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ABSTRACT
Defoe’s fictional Englishmen turn to the notion of a life-debt as rhetorical resources for spinning fictions generative of reliable contractarian bond/bondage. This article explores what vexes Defoe as tough questions: how to set the conditions of a newfangled tie-up between complete strangers in the New World, or how to adjudicate broken political contracts between the Crown and the outlaws. In the era when the Civil War denaturalised the existing discourse on man’s duty to his monarch, Defoe strives to address early modern crisis of political obligation by reformulating a classical concept of a life-debt into a cement that would hold together precarious social relations into a sustainable form of paternalism. In the thick of their checkered criminal and colonial career, Defoe’s protagonists often slip into the Hobbesian states of nature that present itself in the form of major confrontations with the national sovereign and racial others. Thus, Defoe’s characters reconstruct them into sentimental hierarchies, suggesting a life-debt as a rationale for voluntary subjection. Furthermore, Defoe’s fictional narratives including Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack demonstrate how such contractarian discourse necessarily produces fiction-writing moments and rhetorical exemplars that complicate the morality of the author’s writings.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 171–2 (emphasis added).
2 Ibid., 176.
3 Novak, Economics and the Fiction, 64.
4 Wheeler, “Powerful Affections,” 127, 129.
5 Wheeler, “‘My Savage,’ ‘My Man’,” 852.
6 Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 176.
7 Ibid., 168.
8 Ibid., 181.
9 Ibid., 144.
10 Ibid., 144–5.
11 Ibid., 145.
12 Ibid., 168.
13 Ibid., 168.
14 Ibid., 148.
15 A post-revolution man of letters, Thomas Hobbes expresses his deepest pessimism about the severing consensual bonds between the monarch and his subjects with his theory of the state of nature, where he categorically denies man’s innate capacity for natural jurisprudence. In his bleak picture of human nature, man, obsessed by fear of violent death, is driven solely by passions for egoistic pursuits such as self-preservation and private gains. Furthermore, in Leviathan Hobbes founds his body politic on the same fear and trembling that once rendered the state of nature almost panic-ridden. Hobbes assumes that mimetic reasoning among men in the state of nature will evoke fear of each other because everyone there is ruthless in seeking personal glory. But this same assumption ironically underlies his belief that such fear of violent death ultimately builds a political consensus and that it could end the state of war by dints of inducing individuals to voluntarily transfer his natural rights to an absolutist ruler. Supreme and unrestricted power is granted to the king, therefore, in civil society precisely because fear of violent death, instilled by the menace of either death penalty or return to the state of nature, is exploited to contain dangerous elements.
16 Linebaugh and Rediker, 50. According to the authors, the “motley crew” of these “masterless men and women” are diverse types of early modern subaltern groups that emerged as a result of radical social upheavals such as the Enclosure Movement, the Financial Revolution, and imperial expansion. And these unruly multitudes include transported felons, the urban poor and delinquent, pirates and maritime rebels, and first colonial settlers and other early capitalist laborers at the margins of the empire (Linebaugh and Rediker, 211).
17 Kay, 64.
18 Locke, 90.
19 Ibid., 17.
20 For Locke’s ameliorative take on slavery, see Glausser.
21 Ibid., 96.
22 Tully, 137.
23 Locke, 9.
24 Ibid., 11.
25 Ibid., 10.
26 Tully, 139. For similar criticism on Locke’s colonialism, see Arneil, John Locke and America; “John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism”; “The Wild Indian’s Venison”; and “John Locke, Natural Law and Colonialism.” See also Lebovics, Batz, and Armitage.
27 Defoe, Captain Singleton, 51.
28 Ibid., 25.
29 Ibid., 51.
30 Ibid., 54.
31 Ibid., 61.
32 Ibid., 70.
33 Ibid., 53–4.
34 Ibid., 57.
35 Ibid., 58.
36 Ibid., 70.
37 Ibid., 58.
38 Ibid., 73.
39 Ibid., 62.
40 Ibid., 69.
41 Ibid., 60.
42 Ibid., 84.
43 Ibid., 93.
44 Ibid., 96–7.
45 Ibid., 137.
46 Ibid., 137.
47 Ibid., 137.
48 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 121.
49 Ibid., 121.
50 Ibid., 102.
51 Beattie, Crime and Courts, 468.
52 For more discussions on how the Bloody Code reflects a siege mentality of the British government that adopts a tough approach to dealing with any perceived menace to domestic tranquillity, see Hay, Linebaugh, Rule, Thompson, and Winslow. The Transportation Acts, according to Beattie, is part of the state efforts to address the chronic issue of “the overcrowding in Newgate and other goals in London … [i]n the aftermath of the War of Spanish Succession” and find “alternatives to the death penalty and to clergyable branding” for convicts spared from capital punishment (Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 427).
53 Beattie, Crime and Courts, 617.
54 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 264.
55 Ibid., 183, 223.
56 Ibid., 250.
57 Ibid., 223.
58 McBurney, 334.
59 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 276.
60 Todd, 8. Todd argues that the true significance of Jack’s indentured servitude in the New World lies in his successful cultivation of the power of self-mastery as a means for emerging afresh from his criminal past. By subordinating himself to the will of God, and thus to the rigors of rational self-restraints, Jack advances towards spiritual awakening and self-government, and this maturation leads him to freedom and affluence. Therefore, Jack’s transformation presents “the very paradox that Defoe sees at the heart of freedom: one becomes a master by voluntarily submitting himself to servitude” (Todd, 72).
61 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 133.
62 Ibid., 133.
63 Ibid., 133.
64 Ibid., 134.
65 Ibid., 136.
66 Ibid., 135, 145.
67 Ibid., 138.
68 Ibid., 139–140.
69 Ibid., 134.
70 Ibid., 140.
71 Ibid., 141–2.
72 Kay, 61–2.
73 Marais, 57, 59.
74 Hulms, 206.
75 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 145.
76 Ibid., 145.
77 Ibid., 150.
78 Ibid., 150.
79 Ibid., 139.
80 Boukulos, 1–37.
81 Ibid., 148.
82 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 143.
83 By attempting to reform his recalcitrant slaves into law-abiding subjects, Jack acknowledges the universality of man’s rational power. John Locke is again relevant here. Daniel Carey argues that Locke’s universalism for his empiricist philosophy and the colonialism he unambiguously voices in many of his writings do not seem to conflict each other as one might first expect. Because Locke’s stage theory sees Amerindian culture as belong to the later phase of the state of nature, he allows the natives a distinct possibility of advancing their ways of life. Therefore, Locke’s sacred trust in man’s reason in his general theory about human psychology in Essays on Human Understanding can be seen as compatible with his approaches to cultural others. See Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson and “Locke’s Anthropology”. See also Carey, and Festa.
84 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 144.
85 Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man, 118.
86 Defoe, Col. Jacque, 146.
87 Ibid., 149.
88 Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, i–iii.