The Right to Mobility in Adventure Fiction
Novel The Right to Mobility in Adventure Fiction MARGARET COHEN If we were to imagine the kind of novel Mr. Kreuznauer wished Daniel Defoe would have invented, it would be the bourgeois novel of manners. Gracing his son with a modest education and destining him for the law, Crusoe’s elderly father hoped Robinson would settle down in his native country “and raise his Fortune by Application and Industry, with a Life of Ease and Pleasure” (Defoe 4). Would Robinson Crusoe in such a scenario have courted the business and daughters of the local gentry in order to achieve the reward of “all kinds of Vertues” associated with “the middle Station of Life” by Crusoe’s father, viz.: “Peace . Plenty . Temperance, Moderation, Quietness, Health, Society, all agreeable Diversions and All desirable Pleasures” (5)? But Mr. Kreuznauer’s rebellious child is consumed by “rambling thoughts” that take the form of the impulse to go to sea. Rejecting the middle station, despite some ominous hints of misfortunes in the offing, Crusoe goes, in the words of his father, “abroad upon Adventures, to rise by Enterprise, and to make” himself “famous in Undertakings of a Nature out of the Common road” (5). In the second half of the twentieth century, there is an account of the novel launched by Ian Watt that has tried to domesticate Crusoe’s rambling disposition. From Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, critics have evaluated the hero’s accomplishment as establishing a new haven of “Peace, Plenty, Temperance, Moderation,” and so forth on an uninhabited island at the edge of the modern world.
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