Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1991 Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction: An Alternative Marxist Approach. Zaixin Zhang Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Zhang, Zaixin, "Voices of the Self in Daniel Defoe's Fiction: An Alternative Marxist Approach." (1991). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5288. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5288 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 VOICES OF THE SELF IN DANIEL DEFOE’S FICTION: AN ALTERNATIVE MARXIST APPROACH A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Zaixin Zhang B.A., Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute, 1982 M.A., Arizona State University, 1985 December 1991 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to Professor Kevin L, Cope, my mentor, who has pointed out all the right directions on this odyssey through my doctoral studies in English literature, for his insights to spur my literary researching and for his patience to give me enough room to work my own way through. I have especially enjoyed his presence as the "Hammer Coach" in his "Nails Club" where his motto is to drive to excellence and to even encourage "crashing through the boards." Even without his presence on campus, I could still feel the pounding effect of the "Hammer" through e-mail from his sabbatical leave at Cambridge or a conference at McMaster. His lengthy and helpful comments as well as face-to-face conversations have surely made my project much easier and much more enjoyable. I would also like to express my appreciation for the support and help from the faculty of the Department of English and the Graduate School at Louisiana State University. My gratitude goes to Professor Jim Springer Borck, Professor William Evans, Professor Daniel Mark Fogel, Professor Mary Frances Hopkins, Professor John Lowe, and Professor Thomas Walsh for reviewing my dissertation and for comments and suggestions at the earlier stages of the research. In different ways they brought my attention to both historical and theoretical insights which were indispensable to my work. I am also indebted to Ms. Susan Kohler and Ms. Gwen Redditt with the English Department and Ms. Debra Parker in the Graduate Records Office, for being very helpful. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Hong, for her support and understanding of my work. The equations of quantum mechanics in her research have always reminded me of the difficulty and hard work involved in any project. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................... ii LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................... vi ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................... 1 2 VOICES OF THE SPLIT SELF: AN ALTERNATIVE MARXIST APPROACH TO LITERARY CRITICISM ....... 12 2.1. A Critique of Traditional and Postmodern Marxism .. 20 2.2. Voices of the Self............................................................. 44 3 DETERRITORIALIZING CULTURAL BOUNDARIES.........60 3.1. Crusoe and Reterritorialization................................... 66 3.2. Captain Singleton’s Flight in "Motionless Travel"......... 82 3.3. Deterritorialization in Roxana..................................... 96 4 SCHLEGELIAN IRONY AND THE CHAOTIC WORLD OF BECOMING IN MOLL FLANDERS ...... 115 4.1. Schlegelian Irony ....................................................... 117 4.2. Chaotic Becoming and Uncertainty of Authorial Intention........................................................... 124 5 DEFOE’S "MAN-WOMAN" ROXANA: A STUDY OF GENDER, REVERSAL, AND ANDROGYNY ................ 144 5.1. Lacanian "Symbolic" and Roxana’s Cultural Gender Roles............................................................................. 147 5.2. Lacanian "Imaginary" and the Reversal of Gender .... 157 5.3. Roxana’s Androgyny and Degenderizatdon of Man .... 171 EPILOGUE ................................................................................................ 188 NOTES ......................................................................................................... 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 212 VITA ............................................................................................................. 226 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE page 1. Notions of the real in traditional and poststructuralist Marxism............................................. 32 2. Alternative Marxism in relation to traditional Marxism, postmodern Marxism, the real, and ideology........................ 45 vi ABSTRACT The alternative Marxist approach to literary criticism in the present study consists of three "vocal" modes of interpretation: the public voice, the private voice, and the homeless voice of the self. The public voice represents authorial visions of the ideological real projected by dominant ideology that covers up the "objective" real, while the private voice corresponds to the authorial conscious or unconscious insertion into radical ideology that turns the "objective" real into the ideological real. However, the homeless voice of the self obliterates any ties with history and authorial ideology. A personification of the Marxist "particular interest" of the self, the homeless voice echoes in the open space of the text and reaches for the distant real shaped by the reader’s interpretive paradigms inside or outside the constraints of the institutional discourse. Incorporating both traditional and poststructuralist Marxist insights, the current Marxist framework departs from the traditional conviction of a neutral reality and from the postmodern concept of the totalizing ideology. It acknowledges the role of the dialectical real th at is simultaneously "objective" (edited out by dominant ideology) and "subjective" (picked up by radical ideology to be molded as the ideological real). The alternative Marxist approach also attaches relative importance to authorial intention, the text, and reader response in an interpretive activity and values both historical studies and theoretical elucidations because the interplay between the two apparently contradictory modes of criticism may reinforce and supplement each other in their shared territory of the study of the private voice of the self in the text, although the public voice is more oriented towards history and the homeless voice towards theory. The different voices of the self are exemplified in a study of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Captain Singleton. Moll Flanders, and Roxana, which profits from both modem critical theory (deterritorialization, Schlegelian irony, and feminist theory) and historical insights into Defoe’s fiction. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION There has been a tomato/tomahto thing going in the field of eighteenth- century studies: a debate over tradition versus theory or literature versus "metaliterature." The defense of the mainstream tradition rose to its climax at the April 1987 conference at Georgetown, the addresses of