'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 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ELH 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. I 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 ex- tended 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 signifi- cance 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 repre- sented 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 822 Racial Multiplicity in Crusoe 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 an- swered . 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 Roxann Wheeler 823 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 his- torical 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 assimi- lation 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] ..