ pens "most-usually by the rage and violence of smoe of the passions, . . . a man setting his heart vehemently upon some object or other, the spirits are set on fire by the violence of their own motion; and in that rage are not to be governed by reason." This rage accounts for the imbalence of the habitual sinner:

He having passionately addicted himself to some one or other of those worldly objects we lately spoke of, all his spirits are in­ gaged in the pursuit of it, and with that heat and vehemency that nothing can stop their carrier, nor bring them under the reins of reason. No considerations of God, or a World to come, can come into play, no checks of Conscience are attended to, whatsoever comes on’t the passion must be obeyed, lust must have its full swing, be the danger or consequence of it what it will.

The sinner suffered further mental retardation because he labored under the consequences of original sin. Goodwin wrote that original sin not only damaged "the inferior Powers of the Soul . . • but the Contagion hath ascended into the higher Region of the Soul, the Mind" (III, 122).1®

1 ',p. 122. The theory as a whole is developed pp. 122-24.

^Everybody said something similar. In his Worldly Vanity, J. S.’s pilgrim remarks over and over again that during his sinful state he was suffering from the stupidi­ ty induced by original sin. Richai-d Baxter in his The Arrogancy of Reason Against Divine Revelations, Repressed 47

This theory of mental debility seems to function

•*-n Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe frequently refers to the spirit­ ual '’stupidity’* he suffers in his sinful state. For in­

stance, he is shocked to find the footprint in the sand, and

measures it against his own only to find that it belongs to

some other man. The fear he experiences "fill'd my Head

with new Imaginations, and gave me the Vapours again, to the

highest Degree; so that I shook with cold, like one in an

Ague: And I went Home again, fill'd with the Belief that

some Man or Men had been on Shore there" (VII, 183-4). He

is so frightened by the affair and of someone’s detecting

his presence on the island that he contemplates destroying

his crops and fortifications. While we are in such a con­

dition, he tells us,

we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about; and which was worse than all this, I had not that Relief in this Trouble from the Resignation I used to practise, that I hop’d to have. I look’d, I Thought, like Saul, who complain’d not only that the Philistines were upon him; but that God has forsaken him; for I did not now take due Ways to compose my Mind, by : crying to God in my Distress, and resting upon his Providence, as I had done before, for my Defence and Deliverance (VII, 184-5).

Shortly after this he again refers to "This Confusion of my

Thoughts." This incident sounds much like a fictional

working out of Goodwin’s theory of the ruling passions.

(London, 1655) bases his entire argument on the same theme 48

Crusoe’s fear gives him the ’’vapors," which in turn becloud his reason and make him forget to call on God or to regard the incident as God's providence at work. In other words, the excess of passion robs Crusoe of his ability to spirit­ ualize the incident and limits his knowledge to mere carnal cognition.

The Christianized concept of the ruling passion can be seen as determining Crusoe’s psychology throughout the first half of the novel. His ruling passion is, of course, his wanderlust. It is that desire which overrules his knowledge that God disapproves of his projects after the storm off Hull: the vapors of his passions make him incap­ able of spiritualizing the event properly and reading God’s message in it. At least once even after his conversion he allows his wanderlust to upset his mental balance. During one of his restless periods, he contemplates escaping the island by travelling in his boat to the mainland. The very idea "had agitated my Thoughts for two Hours, or more, with such violence, that it set my Blood into a Ferment, and my

Pulse beat high as if I had been in a Feaver, meerly with the extraordinary Fervour of my Mind about it" (VII, 2 3 0 ) .

Apparently Crusoe had frequent moments of temporary dis­ traction before his conversion. V7e see one of these when he first lands on the island and realizes his desperate con- 49

dition.19 Later he tells us that before his conversion

as I walk’d about, either on ray Hunting, or for viewing the Country; the anguish of my Soul at ray Condition, would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very Heart would die within me, to think of the Woods, the Moun­ tains, the Desarts I was in; and how I was a Prisoner, lock'd up with the Eternal Bars and Bolts of the Ocean, in an uninhabited Wilderness, without Redemption: In the midst of the greatest Composures of my Mind, this would break out upon me like a Storm, and make me wring my Hands, and weep like a Child. . .(VII, 1 3 0).

This passage is of interest for several reasons. It illus­

trates the mental debility we have been discussing, but in

addition the whole passage can be read metaphorically in

another way. The terms soul, redemption and wilderness are

the keys. Among the commonest of religious metaphors is

that of the wilderness used to mean one's wandering in this

world in a sinful state or in a place of temptation. Bunyan,

among others, had popularized the wilderness metaphor among

Defoe's readers. The familiar opening line of Pilgrim's

Progress "As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world.

..." contains only one of many references. The same

. metaphor appears later after Christian has defeated Apollyon;

its use here seems very close to Defoe's in the passage just

quoted:

• Now at the end of this Valley, was another,

*-9For a different theory about Crusoe’s fear at this point Cf. Novak’s "Robinson Crusoe's Fear and the Search for Natural Man," MP, LVIII (1961), 238-245. 50

called the Valley of the Shadow of Death; • and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay through the very midst of it. Now this Valley is a very solitary place. The Prophet Jeremiah thus describes it, ?A wilderness, a land of desarts, and of pits; a land of draught and of the Shadow of Death; a land that no man (but a Christian) passeth through, and where no man dwelt.* (Jer. ii. 6.)20

The angel who visits Crusoe in his dream makes it very clear

to him that he will never "pass through" the island unless he becomes a Christian, and Crusoe comes very near dying in

the wilderness, in a state of sin. The passage from Crusoe

is interesting for yet another reason. For Crusoe to

chronicle such a detail about his island existence is pre­

cisely the sort of realism one expects from Defoe the jour­

nalist , but such a detail does much more than simply mere

factual and convincingly realistic trivia. Defoe is making

a metaphorical statement about his character's spiritual

condition, which in turn determines Crusoe's psychology

during this part of the novel. It would be foolish to main­

tain that all the realistic details of the novel serve this

double function, but a great many of them do.

The popularity of the wilderness theme was no doubt

aided by frequent explications of the Exodus story and of

the temptations of Christ in the uninhabited wilderness.

In 1680 the metaphor was popular enough for Thomas Gouge to

20II, 54-5 51 use it in the title of his The Young Man1 s Guide through the Wilderness of this World to the heavenly Canaan, . . ,2*-

Like the children of Israel, Crusoe spends time in slavery before he is stranded in the wilderness, and as might be expected, slavery, like the wilderness, was a widely recog­ nised metaphor for a man in a sinful state. Because of his defective reasoning powers, the unregenerate man is a slave to his -own passions which lead him to sin, Keach develops this metaphor at length and examines the scriptures which justify its use. Acts 8:23 furnishes one example; here

Peter says to Simon, "For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity,” Based on this and similar scriptures Keach observes that

Corporal bondage, or captivity, is as much as to say, slavery and thraldom under some tyrant, or cruel enemy, that oppresseth: and from these scriptures it is evident, that 'Wicked Ken, or such as are in the state of nature, unconverted, are in a state of bondage, they are spiritual slaves of Captives,22

Crusoe is a slave to his wanderlust, of course, but physi­

cally as well he is "in thraldom under some tyrant" during his captivity in Sallee.

2 In his The Second Part of The Pilgrims Progress (London, 1683), T,'Smakes' "wilderness" the name of a country lying between the two larger countires, Heaven and Hell, For a scholarly discussion of the metaphor throughout Christian thought see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York, 1962),

22p. 777. Cf. Paul Baine, A Commentary Upon The Whole 52

Just as Puritan theories determined Crusoe’s psychol­ ogy, so too they determined the spiritual progress he makes from the point of his first revolt downward toward possible damnation. This progress was generally divided into nine steps, each a proportionately further step from God and marked by distinct features. The briefest statement of the steps is that by Thomas Jenner who illustrates each step ° with an appropriate emblem. They are: 1. "Suggestion;"

2. "Rumination;" 3. "Delectation;" 4. "Consent;" 5. "Act;"

6. "Iteration," the repetition of the sinful act; 7. "Glori- ation," the enjoyment of the sin; 8. "obduration," the har­ dening of the heart which leads to insensibility of God’s mercies and judgments; 9. "Impenitency," the final stage of

sin in which one is unable to repent even though he is

conscious of his being a sinner; in the last desperate stages

of impenitency, God was though to withdraw and consign the

sinner to damnation even before his death.

By the time Crusoe becomes a slave in Africa, he has

gone through the first six steps and is entering the seventh.

The first five need little discussion, for they are the pro­

cess by which one comes to almost any decision, but all five

are clearly present in Crusoe.

Epistle of The Apostle Paul To The Ephesians (London, 1653), pp. 69-72.

^ T h e Ages of Sin, or Sinnes Birth &,growth (£L655/n. p.) passim. 53

Crusoe proceeds to the sixth step despite the warnings of father, mother, captain and, in the storm, God Himself.

This ’'iteration” produces what is known as "custom in sin­ ning,” a process which gradually confirms the sinner in his evil practices and prepares him for step seven', "gloriation."

The process is one of hardening in which the sinner’s con­ science is gradually lulled into silence. Ames writes that the custom of sinning

makes the worke of repentance to be harder and harder JEe. 13. 23. The reason is, because thereby evill habits are more strengthen'd and confirm’d, and understanding becomes darker, Eg 4. 13.24

This custom in sinning was a grave matter; Francis Fuller comments that repetition produces hardening of heart, pleas­ ure in sin, and is repulsive to God. Indeed, "nothing pro­ vokes God more than Custom in sin.”2^

Crusoe deliberately delays his repentance and repeats his sin despite clear warnings from God. During his first

trip out from Hull a mild storm arises during which he

began now seriously to reflect upon what I had done, and how justly I was overtaken by the Judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my Father’s House, and abondoning my Duty; all the good Counsel of my Parents, my Father’s Tears and my Mother's Entreaties came now fresh into my Mind; and my Conscience, which

^Conscience, p. 6, sig. A3V .

2^Words To give to the Young-Man ICnowledg And Discretion (London, 1685), p. 101. was not yet come to the Pitch of Hardness to which it has been.since, reproach'd me with the Contempt of Advice, and the Breach of my Duty to God and my Father (VII, 7).

In fact, his conscience becomes so hardened that he thinks very little of leaving his place again later in Brazil to satisfy his wanderlust and desire for material advancement.

The trip from Brazil is clearly intended as a reenactment of Crusoe's earlier sin in leaving England. Like his first voyage from Hull eight years earlier, this journey begins on September first, and he is again leaving the comfortable

"middle Station of Life" as he calls it, in a risky attempt to increase his fortune quickly. This time instead of be­ coming ill, or becoming a slave, he is stranded in a wilder­ ness, all three of which are metaphors for his state of sin.

That Crusoe's conscience does not bother him about this voyage as it did on the journey from Hull dramatizes his be­ ginning the eighth step in sin, "obduration." In the repi- tition and enjoyment of his sin, Crusoe’s reasoning powers have become weaker— as Ames indicates they will-~until by thd time he is cast up on his island, he is insensible of

God's presence. Ames theorizes that because conscience is a part of the reason, not a part of the will,

it appeareth that Conscience is not a con­ templative judgement, whereby truth is simply discerned from falsehood: but a practicall judgement, by which that which a man knoweth is particularly applyed to what which is either good or evill to him, to the end that 55

it mav be a **ule within him to direct his will.26

It therefore follows that custom in sinning prodxices

a benummed Conscience . . . , which is so dull and heavy in its Acts, that there fol- lowes no strong stirrings of heart after it; nothing to purpose comes of it. Those that haue such a conscience, are oppressed with a kind of spiritual sleepe, wherein the sense of conscience, is so bound, that it is no more moved, then a man that sleepeth is by his owne dreames.2 '

By the time of his illness on the island, Crusoe’s spirit­ ual condition is clearly desperate. His reason is clouded and his conscience '’benummed" so that even during the earth­ quake and hurricane he "had not the least serious religious

Thought; nothing but the common, Lord ha’ Mercy upon me; and when it was over, that went away too" (VII, 92). By the time of his conversion he realizes that during his adven­ tures on sea he had suffered "a certain Stupidity of Soul, without Desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil" (VII, 101).

Still later he tells us that he was "perfectly destitute of the Knowledge and Fear of God" (VII, 151). Little wonder he calls his island an "Island of Despair."

Crusoe’s conversion changes all this and produces a major alteration in the nature of his mental processes, an

26p. 2,sig. Blv .

27p. 42, sig. D2V . 56 adjustment to Christian psychology. Many events indicate this change, but two are of special interest. Before his conversion, Crusoe is amazed to see barley growing on his island.

It is impossible to express the Astonishment and Confusion of my Thoughts on this Occasion; I had hitherto acted upon no religious Foun­ dation at all, indeed I had very few Notions of Religion in my Head, or had entertain’d any Sense of any Thing that had befallen me, otherwise than as a Chance, or, as we lightly say, what pleases God; without so much as enquiring into the End of Providence in these Things, or his Order in governing Events in the World (VII, 89).

But the growing barley causes him to reflect for a while on

God’s providence. However, he soon remembers that he had thrown out the contents of an old feed bag, and the wonder begins to wear off, even though, he remarks, "I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforseen Provi­ dence as to me, that should order or appoint, that 10 or 12

Grains of C o m should remain unspoil’d” (VII, 90), Writing from the point of view of a Christian with a Christian defi­ nition of reality, Crusoe here points out his own mistake.

He should have spiritualized the event, seen it as a sign and not as a simple event.

The contrast of pre-conversion and post-conversion mental processes is most pointedly illustrated' in Crusoe’s

interpretation of scripture. During his serious illness

after the vision of the avenging angel, Crusoe opens his

Bible and comes upon the passage ’’Call on me in the Day of 57

Trouble, a n d I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me." He mistakes the promise to mean a deliverance from his island and reflects that his deliverance ’’was so remote, so impos­ sible in my Apprehension of Things, that I began to say as the Children of Israel did, when they were promis’d Flesh to eat, Can God spread a Table in the Wilderness” (VII, 108).

Crusoe has interpreted the scripture only according to car­ nal knowledge based on the data of his five senses. He lacks the knowledge of faith, to recall Calvin’s terms, and rein­ forces the theme by associating his present condition with that of the Israelites in the wilderness. Immediately after his repentance, however, he begins to understand the true meaning of the passage. ' i t Now I began to construe the Words mentioned above, Call on me, and JC will deliver you, in a different Sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no Notion of anything being call’d Deliverance, but my being deliver’d from the Captivity I was in; . . . • but now I learn’d to take it in another Sense; Now I look’d back upon my past Life with such Horrour, and my Sins appear’d so dreadful, that my Soul sought nothing of God, but Deliverance from the Load of Guilt that bore down all my Com­ fort . . .(VII, 111).

Here is the unquestionable mark of a true penitent; the Holy

Spirit has intervened directly to remove the scales from

his eyes, in the Puritans’ own terms, and the poor sinner

can now see reality where before he saw only appearances.

Immediately after his realization of the spiritual

meaning of things, Crusoe remarks, ”My Condition began now 58 to be, tho’ not less miserable as to my Way of living, yet much easier in my Mind; and my Thoughts being directed, by a constant reading the Scripture, and praying to God, to things of a higher Nature: I had a great deal of Comfort within, which till now I knew nothing of. . . (VII, 111).

As he learns to spiritualize, he "entertain'd different No­ tions of Things," and "look’d now upon the World as a Thing remote" (VII, 148). Obviously Crusoe does not forget about such mundane matters as money, but now he knows that appear­ ance is not reality.

Like his progress in sin, Crusoe’s progress toward

salvation follows the conventions outlined in the Puritan

literature on the subject. Almost all Puritan commentators

agreed that the central act of repentance was not the simple

cessation of sin but a conscious turning away from one’s sin­

ful nature toward the life of a devout worshipper. Francis

Fuller cautions his readers that there are two types of re­

pentance, only the second of which is genuine. The first

is "a Repentance that is call’d a Care of mind, such a one

coi\sist6 in Sorrow under Terrors for Sin, the effect of a

troubled Head, and may be found in Hypocrites." The second

kind is "a Repentance that is call’d a Change of Mind, such

a one consists in a turning from Sin, the effect of a

wounded Heart, . . . and is found in none but those that 59 are sincere.” The first type of repentance is that which

Hr. Badman experiences during his illness. Bunyan himself wrote that

many people think also that repentance stands in confession of sin only, but they are much mistaken; for repentance, as was said before, is a being sorry for, and returning from transgression to God by Jesus Christ. 9

William Gouge points out that the Prodigal Son's repentance is genuine because he is not only sorry for his sins, but he also turns from his former life, recognizes its evil, and most importantly has a strong inner conviction that he has done wrong and can recover only with his father’s help.3®

The steps which led to this important "turning” were,

like the steps in sin, the subject of many books and sermons.

In fact, the literature on repentance is even more detailed

and thorough, for in the Puritan scheme of course repen­

tance was the central fact of spiritual life. Using the

Prodigal Son for illustration, Goodman defines six steps in

the process of salvation, and treats each at length and in

detail.31 In summary, Goodman calls the steps: first "con-

28^. Treatise Of Faith And R.epentance (London, 1685) pp. 65-6. 29IV, 62. 30A Recovery, pp. 64-69.

^What follows is a summary of Goodman, pp. 225-272. See also Goodwin’s discussion of the steps and signs III, 359-366, and Fuller’s summary treatment, Treatise, p. 88. • 60

sideration;" at this point the Prodigal "comes to himself"

and realizes that he has been sinning. This step involves

a reawakening of the conscience previously silenced by the

hardening process of iteration or repeated sinning. The

second step is "resolution." The Prodigal decides to do

something about his sinful state, to return to his father,

or metaphorically, to seek salvation. The third step con­

sists of "confession and contrition" which Goodman divides

into four parts: 1. confession of guilt; 2. aggravation of

; the fault (to realize the magnitude of his sin) 3. self-

condemnation (the Prodigal’s "I am unworthy"); and 4. de­

preciation (to beg for salvation despite one’s unworthiness).

The fourth step is to live a reformed life, and on this point

all commentators emphatically insisted. If the repentance

has been genuine, it will appear in the Prodigal’s submis­

sion to God's providence, worship of God, and consciousness

of God’s commands and will. Goodman writes an entire chap­

ter driving home the point that one must live a good life

before salvation can be considered complete. Tears and self-

reproach are but empty things, and had God required these

alone "the most fundamental reason of obedience /is/ de­

stroyed" (p. 233). Goodman stretches his interpretation

of the parable to insist that before the Prodigal could be

accepted by his father, the sinner must have done some good

works (presumably on the road home) as proof of the sin­

cerity of his intentions. Only then can the fifth step, 61 "reconciliation,” take place. The sixth and final step is

"sanctification,” the point at which the son receives some

definite signs of his father's favor. Goodman interprets

the robe in the parable as a symbol of "more compleat holi­

ness," the ring as the gift of the Holy Ghost,and the shoes

as the "honour of being imployed in the service of God for

the drawing others home to him" (p. 272).

Step four was regarded as particularly crucial in

this process. To live a reformed life glorified God and

. at the same time furnished the "signs" for whibh the

Puritans were ever alert. The parable of the barren fig

tree was a favorite text for insisting on this point.

Bunyan's "The Barren Fig-Tree: or The Doom and Downfall of

the Fruitless Professor" is typical. The vineyard keeper

expects his plants to produce; so too

by thy profession thou hast said, I am sensible of the evil of sin. Now, then, live such a life as declares that thou art sensible of the evil of sin. By thy profession thou hast said, 'I am sorry for my sin;' why, then, live such a life as may declare this sorrow. By thy pro­ fession thou hast said,'I am ashamed of my sin," (Ps. xxxviii. 18;) yea; but live such a life that men by that may ’see thy shame for sin,* (Jer. xxxi. 19) By thy profession thou sayest, I have turned from, left off, and am become an enemy to every appearance of evil. (1 Thess. v. 22) Ah! but doth thy life and conversation declare thee to be such an one? Take heed, 62

barren fig-tree, lest thy life sould give thy profession the lie. ^

Crusoe*s conversion and life afterwards fit impressively well into this general pattern. The first step in Crusoe’s return to God is his "consideration'* which was commonly initiated by a shock of some sort. David’s regeneration after the Bethsheba affair began only after the shock of

Nathan's parable, and the Prodigal Son determined to reform 33 only after near starvation. In his discussion of the

Prodigal Son and the steps toward salvation, Willard cites the additional cases of Job and Ephraim.3*1' Crusoe’s shock

is his illness and the dream of the avenging angel. Dreams were regarded as a standard form of divine communication with men. The scripture furnished many examples, and Moses

Amyraldus* work on the nature of dreams was available in 35 the English edition. Further precedent for the associa­

tion of dreams and conversion can be found in the allegor-

3^II, 253. Cf. Samuel Willard, The Barren Fig Trees Doom (Boston, 1691), passim; and Thomas Adams, The Barren Tree (London, 1623).

3^For a typical treatment see Edm. Arwaker /younger7» Thoughts well Employ’d (London, 1695), pp. 4-8.

3*fMercy Magnified, pp. 176-178.

Discourse Concerning The Divine Dreams Mention’d in Scripture, Together With the Marks and Characters by which they might be distinguish’d from vain Delusions (London, 1676). ical literature written immediately before Defoe's time.

The pilgrim in J. S.'s Wandering Prodigal begins his return to grace only after having a dream of the last judgment in which he sees himself condemned to hell.36 Interestingly, the Wandering Prodigal of J.S.'s work also becomes ill just before his conversion and specifically associates his physi­ cal illness with his spiritual condition. His conversion

. . . was done when Sickness had me seiz'd, When both my Soul and Body were Diseas'd; I cry’d alas! when worldly helps were vain, Torttour'd with outward and with inward pain.

As we will see in greater detail later, Crusoe's illness is

yet another spiritually significant "realistic" detail of

the novel.

The dreams of both the Wandering Prodigal and Crusoe

set the characters thinking over their past lives and real­

izing a sense of their sins. Crusoe recalls the major

events of his past and reflects that he had not thought of

them as God's mercies or providences. Indeed, "I had no

more Sense of God or his Judgments, much less of the present

Affliction of my Circumstances being from his Hand, than if

I had been in the most prosperous Condition of Life." But

now "Conscience that had slept so long, begun to awake,

and I began to reproach my self for my past Life. . . (VII,

London, 1687, p. 108 64

103). By this point Crusoe has gone through the first two steps in repentance. He has become aware of his condition; his conscience is awakened, and he has decided to seek sal­ vation.

The four parts of the third step which Goodman de­ lineates are not all distinctly present in Robinson Crusoe, but the general pattern is there. Crusoe confesses his guilt and condemns himself in the strongest terms. 'WRETCH 1 dost thou ask what thou hast done 1 look back upon a dreadful mis-spent Life, and ask thyself what thou hast not done?"

(VII, 106). Before he begs for grace he depreciates his own worthiness: "Now I look’d back upon my past Life with such

Horrour, and my Sins appear'd so dreadful, that my Soul .. sought nothing of God, but Deliverance from the Load of

Guilt that bore down all my Comfort" (VII, 111).

Finally Crusoe begs for repentance. "Jesus, thou

Son of David, Jesus, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me Repentance!" (VII, 110). Crusoe’s theology is sound at this point. It was generally believed that one could not repent simply whenever he felt like it by an act of his own will, for repentance was a gift bestowed by God. A

sinner could repent only if God supplemented his depraved

intelligence with the gift of the Holy Ghost which, among

other things, allowed man to distinguish between appearance

and spiritual reality. In extreme cases of impenitence God

might withhold that gift, especially if the sinner had ig- 65 nored clear and repeated calls to repent. J.S.'s Wandering

Prodigal reflects that it is not

the hour of Grace at all times, nor is it in the power of man to repent when he pleases, unless with his will and affections, moved with the gentle breathings of the holy Spirit, saving Grace put in, and carry on the work of true Regeneration; for of some it is posi­ tively said, They shall call upon me, but _I will not hear; They shall seek me early, but shall not find m e . 8

Thomas Gouge develops some of the sinister possibilities of this theory:

Altho’ it be true, that whensoever a wicked Man truly repenteth, he shall be pardon’d; yet he cannot truly repent whensoever he will; Repentance not being in his own Power, but the free Gift of God, which he seldom bestow- eth on those in their old Age, who have ne­ glected it all the former Part of their Lives: And he that refuseth to turn when God calleth him, provoketh God to give him over to the Hardness of his own Heart , so that he cannot turn.39

Crusoe escapes this fate because he heeds one of God’s distinct calls to repent. Up to this point then, he has achieved repentance and is about to begin his actural refor­ mation. According to Ames, whom Defoe had read, Crusoe has gone through six steps: 1. he has become aware of God’s law; 2. is convinced of his own sinful nature; 3. recognized his own unworthiness; 4. humiliated himself and feared for

38p. 112 ' 66 his sins; 5. has become aware of one particular sin (his revolt from and his father and all it implies) and not just of sin in general: 6. has called on God for repentance.^®

These steps are much like Goodman’s; in fact, they were

standardized among commentators, and Crusoe’s progress fits them all equally well.

After his repentance, Crusoe is at a crusial point in his progress toward salvation. Goodwin emphasized the

importance of good works and even stretched the Prodigal

parable to make his point; Defoe goes to correspondingly

great lengths to prove, to his readers that Crusoe's repen­

tance is a sincere one. Crusoe begins to read his Bible

daily; he asks grace before meals; he keeps the anniversary

of his arrival on the island with a day of fasting. We

have already seen that, in contrast to the first half of

the novel, he begins to spiritualize events after his con­

version. There are other specifically recognizable signs

which modern readers miss. Ames maintains that one way we

can recognize our being in a state of grace is if

we do prepare our selves to follow the will of God in all things, Deut. 5. 33 Even in those which seeme to be opposite to , and to crosse our profits, so that the flesh ap­ prehends them to be evil, Ier. 42. 2. Heb.

^®pp. 8-9 sigs. A4v-Blr. The entire Chapter IV, Bock II, ’’How the sinner ought to prepare himselfe to conver­ sion” is relevant. 67

II. 8. Phil'. 2. 8.41

What Ames is recommending is that the true Christian is not only capable of apprehending a reality beyond physical ap­ pearances, but that he relies on that higher reality even when it contradicts what "the flesh apprehends." Crusoe soon learns this lesson, to obey what he believes is divine guidance, even when it contradicts what appears to be true.

He remarks that

when we are in . . . a Doubt or Hesitation, whether to go this Way, or that Way, a se­ cret Hint shall direct us this Way, when we intended to go that way; nay, when Sense, our own Inclination, and perhaps Business has call’d to go the other Way, yet a strange Impression upon the Mind, from we know not what Springs, and by we know not what Power, shall over-rule us to go this Way .... Upon these, and many like Reflections, I afterwards made it a certain Rule with me, That whenever I found those secret Hint's, or pressings of my Mind, to doing, or not doing any Thing that presented; or to going this Way, or that Way, I never fail’d to obey the secret Dictate (VII, 202-3).

A practical illustration occurs later in the novel when, during the trip home, Crusoe discovers that several ships he had been mysteriously told not to sail on were lost at sea.

In addition to these signs of his new life, many of the incidents themselves are metaphorical comments of Crusoe’s regenerate condition. The island which he had called his

41p. 56, sig. Ilr "Island of Despair" and v/nich he described as a barren wil­ derness becomes a flowering Eden when Crusoe begins to ex­ plore it further after his conversion, and he specifically calls it a garden. In addition to suggesting an Eden and a return to a closer walk with God, the garden also sug­ gests the Promised Land of Canaan. Most of the spies whom

Moses sent into Canaan return to report that it is a land flowing with milk and honey, and as evidence they brought back a large branch of the grapes that grew there in abun­ dance. Crusoe makes a special point of remarking on the grapes growing on his island, and he finds them particularly nourishing. Having passed through spiritual slavery and a spiritual wilderness, Crusoe seems now to have' reached a spiritual promised land.

He still wants to escape, of course, and that desire is part of the wanderlust he never learns entirely to con­ trol. But he no longer regards the island as a spiritual prison. It is a prison after his conversion only in the sense that it cust him off from other human beings, not it the sense that it isolates him from God. After, he.has.:ex­ plored the Dutch wreck off his island, he is bitterly dis­ appointed at not finding a human companion to ease his loneliness. His desire is for "Some-Body to speak to, and to learn some Knowledge from of the Place where I was, and of the probable means of my Deliverance" (VII, 229).

By this time in the novel Crusoe has gone through 69 the fifth step in salvation, has proved his good intentions by living a Christian life of worship. That he has reached the sixth step is indicated by his conversion of Friday.

Goodman interpreted the Father’s giving the Prodigal Son the shoes as symbolic of "the honour of being employed in the service of God." Crusoe's position as Christian teacher is one of the final signs of his new spiritual condition. He has now conquered his own rebelliousness and is in a posi­ tion to hold authority.^ He is ruler over his island wil­ derness, so that in the spiritual sense, he is his own master; he has conquered his previous sinful condition.

Crusoe’s position is made especially clear when he aids the captain, victim of mutiny, to recover his ship. Whereas

Crusoe has earlier rebelled against authority, both God's and his father's, in this incident he becomes the champion of authority and order. In a sense Crusoe's life recapitu­ lates the Christian paradox of free will and divine authori­ ty. As a rebel seeking freedom, he becomes only a prisoner both of his own passion and of the island. Only after submitting to divine direction does he become free both spiritually and physically.

That Crusoe becomes a governor or magistrate is simply a further development of the same theme. In Defoe's day the idea, deriving from Plato, that one must be a good

^ C f . Starr, pp. 122-23. 70 man to be a good governor, was still very much alive.In one of his sermons preached during the Commonwealth, Elidad

Blackwell suggests a chain of reactions depending upon the virtue of the magistrate. The virtuous magistrate, as a

Godly man, governs himself, his family and therefore the commonwealth well. On the other hand, an evil magistrate, for example the evil rulers of Israel, ruin themselves, family life, and the whole social fabric.

A Magistrate he is a publike person; and therefore a publike good, or a publilce evill. If he be carelesse, negligent, ungodly, un­ just, abuse his authorities, neglect his dutie, what’s the issue? Religion degenerates into Idolatry and Superstition. The publike, ministery of the word, and all other means of salvation, are either wholly neglected, or exceedingly slighted. Wicked men in- couraged. Godly men discountenanced. Nothing but Ataxie, Disorder, Confusion, in Church, in Common-wealth.^

That Crusoe is a good governor is another sign of his having achieved personal salvation.

Having learned obedience to God, his place in society, and the proper use of his reason, Crusoe returns to England.

His adventures along the way are meant as further proof of his competence as a man of authority. His presence of mind

during the battle with the wolves, for example, forms a

^S e e Novak, "Crusoe the King and the Political Evolu­ tion of His Island," SEL, II (1962), 337-350.

****£: Gave at For Magistrates (London, 1645), pp. 4-5. 71 direct contrast with his fear of the animals during his voyage up the African coast after his escape from slavery.

Even the wealth he finds he has accumulated does not lead him astray, for he continues to live modestly, and he re­ wards his benefactors generously.^

Both the psychology of the main character and the fall-rise pattern of the novel as a whole are directly in­ fluenced by Puritan literature which immediately preceeded

Defoe's career. As a result Crusoe, like the novels of

Dickens, is deeply imbedded in contemporary social patterns.

Dickens' metaphors are drawn from the machines, factory products and steam engines of his day, and his meaning is finally a social one. Defoe draws his metaphors from Bib­ lical similitudes and explications, and his meaning is fi­ nally a spiritual one. If it is appropriate that Carker

is killed by a train, it is equally appropriate that Crusoe

is stranded in a wilderness. Both are ''realistic'* details, but both have a significance beyond their realism.

To appreciate the extent to which Puritan conventions underlie the choice of detail let us consider the most im­

portant incident of the novel, Crusoe's conversion. The

peculiar blindness toward providence which is the mark of

^ S e e Starr, pp. 121-125 for a more detailed treatment of these final incidents. 72 a sinner received comment from many Puritan authors who of­ ten spoke of it in terms of a sickness or mental debility, both of which metaphors are applied to Crusoe before his conversion. Physical sickness as a metaphor for spiritual weakness was the whole subject of John Ramsey's Morbvs

Epidemicvs: or The Disease of the Latter Dayes in which he speaks of sickness as

a Metaphor or borrowed speech taken up from the natural Food or Physick of the Body; and in a figurative and a spiritual sense, trans­ lated and applied unto the Soul. For the Soul, as it stands in need, so it hath its proper Food, and Physick, aswell / s i c /as the Body, and that is the Word of God.4°

Thomas Adams expands the metaphor even further to include the body politic as well.

Sicknesses in mens Soules are bred like cliseases in naturall, or corruptions in ciuill bodies; with so insensible a pre- gresse, that they are not discerned, till they be almost desperate: .... There is, say Physicians, no perfect Health in this world; and man, when hee is at best, enioyes but a neutrality. But the Physicians of the Soule complaine further: That wee are all as an vncleane thing, and all our righteousnesse are as filthie ragges, &c. and in many things wee sinne all.^?

Crusoe himself associates his physical illness with his spiritual condition. The angel who comes to him in the

^London, 1656, p. 4.

^Diseases of the Sovle: A Discourse Divine, Morall, And Physicall (London, 1616), p. 2. 73 vision makes it clear that his sickness is providential and that his physical death will be a spiritual one as well.

Later when he is looking for some sort of medicine, Crusoe finds some tobacco in a seaman's chest: "I went, directed by Heaven no doubt; for in this Chest I found a Cure for both Soul and Body,” for the chest contains both the tobacco

and a Bible. This seems to be an echo of Ramsey's meta­

phorical equation of the Bible and medicine. After his con- version-cure, almost everything Crusoe says about his ill­ ness can also be read as a comment on his spiritual condi­

tion. For example, he remarks that after his illness he

had to go about his chores slowly "as a Man that was gather­

ing up his Strength after a Fit of Sickness: For it is

hardly to be imagin’d, how low I was, and to what Weakness

I was reduc’d" (VII, 112). If we interpret sickness meta­

phorically in the novel, then Crusoe’s violent sea-sickness

during his first voyage is significant as an indication of

his sinning, and the sickness here and during his conversion

provide metaphorical comments at both the beginning and end

of his career in sin.

That Crusoe becomes hungry and thirsty during his ill­

ness and just before his conversion are realistic details,

but they too are spiritually significant. One need only re­

call the Prodigal Son’s near starvation or the Biblical

"Blessed are those that hunger and thirst after righteous­

ness" to understand the reason for Defoe’s including this 74 detail. The dream, illness, hunger, thirst, all these de­ tails of the incident have definited spiritual connotations, all would have been significant to Defoe’s readers in a way we miss. Even the fact that the Bible is in the seaman’s chest with the tobacco is apparently dictated by the meta­ phorical meaning Defoe wished to attach to it. Precisely how many of the incidents in the novel were included for their metaphorical value will probably never be certainly determined, but clearly Defoe was being more than literally realistic when he wrote his novels.

Having once established his typical subject matter and method of treatment in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe dealt with it by similar methods in all of what are regarded as his major novels. After this introductory study, we are ready to turn to his other novels to see how Defoe played varia­ tions on his themes. CHAPTER III

Colonel Jack

Of Defoe's major novels, the one nearest Robinson

Crusoe in theme is Colonel Jack. Like Crusoe, this novel dramatizes the process of salvation in the central charac­ ter, and as in his preface to Crusoe, Defoe begins Jack by

claiming that his purpose is partly didactic. The plaesant

part of the novel, he writes, "sneaks for itself; the use­

ful and instructive is so large, and has such a Tendency to

improve the Mind, and rectify the Manners, that it would em­

ploy a Volume, large as itself, to particularize the In­

structions that may be drawn from it" (III, vii). And as

in Crusoe. Defoe again refers to the Prodigal Son:

EVERY vicious Reader will here be encouraged to a Change, and it~will appear that the best and only good End of an impious mispent Life is Repentance; that in this, there is Comfort, Peace, and often Times Hope, that the Peni­ tent shall be received like the Prodigal, and his latter End be better than his Beginning (III, viii)0

But there are no allusions to the prodigal parable

in the novel itself, and in fact the structure of this

novel differs significantly from that of Crusoe. In Crusoe

Defoe used the common fall-rise pattern of the Prodigal

story; in Jack he uses the simpler pattern of Pilgrim's

75 76

Progress, a gradual rise from sin to salvation. Just as

Crusoe’s spiritual and material fortunes fall and rise to­ gether, so Jack’s both gradually rise so that from poverty and sin in the first pages, Jack progresses to salvation and wealth in the last. Despite these differences of structure, there are many similar incidents in the two novels, probably because the incidents themselves are metaphors of the charac ters' similar spiritual condition at various points in the novels. Both characters progress from slavery, symbolic of their sinful states, to a wilderness which they gradually turn into fruitful gardens as they become more religious and consequently more worldly wise. Both are finally re­ stored to God and normal society.

The similarities are more superficial tan real, how­ ever, for in Jack Defoe wrote the study of a different kind of sinner than the one examined in Crusoe. Some of the dif­ ferences are obvious. Jack is a far more sympathetic char­ acter in his sin than is Crusoe. Jack does not callously disregard the advice of loving parents or consciously re­ bel against the clear warnings of divine Providence. The difference in the two men’s spiritual conditions is best

indicated by their reactions to being stranded in the wil­

derness. Mot until after his conversion does Crusoe begin

to see that divine Providence was responsible for his

presence on the island. When Jack finds himself in America

he immediately recognizes that some divine power directed 77 events. As a further contrast of the two characters,

Defoe is as careful to insist that Jack’s is innocent sin­ ning, sinning from ignorance, as he is to insis that Crusoe sins against knowledge. Crusoe knowingly sets out on a course contrary to God’s will; Jack sins simply because he knows no better and has no choice but to sin if he wishes to stay alive.

The contrast between these two characters illustrates the way in which Puritan definitions of character types fur­ nished the psychological basis for Defoe's fictional per­ sonalities. Crusoe, as a conscious sinner, can be identi­ fied by clearly defined reactions and attitudes, and his progress in sin and salvation can be followed step by step.

Jack, on the other hand, is what Puritan commentators called a ’’civil man,” one who learns to obey the laws of man and therefore appears good, but who is ignorant of the laws of

God and is therefore not in a state of grace.^ As it was possible to discuss Crusoe’s psychology as sinner and saint,

so too we can discuss Jack in terms of the common Puritan understanding of the civil man and the signs and psychology

of that condition. But there is a further complication, for

the emphasis in Jack is more temporal than in Crusoe.

Jack is to be understood not only as a spiritually defined

1-The best full length discussion of the psychology of the civil man occurs in Goodwin, III, 419 ff. 7 8 civil man, but also as a temporarily defined gentleman as

Defoe explains that term and character type in his The Com- pleat Gentleman.^ To understand Jack we must trace his progress from rogue to gentleman, and from civil man to

saint.

VJithin a few pages of the opening of the novel Defoe establishes Jack's essential innocence. Unlike Crusoe,

Jack "set out into the World so early, that when he began to do Evil, he understood nothing of the Wickedness of it, nor what he had to expect for it" (III, 5). We cannot trace in Jack, as we could in Crusoe, the steps in sin. He

acts out of simple ifnorance, not out of conscious premedi­

tation, and it is a measure of his innocence that he never

reaches the stage of "delectation,1' the point at which the

sinner enjoys repeating his crime. P3ven after Jack has be­

come a pick-pocket he does not understand the gravity of

his acts.

Nothing is more certain, than that hitherto being partly from the gross ignorance of my untaught Childhood, as I observ'd before, partly from the Hardness, and Wickedness of the Company I kept, and add to these, that it was the Business I might be said to be brought up to, I had, 3! say, all the way hitherto, no Manner of Thoughts about the Good or Evil of what I was embark'd in; consequently, I had no sense of Conscience,

^Ed. Karl D. Bulbring (London, 1890). All quotations are from this, the first edition. 79 no Reproaches upon my Mind for having done amiss (III, 70-1).

Jack also makes it clear that he knows nothing about reli­ gion. He frequently makes reference to his own ignorance in religious matters in contrast to the Virginia pedagogue:

. . . as to commending Penitent, as this Man had done, I cannot say, I any /sic7Convictions upon me sufficient to bring it on, nor had I a Fund of religious Knowledge to support me in it (III, 206).

For all this ignorance, Jack manages to live a re­ markably virtuous life. During his five years as a pick­ pocket x^e see him participate in only five crimes, in four of which he acts only as the assistant of Will. Several of the crimes, in fact, especially that of the theft from the diamond merchant, seem meant to evoke our admiration, for they furnish opportunities for Jack to return to their owners stolen goods he cannot use.5 Jack's natural good­ ness is a trifle too obvious for some critics: Bonamy

Dobree writes that "as we follow the growth in him of the idea of wrongdoing, he may seem a little too innately good.”^

Psychologically, however, the characterization is

5Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford, 1963), pp. 74-80, suggests that because Jack’s crimes are moti­ vated by necessity Defoe would have excused him from any responsibility for them.

^English Literature in the Early Eighteenth-Century (Oxford, 1959), p.426. 80 sound. Jack has one major advantage over his fellow urchins; he has been told that he is a gentleman, and this knowledge sets him apart from his fellows in his own regard. Although he had a difficult time understanding what the term "gentle- man" implies, he learns from the glassmaker's lecture to a young fop that a gentleman should not swear. The knowledge stays with him the rest of his life, so that even in

Virginia he "continually remember'd the Words of the antient

Glassmaker, to the Gentleman" (III, 187).

Jack's natural goodness is also justifiable on theo­ logical grounds. Despite their insistence that man was in­ nately sinful, most theologians granted that "natural man" could appear to be good because God had implanted certain qualities in him which in the particularly sensitive and in­ telligent served as guides to a virtuous life. Goodwin cites

Romans 2: 14-15 to justify his discuccion of the civil man:

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness . . . .

He puts this scripture in modern terms; because man's nature

is wholly corrupted, God found it necessary to implant in

him a conscience which "hath some Strook and Power in Men,

to restrain and curb them from many Sins, and to make them

do many things agreeable to the Law (III, 413). In addition

to conscience, God has made some small impression upon the 81 wills of men

which makes them also in their Wills and Affections somewhat more conformable to the Light of their.: Consciences, stamping such Impressions upon them, as it shall become more easy for them to do what Conscience dictates to them, to abstain from gross Sins, to be temperate, just and sober. And though indeed the Will be left more to its Corruption that the Understanding, yet there are Impressions from God upon it: and look as Conscience, in the light of it, hath a double Effect; so suitably hath God upon the Will also (III, 413).

Goodwin goes on at great length to include ’’Natural Wisdom,”

"Fear of Shame” and "Good Education” as other qualities which without the law of God tend to make a man virtuous.

Jack seems to be the sort of civil man Goodwin is writing

about here. He is a virtuous pagan, a good man who is none

the less damned because he is not in a state of grace.

As with the conscious sinner, the civil man’s spirit­

ual condition led to clearly definable characteristics.

Goodwin asserts that the good a civil man does can always

be detected because it proceeds only from "natural wisdom”

as opposed to divine wisdom or knowledge of faith. The

good which civil men do "is fed and nourished with Motives

drawn from the World and worldly Wisdom, and not such as

are taken out of the Word. . .’’(Ill, 419). Thomas Taylor

makes much the same claim; civil men ’’having no sense of

their misery . . . rest in pure naturals, ciuill honesty,

-L 82 externall vertues, as in a good estate."^ Jack’s apparently virtuous acts are consistent with this theory. For example, he returns the money to the old Kentish woman not because of consciousness that theft is a sin, but because of civil honesty. He know that stealing a little old lady's last few pennies is somehow wrong.

Taylor and Goodwin are simply expanding the standard

Puritan observation that unregenerate man mistakes appear­ ance for reality; that is, he is more concerned with earthly than with spiritual values. The civil man’s virtues are

'’externall virtues" in Taylor’s terms because they arise from earthly motivations instead of spiritual ones. In his

Serious Reflections Defoe develops a similar theory, dis­ tinguishing between what he calls "negative religion" and that religion characteristic of those who are in a state of grace. True religion, he writes, must consist of two things, faith and repentance. But Mr. Negative" "Knows little, or perhaps nothing of faith, repentance, and a Christian morti­ fied life; in a word, he is a man perfect in the circum­ stances of religion, and perfectly a stranger to the essen­ tial part of religion" (p. 163). Those who practice mere negative religion are deluded by appearances and are self

5The Practice of Repentance, Laid downe in sundry directions, together with the Helps, Lets, Signes and Ho- tiues (London, 1629), p. 57. 83 confident of their virtue.

I have observed that many fall into this case by the excessive vanity of being thought well of by their neighbours, obtaining a character, &c. It is a delusion very fatal to many; a good name is indeed a precious ointment, and in some cases is better than life. But with your pardon, Mr. Negative, it must be a good name for good deeds, or otherwise a good name upon a bad life is a painted whore, that has a gay countenance upon a rotten, diseased, corrupted carcass (p. 160).

Jack’s character is consistent with these theories of the civil man. He typically mistakes appeai'ances for reality and himself points out the error for us. During his first long residence in Virginia he tells us,

. . . I had hitherto gone on upon a Notion of Things founded only in their Appearance, as they affected me with Good or Evil, esteem­ ing the happy and unhappy part of Life to be ■ those that gave me Ease or Sorrow, without regarding, or indeed much understanding how far those Turns of Life were influenced by the giver of Life; or how far they were all directed by a Sovereign God that governs the World, and the Creatures it ^sic7had made (III, 202).

It is this fault which leads Jack into the error of marrying his first wife, for she tricks him into marriage by appear­ ing what she is not. When her forward behavior disgusts him, she simply affects dignity and reserve. Jack is fooled

and they soon enter negotiations for marriage. She is so

clever that for Jack "her Design was perfectly impenetrable

to the last Moment" (IV, 10). Only after the marriage when she "threw off the Mask of her Gravity" does Jack see

her for what she is. 84 Jack's avarice is another widely recognized conse­ quence of his spiritual condition and is a natural outgrowth of his attachment to things earthly and ignorance of things spiritual. Ames thought that one of the signs of unregener- ate man "is perversnesse of the affections whereby men, turne away from God, and wholy cleave, and adhere, to worldly things." Evidence of a man’s being in this condi­ tion is

1. If he imploy his chiefest care, and dili­ gence about these things Mat. 6. 25. 31. 32. The reason is given Verse 21. & 24. for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 2. If he be ready rather to’ forsake God and his righteousnesse then these worldly things, Mat. 37. 33. 3. If he do in his heart judge those men to be happy which have an abundance of these worldly goods.6

That Jack devotes his "chiefest care" to making money is no doubt true, and his avarice reaches its highest point during his final trip to trade with the Spanish merchants. Despite common sense and the pleas of his wife, Jack "dream*d of nothing but Millions and Hundred /s icy7 of Thousands" and sets

sail again..

That Jack's sin leads to a disaster which helps moti­ vate his conversion is the dramatization of a common

Puritan belief. Milton's God points out the irony that He

brings good out of intended evil. The Virginia pedagogue,

reflecting on his own past, seems to foreshadow the way in

6pp. 4-5, sigs. A2v -A3r . 85 which Jack finally meets disaster and is converted. One of the strongest motives to repentance, he tells Jack, is God’s

"working good to us out of Evil, when we are working the very Evil out of his Good" (III, 199). Jack is brought to

America by an act of providence so that he can live a better life, but he turns this good to evil by his avarice. In turn providence uses this evil to cause Jack’s conversion.

Before going on to other events in the novel, it is necessary to examine the other determining gactor in Jack's personality, Defoe’s conception of a gentleman, for this more temporal theme helps shape Jack’s psychology and a num­ ber of the events in the novel. As in the religious theme, the problem of appearance and reality plays a role in Defoe’s conception of a gentleman. In his Compleat English Gentle­ man Defoe is concerned with the misapplication of the title

to men who appear to deserve it but in reality do not. In

short, he attempts to redefine "gentleman" in spiritualized

terms by placing it partly in the realm of things immaterial.

Early in his work Defoe makes clear the premises of his of

his definition:

The Gentleman is to be represented as he really is, and in a figure which he cannot be a gentle­ man without; I mean as a Person of Merit and Worth; a Man of Honour, Virtue, Sense, Integ­ rity, Honesty, and Religion, without which he is Nothing at all . . . (p. 21).

One’s simply possesing an escutcheon does not make him a

gentleman, for if such a man is "exclusiv /sic7of learning 86 or virtue, and of all personall merit” he cannot be called a gentleman (p. 4); Religion and education are the keys to being a gentleman in Defoe's sense, for in addition to the mere earthly qualifications of good birth and at least moderate wealth, a gentleman is one who has overcome natural depravity as completely as he can. Learned gentlemen may question whether man is originally depraved, but Defoe af­ firms his belief, especially when he sees

that men are in their youth hurry'd down the stream of their worst afeccions by the meer insensible impetuosity of nature; I say while it is thus, and that not generally onely, but universally, I can not but conclude that there is something of originall depravity in nature more than those gentlemen think of. And what does all this import (to bring it down to my present purpose) but that Nature is not able to accomplish the gentleman without the help of outward application? Nature works by its Maker's direccion, and can not go beyond it self (pp. 111-12).

Hence religion and education are obviously essential to one's becoming a gentleman, and in Jack the term implies not only

social position, but religion as well.

This definition of a gentleman throws some interesting

light on the structure of the novel. Jack begins his story with only the least important qualification of a gentleman;

^But cf. William H. McBumey, "Colonel Jacque;Defoe's Definition of the Complete English Gentleman," SSL, II (1962), 325, where the author argues that the innate prin­ ciples Jack seems to have are "based, one should note, not on religious ideals but on social aspirations. ..." 8 7 he is born of a gentleman. He lacks not only the earthly

qualifications of social position and manners, but also

the spiritual ones of virtue and religion. In a double

sense he falls short of the title, ;.and the novel dramatizes

the way in which he overcomes both deficiencies. Jack's

conversion at the conclusion of the novel, sometimes re­

garded as a hasty afterthough on Defoe's part, is an integ-

■» ral part of the structure of the work. In becoming a

Christian Jack not only escapes the uncomfoi”table spiritual

condition of a civil man, he also becomes a complete English

gentleman as Defoe conceived of him. For Defoe’s purposes

the novel has both thematic unity and logical structure.

To be a Christian and a gentleman are closely allied, Jack

begins the novel as neither and ends as both.

But being a gentleman has its temporal aspects as

well, and it is these that account for a number of inci­

dents in the novel, especially in the later half of the

work when Jack returns to Europe after establishing him­

self as a planter. The lengthy story of his success in the

war on the continent demonstrates his newly acquired cour­

age and contrasts with his earlier experience in an army

which ended in desertion.® Jack's success in arms is also

a sign of his stature as a gentleman according to Defoe.

®Novak, Nature of M a n , pp. 142-45, treats the theme of courage in Jack in relation to Defoe’s knowledge and use of "natural law" in the novel. 88

In his E n g l i s h Gentleman he remarked that the ignorant are capable of only physical pleasures and cannot experience the ’’exalted delight of an improved soul;" they have "no gust to books to read the accions of great men or to tread in the steps of glory and vertue" (p. 89). While still in

America, Jack is fired by a newly acquired knowledge of history and of great men, just as Defoe remarks a gentle-

■> man ought to be. And, like the gentleman Defoe defines,

Jack refuses the chance to live in simple ease in America and participates in making history in Europe instead.

Jack learns patriotism, another of the necessary as­ pects of gentility, by his involvement with the ill-fated forces of Prince Charlie. His role as rebel is not only immediately dangerous to his position as a gentleman, it later threatens his security in Virginia and leads di­ rectly to his learning the proper respect for his king.

The incident is also another illustration of the way Provi­ dence brings good out of evil. Ironically, Jack learns patriotism only after he becomes a rebel, just as he learns charity after being a theif and mercy after being a slave.

Jack’s numerous marriages teach him another lesson in worldly wisdom, one which Defoe emphasized in his

English Gentleman, that birth and wealth are not the most

important' qualifications for gentility. Each of Jack’s

four marriages is to a woman of less elevated social po­

sition than the last. He finally finds temporary happi- 89 ness with the daughter of a humble citizen, itself a com­ ment on the importance of wealth and birth. But Jack finds a perfect wife only among the lowest social order, slaves.

When he again meets his first wife in America, she is stripped of all the earthly qualifications she had in England.

Her only assets are her complete honesty and humility, and with those alone she makes a superior mate. That Jack’s wife finds both spiritual and physical happiness only after disaster again reinforces the theme of Providence’s bringing good out of apparent evil.

That Jack’s wife is converted in Virginia is one as­ pect of another major theme in the novel, the role of

Virginia as a new world in both the physical and spiritual sense. After the deaths of his fourth wife and three of his children, Jack feels that ’’Heaven summon'd me to retire to Virginia, the Place, and (as I may say) the only Place

I had been bless’d at . . ." (IV, 81). Certainly Virginia furnishes the answers to Jack’s material problems. As a *

child in England his major trouble was financial, and on

arrival in Virginia that trouble vanishes. As an adult in

the old world he has serious marital problems,- and those

too are immedi.ately solved upon his second ari'ival in

Virginia. But also in a spiritual sense Jack is ’’bless’d"

in Virginia, for only in the new world does he learn spirit­

ual truth; in the old he learns only worldly wisdom. Ap­

propriately Providence is directly responsible for both of his prolonged visits to Virginia. His retnrn is directed by a call from Providence, and after his first arrival he

is sure he "was brought into this miserable Condition of a

Slave, by some strange directing Power . . ." (Ill, 142).

Like his wife later, Jack starts a new life in

Virginia. Its beginning is marked by another of the many

contrasting events in the novel. The first interview Jack

has with his Virginia master Smith is parallel to the one he had earlier in England with the cleric of the custom house. In a note (III, 147) Defoe even calls our attention

to the contrast in the interviews and to the change in Jack's

skill with rhetoric, a mark of his progress toward gentility.

The interview and the events which lead up to it also help

establish the symbolic importance of Virginia. Shortly af­

ter their arrival, the master addresses his new slaves,

among whom is a hardened criminal, a pick-pocket with a his­

tory much like Jack’s. After the lecture and some comments

to the pick-pocket, Jack "thought all my Master said was

spoken to me, and sometimes it came into my Head, that sure

my Master was some extraordinary Man and that he knew all

Things that ever I had done in my Life" (III, 145). Smith

begins to talce on more than human dimensions; Jack begins

to regard him as all-knowing, and as a master he is all-

powerful over his slaves. It is finally his mercy that makes

Jack’s new life easy. Smith is almost Providence personi­

fied; he even begins to sound like a god when he tells his 91 slaves that they are "to look upon the Life they were just a going to enter upon, as just beginning the World again . . ."(Ill, 143). Later when Jack is negotiating with Mouchat, he speaks of Smith as though he were a long suffering god waiting patiently for sinners to repent. Jack explains his method with Mouchat to Smith:

. . . I began, and represented to him how kind you, that were his Great Master had been to him; that you had never done him any Harm, that you had used him gently, and he had never been brought to this Punishment in so many Year, tho' he had done some Faults be­ fore . . . (Ill, 163).

In this new world under the special care of Provi­ dence Jack’s spiritual life develops apace, and he breaks completely with his former life. His "beginning the World again" in Smith's terms is indicated in the novel by the loss of the ninty-four pounds worth of goods shipped from

England, goods purchased with the proceeds of his life of crime. When he hears that the ship carrying the goods has been lost at sea Jack reflects:

I own I had such an Abhorrence of the wicked Life I had led, that I was secretly easy, and had a kind of Pleasure in the Disaster that was upon me about the Ship, and that tho’ it was a Loss, I could not but be glad that those ill-gotten Goods were gone, and that I had lost what I had stolen; for I look’d on it as none of mine, and that it would be Fire in my Flax if I should mingle it with that I had now, which was come honestly by . . .(Ill, 188-9).

Jack's belief is standard Puritan doctrine; Spencer wrote

that "ill-gotten goods seldom prosper, they have a poison- 92

ous operation in them, bringing up the good food together

with the ill humours, Job xx. 15. He that hath any such,

hath but locked up a theif in his closet, that will rob him

of all that he hath."^

Jack’s relationship with Mouchat indicates his fur­

ther progress in spiritual wisdom. Puritan literature fur­

nishes an abundance of sermons and pamphlets on how to treat

servants and act in a Christian manner in domestic affairs.10

The most frequent method of treating the relations of ser­

vants and masters was to draw a parallel between that rela­

tionship and the one between man and God, a parallel which

James Janeway uses throughout his sermon "Duties of Masters

- and Servants."11 Janeway takes as his text Ephesians 6: 5-9.

Servants,be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good-will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he re­ ceive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things

^1, 526; see also I, 248; and I, 506-7. Defoe ex­ presses similar sentiments in Serious Reflections, p. 43.

10E.g., the two volumes of The Morning Exercises at Cripplegate, ed. Samuel Annesley (London, 1844),' contain three lengthy sermons on the subject.

11In Cripplegate, II, 358-86 93

unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.

After using the text to justify the parallel between slave and man, and God and master, Janeway goes on to attribute i slavery to the fall and its consequences. Before the fall man was a majestic creature on the earth, but since then he has been just another of the animals. Even so, a man may still attain some majesty by becoming holy.

And now, the more of holiness is in a man, and the more near God, and like him, the more likely ^Is h . £ / t o get and keep a maj­ esty and dominion in his place. Surely, "great holiness commands respect and reverence;" and rather choose to have your inferiors reverence than fear you; for admiration and loye accompany reverence; but hatred, fear. 2

That Jack becomes the master of servants by the use of love and gratitude instead of by fear as the other planters and overseers do is a sign of his becoming a Christian, his be­ ginning to overcome the consequences of the fall. It is

also a sign that he is becoming a gentleman, one whom Defoe

thought had overcome as nearly as possible his original de­

pravity.

The Mouchat episode has other important consequences

for the'theme of the novel which may easily be overlooked.

Novak has suggested that "not only is Jack's kindness an

economic expedient, but it is in these terms that it must

12p. 369. 94 be measured. The very scheme of first arousing the slave's terror of death and then implanting gratitude in him by re­ voking the sentence is a base trick.To call Jack's

actions a "base trick" is to miss the point, for the inci­ dent is primarily spiritual, not economic in significance.

Certainly Milton did not regard it as a base trick in

Paradise Lost when God arouses in Adam and Eve a knowledge

of the magnitude of their crime and the horror of itspunish­ ment before granting them the vision of infinite mercy and

the coming of Christ. But this is precisely the method which

Jack uses to gain the affection of his slaves. Defoe seems

to invite a symbolically spiritual interpretation of Jack’s

treatment of slaves. There is a clear parallel between in­

nocent sinner (Mouchat), interceeding mercy (Jack) and com­

passionate master (Smith), When Jack explains to Smith his

method with the slaves, he says that he

first . . . put them into the utmost Horror and Apprehensions of the cruelest Punishment they had ever heard of, and thereby enhance the Value of their Pardon, which was to come as from your self, but not without our great Intercession: Then I was to argue with them, and work upon their Reason, to make the Mercy that was shew’d them sink deep into their Minds, and give lasting Impressions. . • (III, 172-3).

And when Jack explains gratitude to Mouchat, he explains

that the rescued slave must be grateful to "our Great Mas-

i3£COTlouiics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkely, 1962), p. 91. 95 ter, for it will be from him entirely that you will be par­ don’d, if you are pardon'd at all; for your Offence is against him . . ." (Ill, 164). Jack is not explaining only the relationship of benevolent master and misbehaving slave; he is also explaining that of merciful God and sinner.

Defoe goes to some length to make the spiritual parallel to Jack’s method as clear as possible. Only a few pages after Jack explains his method of treating slaves, the pedagogue uses very similar terms to explain to Jack

God’s method for dealing with sinners.

; . . certainly the Goodness of out great Creator in sparing us, when we forfeit our Lives to his Justice, and his Merciful bringing us out of the Miseries which we plunge ourselves into, when we have no Way to extricate ourselves, his bringing those very Miseries to be the Means of our De­ liverance, and working good to us out of Evil, when we are working the very Evil out of his Good; I say, these Things are certainly the strongest Motives to Re­ pentance that are in the VJorld.

In view of Death, Men are fill’d with Horror of Soul, and immediately they call that Repentance which I doubt is too often mistaken .... But the Sense of Mercy is quite another Thing, this seizes all the Passions, and all the Affections, and works a sincere unfeigned Abhorrence of the Crime, as a Crime; as an Offence against our Bene­ factor. . . (Ill, 199-200).

The parallel between the two methods of treatment is so

close as to border on the obvious. Jack does not overlook

the economic benefit of the proper treatment of slaves, of

course, nor did Janeway in his sermon when he wrote that careful masters Mmay be enriched; there is God's promise for your security (Prov. xxviii. 20; x. 6.) By this your trade is likely to thrive, your credit rise greatly, your custom increase.But economic expediency is clearly not all the picture. As God brings salvation out of sin and the sinner's despair, so Jack brings good out of a slave's misbehavior and dread.

There are two other interesting aspects of the slavery theme in the novel. In the parallel just examined, Jack is put into the ironic situation of explaining something which, he does not really understand as it is applied to himself.

He is still a slave in the spiritual sense, himself, aware that he has offended God and been preserved. But Jack is

an ungrateful slave, one who does not consciously repent

even after the pedagogue has explained the nature of repen­

tance and man's proper relationship to God. Jack is, of

course, unaware that in condemning slaves who do not re­

spond to his system he is at the same time condemning him­

self for precisely the same reaction to God’s mercy toward

him. Jack's blindness in this case is simply another ex­

ample of the spiritual blindhess characteristic of the un-

regenerate man. When the system is applied to physical

matters, to slaves and masters, Jack understands, but as it is applied to his own spiritual condition he is blind. Like

David by his reaction to Nathan’s parable, Jack unknowingly condemns himself.

A second irony in this part of the novel is the slavery-freedom paradox as it is found developed implicitly in Robinson Crusoe. In Colonel Jack it is developed expli­ citly in the pedagogue’s prayer:

Lord! whatsoever Sorrows rack my Breast, Till Crime removes too, let me find no Rest; How dark soe * er my State, or sharp my Pain, J2' not Troubles cease, and Sin remain. For Jesus Sake remove not my Distress, Till free Triumphant Grace shall repossess The vacant Throne, from whence my Sins depart, And make a willing Captive of my Heart; Till Grace coraoleatly shall my Soul subdue, Thy conquest full, and my Subjection true (III, 196).

Like Crusoe’s, Jack’s spiritual slavery continues long after his physical slavery is over, and like Crusoe, Jack appar­ ently finds freedom from slavery to sin only after submission to God. In his Gentleman Defoe indicated that education was one of the first requisites of both a gentleman and a

Christian, and Jack's formal education is completed in Vir­ ginia. In Scotland he had learned the three R ’s, but it is the Virginia pedagogue who is responsible for completing both his formal and spiritual education. The pedagogue

serves several other functions in the novel. He is a living

example that mere formal education is not enough to make a

gentleman, as Defoe indicated when he included virtue in 98 his definition. Although uneducated, Jack is ever alert in his early years to the dictates of his conscience and sense of right and wrong, and consequently he avoids the worst sins and crimes. But eith the best of formal edu­ cations the pedagogue becomes a desperate criminal and de­ liberately stifles the dictates of his conscience. In addition, the pedagogue, like many of the other charac­ ters and incidents of the novel, forms a contrast, in this case with Will, Jack's tutor in England. This pair of tutors reinforces the contrast of the old and new worlds.

The old world, associated throughout the novel with car­ nality, furnishes Jack only with Will, a tutor of pick­ pockets; Virginia, a new world of spiritual symbols and values, furnishes hthe pedagogue whom Jack recognizes as a tine penitent.

The tutors' names and the contrast between them sug­ gest an almost allegorical interpretation based on the nature of man's will and understanding. The general belief

among Puritan commentators was that man could easily grasp the nature of God and religion in his understanding, but

that unless the will, a more corrupt faculty, turned to God,

repentance had not occurred. Goodwin implies as much when he remarks that the will God "left more to its Corruption

than the Understanding" (III, 413). Speaking of the nature

of repentance, Taylor says something similar: some men have

a change in their minds, and haue some illu- 99

initiation, and rest in that as R-epentance. But hoeuer it is true, that the first thing in R-epentance, is the change of the mind from darknesse to light, yet Repen­ tance is not the turning of the vnder- standing vnto truth, vnless the will" also bee turned to God. ^

It is Will who first leads Jack to sin, and only after Will's reformation just before his death does Jack return the money to the old Kentish woman. Jack's name also has in­ teresting associations. His first name suggest anonymity,

and early in the novel he tells us that he may be called

"Mr. Anything" (III, 2). Perhaps he may be seen as an Every­ man who is led into a life of crime by a corrupted Will.

By contrast the pedagogue who acts as Jack's tutor in Virginia may be seen as representative of the understanding. He is

well educated, and it is he who leads Jack to a sense of his

own sin and sets in motion the conscious process of conver­

sion. It is impossible to insist on a one to one allegorical

interpretation of these aspects of the novel, but they indi­

cate that Defoe may have had something like this notion in

mind.

One particular incident in the novel defines the

pedagogue's and Jack’s spiritual condition and relationship.

On one occasion Jack finds the pedagogue reading the Bible.

Jack

took the Book out of his Hand, and went to

^Practice of Repentance, pp. 49-50. 100 look into it, and the Book open’d at the Acts 26. v. 28. where Faelix says to St. Paul, almost thou perswadest me to be a Christian. I think, says I, here’s a Line hits me to a Tittle, upon the long Account you have been given /sic7of yourself, and I must say them to you, as the Governor here said; and so I read the Words to him. He blush’d at the Text, and returns, I could answer you in the very Words the Apostle return’d to him in the next Verse, JE would thou wert both almost, and altogether such as 1 am, except these Bonds" (ill, 204TT

The quotation is inaccurate, but its implications in the

r novel are clear. Agrippa, who addresses Paul in the actual test, is, like Jack, a reasonable man but not in a state of grace. He and Jack are both civil men in positions of authority over men of great learning who are true penitents acting as ministers of spiritual truth. The famous story of Paul's early life of sin and subsequent conversion occurs immediately before the quotation Defoe cites, a story very much like the one the pedagogue had just finished narrating about himself. For contemporary readers this passage would have succinctly defined the spiritual roles and relation­ ship of the two characters as authoritative civil man and humble Christian missionary.

It is not until many years later, after Jack' has

learned the genteel qualities of courage and patriotism, that his conversion completes his education and makes him

a thorough gentleman. The conversion itself has a number

of interesting circumstances. It occurs only after Jack,

like Crusoe, is forced into thinking over his past. In writing his memoirs Jack becomes aware of a pattern in his life. The logical necessity for a first mover to initiate the pattern leads him, as Crusoe is led, to consider the divine pattern of nature and the universe. Just as Crusoe sits on the seashore and reasons from the universal order to a first mover, so Jack, having discovered a divine order in his own life, reasons that "as he /God/ guided, and had made the Chain of Causes, and Consequences, which Nature in general strictly obey’d, so to him should be given the

Honour of all Events, the Consequences of those Causes, as the first Mover, and Maker of all Things" (IV, 153).

For both Jack and Crusoe, this is a critical moment, the point at which both characters learn to "spiritualize" events. That they see beyond the mere physical appearances

of nature to the presence of divine providence is the sign

that they now have knowledge of faith, the gift of the Holy

Spirit necessary to true conversion. We do not see Jack,

as we do see Crusoe, turn from his vice to live a reformed

life, and to that extent the novel lacks thematic complete­

ness. But we know that his conversion has taken place in

the midst of fabulous wealth; that in the most worldly

situation possible he has turned to things spiritual after

witnessing his own vice of avarice in its ugliest form in 102

Cuba and among the Spanish merchants.1-^ We know too that he has changed from a civil man to a true Christian with the gift of the Holy Spirit and in so doing has completed the long process which the novel dramatizes; he has at last be­ come a gentleman.

l^See Novak, "Colonel Jack's ’Thieving Hoguing’ Trade to Mexico and Defoe’s Attack on Economic Individualism" HLQ, XXIV (1961), 349-53, for the importance of these final in­ cidents to Defoe’s understanding of natural lav/. CHAPTER. IV

Roxana

In the two novels examined so far there has been a direct correlation between the hero’s spiritual and mater­ ial prosperity. As both Crusoe and Jack become spiritually wise they also achieve worldly wisdom and wealth. As we saw

in the discussion of Robinson Crusoe, Puritan commentators frequently associated spiritual and material well being, but

just as frequently they warned that too great a concern for

the things of this world was a sure sign of a fallen state.

Thomas Gouge, for example, admonishes his readers to be

diligent in their callings for the glory of God who appointed

each man his labor but then goes on to warn that heavenly

duties must always come first.'®' If in Crusoe and Jack Defoe

illustrates the way in which spiritual wisdom and worldly

prudence could complement each other, in Roxana he concen­

trates on the way in which material wealth and concern for

things temporal can be deadly. In fact, Roxana is the study o of a lost soul.

®-The Young Man * s Guide, p. 71.

2Novak suggests as much in his "Crime and Punishment in Defoe’s Roxana,11 JEGP, LXV (1966) .445-465, but cf. his Nature of Man, pp. 86-87 where he seems to assume that Roxana ends the novel as a sincere penitent. 104

The separation of spiritual and financial well being gives Roxana an interesting double movement lacking in the two novels examined earlier. Crusoe’s spiritual and worldly fortunes fall and then gradually rise together. Jack’s begin at the lowest point and end at the highest. In Roxana the heroine begins spiritually and financially secure; in both respects she falls as Crusoe does. But from then on her material fortunes gradually rise as her spiritual life deteriorates and as she becomes more and more hardened in sin. She becomes more devoted to material wealth and more blind to spiritual reality as the novel progresses. Defoe emphasizes this theme so heavily that the novel may be read as a study of the nature of appearance and reality.^ To cite only one example here of the way this theme works,

R.oxana ends the novel in a condition to all appearances happy and enviable. In reality, or course, she is miserable, frightened and damned.

The most serious flaw of Roxana’s character and the theme of the novel are both made clear in the. early pages of the narrative. She marries the brewer because he dances well and is handsome; in other words the ruin brought on her by this "fool" is partly caused by her judging him by appearances only. This is the first example of what more

^The matrimonial theme is also important to undei'sten­ ding the novel but irrelevant to my present discussion. See Spire Peterson, "The Matrimonial Theme of Defoe’s Roxana," 105 and more obviously becomes Roxana’s major weakness and the one which leads her to mistaking material appearances for spiritual realities. The importance of this theme to Defoe and his Puritan readers heed hardly be restated. It appears as a sign of salvation in Crusoe, when Crusoe mistakes the

Biblical promise of deliverance for physical deliverance from his island. Only after his conversion does Crusoe un­ derstand the text in its true spiritual sense and see that its meaning is not merely physical. The ability to distin­ guish between appearance and reality, to discover the spirit­ ual significance of physical phenomena, was basic to the

Puritan scheme of salvation. Roxana is Defoe’s study of a character who never learns the difference between the two.

The first incident of major importance in the novel is Roxana’s relationship with the jeweler, and it presents a serious problem. Roxana has been brought nearly to star­ vation, and she has little choice but to accept the jeweler’s charity. On these grounds Novak contends that Defoe "would have exhonerated her entirely" for her adultery, for neces­ sity leaves her no choice.^ Defoe generally excused crime motivated by necessity as long as the necessity was not brought on by the criminal himself. Anyone brought by cir-

PMLA, L,

^Nature of Man, p. 84. 106 cumstances to the choice between breaking the law and star­ ving would be forced to choose the former, Defoe thought, and could therefore be excused just as Jack’s childhood crimes are intended to be excused. Novak claims that Roxana's adultery is a similar cas, for ’’Roxana is entirely guiltless until her husband’s folly . . . That is not entirely true, however. Roxana’s choice of a husband was apparently the result of her love of appearances, and in the early pages of the novel Defoe is careful to characterize her as a giddy young lady of less than clerical reserve. It also seems unlikely that in depicting his most unsavory hero, as

Roxana surely is, Defoe would have begun her career with a crime which he intended to be excused. In fact, nowhere does Defoe make it clear that the jeweler demands that

Roxana either sleep with him or starve. She goes to bed with him out of gratitude, not out of necessity.

Even if, as I doubt, Defoe meant the relationship with the jeweler to illustrate an excusable crime motivated by necessity, the whole incident is developed in such terms that contemporary readers would have recognized it as a

serious sin. Roxana does not enter the affair with any un­ becoming feminine reluctance. In fact, before their first night together she plainly enjoys thinking about him, pre­

determines to give in the first time he suggests their

making love, and finally ends up by begging him to return

to her early on the fateful evening instead of spending the 107 night in London as he had planned. Thus early in the novel

Roxana goes through the first five of the nine steps in sir* the same point Crusoe had reached by the time he set sail from Hull. The suggestion, step one, has been made by Amy, and it is Amy who sees to it that step two, rumination, comes immediately after. The third step, delectation, also

is clearly represented. When the jeweler begins to be a trifle more than friendly, Roxana says, "I not only was

easie at what he did and made not Resistance, but was in­ clin'd to do the like, whatever he offer'd to do . . ." (XI,.

36). That evening she asks him to spend the night, and

steps four and five, consent and act, follow.

Like Crusoe's sin, ’Roxana's is the result of a con­

scious desire and therefore can hardly be excused by neces­

sity. In Jack's case, where Defoe clearly intended to de­

pict sin excused by necessity, the steps are not dramatized

and the sinner has only distaste for his crime. Again like

Crusoe and unlike Jack, the magnitude of Roxana's sin is

indicated by its being a sin against knowledge. Goodwin de­

fines a sin against knowledge as

such Sins as are committed against Knowledg, that is, when Knowledg comes and examines a Sin, in or before the committing of it, brings it to the Law, contests against it, condemns it, and yet a Man approveth it, and consen- teth to it . . . (Ill, 515).

Goodwin goes on to devote an entire chapter to sin against

knowledge, the sura of which is that to sin against one’s "lights'1 indicates a particularly weak character, for if one willingly sins knowing it to be a sin, how sinful must he be kn matters where his conscience is silent or his knowledge is limited? Finally, he goes on, to sin even as one regrets it is a sign of hardness of heart, a sign that one willfully disdains God’s laws.

Roxana tells us repeatedly that hers is such a sin, just as Jack insists that his sins are innocent ones. In her relationship with the jeweler, she says, "I was a double

Offender, whatever he was; for I was resolved to commit the

Crime, knowing and owning it to be a crime; he if it was true as he said, was fully persuaded it was Lawful . .

(XI, 44). And after accepting him as a lover she remarks,

And thus, in Gratitude for the Favours I receiv’d from a Man, was all Sence of R.e- ligion, and Duty to God, all Regard to Vir­ tue and Honour, given up at once, and we were to call one another Man and Wife, who in the Sence of the laws of both God and our Country were no more than two Adulterers, in short, a Whore and a Rogue; nor as I have said above, was my Conscience silent in it, tho’ it seems, his was; for I sinned with open Eyes, and thereby had a double Guilt upon me (XI, 47).

Besides establishing Roxana as a sinner of the first

order, the incident with the jeweler is important for several

other reasons. It furnishes another example of Roxana’s re­

liance on appearances. She does not suspect the jeweler’s

real motives for his generosity until Amy suggests them, and

even then Roxana refuses to believe her. Then, when the

jeweler leaves after his first evening visit with Roxana he 109

protested an honest Kindness to me, said a thousand kind things to me, which I ciannot now recollect, and, after kissing mejtwenty times, or thereabouts, put a Guinea into my Hand, which he said was for my present Supply, and told me, that he would s«ke me again, before ’twas out (XI, 32).

After he leaves, Roxana asks Amy, "are you convinc’d now that he is an honest as well as a true Friend, and that there has been nothing, not the least Appearance of anything of what you imagin’d, in his Behavior" (XI, 33). After such

a naive remark, the reader knows that Roxana has little a- bility to interpret events for their real significance. j This passage is the first of many in which koxana’s blindness

leads to an amusing but tragic irony, a subject we will treat i at length later.

These early scenes also establish the role Amy will

play throughout the novel. She functions much as Christian’s

traveling companions do in Pilgrim’s Progress. She is j Roxana’s adviser, but an entirely worldly one. She smooths

the way for Roxana’s journey to material prosperity. She

arranges meetings, tells lies, suggests subterfuges, begins

the novel by foisting Roxana’s children onto reluctant

relatives and ends it by murdering one of them. She is al­

most a symbol of one part of Roxana, the entirely worldly

part. It is she who argues for Roxana’s yielding to the

jeweler’s desires, and she even suggests tjaat she will take

Roxana’s place if Roxana herself refuses. To this extent

Roxana is more accurate than she knows when she calls Amy 110 the "Devil’s Agent," for that is symbolically what she is; the wholly material advocate of worldly expediencey, pre­ cisely the opposite of spiritual other-worldliness and of

Christian’s spiritual advisers. Later in the novel we find that Roxana has come to depend on Amy almost entirely, which is symbolically appropriate since R.oxana more and more turns toward the earthly and away from the spiritual as the novel progresses.

In light of this interpretation of Amy’s place in the novel, Roxana's debauching her becomes symbolically impor­ tant. That she puts Amy to bed with the jeweler is bad enough in itself, of course, for by doing so Roxana becomes herself the Devil’s agent. But symbolically Roxana has de­ bauched her worldly adviser and totally ruined herself. It is as though Christian had drowned Help in the Slough of

Despond. The structure of the novel, in fact, can be seen as a sort of material Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian sets out to secure salvation and ends indifferent to material wealth. Roxana sets out to seek material comfort and suc­ ceeds admirably, but she is spiritually destitute.

Amy’s actions in the early part of the novel are in­ teresting for another reason. Roxana tells us that when Amy was convincing her to go to bed with the jeweler Amy

had but too much Rhetoric in this Cause; She represented all those Things in their proper Colours; she argued, them all with her utmost Skill, and at last the Merry Jade, when she came to Dress me, Look ye Ill

Madam, said she, if you w o n ’t consent, tell him you’ll do as Rachel did to Jacob, when she could have no Children •— put her Maid to Bed to him; tell him you cannot comply with him, but there’s Amy, he may ask her the Question, she has promised me she won’t deny you (XI, 42).

The Biblical allusion is important because of its later re­ appearance. When Amy is discovered to be carrying the jeweler’s child, Roxana soothes her '‘husband’s" troubled conscience:

Come, my dear, says _X, when Rachel put her Handmaid to Bed to Jacob whe took the Chil­ dren as her own; don't be uneasie, I'll take the Child as my Own. . . (XI, 52).

Roxana is using the same argument she had earlier condemned

Amy for using. The parallel indicates that ?>.oxana is gradu­ ally moving toward Amy's pragmatic, materially expedient point of view. In addition the allusion to Hagar, Jacob and Rachel helps define the theme of the novel and Amy's place in its structure. The similarity between Defoe’s story and-its Biblical counterpart is too close to be accidental, especially after Defoe twice calls attention to the parallel.

Like Rachel, R.oxana has no children by her "husband;" she puts her maid to bed with him; the maid has a child; and

afterwards the mistress herself becomes pregnant. The

Biblical story was commonly allegorized, a practice begun

as early as St. Paul in Galatians 4: 22-26, where he inter­

prets Hagar as the founder of the city of bondage, that is

the allegorical representative of all things material. 112

Rachel he interprets as the bearer of the divinely proraised child and therefore representative of things spiritual. St.

Augustine continues this traditional interpretation in his

City of God where the two women are made to represent the material and the spiritual points of view.^ In Defoe’s time Mathew Henry continues the tradition in his famous Com­ mentary oh-the Bible.^

Such allusions were among Defoe’s favorite devices.

Just as the allusions to the Prodigal Son in Robinson Crusoe and the allusions to Paul’s trial in Jack define the themes and character’s roles in those novels, the use here of the

Hagar-Rachel story defines the theme of this novel as the opposition of the spiritual and the material. Amy, as Hagar, is the advocate of total materialism as we have already seen. She represents the point of view toward which Roxana gravitates as the novel proceeds. It is part of the tragedy of Roxana's position at the end of the novel that, potential founder of an illustrious race, she can turn only to Hagar-

Amy for comfort just as throiighout the novel she turns to material well being in a crisis.

All of the themes and ideas introduced in this first major incident of the novel are summed up in one of Roxana's

5Ed. Marcus Dods (New York, 1948), II, 147.

®New York, n. d . , V, 1110. 113 lengthy reflections on her own spiritual condition. In this passage Defoe pulls together and restates Roxana's double guilt, Amy's role as agent of the Devil, Roxana's peculiar blindness to reality, and the split between the spiritual and material realms. It bears full quotation since the author put so much into it.

Had I now had my Sences about me, and had my Reason not been overcome by the power­ ful Attraction of so kind, so beneficient a Friend; had I consulted Conscience and Virtue, I shou’d have repelled this Amy, however faithful and honest to me in other things as a Viper and Engine of the Devil; I ought to have remembered that neither he or I, either by the Laws of God or Man, cou'd come to­ gether upon any other Terms than that of notorious Adultery. The ignorant Jade's argument, That he had brought me out of the Hands of the Devil . . . shou'd have been a powerful Motive to me, not to plunge my­ self into the Jews of Hell and into the Power of the real Devil, in recompense for Deli­ verance; I shou’d have look'd upon all the Good this iMan had done for me, to have been the particular Work of the Goodness of Heaven, and that goodness shou'd have mov'd me to a Return of Duty and humble Obedience; I shou'd have received the Mercy thankfully, and ap­ plied it soberly, to the Praise and Honour of my Maker; whereas by this wicked Course, all the Bounty and Kindness of this Gentle­ man, became a Snare to me, was a meerBait to the Devil's Hook; I receiv'd his kindness at the dear expence of Body and Soul, mort­ gaging Faith, Religion, Conscience, and Modesty for (as I may call it) a Morsel of Bread; or, if you will, ruin'd my Soul from a Principle of Gratitude, and gave myself up to the Devil, to show myself grateful to my Benefactor: I must do the Gentleman that Justice, as to say, I verily believe that he did nothing but what he thought was Lawful; and I must do that Justice upon myself, as to say, I did what my own Conscience con­ vinc'd me at the very Time I did it, was 114 horribly unlawful, scandalous, and abomi­ nable (XI, 40-1).

Besides the other themes in this passage, there seems to be a veiled allusion to Esau who sold his birthright for a

"Morsel of Bread." Such an allusion is perfectly appropri­ ate here, for Roxana abandons her religious education for the satisfaction of her immediate desires, and like Esau she prospers materially but not spiritually.

Before going on to discuss the thematic structure of the novel, it is necessary to get some idea of the mechanical unity of the work. The novel may be divided into two parts of roughly equal length. In the first part Roxana gradually learns more and more worldly prudence; her conscience is gradually silenced, her sins become blacker, and she more frequently mistakes material appearances for spiritual real­ ities. By the midpoint of the novel, she has reached the

eighth of the nine steps in sin, obduration. The second half of the work begins with her return to England after re­

jecting the Dutch merchant’s offer of marriage, and shows

the consequence of Roxana’s becoming a hardened sinner. By

the end of the novel she has clearly reached the ninth and

final step in sin, impenitency, although God has not yet

entirely abandoned her.

The divisions of the structure are clearly marked.

Roxana begins the novel as a religious woman married to a

"fool" of a merchant and ends it in precisely opposite cir- 115 cumstances, married to a prudent merchant, living in wealth, and damned. The mid-point of the work is marked by her affair with the prudent merchant (contrasting to the "fool" she is associated with at the beginning) whose offer of marriage she rejects (contrasted to her acceptance at the conclusion). Further symmetry of structure may be found in

Roxana's major love affairs. She proceeds from a merchant, to a lord, and finally to the king; then she descends again to a lord and ends the novel with a merchant. The way in which this symmetry of structure is complemented by the themes will emerge in our discussion. For the time being, suffice it to say that I find it difficult to agree with the generally held critical assumption that the novel is "in­ complete."^

There are major similarities and structural links be­ tween Roxana's first and second love affairs. The trip to

Italy with the prince is parallel to the trip to France with the jeweler even to the extent that the two men ap­ proach the subject of travel in similarly mysterious manners.

Both trips come not long before the conclusion of the re­ spective affairs, and both trips serve as stepping stones to the next major lover in Roxana's career. The sojourn in

7 See McBurney, p. 321, and John H. Raleigh, "Style and Structure and Their Import in Defoe’s Roxana," UKGiR, XX (1953), 132. 116

France leads to the introduction to the prince, and the trip to Italy furnishes her with the Turkish dress, her major weapon in becoming the King’s mistress later.

It is in France, where she began her life as a

Christian, that Roxana is confirmed in her life of vice.

France is also appropriate since during the time of the no­ vel’s setting, the reign of Charles II, it was associated with the sort of sorldliness in which Roxana glories. The affair with the prince is therefore a preparation for

Roxana’s conquest in the English court. It is also an in­ dication of Roxana’s progress in vice. By a series of lies

Roxana secures herself a considerable fortune out of the jeweler’s estate and has sent Amy to secure what wealth she can out of his estate in England by the same method. From this point on Roxana’s career is supported by an elaborate web of lies until by the end of the novel her entire life with the merchant and her treatment of her daughter Susan

are one monstrous lie. For Defoe lying was a particularly

black sin. In his Serious Reflections he wrote:

I suppose all men that read me will acknowledge lying to be one of the most scandalous sins between man and man, a crime of a deep dye, and of an extensive nature, leading into in­ numerable sins, that is, as lying is practised to deceive, to injure, betray, rob, destroy, and the like. Lying in this sense, is the concealing of all other crimes; it is the sheep’s clothing hung upon the wolf’s back, it is the Pharisee's prayer, the whore’s blush, the hy­ pocrite's paint, the murderer’s smile, the thief’s cloak; 'tis Joab's embrace and Judas’s kiss. . . (p. 97). 117

This is precisely the kind of lying which Roxana does, both to secure her fortune out of the jeweler, and to deceive the Dutch merchant and her daughter at the end of the novel. Lying also reinforces the major theme of the novel and the fault in Roxana’s character, for by lying

Roxana devotes herself to maintaining appeamaces regardless of truth.

A further indication of Roxana’s degeneracy is the contrast between the motives for the affairs with the jeweler and the prince. By no means can Roxana plead necessity to excuse her becoming the prince’s mistress, for she tells us that she now has nearly 10,000 pounds. She simply pretends to the prince that she is in need, and she even convinces herself that her loving him is lawful. She points to the absurdity of this logic herself:

I satisfy’d myself with the surprizing Oc­ casion, that, as it was all irresistible, so it was all lawful; for that Heaven would not suffer us to be punish’d for that which it was not possible for us to avoid; and with these Absurdities I kept Conscience from giving me any considerable Disturbance in all this Matter, and I was as perfectly easie as to the Lav/fulness of it, as if I had been marry'd to the Prince, and had had no other Husband: 3o possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in Wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by Conscience . . . (XI, 78).

Another interesting contrast in the two affairs is that the

jeweler at least protests that he really loves her. The

prince makes no such claim during his short courtship, but

instead simply leads Roxana to a mirror to admire her 118 beauty. The prince’s compliments on her beauty are ap­ parently his strongest argument, for as Roxana tells us,

This was the Way, in all the World, the most likely—to break in upon my Virtue, if I had been Mistress of any, for I was now become the vainest Greattxre upon Earth, and partic­ ularly, of my Beauty; which as other people admir’d,so I became every Day more foolishly in Love with myself, than before (XI, 69).

The prince appeals to Roxana's weakest point, her love of appearances.

The affair with the prince also represents two fur­ ther steps in sin, number six, iteration, and number seven, gloriation, repetition and enjoyment of the sin. The last step Roxana makes quite clear for us:

I have, I confess, wondered at the Stupidity that my intellectual Part was under all that while; what lethargic Fumes doz’d the Soul; and how it was possible that I, who in the Case before, where the Temptation was many ways more forceful, and the Arguments stronger, and more irresistible, was yet under a con­ tinued Inquietude on account of the wicked life I led, could now live in the most pro­ found tranquility with an uninterrupted Peace, nay, even rising up to Satisfaction, and Joy, and yet in a more palpable State of Adultery than before . . . (XI, 78).

This passage indicates several important things. The stu­

pidity referred to here is the same sort to which Crusoe is

subject when seized with the desire to be on the move and

O on which Puritan commentators had much to say. The passage

also indicates that by this point in her career Roxana has

®See above, Chapter II, notes 16, 17, and 18. 119 silenced her conscience and has therefore reached the stage called ’’custom in sin." That she now finds it easier to' sin is a widely recognized sign of her condition. Goodwin wrote that "when a sin hath never been committed by a man before Conscience will fly in the face of a man for it, but a sin which a man practises every day, and with which Con­ science is made familiar, it will let alone, and n e ’re trouble the man for it" (III, 262). According to Gouge, custom in sinning produces three undesirable effects, all three of which clearly show up in Roxana’s history:' first,

"the longer thou continueth in any Sin, the stronger it will grow, and the more hardly be subdued." Secondly, to con­ tinue sinning will "insensibly harden thy Heart." And fi­ nally, "The longer thou deferrest thy Reformation and Amend­ ment , the greater Indisposition and Disability wilt thou find in thy self thereunto. Thine Understanding will be more and more darkened with the Mist of Ignorance: Thy Will, thro* Custom in sinning, be more stubborn and refractory to the Will of God . . . ."9 The hardening of heart and si­ lencing of conscience which Roxana finds so surprising are perfectly consistent with Puritan theories of the sinner’s psychology, and in Roxana as in the two novels examined earlier, Defoe used those theories for the psychological basis of his character.

9The Young Man’s Guide, pp. 9-10. 120

Perhaps the moste Interesting incident during Roxana's affair with the prince is what may be regarded as a worship scene. She tells us specifically that the prince is the

?only Deity I worshipp'd" (XT, 79). Such a deity is consis­ tent with her spiritual condition, her gradually forsaking spiritual reality for material appearances and her making them the object of her worship. The wealthy prince who showers her with material blessings is a fitting deity for such a worshipper. To make this theme as clear as possible,

Defoe shows us Roxana worshipping her deity immediately af- . ter she tells us of her misplaced religious devotion. Af­ ter having been in bed with the prince in her apartments fitting sacrament and temple for such worship), Roxana goes into another room where she puts on one of the finest dresses he has given her (an appropriate vestment for her worship).

She returns to the bedroom, kneels to the prince, and ex­ plains the tears in her eyes:

I beseech you to believe me, they are not Tears of Sorrow, but Tears of Joy; it is impossible for me to s_ee myself snatch’d from the Misery I was fallen into, and at once to be in the Arms of a Prince of such Goodness, such Immense Bounty, and be treated in such a Manner— ’tis not possible, my Lord, said I, to contain the Satisfaction of it, and it wTll break out in an Excess in some measure proportion’d to your immense Bounty, and to the Affection which your Highness treats me with, who am so infi­ nitely beloxvr you (XI, 81).

This sounds very much like a recent convert’s prayer of

thanksgiving for free grace, the sort of prayer to be found 121 in dozens of spiritual autobiographies. The term "Lord," the infinite gratitude, the self-abnegation, the joy at res­ cue from damnation are all there. Amy, a fitting layman, dresses Roxana for the occasion, and as a reward for her con­ version" the prince blesses Roxana with a fine diamond necklace.

Y/ith this secene Roxana's confusion of material and apiritual values is completed. She pledges her body (not her soul) to her deity in return for material(not spiritual) salvation. To top off the whole symbolic scene, we soon discover that Amy is sleeping with the prince's valet. In case any readers have missed the point, Roxana tells us that during her career as a whore she was "blinded with the glit­ tering Appearances, which at that time deluded me . .

(XI, 90).

Roxana’s moralizing about her past in this manner brings up the thorny problem of point of view in the novel, and for clarity it must be treated here. The problem can be stated simply enough: if Roxana, at the time of writing her story,is impenitent, as I believe Defoe intended her to be, - how may one trust her moral reflections about her past?

Some of the moralizing passages, like the one just quoted, seem sound; others seem ironically intended. The answer to the problem, I think, is to be found in the nature of the impenitent. After one had progressed through the eight

steps in sin and had reached the final stage, impenitency, 122

God was thought to take drastic measures to induce repen-

/ tance before he finally withdrew entirely and gave up hope of reclaiming the lost soul. One of these drastic measures was that He gave the sinner a foretaste of hell by making him acutely aware of his sin and the horror of the punish­ ment awaiting him. This was accomplished by reawakening the sinner’s sleeping conscience and by reducing him to ter­ rible fear. John Spencer, for instance, says that

. . . this is the case of all wilful, bloody presumptuous sinners, that though there be some stragglings and wrestlings to the con­ trary, yet their hearts and consciences are greater than themselves, and will put them in mind, that nothing but destruction waiteth on them; if they walk abroad, sonus excitat omnis suspensum, they are afraid' of every leaf that wags; if they stay at home, nothing but horror attends them: in the day, they are struck with a variety of sad apprehensions; and in the night they are tormented with fearful dreams, and strange apparitions; such and so is the hell of a guilty conscience.

Bunyan wrote that one of the final signs of the damned is

that he will be terrified and perplexed in conscience and

that Mfor by reason of guilt, and a shaking conscience, his

life will hang in continual doubt before him, and he shall

be afraid day and noght, and shall have no assurance of his

life.11^ Puller claimed that the neglect of repentance

10I, 136. See also I, 272 and IX, 369.

11II, 263. 123

"will make two Hells, viz. within and without, here and hereafter . . . .

It seems clear then that Defoe intended to depict

Roxana in precisely this condition. Before the lengthy flashback description of her trouble with her daughter, she tells us something about her later life with her mer­ chant husband, and she moralizes:

And let no-body conclude from the strange Suc­ cess I met with in all my wicked doings, and the vast Estate which I had rais’d by it, that therefore I either was happy or easie: No, no, there was a Dart struck into the Liver; there was a secret Hell within, even all the while, when our Joy was at the highest, but more especially now, after it was all over, and when according to all appearance, I was one of the happiest V7omen upon the Earth; all this while, I say, I had such a constant terror upon my Mind as gave me every now and then very terrible shocks, and which made me expect something very frightful upon every Accident of Life. In a word, it never Lighten’d or Thunder'd but I expected the next Flash wou'd penetrate my Vitals, and melt the Sword (Sou l ) in this Scabbard of Flesh; in never blew a Storm of Wind, but I expected the Fall of some Stack of Chimneys, or some Part of the House wou’d burv me in its Ruins; and so of other things (XII, 75-6).

And a little later she tells us of terrible nightmares of devils and that she is "altogether in the dark" (XII, 32).

All this sounds remarkably like the symptoms Spencer de­

scribes of the impenitent. Roxana is clearly aware of her

12A Treatise, p. 73. Cf. Goodwin, III, 569-70. l?A own spiritual condition and sees her past as sinful. In the cases where she remarks on her own spiritual condition, therefore, her reflections may be taken as trustworthy; God has made the information accessible to her to bi'lng her to repentance. Her statement that she was deluded by appear­

ances is reliable information.

On the other hand, she is unregenerate and therfore unable to ’’spiritualize" events properly, just as we have

seen Crusoe could not not before his conversion, for Roxana

still lacks the knowledge of faith, the gift of the Holy

Ghost to sincere penitents. It is in the passages where

she tries to spiritualize events that her blindness inevi­

tably makes for irony in the novel, while those passages

where she comments on her own spiritual condition are con­

sistently straightforward. The irony is sometimes obvious.

For example, after her return from Italy she bears the prince

a son, and shortly after its birth she reflects:

. . . whatever the Merit of this little Creature may be, he must always have a Bend on his Arms; the Disaster of his Birth will be always, not a Blot only to his Honour, but a Bar to his Fortunes in the World; our Affection will be ever his Affliction, and his Mother’s Crime be the Son's Reproach; the Blot can never be w i p ’d out by the most glorious Actions . . . (XI, 92).

This is the tritest of common places; the sort' of thing any

well drilled product of a Protestant Sunday School might

trot out for the occasion. Its hollowness is made clear

when on the next page Roxana herself tells us that 125

This child liv’d to be a considerable Man: He was first, an Officer of the Guard du Corps of France; and afterwards Colonel of a Regi- ment of Dragoons, in Italy, and on many extraordinary Occasions shew'd that he was not unworthy of such a Father, but many ways deserving of a legitimat Birth, and a better Mother ....

This irony occurs here because Roxana is incapable of spirit­ ualizing the event properly; there is nothing spiritual about her reflections, nor are they even accurate concerning the son’s material fortunes.

The moralizing in this passage is of further interest for it furnishes concrete internal evidence that Defoe was consciously beiiig ironic in the passage. The style in which it is written, if not the trite nature of the content, should alert the reader that Defoe is doing something un­ usual. The Euphuistic prose contrasts markedly with Defoe’s usually simple, journalistic style, and gives the whole quotation a pompus and hollow r ing.^ Defoe, like most

Puritans of his day, associated the plain style with sincer­ ity, as in his essay on honesty in the Serious Reflections:

‘ The plainness I profess,.both in style and method, seems to me. to have some suitable analogy to the subject, honesty and there­ for is absolutely necessary to be strictly

*-30n the Puritan’s attitude toward style see Harold Fisch, "The Puritans and the Reform of Prose-Style," ELH, XIX (1952), 229-248. For evidence of Defoe’s sensitivity to contemporary problems of style see Novak, "Simon Fore­ castle’s V/eekly Journal’: Some notes on Defoe’s Con­ scious Artistry," TSLL, VI (1965), 433-40. 126

followed; and I must own, I am the better reconciled, on this very account, to a natural infirmity of homely plain writing, in that I think the plainness of expression, which I am condemned to, will give no dis­ advantage to my subject, since honesty shows the most beautiful, and the more like honesty, when artifice is dismissed, and she is hon­ estly seen by her own light only . . . (p. 23).

In the passage win which Roxana moralizes about her son we have concrete evidence that Defoe was not being ironic by

accident. He has consciously manipulated the style to make

his point.

Once the point of view and the theme of the novel are

understood, the reader discovers numerous ironic passages

in the novel which often reveal Roxana’s primarily material

instead of spiritual concerns. For example, when she dis­

covers that Amy is sleeping with the prince’s valet she re­

marks, ”1 was indeed afraid the Girl would have been with-

child too, but that did not happen, and so there was no Hurt

done” (XI, 95). Roxana’s concern is a purely physical one,

and this casual comment as well as anything else indicates

that by this point in the novel she has no spiritual values

left. Among the ironies in the novel the phrase ’’Fortunate

Mistress” in the title is certainly noteworthy. With all

the care Defoe took at the end of the novel to indicate

Roxana’s damned condition, it is hard to imagine that the

title is not ironically intended.

The first half of the novel contains several other

incidents of major importance, most of which may be inter- 127 preted as God’s warnings to Roxana to change her way of life.

She seems to recognize the significance of the events, but only in the dull, ironic way characteristic of her fallen condition. Roxana escapes disaster at the hands of the Jew by boarding a ship with the Dutch merchant’s help. She spiritualizes the incident this way:

And now Amy and I were at Leisure to look upon the Mischiefs that we had escap’d; and had I had any Religion, or any Sence of a Supreme Power managing, directing, and gov­ erning in both Causes and Events in this World, such a Case as this w o u ’d have given any-body room to have been very thankful to the Power who had not only put such a Treasure into my Hand, but given me such an Escape from the Ruin that threaten’d me; but I had none of those things about me; X had indeed a grateful Sence upon my Mind of the generous Friendship of my Deliverer, the Dutch merchant . . . (XI, 140).

Because she is not reflecting on her own spiritual condition concerning which God has clarified her intellect, she man­ ages to miss the entire spiritual point of her escape. In­

stead of being thankful to God for a chance to live without sin, she thinks she should be thankful for His allowing her to make a fortune by whoring, and it is to a physical de­ liverer, her merchant, that she is thankful, not to God.

The sea storm is an even more obvious warning from

Providence, but just as Crusoe's repentance during the

storm out of Hull soon wears off, so too does Roxana’s. She

clearly recognizes that in the storm she is being divinely

called: "Death began to stare in my Face, ay, and, something 128 else too, that is to say, Conscience, and my Mind was very much Disturbed . . ." (XI, 143). Fear makes her penitent, and she "cry’d out, tho* softly, two or three times Lord, have Mercy upon me,n but she soon recognizes that her re­ pentance is a sham brought on more by fear of death than by sorrow from sin.

. . . I had no Sence of Repentance, from the true Motive of Repentance; I saw nothing of the Corruption of Nature, the Sin of my Life as an Offence against God; as a thing odious to the Holiness of His Being; as abusing his Mercy, and despising His Goodness; in short, I had no thorow effectual Repentance; no Sight of my Sins in their proper Shape, no View of a Redeemer, or Hope in him . . . (XI, 149).

Even during the storm itself Roxana was "in a.kind of Stu­ pidity" so that "my Thoughts got no Vent as Amy * s did; I had a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears, and which was, therefore, much the worse to bear" (XI, 149). This sounds very much like the beginning of the "foretaste of hell" to which we referred earlier.

A third incident seems to offer Roxana a chance to reform her life in this section of the novel. The Dutch merchant offers her marriage. She refuses and again closes off an escape route from her life of vice. Later she la- i raents refusing this offer in revealing terms:

. . . I call’d myself a thousand Fools, for casting myself upon a Life of Scandal and Hazard; when after the. Shipwreck of Virtue, Honour, and Principle, and sailing at the utmost Risque in the stormy Seas of Crime, 129

and abominable Levity, X had a safe Harbour presented and no Heart to cast-rAnchor in it (XI, 138).

The association of the marriage offer and the sea storm is a natural one, since both are spiritually the lame thing, a Providential call for Roxana to reform.

The arguments Roxana uses against marriage with the merchant are further indexes of her spiritual condition.| At first she refuses the marriage because she feels she may endanger her financial security by accepting. When the mer- i chant rmoves this objection, she uses an argument based on j women’s rights to turn him down. Both arguments are re­ vealing. The first, of course, is logical to Roxana’s ma­ terial pilgrimage, just as Christian’s refusal to tarry in

Vanity Fair is to his spiritual one. The secohd argument, women’s rights, is one Defoe himself had advocated, for example in the Essay on Projects. But Defoe conceived of i women’s rights as a way of strengthening marriage and social

justice. Roxana perverts the argument to destroy marriage, a further illustration of the "kind of stupidity" she is in.

A final indication of Roxana's progress in sin is her

reaction to the child she has by the merchant. The occasion

of her having a child by the prince had set her thinking

about its future. Her reflections were beside the point,

as usual, but at least she retained the sensitivity to know

that the birth was occasion for sorrow. But for the child

conceived by the merchant she has no compassion, and it is 130 the merchant who pleads for the child’s welfare. What is more, his reflections are distinctly Christian in tone whereas Roxana’s lamentations for the prince’s child, which were unfounded in the circumstances anyway, were wholly ma­ terial.

The first half of the novel closes with Roxana’s re­ fusing the merchant, just as the second half ends with her accepting him. Up to this point Defoe has delineated her character carefully. He has insisted that her sins are

’’against knowledge” just as clearly as he insisted that

Jack's were innocent and accordingly less heinous. Further­ more, Roxana has remained "impenitent against knowledge," an even graver sign of her condition. Goodwin maintains that if to sin against knowledge is to be taken as a sign of a hardened heart, then to continue in sin while conscious of God’s call to stop must be considered even worse:". . . when a Man knows his Estate bad, and that he is without God in the World, and yet goes on, he doth hereby cast away the

Lord, and professeth he cares not for him, or that Com­ munion which is to be had with him, as Esau did he Birth­ right."^^ Again the contrast with Jack indicates Defoe's conscious intentions in the two novels. Jack insists that

•^^Cf. Ames, pp. 6-7 (sigs. A4r-Blv ). Note Goodwin’s association of the Esau story with impenitency and Roxana’s allusion to Esau’s selling his birth-right when she becomes the jeweler's mistress; see above p. 131 he had neither the sknse of being called to repentance nor the religious education to make repentance possible until the final scenes of the novel. Hence his late repentance is acceptable, just as Puritan commentators, usually sus­ picious of death-bed repentances, accepted that of the dying thief on the cross who repented the first time he had the knowledge and chance.^ Roxana, on the other hand, had both a religious education and numerous calls from Provi­ dence to reform. Defoe's intentions seem clear: he wished to depict in Roxana the worst sort of sinner and in Jack the less offensive "civil man." V/hereas Jack gradually learns both spiritual and material values and their proper balance, Roxana entirely replaces spiritual with material ones. The second half of the novel shows the consequences

of this confusion.

Defoe passes over Roxana’s relationship with the king

and lord hurriedly, for after she has refused marriage and

committed herself to material values, lovers are important

only as they contribute to her wealth. We learn that she

accumulates wealth until "even Avarice itself seem'd

glutted," (XI, 213) and that she is careful with her in­

vestments, relying on the aid of Sir Robert Clayton, a

famous Restoration financier. She also continues to keep

us posted on her spiritual condition. She tells us that for

See, e.g., Spencer, 1,386; II, 242; and Fuller, Treatise, p. 117. 132 twenty-six years she lived a life of vice "without the least Signals of Remorse; without any Signs of Repentance; or without so much as a Wish to put an End to it; I had so long habituated myself to a Life of Vice, that really it appear’d to be no Vice to me . . ." (XI, 220). By this time

Roxana has gone through the eighth and entered the ninth

and final step in sin. She has pass beyond obduration so

that her conscience is now silenced completely and she is hardly aware that she is living in sin.

Even when she decides to "reform" and live respec­

tably she tells us that "there was not the least Hint in

all this, from what may be call’d Religion or Conscience,

and far from any-thing of Repentance, of any-thing that

was a-kin to it . . (XII, 3). Her observation is cor­

rect, for her desire for a. new life is motivated by dis­

gust with the sexual perversion of her keeper and by a de­

sire to appear respectable to her children. In his discus­

sion of repentance Fuller treats precisely this sort of

false reform. A false or only partial repentance is that

in which

some Acts may cease, not from any inward Prin­ ciple, either of Love of God, or hatred to Sin, but from a principle of slavish Fear, or through the want of a Supply for Sin, or an occasion to it; and when so, can no more be called Repentance than that can be said to 133

be a Merciful Fire, that goes out through want of Fuel.16

Roxana indicates the relation of her reform to the theme of the novel when she says that she decided to put

"a new Face upon" her way of living (XII, 12). The same

interesting word choice occurs when she says that her con­

cern for the legitimate children "had the Face of doing

good" (XI, 220). The words are well chosen, for the reform

is indeed only a new "face" on things; it is a reformation

in appearances only, an appropriate method of reform for one

who consistently mistakes material appearances for spiritual

realities.

The measures she takes to reform are accordingly con­

fined to altering her appearances. Amy, the ever-present

exponent of materialism, suggests that to begin her new life

Roxana need only move to a remote part of town and cover

her coach with a new coat of paint instead of getting rid

of it. Her new life begins in a Quaker’s home and she soon

assumes the appearances of the sect. She changes her speech

patterns and even goes so far as to dress in a 'Quaker’s

habit which she calls and uses as a "disguise." The irony

here is paritcularly heavy. Roxana has covered her body,

the instrument of her sinning, with a Quaker’s dress, the

16a Treatise, p. 75. Cf. the Virginia pedagogue’s dis­ cussion of true repentance in Colonel Jack, III, 199-200. 134 physical appearnce of honesty and respectability. Thus in physical reality Roxana becomes of symbol of what she is trying to do spiritually, cover her inner evil with the ap­ pearance of honesty and reformation; she both is and rep­ resents sin clothed in respecitability.

For a while Roxana is even rid of Amy and hires the

Quaker in her place, but the Quaker becomes only an innocent tool for deception, another way Roxana hides reality behind appearance. Amy is associated with Roxana’s life of open sin, and that she is replaced by the Quaker is a symbolic statement of Roxana’s intentions in these secenes, for the two women are symbols of two aspects of Roxana herself, the underlying evil and the mask of truth. Susan cannot find her real mother because she is always intercepted in the at­ tempt by the mask of truth, the Quaker. And when the girl comes too close to finding out the truth, Amy, the evil reality, kills her. Besides this thematic function, the

Susan episode serves the rhetorical purpose of forestalling any possible compassion the reader might conceive for

Roxana because of her supposed charity toward her children.

Even Roxana's generosity toward the Quaker is motivated by the need of a friend who will act as an innocent deception.

Roxana’s relations with the Dutch merchant serve a similar function, for deception and self-interest again con­ trol all her actions, and much of what she does indicates her spiritual condition. The depth of her genuine affection 135 for the merchant, for example, can be measured by her re­ action to the news that the prince of former days is willing to marry her if he can find her. The news comes when

Roxana is considering marrying the merchant, but the idea of being a princess and living in such luxury "dazl’d my

Eyes, turn’d my Head; and I was as truly craz'd and dis­ tracted for about a Fortnight as most of the People in

Bedlam, tho' perhaps not quite so far gone" (XII, 44). She begins to be rude to her merchant.

I think, verily, this rude Treatment of him was for some time the Effect of a violent Fermentation on my Blood; for the very Motion which the steady Contemplation of my Fancy'd Greatness had put my Spirits into, had thrown me into a kind of Fever, and I scarce knew what I did (XII, 45).

The madness she experiences here is like that examined ear­ lier and is an indicationof her spiritual instability.

After marriage with the prince becomes impossible, the merchant surprises Roxana by offering to buy her a title, and in fact he eventually buys her two. The incident once more reinforces the theme of the novel and Roxana’s charac­ ter. She is precisely the opposite of everything Defoe

thought necessary to nobility as he explains that concept

in his Gompleat English Gentleman, and as he dramatizes the

making of a gentleman in Colonel Jack. But Roxana has all

170f. Crusoe's frenzy at the thought of escaping his island, VII, 230. 136

the appearances, and with those she is satisfied. It never

crosses her mind that her possessing titles is ironic, just

as she never sees the irony of her assuming the Quaker’s habit, but Defoe does not let the reader miss the point.

Roxana tells us that her merchant

told me, that Money purchas’d Titles of Honour in almost all Parts of the Vforld; tho’ money cou’d not give Principles of Honour,they must come by Birth and Blood; tha, however, Titles 5 sometimes assist to elevate the soul, and to infuse generous Principles into the Mind, and especially where there was a good Foundation laid in the Persons (XII, 31-2).

Roxana, of course, is far from having any such ’’foundation,”

although the deluded merchant never knows better. Defoe

uses the merchant to point out irony in at least one other

passage, when Roxana decides to give the Quaker some gifts,

the merchant remarks that gratitude ’’was one of the

brightest Parts of a Gentlewoman; that it was so twisted

with Honesty, nay, and even with Religion too, that he ques­

tion’d whether either of them cou’d be found, where Grati­

tude was not to be found . . . (XII, 62-3). Roxana her­

self has admitted her ingratitude toward the merchant, and

we know that the motives for her generosity to the Quaker

are far from religious. Defoe’s use of irony here is highly

sophisticated. Not only do these passages dramatize Roxana’s

concern for appearances, they indicate her diabolical lack

of honesty and her ability to use others as tools of her own

deception. In this section of the novel she approaches 137 the nature of a Duessa, incarnate evil able to pass itself off as good and therefore all the more deadly. / One other incident in this part of the novel is of major interest. After Roxana is married and while still living with the Quaker, she appears before her merchant in her Turkish dress. That she kept the dress at all is in­ structive; it was the toll by which she made her major con­ quest and is therefore associated with the height of her

ID career in sin. She does not see the irony in her appearing in the dress before her merchant and Quaker, but momentari­ ly she is admitting her real condition; she is still the old whore Roxana. The same sort of irony appears in her sewing the merchant's jewel picture to the dress and her giving the Quaker the plate on which she served her courtier ad­ mirers. Instead of reforming her own life according to the

Quaker's and merchant’s principles, Roxana simply tricks them into admiring her without any real change. It is log­ ical that the knowledge of ?«.oxana’s having the dress and a maid named Amy confirm Susan's suspicions that Roxana is her mother. Both are symbols of what Roxana really is; she

really is anevil woman just as she really is a mother; but

she is desperately trying to hide both. The dress, symbol

*®The O.E.D. indicates that in Defoe's time the terms "Turk" and "Turkish" still retained their common Renaissance connotation of meaning cruel and irreligious. In this sense Roxana has "turned Turk" and her keeping the dress is all the more appropriate. 133 of the real Roxana, gives away the other truth Roxana is trying to conceal, her motherhood,.

By the end of the novel there is a clear and drastic division in Roxana’s world, a division of which she seems unaware but which Defoe has made clear to the reader. The plate, the dress, and Amy, all symbols of Roxana's real self, are passed off for something else. The plate becomes a generous gift to a religious woman who would never lie;

Amy appears to be a devoted maid named "Cherry;" and the dress becomes a novel conversation piece for a deluded hus­ band. In place of these, Roxana acquires the Quaker’s habit, the Quaker’s services in place of Amy’s, marriage to a naive merchant, and two meaningless titles.

As far as we know, Roxana never changes. In fact, she never seriously claims to repent. After going to Holland she experiences a false repentance, on which was "of another and lower kind of R.epentance, and rather mov’d by my Fears of Vengeance, than from a Sence of being spar'd from being punish’d and landed safe after a Storm" (XII, 76-7). The use of the storm metaphor again associates Roxana's repen­ tance with the false one after the storm earlier in the no­ vel. And again in the last paragraph of the novel we dis- . cover that after the narrative proper ends she suffered a

reverse in fortunes which brought on yet another false re­

pentance which "seem’d to be only the Consequence of my

Misery . . ." (XII, 160). God seems still to be interested 139 in Roxana's soul and accordingly acts upon her through

Providence. But as far as we know she is a damned soul and is definitely one of Defoe’s most interesting and dia­ bolical characters.

The most interesting aspects of a study of Roxana are first of all its unity and secondly its contrast with

Colonel Jack. Both thematically and structurally the novel is well put together. The division between reality and appearance which first appears in Roxana’s choice of a

’’fool” husband is consistently developed througho\it the novel until at its conclusion her world is sharply divided between the real evil which gnaws at her peace of mind and the appearance of good which fools everyone but Susan. The symbols of the dress and Amy are developed throughout the narrative and exploited for all their value in the closing scenes. The symmetry of structure reflects the same sort of artistic care. The problem of point of view is super­ ficially confusing, but once the reader understands Roxana’s spiritual state in light of Puritan conventions, the point of view is consistently and logically used. Roxana is al­ ways right about the state of her soul; she is consistently wrbng when she tries to spiritualize events. Defoe’s read­ ers, familiar with the Puritan conventions of spirtual- izing' almost everything, would have immediately recognized

Roxana’s attempts as badly misdirected. Roxana’s entire religious outlook is wrong of course. She devotes herself to accumulating "things” which to religious, right thinking men were important primarily for the spiritual reflections they aroused.

The contrast with Jack has already been mentioned, but it bears emphasis because it reveals that in the two novels Defoe was consciously depicting very different types of characters both of which were widely recognized and dis­ cussed in Puritan literature. Jack very clearly ends with a sincere conversion, hurriedly written though it seems to be; Roxana concludes with an explicit denial of sincere re­ pentance. Jack sins out of innocence and is extremely sen­ sitive to the dictates of his conscience; Roxana sins against knowledge and systematically silences her conscience.

Jack repents the first time he sincerely believes himself called; Roxana goes on sinning against knowledge. Jack se­ cretly rejoices when his ill-gotten goods are lost at sea;

Roxana tenaciously holds on to hers but hesitates to com­ bine her fortune with her Dutch merchant's lest it be "Fire in his Flax," the same phrase Jack uses.

The evidence seems to suggest that Defoe was far from being a novelist by accident, an ironist by default of time; or a journalist turning out stories for money a- lone. There is too much conscious management of the ele­ ments of art, symbol, characterization, structure, style, and focus, too careful an exploitation of recognizable

Puritan psychology, too clearly a distinct difference of intention in the novels to justify such a naive cism. CHAPTER V

Moll Flanders

More than any other of Defoe's novels, Moll Flanders is clouded by conflicting interpretations, questions of the author's intentions, and misunderstandings about the meaning and structure of the novel. Thanks to Ian Watt there is even some question about whether Moll may be considered a novel, a question hardly worth pursuing since its answer depends on a definition about which no one agrees. Having examined the novels over which there is less confusion, we are ready to suggest some solutions to the problems that plague Moll.

Probably pre-eminent among the critical questions is

point of view, and pre-eminent among its statements is that

by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel. Watt contends that

the irony modem readers find in the novel was not conscious

on Defoe's part, but resulted from his own confusing of

Puritan and mercantile values. Watt cites as an example

Moll's reflections when she and her Lancashire husband

part

'Nothing that ever befell me in my life sank so deep into my heart as this farewell. I reproached him a thousand times in my thoughts

142 143

for leaving me, for I would have gone with : him through the world, if I had begged my bread. I felt in my pocket, and there I found ten guineas, his gold watch, and two little rings . . . .? She cannot even in theory attest the reality of her devotion by expressing her willingness to beg her bread, without immediately proving that it was only a rhetorical hyperbole by reassuring herself that she has enough in her pocket to keep her in bread for a lifetime. There is surely no conscious irony here: for Defoe and his heroine generous sentiments are good, and concealed cash reserves are good too, perhaps better; but there is no feeling that they conflict, or that one attitude under­ mines the other.1

Lifted out of context, Moll’s remarks look strange, and we will explain the incident later when it is relevant. For the time being we need only note that Mr. Watt is so com­ mitted to his argument that Defoe and Moll are the same per­ sonality that after admitting that Moll is clearly feminine in character, he none the less insists that somehow Moll strikes him as being masculine.

There are at least two reasons for simply forgetting about this kind of criticism. First of all, it can lead only to more confusion instead of an understanding of what Moll

is or accomplishes. Secondly, it requires that the critic

disregard Defoe’s insistence that Moll is narrating her own

story. The confusion of author’s products and author’s

personality led to patent absurdities in past criticisms of

Swift arid Pope, and only recently have we learned to dis­

1London, 1957, p. 125 „ 144 tinguish between Swift and Gulliver, Pope and persona. It

is'time that similar respect be extended to Defoe.

The central question to be asked regarding point of view then is not, MWhat kind of person is the author?" but

"What kind of character is Moll?" Dorothy Van Ghent has

answered the question as well as anyone: Moll is "'condi­

tioned f to react only to material facts," and her world

therefore takes on "a shape astonishingly without spiritual

dimension.To this Mark Schorer adds his opinion that in

Moll "Everything is external. Everything can be weighed,

measured, handled, paid for in gold, or expiated by a prison

term. To this the whole method of the novel testifies: this

is a morality of social circumstance, a morality in which

only externals count since only externals show.”^ These

statements seem to clarify the point of view from which Moll

sees her world, but they do not answer the equally fundamen­

tal question of why Moll's point of view is so limited

(there is a lingering doubt that she sees things as she does

because Defoe saw them similarly). I would like to suggest

that Moll is limited to a purely material point of view,

not because Defoe was, but because she is his dramatization

^The English Kovel: Form and Function, (Harper Torchbook), p. 34.

^"A Study in Defoe: Moral Vision and Structural Form," Thought, XXV (1950), 234. 145 of a person wholly lacking in spiritual dimensions, that is, wholly abandoned by God and inevitably damned. The key to the structure and meaning of the novel, I contend, lies in the way in which Defoe’s readers conceived of such a charac­ ter.

V7e have already seen that the mental processes of the characters in Defoe’s novels noticeably differ with their differing spiritual conditions, and that Defoe was careful to manipulate the common signs of spiritual salva­ tion and damnation. The conversation between Jack and his

Virginia pedagogue, the differing ways Crusoe thinks before and after his conversion, and the careful delineation of signs in both Jack and Roxana all confirm that Defoe knew these signs and used them as clues for his readers. In other words, the signs provided Defoe with an indirect means of author-reader communication so that no matter what the hero says about himself and his spiritual condition, he in­

evitably gives himself away. Thus Roxana claims to reform,

but the reader and author know that she does no such thing.

To understand what Moll is about, we will have to read the

novel closely for the inevitable signs. A comparison of

Moll with the novels previously examined vill also help in­

dicate Defoe’s intentions in this novel.

To begin with, Moll is not a true penitent, as an

examination of her experience will indicate. '.Then she is

finally caught, Moll is taken to Nev/gate where 146

I look’d on my self as lost, and that I had nothing to think of, but going out of the World, and that with the utmost Infamy; the hellish Noise, the Roaring, Swearing and Clamour, the Stench and Nastiness, and all the dreadful Afflicting things that I saw there; joyn’d to make the Place seem an Em­ blem of Hell itself, and a kind of Entrance into it (II, 98).

At this point Moll is experiencing another form of the ter­ ror Roxana is suffering at the close of her story. She is getting a foretaste of hell while on earth, one of the last and most desperate signs that God is making a final bid for the sinner’s lost soul. While she is in her emblematic hell,

Moll loses the last vestiges of her earlier religious train­ ing, and ’’scarce retain’d the Habit and Custom of good

Breeding and Manners, which all along ’till now run thro’ my Conversation” (II, 105). This detail may simply be

Defoe’s observation of what is now a trite condemnation of prisons; in them one learns more evil than good. But it is of major interest because of its association with the pre­ face of the novel. One of the first facts Defoe calls to our attention there is that

the original of this Story is put into new Words, and the stile of the famous Lady we here speak of, is" a ‘little alter’d , par­ ticularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester Words than she told it at' first; the Oooy which came first to Hand, having been written in Language more like one still in Newgate, than one grown Penitent and Humble, as she afterwards pretends to be. The pen employ’d in finishing her Story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had no little difficulty to put it into a 147

Dress fit to be seen, and to make it Sneak Language fit to be read . . .‘ '('£7 vii) .“

This apparently gratuitous information throws an interesting light on the reformed Moll. The woman writing is specific­ ally associated with her Newgate experience, her emblematic hell. Filthy language is emphatically not a sign of refor­ mation and penitence, yet Defoe specifically calls pur at­ tention to- its presence in Moll’s writing. Jack had made it a specific point never to curse, and that is one of the signs of his progress toward gentlemanliness and salvation.

After achieving supposedly the same position of gentility and salvation, Moll continues to curse unprintably.

Another interesting aspect of Moll’s Newgate experi­ ence is her repeated denial of salvation. Shortly after being incarcerated she tells us that she

repented heartily of all my Life past, but that Repentance yielded me no Satisfaction, no Peace, no not in the least, because, as 1. said to myself, it was repenting after the Power of farther Sinning was taken away: I seem’d not to mourn that I had committed such Grimes, and for the Fact, as it was an Of­ fence against God and my Neighbour; but that I was to be punish'd for it; I was a Penitent as I thought, not that I had sinn’d, but that I was to suffer, and this took away all the Comfort of my Repentance in my own Thoughts (II, 99).

And later she tells us that she "was sorry (as before) for

being in Newgate, but had few Signs of Repentance about me"

(II, 103). This should alert the reader to be looking for

the signs, the first of which appears after the double shock of seeing her Lancashire husband and finding that the grand jury has returned a bill against her. ''Conscious

Guilt began to flow in my Mind: In short, I began to think, and to think indeed is one real Advance from Hell to

Heaven" (II, 107). But even so, "I never brought myself to any Sense of being a miserable Sinner, as indeed I was, and of Confessing my Sins to God, and begging Pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ; I was overwhelm'd with the sense of my Condition, being try'd for my life . . (II, 109).

Only after her conviction and after being sentenced to death, in other words only after all apparent possibility of earthly salvation is past, does Moll turn to spiritual salvation.

To the minister sent by her "mother" Moll tells her entire story, and he in turn explains the scheme of salvation.

Moll seems to react favorably: r . . . h e reviv'd my Heart, and brought me into such a Condition, that I never knew any thing of in my Life before: I was covered with Shame and Tears for things past, and yet had at the same time a secret surprising Joy at the Pros­ pect of being a true Penitent, and obtaining the Comfort of a Penitent, I mean the hope of"being forgiven; and so swift did Thoughts circulate, and so high did the impressions they made upon me run, that I thought I cou'd freely have gone out that Minute to Execution, without any uneasiness at all, casting my Soul entirely into the Arms of infinite Mercy as a Penitent (II, 115-16).

But there is something false about all this. In the first

place, immediately after this declaration of confidence

Moll tells us that when the death warrant appeared with her 149 name on it, it was "a terrible blow . . . to my new Reso­

lutions, indeed my Heart sunk within me, and I swoon’d away

twice . . ." (II, 116). Clearly Moll is not as confident

of her salvation as she thinks she is, and her primary con­

cern is still for her body, not for her soul. Furthermore,

she is terribly vague about her feelings during her "con­

version," the very feelings which both Crusoe and Jack dwell

on at length. Moll, in fact, is incapable of "spiritualiz-..

ing" the event: "I am not capable of reading Lectures of In­

struction to any Body .... It must be the Work of every

sober reader to make just Reflections, as their own Circum­

stances may direct. . . " (II, 114). This is an interesting

contrast to Crusoe who makes use of his new found knowledge

to convert Friday, and to the Virginia pedagogue who does

the same with Jack. Moll not only makes no use of her know­

ledge, she simply glosses over its existence.

There are other hints that Moll's conversion is less

than complete. After her reprieve the minister three times

expresses his fear that Moll may backslide and forget her

new resolutions. Defoe seems to confirm these fears in the

preface where he tells us that after her eight years in

America Moll returned to England "where she liv'd it seems,

be very old; but was not so extraordinary a Penitent as

she was at first" (I, xi). This and the statement about the

language of the original MS in the preface are important only

in connection with details of the novel. They are appar- 150 ently Defoe’s hints to the reader of Moll’s impenitent con­ dition at the time of her writing her story.

Moll tells us that she herself was far from convinced

of her slavation during the Newgate experience. After the

death sentence is commuted, Moll is still faced with trans­

portation, a hard punishment, she thinks, but "we all shall

choose any.thing rather than Death, especially when ’tis

attended with an uncomfortable Prospect beyond it, which was

my Case” (XI, 120). This hardly smacks of the assurance of

salvation or readiness to meet death characteristic or one

convinced of his state of grace. Her ’’hopes of forgiveness”

are either forgotten or given up once death is indefinitely

delayed.

A contrast between Moll and the novels studied earlier

seems to cast further doubt on Moll's conversion. Jack's

late conversion would have been acceptable as sincere since

he repented the first time he had sufficient opportunity and

knowledge. Moll, like Roxana, has had a religious education,

so that both women sin against knowledge from the beginning

of their careers, and like Roxana, Moll has ample opportunity

to repent. She does not and so is guilty of ’’impenitency

against knowledge.” One of the clear signs of Jack’s gradu­

ally approaching reformation is his restoration of stolen

goods and his hesitance to steal beyond his immediate needs.

Moll steals anything in sight, including a horse for which

she has no conceivable use. In fact, the horse incident 151 forms a direct contrast between Moll and Jack who rebukes his brother for stealing a horse. Far from returning any­ thing she has stolen, Moll husbands it all carefully and like Roxana uses it as the basis for her ''reformed" life.

For both women the stolen goods form an appropriate basis for reformation which is really not reformation at all but simply an extension of disguising of their pasts. By con­ trast, Jack begins his life entirely anew in America, and he secretly rejoices when his ill-gotten goods are lost at sea.

One of the important signs of Jack's progress toward real Christianity is that he treats his servants as Puritans thought they should be treated. Moll's treatment of her servants in America is not so humane. Her "mother" sends

over a cargo of goods which "arrived safe, and in good Con­ dition, with three Women Servants, lusty Wenches,. . .

suitable enough to the Place, and to the ,/ork we had for

them to do, onw of which happen’d to come Double, having

been got with Child by one of the Seamen in the Ship . . .

so she broiight us a stout Boy, about seven Months after our

Landing" (II, 175). Moll regards her servants as little

more than cattle. Jack treats his as weak men who deserve

mercy and guidance when they sin. Perhaps the most telling

contrast between Jack and Moll is their attitudes toward

penance. When Jack is brought to America, he comes to be­

lieve that an unseen power directed his arrival to give him 152 a new lease on life. Later he recognizes his Virginia tutor as a true penitent because the scholar was

. . . not sorrowing for the Punishment he was suffering under; for his Condition was no Part of his Affection, he was rather thankful for it,'as above; but his Concern was a feeling and affecting Sense of the wicked and abomin­ able life he had led, the abhorr'd Crimes he had committed, both against God and Man, and the little Sense he had had of the Condition he was in . . . (Ill, 197).

Crusoe similarly comes to regard his confinement on the island as an act of .God for which he should be thankful.

Moll, of course, never reaches this stage. She buys'off her penance with her stolen wealth and is glad to be going to America only because she knows she can live comfortably there and believes and estate may be waiting for her poses- sion. As another minor contrast, one notes that both Moll and Jack have evil tutors in England, but when Jack comes to America his association with the converted tutor is an indication of his complete break with his past. Vfhen Moll reaches America, she associates only with her highwayman husband and with her son, the product of her incest.

If further evidence of Moll's impenitent condition at the end of the novel is necessary, it is readily avail­ able among Puritan commentators. Moll's repentance would be suspect even under the best of circumstances, for late

and death bed repentances were highly questionable.

Fuller's statement about old age repentance is typical: "It 153 is never too late, when true: but seldom true, when Late.

Such skepticism was motivated partly by the knowledge that late repentance was more likely to arise from fear of death than from a sense of one’s sin against God, precisely the case with Moll. Moll’s minister seems to express this fear when he exhorts her ’’not to let the Joy of my Reprieve, put the Remembrance of my past Sorrow out of my Mind . . and when he prays that Mmy Repentance might be made Unfeign'd and Sincere; and that my coming back as it were into Life again, might not be a returning to the Follies of Life. . ."

(II, 117). Late repentance was questionable also because it allowed no time for the sinner to prove his sincerity by living a good life. This motive was particularly strong among those who believed in the necessity of good works in addition to faith. Bunyan’s statements concerning the con­ verted sinner in his sermon on the barren fig tree are typical:

But where is the fruit of this repentance: Where is thy watching, thy fasting, thy praying against the remainders of corruption? Where is thy self-abhorrence, thy blushing before God for the sin that is yet behind? 'Where is thy self-denial and contentment? How dost thou show before men the truth of thy turning to God? Hast thou ’renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in crafti-

^Treatise, p. 117 154

ness?’ (2 Cor. iv. 2) Canst thou commend thyself ’to every man’s conscience in the sight of God?’^

For Moll the answers are all clear; there is no fruit to her repentance, no self-denial, no renunciation of "the hidden things of dishonesty." The contrast to Crusoe again indi­ cates Defoe's intentions in Moll. Crusoe’s conversion bears fruit; Moll’s makes no difference in her life and is neces­ sarily ineffectual.

If Moll is not truly penitent, then it is necessary to establish precisely her spiritual condition to determine the point of view in the novel. The discxission of Roxana revealed that the final stage of sin, impenitence, was marked by clear signs, some of which Roxana experiences.

Torments of conscience, fearful dreams and glimpses of hell

signalled this stage of degeneracy, a stage Moll experienced

in Newgate. But at this point in their careers neither

Moll nor R.oxana had1 reached the final stage of the hardest of sinners, total abandonment by God. Providence was still

at work on Roxana when that novel closed, and Moll was still

beign called to repentance in Newgate, but apparently Moll

tired God’s patience beyond what Puritans thought were di­

vine limits. As already noted, God was thought to extend

a call to repentance only at certain times in a man’s life,

5Vforks, II, 253. For a similar interpretation of the parable see Adams, The Barren Tree. 155 and if he rejected it, then he could not repent simply by an act of his own will. Chamocke believed that after re­ peated calls had proven futile, God simply abandoned the sinner and allowed him to live on in sin and worldly com­ fort.

That God withdraws his Grace from men, and gives them up sometimes to the fury of tl^eir Lusts, is as clear in Scripture as any thing; Deut. 29. 4. Yet the Lord hath not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, kc. Judas was delivered to Satan after the Sop, and put into his power for de­ spising former Admonitions. He oftin leaves the Rains to the Devil, that he may use what efficacy he can in those that have offended the Majesty of God; he withholds further influences of Grace, or withdraws what before he had granted them.^

Perhaps more immediate for Defoe’s audience were the writings of Bunyan, who mad the same point repeatedly. In the sermon already referred to, for instance, he cites the examples of Gain, Ishraael, and Esau who were all past grace and yet led lives of ease and prosperity.^ In another work,

Some Gospel Truths Opened, Bunyan discusses "those things which are most surely believed by all thos that are, or shall be saved . . . ." He opens the discussion by outlining satan’s three major tools for preserving souls he has gained.

First the fiend tries to keep one entirely ignorant of re-

^Several Discourses, p.536.

^Works, II, 263. 156 ligion; he obviously fails in this with both Roxana and Moil.

Second , if the sinner manages to hear about religion and becomes convinced of his oxm sin, the devil will force him to despair, then satan will try to make the sinner f,rest upon own righteousness . . . ." Bunyan may have intended to depict such a condition in his Mr. Badman who dies peace­ fully causing Attentive and VJiseman to recall John XII, 40:

MHe hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.”9

As the devil catches Roxana by his second trick, so he seems to catch Moll by his third. Moll insists that she has repented, but when faced with death she is far from positive, and the signs which Defoe uses to indicate Jack’s and Crusoe's salvation are conspicuously absent in Moll.

In fact, Moll’s "post-reform" activities are closer to

Roxana’s than to Crusoe’s or Jack’s.

That Moll is inevitably damned results in a point of view best understood in contrast to Roxana’s Because

Roxana, at the time of narrating her story, is aware of her own spiritual condition, we are only occasionally given ob­ viously ironic passages, and because of the narrator’s

®Works, I, 46.

9Works, IV, 67. 157 peculiar double vision (awareness of her own spiritual con­ dition but blindness to the spiritual significance of events) she explicitly calls the reader’s attention to the material- appearances versus spiritual-reality theme. In Moll the case is different. The heroine is totally deceived both about herself and about the spiritual meaning of events.

The result is Moll’s naive, curiously one-dimensional reac­ tion to everything in the novel, including her own salva­

tion, a one-dimensional vision not found in any of the other novels studied here. Moll is only vaguely aware that things

should have a spiritual dimension, but her attempts to

spiritualize inevitably end up as reflections on material

value and financial status. Hence after stealing the neck­

lace from the little girl, Moll can reflect only on pater­

nal neglect. Any Puritan could have seen the event as an

example of the way diabolical cleverness can overcome unin­

formed innocence and could have enlarged on the dangers of

not studying the clever ways the devil takes advantage of

good men who are not always on their guard. In short,

Moll’s world is totally "without spiritual dimension," as

Dorothy Van Ghent has put it, because according to the

Puritan "psychology" with which Defoe was familiar, Moll

cannot perceive that dimension. She is not even aware that

anything but "appearance" exists. The only real progress

in the novel, therefore, is her progress to total spirit­

ual blindness and complete self-deception. 158

The thoroughness of this change in Moll is dramatized

in the contrast between the first and final major incidents

of the novel. Early in the novel she is sensitive to the

incest inherent in her relation with the two brothers, but

in the final scenes she sees nothing strange in lavishing

her affection on the son who resulted from her incestuous

relationship with her brother. That she loveshim and ne­

glects her legitimate children and that she gives him a

stolen watch to kiss in remembrance of her are vivid indi­

cations of the perversion of herpoint of view. There are

no internal indications of irony in these final scenes be­

cause Moll herself is unaware of the irony and because

through the use of the signs Defoe has amply indicated her

spiritual condition for us indirectly. As the novel pro­

gresses and as Moll becomes more and more blind to her con­

dition, the irony becomes heavier until in the last phrase

of the novel (perhaps the most tragically ironic Defoe ever

wrote) both Moll and her husband return to England "where

we resolve to spend the Remainder of our Years in sincere

Penitence, for the wicked Lives we have lived" (II, 175).

" Moll means this without a trace of irony; hence its straight­

forward tone. 3ut after the scenes in America both the

reader and Defoe know that Moll is tragically deceived. Her.

self deception is so total that it easily deceives those

who refuse to differentiate between Moll and Defoe.

The evidence, then, and particularly a comparison of 159

°f Moll with the novels in which Defoe clearly meant the character to be truly penitent, indicates that Defoe knew how to portray true repentance and all its signs, that he

did not do so in Moll, that Moll is a study of total spirit­ ual deception, and consequently that the irony is uncon­

scious on Moll's part but certainly not on Defoe's. A word

should be said here about how this interpretation is consis­

tent with the preface of the novel. Particularly difficult

are the passages in which Defoe speaks, of the purpose of his work. For example, early in his preface he says that in

such histories as Moll's the story must be made as vicious

as possible "to illustrate and give a Beauty to the Penitent

part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related

with equal Spirit and Life" (I, viii). Defoe is not speaking

specifically of Moll here, but is defining one of the char­

acteristics of the type of story Moll intends hers to be.

The clause "if: related with equal Spirit and Life" is es­

pecially significant, for we have already seen that Moll

disposes of her "repentance" with a minimum of description.

As numerous other critics have remarked, she describes with

most "Sx^irit and Life" only her most lucrative criminal ac­

tivities. The next sentence of the preface goes on: "Lt is

suggested there cannot be the same Life, the same Brightness

and Beauty in relating the penitent Part, as in the criminal

part . . . ." He then goes on to condemn those who are

bored with repentance scenes and notes that the fault for 160 the boredom lies in the observer, not in the material.

Moll, of course, is bored with the repentance scene, and thus in her very relation betrays the shallowness of her t "repentance.’1

That Moll is damned and abandoned by God explains the often quoted passage in which Defoe, writing now specifi­ cally about Moll, claims that "there is not a wicked Action i n 'any part of it, but is first or last rendered Unhappy and unfortunate . . ." (I, ix). This can be taken as a con­

tradiction of the plot only if one assumes that Moll is necessarily happy because whe is rich. Conditioned by

reading spiritual autobiographies, Defoe’s audience would no more make such an assumption than modern readers would

assume otherwise.

It remains to discuss the way in which Defoe has se­

lected themes and arranged incidents to delineate Moll’s

character and her progress in sin. The theme of gentility

is of interest in this respect. The first remarkable inci­

dent of the novel is Moll’s innocently desiring to become

a gentlewoman, the model for which is a whore. The inci­

dent is interesting because it is precisely this sort of

gentlewoman which Moll becomes and because it is the first '

example of Moll’s blindness. Here as everywhere in the

novel she mistakes appearance for reality, vjfhat are impor­

tant for Moll are not the values of gentility, but the trap­

pings , and it is the trappings which she has in abundance 161

at the end of the novel. The theme reappears latei' when,

after the death of her first husband, Moll determines to marry a merchant who can carry himself like a gentleman.

She settles on the draper who is successful in business but

can dress like a gentleman and carry a sword well. They

live like a gentleman and his wife and are soon ruined.

Moll’s mistake in this incident is the same one she makes

throughout the novel: the trappings, the appearances of

whatever she wants are all important to her, and the reality

is irrelevant. In fact Moll never learns the difference

between the two, nor even suspects that there is anything

beyond the trappings.

This blindness is illustrated when near the end of

the novel Moll is apprehended in the mercer’s shop and in­

sists on her symbolic rights as a ”gentlewoman." She does

not see the gulf between the gentlewoman she passes herself

off as and what she once aspired to be. Like Roxana at the

conclusion of her narrative, Moll simply uses the appearance

of gentility as a mask for ungenteel activity. Again, the

contrast between Jack and Moll reveals Defoe’s attitude

toward Moll. Jack has the noble blood of a gentleman and

learns the necessary moral and worldly lessons of gentility.

Jack’s sincere conversion was a necessary final step to

make his claims to gentility genuine. Moll’s position is

precisely the reverse; just as her claims to gentility are

obviously spurious, so to is the "conversion" which she ex- 162

periences. In this respect Moll is’ an inversion of Jack,

The two novels, written in the same year,, are perfect op-

posites in so many different ways, that it is tempting to

believe that Defoe may have consciously intended them as

companion studies of character.

Defoe begins to dramatize Moll's blindness early in

the novel. She tells us that she had a religious education

and that she had "the Character too of a very sober, modest,

and vertuous young Woman, and such I had always been ..."

(I, 14). On the other hand she emphasizes that she is vain

and proud, the same two sins which commentators attributed

to Adam and Eve as causing the fall. Her vanity and pride

lead her to her own fall, for when the elder brother begins

his attack he caters to her weaknesses with money and flat­

tery. She falls willingly and blindly:

I told the Guineas over a Thousand times a Day: Never poor vain Creature was so wrapt up with every Part of the Story, as I was not considering what was before me, and how near my Ruin was at the Door; and indeed I think, I rather wished for that Ruin, than studied to avoid it (I, 22).

V7hen the younger brother later proposes marriage, Moll rec­

ognizes her mistake. She has taken the elder brother's

lust for love and his bribery for generosity; she has taken

the appearances of love for the real thing. It is instruc­

tive that she apparently never learns to appreciate the

honest reality of the younger brother's love instead of

the empty professions of the elder. She makes the same 163 mistakes over and over. Any older woman who helps her be­ comes her ’’mother," and in fact Moll feels more affection for her governess mother than for her real mother in America.

Her treatment of her relatives is consistent with her fault.

The criminal "mother" who can give her material comfort is more important to her than her real mother in America, and the son resulting from incest who can be steward and gift giver is more attractive to her than the normal children of her legitimate marriages.

The same principle governs the nature of Moll’s con­ version, and her false repentance is the tragic and logical

outcome of her blindness. She goes through all the ap­

propriate drama of conversion — tears, self-abnegation and

joy at the thought of forgiveness, but her subsequent life

reveals that she went through only the appearances and did

not experience the reality of reform. By the end of the novel her self-deception is complete and causes her damna­

tion.^*® She loves her son but fails to understand him as

a sign of her incest; she gives him a gold watch to kiss,

but sees no irony in its having been stolen in England; she

regards the estate she inherits as an act of divine Provi­

dence, but fails to see that it too is the result of her in­

cestuous marriage; and finally she does not see the terrible

appropriateness or the irony of setting up her son as the

■**®Cf. Schorer, p. 283. 164 steward of her estate in America. The source of her se­ curity, her estate, is the result of her blackest sin, and its guardian, her beloved son, is the same.

That incest plays such an important part in the con­ clusion of the novel helps relate it to the first incident with the two brothers which has overtones of incest. After the elder brother forces Moll into marrying the younger, she tells us that she continued to love the older brother, and "I committed Adultery and Incest with him every Day in my Desires, which without doubt, was as effectually Criminal"

(I, 58). She later commits both adultery and incest in reality, and at the conclusion of the novel her happiness

and security are based on both. Her perception, of her own

condition is no more clear at the end of the novel than at

its beginning, the only difference being that she is worse

off in the conclusion, for she is falsely convinced of her

own salvation.

After the opening scenes of the novel establish

Moll’s character, the rest of the incidents dramatize her

progressive self-deception or her striving for what is the

pervading symbol throughout the work, money. It is and was

the symbol of security, happiness and, perhaps more im­

portantly in Defoe’s time, of blessedness. The Puritans’

use of material as a symbol for spiritual wealth is well 165 known and has been widely studied.^ The metaphor origi­ nated in scripture, the most commonly cited passage being

Matthew 13: 45-46: " Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls: and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all

that he had, and bought it." In his Young Man’s Guide

Thomas Gouge entitles. Chapter VIII, "Containeth a Direction

to Young Men how to get Stock of Grace." The chapter be­

gins :

At thy first setting up, content thyself with i* competent stock of Honey to begin in the World withal, but be sure likewise to get a good stock of Grace. Thou art to drive two Trades together, a Trade for thy Body, and a Tirade for thy Soul; and each Trade must have its distinct Stock, to be maintain’d upon, 'Tis like to be but poor Trading where there is no Stock / t o / begin upon. ^

But as popular as this metaphor was, the commentators

just as frequently pointed out that wealth was spiritually

dangerous. In his discussion of wealth, for example, Deuel

Pead quotes the most frequently cited scripture on the sub­

ject: "... ,it jLs easier for a Camel to go through the eye

of a Needle, than for a rich Man to enter into the kingdom

of Heaven." It is "not that Riches are evils in themselves

•^See, e.g., Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Mew York, 1948).

^ T h e Wicked Man* s Misery, p. 5. 166 but they become such by an imprudent Management, when Men suffer their Hearts to be drawn away by them.'’1-5

In her dealing with money, it is clear that again

Moll mistakes appearance for reality, her money for blessed­ ness. VIhen she receives the estate her mother willed her in America, Moll is sure that heaven is blessing her, even more sure than she had been during her supposed conversion in • Newgate:

This was all strange News to me, and Things I had not been us'd to; and really my Heart began to look more seriously, than I think it ever did before, and to look with great Thankfulness to the Hand of Providence, which had done such VJonders for me . . . (II, 168).

That Moll regards her estate as a direct sign of heaven’s favor makes her son's stewardship doubly ironic, since the son himself is a living sign of her blackest sin.

The significance of Moll’s desire for money through­ out the novel can best be understood in contrast to Crusoe.

As Crusoe is a dramatization of spiritual salvation along conventional Puritan lines, Moll may be read as a purely material salvation in strictly earthly terms. Moll goes through a purely earthly hell (Newgate) and acheives a purely earthly paradise, financial security. Her flat state­ ment that "Money's Virtue, Gold is Fate"(I, 80) in the poem

she and her husband-brother write is the perfect statement

^ T h s Micked Man' s Misery, p. 5. 167 of this theme in the novel. Moll is a reduction ot the absurd of the Puritan metaphor of the spiritual merchant; in this as in everything else in the novel, Moll mistakes the metaphor for the reality. Crusoe knows the difference, and in that knowledge lies salvation.^

Defoe shows that Moll’s mistaking money for virtue and gold for fate is not only logical to Moll’s general blindness to spiritual reality, it is also a direct result of her previous experience. We have already seen that her first two marriages illustrate Moll’s mistaking appearances for reality. The incidents which immediately follow these marriages, confinement in the mint and the episode with the captain's widow, are more direct dramatizations of the same thing. In the mint and immediately after, Moll tells us that she learned

That the State of Things was altered, as to Matrimony, that Marriages were here the Con­ sequences of politick Schemes, for forming Interests, carrying on Business, and that Love had no Share, or'but very little in the Matter (I, 66-7).

Moll is gradually learning to deny all abstract values and

^ M o l l ’s last name may be an attempt to suggest her primarily mercantile interests. Hunter, pp. 47-50, suggests that Defoe may have intended the name Crusoe to recall for his readers his old schoolmate from Morton’s Academy, Timothy Cruso, who was a popular writer of Puritan guide literature. If Crusoe’s name suggests his concern for spiritual reality, perhaps Flanders is intended to suggest Moll's entirely material interests. 168 to replace them with money. It comes as no surprise, there­

fore, that Moll tells us "my Money, not my Vertue, kept me

Honest" (I, 60), for this, like the later statement about

money and virtue, fits precisely the theme of the novel.

Using this new knowledge, Moll is able to regain the captain’s

widow's man for her. She attacks his reputation; she does

not appeal to love or honesty or any other irrelevant prin­

ciples. Moll's next two marriages, those to her brother

and her Lancashire husband, both end in disaster, partly be­

cause on Moll's part they are based wholly on material con­

siderations .

V/e may now profitably return to the incident that

Watt cites as an example of Defoe’s unconscious irony. Af­

ter Moll's Lancashire husband leaves her, she swears she

would gladly have begged hei' bread to remain with him, but

then she immediately counts her money to assure herself,

Watt assumes, that she does not have to beg after all. The

incident is perfectly consistent with the principle which

governs most of Moll's other actions, the substitution of

monetary for abstract values. She has learned that love

has little to do with matrimony, and the incident simply

dramatises the unfortunate results. This is only one of

many incidents already discussed which, have the same func­

tion in the novel, ‘.Then regarded as Defoe's sentiments

and isolated from its context the incident becomes only

what Mr. Watt makes of it, a confusing curiosity. '.Then seen as a part of Moll’s narrative it helps define Moll’s character by showing her progressive confusion of values.

The curious man of Bath incident serves several pur­ poses for both the theme and the structure of the novel.

Thematically it provides an indication of Moll’s spiritual condition at this point in her career. Her relationship with the man of Bath is wholly innocent and "natural” until at'Moll's suggestion sex enters the friendship. The whole incident seems to recapitulate the original fall. The man and woman are innocently naked together until the woman in­ troduces carnal knowledge, the only sort of which Moll is now capable. From this fall the man recovers through re­ pentance. After his sickness and salvation Moll reflects:

1 then reproach'd myself with the Liberties I had taken and how I had been a Snare to this Gentleman, and that indeed I was principle in the Crime; that now he was mercifully snatch'd out of the Gulph by a convincing Work upon his Mind, but that I was left as if I was aban­ don’d by Heaven to a continuing in my Wicked­ ness (I, 130).

That Moll sees herself as abandoned by God is a foreshadow­

ing of her condition later in the novel.

Structurally, the conversion of the man of Bath pro­ vides an informative contrast with Moll’s later reform.

The man of Bath refuses to see Moll again, and she remarks,

”... whenever sincere Repentance succeeds such a Crime as

this, there never fails to attend a Hatred of the Object. .

(I, 129). Moll's "repentance” is followed by no such 170 hatred. In fact, the first thing she does after her sup~ posed conversion and reprieve is to renew her acquaintance with her Lancashire husband, a relic of her past whom she married for purely material reasons. In other words, by

taking up again with him, she explicitly indicates her de­ nial of abstract values and asserts her continued adherence

to material ones. Honest love can hardly be the motive for her attatchment to him, for when in America she discovers

that she is rich she wishes she had left him behind in

England. Although she quickly surpresses the desire in her

narrative, the point is made clearly enotigh. One particular

phrase in the letter from the man of Bath seems designed to

drive home the contrast between the author and Moll: M. . .

those things that must be repented of, must also be reform1d"

(I, 129). As far as we are told, he follows his own advice,

but Moll amply demonstrates that she has no intention of

following it. After her reform, she no longer seeks more

and better husbands, but her lying and blindness continue.

’ Moll's association with the banker marks the end of

the first part of the novel and indicates the degree of hei'

blindness, for it is the most heavily ironic of her mar­

riages. • She originally meets him while seeking worldly ad­

vice, but the interview concludes with her advising him on

his marriage problems. Moll, of all people, should know

about whores, adultery and marriage, of course, but neither

she nor the banker understand the irony of her position. 171

He has no idea that in Marrying Moll he is burdening him­ self with a mate little better than the one she has helped him dispose of. But to malce Moll’s ironic position clear for the reader Defoe interposes the birth of Moll's child by the Lancashire husband between the banker’s first pro­ posal and her final acceptance. Marriage to a banker is the logical culmination of Moll's career at this point, for as a banker he represents what Moll most strongly desires, money. But he is only a symbol of security, and when he dies Moll again faces financial ruin.

The incidents as a whole in the first half of the novel seem to serve two functions. They provide a linear development of Moll's progress and personality. By the time of her affair with the man of Bath she feels abandoned by God, and she is blind to the irony of her association with the banker. In this sense the events have an accum­ ulative effect; Moll's sins continue to pile up just as her husbands do, so that after marriage to the banker she has four husbands (the draper, her brother, the Lancashire hus­ band, and the banker), has been an adultress and whore, and has committed incest twice. But besides this linear relationship, all of the events also have an individual and direct association with the central theme of the novel.

Each in some way illustrates Moll's mistaking appearances for reality or otherwise furnishes a sign of her condition.

For this reason the events do not seem logically to succeed 172

each other as they do in a modern novel with an organic plot structure. Instead, each is an exemolum, not impor­

tant in itself so much as important for its illustration of

the main character’s spiritual condition, the subject of

real interest in the novel.

Her marriage with the banker represents a crucial

point in Moll's progress in sin. She has several years of

peace and-security in which to repent, but even in the re­

lation, she admits that there was no real feeling of repen­

tance :

; Now I seem'd landed in a safe Harbour, after the Stormy Voyage of Life past was at an end; and I began to be thankful for my Deliverance: I sat many an Hour by myself, and wept over the R.ememberance of past Follies, and the dreadful Extravagances of a wicked Life, and sometimes I flatter’d my self that I had sin­ cerely repented (I, 203).

The use of the term deliverance here forms an interesting

contrast to her use of the same word a little later after

the Banker’s death:

. . . two or three times I fell upon my Knees, praying to God, as well as I could, for De­ liverance; but I cannot but say, my Prayers had no hope in them; I knew not what to do, it was all Fear without, and Dark within; and I reflected on my pass’d Life as not repented of, that Heaven was no beginning to punish me and w'ould make me as miserable as I had been wicked (II, 6).

Moll is here praying for and was earlier referring to a ma­

terial deliverance, just as before his conversion Crusoe

misunderstood the scripture to refer to a material instead 173

of a spiritual deliverance. The "Dark within" to which

"Roll refers anticipates the loss of her reason, just as

Roxana lost hers. After the banker dies, she tells us, "X

sat and cried and tormented myself Night and Day; wringing

my Hands, and sometimes raving like a distracted VJoman; and

indeed X have often wonder’d it had not affected my Reason,

for I had the Vapours to such a degree, that my under­

standing was sometimes quite lost in Fancies and Imagina­

tions" (II, 3).

From here on Moll is clearly in the hands of the

devil. She has turned down numerous calls from Providence

to repent, and she has had the knowledge and opportunity

several times. On the day of her first theft, she goes

.aimlessly into the street guided by the devil who had "laid

his Bait for me," and "brought me to be sure to the place,

for I knew not whether /sic/1 was going or what I did" (II,

4). Even after Moll could have supported herself honestly

by quilting, the devil "resolv’d I should continue in his

Service," and "prompted me to go out and take a i/alk, that

is to say, to see if any thing would offer in the old way"

(II, 12). Still later when she would like to stop stealing

she cannot. "Thus, I that once in the Devil’s Clutches, was

held there fast as with a Charm, and had no Power to go

without the Circle, till I was ingulph'd in Labyrinths of

Trouble too great to get out at all"(II, 18). At the time 174 of writing this passage Moll does not seem convinced of her own salvation.

From this point on until Moll’s capture the events move rapidly, for Defoe has already dramatized Moll’s de­ generation from innocence to impenitency. There remain only three more major ideas to dramatize. The first is the de­ velopment of the "Labyrinths of Trouble" Moll refers to.

The second is the final crisis in Newgate and Moll’s reac­ tion. And finally we are shown that the crisis produced only a fateful and final self-deception on Moll’s part.

The incidents during Moll's career as a thief would have been interesting to Defoe’s audience because they are sen­ sational reading, popular journalism in the tradition of

Greene's Cony Catching Pamphlets. More important for the internal structure of the novel, they have the accumula­ tive effect of piling up sin upon sin with the resultant hardening which inevitably accompanied them. Moll steals the horse, for example, not because of any possible use to her or her governess, but simply because the opportunity to

steal presents itself and Moll cannot resist. Shortly after

this we learn that Moll surpasses even her governess, an

old hand, in hardness. Earlier Moll had suggested that they

stop their lives of crime while they are still safe and

have enough money to live on, but the governess had refused.

After Moll steals the horse the governess makes the same

suggestion, but now it is Moll who refuses to stop. 175

Some of the later events in the novel are clearly intended to reinforce the impression of Moll's blindness.

When she is mistakenly taken for a crime in the mercer's shop, she insists on her symbolic rightd as a "gentlewoman," and misses the ironic justice of the affair. She does not see the incident as the Providential warning that it is; she is not seriously frightened by such a close call nor sated by her wealth. Xn:^this condition she is capable only

of the sham repentance we have already examined, and she

ends the novel more certainly damned than even the impeni­

tent Roxana. CHAPTER V I

Conclusions

The four novels I have examined here are distinctly related in both structure and content. Moll, both novel and character, is to Roxana, what Crusoe is to Jack.

Crusoe traced the fall, conversion, and spiritual rise of the central character. Jack, too, is a study of the grad­ ual rise of:a man from sin to salvation, but the fall and the fruits of the repentance are not dramatized as they are

•*-n Crusoe. Instead, Jack seems to be a more thorough study of the signs and steps in salvation. Opposed to these two novels are Moll and Roxana, which are almost mirror images

C**usoe and Jack; they are structurally similar but thema­ tically opposite. Like Crusoe, Moll goes through roughly three major actions; fall, repentance, and reform. The difference is that Moll’s is not a true repentance; both novels seem based on the story of the Prodigal Son, but

Moll is the Prodigal who makes good at the gaming table and learns to enjoy living with the pigs. Whereas Crusoe’s crisib.brought on sincere repentance, Moll's brings on only clever scheming and fear of death. Instead of spiritual dedication, Moll's only dedication is to her money, the symbol, but not the substance, of blessedness. As Jack is

176 177

Crusoe, so Roxana is to Moll. Instead of the fully rounded spiritual life based on the Prodigal Son story,

Roxana is the thorough study of the signs and steps to sin, as Jack is in salvation. The four novels, then, form double pairs; structurally Jack and Roxana, Moll and Crusoe are complementary; thematically Jack and Crusoe, Roxana and Moll belong together.

It is impossible to know and therefore useless to ask how far Defoe ’’consciously" intended these four novels to be read together as contrasting and complementary character studies. That all four lend themselves to interpretation according to Puritan doctrine at least suggests that Defoe was consciously drawing on a tradition he expected his audi­ ence to recognize.

If the foregoing discussion and the studies of Hunter and Starr have any validity, then some serious reassessments .

of Defoe as a novelist are in order. Ian 'Natt’s comment

that "the heritage of Puritanism is demonstrably too weak

to supply a continuous and controlling pattern for the hero’s

experience" can no longer be regarded as true of any of the

four novels studied here. 1 Nor can I agree with Lionel

Stevenson who expresses the standard critical doctrine that t Defoe’s works cannot be regarded as major novels because / "they are based upon no analysis of life. Defoe is a chron-

*-The Rise of the Novel, p. 80. 178 icier of phenomena, not an interpreter of them. Hence there could be neither true comedy nor true tragedy in his stories. Their only ideological element is the revelation of the mentality of the author’s time and class.” ' On the contrary, I am convinced that Defoe conceived of his novels in much the same way modern’ authors conceive psychological novels. The conflict is essentially an internal one, in

Defoe’s case between sin and salvation, and the events are objective correlatives, not, when taken together, a plot.

Historically, the importance of Defoe as a novelist is not altered by the conclusions reached here. Defoe ap­ parently came at the end of a tradition in literature, whereas 'Richardson and Fielding came at the beginning of one. Defoe’s potential audience was still intensely inter­

ested in and read the literature on the nature of their own

souls. By Richardson’s time an audience trained to recog­ nize the signs and metaphors popularized by earlier Puritan

literature was turning into a comfortable middle class of

store keepers who were delighted to see Pamela’s virtue re­ warded by social elevation and a coach and six. The sort of

novels Defoe wrote soon lost their understanding audience

and therefore had no lasting impact in the sense that Tom

Jones or Pamela had. But that should not be allowed to

2The English Novel (London, 1960), p. 74 <

179 diminish our admiration for Defoe’s achievement as a conscious artist. List of Works Cited

Abbot, George. The Whole Booke of lob Paraphrased, Or Made easie for any to understand. London, 1640.

Abbott, Robert. A Christian Family Bvilded by God, Directing all Governours of Families how to act. London 1652,

Adams, Thomas. The Barren Tree. A Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse October 26. 1623. London, 1623.

Adams, Thomas. Diseases of the Sovle: A Discourse Divine, Mora11, And Physicall. London, 1616.

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