Finding Oneself in Print: Robinson Crusoe, Metonymy, and the Ideologically Constructed Self

Abstract

Abstract:Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe dramatizes the extent to which the racism endemic to colonialist discourse mediates the titular character's interactions with his island environment, thus precluding the empiricism valued during the eighteenth century. While scholars often assert that Crusoe's discovery of the footprint initiates a drastic change in how he perceives the island, the footprint merely reinscribes the positionality that has dictated his mode of relating to this setting all along. The nature of the danger confronting Crusoe becomes evident in the semiotic transfer of cannibalistic signifiers to the structures he constructs to safeguard him from them. These structures, designed to replicate English enclosure, impose onto the island an artificial order that, by neglecting its topographical particularities, transform it into a discursive space, especially when considering that fear of "savages" motivates his interactions with his environment. The cannibal trope employed by colonialist rhetoric to justify exploitation of New World inhabitants and resources alike dictates virtually every decision he makes after landing on the island and serves to render illegible both the island and the Other. Indeed, the novel participates in a more pervasive discourse whereby the era's privileging of empiricism conflicts with representations of cannibalism and savagery in cartographical and literary representations of the New World. This epistemological dissonance manifests in "Great Newes from the Barbadoes," a report of a failed slave revolt; the document emphasizes its veracity, which it unintentionally conflates with violence, while employing racist stereotypes. As evinced by Crusoe's refusal to abandon his fortified home despite concerns over its structural integrity, it is this ideological construction of the Other that endangers him, rather than any threat posed by New World "savages." What disturbs Crusoe about the footprint is that it compels him to confront the contradictions of a racist dialectic that constructs alterity according to conflicting Christian, capitalist, and feudal paradigms, each of which seeks to justify further imperialist pursuits. Defoe thus explores the interiority of the interpellated self, using the footprint to foreground the challenge of circumventing biases in order to arrive at an empirical understanding of the spaces one inhabits and traverses.