Urban Ambivalences and Narrative Domains in Defoe's Novels

chapter 3 Urban Ambivalences and Narrative Domains in Defoe’s Novels

Anne Dromart

Abstract

Drawing upon Thomas Pavel’s notion of “narrative domains,” this essay shows how Daniel Defoe’s novels, although they predate the emergence of any form of ecological awareness, nevertheless offer crucial explorations of the ways human beings are shaped by their relations to their physical environments. As a new genre, the novel in eighteenth-century England, through its depiction of “spatialized subjectivities,” ini- tiated and reflected a deeply modified sense of human identity, as the mobility and instability of the urban environment both mirror and model the modern individual’s many-faceted identity. Even though the early English novel provides no mimetic representation of the areas of London or of the places the heroes go to or stay at, geography in Defoe’s novels provides a genuine fictional environment that fulfills a specific cognitive function. Defoe’s description of urban life testifies to the way the new narrative forms enabled cognitive mapping, constructing reality on a mode that offers an anal- ogy of the modern individual’s consciousness of his or her perception of the world he or she lives in.

Keywords

Cognitive mapping – community – Defoe, Daniel – geography – identity – Journal of the Plague Year – mobility – modernity – Moll Flanders – narrative and narration – novel (English) – Pavel, Thomas – perception – Roxana – subjectivity – urban environment

Even though the assumed superiority of man over the natural world seems to preclude any ecological concerns at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the role played by the environment in the early novel deserves attention. At first sight, Daniel Defoe’s novels, with their emphasis on the individual’s struggle for existence, identity and recognition, do not seem to concern themselves much with the natural world. But as the novels’ narrative

40 Dromart domains1 make the reader aware of the predicament of the individual, he or she becomes aware of the peculiarities of the city as a physical environment, which proves that as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century the mi- lieu one inhabits is “a shaping force of individual […] psychology and identity” ( Armbruster and Wallace 2001: 7). It is the interrelation between the generic features of the novel and the representation of the characters’ environment that comes to the fore, particularly so when one considers the urban backdrop that makes the topographic framework of most of Daniel Defoe’s novels: the insertion of the characters in an urban environment at a time when urban expansion was accelerating has much to do in Defoe’s stories with the idea that our “experience of the world is shaped by the processes and practices by which we signify or represent the world” (Hastings 1999: 7). Defoe’s depiction of the geographic settings of his stories seems to play a decisive role in his un- derstanding of the individual. Many critics have underlined aspects of the pastoral tradition linger- ing in the Georgian novel. “[T]he classic eighteenth century novel begins in a city and ends in a garden” (Hahn 1991: 1), which seems to argue in favor of a representation of the environment that would highlight the evils of urban development with both moral and political undertones reminiscent of the pastoral and georgic tradition: “That ‘God made the country, man made the town’ was a widespread sentiment”; consequently the country was associated with “a certain innocence or virtue, peace, and simplicity” (Duncan 1968: 255) and the town seen as a place of “uncertainty and insecurity” (George 1987: 55). Though concern for the environment is not inexistent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, for instance, John Evelyn’s text of 1661 on pollution, Fumifugium, clearly evidences, the early British novel, however, has little inter- est in man’s detrimental action on nature. Instead, it pays great attention to the insertion of the characters in their environment, so much so that the urban landscape seems to have much to do with their unstable existence and per- sonal construction in a way that echoes modern-day anthropology’s concern to “think about and situate the individual” (Augé 2008: 31) in terms that mark a movement away from a collective approach to people’s existences. Admittedly the sense of community is traditionally a great deal stronger in the country than in the city. Consequently the force of wild individualism is generally more harnessed in a rural than in an urban environment, where the moral norm seems to fade away. Indeed, whether you read Richardson,

1 The narrative domain of a character is the set of actions central to the plot implemented by a character, along with his or her reasons for acting as he or she does. “A domain contains ontological, epistemological, axiological and action propositions” (Pavel 1980: 106).