Robinson Crusoe" Author(S): Roxann Wheeler Source: ELH , Winter, 1995, Vol

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'My Savage,' 'My Man': Racial Multiplicity in "Robinson Crusoe" Author(s): Roxann Wheeler Source: ELH , Winter, 1995, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 821-861 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030104

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 'MY SAVAGE,' 'MY MAN': RACIAL MULTIPLICITY IN ROBINSON CRUSOE

BY ROXANN WHEELER

Although critics of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) have long been fascinated by Crusoe's and Friday's relationship, twentieth-century scholars have been slow to treat the dynamic of race that informs that relationship and the entire novel.' When race has been considered a significant category of inquiry, often the nuances of its meanings in the early eighteenth century have been neglected for a more contemporary paradigm of self and other or white man and native. My essay develops a different approach both to early eighteenth-century ideas about race and to Crusoe's various relationships with non-British men. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe exemplifies the way in which reading for racial multiplicity is better able to analyze race as an emergent, rather than rigid, concept in the early eighteenth century. That is, by reading for racial multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe, I argue not only that the color binary of black and white is an inadequate tool for understanding either the representation of race or colonial relations, but also that significant racialized categories other than skin color, such as "savage," "Christian," and "slave," complicate an understanding of race at this time. For example, focusing on a color binary is not sufficient to explain the juxtapositions of the British with other Europeans, Moors, West Afri- cans, or Native Caribbeans that characterize Robinson Crusoe. By studying the multiple meanings of race and color in this early eighteenth century text, I do not erase the hierarchies structuring colonial and racial relations, rather I register the complexity of their operation. This analysis of Robinson Crusoe and of its social text examines the novel's representation of racial multiplicity and its participation in contemporary eighteenth-century articulations of race and colonial power relations.2 First, I show the precision with which Robinson Crusoe defines the various boundaries between people in racialized terms. Then, I demonstrate that despite this, the novel has fostered confusion in its many subsequent interpretations. In fact, the novel's difficulty in situating Friday in a stable category of Carib, cannibal, or slave, is central to analyzing Robinson Crusoe.3 Such a difficulty reflects a larger cultural uncertainty about the significance of racial difference in the early

ELH 62 (1995) 821-861 c 1995 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 821

This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms eighteenth century. But first, I begin with a contemporary reading of Robinson Crusoe that shows the problems which arise when an analysis seeks to confine an eighteenth-century colonial text to a color binary informed by current notions of race.

In 1992, when Toni Morrison introduced Race-ing Justice, En- gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality and sought to make sense of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's position in relation to racial politics in the United States, she chose an analogy to Robinson Crusoe.4 Morrison identifies Friday's relation to Crusoe as a particularly appropriate analogy for Thomas's relation to the Bush administration. For many social critics, including Morrison, Robinson Crusoe and Friday are paradigmatic of colonial relations between whites and non-whites.5 Yet, homogenizing race to a rigid set of binary differences divorces the literary from its social text and produces a narrative about racial relations in Robinson Crusoe that seems remarkably contemporary. Morrison's "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac" juxtaposes Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearings to Robinson Crusoe. This extended analogy to Friday and Morrison's critique of both Thomas and United States's politics are first introduced in her choice of epigraphs, which move from comments by Thomas and Anita Hill to the scene in which Friday bends his head to Crusoe's foot. Arguing that the significance of the hearings is, in part, "history," and suggesting that "the site of the exorcism of critical national issues was situated in the miasma of black life and inscribed on the bodies of black people," Morrison's essay deftly critiques the way that race is played out in the United States's national text, unveiling the structure of racial discrimination in which Thomas and Hill were placed.6 Morrison further argues that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the media coverage of the hearings situated the two main players on an historical binary depicting Africans in slavery: the "tom" (Clarence Thomas) and the "savage" (Anita Hill). Morrison's interpretation of the hearings and the aftermath was that they represented a process "to reorder those signifying fictions ['natural servant' and 'savage demon']."'7 Not surprisingly, perhaps, these terms are the very terms in which Robinson Crusoe works out Friday's position. In Morrison's essay, the relationship between Crusoe and Friday functions as a myth of contemporary race relations, which, when compared to the novel, shows that Morrison has significantly changed the racial dynamics that the novel depicted in order to characterize

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms modern race relations in the United States. Beginning the comparison between the present and the past, Morrison spotlights "Friday":

On a Friday, Anita Hill graphically articulated points in her accusation of sexual misconduct. On the same Friday Clarence Thomas answered . . . those charges. And it was on a Friday in 1709 when Alexander Selkirk found an 'almost drowned Indian' on the shore of an island upon which he had been shipwrecked. Ten years later Selkirk's story would be immortalized by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe.8

Morrison's version of the novel's origin is mistaken, but such a confusion, especially about Friday, has been part of the novel since its initial publication.9 First, Selkirk is a disputed, factual base for Defoe's novel; second, there were two separate instances of solitary individuals on Juan Fernandez island that Morrison's version conflates. One instance was indeed a Guyanese man, the Mosquito Indian Will, who was not shipwrecked but left behind accidentally in 1681; the other instance was a Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk, who was not shipwrecked either but abandoned by his captain in 1704. Thus, Selkirk did not find an Indian, drowned or otherwise; Will had been reunited with another buccaneer ship in 1684. Transferring an Indian to Selkirk's narrative allows Morrison to replace Friday (an Amerindian) with a character she refers to as a "black," "savage," "cannibal" in her recollection of Friday in Robinson Crusoe. But Morrison has recalled a fiction of the fiction:

There [in Defoe's novel] the Indian becomes a 'savage cannibal'- black, barbarous, stupid, servile, adoring.... Crusoe's narrative is a success story, one in which a socially, culturally, and biologically handicapped black man is civilized and Christianized-taught, in other words, to be like a white one.'0

On the contrary, in the novel, the "savage" is a Carib, an Amerindian attached to a group with specific customs, religious and social beliefs, and rules of governance; moreover, the novel carefully depicts Friday in a way that it refuses to depict the other "savages." I agree with Morrison, however, that Friday is taught to be like a white man, and a certain kind of white man-a servant. Yet, the extended analogy between Friday and Clarence Thomas significantly rewrites the original. Given Morrison's focus on Clarence Thomas, it is understandable that she revises the details of Robinson Crusoe in the process. However, part of my goal in analyzing racial multiplicity is to demonstrate the way that the Robinson

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Crusoe myth predictably detached itself from eighteenth-century historical conditions in this instance. In her essay, Morrison misremembers not only Selkirk but also Robinson Crusoe, recalling an African Friday rather than a Caribbean Friday." Furthermore, in the novel, Friday is neither "black," "stupid," nor considered "biologically handicapped." Such stereotypical features are enabled by a peculiarly nineteenth-century racism and a North American, post-Civil Rights critique of the construction of race; they are also a measure of the power of black power to act as proxy for all other oppressed groups.12 Referring to Friday as a case study of internalized racism, Morrison observes that the interaction between Crusoe and Friday takes place on Crusoe's terms, not Friday's: "The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued." Commenting on Friday's assimilation into British culture, the loss of his "mother tongue," and the associated consequences for internalizing the norms of the master's language, Morrison concludes that "both men [Thomas and Friday] ... are condemned ... never to utter one single sentence understood to be beneficial to their original culture." Of Clarence Thomas, Morrison writes:

if the language of one's culture is lost or surrendered, one may be forced to describe that culture in the language of the rescuing one. ... It becomes easy to confuse the metaphors embedded in the blood language of one's own culture with the objects they stand for ... One is obliged to cooperate in the misuse of figurative language, in the reinforcement of cliche, the erasure of difference, . . . the denial of history,... [and] the inscription of hegemony.'3

Unfortunately this critique of Thomas's reinforcement of clich6 and denial of history is applicable, in a different sense, to Morrison's own erasure of the Caribbean Friday and to the exclusive association of blackness with servility. One of my contentions is that current political hegemony in the United States constructs only one other at a time (hence the confusion and general failure to find a way to discuss the ideological differences between Thomas and Hill; or, in the case at hand, the differences between Caribs and Africans), and that if the black/white color binary breaks down, it is in racist ways, such as the construction of a "model minority."14 An important implication is that, in general, only one group at a time is positioned as other, marginalized, or disenfranchised. In the quintecentenary of Columbus's "discovery" and the debates over what

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the quintecentenary means-whether it is cause for national celebration or shame-it is simply no surprise that Friday becomes an allegory for an African-American man. Morrison's trenchant critique of dominant United States's racial politics also allows us to read its contradictions. Substituting a black Friday in her recollection of Robinson Crusoe's plot figuratively repeats the material eradication of native Indian cultures (through disease and population manipulation as well as slaughter, despite their resistance; and, of course, through rewriting history). This replacement also fails to articulate the historical connections as well as discontinuities between native Caribbean populations and Africans, especially the substitution and insertion of African peoples in the Caribbean and the mainland of the Americas as slave labor to supplement the one that Europeans could, in some cases, not adequately command or had destroyed. By linking Robinson Crusoe to contemporary race relations, Morrison's essay demonstrates the way that race has become inextricably linked to negritude in the United States.'5 Despite my critique of Morrison's elisions, that they can appear in 1992 is symptomatic of binary racial understandings reproduced in our culture and of the ways that critical attention to difference between non- Europeans is often collapsed and confused in Robinson Crusoe. The novel is caught in the cataclysmic shift from a subsistence-based to profit-oriented colonial economy dependent on African slaves, yet its ideology clearly manifests a desire for European difference to be constructed in relation to Caribbean peoples.

Even a simple rehearsal of Robinson Crusoe's plot and its geography supports the customary critical emphasis on the production of differences. Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 has been instrumental in framing Robinson Crusoe as a study of colonial discourse and in making visible the significance of cannibalism to constructions of European identity. Crit- ics, including Hulme, have tended to regard the novel primarily in its construction of difference, and certainly such an emphasis seems war- ranted given that, overall, power relations in the Atlantic benefited Europeans. My analysis, while also featuring the Caribbean, differs significantly. I link the Caribbean to other aspects of colonialism in the early eighteenth century, especially attending to the way that the novel produces both racial difference and racial multiplicity. Before incorpo- rating racial multiplicity into the analysis, I establish a foundation of

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms racialized differences that shape the colonial narrative. These differences have been addressed predominately in the context of the island segment.16 Several colonial factors, I argue, give impetus to the plot: Crusoe's desire to improve his station in Britain and in the colonies; his fear of bodily harm from the Caribs; the necessity of eradicating the cannibals; and the desire to domesticate Friday. Initially, Crusoe's desires for advancement beyond the station allotted to him propel the plot forward. Although Crusoe reiterates that his desire to travel and for wealth is inexplicable, we might explain these goals as results of the unprecedented capital accumulation made possible through global trade and colonization in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Expanded trade routes and new colonies stripped parts of what was called the "uncivilized" world of their natural and human resources and permanently altered those economies and ways of life to satisfy spiraling British consumer desire-including a desire for adventure and travel." Crusoe's wish for advancement materializes when he joins a trading expedition to Guinea: "That evil influence which carryed me first away from my father's house, that hurried me into the wild and indigested notion of raising my fortune . . . whatever it was, presented the most unfortunate of all enterprises to my view; and I went on board a vessel bound to the coast of Africa" (38-39). Crusoe notes that "this voyage made me both a sailor and a merchant"; the gold dust he brought back yielded him x300: "this filled me with those aspiring thoughts which have since so compleated my ruin" (40). The even greater desire to increase this wealth leads to another African voyage, but Moorish pirates take him prisoner and he is enslaved in Morocco. Upon Crusoe's escape from the Moors, a generous captain of a Portuguese slave ship allows Crusoe to sell and barter his stolen property, including his companion Xury, for a considerable sum of money. After staying with a man who owns a Brazilian sugar plantation, Crusoe observes: "seeing how well the planters lived, and how they grew rich suddenly, I resolved, if I could get licence to settle there" (55). By setting up as a planter in Brazil, Crusoe hopes to increase his fortune even more, and he follows the pattern of European settlement in the Americas first by buying land, working it with his own labor, and eking out an existence. Noting that his neighbor is in the same circumstance, Crusoe comments about the difficulty of producing profit: "we rather planted for food than any thing else, for about two years ... [in] the third year we planted some tobacco, and made each of us a large piece of ground ready for planting canes in the year to come; but we both wanted

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms help" (55). He complains that all the work is by the labor of his own hands and that his standard of living is lower than it was in Britain. To improve his profits, he purchases European and African labor. His excessive desire for advancing more rapidly than he otherwise would leads him to act as a slave trader on behalf of other planters (58-59). Obeying "blindly the dictates of my fancy rather than my reason" (60), Crusoe sets out on a third voyage to Africa. A shipwreck arrests his trip to the slave coast, and he arrives on the island. A similar pattern repeats itself on the island as it had on the mainland: he acquires land, improves it with his own labor, and then acquires Friday as additional labor power. Before this point, when Crusoe is convinced he will remain on the island alone, he notes that his desires have dissipated because there are no competitors: by the fourth year "I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying; I was lord of the whole manor; or if I pleased, I might call my self king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals; I had no competitor" (139). There is neither surplus nor a circuit of exchange. This fulfillment should end a novel driven by Crusoe's desire for economic gain, but another motivating factor takes over the colonial plot. It is no longer Moors or other Africans but Caribs who form the significant point of contrast to Crusoe. At the point of apparent stasis in the plot when his pecuniary desires have subsided, Crusoe sees a footprint, and the fear of cannibals, rather than a desire for advancement, takes over as the driving force of the plot (162-67, 171). The fear of cannibals renews his desire to escape, but the desire to domesticate Friday soon substitutes for a desire to escape. The novel ends with Crusoe's return to Europe as a wealthy planter and with a synopsis of his island colony's violent fate from internal dissension among the Europeans and from external aggression resulting from a conflict with the neighboring Caribs. In terms of plot and content, Robinson Crusoe is best understood as a colonial narrative. The novel establishes Crusoe's method of rising in the world as possible because of a developed colonial labor force and of the demands of trade: African trade, particularly in slaves, provides Crusoe's capital and labor base for his profitable sugar production in Brazil. Robinson Crusoe also rehearses the early stages of European colonial contact in the Atlantic twice, once in Brazil and then on the Caribbean island, and depicts the shift from subsistence planting to a profit- oriented economy. Lastly, the difference between the Englishman Crusoe and the others with whom he comes in contact seems clear cut in

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms terms of establishing the superiority of enslaver to enslaved: the Africans he trades in, the Maresco Xury whom he sells as a slave, and the Carib Friday whom he relegates to perpetual servitude. Despite the emphasis on differences between Europeans and non- Europeans, Robinson Crusoe corresponds to a particular period of colonialism, a stage when the representation of differences was not as concrete as it became later in the eighteenth century. Multiplicity, not simply difference, is produced in relation to the Englishman Crusoe, the Maresco Xury, and the Carib Friday especially. Focusing on difference and multiplicity analyzes the complexity of colonial power relations and racial oppression at the same time it acknowledges that difference is not as fixed as we might imagine by reading backward from the present. Emphasizing difference and multiplicity also means that we can read Robinson Crusoe as a vindication of the European, specifically the British, colonial spirit and yet that such a method reveals its fissures: emergent categories of race enable both of these emphases. By examining categories of the savage (especially the cannibal), Carib, Christian, and slave/servant, I contend that race as we understand it today did not anchor European difference and cannot analyze colonial relations adequately. In fact, the novel demonstrates that only some differences could justify European domination, and they did not include skin color or status by themselves. Neither complexion nor a category such as "slave" explains the power relations represented in Robinson Crusoe adequately (though they both emerge as more significant representational issues later), but a focus on "savage" and "Christian" is much more applicable. Unless we bring these categories to bear on Robinson Crusoe, there will be little to say about race, colonialism, or colonial narratives. The savage and the Christian are the most important racialized categories between Europeans and others that help produce and maintain a sense of European superiority in North and West Africa, South America, and in the Caribbean. In section three, I analyze racial multiplicity also in terms of the several categories pertinent to early eighteenth-century ideas of race and the way that these categories do not maintain difference uniformly.

III

The first part of Robinson Crusoe locates the main character in Britain, Africa, and then Brazil; his significant relations are with the Moors, Africans on the west coast farther south, the Spanish Moor Xury, and other Europeans, specifically the Portuguese. The most important

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms racialized categories that the novel produces in this context are the savage, the Christian, and the slave; analyzing these boundaries shows that both difference and multiplicity are relevant to reading Robinson Crusoe as a colonial narrative. By focusing on Xury and Crusoe, I demonstrate the similarities of this relationship to Crusoe's subsequent relationship to Friday. Such a focus is instructive because in both cases, the novel depicts Crusoe's association with a younger, non-European man who does not fall easily into categories of difference. Different aspects of colonialism structure such a relation in which the Englishman Crusoe acquires a non-European man as a (naturalized) servant. In Africa, piracy fills the narrative function that the hurricane does in the Caribbean, "accidentally" situating Crusoe in the realm of an historical power struggle for European hegemony first on the coast of Africa and then in the Americas. The Moors serve a similar narrative function to the Caribs later-as impediments to Crusoe's success as a slave trader. For both Xury and Friday, the issue of their status in relation to Crusoe hinges on (the conversion to) Christianity. Lastly, the relation between Xury and Crusoe (and then between Crusoe and Friday) alters in relation to the presence of other Europeans. These narrative functions are not simply structural similarities but also ideological ones about the importance of race to establishing British power relations. Difference and multiplicity cannot be separated conceptually, and the depiction of Crusoe's enslavement in Morocco by a Turkish pirate begins to emphasize this issue. What might seem the most significant alteration in Crusoe's status receives little narrative or critical attention. At the level of plot, it is in Morocco, strangely enough, that Crusoe's status is most compromised and his body suspended from its self-mastery in slavery. At the height of Corsair activity in the mid-seventeenth century, thousands of Europeans were enslaved by the Moors, and some were released for ransom money or became wealthy renegades by converting to Islam. Crusoe becomes a prisoner to a pirate and then his household slave; Crusoe's change of fortune results in a temporary change of status from a merchant to a slave, a change that apparently has nothing to do with his national or personal essence (as it does in the case of the Amerindians).'8 Indeed, one of Defoe's contemporaries asked about the comparison between a European in Barbary and an African in the West Indies: "Doth he [the European] thereupon become a Brute? If not, why should an African, (suppose of that, or any other remote part) suffer a greater alteration than one of us?"'9 The juxtaposition of Crusoe, his patron the Moor, and Xury another slave, who is a Maresco or Spanish Moor, becomes a collection of national identities thrown together by the

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms fortunes of international power differences. The novel offers Crusoe's ingenuity in escaping as a significant difference between Crusoe and other slaves. Multiplicity is produced in terms of the category of slave because Crusoe is a European Christian; the enslavement of European Christians is a little remembered historical phenomenon, particularly for European men.20 Despite the novel's highlighting his status as a captured slave, the section on Crusoe in Sallee suggests that he was treated more as a household servant than a slave and certainly not subject to reculturation like Xury by the Portuguese Captain or Friday by Crusoe. Although Crusoe's status may give rise to questions, the novel seems quite clear about the difference between Moors and West Africans: Moors are neither savage, naked, nor unfamiliar.2' But their representation fails to match Crusoe's "real" peril: the Moors who enslave Crusoe are represented as frightening (rather than inferior or savage); I attribute such a depiction to their centuries of maritime and financial power, which was historically more threatening and much better known to eighteenth- century Europe than either the history or civilization of the Amerindians or West Africans. Thus, it is neither the nature nor the customs of the Moors that define their difference (as it is in regard to the Amerindians), but their power.22 In such a context, slavery does not appear to be a particularly clear boundary of permanent difference between people since it can happen to any one in spite of religion, national origin, or skin color. In the novel, slaves are Marescos and European Christians as well as Africans and Amerindians. Robinson Crusoe constructs black African savagery as the most significant difference to Europeans rather than European slavery in Morocco or the Muslim religion. Savagery rather than slavery constitutes the dominant contrast to Europeans in the first part of the novel. Crusoe and Xury sail southward from Morocco "to the truly Barbarian coast, where whole nations of negroes were sure to surround us with their canoes, and destroy us; where we could ne'er once go on shoar but we should be devoured by savage beasts, or more merciless savages of humane kind" (45).23 Even though Crusoe fears human savages in Africa, the text offers savage animals instead. Crusoe laments "the horrible noises, and hideous cryes and howlings" on the African shore (47). Finally, Crusoe and Xury sail far enough south to spot people. The West Africans' skin color and nakedness most clearly separate them from the Englishman Crusoe and the Maresco Xury. Although these features seem to constitute signs of the Africans' alleged savagery, they are not sufficient to account for Crusoe's conviction that they are cannibals. Crusoe's first observations of the

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms inhabitants note their outstanding attributes: "we saw people stand upon the shoar to look at us; we could also perceive they were quite black and stark-naked. I was once inclined to ha'gone on shoar to them; but Xury was my better councellor, and said to me, 'no go"' (50). Such a specific identification of African difference does not compare to the unspecified savage cannibalism of the Caribs. It must be said that Crusoe's fear of African cannibals is completely unfounded in terms of the novel. As opposed to his violent and anonymous encounter with the Caribs later, Crusoe meets and commu- nicates with West Coast Africans who offer not to eat him but to aid him. The people bring him food and water: "I was now furnished with roots and corn, such as it was, and water, and leaving my friendly negroes, I made forward" (52). The novel quickly reveals that these "savages" simply eat wild beasts, not men. The scene in which Crusoe gratifies the Africans by shooting "a most curious leopard" for their culinary delight confirms such a crucial difference (52). Crusoe departs with provisions and a changed perspective. It is important to note that after his encounter with the West Africans, Crusoe's earlier fear of African savages has been replaced entirely with a fear of savage animals in Africa. The novel does not strictly maintain the savagery of the Africans as it does the Caribs'. The only "real" cannibals, then, are the Amerindians, whose several feasts punctuate the latter part of Crusoe's island sojourn. Crusoe's relationship to Xury has been interpreted typically as a relation of master to slave, and certainly Crusoe's selling Xury to the Portuguese captain confirms this idea. Initially, however, in the context of Moroccan slavery, Xury and Crusoe resemble each other more than they are dissimilar; in fact, Crusoe's greater age seems the only difference between the two slaves. The similarity between Xury and Crusoe is further emphasized because of their common difference from the Moors (their common European origin weighs most in this respect).24 Once out of the context of slavery, a different configuration is formed-first in relation to black Africans and then in relation to Christian Europeans. When they escape, Xury and Crusoe are allied in their fear of the Moors who enslaved them and then in their fear of the "real" savages, the West Africans. The potential danger of the "wild mans" and the resulting fear of being eaten lead Crusoe to notice that which most clearly separates Xury and himself from the West Africans: their skin color and nakedness. While Xury's status is neither as powerful as Crusoe's nor as abject as the Africans' on the west coast, his position in the novel is not as clear as it might be. A household slave like Crusoe, he is also a European--but not a Christian. In most cases, the Marescos had been violently segregated

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms from the Christian population in Spain since the sixteenth century, and they often worked on behalf of the African Moors, especially the pirates. Although Marescos often assisted Moorish pirates, they were also subject to slavery in Africa. Marescos therefore occupied a complex position, considered neither fully European nor fully Moor. Upon escape from Sallee, Xury's "worth" as a person is compromised from the beginning because it is construed only in terms of his usefulness to Crusoe. For example, Crusoe observes of a non-slave and the kinsman of his patron: "I could ha' been content to ha' taken this Moor with me, and ha' drowned the boy [Xury], but there was no venturing to trust him.... I turned to the boy, who they called Xury, and said to him, 'Xury, if you will be faithful to me I'll make you a great man'"' (45). Crusoe's age and initiative position Xury as a particular kind of subordinate-a servant: Crusoe orders him to perform menial tasks. Yet Xury also advises Crusoe and they hunt together in Africa (47). Theirs is not a relation of equals but roles that can be assumed by a trusty servant in relation to a master: Friday and Crusoe repeat such a pattern later. The arrival of the Portuguese slave ship alters Xury's status vis-a-vis Crusoe even further. If the least difference between Xury and Crusoe occurs when they are slaves to the Moors, the greatest difference occurs when they are in the presence of other Europeans. In this context, Crusoe assumes the position of the owner of the stolen goods and boat from Morocco (54). In this episode, the Catholic Portuguese captain treats Crusoe as an equal, even though he possesses only the stolen boat-and Xury. Crusoe explains: "I immediately offered all I had to the captain of the ship, ... but he generously told me he would take nothing from me" (53-54). Indeed, the captain identifies with Crusoe's plight: "'I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved my self"' (54). Instead, the captain offers to purchase Crusoe's goods. Xury's status seems to slip from servant and occasional partner to a slave because he is considered a legitimate object of exchange by both the captain and Crusoe. Xury's position as an object of exchange between the two European men becomes a sign of their friendship and equality. Crusoe's reluctance to part with Xury prompts the captain to mitigate Xury's permanent servitude to a temporary term. Although the eventual terms of Xury's sale are more akin to indentured servitude (of 10 years contingent on conversion to Christianity) than to permanent enslavement, Xury's status is as a slave not a servant precisely because he is understood to belong to Crusoe who has no contractual rights to his labor or person.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Xury's economic mobility and ability to be a "free" subject are silenced by the Europeans' ostensible concern for his spiritual welfare. The importance of Christianity as a significant bond between Europeans overrides even historical differences between Protestants and Catholics by representing the greater difference as that between Christians and Muslims. It is clearly not Xury's nation that locates him as a slave but his religion: he is a Spanish Moor.25 Christianity represents the most significant category of difference that excuses European domination and establishes the conditions for enslavement. Xury, however, is not the "permanent" savage or slave the Africans and Caribs are; he is linked to Europeans by his shared fear of being eaten by the "wild mans" on the west coast of Africa (47). In comparison to West Africans, Xury is reassuringly similar to Crusoe. To account for the changeability of Xury's position, it is necessary to bring the categories "European," "Christian," and "Muslim" to bear on the juxtaposition of the Englishman Crusoe and the Maresco Xury to the Moors, West Africans, and Portuguese. Clearly it is important to identify the nuances between Xury's national origins, which separate him from west coast Africans (and from Friday), and Xury's Islamic associations, a religious category that compromises the similarity to Crusoe. Just as Crusoe made his first fortune in England by trading "trifles" on the African coast for slaves and gold, so the sale of Xury and other goods stolen from the Moor establishes him in Brazil as a land-rich plantation owner. Twice in the novel, Crusoe regrets parting with Xury, not out of loneliness or ethical regret, but because he wishes to command his labor power. Specifically, once Crusoe's plantation begins to be profit-oriented rather than subsistence-based, he desires Xury's presence. On the one hand, the narrative validates Crusoe's prosperity in the colonies; on the other, it reveals the manipulations, expropriations, and betrayals his newfound status requires to attain power. The ownership of property-land and especially slaves-permits the apparent equality of different nationals of European descent on the Portuguese ship and in Brazil. Thus, the status of European men in a colonial economy depends on the labor supply they command to determine their rank (in South America the labor supply was over- whelmingly either native Amerindian or African).26 An important explanation for the absence of strife either between countrymen or other European nationals involves shared economic benefits in the Atlantic empire. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, successive travelers noted the undiluted friendliness among planters especially in the

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Caribbean: important political and religious differences particularly in Britain (and to a lesser extent between European nationals) were often suppressed to pursue common economic goals.27 Even though the most significant categories of difference in Africa are the savage, Christian, and slave, "Christian" is the only one that is not substantially questioned in terms of its "naturalized" explanatory power. Europeans of various national origins are connected by their common Christian heritage and desire for economic advancement in exploiting African labor and natural resources. Neither savagery nor slavery adequately maintains differences between Europeans and others. The hospitality of the Africans replaces their savagery, though their complexion and lack of clothing still visibly distinguish them from Europeans and from Xury. Human commodities do not initially characterize Crusoe's trading from Britain to Guinea, and, while the difference between enslaver and enslaved is crucial, the novel also shows Moors as slave traders. The category of the slave is not exclusively reserved for Africans, nor is it represented as a permanent state for either Crusoe or Xury. For the Maresco Xury to be positioned as the naturalized slave rather than a West African speaks volumes about the significance of his religious status in comparison to other racialized categories at this time. For example, in A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern (1757), there are several pictures of people from Egypt and Barbary, including an African woman, a noble lady of Alexandria, a woman of Fez, an Ethiopian, and a Morisco slave (illustrations were commonly copied from seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel narratives).28 Of all these people, the features of the Morisco slave are the most stereotypically African. The signification of "slave" as black African seems fairly stable in this instance. Moreover, some critics have been confused about Xury's color and national origins. Stephen Hymer, who identifies Xury as "a black Man," explains Xury's commodity status as a function of his nation (incorrectly identified in his text): "An African is an African, and only under certain conditions does he become a slave."29 Despite the way that Xury has been associated with black Africans, the first illustration of Xury in Robinson Crusoe depicts him as a boyish replica of Crusoe, including the same clothing and coloring as well as the possession of a gun.3o While the novel helps produce European difference from Moors and West Africans, this interest is never as great as Crusoe's difference from the Caribs.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms IV

The remainder of Robinson Crusoe locates the main character in the Caribbean on an uninhabited island and then briefly in Europe. Unlike the frequent encounters with other populations in Africa and Brazil, Crusoe spends much of this part of the novel alone. His significant relations are with the largely absent Caribs, Friday, and other Europe- ans, especially the Spaniard and the English captain. Section four examines the same categories that were relevant in an African context: the savage, especially the cannibal, the Christian, the slave, and the indentured servant. Unlike Africa, in the Caribbean, it is not black but white skin color that has the most meaning, and the emphasis on the absence of clothing is more fully developed in relation to the Caribs than it was to the Africans. Multiplicity disrupts the establishment of boundaries. There are three related issues that I explain by this focus on difference and multiplicity: 1) the construction of Friday as neither a savage nor an African in the novel, 2) the depiction of Friday and the Caribs as Africans on the 1720 frontispiece to Serious Reflections on the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and, 3) the changeability of Friday's status as a savage, servant, or a slave. While Friday displays a lingering penchant for human flesh and is reluctant to give up his belief in Benamuckee, the novel distinguishes Friday from other savages in remarkable ways. The key terms of cannibal, Christian, and slave share a long history in signifying European superiority. In general, the novel sets up a binary of the savage versus the Christian European and stages this distinction in Africa and the Caribbean. As several interpretive works on the eighteenth century suggest, the savage was linked to ideologies of European empire and race at this time.3' The Amerindians, in general, constituted one if not the most significant population of savages. This system producing the savage and the European operates through its attendant visible racialized categories-especially the absence or presence of clothing and skin color. Savagery comprises, most importantly, cannibalism, paganism, and nakedness. The novel establishes a cluster of boundaries for differences between populations centered on attributes of savagery, and the most casual assumption is just what a "savage" might be; the word litters the text and is the primary label of difference.32 The outstanding characteristic of the savage was cannibalism, and this practice stands in for religious practice. For example, until the eighteenth century, Caribs signified "the most extreme form of savagery. Truculent by nature and eating human flesh by inclination, they stood

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms opposed to all the tenets of Christian and civilized behaviour."33 Richard Blackmore, Defoe's contemporary, identified Indians as "a middle Spe- cies ... a humane salvage Beast."34 Not surprisingly, then, in Africa and the Caribbean, cannibalism is the motivating fear most constitutive of Crusoe's subjectivity and his ideas about the inhabitants. In the Carib- bean, Crusoe's fear is subsequently "justified" in narrative terms by his repeated witnessing of the primal scene of cannibalism.35 Initially, the unsubstantiated fear of cannibals results in Crusoe's altering his mode of production from a subsistence-based to a surplus economy (164); then the first visual verification of cannibalism leads Crusoe to vomit at the scene of frenzied ingestion. Immediately he thanks God "that had cast my first lot in a part of the world where I was distinguished from such dreadful creatures as these" (172). Crusoe's security in his difference from cannibals participates in a larger cultural phenomenon; in The Man-Eating Myth, W. Arens demonstrates that "anthropology has a clear-cut vested interest in maintaining some crucial cultural boundaries-of which the cannibalistic boundary is one-and [in] constantly reinforcing subjective conclusions about the opposition between the civilized and savage."''36 This same desire to maintain the boundary between the civilized and the savage may be found in most European travel literature and fiction located in the Atlantic, of which Robinson Crusoe is an outstanding instance. Since the early sixteenth century, Carib savagery, signified most strongly by cannibalism, had been a justification for their enslavement; Europeans had long distinguished between Amerindians and cannibals-at least in theory. Amerindians were members of sovereign nations; cannibals had foreclosed the question of rights by virtue of their threatening behavior. This combination of cannibalism and enslavement constituted a major racialized boundary. In The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, David Brion Davis sketches the shifts in policies and attitudes about Amerindians as slaves.37 From time to time in North and South America, enslavement of the Amerindians was forbidden.38 For example, in 1537, the Pope declared that the Indians were rational beings capable of Christianity and therefore could not be deprived of their natural liberty; the resistance of the European colonists under- mined this policy a year later, and they continued to force Amerindians into slavery.39 In contrast, twenty-six years before the Papal policy of forbidding Amerindian enslavement, a Spanish royal edict "defined as Caribs any Indians who were hostile to Europeans, behaved violently, or consumed human flesh. Caribs, the edict concluded, were without souls, and so were suitable subjects for the slave trade."40 Thus, while enslaving

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms inhabitants of the islands was prohibited since the Pope considered their spiritual welfare paramount over the economic interests of the colonialists, cannibals, on the other hand, were legitimate candidates for slavery.41 Interestingly, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe revises its identification of Friday and his nation as Caribees, thereby eroding a "valid" reason for their massacre and enslavement on the island. Historically, one way that Europeans had made Caribs and cannibals equivalent connected their threatening behavior to their alleged monstrous appearance. From Columbus's third voyage onward, there was a close association between cannibals and hideous appearance. Europeans did not have to witness acts of cannibalism to confirm that a certain group of people were cannibals and hence "legitimate" candidates for servitude or eradication: they could tell by looking at the Caribs.42 Furthermore, Columbus's text reveals the use of cannibalism as a theme once the possibility and profitability of a slave trade seemed likely to materialize. This increasingly naturalized cluster of terms should alert us that where Europeans "find" cannibals, their enslavement often ensues, and Robinson Crusoe repeats such a pattern. Arens further argues that by the sixteenth century, "resistance and cannibalism became synony- mous and also legitimized the barbaric Spanish reaction."43 Europeans thereby developed an imaginary visual referent for the failure to comply with their terms. There were, however, other histories of more favorable Amerindian representations that challenged this older mode of meaning and that could be applied to Friday. If cannibalism is the most important practice signifying savagery, then Christianity is the most significant feature constituting European identity in Robinson Crusoe.44 The paganism of savages is threatening in a different way than is their cannibalism; again, the Amerindians rather than the Moors or West Africans are the ideological center of this concern in the novel. All other boundaries of difference are represented as secondary: national origin, skin color, mode of governance, and use of Western technology. The most thoughtful and extended musings in Robinson Crusoe about differences between people concern religion, those to whom God reveals the light and those from whom God hides the light. Crusoe can account for this difference only in terms of a rough geographic injustice (172), which permits some nations to be Christian and "forces" others to be sinners and punishes them in their absence from God. The ideological work of such developed speculations about religious difference makes these apparent or visible global inequalities seem to be divinely ordained and sanctioned instead of man-made and temporally convenient to European domination.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In Robinson Crusoe, religious difference remains paramount despite the multiple categories it introduces. For example, Crusoe's delight in Friday leads him to question what he had previously believed: that God had taken

from so great a part of the world of His creatures, the best uses to which their faculties and the powers of their souls are adapted; yet that He has bestowed upon them the same powers, the same reason, the same affections, the same sentiments of kindness and obligation, the same passions and resentments of wrongs, the same sense of gratitude, sincerity, fidelity, and all the capacities of doing good and receiving good, that He has given to us; . . . this made me very melancholly sometimes, ... why it has pleased God to hide the like saving knowledge from so many millions of souls. (212)

It is worth emphasizing that this meditation on savages, with Friday uppermost in his thoughts, leads Crusoe to enumerate all of the similarities between the Carib savages and European Christians. The single greatest difference is not located in appearance, mental prowess, or in technological sophistication but in God's inexplicable will. Crusoe finds this "arbitrary a disposition of things" worrying, and it makes him momentarily disbelieve. He notes, however, "But I shut it up," and he concludes in a stunning non sequitur that "if these creatures were all sentenced to absence from Himself, it was on account of sinning against that light" (212). Note the shift here from an arbitrary to a just God. These disruptive questions lead not to permanent doubt but to a comforting reinsertion of polarization. This section of the novel on religious difference also shows the most vagueness in the language assigning actual difference. Multiplicity is introduced in relation to determining the nature of the Caribs' difference. At the points when Crusoe seems most convinced of the Caribs' difference, the text often fails to account for it satisfactorily; the several terms referring to the Caribs are a symptom of such a failure. Determin- ing the status of the Amerindians in relation to God proves challenging for Crusoe, and it produces Caribs, specifically cannibals, as the most unstable category of difference. Crusoe alternately refers to the Caribs as "criminals," "prisoners," "sinners," and "sovereign nation," and it is never clear which terms will suffice to represent their relation either to God or Crusoe-except through ad hoc practice. Finally, it seems, Crusoe's deliberations lead him to conclude that the national character of the Carib crimes means he cannot intervene or kill them because they have not harmed him by their rituals of cannibalism (179, 233). Eventually,

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the Caribs' status as an independent nation triumphs momentarily over religious difference; but the sight of an European victim completely resolves Crusoe's intentions toward the Caribs. Thus, significant issues of multiplicity are raised only to be falsely resolved into previously available paradigms of European and Christian superiority. Despite the priority that the novel places on Christianity, Robinson Crusoe reflects the increasing influence of other categories of difference emerging in colonial narratives. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most important category of difference, Christian, became less dominant: in addition to religion, European and national origin, slavery, and/or skin color all served as competing divisions between Europeans and people both of Amerindian and African descent. While color emerged as a new category at this time, its predomi- nance was not assured.45 Winthrop Jordan argues that in the mid- seventeenth century, there was more than one shift in the terminology that colonists used to describe themselves (in relation to other colonial populations): "From the initially most common term Christian, at mid- century there was a marked drift toward English and free. After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term appeared-white."46 Between 1660 and 1690, slavery shifts to a more permanent, hereditary state; in the colonies, the term "white" emerges at this time, especially in reference to European indentured servants.47 Even though the terms differ, they all contrast Europeans to other people that they encounter in the Atlantic. In the novel, the differences among Europeans are not as important ideologically as their similarities. Contact with non-Europeans thus raised the issue of racialized differences competing for dominance, and they carried quite different emphases: religion, national origin, ownership of property, or skin color were variously changeable conditions and differently (in)visible. The novel situates Europeans in a kinship by virtue of a common Christian heritage, the wearing of clothes, use of firearms, skin color, and linked national economies, especially between the Portuguese and English in Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic empire. The threat of the Amerindians also assures the provisional equality of European men. An illustration of the way that multiple categories of difference interchangeably construed boundaries between Europeans and others is particularly noticeable when Friday alerts Crusoe that the next victim of the cannibals "was not one of their [Friday's peoples'] nation, but one of the bearded men, who he had told me of, that came to their country in the boat." Crusoe responds: "I was filled with horror at the very naming

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the white bearded man ... I saw plainly by my glass a white man who lay upon the beach ... and that he was an European, and had cloaths on" (233).48 These important visible differences Crusoe draws between Europeans and savages trigger his anger and result in the massacre of the cannibals. This scene of a potential European victim marks the change in the island from an individual to a corporate colonial relation in which the Europeans produce a domestic labor population comprised of Friday and his father and fight a hostile enemy population composed of the native enemies of Friday's village. Despite the assurance that cannibalism is the most important attribute of savagery, the novel is unclear about the most important term to represent nonsavages. Crusoe's first contact with the Spaniard on the island reveals such an undecidability: Crusoe "asked him in the Portu- guese tongue what he was. He answered in Latin, 'Christianus'; .. . I asked him what countryman he was, and he said, 'Espagniole"' (235). Obviously, in terms of representing Europeans to each other, "white" was not an appropriate response, but it is notable that religious markers carry more meaning than national ones at this point. The novel vacillates between the designation "Christian" and "white" (although the Spaniard first identifies himself as a Christian, Crusoe sees him as white and European first), and "free" remains a crucial, if repressed, subtext always distinguishing Europeans in the Atlantic.49 Although Robinson Crusoe tends to downplay differences among Europeans, the Spanish occupy a hybrid position that the novel never satisfactorily resolves at the level of explanation. The Spanish are positioned between the civilized and the savage. Such a relation is best shown in the juxtaposition of Crusoe, Friday, his father, and the Spaniard whom Crusoe rescues from the cannibals. The British colonial architec- ture of power relations is most pronounced as these four prepare to increase food stores for the advent of the other Spaniards and Portu- guese residing with Friday's nation. This passages naturalizes British supremacy: Crusoe chooses trees for use, Friday and his father cut them down, and the Spaniard is the trusty middle manager. Crusoe refers to the Spaniard "to whom I imparted my thought on that affair [escape from the island], to oversee and direct their work" (246). As with Xury and the Portuguese captain, other Europeans negatively alter the configuration of power between Crusoe and his servant/companion. Musing on Spanish colonial relations as evidence of their tendency to participate in barbarity, Crusoe decides not to attack the Caribs because

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people, who, however they were idolaters and barbarians, and had several bloody and barbarious rites in their customs, . . . were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people. (178)

Because of this "unnatural piece of cruelty," "the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity, or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the product of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness" (178). Initially rejecting the Spanish model for conduct in the Americas, Crusoe finds more comfort in being "not Spanish" than in eradicating cannibals. Later, Crusoe claims that his fear of the Spaniards exceeds his fear of dismemberment by the cannibals. Imagining being made a prisoner in New Spain, where an Englishman was certain to be made a sacrifice, Crusoe observes: "I had rather be delivered up to the savages, and be devoured alive, than fall into the merciless claws of the priests, and be carry'd into the Inquisition" (243). Crusoe's inadequate solution to the Spaniards' potential savagery and treachery is a contract with them. The novel uses savagery as the linchpin not only to separate Europeans from those with whom they came in violent conflict in the Atlantic, but also to create hierarchies among Europeans. In this depiction of the Spanish in particular, the novel reveals profound anxiety about the control of the Atlantic islands. Yet, the novel clearly helps obscure the role other European powers had in making colonial conditions dangerous for each other. Many historians have documented the almost equal danger from the Caribs and other Europe- ans to the British in the West Indies.50 In the novel, however, the similarities among Europeans far outrank national differences and sectarian Christianity in the colonial context, implicitly indicating the overriding importance of European unity against the indigenous peoples. Such a desire, however, rarely transpired in the Atlantic empire: the major European nations capitalized on national and tribal rivalries among Amerindians to their advantage against each other, as did the native Caribs and other native Americans, in their turn. In Robinson Crusoe, we are left with the text's implicit assumption that because the Spanish are European and Christian, they are within non-savage boundaries, even though they act like savages in relation to Amerindians. There are several related categories that help maintain important visible differences between savages and Christians, especially the absence

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms or presence of clothing and, of course, skin color.51 The significance of clothing to identifying European difference from savages should not be underestimated. In both Africa and the Caribbean, Crusoe repeatedly notes the nakedness of the people; on the island, neither the gender nor the skin color of the Amerindians are as important as their absence of clothing and cannibalism. One way that the several scenes involving clothing gather meaning foregrounds European superiority at crucial junctures in the novel. For example, when Crusoe is determined to attack the cannibals, he indicates their inferiority in this way: "I do not mean that I entertained any fear of their number; for as they were naked, unarmed wretches, 'tis certain I was superior to them" (232). Technol- ogy, particularly in the form of weaponry, is a feature of Europeans clothing; guns especially are important accessories. The symbolic value of clothing distinguishes Crusoe from savages in other scenes. First, Crusoe accounts for why he cannot bear nakedness despite the weather: "it is true that the weather was so violent hot that there was no need of cloaths, yet I could not go quite naked; no, tho' I had been inclined to it, which I was not, nor could not abide the thoughts of it, tho' I was all alone" (144). The blistering sun does not fully account for his lack of inclination, but it may be more understandable given that clothing helps maintain his difference from savages. Another crucial scene involving the presence of clothing concerns identifying Friday in his new status as "not cannibal." Notably, it is only after Crusoe discourages Friday's lingering desire for human flesh that he is clothed European style (210). Crusoe reveals an uneasiness about the issue of clothing, indicating that it is impractical in the tropical climate though necessary as a sign of his distinction from naked savages. At different times, Crusoe is nearly naked or burdensomely over clothed.52 Robinson Crusoe even questions the general sense of Europeans claim to civility; at these points, difference from savages seems entirely incidental. For example, realizing that tools and clothing obtained from the ship separate him from savages, Crusoe worries: "how I must have acted if I had got nothing out of the ship; . .. that I should have lived, if I had not perished, like a meer savage; that if I had killed a goat or a fowl, ... [I] must gnaw it with my teeth and pull it with my claws like a beast" (141). Even the sensitive issue of cannibalism is both abhorred (for savages) and understood as a potential survival tactic for Europeans (see 192). Crusoe's distrust of the Englishmen who arrive at the end of the novel is dramatized by Friday's comment that Englishmen will eat prisoners as well as savage men (250). Thus, this double standard for

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms clothing and cannibalism is another way that Robinson Crusoe repro- duces contradictions and qualifications of its seeming rigid divisions. Unlike savagery and Christianity, or even clothing, complexion is not fully exploited for its potential to carry a strong load of ideological difference. Instead, skin color plays a significant secondary role; for instance, Crusoe uses whiteness as an identifying distinction of Europe- ans (as opposed to Friday who uses the presence of beards as an alternative system of difference).53 Because Crusoe's culturally produced criteria associate Christians, Europeans, and white bearded men, his seeing a European fall victim to the cannibals develops the colonial plot. This palpably seen and felt kinship leads to the destruction of those who are clearly other (234). In terms of the Caribs, Crusoe connects the ugliness of their skin color to a general sense of their disagreeableness, not unlike the traditional association between cannibals and hideous appearance discussed earlier. The Caribs' complexion is not represented directly in the novel, even when Crusoe describes the cannibal scenes; instead, he refers to their color obliquely as "ugly yellow nauseous tawny" (208). This comment is embedded in the description of Friday, in which Crusoe is at great pains to be exact about Friday's comparatively attractive color-"very tawny" (208).54 Thus, complexion is most frequently part of a larger cluster of differences and not able, on its own, to signify racial boundaries as strongly as savagery or Christianity. The novel's difficulty in defining the precise nature of Amerindians and Europeans, especially in terms of Friday, may be explained by an alternative tradition of representing Amerindians. They were not depicted solely as fierce cannibals in other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century narratives. Although Amerindians were sometimes considered black, they were more likely to be considered visually akin to Europeans, much more so than Africans, for instance. An important reason that Friday looks and acts so differently from the rest of the Caribs may be explained by this alternative tradition. The category of Carib was not fixed, then, especially not in terms of representation because of the Amerindian's widely perceived physical similarity to Europeans. Jean Baptiste du Tertre in 1667 provides a typical example: "Only skin color distinguishes them from us, for they have bronzed skin, the colour of olives."55 In fact, Richard Bradley, a contemporary of Defoe's, related the dominant perception of Amerindians as "a sort of White Men in America (as I am told) that only differ from us in having no Beards."56 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Amerindians were often illus- trated as naked, beardless versions of Europeans; frequently, they were

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms considered white, because artificially colored (by roucou), and indeed, quite similar in coloring to the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Italians, being only a slightly more tanned version. Despite an occasionally more favorable representational history than Africans, Amerindians did not escape murder or enslavement either.' Such a defining ideological pressure helps explain not only the representation of the character Friday, but also Toni Morrison's critique of Friday as the native image of the Englishman Crusoe. Turning to the analysis of Crusoe and Friday, I argue that their juxtaposition redistributes the historic representation of boundaries between Carib and savage as well as between Christian and European. Thus, the representation of Friday furthers the case for multiplicity rather than only difference between Europeans and Caribs. Two pivotal scenes in the novel illustrate the way that Robinson Crusoe simultaneously establishes and undermines racialized differences. These scenes seem to establish clear boundaries of difference; yet, they are ultimately more interesting for the way that they question the stability of racialized boundaries. In each case, the passage describes the appearance of Friday and Crusoe through Crusoe's eyes. The most significant feature in comparing the two is the lack of symmetry in the narrative object: Crusoe defines Friday by his body and himself by his clothing.58 However, despite this telling difference, the effect of these scenes makes imprecise the primary boundaries of savage and European Christian. At first glance, the description of Friday appears to attend to the terms of his difference from Crusoe. The careful description is as follows:

He was a comely handsome fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong limbs, not too large; tall and well shaped, . . . twenty six years of age. He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but seemed to have something very manly in his face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his forehead very high and large, and a great vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes. The colour of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians, and other natives of America are; but of a bright kind of a dun olive colour, that had in it something very agreeable, tho' not very easy to describe. His face was round and plump; his nose small, not flat like the negroes, a very good mouth, thin lips, and his fine teeth well set, and white as ivory. (208-9)

This passage is key in preparing us to read Friday, not in his difference from Crusoe, but in his difference from Africans and other Amerindians.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Most critics who mention this passage reiterate that Friday is not of African descent in order to specify his difference from Africans, but not necessarily his similarity to Europeans. In terms of the eighteenth century, Crusoe's first observations about Friday carry positive connotations, including his seeing a European countenance as somehow present in Friday's visage. The rest of the physical description explicitly distinguishes Friday from a West African: "not curled like wool," "not quite black," "nose small, not flat like the negroes," "thin lips." Yet, in terms of color, Friday is contrasted favorably, not only to Africans as we might expect, but primarily to other American Indians. More importantly, this description aligns him with Europeans in terms of intangibles, such as "sweetness and softness," yet distinguishes him from other Amerindians in terms of attitude and skin color: "not a fierce and surly aspect," and "not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny." Clearly we are meant to share in Friday'sje ne sais quoi that resembles a European, and does not, that resembles a Brazilian or Virginian, and does not. Among the first attributes that Crusoe notes are Friday's "strength and swiftness" (205); it is not until four pages later that he mentions Friday's nakedness and preference for men's flesh (209), the two overriding and, in fact, sole characteristics of the group from which Friday comes acknowledged in the novel. Such an important contradic- tion stems from the narrative desire for Friday to be simultaneously both a savage and a Christian. Although the novel introduces Crusoe's initial intentions to treat Friday as a slave or a servant, his subsequent desire to convert Friday to Christianity raises the issue of whether Friday's status then may be "upgraded." An ideological compromise constructs Friday as an exceptional savage and silences this issue. Not surprisingly, Crusoe's self-representation implicitly establishes his difference from Africans and Caribs, but the description also reveals his difference from other Europeans. In the representation of Friday cited above, Crusoe tries but fails to establish an essence of Friday's distinction; here, Crusoe represents himself in his difference from the reader and from himself as he was in England. But, as part of the system signifying "European," Crusoe describes what is on his body rather than the body itself, as with Friday. For instance, he imagines

had any one in England been to meet such a man as I was, it must either have frighted them, or raised a great deal of laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at my self, I could not but smile at the notion of my travelling through Yorkshire, with such an equipage, and in such a dress. Be pleased to take a sketch of my figure, as follows. (158)

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The description centers on Crusoe's clothing: goat skin hat with a flap hanging down behind, a short jacket of goat skin with tails to mid thigh, open-kneed breeches with goat hair hanging down to the middle of his legs, and buskins to cover his legs. Carrying a saw and hatchet on his belt, a powder pouch and shot on his body, Crusoe also totes a basket on his back, a gun on his shoulder, and the goat-skin umbrella. "As for my face, the colour of it was really not so moletta-like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten degrees of the equinox" (158). Crusoe's one concession to fashion rather than function- ality is his whiskers, which, because of their style and length, visibly distinguish him both from other Europeans who wear beards, and from Moors and Amerindians who do not: "I had trimmed [my moustache] into a large pair of Mahometan whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks who I saw at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such, tho' the Turks did; . .. they were of a length and shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have passed for frightful" (159). Here, Crusoe represents his body as laden with Western artifacts and tools, though his European fashion is fabricated with native materials. Moreover, Crusoe's body is a fortified body, not unlike the structures he builds to protect himself from the savages. His facial hair, clothing, and accouterments, however, are every bit as foreign as the Carib's nakedness that he subsequently observes. Overall, there is very little in his self- representation to distinguish him as essentially European, even though his own color, "not so moletta-like" from the intensity of the sun as he imagined, changes the least of all. In fact, in terms of color, Crusoe fails to correspond to other Europeans who are called "white." His complexion is closer to Friday's: tawny and mulatto were often associated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.59 Yet, the presence of the whiskers connects him to the Spaniards. In the description of Crusoe and of Friday, especially, it is possible to detect a pattern of partially collapsed boundaries of difference characteristic of the novel. Initially, the representation of Friday seems to suggest the construction of colonial desire for the other only as different; in the case of Crusoe, the description at first seems to confirm the way he recreates himself in the image of a typical European. Yet, as I have indicated, neither passage maintains a stable representation of difference between savage and European: in the one, there is a Europeanized savage; in the other, a barbaric-looking European. The collapse of absolute difference between savage and European supports the idea that the savage, and Carib in particular, is a complicated category, especially in terms of Friday.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms As I have suggested, Friday compromises the effort to distinguish Europeans from savages. While Robinson Crusoe can describe Africans for us, the novel cannot provide a description of the cannibals, despite Crusoe's intensive gazing and habitual monitoring of the cannibal feasts. Their cannibalism is represented as the only sign of their difference; the description of Friday, on the contrary, is one of the most sustained in the novel. Because Friday becomes the desired other for Crusoe, he must be and yet cannot be the same as the Caribs. Friday is Robinson Crusoe's "solution" to the narrow boundary between legitimate Caribs, or unenslavable inhabitants, and cannibals. The text retains the hideous cannibals (many of whom are massacred by the Europeans) but puts one of them (who does not resemble the others) in servitude, thereby providing a relationship in which power clearly remains in European hands but allows an individual Amerindian's spiritual welfare to be attended to." Such a pattern of religious conversion in the Caribbean repeats the terms of Xury's exchange between Crusoe and the Portu- guese captain, but this time, Crusoe does not require liquid capital and keeps possession of Friday's labor. The economic nature of their relationship disappears as the spiritual and affectionate aspects are foregrounded. The pairing of spiritual welfare and religious conversion with free labor allows Crusoe to fill the role of a benefactor rather than an exploiter in terms of colonial plot and thematics. As sixteenth- and seventeenth- century documents reveal, many native American and Caribbean groups had befriended colonists, making their survival possible. Historically, the benefactor was not the European but the native, a reverse Robinson Crusoe and Friday situation. Thus, there is a splitting within the representation of Amerindians, of an individual from the whole; everything other than Friday's savagery is foregrounded. The emphasis that I have placed on aspects of racial multiplicity, especially the history of representing Amerindians as physically similar to Europeans and on the sustained physical description of Friday's body and demeanor, does not fully account for the persistent Africanization of Friday. Indeed, how is it possible to account for the first illustration of Friday and the Caribs which depicted them as African cannibals? In the early illustrations of the novel, particularly, the original frontispiece to The Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Friday appears with short, black curly hair and a black body, as do the rest of the Amerindians featured at a cannibal feast. Despite the novel's precision about the Caribs' color and savage attributes, and that the island is not in Africa but in the Caribbean, an aspect duly noted by the title page, the idea of savage or slave signified

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "African" rather than Carib: in the illustrations, those who were most clearly different from the Englishman Crusoe were Africanized. Already at the moment of publication, the text and its illustrations are telling different stories, reproducing confusion about Carib, slave, and Afri- can.6' In terms of Robinson Crusoe, visual difference seems more stable than discursive constructions. An important historical factor accounting for Friday's Africanization is the category of "Black Carib." Several slave shipwrecks over the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries resulted in the Amerindians assimilating the survivors.62 Moreover, on St. Vincent in 1674, there were reports of Africans as well as Englishmen living with Caribs (who had been carried off when young); of the African population, some of them lived with the Caribs through intermarriage, some as slaves, and others in a neighboring nation of Maroons." Because of intermarriage between Africans and Amerindians, there was a literal blending, giving rise to what were known as "Black Caribs," who were considered particularly dangerous." Some of the confusion about the difference and/or relation between Caribs and Africans did not result solely from substituting an imported labor force for the indigenous one, but from other political and cultural factors of oppressed populations resisting European assimilation. The notion of equivalence or exchangeability between different designated laboring forces may be explained partially by a desire for a numerous and inexpensive labor force and by the population dispersals conducted by Europeans in the Atlantic.'5 There are several other important ways to account for the complexity of Friday's representation in the novel, especially his Africanization. One way to explain the critical rewriting of Friday as an African involves more recent ideologies of race and slavery: Friday is most often remembered as Crusoe's slave, and slave has come to be connected almost exclusively to Africans, despite the fact that Europeans enslaved both Africans and Amerindians. But there are aspects of the novel's publication, the narrative itself, and other historical conditions that promote such a link. A confusion between Caribs and Africans arises because Caribs are the focus of the novel precisely at the time when Africans had become the most significant other laboring population in the Atlantic world.66 A rarely noted factor contributing to the Africanization of Friday and to imagining him as a slave rather than a servant is the discrepancy between the narrative time and the publication date. The text, published in 1719, is a narrative placed in the 1640s-1690s.67 The events of the book roughly correspond to the historical situation of the mid-seventeenth century as opposed to the time of publication, though Robinson Crusoe

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms does not reflect either historical period accurately. Between the narrative time and 1719, the changed territorial, economic, and labor conditions alone were sufficient to introduce several possibilities for confusion. By the 1660s, the British West Indies had shifted from a dominant system of indentured servants to a slave economy for the production of sugar; and, for the first time, people of African descent outnumbered the European population on many islands. But, Indians still occupied some of the Caribbean islands and were considered formidable enemies, though they were enslaved and murdered at increasing rates during the seventeenth century; by 1719, they were less powerful in the Caribbean.68 Further- more, in the mid-seventeenth century, the status of Africans as slaves in British colonies was less rigid than in 1719 because not always permanent or hereditary. "It was only in the period from 1680 to 1710 that hereditary lifetime African slavery was first regularly instituted.""69 These tremendous changes in the role of colonies and labor fall between the narrative time and actual composition of Robinson Crusoe; they help explain one interpretation of Friday as simultaneously a savage, slave, servant, and Christian. To further analyze the complexity of Friday's representation, I demonstrate that slave, servant, African, and Amerindian are changing racialized categories between the narrative time and publication. Such a focus makes a final case for the importance of racial multiplicity to reading Robinson Crusoe and other colonial narratives in the early eighteenth century. Crusoe refers to Friday interchangeably as a "savage," "slave," and "servant." Neither slave nor servant in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries carried the distinction that those terms do now. Such a simultaneous focus on the shifting categories of slave and servant also explains the persistent Africanization of Friday and, perhaps, accounts for the changeability of Xury's position earlier in the novel. Initially, when Crusoe sees Friday, before he meets him, he automati- cally connects Friday to servitude: "It came now very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was my time to get me a servant, and perhaps a companion or assistant; and that I was called plainly by Providence to save this poor creature's life" (206). This uncertainty about Friday's relation to Crusoe is already present in the slippage among servant, companion, and assistant, which persists until the novel ends. Before religion has intervened as the determining discourse of difference in his interpretation of Friday, Crusoe perceives him ultimately as adopting the role of prisoner (207), and it is Friday's actions that Crusoe interprets as establishing him as a slave. Crusoe explains Friday's reaction as stemming from fear of him:

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms I cou'd then perceive that he stood trembling, as if he had been taken prisoner, and had just been to be killed, as his two enemies were. I beckoned him again to come to me, and gave him all the signs of encouragement ... he came nearer ... kneeling down every ten or twelve steps in token of acknowledgment for my saving his life ... he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever. (206-7)

Later, Crusoe also refers to Friday as a companion (213), but "companion" is entirely compatible with a subordinate. While the text wavers between defining Friday as either a slave or a servant in the Caribbean, Friday's status as a servant seems more secure in Europe.70 In fact, in the novel, Crusoe uses the word "slave" only once in interpreting Friday's putting his head underneath Crusoe's foot. In Colonial Encounters, Peter Hulme offers two insights that account for the complex relation between Friday and slavery: Crusoe's relationship with Friday functions as "a veiled and disavowed reference to the more pressing issue of black slavery" and "within the fiction the term 'slave' can be avoided because Friday's servitude is voluntary, not forced."71 Although Hulme does not explore the issue of indentured servitude, his argument does acknowledge the undecidability in the novel's representation of Friday's status. In the Caribbean, the category "slave" was used primarily for Africans but also for Amerindians; "servant" might refer to any population, though most commonly to people of Irish, Scottish, and English descent who initially dominated the category of indentured servants. It is in relation to these populations of servants that "white" first emerged as a term of identity. Conditions of slavery and servitude changed for Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians throughout colonial contact; in general they improved primarily for Europeans. But, as I have argued, the ability to be defined as "free" rather than as a slave or servant changed continually for all populations. Because "slave" produced both African and Amerindian difference from Europeans on the one hand, and difference between Africans and Amerindians on the other hand, it was an unstable category in theory. Lastly, Europeans treated Caribs and Africans differently sometimes and similarly at other times; the Caribs' relation to Africans and to Europeans was not firmly established in the realm of representation either. The novel plots the political/economic transition from the colonies as subsistence-based economies to profit- making concerns in terms of Crusoe's own fortunes and his attendant "need" for cheap labor (see 55). Such a transition also meant that "slave"

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms became a much more rigid category, especially for people of African descent.72 Friday reflects the indeterminacy between the categories "slave" and "servant" and the complexity of the designation "Carib" at this time of change. Indeed, in the mid-seventeenth century, the distinctions between slave and indentured servant were not always as significant as the similarities in terms of their value and treatment as individual labor units and as an overall labor force. As a slave in Morocco, Crusoe exemplifies such a blurring of status as do both Xury and Friday in relation to Crusoe. Hilary Beckles's White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbadoes, 1627-1715 focuses on the connections between slave and servant status in the British West Indies and on the way that African slavery systemati- cally replaced other forms of servitude in the mid-seventeenth century. The Africanization of Friday, combined with this changeable designation as savage, slave, servant, and companion to Crusoe, reflects and participates in the ideological confusion generated by such far-reaching changes in colonial relations. Noting that British planters were committed to a white indentured labor force before the mid-century shift to a sugar- driven economy, Beckles provides convincing interpretive evidence for the negligible planter distinction between indentured servants and slaves in terms of the market use of labor.73 Both indentured servants and slaves, no matter what their national origin, worked in the fields and at other unskilled manual labor jobs. Both populations were subject to kidnap- ping from their country of origin, to restraining in the ship's decks during the middle passage, and to general conditions of trade, such as medical inspection and auction; both were corporally punished, used to repay debts, and were valued in terms of other commodities such as cotton bales or livestock for trade or sale.74 Planters regarded indentured servants as "temporary chattels."''75 In fact, until the African slave economy dominated the West Indies in the 1650s, indentured servants were considered a better short-term investment because they did not require training and were a preferred form of debt repayment. The supply of indentured servants never met the demand, and it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that planter demands for indentured servants abated. By then, the price of slaves had decreased dramatically and the price of servants had doubled.7' Thus, during the narrative time of Robinson Crusoe, the category of servant was not reliably different from slave in many instances; slaves could become servants and indentured servants could become "free" servants. Indeed, well into the mid-eighteenth century there were narratives of British citizens sold into slavery in the Americas. In the

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms novel, the relations that Crusoe enters into as owner of others' labor are much more perfunctory than his relation to Xury or Friday: one European servant under six years' bond, one permanent European servant, and one African slave. This example emphasizes the several categories of labor and some crucial differences between Europeans and Africans. Both Friday and Xury elicit different narrative treatment. Crusoe's treatment of Friday situates him in a hybrid position that alternates among laboring slave, trusted servant, and affectionate companion as well as fellow Christian. Friday's crossing of the most significant aspect of European identity represents a dilemma. As The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe suggests, Crusoe persisted in referring to Friday as "my trusty savage" despite his servitude, European clothing, English-language acquisition, conversion and adherence to Christian- ity.77 I have focused first on Xury and then on Friday to argue that emergent racialized categories of difference are indeed produced but are not stable in either the literary or social text, and that the dynamics of the early colonial situation called rigid boundaries between servant and slave into question. Indeed, Robinson Crusoe participates in reframing colonial paradigms to a more palatable interpretation of power differences than actually existed. For example, the depiction of Friday, Crusoe, and Xury focuses on slavery as an individual and even temporary phenomenon and not as the systemic oppression necessary to a success- ful colonial empire. Particularly in characterizing Crusoe's relation to Xury and Friday, slavery is suppressed in favor of servitude. To return briefly to Toni Morrison's claim that the Senate Confirma- tion Hearings reordered the signifying fictions of 'natural servant' and savage demon' through the bodies of Thomas and Hill: my analysis suggests that their application to people of African descent is not inevitable historically.78 Friday and the Caribs represent the splitting of these two signifying fictions in Robinson Crusoe. That they later became a crucial legacy of North American slavery is another, though related, story. I have shown the significance of savagery and Christian civilization to early eighteenth-century ideologies of racialized difference as well as the reliance of these categories on cannibalism and the presence of clothing to bolster their power of signification. Simply opposing Crusoe to Xury and Friday in interpreting the novel erases a significant aspect of European colonialism-its contradictory histories of contact and oppression. Thus, a reading practice emphasizing multiple categories of race makes a difference to the terms upon which modern readers interpret the novel. By selecting connections between Xury and Friday rather than

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms simply focusing on Crusoe, I have argued that despite the reality of British domination in the African slave trade and in the Caribbean, Robinson Crusoe represents the complexity of changing colonial paradigms during the early eighteenth century and reflects some of the confusion that they represented and elicited. Bringing both racialized difference and multiplicity to bear on Robinson Crusoe allows me to analyze not only the way in which categories other than skin color were racialized but also the way in which they were flexible and permeable categories. Robinson Crusoe helps demonstrate that colonialism was not simply staged between white and black men- nor even between Europeans and Amerindians-and brings to the foreground the way that the desire for clearer boundaries of difference has always informed both the writing and subsequent readings of Robinson Crusoe.

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

NOTES

1 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1965). All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page. Throughout the essay, the term "race" carries the following definition: it is a historically changing political construction in all parts of the globe, not an essential condition. 2 By social text, I refer to the historical, political, and psycho-sexual representation of race, cannibalism, slavery, and servitude in other contemporary eighteenth-century texts and to the material relations of colonialism generally in the mid-seventeenth century to the time of Robinson Crusoe's publication. Because of considerations of length and because I wish to establish the key points about categories of race in the early eighteenth century, the important issue of the way that savage, Christian, and slave are also informed by gendered categories is unexamined here. In general, I would contend that a subordinate masculinity is accorded Friday, for example. 3 In volume two, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, ed. George Aitken (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1899), Crusoe acknowledges that Friday is not, in fact, Carib: "the savages who came to my island were not properly those which we call Caribees, but islanders, and other barbarians of the same kind, who inhabited something nearer to our side than the rest" (52). I have retained the term "Carib" because in the novel it signifies savagery, especially cannibalism; such a specific reference, even if later repudiated, indicates its ideological power as a term of opposition to "European." Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (New York: Routledge, 1986) provides a thorough examination of the association between Carib and cannibal and the etymology of other Amerindian naming, especially in chapters one and two. 4 Toni Morrison, "Introduction: Friday on the Potomac," Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992). 5 Bernard McGrane's Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York:

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Columbia Univ. Press, 1989) and Patrick Brantlinger's Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America (New York: Routledge, 1990) are exemplary cultural analyses of Robinson Crusoe and Friday as a paradigm of colonial relations. McGrane examines the shifting history of European conceptions of difference from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Robinson Crusoe was McGrane's choice as a representative text of the Enlightenment's concept of the other. That is, the representation of Friday tells us not about Caribs but about the British. There are literally dozens of other recently published popular articles that use Crusoe as a cultural paradigm including essays about travel, economic behavior, and children's games. Add to this the scores of translations and adaptations of the novel since its publication in 1719 as evidence that Robinson Crusoe is still an important cultural text. Michael Seidel develops the novel's significance today, especially in chapters one and two of Robinson Crusoe: Island Myths and the Novel (Boston: Twayne, 1991). 6 Morrison (note 4), x. 7 Morrixon, xvi. 8 Morrison, xxiii. Some critics speculate that Selkirk and Defoe actually met. Angus Ross's introduction to The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (note 1) strongly connects the novel with Selkirk: Robinson Crusoe was "based on the central incident in the life of an undisciplined Scot, Alexander Selkirk" (301). Ross's introduction is an example of the critical excision of everything but the island experience: "Crusoe's preliminary adventures with the Moors are of tangential interest to the island story, and the book tends to tail off with the rather slack account of his journey back to England" (301). This abridgment is typical of the desire to contain Crusoe to a single meaningful and unified experience and colonial relationship. There has been significant critical attention to subsequent novels that recast the deserted island scenario of Robinson Crusoe; see, for a recent approach, Martin Green, Robinson Crusoe's Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1990). 9 Section four extensively addresses the conditions under which the Europeanization and Africanization of Amerindians in general and Friday in particular are possible. 10 Morrison (note 4), xxiii. 10 Interestingly, there are other national confusions in Morrison's remembering of the novel. She recalls a scene of Spanish mutineers, some of whom Crusoe saves, because worthy, and some of whom are singled out as villains for slaughter (xxvii). Morrison observes: "This discrimination [recognition of difference within a group] is never applied to Friday's people" (xxvii). In fact, in the novel, the mutineers are English and thus she erases European difference. Moreover, Morrison neglects to mention that Friday and his father are represented as different from the rest of the cannibals in significant ways. In another example, Morrison mistakenly points out that Friday's father does not return from his island, but that the Spaniard does: "once his services [Friday's father] are no longer needed, there is no mention of him again" (xxvii). But both the Spaniard and Friday's father remain outside the text after they go to retrieve the other Spanish and Portuguese men. In fact, neither resurfaces until the second volume, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). The effect of replacing the English with the Spanish confounds who Crusoe valued and who he did not and thus (falsely) solidifies her case for the insignificance of the native. 12 The scientific racism of the middle to late nineteenth-century featured discourses of biological inferiority, using everything from skull measurements to nationalized notions of blood types. In comparison to scientific racism, the most basic difference of Defoe's time

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms is that race was generally thought to be a result of external factors or chance historical conditions, not an individual and group pathology. See Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982) and Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1978) for a general discussion of the historical development of the idea. 13 Morrison (note 4), xxv, xxix, xxviii. While one could argue that Morrison's complaint of contamination is "true" of all discourse, I would want to agree with her argument that a bicultural or minority person entering hegemonic discourse and assuming a relatively empowered position frequently entails such "damage." Thus, I am arguing that hegemonic discursive power relations are particularly complex for a bicultural or minority person and should be discussed accordingly--not everyone enters them equally, contaminated through they "always already" are or negotiates them similarly. 14 Sumi Cho, "Korean Americans vs. African Americans: Conflict and Construction," in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), identifies the production of a model minority as "an embrace of 'racist love"' because the basis of that love is "to provide a public rationale for the ongoing subordination of non-Asian people of color. Because the embrace or love is not genuine, one cannot reasonably expect the architects truly to care about the health or well-being of the model minority" (203). 15 Of course, the black/white opposition is never borne out in social reality, but it does constitute the metaphysics of twentieth-century racism. 16 Strangely, the concentration on the island segment has not also meant that colonialism was considered the most relevant context until recently. The traditional focus on religious and economic aspects of the novel has allowed the novel to remain primarily a national text in the narrow sense of its geographic borders-the island often becoming a miniature England. 17 Several studies of Robinson Crusoe have connected the plot's impetus to desire, colonialism, and fear. See chapter two of John Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Maximillian Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 25-26, 34, and 37-64; and Maximillian Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1976), especially chapter two. 18 John Wolf, The Barbary Coast: Algiers Under the Turks, 1500-1800 (New York: Norton, 1979) shows that despite the fact that "Cromwell was the first to use naval power effectively for both the protection of commerce and the ransom of prisoners" that "Slaves not yet sold could be freed, but slaves purchased by individuals had become 'private property,' and both the English and the French kings respected 'private property' even though it happened to be an Englishman or a Frenchman" (159). Thus, as Robinson Crusoe confirms, all bodies can be property; for some it is an accident of fate, for others it is their fate. In 1720, Commodore Stewart, on orders from George I, ransomed 296 British subjects from North Africa, a fraction of the captive British population. See Stephen Clissold, The Barbary Slaves (New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), chapters 8 and 9. 19 Morgan Godwyn, The Negro's & Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church: or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negro's and Indians in our Plantations (London: J. D., 1680), 28. 20 Today, our recollection of European slavery in Algiers, Morocco, or Turkey is usually

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms associated with European women in the harems. Novelists such as Eliza Haywood in Philodore and Placentia (1727) and Penelope Aubin in The Noble Slaves (1722) wrote about European slaves of both sexes. 21 In Robinson Crusoe, "Moors" signify Muslim inhabitants of northwest Africa, particularly Morocco. The OED indicates that people from Algeria and Mauritania, who were of mixed Berber and Arab ancestry, were also called Moors. While Europeans popularly considered Moors very swarthy or, indeed, black until well into the seventeenth century (OED), there were other factors that acknowledge this European "myth" and that "Moor" was an unstable category. There was a common distinction between tawny Moors and white Moors which recognized that not all Moors were black; and the simultaneous usage of Moor as a popular synonym for Negro, or black African suggested, on the other hand, that Moor was equivalent to black African. In British literature through the eighteenth century there was a tradition of the Moorish quality ennobling black Africans; Wylie Sypher, Guinea's Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (1942; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1969), 234 and 237 discusses this literary phenomenon. In Robinson Crusoe, "Africans" means black Africans farther south on the west coast (near present day Senegal, opposite the Cape Verde islands where the Portuguese ship finds Crusoe and Xury). Commonly, I refer to the black Africans as West Coast Africans in this essay. 22 Anthony Barthelemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987) features an excellent history of the evolution and complexities of the term "Moor," especially in chapter one. He makes several crucial arguments: "Moor" (similar to Turk and Indian) is a difficult term to define but shares with these others the connotation of alien or foreigner (6); in Spain, the earliest form of "Moor" distinguished Christian from non-Christian (10); Moor could refer to people of different colors and religions; the only certainty is that a Moor is not a European Christian (7); two separate histories of "Moor" as black and as sinner converged and came to describe all black people, an association that did not change until the seventeenth century (12). 23 The novel implicitly compares Crusoe's fear of African cannibals, the scenes of cannibalism in the Caribbean, and the final eating frenzy of the novel on the border between France and Spain to show that in Europe, one may be eaten by wild beasts, not wild men. The strangely gruesome interlude crossing from Spain into France with the wolves, bestial counterparts to human savages, establishes the other form of eating feared by Crusoe. In all three cases, weapon technology secures Crusoe's superiority. 24 A comprehensive historical analysis of the Moriscos' changing position relative to Western Europe and to the Islamic East, based on the Moriscos' own Aljamiado literature, is found in Anwar Chejne, Islam and the West: The Moriscos. A Cultural and Social History (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983). For a skeleton history of the Moriscos' outsider status, especially in relation to Spain and in Spanish Literature, see Israel Burshatin, "The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and Silence," in "Race," Writing and Difference (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), especially 117-18 and 132. 25The critical treatment of Xury, while not as extensive as the interest in Friday, produces similar results as the confusion about Friday's color and national origins that section four addresses. For example, Stephen Hymer identifies Xury as an African in "Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Monthly Review 23 (1971): 11-36, and Lennard Davis in "The Fact of Events and The Event of Facts: New World Explorers and the Early Novel," The Eighteenth Century 32 (1991): 240-55, claims that

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Xury is not easy to classify in terms of national origins: "Xury, whose exact racial origin is unclear, although he is clearly 'Other', is the prototype of the friendly native" (242). In the following sentence, Davis does try to distinguish Xury from West Africans: Xury "is somewhat moorish and in this case the natives are 'Negroes"' (243). 26 Stuart Schwartz demonstrates the historical transformations of status display in colonial Brazil (in which Robinson Crusoe seems to participate): "Social distinctions of noble and commoner were transferred from Portugal, but in the colony, especially on the frontiers, these tended to be leveled and replaced by a hierarchy based on race and European culture, in which the Indian and later the African provided the basepoint against which status was judged" ("The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil," in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987], 15-50, 27). He continues: "Lacking these external proofs of gentility [titles and other marks of European nobility], the colonists sought to demonstrate their nobility by a seigneurial life style, including a landed estate, numerous slaves and retainers, liberality, patriarchal attitudes, and personal justice" (29). This observation describes the style of Crusoe's governance on the island and his own understanding of his desires. 27 Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbadoes, 1627-1715 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1989), 22. 28A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Antient and Modern, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Jeffreys, 1757), volume 1. 29 Stephen Hymer (note 25), 14-15. 30 Maximillian Novak reprints "Robinson Crusoe & his boy Xury on the Coast of Guinny Shooting a Lyon" in his Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983), 38. This illustration was one of six plates added to the sixth edition of 1722. 31 The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Maximillian Novak and Edward Dudley (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cam- bridge Univ. Press, 1976); and Benjamin Bissel, The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1925) are useful general introductions to issues of savagery in the eighteenth century. Maximillan Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (note 17), 37-50 usefully situates Defoe in relation to his contemporaries' views of savages. Peter Hulme's two works remain the most significant current interpretations of the way that savagery and British colonial narratives intersect: Colonial Encounters (note 3) and Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day, An Anthology, ed. Peter Hulme and Neil Whitehead (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Phillip P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992) focuses on the political, religious, and discursive dynamics of French and British contact with Island Caribs; in doing so, he adds considerably to an understanding of differences between European colonialisms. 32 Savagery is a traditional discourse of absolute difference traceable to Herodotus. For a helpful historical analysis of cannibalism and savagery, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters. Stuart Schwartz (note 26), demonstrates the way in which cannibalism and sodomy were most commonly the points of difference Europeans constructed between themselves and Amerindians; both practices were considered crimes against nature and thus justification for enslavement (26). 33 Wild Majesty (note 31), 4.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03: Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 34 Maximillian Novak in Defoe and the Nature of Man (note 17) quotes Blackmore's construction of Amerindians as a degenerate race, 43. 35 Replacing copulation with dismemberment as the site of trauma interests me as a failure to negate cannibalism completely from the colonial construction of subjectivity; Europeans' aggression is thus disavowed and transferred to fantasies of their own bodily destruction. 36 Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 170-71. 37 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 167. 38 The need for such a law tends to indicate that in practice Amerindians were regarded as "legitimate" slaves at this time, even if ideologically there were reasons not to regard them as natural(ized) slaves. See Bernard Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 180-81 for a representative account (though specific to Virginia in 1670-90). Also consult Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), 89-95 for a discussion of why "Indian slavery never became an important institution in the [North American] colonies" (89). 39 Davis (note 37), 170. 40 Dave Davis, "Rumor of Cannibals," Archaeology 45 (1992), 49. 41 In the novel, Xury not Friday is promised his eventual liberty by conversion. 42 Friday, of course, does not fit into such a visible economy, and this shows part of his significant difference from his national group. Arens (note 36) points out Columbus's expertise in recognizing cannibals at a glance by his third voyage (48). 43 Arens, 48, 49. 44 Winthrop Jordan (note 38) provides a historical interpretation of the importance of Christianity versus skin color to European colonial identity in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century colonies. In North America, complexion became a determining racialized category earlier than elsewhere. In Africa, black African difference initially signified savagery; in North America, "the specific religious difference [of Africans] was initially of' greater importance than color" (97-98). Carol Barash, "The Character of Difference: the Creole Woman as Cultural Mediator in Narratives about Jamaica," Eighteenth-Century Studies, Special Issue: "The Politics of Difference," 23 (1990): 407- 28, argues that the centrality of religious difference gave way to constructions of African sexual difference later in the century in British narratives about Jamaica, a shift that was a understood as a more fixed cultural difference onto which race was mapped. 45 Considering that "Europe," "nation," and "empire" were among the most significant eighteenth-century inventions, it is perhaps more understandable that skin color eventually emerged as the most condensed racialized concept to help define other, related constructions. 46 Winthrop Jordan (note 38), 95. 47Winthrop Jordan, 81-82, Michael Goldfield, "The Color of Politics in the United States: White Supremacy as the Main Explanation for the Peculiarities of American Politics from Colonial Times to the Present," in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick La Capra (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 116, and David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 132, convincingly argue that slavery in all of the British colonies shifts to a more permanent, hereditary state between 1660 and 1710.

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 48 For the contrast between beardless Indians and Europeans, see Londa Schiebinger, "The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science," Eighteenth- Century Studies 23, Special Issue: "The Politics of Difference" (1990): 387-405. Observ- ing that in Europe, the beard was historically considered a sign of virility, Schiebinger notes that "the absence of a beard in native American males led to great debate. Many natural historians took this to be a sign that they belonged to a lower class of humans; some even argue that this absence of hair follicles on the chin proved that they belonged to a separate species" (391). As I argue, Indians were also represented as physically similar to Europeans. 49 Hilary Beckles (note 27) cites a 1675 description of Barbados' population: the four categories were freeholders, freemen (former indentured servants), Christian servants, and Negroes (141). Property, station, religion, and color all apply variously to the different populations. 50 Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667, ed. V. T. Harlow (London: Bedford Press, 1925), xix-xxi. 51 See Leon Campbell, "Racism Without Race: Ethnic Group Relations in Late Colonial Peru," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, "Racism in the Eighteenth Century," ed. Harold E. Paglioaro (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), 323- 33. These other markings of difference such as clothing were not uncommon methods of establishing colonial hierarchies. For example, in eighteenth-century colonial Peru: "As it became impossible to distinguish ethnic groups on the bases of color and ancestry alone, cultural and behavioral patterns were employed in their places as primary status determinants. Language, dress, the wearing or non-wearing of shoes, diet, and sleeping arrangements gradually had replaced color and physiognomy as definitions of a person's 'racial' category" (328). 52 In one of the several taxonomies that Crusoe creates, he states: "I have not clothes to cover me," but on the positive side, he counters: "But I am in a hot climate, where if I had clothes I could hardly wear them" (83). As we find out later, he is clothed as thoroughly as if he were in a sub-Alpine climate! This initial naturalization and justification of his own nakedness gives way to an emphasis on the symbolic value of clothing as a sign of difference from savages. 53 Thus, this is one of many instances that shows that the novel opens up the repeated possibility for alternatives to Crusoe's interpretation. Hence, it is important not to confuse the ideology associated with Crusoe with either Defoe's or the text's. 54 Tawny represented not one, but several possibilities in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, including black, brown, reddish brown, or even olive, and it could be a descriptive term or even a derogatory one, depending on the context and user. 55 Quoted in Wild Majesty (note 31), 130. 56 Richard Bradley, A Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (London, 1721), 169. 57 See the many 15th-18th century illustrations of Amerindians in Peter Hulme's Colonial Encounters (note 3). David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery (note 37) argues that the tendency to imagine that Amerindians were more similar to Europeans boded ill for people of African descent: "This discrimination between the two colored races led quite naturally to a view that Negroes were born to be slaves and were inherently inferior to both Indians and whites" (171). Richard Popkin, "The Philosophical Basis of Eigh- teenth-Century Racism," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture vol. 3, "Racism in the Eighteenth Century," ed. Harold E. Paglioaro (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Reserve Univ., 1973), 245-62 is also helpful concerning the hybrid position of Amerindians. Boucher (note 31) argues that British representation of Caribs was more negative than French counterparts; see especially chapter 5. 58 Both feminist and postcolonial scholars have noted that one of the persistent forms of producing and maintaining a sense of inferiority in Western (masculine) culture involves focusing on the body of the other. This other can be gendered female and/or racialized. In a parallel between Thomas and Friday that she doesn't draw, Morrison (note 4) notes about the treatment of Judge Thomas in the media and the Senate that "the black man's body is voluptuously dwelled upon in biographies about them, journalism on them, remarks about them ... What would have been extraordinary would have been to ignore Thomas's body, for in ignoring it, the articles would have had to discuss in some detail that aspect of him more difficult to appraise--his mind" (xiv). 59 Edward Ward, Trip to Jamaica, 1698, Five Travel Scripts Commonly Attributed to Edward Ward (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1933) provides a typical example of the connection between tawny and mulatto. He describes a story of an English woman whose husband had also married a mixed race Jamaican woman, whom she refer to as "a Gipsy, a Tawny Fac'd Moletto Strumpet, a Pumpkin colour'd Whore" (9). 60 Another narrative solution to the issue of slavery marginalizes West Africans by relegating them either to a timeless realm undisturbed by Europeans, as Crusoe's encounter of them with Xury suggests, or to an unquestioned silence as cargoes on route to European enslavement in the colonies. 61 In referring to the first illustrators of the novel, George Layard, "Robinson Crusoe and Its Illustrators," Bibliographica 2 (n.d.): 181-203, notes not the national change in Friday or in the Caribs but the way that illustrators disregarded the narrative in terms of depicting Crusoe: "oblivious to the proper sequence of events" (184), these illustrators placed Crusoe in the foreground with the shipwreck behind him; he is wearing the hirsute costume he would not adopt until many years later rather than European clothing with which he arrived (185). 62 Nancie Gonzalez, "From Cannibals to Mercenaries: Carib Militarism, 1600-1840," Journal of Anthropology Research 46 (1990): 25. 63 Wild Majesty (note 31), 150. 64 See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (note 3) for an analysis of the threat that Black Caribs posed as both an actual relationship and an ideological construct (246 and 323-24). 65 Europeans often considered both Amerindians and Africans indistinguishable as a labor force. For example, in Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623- 1667 (note 50), documents indicate that during the seventeenth century especially it was a custom on Barbadoes for indentured Christian Europeans to serve four years and then be given a previously agreed upon sum of money or equivalent goods to establish themselves as "free"; but "'the Negros and Indians (of which latter there are but few here [Barbadoes]) they and their generation are Slaves to their owners to perpetuity"' (45). 66 See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (note 3) for elaboration about "the disavowed reference" to African slavery (205). 67 The narrative time roughly corresponds to Cromwell's Commonwealth and to the Restoration, a time when both Portugal and Spain were more powerful nations than in 1719, by which time English merchants largely controlled Portuguese trade. Importantly, Defoe wrote after the gaining of the Assiento from Spain in 1713, a monopoly on the slave trade in the Atlantic; after the formation of the Royal African and South Sea Companies, two of the most powerful and lucrative organizations responsible for trade in slaves, gold, and other raw materials between Europe and parts of the Atlantic empire; and after the

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This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Mon, 23 Nov 2020 03:46:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms establishment of the Bank of England, a primary institutional and financial partner of the slave trade. The mid-seventeenth century was also the height of Corsair activity, and Brazil was the leading exporter of sugar, not the West Indies; these conditions changed by the early eighteenth century. Although the narrative time predates these events, it is crucial to account for the differences these events make to the emphasis on and nature of the slave trade and representations of Africa and the Caribbean. 68 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery (note 37), 132. 69 Michael Goldfield (note 47), 116. 70 It is remarkable that this slippage does not occur once they reach Europe; the novel represents Friday's position unambiguously as a servant (see 284). Also, at the end of the novel, in Europe, Crusoe's status among other Europeans is cast in terms of the labor power he commands. Because Friday is "too much a stranger to be capable of supplying the place of a servant on the road" (284), Crusoe hires an English sailor as an additional servant. Clearly construed as his equals in the group traveling to France, the other European men assign him the position of command based on his superior age and numbers of attendants. 71 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (note 3), 205. 72 Stephen Hymer (note 25) is particularly helpful in analyzing colonial relations in terms of labor power, but see Andre Gunder Frank, World Accumulation 1492-1789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978) for a more useful (dependency theory) analysis of the important shift in the colonies from subsistence-based economies to profit-making concerns. Hilary Beckles (note 27) emphasizes the importance of sugar supplanting tobacco and indigo as money-making crops in the West Indies to changes in labor practices and in ideology. 73 Hilary Beckles, 77. I wish to emphasize Beckles's point that in practice, planters were not as selective in terms of forming a more desirable labor force until later in the seventeenth century. 74 Beckles, 65, 33, 72. 75 Beckles, 171. 76 Beckles, 168, 170. 77 Farther Adventures (note 3), 18. 78 Morrison (note 4), xvi.

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