Defoes Writings and Manliness

Defoe’s Writings and Manliness Contrary Men Stephen H. Gregg Defoe’s Writings and Manliness This book is dedicated ...

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Defoe’s Writings and Manliness Contrary Men

Stephen H. Gregg

Defoe’s Writings and Manliness

This book is dedicated to my family, whose patient love has assured its existence.

Defoe’s Writings and Manliness Contrary Men

Stephen H. Gregg Bath Spa University, UK

© Stephen H. Gregg 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Stephen H. Gregg has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Gregg, Stephen H., 1960– Defoe’s writings and manliness : contrary men. 1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?–1731 – Fictional works. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. I. Title 823.5–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gregg, Stephen H., 1960 Defoe’s writings and manliness : contrary men / by Stephen H. Gregg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5605-0 (alk. paper) 1. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. Men in literature. I. Title. PR3407.G74 2009 823’.5—dc22 ISBN 9780754656050 (hbk) ISBN 9780754697428 (ebk.V)

2009015784

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: Defoe, manliness and effeminacy

vii ix 1

1

‘Complete’ men, trade and history

15

2

Born gentlemen and godly manliness

39

3

Crusoe, toil and temptation

59

4 A Journal of the Plague Year: godly manliness under stress

91

5 Singleton, friendship and secrecy

113

6

131

Colonel Jack and the perils of delusion

Conclusion: Contrary Men

163

Bibliography Index

167 191

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Acknowledgements My thanks to the staff at the British Library and the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. This project has had a long genesis, so my grateful thanks to Frank Felsenstein and Paul Hammond for their invaluable guidance in the early years. My thanks too to my editors at Ashgate, Erika Gaffney and Ann Donahue. This book was supported by funding from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). Some material in this book has appeared in print elsewhere. Chapter four on A Journal of the Plague Year is based on an essay printed in the collection The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature (Westport: Greenwood, 1999): I thank Greenwood Press and the editor, Andrew P. Williams, for permission to publish a revised version of the essay here. Thanks to Duke University Press for permission to use material from my paper ‘“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners’, published in Eighteenth-Century Life (2001). I likewise thank the editor of the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Chris Mounsey, for permission to publish an amended version of my article ‘Male friendship and Defoe’s Captain Singleton: “My every thing”’ (2004) as chapter five of this book. Thanks too to Pickering and Chatto for permission to quote liberally from The Works of Daniel Defoe, general editors, W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank. Over the years I have had the opportunity to meet and talk to many scholars, so my thanks goes to all those who have helped with their gifts of knowledge, advice and time: Rebecca Barr; Ian Bell; Marshall Brown; the Gender and Enlightenment Colloquium; George Haggerty; J. Paul Hunter; Chris Mounsey; Andreas Mueller; Bob Owens; David Roberts; Robert ‘One Hundred and Eight Robinson Crusoes’ Sheppard; Geoffrey Sills; Andrew P. Williams. Gratitude was one of Defoe’s most heartfelt topics, so I’m especially grateful to David Fairer, whose generous support has informed this book in subtle ways; and for those whose willingness to talk about Defoe and masculinity over beer, wine and food helped me keep faith in this project: Hans Turley (sadly missed) and Wolfram Schmidgen. Finally, a loving thank you to my wife and fiercest editor, Nicky.


List of Abbreviations CEG CET PEW Review SFWS

The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890) The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727) Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) Review, 19 February 1704–11 June 1713, ed. Arthur W. Secord, 9 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938) Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003-05)


Introduction

Defoe, manliness and effeminacy Thwart lines Gentlemen who neglect their moral and political duties, merchants and traders who ape fashionable gentility, fops who ape women, foolish husbands who abandon their wives, soldiers who prefer chocolate to arms, kings who are addicted to vice, the English nation’s addiction to luxuries, a man from Hull who is repeatedly unable to resist an irrational passion to roam the world, irrational mobs, a pirate and a Quaker who indulge in secret bonds, and a Jacobite ex-thief of possible gentle birth who is successively cuckolded by four wives. Defoe’s men are men, but they are never unproblematically so: they seem to display a contrariness which indicates that failure as an ideal man – that is, a failure of manliness – is never far away. Rather than demonstrating how his men are heroes, it seems more adroit to start from the assumption that Defoe’s abiding interest was in failures of manliness. Being a man in Defoe’s writings was not necessarily being manly: rather, manliness is a continual and effortful becoming – and it is an effort that is not always successful. Right at the beginning of his writing career and in perhaps his most praiseworthy description of a man, Defoe includes a reminder that there are ‘thwart Lines’ in the disposition of the best of men. His writings suggest that rather than a simple presentation of successful manliness, he was much more ready to assume that potential failure was the more likely state. What he works out in so many of his writings was how men could resist this slide into a failure so often termed effeminacy. What is interesting for us as students of Defoe will be how he went about this. And that is what this book will be about: how and in what languages could masculinity be discussed, analysed and represented in this period? How are Defoe’s writings imbricated within the languages of manliness and effeminacy? And, crucially, how does he deploy and transform those languages into something distinctly Defoean? Some terms Masculinities’, ‘effeminacy’ and ‘manliness’: the apparent transparency of such language has been the subject of crucial analysis in both cultural studies and, increasingly, eighteenth-century studies. In recent years critical evaluations of Daniel Defoe, The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy: with a Preface. Written by one of his Hearers (London, 1697), ‘Preface’.


masculinity have emphasised the plural over the singular, and in a parallel move, the historically specific over the trans-historical. The plural ‘masculinities’ suggests that there are and were complex and diverse ways of conceptualising male roles and behaviour. However, while the terms masculinity and masculinities give us a neutral critical framework to describe the whole field of male behaviours including both marginalised and ideal, the terms themselves were not the basis for describing men in the early eighteenth century. Indeed, this has been a central critical problem: men were the standard human being against which women were measured and so men were not conceived as carrying gender as women were: the period’s gender ideologies render the category of men peculiarly invisible. This invisibility, as Jonathan Rutherford argues, derives from a critical blindness that sustains a masculinity seemingly exempt from history and the social: the ‘myth of masculinity is its attempt to pass itself off as natural and universal, free of problems’. This is not to say that the period did not discuss male behaviour, but rather that masculinity was not articulated in a way we would easily recognise; it was, as John Tosh has put it, ‘everywhere but nowhere’. Rather, masculinity was articulated via the concatenation between a variety of historically specific concepts, tropes and discourses. This book will examine precisely these multiform discourses and the concatenation between them in Defoe’s writings. It is for this reason that the period’s own terms are crucial: ‘manly’ and ‘effeminate’ (and their derivatives, ‘manliness’ and ‘effeminacy’). Both terms have deep moral connotations and are signifiers of behaviour, not ontological categorisation. Manliness for instance was an ideal, an aspiration constantly striven for. The eighteenth-century perception of manly and manliness ‘embraced moral or cultural as well as physical facets of being a man’, as John Tosh usefully comments. Samuel Johnson’s definition of ‘Manly’ is a useful historical starting point: ‘Manlike; becoming a man; firm; brave; stout; undaunted; undismayed’. It is a ‘becoming’ indeed, for this ideal behaviour relied upon a continued and R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 76; Andrew P. Williams, ed., The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male (Westport: Greenwood, 1999), p. xii. John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 72. A search on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (Thomson Gale) revealed only six uses of the word ‘masculinity’ in the English language between 1700 and 1800, only one of which was before 1741. Jonathan Rutherford, ‘Who’s That Man?’, in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), pp. 21-67 (p. 23). For the male body as normative human standard, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 22, 61-62. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 31. Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 73. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755).

Introduction

repeated rejection of a vilified anti-manliness: concepts of manliness were, as Anthony Fletcher points out, ‘elaborated around the polarity of manhood and effeminacy’. Effeminacy, then, was deployed as a minoritising and marginalising discourse to shore up hegemonic exemplars of manliness. The critical language of polarities suggests that eighteenth-century men had a simple, if stark, choice; and the most powerful pictorial emblem of this was the ‘Choice of Hercules’. Typically, Hercules is flanked by two women, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Virtue’: one scantily clad and beckoning to a blanket on the ground; the other clad in robes and pointing towards a steep path up a mountain. Joseph Addison, in The Tatler, dramatised the scene: ‘Come along with me into this Region of Delights’ asks ‘Pleasure’, ‘and bid Farewel for ever to Care, to Pain, to Business —’. By contrast, ‘Virtue’ offers a world of rewarding and dutiful work: ‘there is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without Pains and Labour’.10 Hercules, also typically, is already facing ‘Virtue’ directing the viewer/reader to the proper and manly outcome. This scenario of manly agency (contrary to the effeminate choice offered by ‘Pleasure’) is played out in a variety of different contexts of self-control, including those of men pursuing riches, men spending riches, and (in a trope that implicitly drew upon the sexual connotation of ‘spending’), the pursuit of women. Reading the reiterated references to effeminacy and to fops in this period, however, suggests an anxiety concerning the potential fluidity of manliness and effeminacy, and the ease with which men could slide down the slippery slope to effeminacy.11 And this anxiety was keenly felt in a number of overlapping areas. Money The potential for men’s passions to overrun self-control was a critical and pervasive anxiety in an urban world that seemed to encourage a discontented desire to accumulate riches and offer so much potential for spending them. Powering this was a financial revolution that saw the creation of the Bank of England, public debt, speculation and credit, and which facilitated a surge in trade and economic

Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 411; see also pp. 83-98. Connell, Masculinities, pp. 76-81; see also Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, p. 44. 10 Joseph Addison, The Tatler, no. 97, 22 November 1709, ed. by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 2:101. 11 Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub argue that the fluidity of boundaries between normative and non-normative gender categories are ‘enormously unstable and labile, indicative of threatened ideological positions’. Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 2-3.


success for the non-landowning.12 The role of men’s passions in this ferment of economic success was hotly debated. One the one hand, consuming luxury goods drove that success. On the other, an unrestrained appetite for consumerism risked denuding men of their manliness. Classical virtue dictated that desires should be regulated to necessity – needs should be met, and no more – and the unregulated passion to spend was demonised as ‘luxury’.13 And in so many commentaries of this period’s culture, luxury was almost invariably related to effeminacy imagined as a national malaise.14 Moreover, men’s passion for making wealth (rather then merely spending it) presented yet another threat to male identity. As J. G. A. Pocock has argued, one of the most persuasive ideologies that gave this period a language with which to shape manliness in the face of such temptations to spend and speculate was civic humanism. Civic humanist ideology outlined a manner of male citizenship whose political independence, his virtue and indeed his whole moral function, was based upon economic independence, ideally in the form of land (it was also based upon an ability to bear arms independent of state-sponsored soldiery). He was not to be dependent upon political sinecures or upon the dangerously effeminate vagaries of speculation. In the language of classic civic humanism, sexual desire and acquisitive desire were synonymous, so that it was the figure of a dangerously enchanting woman that came to emblematise – externalise – men’s potential for loss of agency.15 In the early eighteenth century the fantasy of instant wealth offered by speculation and credit became increasingly emblematised as feminine, so that men risked another form of effeminisation. Such emblems were prominent during Britain’s first stock-market crash, the South Sea Bubble.16 Indeed, it is possible to think that, as John Barrell puts it, ‘the discourse of civic humanism was the most authoritative fantasy of masculinity in early eighteenth P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967). 13 The classic discussion is John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). See also Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 14 Philip Carter, ‘An “effeminate” or “efficient” nation? Masculinity and eighteenthcentury social documentary’, Textual Practice, 11/3 (1997), 429-43. 15 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2003); Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 16 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17-39; Laura Brown, Fables Of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 95-131; E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 1-12, 51-73. 12

Introduction

century Britain’.17 Pocock’s discussion of Defoe posits him as a defender of the possibilities for economic self-invention offered by the new forces of speculative acquisition epitomised by credit. Pocock argues that for Defoe, the image of a disabling female force, Fortuna, is transformed into enabling emblems of Trade and Credit, ‘an innovative conquering force’ and that Defoe was attempting to stabilise the ‘pathological condition’ of men in thrall to instant riches.18 However, this is to miss Defoe’s conservative mobilisation of the languages of classical male virtue in critiquing luxury and excessive emulative desires. In chapter one, ‘“Complete men”, trade and history’, I will examine Defoe’s attitude towards trade through the lens of effeminacy. Looking at Roxana, Moll Flanders and The Complete English Tradesman I argue that Defoe’s engagement with effeminacy, and the mobilisation of the language of superficial foppery is an attempt to construct a ‘complete’ and substantial manliness in the face of emulative desires and the dangerous potential for self-invention offered by trade as well as the trader’s relationship to credit. The second half of this chapter concerns the place of effeminacy in Defoe’s analysis of economics, historical change and national virtue, focusing on his writings of the 1690s (An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, and An Essay on Projects); those of 1704-06 (including selections from his journal the Review, poems on Marlborough’s campaign and his epic satire Jure Divino); and lastly, A Plan of the English Commerce from 1728. I argue that Defoe’s analysis of effeminacy and national character reveals a more complex engagement with the language of civic humanism than has been previously argued, albeit one characterised by various shifts in position, from rejection to ambivalence to exploitation. Gentility: status and manners Effeminacy and manliness were also deeply imbricated within the debate on status and rank in this period, a debate that was insistently focused on the nature, function and behaviour of gentility. This debate centred on what Michael McKeon has termed ‘status inconsistency’: the situation whereby the concepts of birth and merit were flung into new and fraught juxtapositions. McKeon’s important study of the English novel posits a crucial social shift in ideologies of status: a progressive ideology was born which declared that, in opposition to aristocratic ideology, personal merit, not birth, is the guarantee of virtue or honour. The renegotiations between these concepts resulted in a ‘transvaluation of honour’.19 And perhaps 17

John Barrell, ‘“The Dangerous Goddess”: Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Cultural Critique, 12 (1989), 101-31. 18 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 454; Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, p. 113. 19 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), see pp. 131-75. This study’s neglect of the relations


the most succinct articulation of this transvaluation is from Defoe’s own poem The True-Born Englishman: ‘For Fame of Families is all a Cheat, / ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great’.20 Of course, ‘honour’ not only implicates status (gentility and the middling sorts) but also manliness: central to the progressive ideology of status and the self-definition of the middling sorts was, as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick remarks, ‘the feminization of the aristocracy [who] came to be seen as ethereal, decorative, and otiose in relation to the vigorous and productive values of the middle class’.21 This revaluation of male honour can be seen as part of a more general refinement of social mores, the ‘civilising process’ under way since the Middle Ages as outlined by Norbert Elias.22 Two strands of this process are key to masculinity in our period. Firstly, the pervasive culture of reform which was largely aimed at reforming male manners in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (particularly strident in the writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners) in which effeminacy, luxury as well as more specific male pleasures and vices such as sodomy and drinking played an important role.23 Secondly, a number of studies have argued for the importance of the ‘rise of politeness’ to the definitions of between status and gender was partially addressed by McKeon’s ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28/3 (1995), 295-322. This focuses on the relations between class, effeminacy and sodomy, but it overlooks the importance of the negative associations of effeminacy in the construction of class and manliness. See also Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 75-95. 20 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman. A Satyr, ll. 1215-16 (SFWS, 1:118). 21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) p. 93. By including men, Sedgwick is extending Michel Foucault’s argument that it is just women that are central to the middleclass’s self-fashioning. The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 103-31. For a succinct overview of recent conceptualisations of feminisation, see Clery, The Feminization Debate, pp. 1-12. Thomas King argues for an ideological shift of masculinity in which the emergent ‘private men’ were valorised by a rational public sphere of activity and by the demonisation of a previous economy of courtly display – ‘residual pederasty’ – as affectation and irrational. The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750. Volume 1: The English Phallus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 1-19. 22 Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; 2nd edn, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). 23 See Stephen H. Gregg, ‘“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25/1 (2001), 17-28. G. J. Barker-Benfield sees the Societies as part of a more general reformation of male manners leading up to the birth of sensibility; The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 55-61.

Introduction

masculinity in this period. In the discourses of politeness, effeminacy, especially exemplified in the figure of the fop, connotes excess and also functions as an outer marker boundary for acceptable polite manliness.24 Defoe’s own attitudes to the connections between gentility and manliness are shaped by these various discourses; yet his writings also indicate a distinctive attitude towards, and a unique shaping of, these different strands. Chapter two, ‘Born gentlemen and godly manliness’, analyses Defoe’s attitude to the born gentleman and his imbrication within the language of politeness and the culture of the reformation of manners. Opening with Defoe’s analysis of two gentlemen – Prigson from the satire Reformation of Manners and Jemy from Moll Flanders – this chapter argues that Defoe’s vision of the gentlemen of England was not a simple critique of a feudal landowning aristocracy. Rather, examining his conduct book for men of the upper sort, The Compleat English Gentleman (written about 1729 and unpublished in the eighteenth century), reveals that Defoe was treading a fine line between two powerful and yet contrary visions: on the one hand, of a gentlemanly honour transformed via middling-sorts values; and on the other, of the born gentleman whose virtue had a vital civic function to perform. The second half of this chapter examines religiosity, foppery and manliness in a variety of Defoe’s writings, including Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Religious Courtship, as well as his engagement with the Societies for Reformation of Manners. Godliness features across a number of representations of male behaviour, and driving this is Defoe’s insistent attack on men’s slide into Deism and atheism. Yet such religiosity is also inflected with a language of stoicism that relies on more classical stereotypes of manliness. This is neatly exemplified by one of Defoe’s favourite aphorisms: ‘A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise; he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die’.25 Defoe’s source is a fable that relates to the conduct of that pillar of manliness Hercules: as L’Estrange glosses the tale, ‘Hercules helps no Body that will not help Himself.’26 It is an emblem of manliness that appears regularly in Defoe’s writings and is a good example of how he employs a distinctive mix of languages to debate and shape manliness. Chapter two finishes with one of Defoe’s The phrase is Philip Carter’s, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 53-87. See also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral discourse and cultural politics in early eighteenthcentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Klein, ‘Coffee-House Civility, 1660-1714’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59/1 (1996), 31-51; Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996). 25 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727), 2:i.183. 26 Roger L’Estrange, Fables, of Aesop and other eminent mythologists: with Moral and Reflexions (5th edn, London, 1708), p. 262. 24


earliest published writings, the Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy, and illustrates how Defoe’s attitude towards the gentry is revealed to be more complex and uniquely his by a magpie-like mobilisation of a variety of languages of manliness. Betraying himself: irrationality Rationality has an almost mythic relationship with manliness and in the eighteenth century was measured in relation to male agency. Effeminacy, contrariwise, was a state of slavery to unregulated passions: and to be a slave is to lack that autonomous self-mastery that is inextricable from rationality.27 In Jure Divino – Defoe’s poetic analysis of men’s innate disposition to be slaves or tyrants – ‘reason’ is intimately linked with a man’s proper projection of manliness: ‘Reason is a faithful Counsellor, with whom, would Men constantly consult without the Agency of their Passions, they would be guided to more regular Actions than they are.’ Manliness, in other words, is the proper outcome of a constant and vigilant battle of agencies: a regulated substantial reason against unregulated and superficial passions. The fall of Adam underlines Defoe’s alignment of sin and slavery: ‘Man born to rule himself, himself betrays, … And he’s a Slave, as soon as e’er he sins.’ Such a loss of selfhood is inextricable with a loss of reason: When Crime at first possest the Humane Soul, The Wise First-Man sunk down below the Fool: Not only lost his Rectitude of Mind, But all his new illustrious Sense declin’d; The Infernal Vapour fum’d up to his Head, And all his intellectual Part lay dead; The strong Debauch his Reason stupify’d, And wild Impertinence the Place supply’d.28

The fumes and impertinences of sin blot out the light of rational self-awareness. The working through of irrationality and the consequences for Adam (and for eighteenth-century men) is visible in that most mythic figure of masculinity, Robinson Crusoe. In chapter three, ‘Crusoe, toil and temptation’, I discuss The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and the considerably less mythic sequel The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. And it is precisely because of the first part’s mythic nature that its presentation of masculinity needs to be approached so carefully and critically, and why I will briefly review the part 27 Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of EighteenthCentury Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 11. 28 Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: A Satyr, book III (SFWS, 2:131, note (a)); book VII, ll. 76, 87, 94-101 (SFWS, 2:218-19).

Introduction

Defoe studies have played in this mythologisation. Recent studies have been a breath of fresh air, revealing the contingency of Crusoe’s ostensibly autonomous manliness, and in doing so implicitly critiquing so many studies which assume or leave unexamined such idealising myths of masculinity.29 Such mythologisation was certainly strong in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.30 And in the latter half of the twentieth century Defoe criticism has – implicitly and problematically – tended to replicate this, albeit alongside sophisticated analyses. Ian Watt’s seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957) unwittingly reproduced one particular strand of eighteenth-century manliness when he described the novel’s necessary expulsion of emotional relationships; adapting Max Weber, he noted that ‘sex … being one of the strongest non-rational factors in human life, is one of the strongest potential menaces to the individual’s rational pursuit of economic ends’.31 To many in the eighteenth century, such a comment would be practically an aphorism as regards male behaviour: rationality and manliness having long been associated in contrast to irrationality and the sphere of the feminine. However, many in this period were at least sceptical about the equation of male rationality and the pursuit of economic wealth – including Defoe himself. Other studies that have emphasised Crusoe’s self-sufficient autonomy and Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 128-58; Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism, and Crusonian identity’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 176-93; George Haggerty, ‘Thank God It’s Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe’, in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005), pp. 78-87. See also Joseph Campana, ‘Cruising Crusoe: Diving into the Wreck of Sexuality’, in Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 159-79. 30 On the nineteenth-century Robinsonnades as texts of masculine imperial fantasy, see Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1990), Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997). See also James Joyce’s 1913 lecture on Defoe, in Micheal Schinagel, ed., Robinson Crusoe (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. 322-23; Walter de la Mare declared that Defoe’s island ‘remains for us an Eden uncomplicated by the wiles and distractions of an Eve’, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), p. 41. 31 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), p. 70. The ideas of Weber themselves are steeped in stereotypical assumptions regarding masculinity; see Victor Seidler, ‘Fathering, Authority and Masculinity’, in Male Order, ed. Chapman and Rutherford, pp. 272-302; David H. J. Morgan, Discovering Men (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 52-65. DeeAnn DeLuna argues that Crusoe is a virginal merchant-hero steeped in a Germanic-Christian tradition. The argument is a more nuanced version of Watt’s; however, it depends upon simplifying recent queer readings. ‘Robinson Crusoe: Virginal Hero of the North’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 28/1 (2004), 69-91. 29


10

his mastery (of his self, of Friday, of the colony) have also implicitly reproduced or left unexamined certain myths of masculinity.32 Other analyses that have examined Crusoe’s mastery of a feminine landscape by engaging more explicitly with the terminology of gender and masculinity have been suggestive, though still relying on ahistorical assumptions of gender symbolism.33 A number of these studies employ the terms ‘masculinity’ or ‘masculine’, terms which serve to mythologise a normative ideology that obscures the differences between men and a range of behaviours. Moreover, no image or narrative springs into being without context: how did notions of autonomy and mastery become inextricable from a certain ideal of manliness, and where do such ideas come from? My chapter will rather focus on the historically- and geographically-specific gendered resonances of the threats to Crusoe from within and without. I argue that the first part’s location in the colonial Americas and also its emphasis on work is crucial to understanding how the novel is embedded within hegemonic languages of manliness and effeminacy that centre on the naturalising equation of toil and manliness, and the enervating temptations of colonial American spaces. Crusoe’s own contrariness – his repeated and explicitly irrational temptation to wander – is most clearly signalled in part two. The text’s ambivalence towards Crusoe reflects a distinctively Defoean attitude that at once tentatively valorises acquisitive discontent and yet also is unable to characterise this as anything other than irrational, vapourish and unmanly. Defoe’s narratives explore the limits of these languages, but in doing so is unable to reconcile these contrary forces, and so Crusoe remains a fractured portrait of masculinity. Chapter four, ‘A Journal of the Plague Year: godly manliness under stress’, also addresses the fracturing of men; although this time, under the stresses of the plague, Defoe portrays a variety of manly exemplars, each an answer to the tricky negotiation between men’s submission to Providence and hegemonic ideals of manliness as vita activa. The Journal, then, continues Defoe’s engagement with godliness and manliness as outlined in chapter two. I argue that this fiction’s analysis of the behaviour of Restoration Londoners under a national judgment 32

For example, John Richetti’s chapter was entitled ‘The Self as Master’, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 21-62; Peter Hulme noted the ‘masculinist ethos of European colonialism’; Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 211-12; Green claimed that ‘Adventure has … been the liturgy – the series of cultic texts – of masculinism’; The Robinson Crusoe Story, p. 2. 33 Robyn Weigman, ‘Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana’, Criticism, 31/1 (1989), 33-51; Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 248-58; Susan Paterson Glover; Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), though Glover is more sceptical of Crusoe’s mastery over the feminine, pp. 111-17. The most ambitious reading for female sexual symbolism in the novel is Janine Barchas, ‘Crusoe’s Struggles with Sexuality’, The Eighteenth-Century Novel, 5 (2006), 93-116.

Introduction

11

draws upon the rhetoric of the culture of reform (and the Societies for Reformation of Manners in particular). In addition, it becomes clear that the Journal’s attitude to masculinity is inflected by class and status: it insistently castigates the upper classes and libertine gentlemen of the Restoration. H. F.’s attitude towards the urban poor is more complex and not uncritical: distinctions are drawn between a feminised, hypochondriac irrationality and a rational and manly religiosity which is based upon a courageous submission to Providence. The inset narrative of the three men of Stepney, however, suggests another exemplary masculinity, one that reveals Defoe’s idiosyncratic shaping of a manliness that combines Christianity and rationality, and yet also draws upon the language of martial aggression. Intimacy: male friendship and women Intimacy is not a word normally associated with Defoe’s writings, yet two of his novels deal with forms of intimacy – one between men, another between men and women – in some complexity. Defoe’s reaction to one particular kind of male– male intimacy was fairly clear: I believe every good Man loaths and pities them at the same time; and as they are Monuments of what human Nature abandoned of Divine Grace may be left to do – So in their Crime they ought to be abhorr’d of their Neighbours, spued out of Society, and sent expressly out of the World, as secretly and privately, as may consist with Justice and the Laws. (Review, 27 November 1707, 4:496)

So much for sodomites. Yet the culture of Defoe’s day described another version of male–male intimacy as ‘that solemn engagement founded on mutual Love’.34 While at least one of the examples here is clear about what it thinks it is describing, what exactly is meant by ‘Love’ in the second example? To merely say that the difference is that one relationship involves a sexual act and the other does not would be a reductive replication of the ideologies of masculinity which silence the potential continuities between the homosocial and the homosexual, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has famously pointed out.35 To reduce male–male love to the issue of sexuality also risks overlooking other complex issues that shape the contours of male friendship, such as class, reciprocity and asymmetry, (dis)interestedness or its public and private dimensions. Within recent studies the cultural and historical legibility of male–male friendship has been focused on the problematic significance of such terms as ‘love’, ‘desire’, ‘friendship’, ‘eroticism’,

34 Timothy Greated, An Essay on Friendship; or, a Moral Discourse on the Nature and Effects of mutual Love (London, 1726), p. 4. 35 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 1-2.


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‘virtue’, ‘mutuality’, ‘homosociality’, ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’.36 Critically, as Alan Bray has argued, there is a need to keep alive the troubling ambiguities in representations of male–male intimacy since this mode of analysis avoids reductive or ahistorical readings.37 Chapter five, ‘Singleton, friendship and secrecy’ analyses the intimate and heightened language between the pirates Bob Singleton and William Walters in Captain Singleton. How, we might ask, does this friendship, because it is so clearly outside normative male civil society, negotiate the problematic legibility of male–male love? I argue that the relationship between Bob and William (and that between Jack and his Mexican host in Colonel Jack) should be read alongside the classically influenced discourses of male–male friendship. In these heteronormative encomia on male–male friendship, civic humanism was crucial in shaping proper and improper homosociality: these writings argued that those loving bonds which align self-interest with disinterested and civic reciprocity are those that are virtuous and manly. An open reciprocity was not the only ideal, however: paradoxically, secrecy was also praised within dominant models of friendship. Male–male love, then, had a number of fissures at its heart, since the whys and wherefores of such secret friendships were potentially opaque and therefore unmanly or even sodomitic. The peculiarly charged ending of this novel – William and Bob’s friendship is founded on secret contracts and continues so beyond the narrative’s end – is both symptom and trace of this parallel anxiety about the public legibility of male–male friendship. As for Defoe’s representations of men’s intimacy with women, these are closely bound up with the debates surrounding the role of men in courtship, marriage and the family; in other words with the various strands that make up early eighteenthcentury patriarchy. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract is the seminal study of the birth of modern gender relations after John Locke’s Two Treatises (1695): in short, the consequence of the overturning of political hierarchies under the earlier form of patriarchy only meant the strengthening of gender hierarchies

Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997); Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash; George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also the essays in Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, eds, Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003) and Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda, eds, Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700-1800 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007). For an excellent overview of the conceptual and theoretical problematics of recent scholarship in this field, see Mounsey and Gonda, eds, Queer People, ‘Queer People: An Introduction’, pp. 9-37. 37 Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (1990), 1-19 (p. 15). See also The Friend for Bray’s fullest argument for making more complex the signs of friendship. 36

Introduction

13

under modern patriarchy.38 Paralleling that was a debate from the 1690s to the 1700s that voiced a recurring anxiety over the manliness of England’s men for marriage and for public service.39 A third strand of thinking behind men’s relations to women draws on the folklore that warns men of effeminate enervation following excessive sexual relations with women.40 All these strands are important for understanding Defoe’s delineation of proper and improper performances of patriarchal sexual hierarchies in marriage and courtship: failure to perform a normative authoritative (and hierarchical) role risks the situation of John Milton’s uxorious Samson, who belatedly laments, ‘foul effeminacy held me yoked / Her bond-slave’.41 This aspect of effeminacy is a deep ideological anxiety within Defoe’s Colonel Jack, in which the central character finds himself repeatedly ensnared and then cuckolded by sexually active women. Indeed, the final chapter, ‘Colonel Jack and the perils of delusion’ fittingly encompasses a wide variety of the issues this book will address. Jack’s narrative can be characterised as a life of being bewitched: by Jacobitism, by women, by wealth. I will argue that these are crucial signals of a loss of manly agency over political honour, domestic and sexual authority, and acquisitive desires. The novel’s resolution of Jack’s remarkable series of failed marriages and his allegiance to his monarch reveals the latent patriarchalism within post-Lockean contract theory, and also suggests the novel’s dependence upon an ideology of gender which is suspicious of female sexual snares. Most critics have tended to analyse this novel with a certain blindness to gender, despite a number of those studies focusing on the issue of Jack’s gentlemanliness. While Jack’s ironised pursuit of gentlemanliness seems only to be connected with his earlier Jacobitism, the issues of gentlemanliness and wealth resurface at the end of the novel. Taken together, these signs reflect Defoe’s complex attitude to patriarchy, gentlemanliness and the illusory pursuit of instant wealth. On contrariness The spirit of ‘contrariness’ runs through much of Defoe’s writing, evinced in his almost perverse way of making a didactic point (to name but a few examples: that dangerous parody of High Church rhetoric, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; pricking the English nation by addressing the conduct of France in the Review; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Michael Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston and London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 121-53. 40 Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness, p. 37. Sedgwick succinctly comments that ‘Lust … is a machine for depriving males of self-identity.’ Between Men, p. 36. 41 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. by John Carey (London: Longman, 1971), ll. 410-11. 38

39


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having a Royalist appraise the shortcomings of his own side in Memoirs of a Cavalier).42 This sense of contrariness has its basis in Defoe’s predilection for illustrating social, political and moral truths by depicting human failings; as J. Paul Hunter observes, ‘Defoe is almost always better at depicting flaws and weaknesses than at making positive qualities convincing’: such an attitude undoubtedly reflects his early sense of himself as a writer of satire.43 It is this contrariness of representation that is most striking when it comes to the subject of men in his writings: for it is their wayward lives and sometimes wilful contrariness that reveals much about exemplary and erroneous masculinity. The notion of ‘contrariness’ also turns on the dominant contrary of manliness and effeminacy. But as importantly for this book is the idea that manliness is shaped by the intermittent tensions and fitful syntheses between a variety of contrary forces in Defoe’s writings: between, for example, commerce and civic humanism; Christian and Classical virtue; patriarchy and companionate marriage; gentility and gentlemanliness; or between private friendship and public spirit. It is for this reason that this book crosses over and moves between modern paradigms for the analysis of masculinity in Defoe’s work. Whether it be civic humanism, politeness, queer studies, or the rise of the middling-sorts, no single approach on its own can adequately assess Defoe’s comprehensive, if contrary, vision.

42

P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens pinpointed this spirit of contrariness as crucial to understanding Defoe’s attitude in his writings. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 142-47. 43 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Defoe and Poetic Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 216-36 (p. 227).

Chapter 1

‘Complete’ men, trade and history Economic men and a trading nation Success in trade was the foundation of national pride and yet was also perceived as the cause of luxurious corruption, and Defoe’s attitudes, though occasionally idiosyncratic, were deeply bound to this essential problem. Traditionally posed as a ‘paradox’, there have been numerous attempts to grasp the mind-set of Defoe on morality and trade, from Defoe as moral ironist to Defoe as amoral capitalist. Defoe spares no one’s blushes when it comes to outlining the ethical negotiations in trade; yet he is no simple economic pragmatist. Examining these issues through the lens of masculinity, reveals that Defoe repeatedly engaged with his period’s anxieties concerning the relationship between trade and effeminacy and national virtue. That manliness is founded upon virtue would be an axiom hardly worth mentioning in the early eighteenth century. That engaging in trade (or using credit) might potentially compromise this manly virtue was an axiom voiced more loudly. Similar axioms were repeated at the macro level of the nation’s virtue. The success of British trade made the nation strong. But its success in fostering the trade and consumption of luxury goods was repeatedly cited as a source of corruption of the nation’s virtue: a corruption insistently represented as effeminising. For eighteenth-century detractors of the new economics, civic humanism offered an incisive language for examining these problems; in this language the new economy created effects that compromised authentic moral identity. And, in relation to the citizen and national history, it is a language steeped in the gender associations inherent in its Classical Roman tradition, as E. J. Clery notes: ‘the public virtue it celebrated was a specifically masculine virtue, epitomised by the male warriorcitizen’. Moreover, civic humanism’s analysis of historical and cultural change delineated ‘the growth of commerce and the consequent corruption of the social body as part of an inevitable, cyclical decline into effeminacy’. For key criticism in this debate, see Hans H. Anderson, ‘The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe’, Modern Philology 39 (1941), 23-46; Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Bram Dijkstra, Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987). E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 6. The seminal discussion of the discourse of civic humanism is J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian

16


As we will see in this chapter, Defoe engaged with both of these issues. Defoe’s fictional trading characters, his writings in the Review and his magnum opus for tradesmen, The Complete English Tradesman (1726/1727), reveal his acute awareness of the potential dangers to men’s manliness when engaging in trade. Defoe’s historical analysis of his nation’s virtue ran parallel to this: an analysis that was bound up with trade, war and the social structure, evidenced in a variety of his writings from the 1690s through to A Plan of the English Commerce in 1728. Part one: incomplete tradesmen The questions raised by civic humanism of the tradesman were urgent and fundamental: how does a man stay manly when he may need to be less than honest, or when his desires and hopes of riches rest upon a chaotic and unpredictable future; or when he has to sell luxurious goods, or to bend his manners to the will of others, or is tempted to emulate his betters? How to, in other words, maintain a manly and autonomous agency in a proto-capitalist market? J. G. A. Pocock has famously argued that the man who engaged in economic activity, endangered his own manliness: Economic man … was seen as on the whole a feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolised by such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and most recently Credit herself.

Men lose their virtuous autonomy because they become subject to the vagaries of their own passions that are, in turn, subject to the whims of the market. And the most visible reminder of such a market was the burgeoning credit economy. As political economist Charles Davenant put it, ‘of all the beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice then Credit; … it hangs upon opinion, it depends upon our passions of hope and fear’. As Pocock Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2nd edn 2003). For analyses that question the hegemony of civic humanist discourse, see Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 127-28, 132; and Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 105. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 114. Pocock’s phrase ‘economic man’ passes over the distinctions Defoe makes between stockjobbers and tradesmen. Charles Davenant, Works, I, 151; quoted in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 439.


17

observed, such a loss of manly agency was displaced onto a female emblem of threatening unpredictability; the most powerful emblem of the period being ‘Lady Credit’. Amongst numerous representations of Credit as a female emblem of volatility, Defoe’s ‘Lady Credit’ in his Review of 1706 is one of the first. The younger sister of money, she is ‘a coy Lass, and wonderful chary of her self’, yet also capricious: ‘how absolute this Lady is; how despotickly she governs all her actions’. Courted and lost by various monarchs and governments, she herself is at once prude and coquette, constant only in her sexual inconstancy (Review, 10 January 1707, 3:1718). This representation of national credit schemes is reiterated in relation to personal credit in The Complete English Tradesman: ‘Credit is, or ought to be the tradesman’s Mistress’. While this may seem to replicate the Machiavellian dictum that Fortuna must be forced to the will of male virtue, Defoe replicates the misogynistic stereotype of female sexual inconstancy seen in ‘Lady Credit’: ‘if you court her, she is gone; if you manage so wisely, as to make her believe you really do not want her, she follows and courts you’. He adds, ‘But by the way no Tradesman can be in so good circumstances, as to say he does not want, that is, does not stand in need of credit’ (CET, 1:408). Defoe underlines the precarious position of the tradesman in relation to the feminised and sexualised figure of credit: men are rendered passive in the face of such a perpetually unrequited need. Yet while Defoe was indeed imbricated within the language of civic humanism, the dominant critical attention to Defoe’s Lady Credit has obscured his more insistent concern with a different aspect of the relationship between trade and men: one that intersects with the period’s hegemonic ideologies of effeminacy, manliness and status. Defoe repeatedly depicted opportunities for the trader to prove his mastery over the private self, to display agency over pleasures and desires. While Defoe did not shy away from the potential problems of the seemingly inauthentic moral identity of the trader, he reached for tropes of theatricality or authenticity to stabilise the identity of the trader that drew upon dominant ideologies of gender: manly, creditable, virtuous trading was contrary to superficiality, excessive emulative desires and foppery.

See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 452-57; Paula Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Lady Credit’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981), 89-100; Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 40-54; Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17-39; Laura Brown, Fables Of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 95-131; pp. 103-25 on Defoe. As Sherman notes, she has a ‘bivalent sexuality’. Finance and Fictionality, p. 45.

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‘Vanity is the perfection of a Fop’: this is Moll Flanders’s damning summary of her first husband, the draper. Moll had initially thought to have found her ideal, ‘a Tradesman … that was something of a Gentleman too’ (60). But the folly of this ideal is revealed in her sarcastic description of such a hybrid creation: ‘this amphibious Creature, this Land-water-thing, call’d, a Gentleman-Tradesman’ (60). The folly, it turns out, is not that it is impossible for a trader to aspire to gentility, but rather that gentility could ostensibly be accomplished by ‘a profusion of Expence’, the pleasure to ‘look like Quality for a Week’, and the trappings of equipage (61). Moll’s draper husband is a fop as a result of his shallow mimicry of gentlemanliness through spectacular display and ostentatious finery. As Thomas Dyche defined him, the fop was ‘a whimsical, foolish, empty fellow, one that is wholly taken up about modes and fashions in dress, and by the effeminateness of his behaviour, comes nearer to a woman than a man’. Such effeminate pleasures are performed at the expense of a substantial foundation of worth and, for the draper, lead down to the abyss of financial ruin for himself and, inevitably, for his family: ‘Vanity is the perfection of a Fop; my Husband had this Excellence, that he valued nothing of Expence, and as his History you may be sure, has very little weight in it; ’tis enough to tell you, that in about two Years and a Quarter he Broke’ (62). Moll’s disastrous gentleman-tradesman husband has echoes of an earlier vacuous male, Fletumacy, one of the ‘finish’d Fops’ in Defoe’s Reformation of Manners, A Satyr: Dull Fletumacy has his Heart’s Delight, Gets up i’th’Morning to lie down at Night; His Talk’s a Mass of weighty Emptiness, None more of Business prates, or knows it less.

Fletumacy’s flatulent prattle is unsupported by any real business acumen and is a mask for a meaningless life of ‘Emptiness’, which is summed up with terrifying Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 62. Further references after quotations in the text. Defoe does allow a tradesman’s family to claim gentility, but only from the second generation; The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890), pp. 4, 258, 268-78. Further references after quotations in the text. Thomas Dyche, A New General English Dictionary (London, 1735). As Samuel Johnson would define it later, effeminacy is ‘Admission of the qualities of a woman; softness; unmanly delicacy; mean submission’, and defined effeminate as ‘womanish; soft to an unmanly degree; voluptuous; tender; luxurious’. A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London, 1755). For a lucid discussion of the fop and the scholarship, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 137-62.


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succinctness: he is ‘only born to die’.10 Such pretensions to business are forcefully repeated in Defoe’s novel Roxana. Roxana’s first marriage is to a brewer, and though not called a fop, he is a ‘conceited Fool’, echoing the draper’s vanity.11 Most unforgivable, however, is his superficiality: he had no Genius to Business; he had no Knowledge of his Accounts; he bustled a little about it indeed, at first, and put on a Face of Business, but he soon grew slack; it was below him to inspect his Books … and while he found Money in Cash to pay the Malt-Man, and the Excise, and put some in his Pocket, he was perfectly easie and indolent.

After a half-hearted show of business sense, her husband’s preoccupation, it becomes clear, is with the luxurious trappings of gentility at the expense of a credit-worthy business: despite emptying coffers, he would not ‘abate his Figure or Equipage, his Horses or Servants’ (11).12 Later in her life and now in France, Roxana is troubled to hear that her brewer husband is now a soldier there and she secretly enquires into his life: I found an Opportunity to see what a most insignificant, unthinking Life, the poor indolent Wretch, who by his inactive Temper had at first been my Ruin, now liv’d; how he only rose in the Morning, to go to-Bed at Night; … he was a meer motionless Animal, of no Consequence in the World; that he seem’d to be one, who, tho’ he was indeed, alive, had no manner of Business in Life, but to stay to be call’d out of it. (95)

Indolence, insubstantiality, ignorance: Defoe even recycles the description of the fop Fletumacy whose only purpose in being born is to die and who ‘Gets up i’th’Morning to lie down at Night’.13 It is hard to think of a more succinct account of a failed manliness in Defoe’s writings. It is also significant that the catalyst for both Moll’s and Roxana’s descent into crime and vice is the vanity, indolence and superficiality displayed by their first husbands: what propels these domestic households into collapse is the inauthenticity of their hybrid masculinity – a failure of a ‘complete’ manliness. 10 Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr, ll. 1046, 1082-85, 1091 (SFWS, 1:185, 186). 11 Daniel Defoe, Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 9-10. Further references after quotations in the text. 12 Defoe’s inveighs against shopkeepers who ‘keep horse ride a hunting, learn dog-language, and keep the sportsmens [sic] brogue upon their tongues’. The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727), 1:120. All further references are to volume, (and in vol. 2, part), and pages after quotations in the text. 13 This is one of Defoe’s stock phrases, and is also repeated in The Compleat English Gentleman (CEG, 180).

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The trader’s choice: The Complete English Tradesman There is little doubt that any man following Defoe’s advice in The Complete English Tradesman (1726/1727) would be embarking upon a tricky path, one that seemed to require ethical sophistry and moral rectitude in equal measure, added to the dangers posed by the unpredictable vagaries of the market.14 A constant theme, however, is the potential inauthenticity of the tradesman’s identity, through either emulation or dissimulation. Defoe opens The Complete Tradesman with a worrying scenario: Tradesmen cannot live as Tradesmen in the same class used to live; custom and the manner of all Tradesmen round them command a difference, and he that will not do as others do, is esteemed as no body among them, and thus the Tradesman is doom’d to Ruin by the fate of the times. In short, there is a fate upon a Tradesman, either he must yield to the snare of the times, or be the jest of the times; the young Tradesman cannot resist it; he must live as others do, or lose the credit of living, and be run down as if he was broke: In a word, he must spend more than he can afford to spend, and so be undone, or not spend it, and so be undone. If he lives as others do he breaks, because he spends more than he gets; if he does not, he breaks too, because he loses his credit, and that is to lose his trade; what must he do? (CET, 1:viii)

The young tradesman starting out is swayed by present fashion to present a creditworthy appearance, even at the risk of bankruptcy. Defoe may be uncovering an unpalatable truth in a pragmatic way, but his lament is directed at ‘the times’ and their seeming obsession with appearances and status emulation. As we have seen, the draper and the brewer’s hybrid emulation of gentlemanly appearances underlined their failure as complete tradesmen. Similarly damaging to the maintenance of a manly virtue is Defoe’s description of the trader’s hypocrisy and dissimulation: ‘there is some difference between an honest man, and an honest tradesman’ (CET, 1:274).15 The tradesman must dissemble and present a surface demeanour to his customers that is false to his private self. One of the reasons for failing in trade, Defoe notes, is a lack of patience with the customer: ‘he must have no passions, no fire in his temper; he must be all soft and smooth; nay, if his real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must shew none of it in his shop; he must be a perfect complete hypocrite, if he will be a complete tradesman’ (CET, 1:114). Defoe even cites cases where tradesmen, faced with irritating customers, have retreated upstairs to bang their heads against walls, or beat their children and wives till their passions had been vented. 14 Peter Earle calls it a ‘hazardous path’, and the trader would have to be a ‘subtle casuist’; The World of Defoe (Newton Abbot: Reader’s Union, 1977), pp. 239, 238. 15 See also 2:i.42-45.


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Critics Lincoln Faller and Sandra Sherman have argued that what is revealed in these scenarios is the destruction of an authentic and autonomous self, where the tradesman is forever dependent upon capitalist exchange for expression.16 As with men under the sway of ‘Lady Credit’, or Moll and Roxana’s first husbands and Fletumacy who lead lives of showy and ineffectual emptiness, such a loss of agency is ideologically aligned with effeminacy. The Complete English Tradesman counters the dangers of emulation and inauthenticity by drawing upon an idiosyncratic mix of classical myth and Christian discourse to animate the trader to manly behaviour.17 Defoe (however peculiarly he seems to relish these descriptions of the pressures on the tradesman), attempts to ground the tradesman’s manliness in an aura of solidity, stability and completeness. For Defoe, this problem was the urban middling-sorts version of that classical emblem of male virtue ‘the Choice of Hercules’, in which Hercules was forced to choose between a life of ease and pleasure and a hard but rewarding life of virtue. That this myth was also adaptable to illustrate Protestant ethics only goes to show the confluence of forces on male behaviour. Early in The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe draws upon Proverbs to drive home the requirements of diligent virtue: ‘He that is slothful in business, is brother to him that is a great waster’ and ‘The diligent hand maketh rich’ (CET, 1:53-54).18 This Christian discourse is reiterated in Defoe’s advice to the failing businessman where Providence helps only those who help themselves: ‘A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise; he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die’, adding, ‘We know ’tis the Hand of Heaven that makes rich; but the Text gives it to the hand of Diligence’ (CET, 2:i.183). Such formulations are in keeping with the discipline of work espoused by the strand of Protestant thinking that saw ‘material success as a sign of spiritual salvation’.19 In this ideology, as Max Weber famously set out, a desire for worldly success was perceived as a Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 153-54. Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, pp. 101-2, 108-9. For the text as part of a wider debate about the fine line between trade and criminality, see Pat Rogers, EighteenthCentury Encounters: Studies in Literature and Society in the Age of Walpole (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), chapter eight, ‘Merchants and Ministers; Peachum, Jonathan Wild, and The Complete English Tradesman’, pp. 100-14. 17 In relation to emulation, Margaret R. Hunt points out that it ‘certainly did not operate without check.’ The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 4-5. Michael Shinagel discerned a consistent pursuit of gentility throughout Defoe’s writings, but he overlooks Defoe’s considerable ambivalence towards this pursuit. Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 18 Proverbs 18:9 and 10:4, respectively. 19 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 196. 16


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godly calling within a regime of asceticism, frugality and labour.20 For Defoe, as Katherine Clark reminds us, a tradesman’s proper sense of his calling was dependent upon him seeing ‘his daily choices as part of a wider framework of nature, time, and Providence’.21 Yet the origins of Defoe’s ‘ditch’ maxim reveal to us the deep interplay between classical and Christian languages of manliness: the phrase has a classical source in the fable ‘A Country-man and Hercules’, to be found in the collection of fables by Roger L’Estrange: A Carter that had laid his Wagon Fast in a Slough, stood Gaping and Bawling to as many of the Gods and Goddesses as he could Muster up, and to Hercules Especially, to Help him out of the Mire. Why ye Lazy Puppy you, says Hercules, lay your Shoulder to the Wheel, and Prick your Oxen first, Then’s your Time to Pray. Are the Gods to do your Drudgery, d’ye think, and you lie Bellowing with Your Finger in your Mouth?

Glossing this, L’Estrange drew the Christian moral that ‘Providence Assists No Body that does not put his Own Shoulders to the Work’, though the classical myth remains strong: ‘Hercules helps no Body that will not help Himself.’22 For the middling-sorts tradesman, the steep and rocky path of Herculean manly virtue becomes the rugged self-denying path of Christian trading virtue.23 In The Complete English Tradesman, this is driven home in the Bunyanesque language of a pilgrim: ‘Trade is a strait and direct way, if they will but keep in it with a steady foot, and not wander’, Defoe warns, adding that there are ‘many turnings and by-lanes’ and that these ‘dangerous and fatal roads’ lead to ‘Pleasures and Diversions’ (CET, 1:117-18). Avoiding the temptation of pleasurable diversions is not merely to maximize profit; a tradesman has a special ethical duty: ‘another man has not the same obligation to a calling, the same necessity to apply to it, the same cry of a family, whose bread may depend upon his diligence’ (CET, 1:119). It is this appeal to a larger, if domestic, ethical good that transforms a classical model of manliness into something more unique to the middling-sorts ideology of manly virtue. As Margaret Hunt has shown, the problem of excessive emulative Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. by Anthony Giddens (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976). 21 Katherine Clark, Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 157. 22 Roger L’Estrange, Fables, of Aesop and other eminent mythologists: with Moral and Reflexions (5th edn; London, 1708), pp. 261, 262. This is a fable by Anianus. Maximillian Novak suggests only that the fable indicates Defoe’s ‘reliance on natural morality rather than religion’. Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 144. 23 See also Roxana’s brewer husband, of whom she comments: ‘a Man of Sence falls in the World, and gets-up again, and a Woman has some Chance for herself; but with a Fool! once fall, and ever undone; once in the Ditch, and die in the Ditch’ (96). 20


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desires was countered by diverse moral strategies, including control over how one spent one’s time, and a rational control over how one spent one’s money – accounting, in other words – both of which can be found in The Complete English Tradesman.24 But as importantly, because of the vicissitudes of the marketplace visited upon the family, the middling sorts attempted to construct an equation between trading virtue and familial order.25 As Defoe puts it, That tradesman who does not delight in his family, will never long delight in his business; for as one great end of an honest tradesman’s diligence is the support of his family … so the very sight of, and above all, his tender and affectionate care for his wife and children, is the spur of his diligence. (CET, 1:152)

It is an admonition both Moll and Roxana may have wished their first husbands had listened to. If neither draper nor the brewer gave much thought to their families, they thought even less about their country. Defoe is never in doubt that the wealth of England and its colonies is entirely owing to its tradesmen; in fact English identity is predicated upon this: ‘It is said of England by way of distinction, and we value ourselves upon it, that it is a trading country’ (CET, 1:368). But, alongside claims of the best trade and the best climate, is a claim for the best men, for manliness: Our Englishmen are … the stoutest and best, because strip them naked from the wast upwards, and give them no weapons at all but their Hands and Heels, and turn them into a room, or stage, and lock them in with the like number of any men of any nation, man for man, and they shall beat the best men you shall find in the world. (CET, 1:370)

On the face of it, this is merely a patriotic representation of English men in general. However, it suggests the perhaps surprising image of semi-naked shopkeepers bare-knuckle fighting. Coming within the immediate context of a claim for the superiority of tradesmen and their potential to raise huge fortunes, and a larger claim that trade underpins the success of the British empire, this passage powerfully aligns manliness with national trading prowess. Pocock has been influential in delineating a crucial debate between two contrary conceptions of society in the period: on the one hand ‘a conception of property which stresses possession and civic virtue’, on the other ‘one which stresses exchange and the civilisation of the passions’.26 Contrarily, Defoe’s guide book for tradesmen does not fit easily into either one of these conceptions. Defoe is a keen-eyed analyst of the effect of the market on the masculinity of tradesmen, yet plainly feels that the civic humanist critique of the market does not enable a 24

See 1:61; 1:323-47. Hunt, The Middling Sort, see chapters 2, 6 and 8. 26 Pocock, Virtue, p. 115. 25


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thriving nation. Yet neither does he draw upon the discourse of politeness and refined sociability to ground the manliness of men in trade. The Complete English Tradesman’s appeal to classical myth and Christian fortitude, taken together with this last passage, suggests that, for Defoe, trade is a far more strenuous manly undertaking. Peacocks and feathers In the section entitled ‘Of Extravagant and Expensive living; another step to a Tradesman’s Disaster’, Defoe offers a summary of the kind of emulative desires in which both Moll’s draper and Roxana’s brewer indulge: 1. Expensive house-keeping, or family extravagance. 2. Expensive dressing, or the extravagance of fine cloaths. 3. Expensive company, or keeping company above himself. 4. Expensive equipages, making a shew and ostentation of figure in the world. (CET, 1:136)

Defoe makes it clear that such luxury is ‘the expensive humour of the times’ (CET, 1:138), yet this underlines the potential effeminacy of a tradesman unable to exert self-control. Indeed, Defoe reaches for the contraries of effeminacy and manliness to stabilise the difference between victim of the market and agent of trade. Central to the representation of a man of business (in contrast to the foppishness of, say, Moll’s draper husband) are the contrary images of substance and insubstantiality. Defoe alludes to the archetypal fop in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode: We are speaking now to a tradesman … one that would be a rich tradesman, rather than a poor, fine, gay man; a grave citizen, not a peacock’s feather: for he that sets up for a Sir Fopling Flutter, instead of a compleat tradesman, is not to be thought capable of relishing this discourse. (CET, 1:142)

Defoe contrasts two kinds of masculinity: substantial, temperate solvency versus spectacular, superficial extravagance. Defoe extends this image of foppish vacuity into a metaphor that constructs the successful tradesman as an embodiment of manly substance: Trade is not a ball, where people appear in masque, and act a part to make sport; where they strive to seem what they really are not, and to think themselves best drest when they are least known: but ’tis a plain visible scene of honest life, shewn best in its native appearance, without disguise; supported by prudence and frugality; and like strong, stiff, clay land, grows fruitful only by good husbandry, culture and manuring. (CET, 1:143)


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Deliberately mixing his metaphors to create a contrast between urban pleasure and rural diligence, Defoe is anxious to link the prudent management of one’s economic desires with an ideal of authenticity and substance. Defoe demonises the fashionable masquerades which, to their detractors, symbolised the fantasy of an unregulated mobility and fluidity of identity, and suggested the performativity of identity rather than its stability. Both the fop and the masquerade were subject to a long-standing anti-theatricality prejudice which, as Jonas Barish has pointed out, was ‘a conservative ethical emphasis in which the key terms are those of order, stability, constancy, and integrity, as against a more existentialist emphasis that prizes growth, process, exploration, flexibility, variety and versatility of response’.27 In Defoe’s vision, manly substance, aligned with economic integrity, is contrasted with the surface appearance of finery and uncontrolled emulative desires: ‘A tradesman drest up fine, with his long wig and sword, may go to the ball when he pleases, for he is already drest up in the habit; like a piece of counterfeit money, he is brass wash’d over with silver, and no tradesman will take him for current’ (CET, 1:143). In this section of The Complete English Tradesman, superficiality and theatricality, figured in an excessive concern for the ‘counterfeit’ trappings of status, are opposed to ‘current’ wealth and images of ‘honest’ substance. In the ideological language of gender contraries, the tradesman who indulges his desires for outward show is aligned with the effeminate fop; the prudent tradesman, in contrast, is implicitly ‘complete’ and manly. Michael McKeon’s comment on Defoe’s ‘real uncertainty … about some of the more disquieting features of the world of exchange value’ reflects the double vision of a world of fantastic identities and unmoored morals sitting side-by-side with the virtues of trade, prudence and diligence.28 This split is mirrored by the one between would-be aristocrats and those embracing their own middling-sorts values. Paradoxically, given Defoe’s insistent trumpeting of progressive notions of honour, this leads to a position where his comments on emulation and status-envy seem conservative at the very least. Driven by ‘Pride’ and ‘Envy’, ‘Immodesty’ and ‘Irreligion’, the ‘purse-proud’ tradesman stands as a example ‘to warn the Compleat Tradesman, to avoid the hateful Character; … to infuse Principles of Modesty, Prudence, Diligence, and Virtue’ (CET, 2:i.234-35). Underlining this, Defoe paints a picture of a rich tradesman attempting to mix with men who are gentlemen by birth:

27 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 116-17, quoted in Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 75, see pp. 74-75. See also Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986). 28 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, p. 206.

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Defoe’s Writings and Manliness the sordid teizing Mechanick, trusted by Heaven with a little more Money than his Neighbours, borrows the Feathers of the Gay, the Polite, the Manly, and the Mannerly; and in spite of Nature, and his Want of Brains, claims not to pass for what he is, but for what he neither is, or is capable to be. (CET, 2:i.248)

That the purse-proud tradesman can only borrow the superficial attributes of gentility underlines how far away he is from manly ideals that are here implicitly naturalised on gentlemen by birth.29 The anxieties over avarice, pleasure and emulative desires are contained by a cautious attitude towards status; the text ‘affords us a glimpse of progressive ideology hesitating on the edge of conservative reversal’.30 Defoe is effectively warning the middling sorts against emulative desires that undermine the attainment of a trading virtue. Bram Dijkstra’s perceptive study of Defoe’s economics argues that Defoe’s attitude towards status is aligned with an economic theory that revolves around the central trope of the ‘pond’ and the ‘spring’; a trope that reflects the contrasts between the new economic merchants and an outmoded feudal life of indolence and luxurious excess. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe notes that, ‘an Estate’s a pond, but a Trade’s a spring’ (CET, 1:375). Dijkstra’s analysis turns upon a scene in Roxana where Sir Robert Clayton (a real-life financier and merchant) declares that ‘an Estate is a Pond; but that a Trade was a Spring; that if the first is once mortgag’d, it seldom gets clear, but embarrass’d the Person forever; but the Merchant had his Estate continually flowing’ (170). Here, the contrast is between an innovating, continually re-creating prudent merchant-class and the outmoded and static aristocracy. Roxana’s marriage to her useless brewer is, Dijkstra argues, ‘a vivid warning against the tendency of the middle class to affect aristocratic attitudes. The stagnant pond of the aristocracy saps the tradesman’s capacity for survival.’31 However, Dijkstra fails to note Defoe’s insistent resort to the figure of the fop and the ideologies of effeminacy and manliness in these texts.32 This is despite the suggestive imagery of the contraries of pond and spring, of stagnant, indolent pleasure and active, diligent improvement. Defoe’s ideas of economic behaviour are intimately bound up with powerful ideals of manliness. Once again, we can see the contrary images of the slippery slope into effeminacy versus the road of virtuous improvement: the trader’s choice. How this ‘choice’ was played out at a national level was one of the problems that nagged Defoe’s thinking. In The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe’s articulation of the conflicting ideals of national grandeur and the paradoxical relations between morality, luxury and commerce comes down to this: ‘What a poor Nation must we 29 See also The Compleat English Gentleman on the ‘Purse-proud’ stock-jobber (CEG, 257-58). 30 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, p. 206. 31 Dijkstra, Defoe and Economics, p. 18. 32 Dijkstra also overstates Defoe’s contempt for the gentry: see my discussion in chapter two.


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have been if we had been a sober, religious, temperate Nation?’ (CET, 2:ii.106). But in reconciling the tradesman to his business of selling luxuries, Defoe relies on two larger structures of social categorisation: nationhood and gender. Defoe is especially unforgiving of tradesmen who trade in foreign imported luxuries (CET, 2:ii.160-61), and commenting that ‘a Reformation might effect Trade in many particular things, but need not overthrow and destroy it in general’, he advocates the support of home-grown (and plainer) goods and fare (CET, 2:ii.173). Defoe also devolves moral responsibility for the purchase of luxurious fripperies upon the effeminate consumer, rather than the tradesman: ‘Now the Tradesman indeed takes the advantage of the Fop, and puts in to furnish him with Gaieties, and fine Feathers: But the Tradesman does not bid him turn Peacock, and strut about to shew and spread his Plumes’ (CET, 2:ii.119). As we have seen, Defoe’s representation of the tradesman already draws upon a set of gendered tropes that construct an opposition between the virtuous man of substance and frugality and the superficial effeminate: the distinction drawn here between tradesman and effeminate consumer echoes and reinforces these tropes. Part two: virtue and luxury, effeminacy and nation Defoe was frequently explicit that effeminacy and luxury were intimately bound up with national character and virtue (or the lack thereof). In casting aspersions at various states and peoples on the geopolitical outskirts of Europe, Defoe drew upon well-known stereotypes of national character in which degeneracy is aligned with luxury, such as Italy, where ‘so much has Sloth, Bigottry, and Debauchery Effeminated the Gallantest and most Magnanimous Nation in the World’ (Review, 6 June 1704, 1:121). The Portuguese, too, suffered Defoe’s judgement in A Plan of the English Commerce: ‘an effeminate, haughty, and as it were, a decay’d Nation in Trade’ (PEW, 7:121). Similarly, when he declared in The True-Born Englishman that ‘Wealth makes the Persian too Effeminate’ (SFWS, 1:89), he was reproducing the stereotype of the Orient in whom luxurious riches went hand-in-hand with effeminacy. While Defoe’s sentiments here seem unremarkable, the position was different when it came to considering England. He constantly revisited the relations between wealth and commerce, effeminacy, morality, political constitution and national character. Unavoidably, then, Defoe needed to draw upon the dominant models of social change to explain these relations: civic humanism and commercial ideology. Defoe’s attitudes towards luxury place him at the nexus of two competing systems of thought. In civic humanist ideology, the creation of luxury goods feeds desire, creating in their turn more desires for further luxuries. Such private desire is an expense of public spirit, a dependence upon, or slavery to, commercial culture that undermines a man’s economic, and therefore political, independence. In commercial ideology, however, luxury – the production of excess – is the motor of economic success: desires and their fulfilment create profit, employment and


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investment. It is precisely the connection between the two sides of the debate that Bernard Mandeville scandalously revealed in the subtitle of his poem, The Fable of the Bees: ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits’.33 It was a connection that scandalised because, to those that wanted to have their cake of virtue, and eat the economic benefits too, it revealed what ought to be unseen. ‘National Vices are become Virtues in Trade’, Defoe comments in The Complete English Tradesman (CET, 2:ii.148). Defoe’s acknowledgement of Mandeville’s aphorism is reiterated in A Plan of the English Commerce: ‘our Vices are so unhappily mingled with our Interest in Trade, that as a late Author, writing on that Subject, says well, Our Luxury is become a Virtue in Commerce, and our Extravagancies are the Life and Soul of our Trade’ (PEW, 7:228). It is precisely this problem that Defoe grapples with in a number of his writings on social reform, war, trade and gentility: reforming vice and luxurious consumption offered a way of reinvigorating the nation’s manly virtue; yet, problematically, reform could potentially damage the very economic boom generated by luxury. For Defoe this problem is fraught with importance: in his vision, the question of luxury and nation does not only concern the trading classes, but was also intimately involved with the history and role of the gentry. Katherine Clark’s impressive analysis of Defoe’s writings argues that he was ‘one of the most important historical thinkers’ of the period: his ‘historical sophistication’, lay in the way ‘he used various historical arguments to make sense of the dramatic intellectual and cultural changes taking place in his own present’.34 More importantly, Defoe’s analysis of social and historical change was also bound up with ideologies of gender, since it was often also an analysis of the causes and effects of luxury and effeminacy. 1690s: economics and civic virtue In fact, in The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville merely repeats as an ironic scandal what liberal economic commentators had proudly stated as economic maxim, and even commercial aspiration, in the 1690s.35 Nicholas Barbon had noted that, The Wants of the Mind are infinite, Man naturally Aspires, and as his Mind is elevated, his Senses grow more refined, and more capable of Delight; his Desires are inlarged, and his Wants increase with his Wishes, which is for every Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. Philip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 34 Clark, Daniel Defoe, pp. 4, 164. 35 Novak, Economics, pp. 135-36; Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism, pp. 34-57. In the first edition of the poem in 1705, it gathered little comment, but by the 1720s, when his revised and enlarged version was published, Mandeville’s argument had become infamous. 33


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thing that is rare, can gratifie his Senses, adorn his Body, and promote the Ease, Pleasure, and Pomp of Life.36

These explanations for national economic expansion and growth offered a proto-psychology of consumerism. Dudley North declared even more bluntly, ‘did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World’.37 These, then, were the forerunners of The Fable of the Bees, but their arguments were a hornet’s nest to both civic humanists and reformers, who saw in commercial expansion based upon desire for luxuries the corruption of national virtue. Charles Davenant’s comment, from ‘On the Plantation Trade’ (1698), sums up the civic humanist narrative of national corruption whereby luxury, effeminacy and national virtue were indissolubly linked: ‘Extended Dominion, Power atchieved by Arms or Riches flowing in by Trade, beget Effeminacy, Pride, Ambition and Luxuries of all Kinds’.38 Speaking on behalf of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, Edward Stillingfleet’s sermon, Reformation of Manners, the true way of Honouring God, mobilises a synthesis of civic humanist analysis and religious rhetoric: ‘the Sins of a Nation do naturally tend to the Weakness and Dishonour of it. … Who can deny that Luxury and Debauchery, and all sorts of Intemperance, not only sink the Reputation of a People, but effeminates and softens them.’39 To civic humanists like Davenant, commerce and civic virtue were uneasy, if not hostile, bedfellows. Davenant’s tract on the colonies was published at the same time as the ‘Standing Army’ debate was galvanised; a debate that took in the relationship between social and constitutional change, luxury and virtue. In Anthony Fletcher’s pamphlet, A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias (1697), the birth of commerce around 1500 had a number of far-reaching consequences: it brought about the birth of luxury and the consequent enervation of the gentry, and so put paid to the ostensible independent virtue of the barons, upsetting the feudal or ‘Gothic’ constitutional balance between barons and monarch. Fletcher’s pamphlet also proposed a Spartan model of militia training camps as an alternative to a standing army.40 Defoe’s riposte, An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government (1698), does not depart from the historical narrative that Fletcher constructs his tract upon, a narrative Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), p. 15. Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade (London, 1691), p. 14. 38 Charles Davenant, ‘On the Plantation Trade’, in Select Dissertations on Colonies and Plantations. By Those Celebrated Authors, Sir Josiah Child, Charles D’avenant, LL.D. and Mr. William Wood (London, 1775), p. 68. 39 Edward Stillingfleet, Reformation of Manners, the true way of Honouring God. With the necessity of Putting the Laws in Execution against Vice and Profaneness. In a Sermon Preach’d at White-Hall (London, [1700?]), p. 15. 40 The Political Works of Anthony Fletcher (London, 1737), pp. 7-9, 12-14, 49-66. 36 37


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which sees the period from the reign of Henry VII as one of social, economic and constitutional change.41 Whereas ‘the old Gothick Model of Government’ was praised by Fletcher for its civic virtue, for Defoe its collapse liberated the nation from the constant danger of warring barons and brought about the ‘Freedoms the Commons enjoy’ under the auspices of the House of Commons (PEW, 1:73).42 Defoe also emphasised that the army was in the hands of the Commons and that modern warfare is dependent upon the wealth of the public purse: ‘he who had the longest Sword has yielded to them who had the longest Purse’ (PEW, 1:76). It was a formula Defoe had also employed in An Essay on Projects, published the same year as Fletcher’s standing-army pamphlet, in which he had also advocated a military academy similar in some ways to Fletcher’s. Defoe exhorted young gentlemen to leave off ‘the foolish Boyish Sports of Cocking, and Cricketing, and from Tipling, to shooting with a Firelock, an Exercise as Pleasant, as ’tis Manly and Generous’ (PEW, 8:124), implicitly contrasting childish and vacuous pastimes with adulthood and proper manhood. 1704-06: monarchs and gentry; luxury, war and reform In the 1690s, Defoe chose not to engage with Fletcher’s contention that the social and economic changes of post-feudal England had brought about the luxurious downfall of the barons. But by 1706, this was central to Defoe’s discussion of trade and luxury in a series of issues of the Review in which he revisits this historical narrative of the barons and the gentry. Indeed, the period from 1704 to 1706 seemed to be when Defoe was grappling most anxiously with the relationships between commercial success, national morality and the virtue of the gentry. Was Defoe, in the early 1700s, hesitating on the verge of a vision of politics in which he constructed a rapprochement between the obvious benefits of the trade in luxuries for the nation’s wealth, and the possibility for a prudent – and manly – gentry to have a crucial role in politics, and even national military prowess? Over a number of issues of the Review in January and February 1706, Defoe attempted to debate ‘whether Parsimony or Frugality be an Advantage to a Nation’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:37). While he admitted that ‘the Luxury 41

Defoe and Fletcher are drawing upon the work of the seventeenth-century historian James Harrington. For a discussion of Harrington’s ideas, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 383-96. Clark’s analysis of Defoe and Henry VII is limited only to Defoe’s A Plan of the English Commerce (1728); Daniel Defoe, pp. 171-78. Henry VII’s reign also appears in Defoe’s unfinished manuscript Of Royall Educacion. A Fragmentary Treatise by Daniel Defoe, ed., Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1895) pp. 38-46. 42 Pocock, analysing Defoe’s defence of a Standing Army, argues that Defoe is an apologist for commercial specialisation, who, while employing the language of civic humanism, rejects the ideals of civic virtue as outmoded. Machiavellian Moment, pp. 432-35.


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and Extravagancies of the English Nobility and Gentry, have been the Advantage of the Common People, and is a great Support to some part of Trade’, Defoe eventually – and guardedly – argues that it might be perhaps possible to ‘Reform Ill Manners, and not Destroy Trade’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:37, 3:43). What is most striking about Defoe’s discussion is his historical perspective on the rise of luxury which, whilst it parallels his analysis in An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, differs in its language, in that there is a glimpse of regret that any possibility the gentry might have had for a political or civic role has been undermined. For Clark, Defoe’s attitude to historical change in economics and the gentry ‘confirmed that Defoe believed that an age of commerce, science, and the arts had superseded an age of military conquest’, and the place of Henry VII in that thinking was as a monarch who ‘embraced this new world order’.43 There is certainly plenty of evidence for that, but this misses the shifts and ambivalences in Defoe’s analysis of effeminacy, virtue and the gentry. In Defoe’s narrative, England’s gentry have lost their independence both economically and politically, a loss inextricable from the rise of luxury: this is ‘the Original of this Fatal Error of our Gentry’. He begins by describing the original state of the gentry, a time when their Houses were Impregnable Castles, their Lordships and Tenantry Armies of Vassals at their Absolute Command; when they were Lords of the People, and Bridles to the Prince when if a Nobleman was Disgusted at Court, he would retire to his Seats or Castles in the Country; and whenever that happen’d, the King knew what he had to expect, and had nothing to do but to raise Forces and follow him, or else perhaps he saw him in the Field before him. (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:38)

This is as close as Defoe ever gets to expressing sympathy for the feudal constitution: generally, he has little time for its tendency to tyranny and internecine strife. Defoe makes it clear that the corruption of the gentry has not come about by ‘taking away their Privileges, or invading their Liberties’ (a paraphrase of Fletcher). Rather, the gentry were undermined by the ‘unusual Magnificence’ of Henry VII: by advancing this Humour of the People, in the Gayeties of the Court, he brought the Gentry to be more dependent upon him, Demolish’d their Fortifications, and gave them Places to Please them; made them Bed-Chamber-Men and Attendants; in short, Hewers of Wood, and Drawers of Water, for Pensions and Salaries. (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:38)

Henry VIII’s reign only exacerbates this: ‘his haughty Spirit perfectly aw’d his Nobility, his luxuriant Court effeminated them’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:39). For Defoe, changes in the character of the court, specifically the manners adopted Clark, Daniel Defoe, p. 164.

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by a ruler, create shockwaves that undermine the independence, the virtue – and the manliness – of the nation’s gentry. The effeminacy of the gentry is based not only on their consumerism, but on their concomitant lack of political and economic agency: ‘As Poverty came upon them, the Dependance upon the King for Pensions, Places, and Preferments, was entirely secur’d’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:39). Such an indictment of the gentry reminds us of the central place given to ‘corruption’ in civic humanist thought, and the emasculating effects of the excesses of luxury forced upon society by commercial gain. At this point there is little difference between Defoe’s narrative and that of the defender of civic virtue, Anthony Fletcher, who had claimed that trade and manufacture had sunk ‘Europe into an abyss of pleasures’ and changed the barons’ ‘frugal and military way of living’.44 Defoe’s concern for the gentry’s function as exemplars of proper military behaviour is clear in his plan for a military academy in his 1697 Essay on Projects, but it is also plain in his poems on Marlborough’s military campaign during the War of Spanish Succession, in which he seems to resort to the kind of language that would have been music to the ears of defenders of civic virtue. In his 1704 poem, A Hymn to Victory (the English victory over the French at Blenheim), Defoe contrasts English martial prowess before and after Marlborough’s appearance on the battlefield. The poem starts with an apostrophe to the goddess ‘Victory’. Before the time of Marlborough, the goddess had left England and the poem accuses her of being ‘the Whore of War’, for ‘The longest Purse subdues the Longest Sword’.45 The difference in tone is striking when compared with the neutrality with which this formula is used in An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent with a Free Government: in A Hymn to Victory the phrase is given an acerbic and satiric sexual twist. Defoe’s historical vision continues when he describes how English military potency was undermined by party faction, political corruption and luxury: Britannia! What was in thy Fate, That always found thee R[ake]s to Pawn thy State? Thy Noble Sons regard no Camp or Fleet, But Bully France in Chocolate; Beg Places to Betray the Land, And steer the State they cannot understand.46

The corruption of politics and of masculinity go hand-in-hand, the nation betrayed by place-men and chocolate-drinkers. Yet under Marlborough ‘Old English Courage’ flourishes once again, and military success abroad subdues political corruption Works of Anthony Fletcher, p. 13. Daniel Defoe, A Hymn to Victory, ll. 212, 219 (SFWS, 1:301). 46 Defoe, Victory, ll. 341-46 (SFWS, 1:305). 44

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at home.47 However, these implicit warnings to the gentlemen of the army are repeated the following year in The Double Welcome: the ‘Campaign Beaus’ must give up the ‘Powder’d Wig, the Snuff-Box and Perfume’. Foppish and effeminate luxuries are clearly allied to a loss of national virtue: ‘The English Arms grown dull with Rust and Peace, / Tarnish’d with Luxury, and stain’d with Ease’.48 The monarch’s virtue – or its lack – had a critical effect on the entire state, and was therefore crucial to Defoe’s view of English society.49 Defoe, like many others, could draw upon two stock-in-trade exemplars of luxurious rulers: Charles II was a ruler ruled by ‘Luxury and the Effeminacy of his Vices’, and the conquests of Edward I ‘were Unravelled in his Effeminate Luxuriant Son’, Edward II.50 In 1706 (the same year as his debate in the Review), Defoe published Jure Divino. In Jure Divino’s historical cycle of tyrannical, violent and vice-ridden monarchies, the reign of Sardanapalus stands out as particularly deserving its downfall. Defoe pithily writes, ‘The viler Life cut short the dreadful Reign, / Unmann’d the King, and then un-king’d the Man’, and goes on to revile Sardanapalus as an ‘effeminate Monster’.51 Defoe cites the German historian Sleidan, who confirms the Assyrian king’s effeminacy: ‘he was so given up to the company of the Women, that they taught him to work with the Needle, and thus altogether unmann’d himself’. For Defoe, the conjunction of his ‘Tyrannies’ and ‘his Lusts and Luxury’ was directly responsible for civil war and the collapse of the Assyrian empire.52 Reflecting stereotypical attributes of effeminacy – the excessive contact with the ‘feminine’ sphere – and the civic humanist association of luxury and tyranny, Sardanapalus is a monument to corrupt monarchy and masculinity. In 1706, as Defoe equivocated over the subject of the reformation of the nation’s morals in the context of trade and gentility, and produced his poetic litany of corrupt monarchs, he would also praise the work of the Societies for Reformation of Manners. Yet, typically, it was on his own terms. Defoe had no quarrel with the aims to reduce vice and debauchery, but objected to whom the Societies went Defoe, Victory, l. 318 (SFWS, 1:318). Daniel Defoe, The Double Welcome, ll. 255, 257, 280-81 (SFWS, 1:334). There are echoes here of the fops Prigson and Fletumacy in Defoe’s Reformation of Manners: ‘The finish’d Fops, the Men of Wig and Snuff, / Knights of the Famous Oyster-Barrel Muff’, ll. 1046-47 (SFWS, 1:186). 49 For Defoe’s intense interest in the monarchy, see Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 50 Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (London, 1717), p. 172; Daniel Defoe, The History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1709), p. 4. 51 Jure Divino, book VIII, ll. 40, 53 (SFWS, 2:241, note (b); 2:248, note (a). 52 Jure Divino, book VIII, SFWS, 2:241, note (b); 2:242, note (a). Sardanapalus is mentioned at the end of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire as a poor contrast to Hercules, though the latter receives no mention in Dryden’s translation. The Sixteen Satires, trans. by Peter Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 216. 47

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about reforming. Defoe had little time for the zealots who pursued the vices of the poor, especially when those zealots, JPs and clergymen who should be displaying virtuous behaviour, were (im)moral hypocrites.53 As we have seen, for Defoe the monarch played a crucial role in exemplary behaviour. So in 1706 – when he was describing the gentry’s moral, economic and political downfall, and delineating the wealth to be made from vice – he could still declare the moral superiority of England, because that virtue rested in the exemplary behaviour of the monarch, in contradistinction to Sardanapalus, Henry VIII or Charles II: England, BAD AS SHE IS, is yet a reforming Nation, … the Work of Reformation has made more Progress in England, from the Court even to the Street, than I believe, any Nation in the World can parallel in such a Time, and in such Circumstances: Let any Man look back to the Days of King Charles II. when Rampant Vice over-run that Court, when all Sort of Lewdness spread the Face of Authority: Let them view the Example of the late Royal Pair of King William and Queen Mary, how Vice learn’d to blush, and being banish’d from the Court by the Royal Example, Virtue and good Manners became the Mode there. (Review, 26 December 1706, 3:613)

That archetype of effeminate and corrupt monarchy, Charles II, is contrasted to the virtuous – because godly – rule of William and Mary. Moreover, while this is a piece of pro-Union propaganda, is serves to exemplify how Defoe drew upon the language of moral reformation, despite Defoe’s historical awareness of the inevitability of economic change.54 1728: luxury and war revisited Defoe’s A Plan of the English Commerce, published in 1728, revisited the issue of the relationship between war, economics, nation and effeminacy in the context of his historical analysis of the change from feudal to commercial society. In feudal society, Defoe argued, the ‘People were divided into Master and Servant … Lord and the Vassal’ (PEW, 7:149). But after the ‘Prudence’ of Henry VII, ‘Your People … tasted the Sweets of Commerce’. This ‘Revolution in Trade, brought a Revolution in the very Nature of Things; the Poor began to work, not for Cottages and Liveries, but for Money, and to live, as we say, at their own

Daniel Defoe, The Poor Man’s Plea, in Relation to all the Proclamations, Declarations, Acts of Parliament, &c which have been, or shall be made, or publish’d, for a Reformation of Manners, and suppressing Immorality in the Nation (London, 1698); Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr (SFWS, 1:153-91). 54 See chapter two for a more extended analysis of Defoe’s engagement with the language of reformation and his ideals of religious virtue: pp. 47-54. 53


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Hands’ (PEW, 7:150). For Defoe, the consequence of liberty from feudalism was the separation of the commercial and aristocratic spheres: I might enlarge here upon the differing Effects of Luxury and Frugality, which became more than ordinarily visible upon this Change of Affairs; namely, that as the frugal Manufacturers, encourag’d by their Success, doubled their Industry and good Husbandry, they lay’d up Money, and grew rich; and the luxurious and Purse proud Gentry, tickl’d with the happy Encrease of their Revenues, and the rising Value of their Rents, grew vain, gay, luxurious and expensive. (PEW, 7:151)

This social and economic change paves the way for a rising middling-sorts to begin their ideological transformation, or even displacement, of an outmoded gentility. However, Defoe reveals other effects of specialisation: Money raises Armies, and Trade raises Money; and so it may truly be said of Trade, that it makes Princes powerful, Nations valiant, and the most effeminate People that can’t fight for themselves, if they have but Money, and can but hire other People to fight for them, they become as formidable as any of their Neighbours. (PEW, 7:153)

Under such social changes, the civic humanist conception of political virtue is replaced by economic specialisation: men no longer have to bear arms or be economically independent to ensure the public good – they are part of a system in which money and services are exchanged. Regardless of the luxury of the gentry, effeminacy no longer matters since they can pay others to fight for them, and so national military strength is not affected. In A Plan of the English Commerce, Defoe is engaging with and rejecting the civic humanist analysis (and the arguments of the Societies for Reformation of Manners), as did Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees which dismissed the argument of ‘Those that have such dismal Apprehensions of Luxury’s enervating and effeminating People’. While individuals indulged in luxuries, Mandeville argued, this did not necessarily affect fighting spirit or lead to national impotency: Thus every Part was full of Vice Yet the whole Mass a Paradice; Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars They were th’ Esteem of Foreigners.55

For Defoe in A Plan of the English Commerce, Britain’s international reputation is guaranteed by its wealth: ‘’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword’ (PEW, 7:152). His stock-in-trade formula in this context reminds us of Mandeville, Fable, pp. 147, 67-68.

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his arguments of 1698 (in relation to the Standing Army debate), but it is in sharp contrast to its satirical tone in his 1704 poem A Hymn to Victory. By the late 1720s Defoe had developed a view of history which played upon his intended readership. In contrast to his attempts at a successful negotiation between warring ideological imperatives in the early 1700s, Defoe’s A Plan of the English Commerce echoes the neutrality of the economic history posited in An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army … is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, but it was obviously aimed at a trading readership that would be flattered to see this paean to their rise to prominence and to the post-feudal commercial boom, and a history that severed the link between luxury and effeminacy. ‘Complete’ men, trade and history Defoe’s stunning and comprehensive grasp of economics – its workings, effects, history – enables us to see the extent to which, for Defoe, this was intimately and urgently bound up with manliness and effeminacy. However, Defoe’s passionate interest in trade, and his identification with the genres of history, satire and didacticism collide in intriguing ways to produce an oeuvre on the subject that constantly shifts its analytic tone and viewpoint. Defoe’s apprehensiveness concerning the effect of a credit economy on the tradesman is clear in the way that he is forced into inauthentic and unmanly passive roles, hiding his passions from customers or mimicking gentlemanliness. At times, Defoe has little sympathy: his portraits of Moll or Roxana’s first husbands are clearly satiric; at other times his depiction of the situation of tradesmen is often disturbingly neutral. However, his response was consistent: Defoe reached for a didactic rhetoric of depth, substance and manly completeness as a counter to the empty and inauthentic lives of self-fashioning tradesmen-fops. Defoe’s historical analysis of the relationship between economics and national effeminacy is similar: in his Standing Army tracts and in A Plan of the English Commerce his delineation of the causes of luxury and (implicitly) effeminacy is morally neutral. Yet in his poems on Marlborough, in Jure Divino and in the Review of 1706, Defoe’s analysis focuses on the gentry and the monarchy and becomes, in the process, satiric and didactic. He establishes a causal and moral link between effeminacy and economic change in which luxury poses a threat to national masculinity. The striking aspect of both Defoe’s analysis and response is the way he drew upon a wide variety of languages with which to analyse manliness and effeminacy; including the civic humanist critique of the new mobile property, liberal and Mandevillian attitudes to economics, Protestant ethics and biblical sources, and classical models of manliness. Such a diverse range of tropes, concepts and discourses sometimes enabled a distinctly Defoean representation of men – the mimic gentleman-fops, or the men in The Complete English Tradesman stand out. But the powerful hegemony of a normative gender ideology that conceived


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a volatile economy as female sexual agency logically led to the conception of a compromised manliness and effeminacy, in individual terms as well as national. Defoe’s representations worked within the same gender parameters, however idiosyncratic a mix of the languages of manliness those ‘complete’ representations illustrated. Defoe saw, with unvarnished penetration, the effects of a new economy on trading men and the national character. Yet, both his analyses and his didactic responses were bound up with, and unable to escape from, hegemonic ideologies of masculinity.


Chapter 2

Born gentlemen and godly manliness Prigson and Jemy: not born to work Prigson – an habitué of Will’s coffee house – is one the ‘Beau’s’, the ‘finish’d Fops, the Men of Wig and Snuff, / Knights of the Famous Oyster-Barrel Muff’. He is included amongst the many corrupt gentlemen in Defoe’s satire Reformation of Manners (1702); a poem satirising those ostensible guardians of the culture of moral reform sweeping London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But Prigson is a failure in a particular way: Prigson from Nurse and Hanging-sleeves got free, A little smatch of Modern Blasphemy; A powder’d Wig, a Sword, a Page, a Chair, Learns to take Snuff, drink Chocolate, and swear: Nature seems thus far to ha’ led him on, And no Man thinks he was a Fop too soon; But ’twas the Devil surely drew him in, Against the Light of Nature thus to sin.

Prigson’s lack of manliness is signalled immediately by association with childhood and the feminine, having only just got free from a child’s leading-strings. There is the further suggestion that Prigson’s ‘Blasphemy’ has been learned ‘free’ from his nurse in the same way as in John Dryden’s fable ‘The Cock and the Fox’, where the ‘nurse’s legends are for truths received’: men who are unable to exercise rational discrimination become as credulous as children. Prigson’s lack of manly agency is driven home by the suggestion that his behaviour ‘seems’ to be the fault Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr, ll. 1044, 1046-47, 1051-59 (SFWS 1:185). Prigson is typical of the ‘Beau’; a figure seen, for example, in Edward Ward’s description of the London club of Beaus. The Secret History of Clubs (London, 1709), pp. 138-46. On the fop and other effeminate ‘types’, see Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 37-41; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660-1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 137-62. John Dryden, ‘The Cock and the Fox’, l. 335, in John Dryden: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 715. See Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 11.

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of ‘Nature’, but that in fact the Devil has led him to sin. This underlines how far behind Prigson has left his own reason which ordinarily would have guarded against this reversal of the proper order of things. Prigson’s libertine atheism – a ‘smatch of Modern Blasphemy’ – clearly runs foul of the culture of reform’s dominantly Christian rhetoric. Moreover, Prigson’s excessive attention to the details of fashionable refinement most clearly damns his slide into foppish effeminacy. Prigson may well be a gentleman, but for Defoe his gentility is not a manly gentlemanliness since his Knighthood is not put to any civic service: Defoe emphasises Prigson’s public ineffectiveness by a parallel with his public and spectacular display. His swearing, chocolate drinking, and the accoutrements of the wig, sword and equipage emphasise his masculinity as a performance of an outmoded version of gentility dependent upon the outward trappings of status rather than inner virtue. Defoe’s mobilisation of the figure of the fop depends upon the opposition between a superficial, theatrical and effeminate gentility and a manly gentlemanliness based upon public utility and inner worth. The accusation of effeminacy, then, was also key to the language of progressive ideology which elevated inner merit above birth. As Eve Kosofky Sedgwick has suggested, an ‘important, recurrent, wishful gesture of this ideological construction was the feminization of the aristocracy as a whole … the abstract image of the entire class came to be seen as ethereal, decorative, and otiose in relation to the vigorous and productive values of the middle class’. It is these images that resonate throughout Defoe’s writings on gentlemanliness. Much later in Defoe’s writing career, he fashioned another questionable gentleman, although this more ambivalent creation is far from being a fop. Jemy, or James, is an unlikely hero in Moll Flanders: a born gentleman, he does very little to deserve his good luck. In the language of progressive ideology, ‘merit’ forms little of his make-up, he is all ‘birth’. He is charming and gallant, to be sure, but it is his good luck to find in Moll Flanders an enterprising and active woman. Jemy had, ‘to give him his due, the Appearance of an extraordinary fine Gentleman; he was Tall, well Shap’d, and had an extraordinary Address; talk’d as naturally of his Park, and his Stables; of his Horses, his Game-Keepers, his Woods, his Tenants, and his Servants, as if we had been in the Mansion-House, and I had seen them all about me’. Moll describes the ‘natural’ accoutrements of a gentleman bred to the life, but implicitly concedes Jemy’s gentility as a George Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 47-48. For an analysis of masculinity, male sexuality and display, see Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) p. 93. Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 143. Further references after quotations in the text.


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performance of hyper-gentlemanliness: a body honed in address and composure, and an easy knowledge of a kind of life with which Moll is unfamiliar. When the illusion is broken, and both Moll and Jemy find themselves cheated with each other, he reveals ‘he was bred a Gentleman, tho’ he was reduced to a low Fortune’ (149). Defoe’s ambivalent attitude to the gentry is clearly revealed than in his portrait of Jemy. His birth is offered as both cause of his reduced circumstances, and also offered as an ameliorative for his behaviour, and so he becomes (relatively) unblameable for resorting to tricking women into marrying him. He also displays a kind of manly fortitude that reflects Defoe’s other famous exhortation to diligence in the face of misfortune: ‘A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise; he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die.’ Jemy resolves that ‘I must try the World again; a Man ought to think like a Man: To be discourag’d, is to yield to the Misfortune.’ It is a manliness underpinned by his status: his ‘gallant Spirit’ is a fillip to Moll, who notes ‘’Tis something of Relief even to be undone by a Man of Honour, rather than by a Scoundrel’ (150). Yet Moll’s use of the term ‘Honour’ aligns rank with nobility of behaviour: Defoe subtly reveals the irony of these fantasies of status. Yet in creating a man suited to Moll’s own predilection for gentility, Defoe is also clear that Jemy will never be anything other than a charming – if manly and gallant – layabout. Jemy’s gentlemanliness is of the old school, preferring the illusion of gentlemanliness as a highwayman to ‘work’, and when settled and relatively well-off in Carolina, his natural indolence leads him to spend his days shooting game: the Case was plain, he was bred a Gentleman, and by Consequence was not only unacquainted, but indolent, and when we did Settle, would much rather go out into the Woods with his Gun … than attend the natural Business of his Plantation. (328)

In some ways, Jemy is of the type of cavalier gentlemanliness depicted in Aphra Behn’s plays and fiction. For example, Hazard from The Widdow Ranter, on arrival in Virginia, declares that, ‘I was not bred to Merchandizing … nor do

There is here the tip of a larger submerged story and one of Defoe’s constant refrains: the disastrous financial fortunes of the gentry. Jemy ‘was really a Gentleman, unfortunate and low, but had liv’d well’ (151). Jemy is like many other of the gentry who have been responsible for their own downfall owing to excesses in luxury and ‘Unwary Prodigality’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:38), thus have ‘Great Families’ been ‘Reduc’d to Beggary, the Estates and Inheritances Sold and gone’ (Review, 7 February 1706, 3:66). Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727), 2:i.183. Further references after quotations in the text. See also Roxana on her first husband. Defoe, Roxana, p. 96.


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intend to follow the Drudgery of Trading’, insisting that ‘I was not born to work’. For Behn this is natural for gentlemen; for Defoe this culture of gentility has led to their downfall, gentlemen having being ‘bred’ to be ‘unacquainted’ with any kind of useful education. Defoe contrasts the indefatigable Moll with the incapacity of the aristocratic gentleman to deliver himself from stasis and superficiality. Defoe’s delineation of such an outmoded tradition of gentlemanliness is clear in The Compleat English Gentleman, a tradition which prized the spending of wealth, not the husbanding of it, and the display of status, rather than the practice of virtue. Complete gentlemen Defoe’s central concern in The Compleat English Gentleman is the representation of a virtuous and manly gentleman: ‘the Gentleman is to be represented as he really is, and in a figure which he cannot be a Gentleman without; I mean as a Person of Merit and Worth; a Man of Honour, Virtue, Sense, Integrity, Honesty, and Religion, without which he is Nothing at all’. But the starting point for his conception of virtue and rank is summed up in the pugnacious last lines of his poem The True-Born Englishman: ‘For Fame of Families is all a Cheat, / ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great.’10 Such a statement, clearly signalling that manly virtue inheres in merit rather than in aristocratic lineage, places Defoe as a progressive ideologue of, what Michael McKeon has dubbed, the ‘transvaluation of honor’. Under this ‘progressive ideology’ honour ‘fails to unite internals and externals … a discrimination that repudiates the automatic aristocratic signification of internals by externals’.11 In The Compleat English Gentleman Defoe does indeed disconnect birth, rank and nobility from honour: the language of aristocratic display is replaced by the language of depth and inner worth, or virtue. This is underlined in the introduction, where Defoe pre-empts criticism from ‘the numerous party of old women (whether male or female), idolators who worship escutcheons and trophyes’ (CEG, 3). He insists that ‘vertue, learning, a liberal educacion, and a degree of naturall and accquir’d knowledge, are necessary to finish the born gentleman’, for a man without these ‘will be but the shaddow of a gentleman, the opaac, dark body of a planet, which can not shine’ (CEG, 5).

Aphra Behn, The Widdow Ranter (London, 1690), p. 6. Daniel Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890), p. 21. Further references after quotations in the text. 10 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, ll. 1215-16 (SFWS, 1:118). 11 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 155.


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The values of integrity and virtue are to be gained through a middling-sorts emphasis upon learning, improvement and politeness.12 Defoe explicitly aligned manliness and learning, and contrasted depth and effeminate shallowness, in Augusta Triumphans (1728). Proposing a London University for gentlemen, he laments ‘the present decay of Learning among us, and the manifest Corruption of Education’, adding, ‘we have been a brave and learned People, and are dwindling into an Effeminate, Superficial Race’ (PEW, 8:259). Such an institution, he pointedly remarks, would ‘add Lustre to our State, and cultivate Politeness’ (PEW, 8:260). Defoe’s equation of useful learning with manliness also appears in The New Family Instructor, where the Father finds his son studying, ‘applying himself to manly, and masterly Studies, such as History, Astronomy, and several of the most useful Parts of the Mathematicks’.13 Implicitly, public utility is the aim of such learning. Defoe, along with John Locke, does not recommend learning in order for a man to be a scholar and a pedant; rather, these studies are ‘useful’ because they are to put a gentleman, in Locke’s words, ‘in the right way of knowing and improving himself’.14 The individual road to self-improvement functioned as a sign of inner virtue, in contrast to the shadowy insubstantiality of the unlearned aristocrat. As we have seen (perhaps most clearly in the figure of Prigson), such an ideal of gentlemanliness also, implicitly, depended upon hegemonic ideologies of gender in which the fop figured as the exemplar of effeminate vacuity: ‘a whimsical, foolish, empty fellow’.15 In aligning manliness, utility and improvement in the figure of this new complete gentleman, Defoe was engaging with the anxieties of his age: that English men were insidiously sliding towards effeminacy. As one poet put it, contemporary men are To Learning, and to Manly Arts estrang’d, (As if with Women Sexes they’d exchang’d) They look like Females, dress’d in Boys Attire.16

12

Katherine Clark stresses Defoe’s engagement with the discourses of politeness. Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 13 Daniel Defoe, The New Family Instructor; in Familiar Discourses between a Father and his Children, on the most Essential Points of the Christian Religion (London, 1727), pp. 15-16. For the kinds of learning Defoe extolled for gentlemen, see CEG, pp. 206-31; see also Defoe’s ‘Cavalier’, who, as a young gentleman, had a similar education. Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1991), pp. 7-8. 14 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. James L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 307. 15 Thomas Dyche, A New General English Dictionary (London, 1735). 16 Henry Carey, ‘A Satyr on the Luxury and Effeminacy of the Age’, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1729), p. 29.


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The cause of men’s slide towards womanliness is the lack of any ‘inner’ qualities of learning – equated with manliness – and is signified by an interest in puerile surfaces. The fop delineated the limits of refinement in the discourse of politeness: excessive refinement could easily topple over into effeminate foppery.17 Yet men were also warned that without any refinement they were reduced to a brutal, outmoded hyper-masculinity, which meant being relegated to the outer margins of the homosocial world of movers and shakers, unable to participate effectively in virtuous society. So Defoe’s emphasis in The Compleat English Gentleman on education and ‘polite learning’ was also aimed at the ‘coarse’ country gentleman; a masculinity embodied by men who, in Defoe’s words ‘insist upon it that their dogs and horses, their sport, and their bottle are the proper business of a gentleman’ (CEG, 64). Defoe rails against elite traditions in which ‘an early lov of pleasure is an invincible obstacle to a love of vertue’ (CEG, 87). In these circles, Defoe argues, learning is a hindrance to gentility: the ‘untaught, unpolished, unimprov’d part’ of the gentry are unable to ‘see what empty, what weak, what unform’d things they are; … how near a life they liv to that of a brute’ (CEG, 89-91). Against this he contrasts ‘all the generous minds, the vigorous spirits, the bright exalted souls, all the men of genius and wit, of bravery, and of great thoughts, that have drunk in education, … and have improv’d a polite genius by a polite learning’ (CEG, 86). Politeness was an exemplary way of behaving that governed social interaction. It involved a way of governing the body and manners that ideally enable differences of rank, gender, politics, opinion to be erased, by the art of pleasing. Its ideological aim was to replace older hierarchical institutions with an alternative way of organising culture. A ‘refined sociability’ brought ‘aesthetic concerns into close contiguity with ethical ones’.18 This emphasis is why duelling became the crucial test-case for reformers of gentlemen’s manners. It was, in the words of Joseph Addison, a ‘mistaken Honour’.19 The discussion on duelling throughout the century illustrates how affectations of gentlemanliness could be lead to charges of either foppish honour-à-la-mode or brutality. In Jeremy Collier’s dialogue, ‘Of Duelling’, one character claims that duelling is ‘the Custom of Gentlemen’; another answers him, ‘If you are a Gentleman, learn to value your self. Don’t stake your Life against a Nutshel, nor run into the other World upon every Fop’s See Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, pp. 148-52; see also G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 18 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 4. Defoe would have little patience with the anti-Church and anti-Court ideas of Shaftesbury. 19 Addison quoted in Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 84. See also Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, p. 72. 17


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Errand.’20 On the other hand, John Cockborn labelled it a ‘shameful Brutishness’.21 Defoe himself decried it as a ‘sordid Misconstruction of Gallantry and Honour’, and – with a twist of sarcasm directed at false notions of gentility – a ‘Genteel Way of Murther’ (Review, 29 April 1704, 1:78).22 While The Compleat English Gentleman aligns Defoe with the emphasis upon refinement, politeness and a progressive reformation of honour, it also reiterates the suggestion in the texts of 1704-06 – particularly the Review in January 1706 – that the gentry had lost a vital civic role.23 Once again, there is a distinct tone of nostalgia in Defoe’s narrative of the decline of the gentry: Let any man look back to the figure the barons of England made in the reigns of King John, Henry III., and other princes of those times, and compare them with the ages of a few reigns pass’t, and let them tell us if the English gentry were to be mannag’d by Prime Ministers and politicians then, as they have been since. (CEG, 176)

In case the reader were to assume that this is a covert criticism of the Walpole administration, Defoe had explained earlier that it is ‘the felicity of the present age that we liv under a Government that desires no frauds, that has no corrupt views, no tyrannick designs’ (CEG, 175). Defoe offers a way for the gentry to regain the loss of their civic or political role and their economic independence – in short, their agency – through education. Coming at the origins of the corruption of the gentry from a different angle to the Review of January 1706, it is gentlemen’s ‘want of learning’ which is ‘the cause of their luxury and extravagance, and that luxury reducing them to necessitous circumstances, those necessities bring them into a readyness of being corrupted, brib’d … ruinous to their country’s liberties and to their posterity’ (CEG, 176-77). Driving his message home, he declares that ‘Ignorance is an enemy to temperance, to frugallity, to honesty, and to the practice of all morall vertues’ (CEG, 177). Gentlemen’s ignorance ‘makes tools of them, makes them engines and instruments for the use of mannagers on all occasions, and even in their worst designs upon the libertyes of their country’ (CEG, 177). Defoe here lays the blame at the door of gentlemen who are fit for no ‘publick posts’ since they have ‘no educacion, no litterature, no knowledge of languages, of history, or of the world!’ (CEG, 178). Like Defoe’s foppish gentleman Fletumacy, 20 Jeremy Collier, ‘On Duelling’, in Miscellanies: In Five Essays (London, 1694), pp. 19-50, (p. 21). 21 John Cockburn, The History and Examination of Duels (1720); quoted in Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, p. 72. 22 Defoe illustrates such mistaken notions of male honour and gentility when Colonel Jack challenges his second wife’s lover to a fencing duel. The History and Remarkable Life of the truly honourable Col. Jacque commonly call’d Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 227-29. 23 See chapter one, pp. 30-34.


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these gentlemen are ‘men of pleasure … who rolling in a kind of naturall indolence are unactiv for meer want of some thing to do, who rise in the morning to go to bed at night’ (CEG, 180).24 Defoe ties together a variety of ideas here: lack of education leads to self-indulgence in luxuries, which then leads to a lack of independence and political corruption.25 At the heart of this is the traditional emphasis on masculine self-control and the government of the passions, as he underlines later: It must be confess’t there is a great, I had almost said an universall, defficiency among our gentlemen in the government of themselves; their morals and manners are deprav’d and vitiated in a manner hardly to be describ’d, at least not fully. (CEG, 232)

What is especially resonant in Defoe’s treatise is that self-government guarantees the moral basis for government in the familial sphere: If the gentleman we are treating of can not govern himself, how should we expect any good œconomy in his household? how shall he direct his family or manage his fortune? … Where can the neglect or omission of it all lye but in the head of the family? Who we find too often letting the reins loose to his vices or at best to his pleasures, thinks it below him to mind his other affaires, either to regulate his family or to manage and improv his estate. (CEG, 232)

As the head of the household, he is ‘haughty, imperious, and tyrannick, or elce soft, easie, and capable of being wheedl’d’; as a husband, he is ‘ froward, surly … unconstant in temper … a fool’; and as a father, he is a ‘Fatal relativ! … his children curse him; … They can learn nothing good from him, and what’s bad they are sure to have his example for’ (CEG, 238-39). Moreover, for Defoe, poor familial government is paralleled by poor political abilities: in ‘publick stacion … the clark makes the justice, while the master does just nothing’; and at court, ‘he has nothing to do but to follow as he is led … he may be truly said to have sold himself (that is, his country) and run away with the money’ (CEG, 239-40). Unable to manage himself, he becomes managed by others. Crucially for Defoe, it is education that enables passions to be reined in, thereby guaranteeing manly virtue; a self-government that, in turn, regulates the familial and public ethics of Defoe’s ‘compleat gentleman’. The language of political corruption and passivity posits an implicitly supine gentry, recalling Defoe’s depiction of the effeminate gentry under Henry VIII or the foppish officers in his poems on Marlborough’s victory, and draws upon Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr, l. 1091 (SFWS, 1:186). For an excellent analysis of political independence and masculinity in the long eighteenth century, see Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 24

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the language of civic humanism. This ‘essentially neo-classical worldview’ argues that luxury and loss of political virtue are bound in an inevitable cycle of cause and effect.26 In The Compleat English Gentleman, however, luxury is a secondary cause of the loss of virtue: lack of a useful education is the primary motor of their downward spiral. Education – the attainment of merit and virtue independent of blood and birth – is the antidote to this historical downward spiral of gentlemanliness. This draws upon a different ideological language: the middling-sorts concern with progressive notions of virtue that was opposed to the traditional aristocratic ideology which equated birth with virtue. In The Compleat English Gentleman, the history of gentlemanly virtue is a product of overlapping ideologies and serves to underline the extent to which manliness was the product of intertwining languages. Defoe draws upon and synthesises these contrary languages to transform the born gentleman and forge an idiosyncratic vision of manly gentlemanliness. Gentlemen and godliness ‘It would very well become a Man of Quality to cane a lew’d Fop, or kick him down Stairs, when his Insolence took a Loose at Religion in his Company.’27 In Defoe’s Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, the figure of the fop makes another ignominious appearance: it alerts us to the fact that there is another discourse to add to the mix. Jeremy Gregory has argued that the concentration upon secular modes of understanding and contextualising masculinity in the eighteenth century – for example, civic humanism, the culture of politeness and (later in the century) the man of sensibility – ‘may end up marginalising strands of masculine behaviour, as well as certain discourses of masculinity, from the historical record’.28 As Gregory rightly underlines, Christian godliness was an important aspect of manliness. In Addison’s The Christian Hero, that ‘one easie and portable Virtue, Piety’ is inseparable from virtuous manliness.29 26 McCormack, The Independent Man, p. 57. See also J. G. A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2nd edn, 2003), pp. 423-505; Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 27 Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (London, 1720), p. 104. Further references after quotations in the text. 28 Jeremy Gregory, ‘Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in English Masculinities 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 85-110 (p. 87). 29 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero: Or, No Principles but those of Religion sufficient to make a Great Man, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 76.


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John Locke emphasises that ‘Vertue [sic] as the first and most necessary of those Endowments, that belong to a Man or a Gentleman’, is founded upon ‘a true Notion of God’.30 Denis Greenville announced that ‘So far is Christian Vertue from being Incompatible with true Gentility, that to speak properly, and strictly, a Man cannot be a compleat Gentleman who is utterly void thereof.’31 In Defoe’s Religious Courtship (1722), a young would-be suitor is rejected by a religious daughter and is forced to reflect that ‘he should never be a complete Gentleman, ’till he became a religious Man’. This is prompted by the appearance of two beaus at a conversation. Talk of religion causes the beaus to laugh and one comments that ‘I think ’tis below a Man of Quality to trouble his Head about it’, the other adding, ‘we are mighty good Christians at the Opera’. The young suitor ‘was asham’d to think, how like one of these Fops’ he had seemed to the daughter. In contrast to the ‘empty’ superficiality of the fops – and their effeminacy is hinted at by their attending the opera – Defoe stresses how it became every Man of Quality to behave himself in Subjection to the Rules given him by his Maker, as it became every Subject to honour his Governor; how Piety and Religion were the Glory of a Man of Quality, and made Nobility truly illustrious; that it was so far from being true, that Religion was not suited to the Life of a Gentleman, that it was certain a Man could not truly be a Gentleman without it.32

In promulgating a progressive ideology of status, Defoe clearly emphasises godliness as a requisite foundational virtue of the new and manly gentleman: piety is not merely an ornament of aristocratic lineage, rather, nobility is conferred by piety. In The Compleat English Gentleman, this is reframed in a typically Defoean piece of satirical dialogue between two gentleman brothers. The elder brother – an irreligious, bumptious, hunting-drinking-cursing country squire – defines gentility solely by the lineage of ‘blood’. The younger brother – educated at university – asks whether ‘vertue, parts, sence, breeding, or religion, have no share in it’. The answer comes back unequivocally: ‘He may be the D[evil] if he will, he is still a gentleman.’ Defoe drives the satirical contrast home by having two clergymen present at the conversation, one of whom puts in, ‘I hope you will allow a clergyman may be gentleman.’ The elder brother brashly answers, ‘I don’t allow it I assure you’ (CEG, 46). Defoe looks to orthodox Christianity to provide a stable foundation for the new gentlemanliness. As we have seen in the example from The Compleat English Locke, Education, p. 241. Denis Greenville, Counsels and Directions Divine and Moral (1685); quoted in McKeon, Origins, p. 192. 32 Daniel Defoe, Religious Courtship: Being Historical Discourses on the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives (2nd edn, London, 1729), pp. 58, 55, 56. 30

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Gentleman cited above, in some cases it is the country squire defending the sole prerogatives of blood who provides the negative exemplar. In most cases, however, it is the effeminate fop – as atheist and consumerist ‘modern’ – who figures as a point of contrast to a godly and manly virtue. In contrasting true manly gentlemanliness with the fop, there is a corresponding contrast between godliness and irreligion, between a reformed gentry whose virtue is founded upon a restatement of active religiosity, and a modern, atheistic masculinity associated with foppish emulation and superficiality. These associations are driven by a number of interrelated factors: the rhetoric of ‘reformation’, Defoe’s consistent attacks on the perceived rise of atheism, the reformulation of stoicism, and the need to provide a stable foundation to manly virtue which has been sundered from blood lineage. Reformation, atheism and virtue It would be a mistake to reduce the concern over male manners to purely secular ideologies. Indeed, a tract of 1693, for example, is steeped in the tone and rhetoric of the pulpit, attacking the supposed association between gentility and a whole range of behaviours inconsistent with a reformed gentlemanliness, as can be seen from its full title: The Reformed Gentleman: or, the Old English Morals Rescued From the Immoralities of the Present Age. Shewing How Inconsistent those Pretended Genteel Accomplishments of Swearing, Drinking, Whoring and SabbathBreaking Are with the True Generosity of an English Man. Being Vices not only contrary to the Law of God and the Constitutions of our Government both Ecclesiastical and Civil, but such as cry loud for Vengeance without a speedy REFORMATION.33

Notably, it locates itself as part of the culture of reform sweeping London from the late seventeenth century onward. Central to this pervasive culture of reform that encompassed the court, the government, legal institutions, and religious denominations both Anglican and dissenting from the 1690s to the 1730s, were the Societies for Reformation of Manners. They were urban organisations propelled by shopkeepers, artisans and tradesmen (the societies were largely all-male): in short, the middling sort, with civil officers, lawyers, JPs and MPs involved at a more distant level. Their spontaneous beginnings in the 1690s were echoed in the same decade by royal proclamations by William and Mary for the enforcing of the laws criminalising a range of activities, including blasphemy, prostitution, sodomy and Sabbath-breaking. Primarily a religious movement, the Societies’ ground-troops used civil law to further their godly reformation of manners, and Anon., The Reformed Gentleman (London, 1693).

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were supported by fulminations from the pulpits. Most distinctive, however, were their attempts to synthesise two different but similarly reactionary languages: the civic humanist rhetoric of rampant luxurious desires corrupting the nation; and the rhetoric of an imminent Providential judgment against a nation made irreligious by desires conceived as sinful.34 Defoe himself had close ties with the culture of reform, and its rhetoric forms an important strand of thinking in his work.35 It is a strand, however, fraught with ambivalence. While criticising the gentry’s descent into luxurious living, Defoe had ruefully argued that ‘whenever we come to reform our Manners, we shall ruin our Manufacturers; that when our Vices come to be Cramp’d and Restrain’d, our Trade will sink with it’ (Review, 22 January 1706, 3:42). In addition, Defoe viewed the Societies’ way of going about their business with a critical eye. In The Poor Man’s Plea (1697) he severely criticised the way in which the Societies singled out the poor and turned a blind eye to the vices of JPs and higher clergy (as he also emphasised in his 1702 satire Reformation of Manners). Yet, implicit in these texts’ criticism of corruption, is Defoe’s crucial belief that the gentry and upperstation had the potential to be exemplars of moral behaviour. Defoe’s (problematic) relationship with the concept of national moral reform is also inflected by his consistently reiterated anxiety of a general slide towards atheism – an anxiety recognised by many reformers of male manners. The catalyst behind the culture of reform was the perception of a ‘proliferating, modernizing, “irreligious”, masculine culture in post-Reformation Britain’ and, perhaps especially, a libertine cultural hang-over from the Restoration.36 In many ways, Defoe’s picture of the fop in Reformation of Manners illustrates this perception, particularly in the way that a necessary accoutrement of the fop is ‘A little smatch 34

For analyses of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, see Dudley W. R. Bahlmann, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3 (1976), 45-61; A. G. Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688-1715’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1980); Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 55-65; Burtt, Virtue Transformed, pp. 39-63; Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 101-24; Stephen H. Gregg, ‘“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Societies for Reformation of Manners’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25/1 (2001), 17-28. 35 His classmate from his youth at a Dissenting academy was John Shower, whose sermons to the Societies for Reformation of Manners were published, and who preached at Salters’ Hall, one of Defoe’s local chapels. Further, Defoe had almost certainly been a member of one of the London Societies in the late 1690s and early 1700s, and was certainly a member of the Edinburgh Society in 1707. Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 85-86, 235-40. 36 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 57.


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of Modern Blasphemy’.37 Indeed, it is related to the seriousness with which Defoe was fighting a battle to preserve certain fundamental Christian beliefs against the rising tide of what he perceived as the atheists and deists of the Enlightenment. These doubters, the ‘moderns’ such as the student who sets up an atheists’ debating club in Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World, were those whom he needed to convince of the reality of this ‘Angelick’ world (64-84).38 Defoe’s An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727) contains this sardonic description of a ‘Fop’: ‘To this unscrew’d Engine talk of Spirits, and of the invisible World, … when he has hardly Brains to converse with any thing but a Pack of Hounds … owes it only to his being a Fool, that he does not converse with the Devil!’ (SFWS, 8:72). The year after An Essay on … Apparitions, Defoe drew a picture that again engaged with the problems of masculinity and godliness. In Augusta Triumphans (in a section entitled ‘An effectual method to prevent Street Robberies’), he shakes his head at a lamentable scenario: Where is the Courage of the English Nation, that a Gentleman, with Six or Seven Servants, shall be robb’d by one single Highwayman? Yet we have lately had Instances of this; and for this we may thank our Effeminacy, our Toupee Wigs and powder’d Pates, our Tea, and other scandalous Fopperies; and above all, the Disuse of noble and manly Sports, so necessary to a brave People, once in Vogue, but now totally lost among us. (PEW, 8:281)

Defoe manages to roll together a variety of hegemonic gender assumptions: Englishness, manliness, physical courage and prowess are contrasted with effeminacy, superficial ostentation and luxurious consumption. Note that Defoe does not single out the robber for criticism, but the gentry. Such disparagement of gentility, as we have seen, is part of a general middling-sorts attack on aristocratic excesses and indolence. However, Defoe’s comments here on the parlous state of England’s gentlemen, so effeminised by ‘Fopperies’ that they can be robbed by a highwayman, taps into the culture and rhetoric of the Societies for Reformation of Manners. His comments on the lack of gentlemanly courage comes after a litany of vices to be reformed by ‘Heavenly means’; specifically, ‘in enforcing and encouraging a Reformation of Manners, by suppressing of Vice and Immorality, and punishing Prophaneness and Licentiousness’ (PEW, 8:280). It is in this articulation of effeminacy, reform and religion that we see that idiosyncratic mix of a civic humanist critique of commerce and religious reformation that the Societies employed in their own writings. However, offering Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, l. 1053 (SFWS, 1:185). On Defoe’s later writings as an attack on Deism, see Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 653-68; Clark, Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence, pp. 185-208. 37 38


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national reformation as an antidote to effeminate luxury is contrary to Defoe’s position in A Plan of the English Commerce, published the same year, in which he argued that effeminacy and national reputation were not related.39 It may be, of course, that Augusta Triumphans, like A Plan of the English Commerce, is another example of Defoe’s increasingly specialised rhetoric: the pamphlet was written under the pseudonym of ‘Andrew Moreton, Esq.’, a ‘public-spirited but irritable old bachelor’, and a broadside at crime, foppish gentlemen and the lack of English courage suits this persona well.40 Yet seen in the wider context of his unthinking, foppish atheists and in his focus on the gentlemen of England and, implicitly, their potential, we see an abiding concern of Defoe’s. The fop who only troubles his head over the opera, or his wig, or tea, and who adopts atheism as an ostensible sign of gentility, echoes the many other figures of superficiality versus inner worth in both The Complete English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman. These contraries of empty shallowness and virtuous depth parallel the opposition between true Christian virtue and, what Defoe terms, ‘Negative Religion, and Negative Virtue’ in the Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The ‘Negative Christian’ professes Christianity but does not practise it. Like the gentry who worship the emblems of lineage, ‘Negative Virtue’ is ‘a piece of religious Pageantry … ’tis a Mask put on for a Character’ (180), and like the vane and superficial fop or the purse-proud tradesman, the Negative Christian i speak of, is full of himself, so perswaded, that he is good enough, and religious enough already, that he has no Thoughts of any thing, unless it be to pull off his Hat to God Almighty now and then, and thank him, that he has no Need of him. (182)

Moreover, such negative virtue is contrasted to active virtue. Defoe sets out the reaction of the soul under ‘universal Contempt’: Happy the Man, who with exalted Soul, Knows how to rate the great the prosp’rous Fool, Who can the Insults of the Street contemn, And values not the Rage or Tongues of Men? He like the Sun exists on his own Flame, And when he dies, is to himself a Fame. (184)

This clearly owes a debt to that strand of Stoic thought in which the happy man contemns the world of cares and luxury, and is found in the praise of the country life in the second book of the Georgics and the Horatian beatus vir, and also articulated 39

See chapter one, pp. 34-36. W. R. Owens, ‘Introduction’, PEW, 8:20.

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in Juvenal’s Satires.41 But here it is a stoicism transmuted by Christianity. As Defoe makes clear, stoicism perceived as a kind of retreat from cares and danger verges on a passive (and rather Epicurean) relationship with virtue: But take this with you as you go, that as negative Praise will build no Man Comfort, so negative Virtue will not support the Mind under universal Contempt … He that fortifies himself against Reproach, must do it with a certain Reserve of Real, and solid Virtue, and Piety; it must be Uprightness and Integrity that must preserve him. (184)

Defoe resoundingly resembles the Milton of Areopagitica, who declared, ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed’.42 It is worth repeating the exhortation to diligence in what might seem a most secular work, The Complete English Tradesman: ‘he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die’ (CET, 2:i.183). One must trust Providence, but Christian virtue is exemplified by strenuously working with that guidance, since neglecting – or retreating from – the warnings and signs of Providence is ‘a kind of practical Atheism’ (221). Geoffrey Sill has persuasively argued for the influence of stoic, and in particular, Galenic thought on Defoe’s writings. Galen recognised that one can never be free from the destructive passions: impossible to be eradicated, they should be controlled or managed by a continual self-reflection or a permanent process of reformation.43 This is paralleled by the contrast between Defoe’s description of ‘negative Virtue’ as a static and ineffective exercise in virtue with the active Miltonic virtue that ventures forth. Sill is right to point out that we should consider ‘a new balance between religious and humanist elements’ in Defoe’s work. However, his argument that the ‘religious elements that are present in Defoe’s narratives are there not to reinforce a dying theology, but to assist in the formation of an emerging view of man that is natural, scientific, and humanistic’ is to tip the scales too far against the importance Defoe attaches to Christian virtue and his active negotiation between religion and humanism.44 Defoe was not alone in opposing a godly manliness to the atheism of pagan or libertine models of masculine behaviour. Indeed, one of the central problems for 41 See also David Blewett, ‘The Retirement Myth in Robinson Crusoe: A Reconsideration’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15/2 (1982), 37-50; Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Érudition, 1984); Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 42 John Milton, Areopagitica, in John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 247. 43 Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 24-31. 44 Sill, The Cure of the Passions, p. 74.


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ideologues who sought to reform male manners was the negotiation of Christianity with classical models of virtue, especially that most hard-boiled model, Stoicism. The school of Stoicism drew on the writings of Seneca, Cicero and Epictetus and was especially exemplified by the Patriot Opposition’s pin-up hero, Cato Uticensis. This tradition posed a particular problem, since it modelled a normative, if generalised, ideology of manly self-control, yet was increasingly perceived as either unsuitable for the refined social interactions of the modern world or destructive of Christian values. Yet very few of the eighteenth-century neo-stoic commentators can be said to be Stoics, rather they modified what they found in these central figures, and should perhaps be called loosely stoical: examples were John Locke’s Thoughts on Education, Steele’s The Christian Hero, Addison’s Cato and Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks.45 Like his contemporaries, then, Defoe was grappling with classical models of manliness which included elements of stoicism and the models of virtue handed down through Christian tradition: it should come as no surprise that both would become transmuted in his writings. A character of virtue It is in Defoe’s Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy (1697) that these ideals of a virtuous and Christian manliness are played out and is perhaps one of his most succinct accounts of a man of ‘Eminent Piety and Vertue’.46 Foreshadowing the argument that he would rehearse in The True-Born Englishman and The Compleat English Gentleman – that birth alone cannot necessarily confer virtue or honour – Defoe underlines how Honour he had by Birth, and not by Chance, And more by Merit than Inheritance; But both together joyn’d, spell out his Name, For Honesty and Honour are the same, And show, when Merit’s joyn’d with Quality, The Gentleman and Christian may agree. Honour by Vertue only is upheld And vain are all the Trophies Vice can build. (7)

Gentility as lineage is transformed in favour of a Christian virtue. Yet gentility and Christian virtue is a two-way street, as Defoe makes clear in the preface:

The distinction is borrowed from Monsarrat, Light from the Porch. Daniel Defoe, The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy: with a Preface. Written by one of his Hearers (London, 1697), ‘Preface’. All further references are after quotations in the text. On Annesley’s life in relation to the Foe family, see Backscheider, Daniel Defoe, pp. 8-17. 45 46


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Every Good Minister does not make a Good Man; there are thwart Lines in the Disposition of some of the best, which even Grace it self has not the power to obliterate: And the Effects of this are most visible in their relative Conversation. Not but that I believe a Man may be of a very ill Temper, and yet be a true Christian: But I cou’d wish no such were to be Ministers. How Beautiful is it, to see a Man that is a Minister be also a Gentleman! For certainly Good Manners are the most consistent with Christianity of any thing in the World. (‘Preface’)

Acknowledging that human passions often bloom as ‘thwart Lines’ in the visible manners of men, and that lack of grace and temper does not necessarily preclude Christian faith, for Defoe, Annesley’s exemplary Christian ministry is founded upon a gentlemanliness which implicitly relies upon graceful manners and a self-control over the passions. Moreover, Annesley’s life and death illustrates that same Christian stoicism, as opposed to a pagan one, that was implied in Defoe’s discussion of ‘negative Virtue’ in Serious Reflections, and on which Gilles Monsarrat has noted that the ‘Stoic philosopher is patient because he knows what happens is both necessary and right, the Christian is patient because he believes that what happens is the will of a just and loving God’.47 This is clear in The Doctrine of the Passions Explain’d and Improv’d, in which minister and poet Isaac Watts emphasised that whoever manages their passions, ‘stands much less exposed to the Injuries and Sorrows of Life, and is better prepared to part with all earthly Comforts at the Call of Providence’.48 Annesley’s death, Defoe comments, is an act of God, unforeseen and unpreventable, and therefore should not provoke grief, since ‘The Passion’s foolish, as it is profane’ (2), adding, Tho’ early Vice does early Death presage, Yet Piety can lengthen no Man’s Age: The Stroke’s promiscuous, and there’s no suspence Beyond the stated Bounds of Providence. (3)

So, despite the importance of merit and virtue, neither can guarantee a long life. For Defoe, however, ‘Pious Works, like living Flowers, grow / To a kind of Immortality below’ (4). In a similar manner in which the great and the good should be moral exemplars to the less virtuous in Reformation of Manners and in The Poor Man’s Plea, Annesley’s virtue guarantees that his life lasts as a model ‘For us to Honour and to Imitate’ (4). Throughout the elegy, Annesley is praised as an emblem of the vita activa as opposed to the vita contemplativa. His early life is characterised by a eagerness Monsarrat, Light from the Porch, p. 72. Isaac Watts, The Doctrine of the Passions Explain’d and Improv’d: Or, A brief and comprehensive Scheme of the Natural Affections of Mankind (3rd edn. London, 1739; first published 1732), p. vi. 47

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‘to list a willing Soldier in the Sacred War’ with ‘vigorous Combat’ (5), and as a minister he informed his flock ‘By dint of Practice more than Argument’ (7). This is combined with an exemplary conduct in life that draws upon stoical language: With David’s Courage and Josiah’s Youth, All over Love, Sincerity, and Truth. The flattering World attack’d him with her Charms, But he shook the gaudy Trifle from his Arms; When Fraud assaulted him, or Fame caress’d, This he with Ease, and that with Scorn suppress’d: Firm as the Rocks in rouling Seas abide, When Flouds of Doubts and Dangers pass beside, When Griefs came threatening on, or Comfort flows, He was undepress’d by these, unrais’d by those. (6)

Seemingly hemmed in by attacks on his credit (‘Fraud’), by the temptation of a female and superficial worldly success (echoing Fortuna), and the temptation to give way to the passions, he sails a calm middle course. It also foreshadows the characterisation of an active stoical Christianity as contrary to the ‘negative Virtue’ in Defoe’s Serious Reflections (180). The rejection, suppression and control over these internal and external dangers to the male self indicates the extent to which classical models of manly virtue were adapted and transformed by Christianity. Indeed, when he declares, ‘A Heavenly Patience did his Mind possess, / Chearful in Pain, and Thankful in Distress’ (9), Defoe’s elegy echoes the same tropes of manliness as Dryden and Juvenal: ‘Serene and manly, hardened to sustain / The load of life, and exercised in pain’ (significantly, this was to be Samuel Johnson’s prime citation for his definition of ‘manly’).49 Yet, while Defoe may seem to part company with Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero, which denounces the stoical suppression of passions as a destructive hyper-rational insensibility, the problematic adoption or even adaptation of stoicism in early-eighteenth-century literature is registered in how Annesley’s ‘Patience’ is clearly labelled ‘Heavenly’. Allied to this stoical Christianity is a clearly marked discourse of manliness. In negotiating between the hegemonic ideology of manliness as active and effeminacy as passive, the passive submission to Providence and the active control over internal and external temptations can be seen as problematic. Indeed Defoe’s elegy to Annesley seems to want to clear this potential problem up:

John Dryden, ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 552-53, in John Dryden, p. 372.

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Humility was his dear and darling Grace, And Honesty sate Regent in his Face; Meekness of Soul did in his Aspect shine, But in the Truth, resolv’d and masculine; A Pleasing Smile sate ever on his Brow, A sign that cheerful Peace was lodg’d below. (9)

‘Meekness’ in the face the world and its concerns is balanced by a ‘resolv’d’, and therefore active, manliness. In its keenness to balance vita activa with a trust in Providence, and to show in Annesley’s life a Christian virtue which depends upon the control over the passions and also a middling-sorts ideology of merit, the elegy constructs a manly gentility which is deeply imbricated within cultural norms, yet whose exact shape reflects Defoe’s own idiosyncratic view of gentlemanliness. Born gentlemen and godly manliness There’s an intriguing doubleness to Defoe’s attitude to the born gentleman. On the one hand, they are, at best, outmoded, impolite, publicly ineffective, uneducated and shallow; at worst, they are corrupt, venal and vice-ridden. On the other hand, Defoe’s satiric and didactic writings on the subject reveal a deeply-held belief in the potential of the gentleman to be an exemplar of virtue. What Defoe aims at is a transformation of the conceptualisation of what being a manly gentleman means. His depictions of the shallow mimicry of gentility, exemplified by Prigson or the young atheists in the Serious Reflections and in Religious Courtship (and as we saw with the tradesmengentlemen in the previous chapter), mobilise the popular gender stereotype of the effeminate fop. Such a simulated gentleman is unanchored by orthodox Christianity or by education – the particular focus of The Compleat English Gentleman. The insistence on a godly manliness, on ‘completeness’, is paralleled by an insistence in Defoe’s satiric and didactic writings on the reformation of manners (Reformation of Manners, The Poor Man’s Plea, Augusta Triumphans): that the gentleman can and should perform a useful civic, national, religious and political role. In many ways, the early elegy to Dr Samuel Annesley exemplifies what this proper, Defoean manly gentlemanliness is. It does so by its wide-ranging mobilisation of differing models and languages of manliness: Christian stoicism, polite manliness, middling-sorts public duty and classically-inflected models of virtue. Published in 1697, the model of manly gentlemanliness that it promotes has definite echoes throughout Defoe’s writings on gentlemen, all the way to his unfinished and unpublished The Compleat English Gentlemen. But is significant that Defoe never represented an unequivocally ideal man like Annesley ever again. It might be tempting to say that Defoe grew more cynical or sceptical about manliness. It would, I think, be more astute to suggest that Defoe found more interesting, if more contrary, ways of analysing and responding to the failures of gentlemen and manliness in his time.


Chapter 3

Crusoe, toil and temptation Beginnings and bread In his third year on the island Robinson Crusoe has finally been able to make everything to produce bread, ruefully commenting that it ‘might be truly said, that now I work’d for my Bread’. In a crucial phrase, Defoe’s allusion to the Adamic curse and the toil of cultivation resonates as a powerful topos of manliness that draws upon a diverse range of ideological languages: Georgic cultivation, classical Stoicism, Christian concepts of punishment and redemption, and colonial fantasies of domination. All these ideological languages posit an economy of gender in which manliness is articulated through an opposition to, and attempted mastery over, what is perceived as feminine or effeminising: idleness, temptation, and luxury; tropes that reappear throughout The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Instead of the tacit supposition of Crusoe as manly and the series itself as depicting a manly ideal, I want to presuppose that many of Crusoe’s choices and situations are, in fact, unmanly or at least potentially so. Even in Crusoe’s repetition of the Adamic curse there is the allusion to an unmanly temptation, since it is Adam’s punishment for an uxorious surrendering to Eve his proper role of domestic dominion and, of course, duty to God. Moreover, Crusoe’s tempting ‘Propension’ (3) to go to sea and, as his father puts it, go ‘abroad upon Adventures’ (4), is not without its own dangers of effeminacy: for many commentators, the torrid zone of the Americas where Crusoe will be washed up posed the danger of an effeminising life of idleness and luxury. The mere giving way to an irrational passion to roam – which is continually repeated throughout both parts one and two of the Crusoe series – is, in itself, a potential marker of effeminacy, connoting a loss of agency and Crusoe’s inability to deploy reason to police his passions. In fact, these crucial anxieties – idleness, temptation and luxury – appear at the very beginning of the novel. Robinson Crusoe, living in land-locked York, son of a German emigrant merchant-trader, youngest of three brothers – one of which had run away to the wars and died in battle, the other mysteriously absent – has the entire weight of his family’s hopes pinned on him. His father’s wishes are for him to enter into law and the ‘middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life’ (4). But Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Donald J. Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1983), p. 118. Further references after quotations in the text.

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Defoe sets up his fiction with Crusoe’s opposition to this: ‘my Head began to be fill’d very early with rambling Thoughts’, so much so that, I would be satisfied with nothing but going to Sea, and my Inclination to this led me so strongly against the Will, nay the Commands of my Father, and against all the Entreaties and Perswasions of my Mother and other Friends, that there seem’d to be something fatal in that Propension of Nature tending directly to the Life of Misery which was to befall me. (3)

The proleptic signalling suggests that Defoe is guiding our reading of Crusoe’s contrariness: however much Crusoe’s ‘Propension’ to rambling is natural, it is an impulse to be lamented. Implicitly, such discontented impulses – temptations – should be controlled for the sake of a contentment with, as his father puts it, ‘the Station of Life I was born in’ (5). Crusoe’s desire to go sea in the face of his father’s commands, his ‘Propension of Nature’ (3), looks like a paradox. Caught between agency and passivity, his will to escape the domestic sphere of rational parental concern is balanced against a seemingly irresistible enslavement to an irrational temptation. It seems a classic ‘choice’ for a youth starting out on the path to manhood. And in one sense, he makes the wrong choice: an unmanly submission to that temptation. It is a choice he repeats more anxiously in part two, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. As Ian Bell has perceptively suggested, this is par for the course for the men in the Crusoe series, who are ‘irrational, headstrong, potentially violent … beset by uncontrollable self-destructive urges’. Geoffrey Sill’s cogent study, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel, emphasises the importance of the language of the passions to the early-eighteenth-century novel. Discussing Robinson Crusoe, he argues that irrationality is Defoe’s real concern and we are ‘to read [Crusoe’s] life as a succession of acts of passion, as a contest between appetites and aversions’. Sill does not examine part two of the Crusoe series, but such successions of passion are striking in Crusoe’s repeated reversions to roaming in the Farther Adventures. As we shall see, Defoe underlines these re-occurrences through the language of a hypochondriac malaise. (Regrettably, Sill does not relate how the perception of the passions or the irrational was central in contemporary discussions of hegemonic male behaviour.)

Ian A. Bell, ‘Crusoe’s Women: Or, the Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime’, in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 28-44 (pp. 44, 43). Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 87. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse also stressed the importance of irrationality in the novel; ‘The Interior Difference: A Brief Genealogy of Dreams, 1650-1717’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23/4 (1990), 458-78.


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Eighteenth-century comments on the world of rationality and manliness were always explicit about the need for a constant and reiterated control over the passions: a man’s battle with his passions should be read within a cultural context in which loss of agency – to be a slave to the passions – is aligned with effeminacy. Moreover, discussions of manliness and the passions cannot be disconnected from status; as we have seen, the conception of a middling-sorts virtue was a powerful ideological language that inflected discussions of male behaviour. Returning to the beginning of the novel, this can be seen in Crusoe’s father’s delineation of the ‘middle State’ (4). This is represented within a debate whose terms are distinctly gendered as a man’s life and not a woman’s: ‘Kings have frequently lamented the miserable Consequences of being born to great things, and wish’d they had been placed in the Middle of the two Extremes’ (4), since ‘this Way Men went silently and smoothly thro’ the World’ (5). His father’s warnings define a middling-sorts virtue that is in opposition to styles of masculinity distinguished by one form of slavery or another: slavery to the passions, or slavery to mere existence. ‘The middle Station’, his father argues, were not subjected to so many Distempers and Uneasinesses either of Body or Mind, as those were who, by vicious Living, Luxury and Extravagancies on one Hand, or by hard Labour, Want of Necessaries, and mean or insufficient Diet on the other Hand, bring Distempers upon themselves by the natural Consequences of their Way of Living. (4-5)

Both the luxurious rich and the miserable poor bring about their own bodily corruption. However, both have a curious kind of passivity that links their modes of living: the poor are ‘sold to the Life of Slavery for daily Bread’, while the rich are ‘enrag’d with the Passion of Envy, or secret burning Lust of Ambition for great things’ (5). The poor are in bondage to an inescapable life of labour. The rich’s passion and lust for acquisition is another version of male passivity: they are in bondage to a cycle of the effeminising passions of ‘Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy’ (4). There are, however, tensions between this middle-station manliness and other models that shaped ideals for male behaviour. Defoe’s father explicitly contrasts the life of ‘Application and Industry’ with those who ‘went abroad upon Adventures, to rise by Enterprize, and make themselves famous in Undertakings of a Nature out of the common Road’ (4). Yet it is Defoe himself who could hardly restrain his Carolyn Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of EighteenthCentury Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10-11. See chapters one and two. Michael McKeon overlooks his father’s attack on aristocratic luxury when he suggests that Crusoe’s father’s ‘appeal is at least as plausibly to what I have been calling “aristocratic ideology”’. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 320.


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admiration for the figures from England’s golden age of adventure, such as Drake and Raleigh. In his introduction to A Plan of the English Commerce (1728), he laments English colonial tardiness: As for new Colonies and Conquests, how do we seem entirely to give over, even the Thoughts of them, tho’ the Scene is so large, tho’ the Variety is so great, and the Advantage so many? On the Contrary, we seem to forget the glorious Improvements of our Ancestors, such as the great Drake, Cavendish, Smith, Greenfield, Somers, and above all, the yet greater Sir Walter Raleigh, upon the Foot of whose Genius almost all the English Discoveries were made, and all the Colonies and Plantations, which now form what they call the English Empire in America were settled and established.

So, while Crusoe’s father eulogises the smooth passage of the middle station, Defoe mythologises an Elizabethan-style adventurism to restore England’s power and wealth: ‘were the adventuring Spirit reviv’d, and some Men fired with Warmth for the Undertaking, and but vigorous enough to make the Beginning’. Even those eighteenth-century commentators anxious about the effect of the passions on the mind and body reluctantly admitted that the passions could be catalysts for deeds out of the ordinary: Isaac Watts declared that they are ‘designed for valuable Ends in Life,’ though adding, ‘when put under due Government’. Discontent, then, could be a useful, if difficult to assimilate, model of male behaviour. In early liberal economic theory, desire was the motor of economic growth, as was succinctly put by Dudley North: ‘did Men content themselves with bare Necessaries, we should have a poor World’. Defoe, too, though characteristically more ambivalent, posited discontent as an engine of change: Being discontented with our present Condition, sets all our Thoughts to work to mend it. This sets the Wheels of Industry and Application a-going; all the Springs of our Faculties are wound up, the whole Machine, call’d Man, is put in Motion, for the great End of transposing the Situation of his Affairs, and altering the Circumstances.

In Defoe’s vision, this is more a statement of human (or male) nature than an impulse to be applauded: ‘there is a Proportion of Discontent mix’d with every Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, PEW, 7:121, 7:122. Isaac Watts, The Doctrine of the Passions Explain’d and Improv’d: Or, A brief and comprehensive Scheme of the Natural Affections of Mankind (London, 3rd edn 1739; first published 1732), p. iii. Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade (London, 1691), p. 14. See also Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), p. 15. The most incisive analysis was Bernard Mandeville’s: ‘Content the Bane of Industry’; The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 75.


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Man’s Constitution’, though he laments that this ‘makes the whole World a Scene of Uneasiness and Dissatisfaction’. More pointedly, and citing Milton, it is ‘Old Mother Eve’ who is the originator of the first discontent, aligning discontent with unmanliness.10 But Defoe does make more of discontent in an earlier poem urging the cultivation of the land, Caledonia: ‘where Contentment makes Endeavour less, / ’Tis then a Vice, and not a Happiness.’11 How, then, are the consequences of this choice for Crusoe’s masculinity played out? This choice is not the Pocockian paradigm in which the effeminised economic man of ‘Fortuna’, overcome by the temptations of airy credit schemes, is opposed to the man of civic virtue. Defoe simply does not frame it that way. It is in the landscape of Crusoe’s island that we see the emblem of his manliness. And while a number of critics have posited the island as a symbolically feminine space that enables a masculine subjectivity, this chapter will focus on historically and geographically specific discourses to unfold a more complex and potentially unstable masculinity.12 What informs the first part of the Crusoe series, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is the relationship between the representations of the early eighteenth-century Americas and the imaginative space of Crusoe’s island; and the relationship between these spaces and ideals of cultivation and gardening. Crusoe’s identity in the landscape of the island is shaped by the gendered religious and classical languages that suffuse the literature of cultivation and of colonial America in this period.13 The island of Crusoe Daniel Defoe, The Commentator, Friday, 20 May 1720. Daniel Defoe, Caledonia, &c, A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation, ll. 1183-84 (PEW, 4: 264). 12 Robyn Weigman, ‘Economies of the Body: Gendered Sites in Robinson Crusoe and Roxana’, Criticism, 31/1 (1989), 33-51 (p. 44); Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 256-62; Susan Paterson Glover, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 111-17. Discussing Robinsonades, Richard Phillips cogently argues for geographical specificity in analysing masculinity: ‘adventures do not reinscribe archetypal, singular masculinity; they map historical masculinities. … Masculinities mapped in the geography of adventure reflect the characteristics of that geography’. Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Empire (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 18. 13 For the interdependency between colonial and imperial endeavour and an ideal masculinity (or manliness), see R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 187; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003). Some studies of this novel have noted its relation to masculinity in passing, yet have not explicated the assumptions behind their characterisations: see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 211-12; Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1990), p. 2. One the most intriguing analyses of masculinity, virtue and 10

11

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(set off the coast of Venezuela and roughly south-east of Trinidad) becomes, as Jill Casid puts it, a ‘seemingly innocent dreamspace of the Edenic island as garden or garden as island’.14 However, the ideological discontinuities in this idealising displacement work to reveal the anxieties that manliness faced: specifically, the torrid New World garden as a space of temptation and idleness. Toil, cultivation and the Georgic mode, I will argue, are crucial to Crusoe’s working through of his first irrational choice in order to cultivate manliness, despite the unmanly dangers of his New World Eden. In many ways, parts one and two of the Robinson Crusoe series work through the dialectic myth of enlightenment that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer outlined: ‘the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establish their sovereignty. … What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men’, and, they add, women.15 Crusoe’s domination of ‘his’ Caribbean island is enabled by a domination of nature within and without: unmanly irrationality is conquered in a parallel move to conquer a feminised landscape. However, the Farther Adventures surprisingly undermines Crusoe’s manliness as established in part one. The repeated irruptions of unmanliness, as revealed in the constant anxiety generated by irrational passions, his abandonment of his island colony, and the restive desire for imperial endeavours, signal the tensions within the idealising processes of gender in Crusoe’s narrative. The Enlightenment myth is disrupted in part two in its suggestion that, ultimately, men are incapable of a sovereignty over the self, and that irrationality is ultimately unconquerable. Temptation and toil, metaphors normatively grounded in gender stereotypes, become untrustworthy grounds for establishing manliness. Colonial Edens Crusoe’s island, as a new-world Eden, poses the problem of a tension between threat and promise: at once a ‘horrible desolate Island’ (66) in need of toil and cultivation, it has also a ‘delicious Vale’ where he eventually builds his inland the sexual politics of a colonial landscape in Robinson Crusoe is Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Vendredi, ou les Limbes du Pasifique (published in English as Friday, 1969). 14 Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 96. Defoe’s representation of a Caribbean island as an unknown tabula rasa also falsifies the realities of this commercial and thoroughly mapped region; Hulme, Colonial Encounters, pp. 185-86. 15 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 3, 4. In their discussion of the myth of Odysseus, they describe his adventures as a series ‘dangerous temptations’ that actually constitute the individual; both this and their argument that these temptations also include women (Circe, the Sirens, the Lotus-eaters) is suggestive for my reading of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (though their own reading of Defoe does not follow this up), pp. 47, 32-34, 61-62.


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‘Bower’ (100, 101). It is a place for regaining paradise or to replay the fall from grace: a place of desolation in which to demonstrate improvement, virtue and domination; or a place of tempting plenitude, of passivity and submission. It is, in short, an emblem of the choice between manliness and effeminacy. Crusoe’s first survey of the island resonates with all the associations of the New World imagined as Eden: I came to an Opening, where the Country seem’d to descend to the West, and a little Spring of fresh Water which issued out of the Side of the Hill by me, run the other Way, that is due East; and the Country appear’d so fresh, so green, so flourishing, every thing being in a constant Verdure, or Flourish of Spring, that it looked like a planted Garden. (99)

Crusoe’s description of his own New World echoes the many florid descriptions of the ever-blooming Paradises of the American colonies and plantations. Robert Beverley, in The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), reproduced the opinions of Captain Arthur Barlowe on his sixteenth-century voyage to the Virginias: ‘that Paradice itself seem’d to be there in its first Native Lustre’.16 The anonymous author of The Voyages and Travels of that Renowned Captain Sir Francis Drake ([1725]) described an island off the Americas as ‘always clad in green, exceeding fruitful, abounding especially with Figs, Coco’s, Planato’s, Oranges and Lemons’. 17 Crusoe’s paradisiacal landscape even has a river which echoes its biblical counterpart that ‘went out of Eden to water the garden’ (Genesis 2:10). Such fruitfulness demanded tending, and the conjunction of colonial endeavour, cultivation and manliness is neatly summed up in another paean to Francis Drake, The English Hero (1701), which proclaimed that, Ever since Almighty God commanded Adam to subdue the Earth, there have not wanted Heroick Spirits in all Ages who have adventured their Estates and

Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (London, 1705) book I, p. 2. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1964), pp. 73-144; Jack P. Greene, ‘Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study’, in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 213-66 (p. 219). 17 Anon., The Voyages and Travels of that Renowned Captain Sir Francis Drake. Into the West Indies and round about the World ([Stamford], [?1725]), p. 13. See also John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), book IV, l. 148; George Warren, who noted that there is ‘a constant Verdancy and Flourishing of Plants,’ An Impartial Description of Surinam (London, 1667), p. 27; see also p. 5; Aphra Behn’s description of Surinam in Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave: A True History, ed. Joanna Lipking (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 44. 16


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Persons to make new Discoveries of the unknown Parts of the World, and many have industriously indeavoured to find out the true Circuit thereof.

Alluding to the biblical injunction to ‘replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28), imperialism and the domination of land go hand-in-hand. Clearly foreshadowing Defoe’s praise of the ‘vigorous’ and ‘adventuring Spirit’ of the heroic Elizabethan explorer-adventurers in A Plan of the English Commerce, Drake turns out to embody precisely such a heroic manliness: a Pattern to stir up all Heroick and Active Spirits in these days to benefit their Prince and Country, and immortalize their Names by the like noble Attempts, who by first turning up a furrow about the whole World, hath exceeded all who went before him.18

Ploughing a ‘furrow’ around the world drives home the relationship between colonial dominion and cultivation. The tract’s figurative associations of manliness and domination of space echo the visual depictions of the continents of Asia, Africa and America, which were traditionally represented as partially-clad women awaiting their discovery by European men: an image idealised by another of Defoe’s heroes, Sir Walter Raleigh, who described Guiana as ‘a countrey that hath yet her maydenhead’.19 In 1717, Sir Robert Montgomery revealingly said of South Carolina ‘that Paradise, with all her Virgin Beauties, may be modestly suppos’d at most but equal to its Native Excellencies’.20 Edenic innocence and colonial sexualisation were two sides of the same coin. Moreover, as in the biblical Eden, the threat of temptation was never far away. Many of the tracts and pamphlets extolling the virtues of the American colonies, for example, emphasised the ease with which these new Edens gave up their fruits. However, such representations also left the door open to accusations of luxury and idleness: the ease of paradise was, as one commentator put it, ‘apt to ‘R.B.’, The English hero: or, Sir Francis Drake reviv’d. Being a full Account of the dangerous Voyages, Admirable Adventures, Notable Discoveries, and Magnanimous Atchievements of that Valiant and Renowned Commander (6th edn, London, 1701), ‘To the Reader’. 19 Raleigh quoted in Hulme, Colonial Encounters, p. 159. See also Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 77-78, 151-60. The dangerous eruption of the sexualised female other (only closer to home, in England) is emblematised in another of Defoe’s characters, Roxana, when she mimics the eroticism of a Turkish dancer; see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 30-41. 20 Quoted in Jack P. Greene, ed., Selling a New World: Two Colonial South Carolina Promotional Pamphlets (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 18


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make people incline to sloth’.21 In the new colonies, ‘indolence’ was the crucial trope for their precarious hold on virtue and the effeminising effect of the torrid zone. This perception was particularly strong in commentaries on the colonies and empire inflected by civic humanism, such as by Charles Davenant and Thomas Nairne. Davenant’s prescriptions for the success of the plantations in the Americas emphasised moral and political virtue, lamenting, on the other hand, how ‘a rich Soil, easy Acquisition of Wealth, and a warm Climate, has infected’ the colonies with ‘Excess and Luxury’. Such vices led to a corruption of manliness and an unproductive population: ‘When a Country is grown vicious, Industry decays, the People become effeminate and unfit for Labour’.22 Nairne’s promotional pamphlet for South Carolina praises the militia for instilling manly virtue: A Planter who keeps his Body fit for Service, by Action and a regular Life, is doubtless a better Soldier, upon Occasion, than a Company of raw Fellows raised in England, whose Spirits and Vigour are soon pall’d by an idle, effeminate Life, in a warm Climate.23

Nairne makes clear the temptations posed to the colonist by a torrid climate: only an active and vigorous life can stave off the spectre of effeminacy. The dangers facing the colonist in the New World owed much to the humoural-based climatic theory of the day, in which climate (and, therefore, latitude) was perceived as a marker of cultural difference: cold or temperate climates produced a hardy people, inured to labour and jealous of their political liberty; hot climates were liable to produce an indolent, effeminate people and a slavish polity. John Arbuthnot declared that ‘People within the Tropicks’ face a constant heat, for which reason they are ‘lazy and indolent’.24 The temptations to vice, luxury and idleness were a constant in many depictions of the New World colonies and plantations; not one to mince his words, Edward Ward declared in 1698 that Jamaica was the ‘Dunghill of the Universe’ and that 21 Michael Zuckerman, ‘Identity in British America: Unease in Eden’, in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, ed. Canny and Pagden, pp. 115-57 (pp. 123-26); John Archdale, A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina (1707), quoted in Zuckerman, ‘Identity in British America’, p. 126. 22 Charles Davenant, ‘On the Plantation Trade’ (first published 1698), in Select Dissertations on Colonies and Plantations. By Those Celebrated Authors, Sir Josiah Child, Charles D’avenant, LL.D. and Mr. William Wood (London, 1775), pp. 43, 58; see also pp. 44, 64, 68. 23 Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina (London, 1710), p. 33. This pamphlet, being essentially propaganda for emigration, plays down the realities of the climate. 24 John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London, 1733), pp. 151-52. On climatic theory, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 21-28.

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Port Royal ‘the very Sodom of the Universe’.25 Edmund Hickeringill’s Jamaica Viewed includes this unrepentant voice of luxurious pleasure: Forbear your Stoick rules, go read To bed-rid Age; for I’ll not heed Your peevish Morals, till dull sense Despairs to have concupiscence. No, (whilst my Spirits are young and good, Revelling in my Frolick Blood) Compar’d to me old Epicure, Shall be a Puritan demure, Each sense shall play the Parasite, To humour my coy Appetite, Till I (bidding all joys good-night) Prove the Nil ultra of delight.26

His blood heated, he revels in his slavery to his appetites; this colonist fairly licks his lips at the prospect of an Epicurean life in the West Indies, in a picture that would enrage both Puritans and Stoics alike. The stereotypical emblem would, later in the century, be the sensual and indolent West-Indian planter.27 The other side of the coin to accusations of effeminate indolence was an answering emphasis on toil. For example, the last words of Robert Beverley, in The History and Present State of Virginia, are spent on an indictment of the sloth of the present Virginian colonists: they depend altogether upon the Liberality of Nature, without endeavouring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham’d to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature 25 Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica: With a True Character of the People and Island (London, 1698), pp. 14, 16. 26 Edmund Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed: with all the ports, harbours, and their several soundings, towns, and settlements thereunto belonging (1661, third edn 1705), p. 16. 27 See, for example, Edward Long’s comments in The History of Jamaica (London, 1774), vol. 2, pp. 260-65. See also Wylie Sypher, ‘The West-Indian as a “Character” in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Philology, 39 (1939), 503-20. Greene focuses on Barbados in his discussion of identity in the British Caribbean. He notes that between 1710 and 1740 Barbadians ‘developed a reputation as a passionate and contentious people who, … continued to live in idle luxury and extravagance heedless of both their own and their island’s welfare’. ‘Changing Identity in the British Caribbean’, p. 264.


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has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me.

Beverley’s depiction of the colonists is in contrast to his representation of the Native American Indians who seem to have no need to toil for their subsistence, ‘happy, I think, in their simple State of Nature, and in their Enjoyment of Plenty, without the Curse of Labour’.28 The allusion is, of course, to the Adamic curse: for the Native Americans in the state of nature, being the closest humans could be to a pre-lapsarian state, nature gives of itself. It is only after the fall that the Adamic curse establishes the eternal discord between humankind and nature: ‘cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life’ (Genesis 3:17). When Captain William Smith’s colonists in William Byrd’s 1728 account refuse to work because ‘they look’d upon all labour as a curse’, they are clearly missing the point.29 Toil may have been a curse, but cultivation and husbandry was a way of redeeming the fall. More particularly, it was a way of redeeming and proving manliness in the colonies of the empire. For the English colonialist project, ‘cultivation’ and ‘improvement’ were crucial, ‘it countered the prevailing assumption in the mother country that all colonists were endemically idle’.30 Planting was also symbolic: as Patricia Seed comments, it ‘represented the colonial endeavour in a fixed, visible form’.31 Enclosing and cultivating land and separating it from the ostensible wilderness transformed the potential of the New World landscape into a productive and tamed garden. While the Americas were hardly unoccupied, the perception that the natives were hunter-gatherers who did not cultivate and labour over the ground nullified their rights to that land: in this ideology of colonialism, all land was in common, waiting for it to be cultivated, and the first cultivator – like Adam – therefore established his property rights over that land.32 Commentators on Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, p. 264 [book IV, p. 83; book II, p. 63; see also book I, pp. 3-4]. 29 William Byrd, The History of the Dividing Line Between Virginia and N. Carolina Run in the Year of our Lord 1728 (Alexandria, VA, 1728), p. 3. Later in the century, Janet Schaw, describing the planters of North Carolina, would draw upon exactly the same language of a biblical paradise unimproved because of the effeminacy of the current planters. Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press,1921), pp. 141, 153-62. 30 John H. Elliott, ‘Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World’, in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, ed. Canny and Pagden, pp. 3-13 (p. 11). 31 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 27-36 (p. 29). 32 Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 76-79. The British legitimised colonialism on the basis of Roman law and the concept of res nullius, or ‘empty 28


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the American colonies were anxious to instil the ethics of an active and manly life, one that explicitly extolled the virtues of an Adamic toil that would improve the potential of an Edenic landscape. In other words, the garden – colonial or metropolitan – is the proving ground for a manly recuperation of Adam’s fall. In this they were drawing upon a conjunction of biblical and secular assumptions about the gendering of cultivation, husbandry and the landscape, and also upon a way of conceiving and representing the relationship between men and nature typical of the Georgic mode. Both ways of thinking are central to Robinson Crusoe’s manliness. Georgic Edens Crusoe continues his description of this ‘planted Garden’: I descended a little on the Side of that delicious Vale, surveying it with a secret Kind of Pleasure, (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting Thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as compleatly as any Lord of a Mannor in England. I saw here Abundance of Cocoa Trees, Orange, and Lemmon, and Citron Trees; but all wild, and very few bearing Fruit, at least not then. (100)

The valley, however, echoes the doubleness of colonial landscapes as both places of ease and places that require improvement: it holds both the threat of effeminisation and the promise of manliness, for Crusoe’s ‘Pleasure’ points forward to a tension between his passive retirement in the bower and his cultivation and domination of this landscape. That this will be a major space of cultivation is signalled proleptically: while the valley is fruitful, it is not productive, ‘at least not then’. This post-lapsarian Edenic landscape needs improving and cultivation. The apparent contradiction between the flourishing ‘planted Garden’ and the unproductive trees is explained by the novel’s imbrication within the Georgic mode.33 Crusoe has things’. John Locke’s characterisation of the ‘vacant places of America’ kept alive this justification, as did an appeal to Genesis 1:28 (‘replenish the earth, and subdue it’) when he comments, ‘He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property’. Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), ‘Second Treatise’, §36, p. 293; §32, p. 291. See Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 32-62. 33 J. Paul Hunter suggests this garden-scene ‘is not, however, a prelapsarian paradise but rather an earthly paradise in posse, for Crusoe is postlapsarian man who has to toil to cultivate his land’. J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1966), p. 172.


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seen ‘several Sugar Canes, but wild, and for want of Cultivation, imperfect’: this may be a ‘planted’ landscape, but unlike Beverley’s indolent Virginian colonists, Crusoe will set about to improve his island and subdue nature (98). Defoe’s own indebtedness to the Georgic mode can been seen in his A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. His description of the English landscape echoes Crusoe’s own ‘planted Garden’ (99) and ‘delicious Vale’ (100). On coming to Bushy-Heath, near St Albans, Defoe’s companions note ‘that England was not like other countries, but it was all a planted garden’. Similarly, coming out of the mountains in North Wales, ‘we came into a most pleasant, fruitful, populous, and delicious vale, … all smiling with the same kind of complexion’.34 Britain is a potential Eden and the description of landscapes in the Tour, as in Crusoe, embody a moral imperative to improve and cultivate.35 Crusoe’s first success at cultivation is initially seen as God’s intervening hand, for, expressing surprise at seeing barley grow, he assumes ‘that God had miraculously caus’d this Grain to grow without any Help of Seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my Sustenance, on that wild miserable Place’ (78). However, Crusoe soon remembers having thrown out some grain there. Later, recovering from a dangerous fever, he realises the potential in the ‘desolate Island’ (66), and asks ‘Can God spread a Table in the Wilderness?’ (94). Alluding to the story of God’s provision of manna to the fleeing Israelites, these words activate the connotations of the divine hand of grace to an elect people (Psalm 78:19). Yet while Crusoe’s initial success at cultivation is ostensibly the result of God’s providential hand, the text constantly reminds us that it is Crusoe’s own ‘laborious’ work (118) that cooperates with providence in this new Eden. And labour is exactly what Crusoe does. Summing up his plantations, he has, near his coastal cave-dwelling, ‘my two Pieces of Corn-Ground, which I kept duly cultivated and sow’d, and which duly yielded me their Harvest in its Season’ (152); near his bower, ‘I had For the Georgic as a ‘mode’, see Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 12. See also David Fairer, ‘Persistence, Adaptations and Transformations in Pastoral and Georgic Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 259-86. Braverman sees Robinson Crusoe and its Georgics as part of a Whiggish ideology of a progressive and consensual civil society that rejects patriarchal domination in Stuart pastoral ideology. Plots and Counterplots, pp. xvi, 248-71 (p. 256). I will argue that Defoe’s Georgic is very much a patriarchal one. 34 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 343, 388; the estate of Wanstead House ‘looks all like one planted garden’, p. 111. For the Georgic element in the Tour, see Pat Rogers, The Text of Great Britain: Theme and Design in Defoe’s Tour (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 135-46. 35 Terence N. Bowers notes, ‘if Great Britain is to achieve its Edenic potential, it can only do so through work’. ‘Great Britain Imagined: Nation, Citizen, and Class in Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 16 (1993), 148-78 (p. 166).

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taken an inconceivable deal of Pains to fence and enclose this Ground’ (152). ‘This will testify for me that I was not idle’, Crusoe assures us, ‘and that I spared no Pains to bring to pass whatever appear’d necessary for my comfortable Support’ (153). As Douglas Chambers claims, the Georgic landscape was ‘the place of a new kind of heroism, the heroic struggle between man and nature’ – though he implicitly reproduces an eighteenth-century ideology of manliness.36 The toil of cultivation central to the Georgic mode was also complicit with stereotypes of manliness that emphasised the male body as physically inured to hardship. Samuel Johnson’s prime citation for his definition of ‘manly’ comes from Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s Tenth satire: ‘Serene and manly, hardened to sustain / The load of life, and exercised in pain’. The satire continues by referring to an emblematic scene of manliness, when imagining a man ‘That dares prefer the toils of Hercules, / To dalliance, banquets, and ignoble ease.’37 Such language is echoed in book one of the Georgics: The sire of gods and men [Jove], with hard decrees, Forbids our plenty to be bought with ease, And wills that mortal men, inured to toil, Should exercise, with pains, the grudging soil.

The implicit parallel between the age of iron and the post-lapsarian world is clear: and the rest of book one goes on to make very clear that ‘Soon was his labour doubled to the swain’ as it details the arts and pains required to cultivate and ‘the unhappy field subdue’.38 Manliness in the post-lapsarian landscape is emblematised in the Adamic curse: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Genesis 3:19). This fact of the Christian world-view, however, was not something to be lamented, but became an integral and powerful facet of manliness. When Crusoe comments, ‘It might be truly said that now I work’d for my Bread’ (118), his depiction of the detailed and painful process of making bread literalises the Adamic curse. Thus, in John Philips’ Georgic paean to apple cultivation, Cyder (1708), all depends upon a working through, if you like, of the Adamic Curse:

36 Douglas Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden: Botany, Trees, and the Georgics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 26. 37 John Dryden, ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal’, ll. 552-53, 557-58, in John Dryden: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 372. 38 Dryden, ‘Virgil’s Georgics’, book I, ll. 183-86, 223, 228, in Dryden, pp. 467-68. See also William Harper, The Antiquity, Innocence, and Pleasure of Gardening. In a Sermon, Preach’d at the Parish-Church of Malpas, in the County of Chester, At a Meeting of Gardeners and Florists. April, 18, 1732 (London, 1732), p 5.


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Wilt thou then repine To labour for thy Self? and rather chuse To lye supinely, hoping, Heav’n will bless Thy slighted Fruits, and give thee Bread unearn’d?39

In the image of supine passivity, we are, once again, reminded of one of Defoe’s favourite maxims: ‘A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise; he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die’.40 As Crusoe has found out, Heaven will bless only those who labour to improve upon Nature by its cultivation. An active participation with providence, as opposed to a passive reliance upon providence, situates Crusoe within the Bunyanesque – and implicitly manly – life of the active Christian. As G. A. Starr points out, ‘labour and dependence on God came to be regarded as a “both/and”, not an “either/or” relationship’.41 Crusoe’s cultivation is labour admixed with a reliance upon providence, most clearly articulated in the allusions to Psalms, 78.19, ‘Can God Spread a Table in the Wilderness’ (94; also 130, 148). Neither a shipwrecked Mammon who advocates a self-sufficient industry to ‘work ease out of pain / Through labour and endurance’, nor a slothful ease of idleness in a colonial paradise, Crusoe’s manly husbandry steers a middle course, synthesising individual labour and dependence upon God’s providential hand.42 Defoe makes this clear in the third part of the series, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1721): To be utterly careless of ourselves in such Cases, and talk of trusting Providence, is a Lethergy of the worst Nature; for as we are to trust Providence with our Estates, but to use at the same Time, all Diligence in our Callings; so we are to trust Providence with our Safety, but with our Eyes open to all its necessary Cautions, Warnings and Instructions.43

Defoe describes such passivity as ‘Negative Religion’ or ‘Negative Virtue’ (SR, 180). Idleness, then, is an over-dependence upon God’s providence; there must be a corresponding industry to attend one’s estate in this life. Crusoe’s Adamic labour – ‘now I work’d for my Bread’ (118) – is a duty to himself and to God. However, in its reliance on the Georgic mode, the novel’s depiction of the toil

John Philips, Cyder. A Poem in Two Books (London, 1708), book I, p. 23. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (London, 1725/27), 2:i.123. 41 G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 188. 42 Milton, Paradise Lost, book II, ll. 261-62. 43 Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (London, 1720), p. 221. Further references after quotations in the text. 39 40


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of cultivation is mediated by the conjunction of biblical and classical languages concerning manliness and cultivation. Temptation We cannot avoid, however, the origin of Adam’s specific curse: it is not just that he has eaten the forbidden fruit, but ‘Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree’ (Genesis 3:17). As God chastises Adam in Paradise Lost, ‘to her / Thou didst resign thy manhood’.44 Adam’s eternal manual toil, then, stems partly from Adam’s abdication of manliness. While there may be no Eve figure on Crusoe’s island to tempt him, the unstable and dangerous temptations offered by the landscape are evident in his description of the ‘planted Garden’ (99) we saw earlier. Crusoe’s ‘secret Kind of Pleasure’ in this ‘delicious Vale’ (100) suggests a complacent loss of manly agency to a feminised and aggressively sexualised landscape. As if to underline the accumulation of associations, the ‘Vale’ tempts Crusoe to contemplate a move from his ‘fortify’d’ (59) coastal fortress to this new Edenic location inland: I began to consider of removing my Habitation; and to look out for a Place equally safe, as where I now was scituate, if possible, in that pleasant fruitful Part of the Island. This Thought run long in my Head, and I was exceeding fond of it for some Time, the Pleasantness of the Place tempting me. (101)

Crusoe anticipates that if he moved in toto to this vale, he would miss the chance of seeing vessels and being rescued; even if such a chance was minimal, he argues, ‘yet to enclose my self among the Hills and Woods, in the Center of the Island, was to anticipate my Bondage’ (101). Crusoe keeps his cave-dwelling, yet the terms in which he articulates this temptation testify to the profound ambivalence Crusoe has as regards this retirement to the Edenic valley: at once a place of protection, it can turn into a prison-like enclosure.45 His reason for rejecting this new location – because he may well miss out on the possibility of rescue – implicitly opposes action and the search for rescue to passivity and submission.46 The disturbing 44 Milton, Paradise Lost, book X, ll. 147-48. James Grantham Turner argues that in John Milton’s political, religious and divorce tracts, any subjection of men to female power results in an unmanly and effeminised thraldom. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 221-26. 45 This ‘Bondage’ echoes Crusoe’s ever-present fear of engulfment and which takes various forms: drowning, pp. 8, 44; the earthquake, p. 82; being eaten, pp. 47, 163-73, 207-08, 224. 46 Braverman also notes Crusoe’s ‘pragmatic’ and symbolic avoidance of the location. However, he ignores the crucial point that Crusoe does, in fact, locate there. Plots and


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language of ‘Bondage’ is in stark opposition to the expansive, wide-ranging husbandman he has now become. Instead of nature being subject to his enclosures, nature threatens to enclose Crusoe, reversing the gendered assumptions regarding the male domination of a female landscape. Crusoe’s temptation is ambivalent, but he is enraptured of the vale, remarking, ‘I was so Enamour’d of this Place, that I spent much of my Time there’ (101). So tempted, in fact, that he builds a second habitation here which he calls, notably, his ‘Bower’: ‘here I lay very secure, sometimes two or three Nights together’ (101-02). Describing his ‘Bower’ later, these suggestions of retirement are underlined: I kept the Trees … that they might spread and grow thick and wild, and make the more agreeable Shade, which they did effectually to my Mind. In the Middle of this I had my Tent always standing, … and under this I had made me a Squab or Couch, with the Skins of the Creatures I had kill’d, and with other soft Things, and a Blanket laid on them, such as belong’d to our Sea-Bedding, which I had saved, and a great Watch-Coat to cover me; and here, whenever I had Occasion to be absent from my chief Seat, I took up my Country Habitation. (152)

Crusoe’s bower is strongly evocative of the ‘shady Bow’r’ of Eden, with its images of repose after Adam and Eve’s day-time labour.47 Crusoe’s comfortable bower uneasily alerts us to the scene of the Adam’s abdication of power: in other words, his effeminisation. Crusoe’s ‘Bondage’ to the ‘delicious Vale’ is the trace of an anxiety lurking close to the surface of the gendered assumptions of the landscape and of colonial cultivation: the male surrendering himself to the pleasures of the colonial garden is flirting closely with a dangerous effeminacy. Yet once again, Christian discourse is inextricable from classical discourse, for, in the trope of the tempting locale, Crusoe’s ‘Bower’ replicates other scenarios of men led astray from the hard and rocky path of virtue. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene offers similarly powerful emblems: both the ‘shadie dale’ within Phaedria’s island in the ‘Idle lake’, and Acrasia’s tempting ‘Bowre of blis’ are pseudo-Paradisiacal locations in which the hero is faced with all the dangers of emasculation and effeminacy.48 As Diane McColley suggests, such spaces are linked to the vice of effeminacy, or excessive yielding to women, in classical and Renaissance epics in which the disarmed warrior betrays his manhood in the Counterplots, p. 262. Glover makes a similar point about Crusoe’s lack of mastery over nature when she argues that it is ‘the “feminine” in the island that comes (temporarily) to dominate and subdue Crusoe’. Engendering Legitimacy, p. 111. 47 Milton, Paradise Lost, book V, l. 367. 48 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 1977), II.vi.14, II.vi.10, II.xii.69. See also Patricia Parker, ‘The Progress of Phaedria’s Bower: Spenser to Coleridge’, English Literary History, 40 (1973), 372-97.

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Defoe’s Writings and Manliness arms of Circe or Armida. Poems and plays that link Eden with Arcadia exalt a blissful indolence uncomfortably akin to the bowers of effeminacy.49

A deceitful Eden, then, could become tainted with associations of seductive repose and luxurious idleness, paralleling the ‘Choice of Hercules’: the locus classicus of the emblem of virtuous manliness triumphing over the tempting female figure of ‘pleasure’. The doubleness of such landscapes – as sexual effeminising threat and potential proving ground of manliness – is caught nicely in the sub-genre of erotica ostensibly devoted to the study of natural history. For example, the frontispieces to Arbor Vitae: or, the Natural History of the Tree of Life (1741), and Little Merlin’s Cave. As it was latel’y discover’d by a Gentleman’s gardener, in MaidenheadThicket (1737), depict a landscape in which a young swain, spade in hand, talks to a young girl, whilst in the centre of the scene there is a little opening in the hill – clearly female genitalia – behind which the land is under the plough.50 As Carole Fabricant has persuasively argued, eighteenth-century landscape descriptions interpellated a male viewer by representing the landscape as a feminised object.51 The displacement of female sexuality into natural landscape that needed male tending is noticeable in the symbolism surrounding Milton’s Eve: She as a veil down to the slender waist Her unadorned tresses wore Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied Subjection, but required with gentle sway.

Eve’s ‘veil’ of ‘wanton ringlets’ connotes also the ‘Luxuriant’ and ‘wanton growth’ of the ‘vine’ that needs constant ‘subjection’.52 Nature may be fertile, but it is Adam, the original gardener, whose responsibility it is to circumscribe and 49 Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 151. 50 Karen Harvey, ‘“The Majesty of the Masculine-Form”: Multiplicity and Male Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Erotica’, in English Masculinities 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 193-214 (frontispieces reproduced pp. 208-09). 51 Carole Fabricant, ‘Binding and Dressing Nature’s Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979), 109-35. In the amatory fiction of the early eighteenth century the enclosed garden space was ‘a displaced image of the susceptible female.’ April London, ‘Placing the Female: The Metonymic Garden in Amatory and Pious Narrative, 1700-1740’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 101-23 (p. 113). 52 Milton, Paradise Lost, book IV, ll. 304-308, 260, 629.


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improve the ‘wanton’ activity of female nature. In the ideology of cultivation, in the possessive gaze over a passive landscape and the symbolism of enclosure, manliness is represented as the active force shaping and ordering a feminised landscape. Crusoe’s cultivation stems from the biblical injunction to subdue the earth, and to work through the Adamic curse by redressing Adam’s original emasculation by Eve. This cultivation is inextricable from eighteenth-century landscape ideology, in which the agriculturist and the poet (and even pornographer) present a female landscape as both threat and potential. Kate Soper’s points about the feminisation of ‘nature’ is useful here: ‘nature is … a complex, composite “female”, a metaphoric register in her feminization of the same divisions and anxieties that have characterized male attitudes to women themselves’.53 Crusoe’s ‘Pleasure’ (100) in his island is also a doubled one: it not only signifies the temptation to passively wallow in his Bower, but also the prospect of ‘a Right of Possession’ (100) and improving ‘the want of Cultivation’ (98). The pursuit of improvement results in enclosures, marking the boundaries between the ‘wanton’ unruliness of a wilderness, and the productive, fertile and subdued land. Preparing the ground for corn, he ‘sow’d my Seed in two large flat Pieces of Ground … and fenc’d them in with a good Hedge’ (119); similarly, his ground for goats is also surrounded by ‘Enclosures’ (146); and near his bower, ‘I had my Enclosures for my Cattle’ (152).54 Nature needs the circumscribing attention of an active principle. In Dryden’s Georgics, the (male) farmer, by ‘sure improvement’, burns the ‘barren ground’. Borrowing humoural physiology, the active heat of the male impregnates the cold female: ‘hence the hollow womb of earth / Is warmed with secret strength for better birth’.55

Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 105. Crusoe’s enclosures resonate with a variety of eighteenth-century connotations. It closely follows late-seventeenth-century writings on cultivation which stressed the improvement and ownership of land; see John Worlidge’s Systema Agriculturae, the mystery of husbandry discovered (London, 1669), p. 10, or Anthony Lawrence and John Beale, Nurseries, Orchards, Profitable Gardens, and Vineyards Encouraged (London, 1677), pp. 21-22. It also signified colonial possession; see Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, pp. 27-36. It also activates political, religious and monarchical images of Britain; see Stephen H. Gregg, ‘Defoe, Hedges, Fences, and the Boundaries of Britannia’, in Borders and Boundaries: The European Spectator, vol. 5, ed. Allan Ingram and Elisabeth Détis (Montpellier: Paul Valéry University, 2004), pp. 43-57. For other readings of boundaries in this novel, see Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature 15801745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 165-215; Casid, Sowing Empire, pp. 97-105. 55 Dryden, ‘Virgil’s Georgics’, book I, ll. 122, 123, 126-27; Dryden, p. 466. For the persistence of such Galenic theories of the body and sexuality, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 42-47. 53

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Defoe forcefully underlined such gendering and sexualisation of landscape improvement in the context of promoting industry in post-Union Scotland: ‘any land will be barren, if it is not cultivated and improv’d; and almost any Country will be fruitful if dilligently apply’d to’ (Review, 28 January 1706, 3:672). In his long propagandist poem for the Union, Caledonia, he argues, ’Tis Blasphemy to say the Climate’s curst, Nature will ne’re be fruitful till she’s forc’t; ’Twas made her Duty from her first Decay, The sweating Brow alone and labouring hand t’obey, And these she neither does, nor dares deny.

Defoe describes it as nature’s ‘Duty’ to be dominated by the hand of the ‘sweating’ Adamic labourer. He then underlines even more forcefully the feminised nature of the landscape, using the language of sexual conquest and rape: Nature’s a Virgin, very Chast and coy, To court her’s nonsence, if ye will enjoy, She must be ravish’t, When she’s forc’t, she’s free, A perfect Prostitute to Industry; Freely she opens to th’ Industrious hand, And pays them all the Tribute of the Land. The strong laborious Head she Can’t Deny, She’s only Backward where they won’t apply.56

Nature’s prudish yet coy sexuality echoes the double nature of Eve’s sexuality in Paradise Lost, whose hair is both a chaste ‘veil’ and ‘wanton’. Yet far from Adam’s ‘gentle sway’, Defoe imagines a forceful rape of the land, ‘open’ to the ‘strong’ ‘Industrious hand’. The fruitfulness of the land can only be guaranteed by a metaphorical sexual economy that envisions the female landscape as potential, and the male as husband and husbandman.57 More specifically, the representation of Nature echoes Defoe’s capricious ‘Lady Credit’: ‘a coy Lass, and wonderful chary of her self’(Review, 10 January 1707, 3:17-18).58 Contrary to J. G. A’s Pocock’s paradigm in which economic man suffers a loss of agency to this new version of Fortuna, Defoe assures us that ‘coy’ Nature is to be forced to bend to the will of the Adamic husbandman. Crusoe, no husband yet, can still be the husband of the

Defoe, Caledonia, ll. 1192-96, 1250-57 (PEW, 4:264, 4:266). Fabricant, ‘Binding and Dressing Nature’s Loose Tresses’, p. 125. 58 ‘Lady Credit’ first appeared in the Review the same year as Caledonia. 56 57


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land, albeit one which requires a distinctly patriarchal – not say misogynistic and imperial – domination of the landscape.59 Crusoe’s eventual perception of his isolation on the island as a fortunate condition owes something to the idea of felix culpa and the concept of contemptus mundi. Thanking God for his preservation and his spiritual repentance, he reflects that ‘I might be more happy in this Solitary Condition, than I should have been in a Liberty of Society, and in all the Pleasures of the World’ (112). This rejection of the world of tempting earthly delights is later underlined: ‘I look’d now upon the World as a Thing remote … well might I say, as Father Abraham to Dives, Between me and thee is a great Gulph fix’d’ (128). As David Blewett has persuasively argued, Defoe is citing the foundational Christian texts (Luke 16: 19-31; John 2:16) for the notion of contemptus mundi.60 Crusoe continues, forcefully articulating the rejection of desires: I was remov’d from all the Wickedness of the World here. I had neither the Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eye, or the Pride of Life. I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying: I was Lord of the whole Mannor; or if I pleas’d, I might call my self King, or Emperor over the whole Country which I had Possession of. There were no Rivals. I had no Competitor, none to dispute Sovereignty or Command with me. I might have rais’d Ship Loadings of Corn; … I had Timber enough to have built a Fleet of Ships. I had Grapes enough to have made Wine, or to have cur’d into Raisins, to have loaded that Fleet, when they had been built. (128-29)

Crusoe’s denial of worldly desire echoes his father’s diatribe against the ‘Pride, Luxury, Ambition and Envy of the upper Part of Mankind’ (4). However, in this remarkable passage, Defoe aligns contempt for the world and manly self-control over the passions with fantasies of dominion and imperial commerce.61 There is in this passage a curious shifting from ideals of contentment to fantasies of adventure and commercial expansion – fantasies that might even be characterised as discontent. For all of his denial of worldly desire, these fantasies are a kind of return of the repressed. As Christopher Flint perceptively suggests, ‘Crusoe seems

59 For Pocock’s thesis, see Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 111-23. 60 David Blewett, ‘The Retirement Myth in Robinson Crusoe: A Reconsideration’, in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15/2 (1982), 37-50 (pp. 43-48). See also Pat Rogers, ‘Crusoe’s Home’, Essays in Criticism, 24 (1974), 375-90. 61 Virginia C. Kenny, The Country-House Ethos in English Literature 1688-1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 102.


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to be hiding the fact that his lack of desire is not an absence of desire but a willed drive not to be conscious of desire.’62 This willed turning away from desire is a powerful emblem of the first part of the Robinson Crusoe series as a colonialist myth of self-sufficiency. This myth is enabled by two related elisions. Firstly, the significant narrative emphasis on the details of Crusoe making bread, pots, tools and his taming of the landscape, occludes the fact of Friday. Friday does in fact help Crusoe tend the land (213), yet this brief note is drowned out by the rest of the novel which is taken up with Friday’s education, the battles with the other cannibals and the mutineers, Crusoe’s rescue and journey home.63 Secondly, the island segment of the narrative works to elide the earlier and brief segment where Crusoe sets up a tobacco plantation in Brazil: the renunciation of desire obfuscates the fact of Crusoe’s riches silently amassing from his Brazilian plantation. This is, as Peter Hulme puts it, ‘the secret of capital itself, that it accumulates in magical independence from the labour of its owner’.64 Crusoe’s reward for his manly toil is the eventual restoration of this almost forgotten wealth at his return to Europe (279-85). The picture of the Jamaican epicure painted in Hickeringill’s poem is renounced by the picture of Crusoe’s ostensibly solitary manly toil. Ideologically, Defoe’s narrative lets Crusoe have his cake of virtue and eat the rewards of it too. Farther gardening for the hypochondriac The second part of the Crusoe series, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719, published just four months after the first part), is remarkable for its repetition of the themes of self-control and imperial endeavour; yet fascinating, too, for its break with the first part’s fantasies of manly colonialist self-sufficiency in its depiction of failure.65 Defoe repeatedly returns to the inexorable temptation of the Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 141. 63 In relation to this, though he does not mention cultivation, George Haggerty perceptively argues that Friday is ‘necessary to the full realization of Crusoe’s masculine power … a master, a king, the generalissimo’. ‘Thank God It’s Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe’, in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005), pp. 78-87 (p. 86). 64 Hulme, Colonial Encounters, pp. 219-20. 65 For analyses that discuss the second part, see J. A. Downie, ‘Defoe, Imperialism, and the Travel Books Reconsidered’, Yearbook of English Studies, 13 (1983), 66-83; Anna Neil, ‘Crusoe’s Farther Adventures: Discovery, Trade, and the Law of Nations’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 38/3 (1997), 213-30; Aparna Dharwadker, ‘Nation, Race, and the Ideology of Commerce in Defoe’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 39/1 (1998), 63-84; Nicole E. Didicher, ‘(Un)trustworthy Praise and (un)Governed Passions in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’, in 62


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passions and, initially, The Farther Adventures repeats the same movement from temptation to felicitous labour, from rambling inclination to Georgic cultivation, seen in the first part: any one would have thought that the native propensity to rambling … should be worn out, the volatile part be fully evacuated, or at least condens’d, and I might at 61 years of age have been a little enclin’d to stay at home, and have done venturing life and fortune any more.66

If these ‘volatile’ humours cannot be ejected from the body and psyche, then at least, Crusoe hopes, they can be brought within compass.67 But they have not ‘condens’d’ so much as expanded into a ‘chronical distemper’ (251) that conjures scenes from his time on the island: ‘my imagination work’d up to such a height, and brought me into such extasies of vapours … that I actually suppos’d myself often-times on the spot, at my old castle behind the trees’ (252). Such an obsessive compulsion to repeat is the stuff of hypochondria: the imagination running to excess, in a condition that Defoe aligns with women. When H. F. (the narrator of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year) disparages the mob’s irrational ‘Hypochondriac’ visions of comets, ghosts and flaming swords, he notes that ‘the old Women, and the Phlegmatic Hypochondriac Part of the other Sex, who I could almost call old Women too’ were most affected with these sights.68 Relocating Praise: Literary Modalities and Rhetorical Contexts, ed. Alice G. den Otter (Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000), pp. 75-85; Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 128-58; Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism and Crusonian Identity’, in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 176-93; Lincoln Faller, ‘Captain Misson’s Failed Utopia, Crusoe’s Failed Colony: Race and Identity in New, Not Quite Imaginable Worlds’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 43/1 (2003), 1-17; Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 177-209. Up to the early twentieth century, a large majority of editions included both parts one and two together; Markley, Far East, pp. 177-78. 66 Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in Robinson Crusoe Parts 1 & 2 ed. Frederick Brereton (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1953), p. 251. Further references after quotations in the text. 67 In Galenic thought, temperament and the body were mutually interactive, see Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen on Psychology, Psychopathology, and Functions and Diseases of the Nervous System (Basel: S. Karger, 1973), pp. 173-219. 68 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; 1990), p. 19. By ‘Phlegmatic’ Defoe does not mean of a calm or unemotional temperament, but means sharing the humoural qualities of women: cold and moist (as opposed to the heat and dryness of the male). In the tale of a ‘sober grave Gentleman,’ Defoe explicitly links hypochondria and other synonyms of nervous illness

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Crusoe goes on to describe how he ‘reason’d myself out of’ his feverish desire to roam: ‘in a word, I conquer’d it’. Yet he emphasises that ‘the most effectual method’ was ‘to divert myself with other things, and to engage in some business that might effectually tye me up from any more excursions of this kind’ (254). Once again, activity and labour help resolve his crisis of manly self-control: the gratification of desires that are perceived as irrational are delayed and sublimated into an activity implicitly rational. Having ‘bought a little farm in the county of Bedford’, he decides to ‘remove my self thither’ in a form of retirement. But it is an especially active form of retirement: ‘the land about it I found was capable of great improvement, and that it was many ways suited to my inclination, which delighted in cultivating, managing, planting, and improving of land’ (254). Crusoe becomes the model land-owner, improving and enclosing land, replicating all the activities of cultivation upon his island. However, Defoe is careful in his delineation of this ‘agreeable life’ (254): What I planted, was for my self, and what I improved, was for my family; and having thus left off the thoughts of wandring, I had not the least discomfort in any part of life, as to this world. Now I thought indeed, that I enjoy’d the middle state of life, that my father so earnestly recommended to me, and liv’d a kind of heavenly life, something like what is described by the poet on the subject of a country life. Free from vices, free from care, Age has no pain, and youth no snare. (254)

Defoe is careful to affix limits to the productivity of Crusoe’s farm, as if anxious that excess might be construed as luxury, and that the country life should not be an industry tainted with profit, but hold the idealisation of rural retirement in balance with individual needs. An autonomous self-sufficiency again holds sway. To toil too hard would connote the ‘men of labour’ who live in a ‘daily circulation of sorrow, … as if daily bread were the only end of wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion for bread’. Yet to produce too much would evoke the life of ‘the man of pleasure’, squandering the profits ‘in vile excesses or empty pleasures’ (255). Repeating the contrasts between rich and poor in the opening of the first part of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe makes it clear that the Georgic life of cultivation on his farm in Bedford is the perfect ‘middle state of life that my father so earnestly recommended to me’ where desires are kept within a moderate compass (254). It is a scene rendered in the language of retirement to a country seat, typical of the Virgilian (and Horatian) ideal of the beautus ille. The lines of the ‘poet’ distinctly recall the Virgilian ideal of rural retreat in Dryden’s Georgics:

with an unrestrained imagination: ‘the World was an Apparition to his Imagination, when the Flatus prevail’d, and the Spleen boil’d up’. An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, SFWS 8:293.


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O happy, if he knew his happy state, The swain, who, free from business and debate, Receives his easy food from nature’s hand, And just returns of cultivated land!69

Crusoe’s ‘happy state’ on his Bedford farm – ‘Free from vices, free from care’ – ‘put me in mind of the life I liv’d in my kingdom, the island’ (255). This is an echo of the self-sufficiency on his island, and the freedom from the desires of the eye, the flesh and pride. Such articulations of autonomy and self-regulation are central to the idea of classical retirement, which brought with it the suggestion of Roman virtue (aligning it within the language of civic humanism) through which homo politicus could avoid the accusations of an effeminate, because luxurious, lifestyle. In short, labour is the antidote to a sedentary and luxurious lifestyle: mens sana in corpore sano – ‘a sound mind in a sound body’ – is how Juvenal put it in at the end of the tenth satire; and it is to be remembered that it is this part of the poem that becomes the by-word for manliness in the eighteenth century.70 Stephen Switzer implies precisely this when eulogising the benefits of agricultural pursuits to mind and body: ’Tis in the quiet Enjoyment of Rural Delights, the refreshing and odiferous Breezes of Garden Air, that the Deluge of Vapours and those Terrors of Hypocondraism, which crowd and oppress the Head, are dispell’d, and that divine kind of Halitus there drawn, perspiring the Organs of the Body, which regulates the precipitate Palpitation of the Heart, and the irregular Pulsation of the whole Machine: ’Tis there Reason, Judgment, and Hands are so busily employed, as to leave no Room for vile Thoughts to interrupt their sweet Retirement.71

There is a nagging sense of conflict here between ‘the quiet Enjoyment of Rural Delights’ and the ‘busily employed’ hands, as if Switzer is playing down the toil of a post-lapsarian garden for his aristocratic readers. However, the opposition of this life to an idle one is signalled by the association of the non-gardening life with

Dryden, ‘Virgil’s Georgics’, book II, ll. 639-42, Dryden, p. 496; see also Dryden’s ‘The Second Epode of Horace’, Dryden, pp. 305-07. The lines on the country-life by the ‘Poet’ are from a popular song from the late seventeenth-century; Eironnach, ‘Quotations in “Robinson Crusoe’”, Notes and Queries, 20 May 1871 (4th series, vol. 7), 426-27; see also Maximillian Novak, ‘Robinson Crusoe’s Song on the “Country Life” and Defoe’s Knowledge of Music’, Notes and Queries, 237 (1992), 40-42. 70 Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, p. 217. 71 Stephen Switzer, The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener’s Recreation: or, an Introduction to Gardening, Planting, Agriculture, and the other Business and Pleasures of a Country Life (London, 1715), ‘Preface’, p. iv. 69

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the ‘Terrors of Hypocondraism’: the symptom of a luxurious and indolent life that fails to keep the psyche busy.72 George Cheyne’s popular The English Malady (1733), also offered up ‘Labour and Exercise’ as prime cures of this nervous malady. Moreover, hypochondria and its related nervous conditions were deemed products of a modern luxurious civilisation. Chronicling the history of classical civilisation, and the Greeks in particular, Cheyne argued that, in Proportion as they advanced in Learning, and the Knowledge of the Sciences, and distinguished themselves from other Nations by their Politeness and Refinement, they sunk into Effeminacy, Luxury, and Diseases, and began to study Physick, to remedy those Evils which their Luxury and Laziness had brought upon them.

Cheyne’s delineation of effeminacy, excess and disease was a cautionary tale for England that offered a distinctly civic humanist narrative of national improvement. It was also aimed at a specific group of idle English people, warning that the disease strikes only ‘the Rich, the Lazy, the Luxurious, and the Unactive’, and not the ‘Frugal, Industrious, the Temperate, the Laborious, and the Active’.73 Hypochondria was a tacitly understood effeminate condition.74 Switzer’s idealised gardening, then, can be seen as part of the Georgic mode’s mobilisation as a cure for the ills of modern civilisation. Gardening is a ‘sweet Retirement’ from the ‘Terrors’ of the world of cares, but the way in which these 72 For analyses of nervous illnesses, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 201-40; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 6-36. 73 George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 178, 56, 28, 28-29. 74 See Thomas Sydenham, who noted that Hypochondria, ‘seizes many more Women than Men, because kind Nature has bestowed on them a more delicate and fine Habit of Body, having designed them only for an easy Life, and to perform the tender Offices of Love: But she gave to Men robust Bodies, that they might be able to delve and manure the Earth, to kill wild Beasts for Food, and the like.’ The Whole Works of that Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham, by John Peachey (London, 1740), p. 308. Although Cheyne does not explicitly single out either of the sexes as being especially susceptible to nervous disorders, the language of fibres, nerves, muscles had gendered attributes: healthy ones were firm, diseased ones weak: ‘There is a due Degree of Strength, Power and Springyness required in the Fibres’, he notes, ascribing nervous illness to a ‘great Laxity or Want of due Tone, Elasticity and Force in the Fibres in general, or the Nerves in particular’. He also attributes the body’s original state to the male: ‘the Original Stamina, the whole System of the Solids, the Firmness, Force, and Strength of the Muscles, of the Viscera, and great Organs, are they not owing to the Male?’. The English Malady, pp. 7, 96. See also Porter, ‘Introduction’, p. xli.


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are associated with ‘the irregular Pulsation’ of the body, suggest those human frailties, desire and the passions. ‘Reason, Judgment’ and busy labour in the garden are clearly aligned as a cure to the implicitly effeminate temptations of modern luxury. Such a cure reveals the convergence of the language of civic humanism, the classical ideal of the beautus ille, and, of course, Crusoe’s father’s middlingsorts virtue. Farther temptations Can desire ever be conquered, can the passions be extirpated, ejected from the mind and body of men forever? Crusoe on his Bedford farm seems to think so, but Defoe clearly does not, for Crusoe’s purchase on a moderate and stoic manliness crumbles the instant that domestic stability is interrupted by the death of his wife: She was, in a few words, the stay of all my affairs, the center of all my enterprizes, the engine that by her prudence reduc’d me to that happy compass I was in … and did more to guide my rambling genius than a mother’s tears, a father’s instructions, a friend’s counsel, or all my own reasoning powers could do. (255)

Defoe had said that ‘Reason is a faithful Counsellor’ but clearly, Crusoe’s passions have the upper hand.75 Her death reveals the utter precariousness of the hold reason has over his impulse to ramble, and once again ‘my head quite was turn’d with the whimsies of foreign adventures’ (256). Crusoe duly returns to island (by the time he had been rescued at the end of the first part, he had established a colony composed of shipwrecked Spaniards and marooned ex-mutineers). He now oversees religious toleration, introduces Christian marriage between them and the now-converted indigenous Indian women, and inserts the Indian population into the Europeans’ domestic economy. Yet Crusoe decides to set up a venture to the East Indies, and abruptly abandons the colony. In his absence, Crusoe’s colony founders: ‘they went on but poorly, were male-content with their long stay there’ and hoped ‘that they might see their own country again’ (374-75). In the colony’s failure and Crusoe’s rambling, Defoe explicitly rejects the virtuous colonial ideals set up in the first part: I pleas’d my self with being the patron of those people I had placed there, and doing for them in a kind of haughty majestick way, like an old patriarchal monarch. … But I never so much as pretended to plant in the name of any government or nation. (374)

Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino, book III, note (a) (SFWS, 2:131).

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But of course Crusoe’s rule has been patriarchal: like Adam his dominion over the island and his subjects has been a paternal one. Defoe said of Adam’s patriarchal rule that it was not suited to larger communities or nations: ‘Small was the Bound of his Imperial State, / Confin’d within his own Paternal Gate’.76 As we have seen, however, the structures of that dominance involved an ideological elision of the contexts of gender difference and Caribbean colonisation, an elision that supported the production of Crusoe’s colonial manliness. There is a paradoxical tension, then, between the manliness idealised by his working through of the Adamic curse, and the resultant Adamic political structure that such a manliness has produced on the island. All the previous part’s adumbration – and even glorification – of colonial dominion is reduced to a mere patriarchalism: manliness in the service of an outmoded and devalued political ideology. Crusoe’s apparent sin is not, W. R. Owen and P. N. Furbank argue, ‘anything in the nature of tyranny’ but more of a ‘venial offence’.77 But coming as it does, amid yet more reflections on his impulse to ramble, it is an abrupt and surprising admission that has resonances for Crusoe’s masculinity beyond a mere moral slip. Crusoe repeats his own inability to control his wanderlust in terms that are explicitly self-castigating and offered as a warning to the reader to avoid similar temptations: I have now done with my island, and all manner of discourse about it; and whoever reads the rest of my memorandums would do well to turn his thoughts entirely from it, and expect to read of the follies of an old man, not warn’d by his own harms, much less by those of other men, to beware of the like, not cool’d by almost forty years’ misery, not satisfy’d with prosperity beyond expectation, not made cautious by affliction and distress beyond imitation. (374)

To be clear: the reader has seen little misery or affliction in the Farther Adventures so far that can be ascribed to his voyage back to the island. This self-portrayal as an exemplar of a man in thrall to his heated passion to roam, can only be a proleptic apologia for his future pursuit of riches in the East: wherein the justice of Providence may be duly observed, and we may see how easily Heaven can gorge us with our own desires, make the strongest of our wishes be our affliction, and punish us most severely with those very things which we think it would be our utmost happiness to be allow’d in. (375) 76 Defoe, Jure Divino, book II, ll. 43-44 (SFWS, 2:102). Ian A. Bell argues that Robinson Crusoe debunks patriarchal theory and legitimises Lockean political ideology, and considers Crusoe’s kingship on the island an ‘interim patriarchy’, though he does not consider The Farther Adventures. ‘King Crusoe: Locke’s Political Theory in Robinson Crusoe’, English Studies, 69 (1988), 27-36 (p. 35). 77 P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), p. 176.


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But, as Robert Markley notes, the subsequent narrative ‘is long on gorging and short on both physical and psychological consequences’.78 Discontent is its own punishment, it seems. Yet contentment, as we have seen, could be an enemy to great deeds: ‘where Contentment makes Endeavour less, / ’Tis then a Vice, and not a Happiness’.79 Defoe’s belief in the imperial needs of Britain powers this narrative on: Crusoe’s discontent is essential for the narrative to venture into the tempting riches of the East. However, the Farther Adventures is fascinating for its unwitting revelation of the precariousness of Crusoe’s identity. As both Hans Turley and Robert Markley reveal, for each important cultural coordinate for his identity – Christian, English – the narrative requires a hyperbolic and repeated statement. In contrast to the realities of the economic and trading might of the Dutch empire in the East and a ‘sinocentric world’, Defoe’s narrative has Crusoe anxiously denounce Dutch barbarity (414-15) and Chinese backwardness (421-26).80 Similarly, an encounter with Tartar paganism unleashes some of the most violent intolerance in Defoe’s fiction: Crusoe’s ‘Rage’ (441) results in a mission that destroys a village and its idols (439-48).81 What is in fact revealed in each violent re-statement is the degree to which Crusoe’s identity needs shoring up. As much as each centrifugal impulse of discontent that flings Crusoe to encounter difference is a paean to Crusoe’s English, Christian, imperial manliness, it is also an admittance that these encounters, these impulses, are the absolutely necessary means by which that identity is established and kept stable; paradoxically, these are the same scenes in which the precarious contingency of that identity is also revealed.82 However, it is also those moments of centripetal quietude – attempted contentment, even – that reveal the instability of Crusoe’s manliness. Stasis or retirement offer no short cut to the extirpation of dangerous and unmanly passions. Rather, these are the moments when the dangers that come with stasis, and the seeming necessity of activity, are most clearly signalled by Crusoe’s irrational ‘vapours’ (252), irresistible ‘whimsies’ (256) and ‘impetuous desire[s]’ (375). Retirement is an impossibility. It is as if stasis is a problem for manliness; it requires no vigilance. Manliness, in other words, requires a constant agonism in order to be seen; repetition is the means by which manly rationality establishes itself, even as it exposes its contingency through unmanly irrationality. In the repetition of passions in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, no secure sense of the defeat of the passions is offered, only a continual narrative of their eruption. Indeed, in the last pages Defoe underlines the precarious hold Markley, Far East, p. 185. Defoe, Caledonia, ll. 1183-84 (PEW, 4:264). 80 Markley, Far East, pp. 177-209 (p. 181). 81 Turley, ‘Protestant Evangelicalism, British Imperialism and Crusonian Identity’, pp. 176-93. See also Defoe, Serious Reflections, pp. 250-70. 82 The classic discussion of the interdependence of Western self-identity and Eastern identity is Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 78

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reason has over the passions in the portrait of the Muscovite Prince banished to Tobolsk, Siberia. The Prince, who was a minister of state, has now found a kind of happiness, or at least contentment, ‘in the retirement he seem’d to be banish’d to there, than ever he found in the highest authority he enjoy’d in the court’ (453). However, there are doubts as to the strength of his rather philosophic virtue. Crusoe offers the Prince a chance of escape, but the Prince, replying ‘in a ferment’, refuses: Here I am free from the temptation of returning to my former miserable greatness; there I am not so sure but that all the seeds of pride, ambition, avarice, and luxury, which I know remain in nature, may revive and take root, and in a word, again overwhelm me, and then the happy prisoner, who you see now master of his soul’s liberty, shall be the miserable slave of his own senses … Dear sir, let me remain in this blessed confinement. (458)

Citing the very same moral failings as Crusoe and his father enumerated, the Prince seems beyond doubt that he will succumb to them again. It is difficult, then, to see in the banished community and the Prince a ‘genuine Utopia’ and an ‘ideal man’.83 Retirement offers no security from discontent or the ‘ferment’ of the passions; and no guarantee of protection from temptation. The Prince resembles those escapees from the world criticised in Serious Reflections, who purposely seek out solitude in ‘a Wilderness … or a desolate Island’ (SR, 7) in order to control their bodily passions and desires. Such a retreat from the world is a ‘Rape upon his Body … where it is impossible for it to have any Converse with Mankind’ (SR, 6). As such, the Prince’s version of masculinity resembles what Defoe calls ‘Negative Virtue’ (SR, 184). Defoe never trusted a ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed’, as Milton put it.84 Except that it is not Crusoe who is tried or tempted here: having been subject to temptation by his own ‘impetuous desire … to wander’ (375), Crusoe himself becomes the tempter of the prince: ‘I am but flesh, a man, a meer man,’ exclaims the prince, ‘have passions and affections as likely to possess and overthrow me as any man: O be not my friend and my tempter both together!’ (458). Crusoe becomes the original messenger of discontent, ‘Old Mother Eve’.85 While the Prince has fallen far short of the manliness that can triumph over the temptations of desire in the world, Crusoe’s own manliness is called into question in his role of tempter. Moreover, Defoe’s narrative of the Crusoe in the second part underlines Crusoe’s own precarious manliness: the Prince’s ferment of passions

83 Didicher, ‘(Un)trustworthy Praise and (un)Governed Passions’, in Relocating Praise, p. 82. 84 John Milton, Areopagitica, in John Milton, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 247. 85 Daniel Defoe, Commentator, Friday, 20 May 1720.


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are a displaced emblem of Crusoe’s own anxieties and passions, emphasised in Crusoe’s reversed role as tempter rather than tempted. As Crusoe arrives back in England on the last page of the Farther Adventures, he again insists that he has learned how to be content and to live with stasis: here, resolving to harrass my self no more, I am preparing for a longer journey than all these, having liv’d 72 years, a life of infinite variety, and learn’d sufficiently to know the value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our days in peace. (466)

Except that there has been little sense of learning so far, and – like some of Defoe’s other protagonists, such as Colonel Jack and Captain Singleton – his spiritual lesson is late in the day and rather perfunctory. There is also a peculiar slippage between cause and effect. Overtly, it suggests that Crusoe has, after ‘having liv’d 72 years’, finally appreciated the ‘blessing’ of retirement, and is now ‘preparing himself’ for that final and blessed journey, death. Yet the syntax peculiarly suggest that he is only recognising the value of stasis and contentment, because of the proximity of this final ‘ending our days’. Defoe suggests that the only end to passion is the end of life itself. Ironically, in contrast to the temptations and toils of all his previous journeys, this ‘longer journey’, will also be the end of the process of becoming manly. Endings and repetition The importance of taking both parts of the Crusoe series together reveals their emphasis on insistent repetition and a lack of spiritual or psychological development. In short, it is a mistake to read Crusoe as exhibiting a psychological realism typical of modernity. Instead, each repetition should be read as exempla that reveal Defoe working through multiform ideological, cultural and social forces. Eighteenth-century commentators tacitly recognised manly virtue as a process rather than a given. In Galenic thought, the mastery of the passions was a process rather than a fixed state.86 And virtue itself was not a given but a continuing agony, as Abel Boyer noted: ‘The state of Virtue is not a state of Indolence; we suffer in it a perpetual Conflict, betwixt Duty and Inclination’.87 ‘Indolence’ or idleness, of course, was a crucial trope for manliness in conjunction with ‘toil’ or its synonyms. Any form of stasis was a worry for men: retirement, pleasure, even contentment, were in far too tempting proximity to effeminate idleness. Yet discontent and success demand some form of reward: it is just that those forms of reward were attended with anxieties for manliness. Sill, Cure, pp. 27-31. Abel Boyer, Characters of the Virtues and Vices of the Age, or, Moral Reflections, Maxims and Thoughts upon Men and Manners (London, 1695), p. 208. 86 87


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In part one, the unmanly temptations to stasis inherent in colonial landscapes are nullified by naturalising hegemonic stereotypes of manliness that depend upon activity and improvement. The Adamic rejection of effeminacy is emblematic of this, as is the implicit civic humanism of the Georgic ideology of toil and cultivation. The resultant ideological thrust is that an original, irrational discontent is converted into a fantasy of manliness rewarded with riches. Part two, however, is far less confident about such manly virtue. The contingency of manliness is emphasised by the inescapable summons to rehearse the spectacle of irrationality and discontent. In this sense, the cycles of irrationality, colonial improvement, imperial endeavour and spiritual reflection in the Crusoe series are a repetitive process that seeks to ground an ideal male behaviour – manliness – on the male body. To recognise this need to repeat, to reproduce, to continually break and remould manliness in these scenes is to recognise manliness, in Judith Butler’s words, as ‘performative’: Gender is … a norm that can never fully be internalized … the abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground to identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ‘ground.’88

The repetition of tropes in both parts is inseparable from the strange and surprising discontinuity between the Crusoes of parts one and two: together, they undermine the stability of Crusoe’s manly identity produced in part one. One does not become manly, but rather it is a process of continual and active becoming, and an ideal gender identity – for example ‘manliness’ – is therefore a culturally enforced aspiration, not a given or even stable identity.89 Defoe, obviously keen-eyed enough not to shy away from unmanly failings, yet obsessed by idealised colonial and imperial heroics, has produced a narrative that discloses the inherent instability of hegemonic manliness. So it is that the final conclusion to the Crusoe narrative withholds resolution in its confusion of death and journey, stasis and movement, passivity and activity. Crusoe’s manliness is an incomplete project.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 141. 89 This is, of course, an adaptation of Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 295. 88

Chapter 4

A Journal of the Plague Year: godly manliness under stress Reformation In an apparent aside, the Journal’s narrator – the saddler, H. F. – rebukes the court of Charles II: The Court removed early, (viz.) in the Month of June, and went to Oxford, where it pleas’d God to preserve them; … for which I cannot say, that I ever saw they shew’d any great Token of Thankfulness, and hardly any thing of Reformation, tho’ they did not want being told that their crying Vices might, without Breach of Charity, be said to have gone far, in bringing that terrible Judgment upon the whole Nation.

H. F.’s disparaging remarks are not directed merely at the court’s unseemly abandonment of the capital, but, more importantly, reflect his perception that it showed little sign of religious self-reflection. Defoe echoes two intertwined and commonly-held views: that the plague was God’s judgement upon a backsliding nation; and that the Restoration court was dissolute. In his opinion, the court has not reflected upon its ‘crying Vices’ nor recognised that it is God who should be thanked for its preservation: a process of self-reflection that should bring about repentance and reformation. The word ‘Reformation’ could not have been used idly. Defoe can hardly have missed the importance of the term in the late seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth: the culture of reform that swept London (and, to a lesser degree, the rest of England and Scotland) forms a crucial backdrop to personal, national, and, in particular, male behaviour in the Journal.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; 1990), pp. 15-16. Further page references are given after quotations in the text. As D. W. R. Bahlmann comments, ‘a tremendous enthusiasm for a reformation of morals broke forth in the years after 1689. … The phrase “reformation of manners” appeared everywhere.’ The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 14.

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Both Pat Rogers and Maximillian Novak have ranged over and illuminated the Journal’s sometimes covert commentaries on the social disorder of the 1720s. Yet, while chaos does indeed provide the motor for self-castigating narratives of national vice and disorder, it also offers fantasies of order and idealized figurations of gendered personhood. John Richetti and John Bender, from different theoretical positions, have adroitly argued that the plague offers a rhetorical or discursive field that effects and enables a crucial individuation. But neither Richetti nor Bender, however, relate such individuation to gender. Moreover, isolation, self-examination and a version of individual reformation are central to both G. A. Starr’s and John Bender’s arguments. Defoe, however, carefully qualifies those who are best able to exemplify the ideals of self-reflection and reformation – and these ideals are crucially aligned with manliness. The Journal, more than any other of Defoe’s fictions, comes close to outlining ideals of masculinity. But even here – perhaps especially here when men are faced with the most terrifying prospect of annihilation – Defoe makes it clear that there can be no one way to survive. Indeed, throughout the Journal H. F. anxiously debates the proper course of human action while lamenting how ‘the Arrow flies thus unseen’ (202). The sheer incomprehensibility of the plague’s moral, social or physical pathology underlines, as Richetti puts it, ‘the plague’s disruption of the normal and the predictable’. The plague disrupted and obscured the signs of Providence and virtuous action, so that there could be no single reformed manliness. Instead, under the stress of the plague crisis, godly manliness is re-formed in different ways, each of which bespeaks a different mix of elements. Central to the Journal are the discourses of reformation that overlap with Defoe’s own concern that manliness should be aligned with godliness. The Journal and the culture of reform reflected in the texts of the Societies for Reformation of Manners share a view of godly manliness that is a synthesis of personal religiosity Pat Rogers, ‘“This Calamitous Year”: A Journal of the Plague Year and the South Sea Bubble’, Eighteenth-Century Encounters: Studies in Literature and Society in the Age of Walpole (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), pp. 151-67; Maximillian E. Novak, ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’, in Critical Essays on Daniel Defoe, ed. Roger D. Lund (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997), pp. 218-35. John Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 233-40; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind on Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 73-84. G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). See also Everett Zimmerman, ‘H. F.’s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year’, in Publications of the Modern Language Association, 87 (1972), 417-23. John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 314. See also Raymond Stephanson, ‘The Plague Narratives of Defoe and Camus: Illness as Metaphor’, Modern Language Quarterly, 48/3 (1987), 224-41. For the contemporary debates on the nature of the plague, see Landa’s introduction to the Journal, pp. i-xxxix.

A Journal of the Plague Year: godly manliness under stress

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and civic virtue. Both the Journal and the Societies construct this godly manliness by demonising certain types of masculinity deemed to have failed or be corrupt: masculinities associated with the sinful Restoration court, irrationality, irreligion and effeminised superstition. As John Tosh has argued, masculinity involves ‘socially crippling distinctions not only between men and women, but between different categories of men’. The monitory narration of H. F. not only delineates corruptions and ideals of masculinity along lines of godliness, but along lines of status. A complicating factor is the period’s stereotypical association of manliness and agency, which points to a tension within men’s relation to Providence. This is the debate between vita contemplativa and vita activa; between philosophic faith in the face of earthly tests and an active public intervention in the affairs of the world. Analysing religious writings of the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Gregory argues that, ‘by highlighting social action, and right conduct within the world, as being the hallmark of masculine religiosity, these writers allowed the godly man of the period to be linked with a public virtue long deemed manly’. The ideal Christian hero of this period is not ‘vita contemplativa’, but ‘vita activa’: a synthesis of religious and civic virtue seen idealised in the rhetoric of the culture of reform. As we have seen in Defoe’s elegy to Samuel Annesley and the Serious Reflections, Defoe had produced his own answers to this problematic negotiation between hegemonic ideals of manliness and a godly dependence on Providence. In the Journal, however, Robert the waterman, H. F. and the three men of Stepney each represent a different answer to that negotiation. In each of these men Defoe forges a different godly manliness, a different kind of manly courage. Robert is manly in his submission to Providence. H. F. displays a manly virtue by way of his serious and rational reflections on Providence and his active intervention in civic virtue. Like H. F., the three men of Stepney are rational and religious; yet they are set apart by their escape from London, their transgression of the law, and their deployment of military language and strategies. Over the years a number of scholars – Maximillian Novak, Manuel Schonhorn and Katherine Clark – have discussed Defoe’s admiration for a warrior-style leadership.10 Indeed, one of his John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 44. See also R. W. Connell on masculinity and hegemony, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 77-78. Jeremy Gregory, ‘Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in English Masculinities 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 85-110 (p. 96). For this debate see also J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2nd edn, 2003), pp. 31-48. See pp. 49-57. 10 Maximillian E. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 137-40; Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power, Kingship, and Robinson Crusoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Katherine Clark,

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earliest writings, An Essay on Projects, included a proposal for a military academy. However, no critic has as yet discussed this admiration surfacing in the Journal, figured most visibly in the figure of the ex-soldier, John. Between them – Robert, H. F., the three men of Stepney – indicate the diversity of Defoe’s response to the problem of men under stress, and also suggests the pressures from overlapping languages of manliness. Reforming men is key, yet the crisis of the plague poses the question: into what shapes will men be re-formed? Defoe, the plague and the culture of reform The culture of ‘reformation’ encompassed a number of initiatives, begun in the 1690s and extending into the late 1720s, to reform the nation’s moral standing. Inherent in this was the insistence of the Williamite court to stress its virtue and piety, in contrast to the Restoration court, by calling on magistrates to enforce the laws prohibiting sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, gaming, cursing and blasphemy, prostitution and sodomy. This was contemporaneous with a unilateral movement in Westminster by religious and professional men and urban workers to police these laws privately; a movement that would become the Societies for Reformation of Manners. Both the court and the Societies couched their rhetoric in terms of moral reformation and deployed both religious and civic discourses.11 The efforts of the Societies – described as a ‘Christian-Brotherhood’ – were centrally concerned with urban male behaviour and were, as G. J. Barker-Benfield observes, ‘responding most immediately and continuously to the proliferating, modernizing, “irreligious”, masculine culture in post-Reformation Britain, centred on alehouse and tavern’.12 John Shower’s sermon, delivered before an audience of the Societies in 1697, gives a flavour of their attitude to reforming men:

Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 25-29. 11 The following draws on my arguments in ‘“A Truly Christian Hero”: Religion, Effeminacy, and Nation in the Writings of the Society for Reformation of Manners’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25/1 (2001), 17-28. For other studies on the culture of reform, see for example, T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform’, Literature and History, 3 (1976): 45-61; A. G. Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners, 1688-1715’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1980); Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 101-24. 12 Josiah Woodward, An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Religious Societies in the City of London, &c, And of the Endeavours for Reformation of Manners which have been made therein (London, 1698), p. 61. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,


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Great Numbers of Subjects, that in a time of War, might defend their Country, are effeminated, debauched, diseased, and made uncapable of bearing Arms; . . . By unrestrained, unpunished Vice and Wickedness, the very Genius of a Nation is changed, a generous and brave People dispirited: By Luxury and Debauchery they are softened and dissolved into Cowardize: They lose their Reputation abroad, and have no Strength at home; and are an easie Prey to Foreign Enemies.13

Shower’s sermon, delivered during the Nine-Years War, clearly addresses anxieties concerning the unfitness of the nation’s men for war. It depends upon a hegemonic language of manliness that is, as Anthony Fletcher notes, ‘elaborated around the polarity of manhood and effeminacy’.14 For Shower, the key causes of this effeminacy are ‘unrestrained … Vice’ and ‘Luxury’: both are imagined as a loss of control which threatens the continuum of maleness and manliness and the English nation’s ‘Reputation’. In the culture of reformation’s rhetoric of the slippery slope to effeminate and enervated Englishmen, the Restoration court was mobilised as the infamous archetype of the nation’s corruption and backsliding: as Gilbert Burnet (the leading propagandist for the Orange court) put it, ‘we have not forgot the Criminal Excesses of the year Sixty’.15 The Williamite court also attempted to reactivate the full connotations of the term ‘reformation’ by appealing to a sense that the great project of the Protestant Reformation had been abandoned.16 It is precisely this rhetoric that is echoed by H. F., when he rebukes the conduct of the court during the plague. The clearest representation of an irreligious, dissolute, Restoration-style masculinity in the Journal, occurs, almost inevitably, in a tavern. The Pye-Tavern, H. F. reports, is the haunt of ‘a dreadful Set of Fellows … who in the middle of all this Horror met there every Night, behaved with all the Revelling and 1992), p. 57. For the all-male nature of the Societies, see Curtis and Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners’, p. 47; Hunt, The Middling Sort, pp. 111-14. 13 John Shower, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies for Reformation of Manners in the Cities of London and Westminster, Nov. 15. 1697 (London, 1698), p. 49. Bernard Mandeville parodies this formulation when he notes that luxury ostensibly ‘effeminates and enervates the People, by which the Nations become an easy Prey to the first Invaders’. The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 141. 14 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 411; see also pp. 83-98. 15 Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preached in the Chappel of St. James’s, Before His Highness the Prince of Orange the 23rd of December, 1688 (London, 1689), pp. 22-23. 16 Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution. This rhetoric is reproduced when Defoe seeks to allay Scottish anxieties that the Act of Union will mean a union with a dissolute nation; see Review, 26 December 1706, 3:613.

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roaring extravagances, as is usual for such People to do at other Times’ (64). The revellers taunt those passers-by lamenting the dead with ‘very profane, and even blasphemous Expressions’ (64); in particular, a man silently grieving inside the tavern whom H. F. had seen earlier at the Aldgate burial pit, mourning ‘with a kind of Masculine Grief, that could not give itself Vent by Tears’ (62). Their lack of restraint presents a clear contrast with the mourner. H. F. interposes, reproving them with an account of his own preservation, which depicts the plague as a visitation of God’s judgement: in this terrible Judgment of God, many better than I was swept away, and carried to their Grave: .. the Case was, that I was mercifully preserved by that great God, whose Name they had Blasphemed and taken in vain, by cursing and swearing in a dreadful Manner; and that I believed I was preserv’d in particular, among other Ends, of his Goodness, that I might reprove them for their audacious Boldness, in behaving in such a Manner, and in such an awful Time as this was. (65)

H. F. implies that his preservation is a sign of God’s especial care, and a call to a pious – and civic – duty to reform the revellers. Although swearing, cursing and blasphemy might seem to us rather venial sins, these were all prime targets of the Societies. Queen Mary’s letter to the Justices of the Peace of Middlesex in 1691 urged the enforcing of laws against Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, lewdness and ‘Prophane swearing and Cursing’; and William III’s proclamation in 1697 emphasises the danger posed to well-ordered government by swearing.17 The revellers’ most serious blasphemy, in sight of a neighbouring church, is to make ‘a Jest at my calling the Plague the Hand of God’ (66). The relation between personal piety and the state of the nation’s manners is clearly signalled: ‘they would be made dreadful Examples of God’s Justice’, H. F. warns, and reminds his readers of Jeremiah 9:9: ‘Shall I not visit for these things, saith the Lord, and shall not my Soul be avenged of such a Nation as this?’ (68). The danger the blasphemers pose in the Journal, then, is not merely to themselves, but also to the nation – a notion supported by the Societies’ constant association of personal sin and national judgement. As Edmund Gibson warned in 1723: The messenger of his [God’s] hand has lately visited a neighbouring Nation in a very terrible manner; and tho’ his hand be staid for the present, yet we have

17 Queen Mary’s letter and William III’s proclamation are reproduced at the head of [Yates], An Account of the Societies for Reformation of Manners in London and Westminster, And other parts of the Kingdom. With a Persuasive to Persons of all Ranks, to be Zealous and Diligent in Promoting the Execution of the Laws against Prophaneness and Debauchery, For the Effecting A National Reformation (London, 1699). For the significance of ‘prophaneness’ to eighteenth-century society, see Craig, ‘The Movement for the Reformation of Manners’, pp. 133-40.


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great cause to dread the Judgements which Profaness and Immorality do always, sooner or later, pull down Kingdoms and Countries.18

God rewards the pious and punishes the wicked: a belief affirmed when the revellers all die from the plague within the succeeding days (66-67). The association of moral corruption and physical infection is very clear in this scene. The Pye-Tavern is precisely one of those spaces of public disorder that were pinpointed as a source of infection. In accordance with public Orders issued by the Lord Mayor, ale-houses, tipling-houses and coffee-houses were strictly policed, as they constituted ‘the common Sin of this Time, and greatest occasion of dispersing the Plague’ (46). Similarly, in his pamphlet Due Preparations for the Plague, Defoe argued that a physically debauched body will be the more liable to infection and singled out intemperate drinking as a lethal inlet and source of the plague.19 The link between medical and moral reasoning, concerning this almost exclusively male public pleasure, is clear. Practices aimed at controlling the plague could also sanction a moral and religious policing of the city, so that the fulminations of the sermonisers and the orders from local authorities were mutually supportive.20 As Susan Sontag argued: ‘Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. … The disease itself becomes a metaphor.’21 Indeed, the sermons of the Societies for Reformation of Manners insistently relied upon the metaphoric associations between moral and physical infection, equating the corruption of the nation’s manliness with the plague, and even likening the process of combating such a corruption with the practices of policing urban conduct during the plague of 1665.22

18 Edmund Gibson; Lord Bishop of London, A Sermon Preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, at St. Mary-le-Bow, on Monday January the 6th, 1723 (London, 1723), p. 16. Gibson suggested French pleasures were the cause of the recent French plague. 19 Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague as well for Soul as Body (London, 1722), p. 44. 20 Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 304. Such discourses are central to Michel Foucault’s thesis: ‘underlying disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder’. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 199. 21 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 58. 22 See, for example, Matthew Henry, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, at Salters-Hall. On Monday, June 30. 1712 (London, 1712), p. 17; Obadiah Hughes, A Sermon to the Societies for Reformation of Manners; Preach’d at Salter’s-Hall, July 1. 1728 (London, 1728), p. 2; John Heylyn, A Sermon Preached to the Societies for Reformation of Manners at St. Mary-le-Bow, Wednesday, January the 8th, 1728 (London, 1729), p. 15.

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Jeremiah Gill, in his sermon to the Societies, imagines a backsliding nation whose men are corrupted by vice. Drawing a direct parallel between the incipient corruption of manners in England and the corruption in biblical Jerusalem, he then embellishes it with the language of plague and contagion. Describing the ‘Degeneracy’ of Jerusalem, he exclaims, ‘this threatening Contagion had Unhappily insinuated into the Whole Body’ and laments, ‘here we read England’s Character and Case too much drawn to the Life!’. Gill goes on to tell us how the breach in the nation’s virtue can be stopped up: Couragiously and Resolvedly. He that steps into such a Breach, and endeavours to make it up, had need be a Person of Courage and Resolution. He must be a MAN, One of a Masculine, brave Spirit. An Inglorious Effeminacy, a creeping 23 Pusillanimity prevents the Undertaking or Effecting any thing that’s Great.

The piling up of normative masculine associations testifies to the anxiety that underlies this passage; a fear that perhaps this man may not be found: a fear that perhaps a contagion has diseased the men of England. At the heart of Gill’s declaration is a desperate tautology (‘He must be a MAN’) which suggests an anxiety that the natural bond between the male body and the ‘Masculine … Spirit’ may be broken by ungodly and effeminate behaviour. Such an active courage underlines the Societies’ conception of the manly Christian soldier. Like H. F.’s assiduous intervention at the tavern, the sermonisers of the day extolled the virtues of legal and civil intervention in public vice by appealing to (Protestant) Christian duty: ‘because by our Baptism we are all engaged to fight under the Banner of Christ, in a constant Warfare against the Devil and his Angels’.24 Matthew Henry echoes this fervent exclamation in his sermon to the Societies: ‘the Undertaking is bold and great, and in which the Spirit of a truly Christian Hero appears as much as in any thing’.25 The male Christian hero is founded upon the synthesis of a Bunyan-like pilgrim godliness and the performance of civic virtue.26 Defoe himself had an ambivalent relationship with the culture of reform.27 He particularly despised the hypocrisy of some of its leading lights. His poems 23 Jeremiah Gill, A Sermon Preach’d before the Society for Reformation of Manners, In Kingston upon Hull; September the 25th, M.DCC (London, 1701), pp. 4, 31. 24 Shower, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, p. 21. See also [Yates], An Account of the Societies for Reformation of Manners, p. 148. 25 Henry, A Sermon Preach’d to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, p. 4. 26 On John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and gender, see Margaret Soenser Breen, ‘The Sexed Pilgrim’s Progress’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 32 (1992), 443-60. 27 His classmate from his youth at a Dissenting academy was John Shower, whose sermons to the Societies for Reformation of Manners were published, and who preached at Salters’ Hall, one of Defoe’s local chapels. Defoe had almost certainly been a member


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Reformation of Manners (1702) and More Reformation (1703) use the lax morals of some of the members of the Societies – clergymen, JPs, the gentry and minor nobility – to rebuke them for their failure to be exemplars of manly virtue. Whilst it is extremely likely that Defoe was a member of the Societies, his approach to moral reform indicated a complex and idiosyncratic attitude to status and virtue, which at once recognised the nobility’s potentially exemplary role, acknowledged that vice was a leveller, and yet noted that the ‘mechanicks’ and poor of London were also capable of heights of virtue sadly lacking in the aristocracy. Defoe’s pamphlet The Poor Man’s Plea (1697) makes this clear. Like the Societies, he too mobilises the rhetoric of plague: ‘In searching for a proper Cure of an Epidemick Distemper, Physicians tell us ’tis first necessary to know the Cause of that Distemper, from what part of the Body, and from what ill Habit it proceeds.’ At first he makes it clear that vice is not limited to the poor, but cuts across rank and station: we do not find, impartially enquiring into the matter, speaking of Moral Goodness, that you are one jot better than we are, your Dignities, Estates, and Quality excepted. ’Tis true, we are all bad enough, and we are willing in good Manners to agree, that we are as wicked as you; but we cannot find on the exactest Scrutiny, but that in the Commonwealth of Vice, the Devil has taken care to level Poor and Rich into one Class.

Yet Defoe does, in fact, delineate the precise ‘Cause of that Distemper’ when he singles out James I (for his Book of Sports) and Charles II as culprits in the ‘Flood of Vice and Prophaneness which is broken in upon the Country.’28 In choosing to speak in the voice of the ‘poor man’, Defoe’s analysis is powerfully bound up with the stratifications and asymmetrical effects of rank and status; yet we will see that these issues of status are inflected by the languages of manliness and effeminacy. Irrational masculinity A number of critics have focused on the representation of class or station in the Journal. Maximillian Novak remarks that this ‘is a novel with a collective hero

of one of the London Societies in the late 1690s and early 1700s, and was certainly a member of the Edinburgh Society in 1707. See Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 85-86, 235-40. For a sceptical view of Defoe’s relationship to the Societies, see Charles Eaton Burch, ‘Defoe and the Edinburgh Society for Reformation of Manners’, Review of English Studies, 16/63 (1940), 306-12. 28 Daniel Defoe, The Poor Man’s Plea in Relation to all the Proclamations, Declarations, Acts of Parliament, &c which have been, or shall be made, or publish’d, for a Reformation of Manners, and suppressing Immorality in the Nation (London, 1698), pp. 1, 8, 4-5, 9.


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– the London poor’.29 In a similar vein, V. L. Wainwright argues that the text engages in a rhetorical project to bring the problems of the poor to the attention of the middle and upper classes.30 In contrast, Corie Schweitzer claims that the novel legitimises the moral and social stability of the middle class at the expense of the poor, despite the text’s seeming compassion. Yet this argument works only by distorting the representations of station: by claiming that the three men of Stepney (one an ex-soldier, one an ex-seaman, the other a carpenter) are inseparable from ‘the merchant class’ and allotting Robert the Thames waterman a ‘quasi-merchant status’.31 However, Novak’s claim that the poor are the novel’s heroes also glosses over some of the finer distinctions Defoe makes: it is far from the case that all the poor are idealised. Rather, there are careful qualifications concerning ideals of status and station throughout the Journal, and they are crucially inextricable from the languages of manliness. In his History of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat’s depiction of another calamity that befell the Restoration capital, the great fire of 1666, is revealing in the way class and gender were mutually informing: Nor was their courage less, in sustaining the second calamity, which destroy’d their houses, and estates. This the greatest losers indur’d with such undaunted firmness of mind, that their example may incline us to believe, that not only the best Natural, but the best Moral Philosophy too, may be learn’d from the shop of the Mechanicks. … no unmanly bewailings were heard in the few streets, that were preserv’d: they beheld the Ashes of their Houses, and Gates, and Temples, without the least expression of Pusillanimity.

The idealisation of the artisan class is aligned with an almost stoic manliness and occurs through the rejection of effeminised behaviour. ‘If Philosophers had done this, it had well become their profession of Wisdom: if Gentlemen,’ Sprat continues, ‘the nobleness of their breeding, and blood would have requir’d it.’32 That the aristocracy no longer held the patent upon personal virtue aligns this text with the ‘progressive ideology’ of status, seen in Defoe’s famous couplet, ‘For Fame of Families is all a Cheat, / ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great’.33 A similar 29

Novak, ‘Defoe and the Disordered City’, p. 222. V. L. Wainwright, ‘Lending to the Lord: Defoe’s Rhetorical Design in A Journal of the Plague Year’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 13 (1990), 59-72. 31 Corie Schweitzer, ‘Public Good and Private Mischief: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of Three Nations in A Journal of the Plague Year’, Eighteenth-Century Novel, 1 (2001) 253-69 (pp. 257, 258). 32 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958), p. 121. 33 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 155. Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, ll. 1215-16 (SFWS, 1:118). 30


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valorisation of the artisan class was occurring in depictions of the plague by 1665, in contrast to the texts of the medieval and early modern periods in which the plague provided opportunities for the aristocratic class to mirror its own concerns. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse note, ‘whereas despairing men and wanton women had filled the plague-riddled streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean cities, a noble and manly figure arises from the ashes of Restoration London and transfigures it. The city no longer languishes in a state of lawlessness, abandoned by the elite cast of people.’34 Crucially for Defoe, London was abandoned by its elite: the court of Charles II abandoned the capital and disregarded the nation’s moral well-being: ‘the Court concern’d themselves so little, and that little they did was of so small Import, that I do not see it of much Moment to mention any Part of it here’ (234).35 If the capital is under a well-ordered rule by a ‘noble and manly figure’, he is, for Defoe, embodied in a variety of figures from the merchant, artisan and labouring classes of urban London: what they have in common is not their class or status, but a godly manliness. They includes H. F. himself (a saddler); Robert the waterman; and – though, as we shall see, not unproblematically – the three men of Stepney. H. F. also records his praise for the clergy and physicians, and notes that ‘the Civil Officers, such as Constables, Headboroughs, Lord Mayor’s, and Sheriff’smen, as also Parish-Officers, whose Business it was to take Charge of the Poor, did their Duties in general with as much Courage as any, and perhaps with more’ (238). The idealisation of the various workers of London in the Journal echoes Sprat’s valorisation of the ‘Mechanicks’, but also included a range of occupations and levels of status encompassing the ‘middling sort’. Robert the waterman and the three men of Stepney would certainly be included in that lower class of people that elsewhere Defoe had defined as ‘meer labouring People who depend upon their Hands’ (Review, 22 January 1709, 5:515). The civic officers, and also H. F. himself, would belong to the middle station in which Defoe included ‘Tradesmen, such as Merchants, Shop Keepers of all Sorts, and Employers of others, either in Trade or Manufactures’ (Review, 22 January 1709, 5:515).36 These are precisely the people who make up the membership of the Societies for 34 Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labour, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 89-97 (p. 96). 35 It is interesting to contrast Defoe’s focus with that of Pepys who mentions the plague only in passing, and whose summary of events includes the comment that he had enjoyed the best three months of his life. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Lathan and William Matthews, 10 vols (London: G. Bell, 1972), 6:125-246 (6:246). 36 See also Review, 25 June 1709, 6:142. For an analysis and problematisation of early-eighteenth-century class structures and Defoe’s definitions, see Peter Earle, ‘The Middling Sort in London’, in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 141-58.

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Reformation of Manners. In their analysis of the class make-up of the Societies, T. C. Curtis and W. A. Speck comment that the majority were from a variety of trades and crafts including porters, schoolmasters, goldsmiths, carpenters, bakers, grocers and butchers; ‘very few’, they note, ‘were gentlemen’.37 Matthew Henry’s ‘Christian Hero’ mentioned earlier – the ground-troops and zealous workers of the Societies – came not from the upper echelons of life, but from an urban working class that encompassed the upper middle-station and the labouring poor. Yet H. F.’s praise of the urban classes does not extend to all, for he characterises a section of the very poor in disparaging terms. As we have seen, the figures of the court and the revellers have in common an irreligious outlook upon the plague and an unreflective view of God’s workings during the city’s calamity. This representation is shared by the superstitious and unthinking conduct of the moblike poor. Recognising that the plague hit the poor the hardest, H. F. finds this at odds with their behaviour: ‘yet, were the Poor the most Venturous and Fearless of it [the plague], and went about their Employment, with a sort of brutal Courage; I must call it so, for it was founded neither on Religion or Prudence’ (89-90). When the plague begins to abate, this irrational boldness is echoed in his description of the mob-like ‘People’, whose ‘precipitant Courage’ (225) and ‘rash and foolish Conduct’ (227) in suddenly venturing abroad leads to further infection. Courage should be ‘not so much a valuing our selves upon our Boldness in staying, as if all Men were Cowards that fly from the Hand of God, or that those who stay, do not sometimes owe their Courage to their Ignorance, and despising the Hand of their Maker, which is a criminal kind of Desperation, and not a true Courage’ (238). Defoe does not reduce manliness to a mere stereotype of courage, but shows its fortitude to be tempered by godliness. For those who stayed, godly manliness was entwined with a serious reflection on God’s providential hand and an unswerving belief that one’s reward is to be found not in this life but in the next. Such a faith in the next life is recommended to a doubting young man in Defoe’s Due Preparations for the Plague: ‘nothing can Animate and Encourage the Mind, like a firm Resignation to the Will of God, and a comfortable Hope that it shall be well with us beyond Life; this is certainly the best preparation for the Distemper’.38 The necessary faith in the providence of God, the calmness of mind and spirit in times of disorder and confusion exemplified in the texts of the Societies and in Due Preparations for the Plague, are missing in the hasty and unreflective conduct of the very poor. This religious reflection is measured by rationality, itself a traditional aspect of manliness bound up with an idealisation of self-control, so that religious delusion, fancy, and superstition compromised this ideal. In Dryden’s fable ‘The Cock and the Fox’, the world of female imagination overthrows reason: ‘When 37 Curtis and Speck, ‘The Societies for the Reformation of Manners’, pp. 47-48 (p. 47); Hunt notes the involvement of civil officers, lawyers and MPs at a more distant level; The Middling Sort, p. 114. 38 Defoe, Due Preparations, p. 142.


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monarch reason sleeps’, dreams are mistaken for reality, and ‘The nurse’s legends are for truths received’.39 The overthrow of reason shifts the ground from under the association of the male with manliness, breaking that naturalised bond, and effeminising the male. Godly men, then, exhibit a rational and temperate faith in the will of God, as Edward Stillingfleet’s sermon, Reformation of Manners, the true way of Honouring God, indicates: ‘Reason and Understanding is a steady and uniform Principle, and being well fixed from a due and thorough Consideration of the Nature and will of God, keeps the Mind even and constant.’ A hysterical or melancholic state of mind pose a danger to manliness, for ‘the Clouds and Vapors of Imagination’ divert the mind from the true course of reason. ‘Nothing’, Stillingfleet adds, is ‘so ungovernable as a restless Imagination; and when it is oppressed with a Religious Melancholy, then every thing seems dark and confused; we neither know God nor our selves as we ought to do.’40 The association of hypochondria, the imagination and religious melancholia was outlined in Robert Burton’s influential The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621); and in the tale of a ‘sober grave Gentleman’, Defoe explicitly links hypochondria and other synonyms of nervous illness with a delusional imagination: ‘the World was an Apparition to his Imagination, when the Flatus prevail’d, and the Spleen boil’d up’.41 The Journal also insists upon this rational religiosity.42 Lamenting ‘how far the People were really overcome with Delusions’ (24), H. F. describes a mob-like population whose credulity in apparitions and quackery – ‘these Oracles of the Devil’ (27) – is an enthusiasm ‘even to Madness’ (35). Such an unthinking and irreligious acceptance of portents, and the voices of quack physicians and astrologers, are in contrast to H. F., whose conduct and acceptance of Providence is guided by the Bible. Irrationality is the measure of behaviour in H. F.’s descriptions of the signs, comets, ghosts, voices and flaming swords that appeared to the superstitious:

John Dryden, ‘The Cock and the Fox’, Fables Ancient and Modern, ll. 326, 335, in John Dryden: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 715. Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1-3. 40 Stillingfleet, Reformation of Manners, pp. 9-10. On religion and rationality in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Philip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 41 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 3 vols (London: Dent, 1932), especially part 3, section 4. Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, SFWS 8:291, 8:293. 42 Starr, Defoe and Casuistry, p. 80. Defoe’s attacks on Deism, however, reveal the limits of rationalising Christianity; see Clark, Daniel Defoe, pp. 185-210. 39

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Defoe’s Writings and Manliness So Hypchondriac Fancy’s represent Ships, Armies, Battles, in the Firmament; Till steady Eyes, the Exhalations solve, And all to its first Matter, Cloud, resolve. (22)

Reason – ‘steady Eyes’ – banishes the hypochondriac’s delusions. Reason becomes distinctly masculinised in this formulation when H. F. explicitly associates hypochondria with the feminine. Disparaging the fanciful reading of comets as forewarnings, he notes that ‘the old Women, and the Phlegmatic Hypochondriac Part of the other Sex, who I could almost call old Women too’ (19), were most affected with these sights.43 The gendering of irrationality and hypochondria could also be seen in the writings of physicians such as Thomas Sydenham: The Origin and antecedent Cause of this Ataxy, is a weak Constitution of the said Spirits, .. the Frame of it the body is disordered, by how much the constitutive Principles that are allotted us by Nature are more or less firm. Whereas this Disease seizes many more Women than Men, because kind Nature has bestowed on them a more delicate and fine Habit of Body, having designed them only for an easy Life, and to perform the tender Offices of love: But she gave to Men robust Bodies.44

In this hegemonic formulation in which irrationality and hypochondria pose the danger of effeminacy, firmness of body amounts to firmness of mind. Rationality, then, as we have also seen in Stillingfleet’s sermonising, is the basis of true religion, and further, the basis for a godly manliness. ‘A Courage resting on God’ Against the failed masculinities of the rash, unthinking conduct of the very poor, the superstitious, and the blasphemers of the tavern, Defoe sets Robert, the Thames waterman. Coming across a ‘poor Man’ (106) on the banks of the Thames, H. F. hears the waterman’s story. Robert explains to H. F. that he does not go near his infected wife and children:

43 By ‘Phlegmatic’ Defoe does not mean of a calm or unemotional temperament, but means sharing the humoural qualities of women: cold and moist (as opposed to the heat and dryness of the male). 44 Thomas Sydenham, The Whole Works of that Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham, by John Peachey (London, 1740), p. 308. For analyses of nervous illnesses and their relation to class and gender, see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 6-36; John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 201-40.


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But said I, Why do you not come at them? How can you abandon your own Flesh, and Blood? Oh, Sir! says he, the Lord forbid; I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and blessed be the Lord, I keep them from Want; and with that I observ’d, he lifted up his Eyes to Heaven, with a Countenance that presently told me, I had happened on a Man that was no Hypocrite, but a serious, religious good Man. (106-07)

Robert continues his employment to support his family, all the while risking infection himself. The language of abandonment is particularly resonant. The court was perceived to have abandoned the capital and their responsibilities; and the reformers felt the court had abandoned their principles and morality. Robert also recognises and resigns himself to the workings of God. Saying of his wife, ‘I hope she will recover’, he adds, ‘I fear the Child will die; but it is the Lord! – ’; he breaks off, weeping, which moves H. F. to observe, ‘thou hast a sure Comforter, if thou hast brought thy self to be resign’d to the will of God, he is dealing with us all in Judgment’ (108). H. F. reiterates Defoe’s advice in Due Preparations for the Plague in which calmness of mind in a time of calamity is achieved by submission to Providence. Robert agrees: ‘it is infinite Mercy, if any of us are spar’d; and who am I to repine!’ (108). H. F. ruefully reflects ‘how much better this Poor Man’s Foundation was, on which he staid in the Danger, than mine ... mine was meer Presumption, his a true Dependance, and a Courage resting on God’ (108, my emphasis). Contrary to the unthinking boldness of the irreligious, Robert displays the Christian stoicism praised by Jeremiah Gill and exemplified in Defoe’s elegy to Dr Samuel Annesley, whose ‘Meekness of Soul did in his Aspect shine, / But in the Truth, resolv’d and masculine’.45 Even while he weeps, Robert displays a manly courage which is founded upon a submission to God’s providence.46 This conversation with Robert is important for H. F. too. Earlier, H. F.’s brother had advocated ‘that the best Preparation for the Plague was to run away from it’ (9) and faced with Robert, and having no such ties of duty to family, H. F. questions the moral and religious basis for his staying in the city. Finding that all his attempts to get away were frustrated by accidents, H. F. believes that these are ‘Intimations from Heaven’ (10), and reasons that to attempt to flee London would be to act ‘contrary to these Intimations, which I believed to be Divine, it was a kind of flying from God’ (11). He turns to the Bible for help, and opening the Bible at random for divination – the practice of Sortes Biblicae that Crusoe employs on his island when suffering from a fever – alights on the 91st Psalm. H. F. reads of his protection from the plague in these verses: ‘I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge, and my fortress, my God, in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the 45 Daniel Defoe, The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy: with a Preface. Written by one of his Hearers (London, 1697), p. 9. 46 Indeed, Annesley was, as Backscheider notes, ‘one of the most visible men who had taken the place of the parish ministers’ during the plague. Daniel Defoe, p. 10.


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snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence’ (13).47 Everett Zimmerman argues that H. F.’s ‘passive trust in God is presumptuous’.48 However, as I have indicated, this submission to the will of God is not so much presumption, but one of the ideal qualities of the godly man. As H. F.’s quotation of the Psalm continues, there is another justification for him to remain in the city: ‘Only with thine Eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked. Because thou hast made the Lord which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation’ (13). In his resignation to the will and providence of God, H. F. is also given an engagement to observe the morals of the time, to see the judgements of God at a time of calamity.49 If that were not enough, then on a more secular and civic level, H. F. is appointed as an Examiner of houses, observing and even judging the chaos and disorder of the city (159). However, the ambivalence of this verse – is it a command or merely a statement? – reappears in H. F.’s apparently ingenuous denial that he is ‘preaching a Sermon instead of writing a History, making my self a Teacher instead of giving my Observations of things’ (247). Yet, as we have already seen, in his idealisations and moral judgements of central men in the Journal, Defoe’s narrator finds it impossible to separate observation from teaching and even sermonising. To the ostensible readers, he declares that ‘I desire this Account may pass with them, rather for a Direction to themselves to act by, than a History of my actings’ (8). H. F. not only reports and analyses the plague year, but passes judgement upon those times and people. His gaze passes judgement upon those men who fail to exemplify godly manliness, and marks out for special attention those men who stand out in their affirmation of godly manliness above the chaos of the plague. H. F.’s project, then, is not dissimilar to the project of the moral reformers: to chose those suitable for carrying out the effort of reform, and to judge and discipline through religious rhetoric and civic law those men deemed unfit for England. As we have seen, H. F. himself embodies many of the qualities of godly manliness. His scepticism towards apparitions and the superstitions of the mob, Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Suprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Donald J. Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1983), p. 94. Although bibliomancy was associated with superstition, Rodney Blaine argues that Defoe thought that such practices should be used in conjunction with a belief where ‘men should listen for the promptings and hints of the blessed angels, hear and question the apparitions which are not of the Devil, and reject all forms of diabolical communication’. Daniel Defoe and the Supernatural (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), p. 11. For the imagery of fortified boundaries in Defoe’s writings, see Stephen H. Gregg, ‘Defoe, Hedges, Fences, and the Boundaries of Britannia’, Defining Nations in Enlightenment Europe: The European Spectator: volume 5, ed. Allan Ingram and Elisabeth Détis (Montpellier: Paul Valéry University, 2004), pp. 43-57. 48 Zimmerman, ‘H. F.’s Meditations’, p. 422. 49 Wainwright observes how ‘the moral imperative underlies and sanctions the compulsion to stay, observe, record and narrate’, ‘Lending to the Lord’, p. 61. 47


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and his rational arguments to stay in London, exemplify the rationality of the godly man. His attempt to reform the revellers in the Pye-Tavern echoes the active involvement of the urban citizens of the Societies, and as a saddler he is a member of the urban artisan class that made up the army of reform. Further, in H. F. there is a synthesis of the active intervention in civic virtue and an acceptance of the will of God and faith in the next life. This parallels the qualities found in the Societies’ ideal men; thus Obadiah Hughes exhorts the zealous intervention in public vice by crying, ‘your reward is safe in heaven: let the certain prospect of a future glorious recompence animate your attempts to reform a vicious age’.50 After lamenting ‘the Unthankfulness and Return of all manner of Wickedness among us, which I was so much an Eye-Witness of my self’ (248), H. F. proclaims his almost exemplary fortune: A dreadful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five, Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls Away: yet I alive! (248)

Here, at the very end of the Journal, H. F.’s roles as recorder, reformer and standard of godly manliness are all encompassed. H. F.’s surveying and judgemental eye and his enforced self-reflection articulate the ideal of a ‘good citizen’, in John Bender’s formulation, who is both ‘watched and watcher’. In Bender’s argument, the Journal’s attitude to confinement and self-reflection is a discursive prototype of the modern individual under disciplinary power (eventually crystallised in Bentham’s panopticon). Bender adds that ‘permanent mental reformation, not mere change of status, is the standard against which H. F. judges the effect of confinement under siege of the plague on the populace’. This is persuasive since the discourses of ‘reform’, as I have shown, are central in H. F.’s attitude to the court, the Pye-Tavern revellers, Robert the waterman and, finally, himself. Moral reformation along the lines of a manly and rational religiosity has been crucial to my argument. The strategies of the Societies themselves, moreover, replicate this project. However, Bender’s reliance on Michel Foucault’s analyses of power also replicates the totalising effects of power in Foucault’s thought. Moreover, when he comments that ‘H. F.’s narrative certifies isolation, reflection, and solitude as means of survival and thus as final values’, H. F. is made to stand for the values of the whole text.51 Bender’s otherwise sophisticated analysis cannot account for the way in which Defoe’s three men of Stepney, who are explicitly exemplary men, display rather more transgressive relations to the state and also a more peculiarly Defoean manliness.

Hughes, A Sermon to the Societies for Reformation of Manners, p. 40. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, pp. 76, 77.

50 51


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The three men of Stepney In the figure of Robert the waterman, Defoe neatly reversed stereotypical assumptions regarding masculinity and the dyad activity / passivity. In their heedless courage, the mob are unmanly in their irrationality and lack of pious self-reflection. Passivity is transvalued via the discourses of Christian stoicism: meekness and submission to God become manly. In the figure of H. F., we saw this mixed with a more active intervention in the conduct of London’s men that overlaps with the Societies’ synthesis of godliness and civic virtue. The Journal’s valorisation of Christian virtue recalls the characterisation of courage in A Family Instructor when a sister warns her despairing brother to reject an impulse to suicide: ‘That is talking more like a Soldier Brother, than a Christian … not like a Man of Courage; since what they call true Courage, consists in sustaining the Mind under the most pressing Afflictions’.52 Yet the three men of Stepney, and John in particular, draw their conduct precisely from the world of the ‘Soldier’. The three men of Stepney come from the stratum of the working poor, and two of them have been in the service of their nation: John was an old soldier, now a biscuit baker; his brother, Thomas, is a wounded sea-man, now a sail-maker; Richard is a carpenter.53 H. F.’s narrative of the two brothers and a kinsman is given an exemplary status: ‘the Story of those three Men … I shall give as distinctly as I can, believing the History will be a very good Pattern for any poor Man to follow’ (58). The three men of Stepney, then, represent yet another answer to the question of the relation between godliness and manliness, since their version of manly courage is different again from either H. F.’s or Robert’s. Far from sustaining affliction by staying in London, the three travellers strike out from the desolation of Restoration London, transgressing civil law. In their first dialogue, the two brothers debate the nature of charity and civil law if they leave their parish. Their rights as civil subjects are severely circumscribed: having nowhere outside London to go to, it is illegal for them to move from place to place under the vagrancy laws; thus, as Thomas reminds John, they have no legal right to escape the plague. John forcefully asks, ‘Is not flying to save

Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor. In three parts (2nd edn, London, 1715), p. 402. 53 While the description of John as a ‘soldier’ and his brother as ‘a Seaman too’ (58) may seem confusing, there was little formal distinction between these roles for anyone aboard a naval vessel who also fought on land, at least before the formation of the first marine regiments later in the seventeenth century. John’s involvement ‘in the late Wars’ (58), means that he may have been part of Cromwell’s Western Design against the Spanish in the Caribbean, 1655-57. His being ‘before that in the Low Countries’ (58) is referring to the naval battles of the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652-54. 52


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our Lives, a Lawful Occasion!’ (124).54 John questions their legal subjection by mobilising natural law, the rational right of self-preservation, against what he sees as unreasonable – and therefore irrational – civil laws.55 Underpinning this is his appeal to a sense of nationhood: ‘the whole Kingdom is my Native Country as well as this Town. … I was born in England, and have a Right to live in it if I can’ (124). The appeal to a superseding and overarching sense of identity is perhaps successful because it is spoken by a figure from the English wars against implicitly greater enemies than parish officers. The travellers’ grasp of their own fate is also informed by an explicitly Christian outlook, underlined in the meeting between their group and another group of travellers. Ford, of the other group, asks them if they ‘are all Sound Men’ (131). Richard reassures them, ‘we do not desire you should put your selves into any Danger’, and ‘that as we have not made use of the Barn, so we will remove from it, that you may be Safe and we also’ (132). Ford, recognising this Christian compassion, replies ‘that is very kind and charitable’ and their parley ends with Ford’s reliance on Providence: ‘God will guide those who look up to him’ (132). As Everett Zimmerman has suggested, their journey also has a typological allusion to the journey of the Israelites escaping Egypt to find the Promised Land, a parallel given strength by the allusion to the Israelites’ difficulty in finding food and passage through other towns.56 These problems are central to the narrative of the three men and the parallels are made clear in their earlier debate about whether to leave London, when John uses a biblical allusion which suggests a religious and divine precedent for them: ‘I am of the same Mind with the Lepers of Samaria, If we stay here we are sure to die’ (124). The allusion is to the Israelites’ journey in the second book of Kings: the lepers amongst them sought food denied by the besieging Syrians, only to find the Syrians had fled leaving their food behind. The biblical tale has added depth: ‘For the Lord had made the host of Syrians to hear a noise of chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host’ (2 Kings 7:6). The lepers are mistaken for an advancing army, and the allusion 54

Under the 1662 Act of Settlement, the poor were forced to stay within their own parish boundaries on pain of whipping, branding, or transportation, unless they could prove themselves worth ten pounds a year. See Carol Houlihann Flynn, who argues that their tale is a criticism of this Act. The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 144-45. 55 On natural law (also known as the law of reason), see Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man, pp. 1-22. 56 Zimmerman, ‘H. F.’s Meditations’, pp. 421-22. Zimmerman adds that ‘what the story seems to inculcate is the personal effort that, in addition to reliance on God, is necessary for Salvation’, p. 422. For Defoe’s use of typology, see J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1966), pp. 98-102, 122; for another typological reading of the Journal, see Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). pp. 221-23.

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foreshadows the three men’s militaristic stratagems against the hardened people of Walthamstow. As Defoe recognised, sometimes piety alone cannot reach the heights of an ideal godly manliness: one must pray, yes, but one cannot rely passively on God. As the lepers of Samaria say: ‘Why sit we here until we die?’ (2 Kings 7:3). The three men of Stepney and the lepers of Samaria may well have been in mind when Defoe was later thinking about his classically-influenced maxim: ‘A Man that will lie still, should never hope to rise; he that will lie in a Ditch and pray, may depend upon it he shall lie in the Ditch and die.’57 While the Christian charity of the three men of Stepney is often echoed by the religiosity of the other travellers, when the group meets with resistance or different behaviour, such reciprocity disappears. During the men of Stepney’s encounter with the people of Walthamstow, whose sense of Christian compassion has been warped by the terrible choices imposed by the plague, Defoe puts the men’s godliness under stress by drawing upon stereotypically normative associations of manliness and martial aggression.58 This is particularly focused on John, who – although a baker and biscuit-maker – reverts to his former identity and becomes ‘the Soldier’ (127), or ‘John the Soldier’ (139), or even ‘Capt. John’ (140). The people of Walthamstow have blocked the roads and are ‘not to be perswaded by Reason’ (135). This is key: as we have seen, Defoe has been at pains to relate rationality with right conduct during the plague, and he emphasises John’s ability to argue ‘rationally’ (144). Here, it seems, the people’s lack of ‘Reason’ legitimates the men’s turn to threats of violence. The men go through elaborate preparations to give the impression they are an armed Company, fashioning fake muskets out of wood, placing guards and kindling fires, as if preparing to garrison outside the town. In his dialogue with a constable of Walthamstow, a figure of civic authority, John asks ‘Why do you stop us on the King’s Highway, and pretend to refuse us Leave to go on our Way?’ (136). The King’s Highway was not a merely a material road, but ‘a legal and customary right’.59 Defoe underlines the legitimacy of the men’s cause by John’s mobilisation of the language of custom and common law. 57 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727), 2: i.183. See also the variation on this in the context of resisting tyranny: ‘Heaven never will our faint Petitions hear, / Till Just Endeavours supersede our Prayer; … In vain they for Divine Assistance stay, / Unless they learn to fight as well as pray’. Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: A Satyr, book II, ll. 446-47, 456-57 (SFWS 2:116). 58 Defoe’s admiration of male physical prowess is reflected in the spectacle of men bare-knuckle boxing in The Compleat English Tradesman, 1.370. Defoe also used the same phrase to describe both Cornish wrestling and the use of firelocks: they were a ‘manly and generous exercise’. On Cornish wrestling, see A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 243; on firelocks, see An Essay on Projects, PEW, 8:124. 59 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: The Story of the King’s Highway, cited in Landa, ed., A Journal of the Plague Year, p. 278.


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This is pitched not only against the town’s lack of rationality, but also against its lack of Christian charity when John then argues that ‘we have a Right to seek our own Safety as well as you, and you may see we are flying for our Lives, and ’tis very unchristian and unjust to stop us’ (137). When this appeal to Christian conduct fails to move the townspeople, John makes more explicit the threats of aggression: ‘I suppose you see we are able to send you going’, and ‘we have offer’d no Violence to you yet, why do you seem to oblige us to it? I am an old Soldier, and cannot starve’ (137). On the one side, unreason and un-Christian behaviour; on the other, appeals to natural law, civil custom, rationality and implicit Christian values of benevolence. However, Defoe has created a confrontation which only the threat of aggression can solve. Here, then, is a considerable tension between violence and godliness: the example of John’s more normative expression of active manliness sits uneasily next to the godliness of Robert the waterman whose courage is a submission to Providence. Moreover, for all John’s appeals to rationality and godliness, his shifting allegiance to the law of the land reveals the ideological legitimisations of a stereotypically manly aggressiveness. While presented as a model for others to follow, the story of the three men from Stepney strains this exemplarity. Defoe, unable to resist testing formulaic conduct-book morality, pits their militaristic conduct against the terrible insularity of other communities, while at the same time forging an idiosyncratic link between martial aggression, rationality and godly conduct. The three men of Stepney are a world away from the supine figures of the Restoration court, the libertine drinkers of the Pye Tavern, or the effeminised and irrational mob. This is all the more emphasised by their narrative’s powerful typological reverberations. Their military prowess also comes from a world alien to the urban virtue of the middling sorts whose spokesperson Defoe so often was in the 1700s. Moreover, the culture of reform left little room for Defoe’s idiosyncratic construction of a manliness that drew upon godliness and a courage closely aligned with martial aggression. Re-formed men Just as part one of Robinson Crusoe presents a fantasy of a self-sufficient manliness that is enabled by and is a product of extremity, so A Journal of the Plague Year presents another set of men in extremis. Here, however, Defoe depicts a variety of men who fail to overcome the brutal chaos of the plague. The distinction of that ideal masculinity – manliness – depends upon the exclusion and demonising of other masculinities, ones associated with Restoration irreligion, irrationality and effeminised superstition. Indeed, the Journal is explicit that these men not only fail, they are both symptom and cause of the nation’s backsliding towards disorder and plague.


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The few that do overcome the conditions of chaos are actually enabled by disorder. Just as the plague as metaphor served the culture of reform’s rhetorical ends of policing and reforming masculinity, the plague in the Journal is, in John Richetti’s words, ‘a fruitful crisis’.60 And both Defoe’s text and the rhetoric of the culture of reform share a similar ideal of manliness, in which godliness is synthesised with an active involvement in the public sphere. Yet while reformation may have been a way to achieve a more virtuous male behaviour, the plague presented a radically unstable and unpredictable threat in which right conduct and the ways of Providence were far from clear. Faced with this, A Journal of the Plague Year presents no unitary or stable ideal of manliness: ideals of masculine behaviour become atomised and re-formed into a series of vignettes of exemplary, yet multiform, manlinesses. H. F. and Robert display various elements of reformed godly manliness: rational piety, self-reflection and civic virtue; each are exemplars of manly virtue. Most striking, however, are the three men of Stepney and more particularly, John. In this figure, Defoe – always tempted within fiction to test ideals – forges a manliness whose comprehensive and complex hinterland of rationality, religiosity, martial prowess and civil transgression, suggests the stresses put upon models of manliness when faced with the blunt terror of the plague.

Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, p. 239.

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Chapter 5

Singleton, friendship and secrecy ‘My every thing’: ambiguous beginnings If the two parts of Robinson Crusoe are a narrative of barely controlled inclinations to roam, Captain Singleton narrates a similarly driven man whose tenuous relationship to civil society is never satisfactorily resolved. His frequent lament is that ‘I had no home, and all the World was alike to me’. Bob Singleton’s childhood kidnap into a life of piracy is the early emblem of this lack of agency and any ‘Sense of Virtue or Religion’ (6) that civil society may foster. Indeed, as many studies of this novel have emphasised, to be a pirate is to be, as the law declared, ‘hostis humani generis … an Enemy to all Governments, because he destroyeth, as far as in him lieth, all Government and all Order, by breaking all those Ties and Bonds that unite People in a Civil Society under any Government’. He is beyond the pale of civilisation and an enemy to civic bonds. Yet Defoe balances Singleton’s declaration that ‘I had neither Friend, Relation, nor Acquaintance’ (137) with a late turn away from his ‘Inclination’ (140) to piracy and towards a remarkable friendship. This turn might also be a Herculean choice of virtue and ‘the Friendship of good Men’, as Joseph Addison put it, but if so, the resolution of Singleton’s masculinity is not unproblematic. In the second half of Captain Singleton, Bob Singleton has amassed a fortune through piracy and trade, and taken on board a Quaker surgeon, William Walters. After giving the pirate-crew the slip, Bob and William travel through Arabia disguised as Oriental merchants; during the trip Bob has a dream in which he stands self-confessed as a murderer, thief and pirate before the Devil. The dream and confession precipitate Bob’s religious awareness, and the scene leads to this Daniel Defoe, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, ed. Shiv K. Kumar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 35. All further references are given after quotations in the text. Matthew Tindall, An Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations and the Rights of Soveraigns (London 1694), pp. 25-26. For an analysis of the pirate’s relation to law see Joel H. Baer, ‘“The Complicated Plot of Piracy”: Aspects of English Criminal Law and the Image of the Pirate in Defoe’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 14 (1985), 3-28. See also Timothy C. Blackburn, ‘The Coherence of Defoe’s Captain Singleton’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 41 (1977-78), 119-36; Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Joseph Addison, The Tatler, ed. by Donald F. Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), no. 97, 22 November 1709, 2:101.

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paean to William: ‘as I had a merciful Protector above me, so I had a most faithful Steward, Counsellor, Partner, or whatever I might call him, who was my Guide, my Pilot, my Governor, my every thing, and took care both of me, and of all we had’ (271). It is the beginning of a dawning religious conversion felt by most of Defoe’s fictional protagonists. Bob Singleton’s conversion is intertwined with his relationship to William as his earthly religious guide, and Defoe makes certain that William’s role is imagined in metaphors appropriate to their sea-faring life and that connote Christian pastoral exemplars. However, what are we to make of the profusion of William’s roles, so much so that Bob runs out of specific terms and rapturously proclaims that William is ‘my every thing’? Further, his conception of his relationship to William moves from one in which Bob is dominant (William as ‘Steward, Counsellor’) to one in which he is subservient (‘my Governor’). Ostensibly, these terms are distinct, yet they are listed together as if they are synonymous. In Bob’s mind, then, William’s roles are interchangeable, and so, therefore, are the terms for his own relationship to William. As I will argue in more detail later, this signals a more symbolic interchange, signifying a friendship based upon mutual exchanges. One more detail of Bob’s characterisation of his relationship demands our attention: William not only takes care of Bob’s religious awakening, he takes care of ‘all we had’. The reference to Bob and William’s plundered riches might seem inappropriate at this important and spiritual juncture. Defoe’s breathless rhetoric gives the sense of a lack of distinction between the economic sphere and the spiritual – between Mammon and God – and suggests that riches and spirituality are not necessarily opposed. Defoe’s inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish between Bob’s spiritual condition and his interest here might be accounted for by a reading that would see this as a typically Defoean mythologisation of economic individualism, or the naturalisation of economic desire. Yet spirituality is neither the ideological cover for, nor the other half of the dialectic of, economic desire. Strikingly, the previous lines are less concerned with Bob’s relationship with God, than with William. What they suggest, then, is a lack of distinction between William’s friendship and William’s concern for their riches. The force of this scene rests on the inseparability of affection and interest, which is not peculiar to Captain Singleton, yet the negotiation between these two contraries forms a central debate on manly virtue and friendship in this period. The remarkable and affectionate friendship between William Walters and Captain Bob Singleton in Defoe’s Captain Singleton has generated some intriguing, if ambivalent, interest. Hans Turley’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash offers an adroit analysis of this novel’s transgression of masculine norms, noting that the ‘implications of homoerotic desire’ go ‘far beyond camaraderie’ in Bob and William’s relationship. However, this neglects other contexts of friendship Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), pp. 77-88; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 319.

Singleton, friendship and secrecy

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which can also shape the terms of male–male love. Also commenting upon this novel, Srinivas Aravamudan argues that ‘although there is no overt mention of homosexuality in the novel … its coded situational elaboration throughout is easily discernible’. Yet Aravamudan’s perception of the anachronism ‘homosexuality’ as a set of transparent signs oversimplifies what is a far more complex context for male–male relations. At the other extreme from these views, lie a number of comments that denude William and Bob’s friendship of any affect at all. Laura Curtis has described it as one of Defoe’s many teacher–pupil relationships: such a reading also ignores the mutuality evident in their relationship. Similarly, Manuel Schonhorn’s view of this novel is that ‘no warm fellow feeling, cleansed of mercenary and practical considerations, ever tempers Defoe’s world of men’. Such a wide range of reactions indicates a profound ambivalence towards William and Bob’s relationship. In his studies on friendship between men in the early modern period, Alan Bray stressed the importance of specific historical contextualisation in sorting through such ‘potential ambiguity about intimacy between men’. However, I want to keep alive that ‘potential ambiguity’ in accounts of early-eighteenth-century friendship, since it is precisely the ambiguities in these and in Captain Singleton that illuminate the imperatives and anxieties of male–male friendships. In particular, what makes William and Bob’s affectionate friendship particularly problematic is that while it reflects certain ideals of private exclusivity in male–male friendship, its lack of a public and civic dimension – another imperative on friendship – renders it suspiciously opaque to interpretation. Manuel Schonhorn’s comment raises another important issue: the implication that ‘warm fellow feeling’ is inimical to ‘mercenary … considerations’.10 Attention Hans Turley, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality and Masculine Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 127. In my use of the word ‘love’ here to describe male–male relations which includes the socially accepted norms of heterosexual friendship and does not edit out the possibility of same-sex desire, I am indebted to George Haggerty’s discussion in Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 18-19; also ‘Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century’, in Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men, 15501800, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 70-81. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 96. Laura A. Curtis, The Elusive Daniel Defoe (London: Vision Press, 1984), pp. 176-77. Manuel Schonhorn, ‘Defoe’s Captain Singleton: A Reassessment with Observations’, Papers on Language and Literature, 7 (1971), 38-51 (p. 50). Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (1990), 1-19 (p. 15). See also Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 10 Watt argued that the world Defoe inhabited demanded that relations between men were solely mercenary (or ‘interested’) and that emotional relationships were therefore

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to the historical contexts of male–male friendship will reveal the way in which male virtue was articulated in the interstices between the two potentially hostile categories of male love and ‘mercenary’ advantage. How, if at all, writers of the early eighteenth century asked, could these two seemingly contrary forces be reconciled? What problems of interpreting the signs of friendship and affection did bonds between men call forth? Friendship and gift-giving An ideal friendship is ‘that peculiar Relation which is form’d by a Consent and Harmony of Minds, by mutual Esteem, and reciprocal Tenderness and Affection’.11 So remarks Shaftesbury, and serves to illustrate the language of affect – of ‘love’ – which is found in various essays that discuss male friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. ‘Love and Esteem are the first Principles of Friendship’, declares Eustace Budgell in The Spectator: ‘As on the one hand, we are soon ashamed of loving a Man whom we cannot Esteem: So, on the other, tho’ we are truly sensible of a Man’s Abilities, we can never raise our selves to the warmths of Friendship, without an affectionate Good-will towards his Person.’12 Emotional responses to the friend are idealised here, for a respect for the friend’s abilities is not enough. Mutual respect and consideration of the friend is the starting point for realising the emotive potential in the friendship. For example, in Jeremy Collier’s Essays, a dialogue between two friends describes how friendship ‘improves into Confidence and Affection’, and how ‘Admiration improves into Love; and Love proceeds to Intimacy and Union’.13 Timothy Greated, in An Essay on Friendship, considers the friendship to be ‘that solemn engagement founded on mutual Love, whereby two particular persons of Sense, Good-nature, and Virtue oblige themselves … to promote each other’s real advantage’.14 While this emphasises love and mutuality, the language of ‘advantage’ may be read as rather mercenary. Affection and generosity – in material or spiritual diminished. The Rise of the Novel, pp. 70-71. Such a reading, however, invests the eighteenth century with post-Marxist views on the incommensurability of affection and economic interest. 11 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 1:56, n.13. 12 The Spectator, 5 vols, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); no. 385, 22 May 1712, 3:445-46. 13 Jeremy Collier, Essays Upon Several Moral Subjects (London, 1698), part two, pp. 52, 53. On the language of love, see also Timothy Greated, An Essay on Friendship; or, a Moral Discourse on the Nature and Effects of mutual Love (London, 1726). He considers the friend to be ‘the dearest object of his love’, and talks of ‘undissembled mutual Love’, pp. 40, 70. 14 Greated, An Essay on Friendship, p. 4.


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things – are inextricable in these accounts of male friendship; so that Taylor, while acknowledging the necessity of ‘vertue’ in the ideal friend, remarks that it is not enough ‘to make him my privado’, he must be ‘a loving man, a beneficent, bountiful 15 man’. Gift-giving, whether of material things or the physical and spiritual efforts of the friend, creates bonds of obligation and gratitude. In a dialogue between ‘Philocles’ and ‘Theocles’ in Shaftesbury’s ‘The Moralists’, ‘Bounty and Gratitude’ are ‘among the Acts of Friendship and Good-Nature’. One of the moralists asks, ‘suppose then, that the oblig’d Person discovers in the Obliger several Failings; does this exclude the Gratitude of the former?’. The other disagrees: ‘I think rather the contrary. For when depriv’d of other means of making a Return, I might rejoice still in that sure way of shewing my Gratitude to my Benefactor, by bearing his Failings as a Friend.’16 The bond between the obliger and obliged is created by the act of gift-giving, where the obliged is expected to return his own friendship in gratitude. Material advantage is converted into spiritual friendship. The representation of such an exchange between men is clear to see in Timothy Greated’s essay on friendship. ‘The wise good-natured man is all life and spirit, when concerned about the service of his Friend’, enthuses Greated, and the pleasure that diffuses itself all over his countenance, and attends every circumstance of his friendly offices, makes the deepest impression upon the person obliged. The receiver is not more agreeably pleased with the gift itself, that he is charmed with the generosity of the giver; and every new obligation does not only secure, but increase his affection.17

The potential self-interest in the power of creating obligation by the giver is transformed into pleasure in the giver and increasing affective bonds on behalf of the obliged. Of course ‘commerce’ was another clearly understood concept that aligned social bonds with commercial gain, encompassing as it did, notions of social and economic transaction. The exchange of gifts and affection that Greated describes could be readily comprehended under this term, yet it stifles the element of affect and emotion; ‘love’ signifies something more complex than either of the connotations of ‘commerce’. Self-interest or homosocial bond? Writers on friendship in this period drew heavily on Augustianian and Ciceronian models of friendship which aligned affective fraternity with civic virtue; yet, as 15 Jeremy Taylor, B. Taylor’s Oposcula. The Measures of Friendship (London, 1684), pp. 14, 15. 16 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 2:31. 17 Greated, An Essay on Friendship, pp. 14-15. See also Collier, Essays, part two, pp. 52-53.


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Jacques Derrida has noted, the negotiations between personal and public interest in the discourses of friendship were perpetually fraught. At the heart of an idealisation of friendship as mutual and symmetrical is an unacknowledged fear that all bonds are asymmetrical.18 And it is those friendships whose symmetrical reciprocity is unclear which subvert proper manly friendship. How might gift-giving and affection between men work in Defoe’s cut-throat world of commerce, populated by individualistic economic heroes and ex-criminals? Towards the end of the complex and sometimes rambling novel Colonel Jack, Jack is on a commercial venture in the West-Indies, where a friendship develops between himself and a Spanish merchant. While illegally trading to Spanish America, and pursued by Spanish frigates, Jack lands with some of his goods near Vera Cruz and is taken in by this Spanish merchant, essentially exiled in Mexico. Jack comments that, my Circumstances were in one Sense indeed very happy; Namely, that I was in the Hands of my Friends, for such really they were, and so faithful, that no Men could have been more careful of their own Safety than were they of mine, and that which added to the comfort of my new Condition, was the produce of my Goods.19

After a novel full of misadventure, that Jack has found happiness and friendship is striking. That he is also happy for the security of his expensive cargo indicates that Defoe does not elevate the material over the social; ‘commerce’ is indeed social and economic here. Even while he is essentially exiled, the force of Jack’s happiness is underlined by Defoe: ‘I had here now a most happy, and comfortable Retreat, tho’ it was a kind of an Exile; here I enjoy’d every thing I could think of, that was agreeable and pleasant, except only a Liberty of going home’ (307). A substantial element of this happiness is, ironically, a certain kind of freedom: he writes his memoirs, continues trading (albeit amongst a small circle), and is free to develop a male friendship which is in distinct contrast to the hierarchical gang relationships when he was a young street-thief. Jack, recognising ‘the Obligation I was under … to this one friendly Generous Spaniard’ (304), sells most of his cargo to his host, and presents the rest – some carefully selected luxury items – to him as a gift. Defoe spares none of the details of the magnificence of Jack’s bounteous cargo. His host declares that Jack’s gift was ‘fit for a Viceroy of Mexico, rather than for him’ and Jack observes that there is now an ‘Obligation I had lay’d upon him’ (305): Jacques Derrida, ‘The Politics of Friendship’, The Journal of Philosophy, 85 (November 1988), 632-44 (pp. 641-44); see also Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). 19 Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the truly honourable Col. Jacque commonly call’d Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965;1989), p. 299. All further references are given after quotations in the text. 18


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Tho’ I was us’d with an uncommon Friendship before, and nothing could well be desir’d more, yet the grateful Sense I shew’d of it, in the Magnificence of his Present [i.e. Jack’s present to his host] was not lost, and whole Family appear’d sensible of it; so that I must allow that Presents, where they can be made in such a manner, are not without their influence, where the Persons were not at all Mercenary, either before or after. (306)

The exchange of gifts and obligations here echoes the encomia upon male–male friendship looked at earlier. Bonds of mutual obligation and gratitude are formed which are ostensibly disinterested: the economic connotations of ‘influence’ are diluted by the lack of ‘Mercenary’ motives and ‘influence’ begins to take on the manner of an affective force. The exchanges between Jack and his host echo that staple trope of British imperialism, the notion of a beneficial, peaceful and sociable commerce typical of the ideology of the ‘pax Britannica’. These two friends engage in a kind of homosocial economic commerce worthy of The Spectator’s Sir Andrew Freeport, or George Lillo’s merchant-hero Thorowgood who rapturously describes how trade ‘keeps up an Intercourse between Nations, far remote from one another in Situation, Customs and Religion; promoting Arts, Industry, Peace and Plenty; by mutual Benefits diffusing mutual Love from Pole to Pole’.20 Jack’s bounty and display of riches, his gift-giving power, owes much to the context of British antiSpanish feeling over the trade in the West-Indies: such a successful venture in spite of the Spanish officials would have been greeted with glee.21 Given that his ‘happiness’ is also in a situation without his wife, Jack’s successful imperial endeavour, seemingly, is best accomplished without the presence of women and depends upon ideologies inherent both in imperialism, which was linked with manliness, and in friendship, that in its ideal form was exclusively between men. Indeed, male–male friendship was deemed to be of a distinctly higher quality than the ‘tinsel dressings’ of male–female friendships outside of marriage: ‘I cannot say that Women are capable of all those excellencies by which Men can oblige the World’, comments Jeremy Taylor.22 As Derrida has noted, there is a ‘double exclusion that can be seen at work in all the great ethico-politico-philosophic discourses on friendship, namely, on the one hand, the exclusion of friendship between women, and, on the other hand, the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman’. To this double exclusion can be added

20 George Lillo, The London Merchant: Or, The History of George Barnwell (London, 1731), III.i.4-6. 21 Maximillian Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 123-27. 22 Taylor, Oposcula, pp. 28, 64.


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another: the ‘marginalization, subordination or even ridicule of femininity’ that grounded the manly imperial project.23 Yet not all of Augustan society would be quite so happy with what could be viewed as a dangerous commingling of affective and economic spheres, of disinterested friendship and interest. The anxiety of more conservative Augustans such as Pope was that symbolic exchanges between men – affection, aesthetic judgement, abstract concepts such as ‘honour’ – were being eroded and undermined by an emphasis upon exchanges which were driven by pure economic self-interest. By imagining the economic and affective spheres as incommensurate, as Pope’s poetry shows, the personal life became associated with an Horatian retirement in opposition to a public world driven by a venial mix of courtly sycophancy and the urban financial revolution (which Defoe and Lillo championed). Thus, for example, in An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr Arbuthnot, the purely aesthetic realm of the poetic community is undermined by those who desire ‘My Friendship, and a Prologue, and ten Pound’.24 This negative exemplar highlights the implicitly disinterested and therefore ‘pure’ friendship of Dr Arbuthnot and of, course, the poet himself. Pope reveals that flattery and sycophancy are symptoms of a world pervaded by the ruling passion for economic self-interest. Pope and others of his circle foreshadow the later perception of the destructive nature of money and the perhaps decisive distinction between the two realms.25 Indeed, we now take for granted the distinction between interest and disinterestedness and the idea that mercenary motives should not be in any kind of proximity to social bonds. However, the life history of the concept of ‘interest’ reveals the changing fortunes of its relation to the ‘hysteria’ and passions

Derrida, ‘The Politics of Friendship’, p. 642; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 203. See also my discussion in chapter 6. 24 Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr Arbuthnot, l.48. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963). See also Lawrence Lee Davidow, ‘Pope’s Verse Epistles: Friendship and the Private Sphere of Life’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 40/2 (1977), 151-70. Pierre Bourdieu’s comment that the relationship between symbolic and economic interests is an ideological and historical construction is pertinent here: ‘Strictly “cultural” or “aesthetic” interest, disinterested interest, is the paradoxical product of the ideological labour in which writers and artists, those most directly interested, have played an important part and in the course of which symbolic interests become autonomous by being opposed to material interests’. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 177. 25 The relationship between social bonds and economics is forcefully described in Karl Marx’s question ‘is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, the universal agent of separation?’. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 377. 23


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of unrestrained economic man.26 Called on to rationalise this passion, ‘interest’ attempted to synthesise reason and economic individualism by becoming a ‘third category’ between passion and reason: ‘Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and as reason given direction and force by that passion.’27 Such a synthesis of reason and self-love under the term ‘interest’ is found in an unlikely place, Defoe’s apparently Hobbesian remark from Jure Divino: ‘Self-Love’s the Ground of all the things we do, / Which they that talk on’t least do most pursue’. Defoe’s footnote, however, reveals rather more: ‘Self-interest is such a prevailing Bond, especially where Reason concurs, that it never fails to open Mens Eyes to their own Advantages.’28 The concept that reason with self-love constitutes a social ‘bond’ may at first seem at odds with the scepticism associated with Hobbes. When Hobbes addresses the issue of gift-giving, it is in the context of gratitude as the ‘fourth Law of Nature’ (a law of nature because, in his survivalist ethos, society must ‘Seek Peace’). He goes on to elaborate that gift-giving is ultimately interested: That a man which receiveth Benefit from another of meer Grace, Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. For no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himself; because Gift is Voluntary; and of all Voluntary Acts, the Object is to every man his own Good.

While there is the expected delineation of ‘Good to himself’, however, Hobbes then goes on to argue that if such self-interest is ‘frustrated’, then essential social bonds are disabled: ‘there will be no beginning of benevolence, or trust; nor consequently of mutuall help; nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and therefore they are to remain still in the condition of War’.29 The notion that apparently mercenary considerations are not in opposition to social bonds is also implied when Hobbes considers obligation. While ‘unrequitable obligation’ is ‘perpetuall thraldom’, receiving gifts from ‘an equall, or inferiour, as long a there is hope of requitall, disposeth to love’. Mutual obligations produce a mutually advantageous exchange: ‘for in the intention of the receiver, the obligation is of ayd, and service mutuall; from whence proceedeth an Emulation of who shall exceed in benefiting; the most noble and profitable contention possible; wherein

J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 113-15; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 31-66. 27 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 43. 28 Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: A Satyr, book IV, ll. 173-74; note (a); (SFWS 2:152). 29 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 105. 26


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the victor is pleased with his victory, and the other revenged by confessing it’.30 What is remarkable is the interchangeability of giver and receiver, as if in this ‘noble and profitable contention’ exchange negates distinction of all kinds in a war of giving, where each individual strives to give of themselves. As Marcel Mauss’s seminal study The Gift emphasises, gift exchanges are part of ‘a wide and enduring contract’. Their function as a social bond goes further, since, ‘this bond created by things is in fact a bond between persons, since the thing itself is a person or pertains to a person. Hence it follows that to give something is to give a part of oneself.’ Exchange includes a whole variety of cultural material and ritual, including people and their bodies. 31 The gift of the body Interest, then, is a central pillar of social relations, or, as Defoe puts it, ‘a prevailing bond’ which potentially includes generosity, exchange, and mutual affection. The homosocial bonds between men are guaranteed by exchanges in which the symbolic and the material are deeply intertwined.32 How are affection and interest negotiated in Captain Singleton? Bob declares that, ‘William and I maintaining an inviolable Friendship and Fidelity to one another, lived like two Brothers; we neither had or sought any separate Interest’ (272). ‘Interest’ here connotes a centripetal tone to their relationship and, as described earlier, amalgamates affection with material concerns. Bob’s declaration of brotherhood and insistence later that they shall always ‘pass for Brothers’ (277), reflects a traditional aspect of male–male friendship: ‘A Brother does not always

Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 71. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1954), pp. 2, 10. While I acknowledge that Mauss’s anthropological study of gift-giving and exchange centres on pre-industrial societies, it is suggestive for the early eighteenth century, a period before the full flowering of capitalist industrialism. This is supported by the suggestion in Wolfram Schmidgen’s analysis of Robinson Crusoe which argued that the conceptualisation of objects in mercantile economics indicated a far more ‘tangible relationship between human and material spheres’. ‘Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration, and the Mercantile Fetish’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35/1 (2001), 19-39 (p. 34). 32 Gratitude, in Defoe’s writings, is often imagined as a social glue between masters and servants, monarchs and subjects, which explains his exasperation of the abuses of obligation and gratitude: ‘I am perswaded, there is no Nation in the World, where Betraying the Confidences of Friendship, and serving ourselves of the Ruine of our Benefactors, is so common as in this Country … I must own some of the most open and Capital Injuries I have receiv’d in the World, have been from those that have eaten my Bread, and who I have kept from starving’ (Review, 30 August 1707, 4:344). See also Maximillian Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 113-28. 30

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make a friend,’ remarks Jeremy Taylor, ‘but a friend ever makes a Brother’.33 However, while the appeal to a familial relationship was one model whereby economic pursuit and affection were synthesised under the rubric of interest, it was not the only one: as the foregoing discussion illustrates, such a synthesis could be effected by mutual exchanges of obligation.34 William and Bob’s relationship is no less dependent upon gift-giving than these other friendships. Granted, economics are part of the picture – they make an enormous fortune from their roving sea-trade – but this does not constitute an exchange of gifts. Rather, Bob and William give of themselves. Their various articles, contracts and agreements constitute an exchange of their material and spiritual selves in the form of promises and mutual obligations. William and Bob’s mutual guarantees, their own exchange of bodily presence, what Alan Bray and Michel Rey term, the ‘gift of the body’: a homosocial bond founded upon the mixture of material and affective exchange precisely adumbrated in the essays on friendship.35 This is clear in William’s first encounter with Bob, in which he gives over his body to Bob, who writes a ‘Certificate’ to the effect that William was taken by force, and even performs a charade in which William is roughly brought on board (143). In one way, this raises the spectre of a mercenary self-interest: William’s gift of his own body is merely a charade to secure his eventual release by the authorities if he is captured. However, as Bob Singleton comments, we can see how a mutual bond is created: ‘Now, Friend, says I, I have brought you away by Force, it is true, but I am not of the Opinion I have brought you away so much against your Will as they imagine: Come, says I, you will be a useful Man to us, and you shall have very good Usage among us’ (143-44). Bob, while wryly echoing the Quakers’ form of greeting, proposes a mutually beneficial partnership, to which William agrees: ‘Thou hast dealt friendly by me, … I shall make my self as useful to thee as I can’ (144). This contract is emblematic of Bob and William’s relationship, depending upon various bonds, contracts and ‘article[s]’ (255) throughout. Such bonds set them apart from the rest of his pirate crew. These contracts are not based upon the usual pirate blasphemies, cursing all religious, institutional and national ties, so that Bob and William’s language of brotherhood is very different from the bonds of the pirate’s world and in sharp contrast with the earlier bond between Bob and mutineer Harris which was sealed

Taylor, Oposcular, p. 50. For the familial model of male companionship, see Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 187. 35 Alan Bray and Michel Rey, ‘The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in the Seventeenth Century’, in English Masculinities 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 65-84 (p. 68). See also Bray, The Friend, pp. 140-76. 33

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by ‘the most solemn Imprecations and Curses that the Devil and both of us could invent’ (138).36 The language of contracts is mobilised when William proposes to Bob that they return home and repent. William first asks Bob to ‘promise on thy Word to take nothing ill of me’; then to ‘promise me not to make it publick among the Men’ (255). Finally, William says, ‘I have but one Thing more to article with thee about’, which is to approve his proposal for himself if not for Bob (255). Bob adds one proviso himself, agreeing, ‘in any Thing, … but leaving me, … I cannot part with you upon any Terms whatever’, to which William answers, ‘I am not designing to part from thee, unless it is thy own Doing’ (255).The language of contracts would seem to connote materiality and economic concerns, yet here it is used to underpin an affective relationship: an exchange of promises is transformed into a pledge that ensures their steadfastness. Such a pledge is underlined when the prospect of home is again mooted: William look’d very affectionately upon me; nay, says he, we have embarked together so long, and come together so far, I am resolved I’ll never part with thee as long as I live, go where thou wilt, or stay where thou wilt. (274)

William openly reciprocates Bob’s desire for his company for the first time. Such words may sound remarkably like the language of heterosexual romance (the echo of the Book of Ruth, often cited during marriage ceremonials, may give this impression to modern ears).37 What is being offered here is the promise of the continued presence of William. These guarantees and assurances that they will never part are symbolic exchanges, gifts of their bodies. Finally, at the end of the novel, Bob and William return home, but in secret, since they are still wanted as pirates. Yet repentance does not form the focus of Bob Singleton’s return. His religious reformation is dealt with in a perfunctory manner at the very end of the novel. Instead, Bob’s return to his native nation depends upon a further series of bonds between William and himself: Come, Brother William, said I, for ever since our Discourse at Balsara, I called him Brother, if you will agree to two or three Things with me, I’ll go Home to England with all my Heart. Says William, let me know what they are. Why first, says I, you shall not disclose your self to any of your Relations in England, but your Sister, no not to one.

36 In this, I differ from Hans Turley who argues for a link between Bob and William’s relationship and that between Bob and the pirates Harris and Captain Wilmot, based upon economic and sexual transgression. Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, pp. 109-27. 37 ‘For wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge’, Ruth 1:16.


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Secondly, we will not shave off our Mustachoes or Beards, (for we had all along worn our Beards after the Grecian Manner) nor leave off our long Vests, that we may pass for Grecians and Foreigners. Thirdly, That we shall never speak English in publick before any body, your Sister excepted. Fourthly, That we will always live together, and pass for Brothers. William said, he would agree to them with all his Heart. (277)

The dialogue underlines William and Bob’s mutual friendship based as it is upon a series of contracts, articles and terms. It deliberately echoes their first meeting, where William begins their relationship by proposing a bond of mutual understanding. Here it is Bob’s turn to propose terms which are ostensibly designed to keep his pirate identity unknown, ‘lest some should be willing to inquire too nicely’ after him (277). Yet this reason is not given until the last sentence of the book. The result is that the terms have a peculiar force about them, as if Bob’s reasons involve something else, some secret pleasure. His first term, that William should not ‘disclose yourself’ has a appropriative, jealous quality. Also, William, by virtue of his original contract with Bob, is not technically a pirate. Bob’s return home is only at his insistence that William binds himself to Bob by various articles and terms. William, then, is offering the continual presence of his own body: their mutual bonds of obligation are such that William is willing and eager to part with his own autonomy to be with Bob for the rest of his life. Bob may be cut off from the norms of English society, but then he insists that William must be too, and William’s glad agreement testifies to the strength of their mutual affection. But it is a strange kind of closure for the novel. There is no vilification of their ambivalent status. Their friendship is secret in the extreme, always in disguise, never speaking English. It could be an emblem of their pirate outlaw status, but because the ending of the novel offers no moral condemnation of this, their friendship is not reduced to it; it is greater than the novel can contain. Secrecy or civic virtue? Their friendship is bound up with an uneasy reconciliation between the contradictory imperatives on early-eighteenth-century friendship: between ideals of private exclusion and public virtue. Earlier in the novel, while travelling through Arabia, their friendship is tied to their secret identity as Christian pirates: after Bob’s confession in his sleep, William ‘was very anxious ever after about my talking in my Sleep, and took care to lye with me always himself’ (270). This close physical proximity echoes the role of the ‘bedfellow’, a position of security signifying trust and intimacy in the household of a patron between servant and lord.38 However, the position of ‘bedfellow’ was a public one, quite different to 38

Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship’, p. 4.

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the relationship between William and Bob. Theirs is essentially a private and secretive one: it is largely for protection against being discovered as pirates that they continue as Persian merchants on their return home. Far from achieving ‘the protection of civil society’ as Timothy Blackburn argues, William, and Bob in particular, must act like aliens in their own nation.39 All of William and Bob’s various articles and bonds have been secret. The initial ‘Certificate’, William’s proposal to return home and their masquerade as Persian merchants all underline the tremendous investment they have in secrecy. Such an exchange of secrets is idealised in Defoe’s comment on friendship: ‘He that receives a Trust, it remains a Trust for ever, till he that committed that Trust to him discharge it – He that has a Secret committed to him in a Time of Friendship, and reveals it in a Time of Enmity, or Anger, he never had any Friendship, and but very little Honesty’ (Review, 5 March 1709, 5:586). William and Bob’s friendship is represented as closer to an ideal of male intimacy wherein, as Jeremy Taylor notes, ‘secrecy is the chastity of friendship’.40 The publicisation and exchange of secrets destroys social bonds, as this denunciation makes clear: ‘Tale-bearing, Whispering, raising evil Reports, and receiving and entertaining of them … are of such pernicious effects and evil tendency, as to reveal Secrets, separate near Friends, beget Strife and Division, destroy Society and Friendship’.41 Of course, not every exchange of secrets was damaging: between men and women in marriage Richard Baxter expected that ‘The opening your hearts to each other is necessary to your mutual help.’42 Indeed, Bob’s new wife is expected to keep the secret of his identity, and such an ideal is seconded by Moll Flanders when she reflects on the sharing and keeping of secrets: let them say what they please of our Sex not being able to keep a Secret; my Life is a plain Conviction to me of the contrary; but be it our Sex, or the Man’s Sex, a Secret of Moment should always have a Confident, a bosom Friend.43

Moll’s ability to keep secrets contradicts the period’s perception of women’s tendency to uncontrolled loquacity, typified in Addison’s description of ‘female

39 Blackburn, ‘The Coherence of Defoe’s Captain Singleton’, p. 134. See also Faller, Crime and Defoe, p. 47. For an account of home and hybridity in this novel, see Sharon Harrow, Adventures in Domesticity: Gender and Colonial Adulteration in EighteenthCentury British Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2004), pp. 27-76. 40 Taylor, Oposcular, p. 68. 41 William Shewen, A Brief Testimony against Tale-Bearers, Whisperers, and BackBiters ([London], 1686), p. 17. 42 Richard Baxter, The Christian Directory, in The Practical Works of the Late Reverend and Pious Mr. Richard Baxter, 4 vols (London, 1707), 4:414. 43 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 325.


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oratory’: ‘With what fluency of invention and copiousness of expression will they enlarge upon every little slip of behaviour of another!’44 However, while Defoe’s works insist upon both men and women being able to keep their counsel, the idealisation of secrecy that runs through the commentaries on male conduct and conversation concerns the damaging effects of an uncontrolled circulation of gossip, rather than the mutual exchange of confidences. The Spectator seems to have been particularly exercised by the betrayer of secrets: in no. 148 it inveighs against the (male) ‘Whisperer’. He is a ‘secret Enemy’ who ‘deals only in half Accounts’ and his ‘Folly’ proliferates beyond his private friends only in order to raise his public self-importance.45 The circulation of gossip lies somewhere between private and public and represents the danger of an uncontrolled proliferation of invented half-truths. Within this halflight world the unmanly betrayal of secrets is dangerous because of its tendency towards a malicious uncertainty that will undermine the bonds of civic virtue. Telemachus, an exemplary figure of manly conduct to eighteenth-century men, was renowned for his virtuous behaviour at an early age. Under pressure from his father’s enemies to reveal secrets, he explains, ‘I have grown up in the Habit of not discovering my own Secret, and much more of not betraying under any pretext the Secret of another.’46 The keeping of secrets is the point where private confidence should be synonymous with public virtue. Here, precisely, is the fracture point in the ideology of male–male friendship: while the private and domestic aspect to friendship is idealised, any movement outwards into the public must always involve a clear expression of civic virtuousness. What questions of interpretation, then, does the purely self-regarding and private friendship raise? Precisely because of their opacity, such relationships could be viewed askance, as examples of criminal vice or political corruption, and frequently both. The anonymous Love-Letters Written Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson (1723) offers an intriguing glimpse of such anxieties, and illustrates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s point that ‘same-sex desire is … structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once marginal and central, 44 Spectator, no. 247, 13 Dec. 1711, (3:36). See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 26-41. 45 Spectator, no. 148, 20 August 1711 (2:83), it warns against ‘Inquisitive’ men: ‘there is nothing, methinks, so dangerous as to communicate Secrets to them; for the same Temper of Inquiry makes them as impertinently communicative’ (2:388). See also no. 68, 18 May 1711. 46 Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fenelon, The Adventures of Telemachus the Son of Ullysses. In Five Parts (4th edn, London, 1705), p. 61. The same scene is quoted approvingly in Spectator no. 337, 27 March 1712 (3:249-50). For Telemachus as manly exemplar see Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993).


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as the open secret’.47 This fictional epistolary correspondence between two men is framed by an editor at some pains to direct the reader’s interpretation of their relationship as sodomitical. All the while this prurient editor makes it clear that it is the hidden and obscure nature of their relationship, and the source of Mr. Wilson’s sudden and fabulous rise to riches, that is the focus of intrigue: The Reader will find, in the Course of the Letters the same dark Guesses, and Conjectures concerning this Meteor of Mortality, as are publish’d from Mouth to Mouth, and born the least Foundation of Truth, and he has been the same Mystery since Dead, as he was when living.48

What, the editor and his public are in effect asking, is the nature of each man’s interest – in all senses of that word – in each other? What becomes clear is that it is not only the secret aspect to this relationship that is cause for concern, but its lack of mutuality. As G. S. Rousseau persuasively argues, the publication of the Letters concerns the abuse of patronage: the accusation of a sodomitical relationship between patron and follower was ‘an admonition to political parvenus’.49 While the anonymous nobleman and Mr. Wilson exchange mutual assurances, obligations and favours, these become twisted by mistrust and mutual suspicion, because such exchanges are not made in the transparent public arena, where exchanges of affection and economic interest are aligned with a wider sense of the social fabric. Open-hearted declarations of mutual love proclaim a moral manliness distinct from the closed-doors activities of such as the nobleman and Mr. Wilson.50 Such a moral manliness is a corner-stone of those breathless paeans to male friendship: the virtuous friendship must be the basis of a community-wide friendship, one that encompasses national virtue and civic duty. Shaftesbury’s paean to friendship includes this enlarged sense of civic and national obligation:

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 22. 48 Anon., Love Letters Written Between a Certain Late Nobleman and the Famous Mr. Wilson, in a special edition ed. Michael S. Kimmel of Journal of Homosexuality, 19/2 (1990), p. 13. 49 G. S. Rousseau, ‘An Introduction to the Love-Letters: Circumstances of Publication, Context, and Cultural Commentary’, Journal of Homosexuality, 19/2 (1990), 47-91 (p. 77). 50 Paul Hammond’s discussion of George Granville’s 1701 version of The Merchant of Venice, The Jew of Venice, is illuminating: Granville ‘takes pains to define the relationship of Antonio and Bassanio as friendship, and to define the meaning of friendship as mutual benevolence; it makes the relationship open to view, avoids places of secrecy, and calls attention to how any display of emotion or offering of the body is a token of moral manliness’, Love Between Men in English Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 111. 47


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Do you think the Love of Friends in general, and of one’s Country, to be nothing? or that particular Friendship can well subsist without such an enlarg’d Affection, and Sense of Obligation to Society? Say (if possible) you are a Friend, but hate your Country. Say, you are true to the Interest of a Companion, but false to that of Society. Can you believe your-self?51

For Shaftesbury, the interests of a friend and the nation should be synonymous. In an apposite comment that could have been addressed to Bob Singleton, Collier suggests that friendship is no true friendship if it undermines civic virtue: ‘Where Vertue is not made the Measure of a Correspondence, ’tis no better than that of Thieves and Pyrats. ’Tis a scandalous Excuse to say, I murther’d a Man, or betray’d my Country, at the Instance of a Friend.’52 This patriotic friendship, emphasising its civic embeddedness, sits uneasily beside the friendship that exists between William and Bob. Clearly a pirate and his accomplice living a life of riches and ease within the borders of a nation which views such beings as ‘hostis humani generis’ might not be viewed as exemplars of national virtue, but as destroyers of civil bonds.53 But there is more. Defoe’s portrayal of this intimate male friendship produces an ending to Captain Singleton in which the contradictory signs of private affection, individual interest, and manly virtue are uneasily resolved. The mutual exchange of articles, obligations and affection constituted an ideal bond between males. In a society that idealised social relations as reciprocal ties of obligation and exchanges of gratitude, then it made sense to idealise these in the smaller sphere of individual male–male friendships. Under ideal conditions friendship is the catalyst for a spreading network of bonds that encompass the civil and national fabric. However, while emphasising public duty, discussions of male friendship also emphasised private exclusion. This imperative to exchange secrets is at once an ideal, but also a source of suspicion. If, like the anonymous nobleman and Mr Wilson, or, like William and Bob, such friendship remains exclusive and secret, a friendship in which the circulation and exchange of affection and interest is centripetal, then it is the opacity of such relationships that render them suspicious. In a society that sought to distinguish different forms of male ‘love’ – mollies and sodomites from an open virtuous affection – it is those who remain opaque who risk (mis)interpretation.

Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, 2:30. See also his essay ‘Sensus Communis’: ‘A Publick Spirit can come only from a social Feeling or Sense of Partnership with Human Kind’, 1:59-60. See also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early-Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 52 Collier, Essays, part two, p. 60. 53 Tindall, Essay Concerning the Laws of Nations, pp. 25-26. 51

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‘Thus we live in a general Disguise’ Defoe has remarked, recognising the dangers posed by illegible identities.54 Even the ending of this novel suggests that Defoe was not unaware of how William and Bob’s friendship might be subject to misinterpretation, for, almost apologetically, a wife is perfunctorily brought in at the very end. Bob arrives home and, ‘some time after married my faithful Protectress, William’s Sister, with whom I am much more happy than I deserve’ (277). Marriage and a Persian disguise seems a flimsy closure over Bob and William’s return to England. ‘My every thing’ William is indeed to Bob, but while idealising the inextricability of affection and interest and the mutual gift of their bodies, Defoe’s friends reveal the tensions between the sometimes contrary imperatives on male friendship: the love in an exclusive and private relationship and the open and public love between men in a civic community.

54 Daniel Defoe, A System of Magick; or A History of the Black Arts (1728), SFWS 7:242. Defoe is satirising the outward performance of religious and moral identities.

Chapter 6

Colonel Jack and the perils of delusion In praise of untidiness If manliness is distinguished from effeminacy in only one thing, it is in its idealisation of agency. If Colonel Jack is distinguished by only one thing, then it is his constantly reiterated lack of agency. The language of strange notions, fancies, delusions and illusions is recurrent in a way which, in Defoe’s ‘most conspicuously untidy’ yet most intriguingly complex novel, reveals a coherent if multiform set of concerns regarding manliness. A brief selection will suffice for now: I had a strange original Notion, … of my being a Gentleman; and several things had Casually happen’d in my way to encrease this Fancy of mine. (60) I know not by what Witch-Craft in the Conversation of this Woman, and her singling me out upon several Occasions, I began to be ensnared. (187) I was … insensibly drawn in. (223) I Dream’d of nothing but Millions. (296)

In my selection of quotations there are, of course, implied analogies between Jack’s delusional search for gentility, the seduction of Jack by his first wife, the passivity with which Jack becomes a Jacobite, and the dreams of instant riches. In each case – gentility, marriage, Jacobitism, wealth – what is presented is a seductive and therefore dangerous temptation that places Jack in a position of unmanly passivity. The analogies cross the political, domestic, economic and personal spheres: but these crossings are crucial in that they reveal this novel’s deep engagement with the contrary forces within the period’s own ideologies of manliness. Such forces are most visible in the idealisations of marriage and political subjecthood, and ideologies of status and speculation: this chapter will examine the relations between Jack and his monarch, then between Jack and his wives, and finally Jack’s own relationship with birth and wealth. The novel articulates these relationships slightly differently, even while inviting analogies that cross familial, David Roberts, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the truly honourable Col. Jacque commonly call’d Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; 1989), p. viii. Further references are given after quotations in the text.

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social, economic and political discourses, and even different ideological positions within these discourses. Lincoln Faller, addressing these peculiar analogies, perceptively suggests that, In its effort to achieve wholeness of meaning and form, Colonel Jack may be saying more than Defoe knows, can admit, or even wants to say about social hierarchy, politics, economic struggle, the dreadful position of men before God, or of men with respect to their wives.

In the novel’s energetic and sometimes chaotic attempts at comprehensiveness and contemporaneity, such crossings and analogies reveal something other than Defoe the author. Such untidiness, then, will be crucial to this chapter: it reveals much about the period’s unwitting and disavowed ideological manoeuvrings concerning hierarchy, and especially the conceptualisation of hierarchy as it relates to constructions of masculinity. Gentlemen: are you bewitched or convinced? The novel’s central concern with Jacobitism is signalled most emblematically by its eponymous title: ‘Jack’ being an appellation for the Jacobite movement. The novel, however, presents us with the rehabilitation of a rebel, and the movement from an irrational illusion of Jacobite gentility to a rational and grateful Hanoverian honour. Illusion is a recurring trope in anti-Jacobite texts. In Protestant Jacobites Lincoln B. Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 191-92. G. A. Starr argues that Defoe’s perception of ‘incongruity’ has ‘exceeded his ability to control and interpret it’. Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 82. Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), p. 18 and note. A more subtle link with naming is hinted when Jack passes himself off as both Frenchman and Englishman in Canterbury under the name of ‘Mr. Charnock’ (Jack, 234). Paul Kléber Monod described Captain Robert Charnock as one of the ‘ex-officers’ of James II who met in the tavern culture which was a locus for Jacobite plotting; Jacobitism and the English People 1688-1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97, 98. For a study of the novel’s imbrication within the historical moment, including Jacobitism, see Katherine A. Armstrong, ‘“I was a kind of an Historian”: The Productions of History in Defoe’s Colonel Jack’, in Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 97-110. The only study that relates Jacobitism and gentility is David Blewett, Defoe’s Art of Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 93-115, though it does not analyse any anti-Jacobite texts other than Defoe’s. Earlier studies on gentility in the novel ignore the issue of Jacobitism: William H. McBurney, ‘Colonel Jacque: Defoe’s Definition of the Complete English Gentleman’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2 (1962), 321-36;


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Represented to be the Pope’s Friends (1722), the anonymous author declares that the followers of the Pretender are ‘forcibly bewitched’. Defoe in his Review, where he constantly attacks Jacobitism, describes the Scottish Jacobites of 1708 as having being ‘drawn into this Snare’ by ‘Delusions’ (Review, 6 April 1708, 5:18). In a scathing diatribe, he declares: What an unhappy wretched Sort of People are those, we call Jacobites? Unhappy, in that their Hopes, Happiness and Wishes are all centred on the veriest Trifle, the most unexhal’d Vapour, the most unconceiv’d Whymsie in Nature, a Confusion of N[o]tions form’d in their own Imaginations, centred upon a meer nothing, an uncondens’d Thought, an unrarified waterish Fancy, without any Manner of real Foundation or sufficient Parts to form a Probability. (Review, 12 October 1706, 3:485)

Such irrational delusions, where ‘Fancy’ usurps the seat of reason, come perilously close to the kind of hypochondria that undermines the traditional associations of manliness and rationality. Such a lack of political rationality is echoed in Jack’s lackadaisical political allegiance. Passing through Ghent, he acts the part of a sightseer to the battles of William III, but casually remarks that ‘as to the Merit of the Cause on either side, I knew nothing of it, nor had I suffer’d any of the Disputes about it, to enter into my Thoughts’ (183). It comes as no surprise, then, that when he does enlist during the War of the Spanish Succession, it is in an Irish regiment on the side of Louis XIV fighting in Italy. Jacobitism’s bewitching effect on Jack is reflected in his first involvement with the rebels of the abortive 1708 expedition from France: ‘I was not only insensibly drawn in, but was perfectly Voluntier in that dull Cause’ (223). The issue of Jack’s lack of rational agency is raised again in his involvement in the 1715 rebellion, when his wife ‘prevail’d with me not to play the Madman’ (264). Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 161-77. Anon., Protestant Jacobites Represented to be the Pope’s Friends ([Edinburgh?], 1722), p. 4. Robert Patten (like Jack, a reformed Jacobite of the 1715 rebellion) similarly characterises supporters of the Chevalier as ‘Zealous, through blind Persuasion’. The Rebel Convinc’d, and Liberty Maintain’d. Containing a Full and Just Account of the Motives that Prevail’d, and the Arguments that Convinc’d the Author to Desert the Tory and Jacobite Principles, and become a Dutiful Subject to his Majesty King George (London, 1718), p. 24. See also Review, 2 December 1707, 4:503. See also David Macaree, Daniel Defoe and the Jacobite Movement (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1980); Manuel Schonhorn, ‘Defoe and the Limits of Jacobite Rhetoric’, English Literary History, 64 (1997), 871-86. Defoe characterises two Jacobite gentlemen in a state of ‘Frenzy’, ‘Madness’, and ‘Lunatick’ in A Secret History of the October Club: From its Original to this Time (London, 1711), p. 36.


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Jack’s illusions about Jacobitism are inextricable from his delusions of status and pursuit of gentility. His desire for status is most obvious when, drawn into the 1708 invasion, he petitions for the‘Chevalier’s Brevet for a Colonel, in Case of raising Troops for him in Great Britain’ (222) which, he says proudly, ‘gave me a great advantage with the Chevalier; for now I was esteem’d as a Man of Consideration, and one that must have a considerable Interest in my own Country’ (223). The deep irony of Jack’s involvement with the Jacobites being represented as a form of patriotism would not be lost on a Hanoverian reader. The ironic appropriation of the language of patriotism is given a keener edge by Jack’s comment that ‘I had no particular attachment to his Person, or to his Cause, nor indeed did I much consider the Cause, of one Side or the other’ (223). Jack’s immediate concerns are ones of status: ‘all this added to the Character which I had before, and made me have a great deal of Honour paid me’ (223). Again, this kind of self-aggrandisement, or the illusion of it, is one of the characteristic themes of anti-Jacobite literature. Robert Patten in The Rebel Convinc’d declared that the supporters of King James’ restoration are concerned only with material rewards: ‘Men for the most part of desperate Fortunes’. The author of Protestant Jacobites remarked that the followers of the Pretender were ‘foolishly bewitched with the uncertain hope of Earthly Advantages’, going on to remark that, ‘It is usual for men of bare and broken fortunes to Create Confusions and disturbance; this Sea being their Element of drumbly water, proper for them to fish in, for raising them selves upon the ruines of others.’ Such writings undermined the gentlemanly, Cavalier status of Jacobites by implying that the rewards offered by Jacobitism are delusions to ensnare those who are desperate for status. John Dunton goes further: ‘The Rebels were all Mobbers (from the Vagabond Pretender, down to that Ragged Scoundrel that Cobbles their Shoes upon Highgate-Hill).’10 Moreover, anti-Jacobite propaganda fed upon perceived connections between Jacobites and criminal sub-cultures. Defoe’s narrative of a criminal turned gentleman Jacobite is entirely in keeping with pro-Hanoverian and Whig representations.11 Jack is a criminal for part of his young life, starting off picking pockets before becoming involved with footpads and then house-breaking Patten, The Rebel Convinc’d, p. 4. Anon., Protestant Jacobites, pp. 4, 5. 10 John Dunton, The High Church Gudgeons, in Royal Gratitude (London, 1716), p. 52. 11 Monod discusses the various types of criminality linked to Jacobitism and cogently argues that ‘the Whigs were not entirely wrong in associating Jacobitism with crime’. Jacobitism and the English People, pp. 111-25 (p. 118). See also Lincoln Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late-Seventeenth and EarlyEighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 121-22, 209-11; Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 57-58.


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(17-67). Notably, his earlier ‘Trade’ (19) of picking pockets is looked upon as a kind of gentility by his accomplice Will, who declares ‘we are Gentlemen’ (42). This parallels the delusive aspiration of highwaymen and Jacobites to such status. Jack’s involvement with crime prefigures his involvement with Jacobitism, being ‘made a Thief involuntarily’ (19), as if drawn in by his naïvety. Indeed, it is at this stage that Jack’s urge for gentlemanly status has its origins, when he had declared, ‘I had a strange original Notion, … of my being a Gentleman’; that this is represented as a ‘Fancy of mine’ again alerts us to the dangerous lack of agency in this deluded path of Jack’s (60). Such contexts severely undermine Jack’s own sense that he is raising his gentlemanly status by his service for the Pretender: Jack’s deluded search for status by rebelling against his own King is no way for an English gentleman to behave.12 Implicitly, Jacobite gentlemanliness, because unattached to the legitimacy of the Hanoverian succession, is itself illegitimate. The novel’s allusions to criminality, irrationality and a persistent lack of political agency support an ideology of manly gentility that is inseparable from a pro-Revolution-settlement stance. Such an ideology of manliness is emphasised even further in Whig propaganda that associated Jacobites with effeminacy.13 It seems impossible, therefore, that Jack’s search for gentility can in any way be idealised (except by Jack himself, of course). Defoe’s consistent pro-Hanoverian and pro-Revolution-settlement stance means that Jack’s path to gentlemanly status via Jacobitism is a thoroughly ironic one. According to the narrative arc of Colonel Jack, manly honour can be recovered and maintained only by the correct self-subjection to the state and its monarch. How this self-subjugation is accomplished can be seen in the responses to the Acts of Pardon by Anne I (for the 1708 invasion) and by George I (for the 1715 Jacobite rebellion). John Dunton, commenting on the practice of Jacobite sympathisers wearing rue and thyme for the defeat of 1715, and white roses for the Pretender’s birthday, punningly declares, ‘e’re long they’ll Rue the Time that e’re their base Ingratitude to King George turn’d them into such very Devils, as to insult his Royal Title with Badges of Treason’.14 The implicit threat is obscure. Yet others hint that the power in the withholding or granting of mercy is the power to instil the appropriate response: gratitude and self-subjection. Patten, in the ‘Dedication’ of his The Rebel Convinc’d, praises the mercy shown by George I towards the captured rebels of the 1715 rebellion: ‘such is my Gratitude, that I shall be ever thankful, and shall still go in a Channel of Loyalty’. Gratitude – and its obverse, ingratitude – become politicised as the bases for the subject’s submission to the monarch. ‘A grateful Sense of his Majesties Clemency’, Patten

Blewitt, Defoe’s Art of Fiction, p. 100. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 94. 14 Dunton, The High Church Gudgeons, pp. 51-52. 12 13


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remarks, is the ‘necessary Result of a true Penitent’s Conviction for past Guilt; for Ungratitude is a very foul Sin’.15 Defoe had rehearsed this theme earlier, in the wake of the abortive 1708 invasion. Yet in Defoe’s words, the Queen’s mercy becomes a violent and coercive force: ’tis forced upon you too, miserable blinded Wretches, that must be sav’d against your Wills, ’tis cram’d down your Throats – ’Tis forc’d upon you – In short, you shall be pardon’d, you shall be spar’d, whether you will or no – And if you will be hang’d – It shall not be for Jacobitism, it shall be for the worst Crime Mankind can commit one against another; it shall be for INGRATITUDE. (Review, 12 May 1709, 6:67)

This hardly seems the mercy that ‘droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven’.16 Instead, the vehemence of Defoe’s call for the rebels to submit actually reveals the nation’s reliance upon executive power to coerce a proper relationship between subject and monarch. Indeed, political, treasonable offences are irrelevant compared to that greater national sin: ingratitude. Moreover, this coercion is inflected by gender: ‘Men of Sense and Men of Honour can never long resist the Importunities of Gratitude and Kindness’, adding, ‘Gentlemen, here is a Government, that like Heaven has strove to conquer you with Mercy’ (Review, 28 April 1709, 6:42). ‘Honour’ and ‘Sense’ interpellate a particular version of masculinity. It is as if their birth has not matched their merit: for Defoe, Jacobite gentlemen will never be complete gentlemen until they recognise their obligation to their true monarch and government. Moreover, seeing their true loyalties is a rational choice, rather than being deluded by the irrational hopes offered by Jacobitism: ‘Gentlemen Jacobites, you will now come in – Pray, will you cast your Eyes about you in the World?’ (Review, 28 April 1709, 6:44). Like these anti-Jacobite writings, Colonel Jack narrates the turn from delusion and treason to faithful and honourable subjection. In Lancashire, Jack had involved himself in the 1715 uprising from Scotland which found its way to Preston.17 Subsequently, he manages to elude capture following the defeat and make his way to his former plantation in Virginia. Soon after, however, Jack is alarmed at the arrival of transported rebels from the action at Preston on his plantation, fearing

Patten, The Rebel Convinc’d, ‘Dedication’, and p. 22. For ingratitude as a Sin the archetype was, of course, Satan’s rebellion. 16 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ‘The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven’ (IV.i.181-82). The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 17 For the popularity of Jacobitism and Catholicism in Lancashire, see Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, p. 313. 15


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that he will be recognised and named as a former rebel.18 Jack’s real fear is of loss of status: ‘for now I was reduced from a great Man, a Magistrate, a Governor, or Master of three great Plantations; and having three or four Hundred Servants at my Command, to be a poor self condemn’d Rebel, and durst not shew my Face’ (267). This is the mere premonition of being recognised: it is, in effect, his conscience that is already subverting his identity. Anxious that his present status as a colonial plantation owner will be stripped away from him, as so much tinsel, the scene reveals the precarious contingency of Jack’s manly identity as ‘a great Man’, master and owner of all he surveys. Jack eventually realises he is included in George I’s pardon and delivers this paean to Hanoverian rule: having now as it were receiv’d my Life at the Hands of King GEORGE, and in a manner so satisfying as it was to me, it made a generous Convert of me, and I became sincerely given in to the Interest of King GEORGE; and this from a Principle of Gratitude, and Sense of my Obligation to his Majesty for my Life; and it has continu’d ever since, and will certainly remain with me as long as any Sense of Honour, and the Debt of Gratitude remains with me. (276)

Jack’s sense of gratitude and the recognition of his rightful obligation to his monarch echo Defoe’s writings upon the Jacobites in the Review of April 1709. In short, the obligation the King’s mercy imposes on Jack can never be repaid and extends from the present to the future, ‘weaving it into the permanent texture of Jack’s temporality’ as John O’Brien comments.19 Gratitude for mercy given is indissolubly linked to ‘Honour’, and, like Defoe’s Review discussion, that honour brings together the virtue of the civil subject and an ideal type of gentlemanliness: I must lay it down as a Rule of Honour, that a Man having once forfeited his Life to the Justice of his Prince, and to the Laws of his Country, and receiving it back as a Bounty from the Grace of his Soveraign; such a Man can never lift up his Hand again against that Prince, without a forfeiture of his Vertue, and an irreparable Breach of his Honour and Duty. (277)

Jack’s transformation from rebel to patriot is articulated and enabled by a realignment of notions of ‘Honour’. 18 Rebels were pardoned under George I’s 1716 Act of Grace. ‘An Act for the King’s most gracious, general and free Pardon’, The Statutes at Large, From Magna Charta to the End of the Last Parliament, 1761. In Eight Volumes (London, 1763), 5:165, c.19. Many were sentenced to transportation to the colonies. For an analysis of Colonel Jack and the legal fictions surrounding transportation at this time, see John O’Brien, ‘Union Jack: Amnesia and the Law in Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32/1 (1998), 65-82. 19 O’Brien, ‘Union Jack’, p. 73.


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It is no coincidence that Defoe had aligned gratitude to the monarch, antiJacobitism and a progressive ideology of honour elsewhere. In The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, Defoe defends William III’s role as saviour of the Protestant English nation against those who sought to undermine his authority via attacks on his Dutch origins. The narrator laments the ingratitude of those now willing to lambast the King and, by implication, the Glorious Revolution: Ye Heav’ns regard! Almighty Jove look down, And view thy Injur’d Monarch on the Throne. On their Ungrateful Heads due Vengeance take; Who sought his Aid, and then his Side forsake.20

Defoe’s attack on English ingrates has a specific focus: ‘As to our Ingratitude, I desire to be understood of that particular People, who pretending to be Protestants, have all along endeavour’d to reduce the Liberties and Religion of the Nation into the Hands of King James and his Popish Powers.’ The conclusion of the poem is significant in this context. The famous and oft-quoted lines are a succinct idealisation of personal merit above birth: ‘For Fame of Families is all a Cheat, / ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great.’21 Yet these lines now have an added significance, since the poem’s anti-Jacobite context suggests that such a recapitulation of the progressive ideology of virtue is aligned with gratitude to William and loyalty to the Protestant Succession. Jack’s attempts to legitimise his fancies of gentility by pursuing ‘Honour’ under service to the ‘Chevalier’ (223), are not only ironised as illusions offered by Jacobitism, but are implicitly devalued as an archaic, aristocratic sense of gentlemanly honour. Jack’s later ‘Sense of Honour’ (276) is indicative of a more solid sense of gentlemanly virtue; if uneasily legitimised by the coercive power of an ever-lasting Hanoverian obligation. ‘My Fate in Wives’ The relationship between Jack and his monarch is paralleled in significant ways in his relationships with his wives. In these, Defoe is working through the issues of obligation and subordination in marriage: it is a parallel that reveals much about the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy. Jack’s numerous marriages are unique for a male character of Defoe’s. He is married five times to four women (he remarries his first wife), and is cuckolded by each of his first three wives. He legally divorces his first wife, divorces his second wife in the spirit of natural law, and his third and fourth wives die. Jack’s various unsuccessful marriages point up problems of Jack’s agency and his position in the domestic order. All of his wives Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, ll. 848-52 (SFWS, 1:108). Defoe, True-Born Englishman, ‘The Preface’ (SFWS, 1:83); ll. 1215-16 (SFWS, 1:118). 20 21


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eventually turn out to be something other than he had expected, and he describes the courtship of two of his wives in terms of entrapment that underline the novel’s anxieties of male powerlessness and female sexuality. It is difficult, then, to entirely agree with John Richetti’s argument that his marriages are ‘another challenge for Jack’s talent for self-preservation … merely entangling problems, puzzles for the resourceful self and opportunities for excursions into social arrangements hitherto unexplored’.22 A view of his wives as ‘merely entangling problems’ reproduces Jack’s – and the novel’s – investment in the period’s representation of women as a potential threat to male agency: rather than a heroic ‘resourceful self’, Jack testifies to powerful male anxieties. The novel’s recurrent imagery of illusion and entrapment underlines the extent to which Jack’s agency – and therefore manliness – is insistently undermined. And while it is a threat that is overcome, it is only done so with considerable ideological tension, and only towards the end of the novel with his remarriage to his first wife. The text’s anxieties concerning marital relations are strikingly displayed in Jack’s first wife. Jack is married to his first wife in a flurry of encouragements and reversals. He characterises the courtship with his first wife in terms of capture; she is a ‘Snare in my way’ (186), she ‘attack’d me without ceasing’ (187). Throughout, the unnamed woman is ascribed stereotypical and misogynistic attributes of fickleness and changeability, but more importantly, the courtship is described as if Jack were under her bewitching mastery: I know not by what Witch-Craft in the Conversation of this Woman, and her singling me out upon several Occasions, I began to be ensnared, I knew not how, or to what End; and was on a sudden so embarrass’d in my Thoughts about her, that like a Charm she had me always in her Circle; if she had not been one of the subtilest Women on Earth, she could never have brought me to have given myself the least Trouble about her, but I [was] drawn in by the Magick of a Genius capable to Deceive a more wary Capacity than mine, and it was impossible to resist her. (187)

In his earlier comment that ‘I Was a meer Boy in the Affair of Love’ (186) naïvety functions as a displacement of desire. Her mastery over Jack is complete; her 22 John Richetti, ‘The Family, Sex and Marriage in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15/2 (1982), 19-35 (p. 19). In his earlier Defoe’s Narratives, Richetti had argued that Jack was in control of his courtship with his first wife and suggested that his marriages were ‘a meaningful sequence in which the narratorhero purifies himself of the social and libidinal needs that marriage serves and in which he learns to make it purely an occasion for self-assertion on the most efficient and meaningful level.’ Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 177-79, 181. Paula Backscheider succinctly noted that ‘each one of the marriages presents the women as a snare’. ‘Defoe’s Women: Snares and Prey’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 5 (1976), 103-20 (p. 118).


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‘Charm’, her ‘Witch-Craft’ and ‘Magick’, represent the courtship as an entrapment, as he is ‘ensnared’, ‘drawn in’, ‘for she manag’d all by Art, and drew me in with the most resolute backwardness’ (187). Such language is an echo of misogynistic satires upon women such as Robert Gould’s Love Given O’re: or, A Satyr against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman: O tell me, does the World those Men contain (For I have look’t for such, but look’t in vain) Who ne’re were drawn into their fatal Snares?23

The male lover is a slave to the artful woman. After the rituals of courtship are over, Jack is surprised to find his new wife other than she appeared. Once again, the stereotypical representation of women as fickle and changeable is invoked: she threw off the Mask of her Gravity, and good Conduct, that I had so long Fancy’d was her meer natural Disposition, and now having no more occasion for Disguises, she resolv’d to seem nothing but what really she was, a wild untam’d Colt, perfectly loose, and careless to conceal any part, no, not the worst of her Conduct. (193)

Jack’s wife indulges herself to ‘Excess’, to such an extent as ‘I could not but be dissatisfy’d at the Expence of it, for she kept Company that I did not like, liv’d beyond what I could support, and sometimes lost at Play more than I car’d to pay’ (193). His wife not only lives beyond his means, but beyond his endurance, beyond his wishes. After declaring herself pregnant, she again outstrips his expenses in her preparations for her lying-in: Jack’s language of ‘Excess’ (193) and ‘Extremities’ (194), leads to his exasperated remarks that ‘nothing could molifie her, not any Argument perswade her to Moderation’ (195), and that ‘she would not be restrain’d’ (195). His wife’s unrestrained consumerism not only threatens Jack’s mastery, but his economic stability. When she becomes pregnant with someone else’s child, this gives Jack grounds for a divorce. The conjunction of his wife’s active sexuality and her consumerism is underlined in Jack’s summary of his life with his first wife: ‘I really lov’d her very sincerely, and could have been any thing but a Beggar, and a Cuckold with her, but those were intollerable to me, especially, as they were put upon me with so much Insult, and Rudeness’ (198). Jack’s concerns are with wealth and monogamy: both have importance to him as markers of manly authority and autonomy in the domestic sphere.

Robert Gould, Love Given O’re: or, A Satyr against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman (1682), p. 8. For satires on women and the pamphlet wars of the 1680s and 1690s, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660-1750 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), pp. 8-42. 23


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The image of a changeable and sexualised women who has charmed her way into a man’s domestic establishment, only to indulge in excesses, to gamble and to bring him to the edge of financial ruin, would have had serious resonances in the 1720s. As one commentator lamented: ‘she bewitch’d Thousands to fall in Love with her, and to spend their whole Fortunes upon her: And what is monstrous in her, is, that tho’ she has reduc’d ’em all to Skin and Bone, yet her Lust is not one Bit abated; and she runs a whoring after new Lovers every Day.’24 Jack’s bewitching first wife echoes the misogynist stereotypes of female volatility propagated during the South Sea Bubble crisis, in which financial instability was figured as a force of female nature. As Catherine Ingrassia has noted, ‘The range of female types being depicted – coquettes, prostitutes, monstrous women – make up a continuum of specifically female dangers that threatens to erode (or perhaps mutate) masculinity and diminish male control of financial structures.’25 Jack’s second marriage also deserves some comment. Through very little will of his own, he becomes embroiled in the European wars leading up to the War of the Spanish Succession on the side of Louis XIV, remarking, ‘I fell into Company with some Irish Officers of the Regiment of Dillon’ (207). After distinguishing himself there, Jack is captured. His meeting with his second wife is represented as entirely out of his control, and in a corollary to his captivity, it is articulated in the language of capture: I contracted a kind of Familiarity, perfectly undesign’d by me, with the Daughter of the Burgher at whose House I had Lodg’d, and I know not, by what fatallity that was upon me, I was prevail’d with afterward to Marry her: This was a peice [sic] of Honesty on my Side, which I must acknowledge, I never intended to be guilty of; but the Girl was too cunning for me; for she found means to get some Wine into my Head more than I us’d to drink, and tho’ I was not so disorder’d with it, but that I knew very well what I did, yet in an unusual height of good Humour, I consented to be Married. (221-22)

The extent to which Jack distances himself from the responsibility of the marriage is remarkable: his ‘Familiarity’ is ‘undesign’d’. Stylistically the passage is striking with its use of negatives (‘I know not’, ‘I never intended’) and the repetition of the relativising ‘but’. The responsibility for this relationship rests outside Jack as a ‘Stander-by’, The Battle of the Bubbles. Shewing Their several Constitutions, Alliances, Policies, and Wars; From their Suddain Rise, to their late Speedy Decay (London, 1720), p. 10. 25 Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early EighteenthCentury England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 26; see also E. J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 56-57. Defoe’s own, earlier, ‘Lady Credit’ exuded a coy coquettishness that foreshadows Jack’s first wife. Review, 10 January 1707, 3:17-18. 24


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‘fatallity’: ‘I was prevail’d … to Marry her’, ‘the Girl was too cunning’. The denial that he was drunk serves only to emphasise his drunkenness.26 The disavowal of an active desire on Jack’s part is all the more remarkable, given the implication of an illicit sexual relationship which Jack seems chary of owning, and that needed to be retroactively legitimised by marriage; a ‘piece of Honesty’ he ‘never intended’. The displacement of sexual desire from the male onto the female again reflects misogynistic stereotypes of femininity that represent the female as suffused with an innate and insatiable sexual desire. Jack claims that his second wife ‘put me to many Inconveniences, for I knew not what to do with this new Clog, which I had loaded myself with’ (222). Again the language echoes a typically misogynistic representation of marriage by Gould: ‘Is there a Dog, / Who, when he may have freedom, wears a Clog?’.27 This is seconded in Richard Ames’s The Folly of Love, where women are ‘Clogs of Life’.28 Jack’s freedom to pursue his life as gentleman-soldier seems to him to be suddenly circumscribed. In a version of the choice of Hercules, female sexual temptation has waylaid manly endeavour. What enables him to escape this marriage is a related stereotype of womanhood and marriage: that the inconstancy of women will always make a cuckold out of men. Jack’s first three wives all commit adultery. Remarking upon his third wife’s degeneration into alcoholism and adultery, he self-consciously alludes to his train of broken marriages: ‘I, that was to be the most unhappy Fellow alive in the Article of Matrimony, had at last a Disappointment of the worst sort, even here’ (240). Such an account parallels the misogynist tradition of anti-feminist satire, as Felicity Nussbaum notes: ‘Women in the myth of satire represent a world of disorder, and the satirists rage at the female power to seduce and overpower them.’29 Of course, this mythologisation of women as symbols of sexualised chaos is not confined to satire. Jack’s first wife courts him with ‘the most resolute backwardness’ (187): a description that is a disavowal of male desire. The figure of the passive male ensnared and drawn in by the oxymoronic representation of feminine desire has its emblem in the representation of Eve in Paradise Lost whose ‘sweet reluctant amorous delay’ seems to at once deny women an active sexuality yet over-determine women as suffused with sexuality. It displaces the responsibility of male desire: for only when Eve has fallen does Adam fall too, his desire released by Eve’s, male reason usurped by feminine sexuality and subjected to female rule. Such a usurpation of a traditionally masculine attribute renders men 26

It even echoes another form of captivity for Jack: earlier, his drunkenness in Newcastle led him to be kidnapped to Virginia (108-11). Defoe describes drunkenness as the ‘most Unmanly part of Vices, which Gorges the Stomach, to divert the Head, / And to make Mankind merry, makes him mad’. Review, 23 August 1709, 6:243. 27 Gould, Love Given O’re, p. 3. 28 Richard Ames, The Folly of Love; or, an Essay upon Satyr against Woman (London, 1691), p. 20. 29 Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, p. 19.


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open to charges of effeminacy; witness the Son of God’s reproach ‘that to her / Thou didst resign thy manhood’.30 Such conceptions of domestic relations construct manliness as mastery, which is supported by Samson’s articulation of his emasculation as a passive enthralment to female sexuality: ‘foul effeminacy held me yoked / Her bond-slave’. The representation of Jack’s first wife, in particular, is strongly reminiscent of Samson’s accusations against Delilah in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, after her betrayal: Nor think me so unwary or accursed To bring my feet again into the snare Where once I have been caught; I know thy trains Though dearly to my cost, thy gins, and toils; Thy fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms No more on me have power.

Notably mixing political and conjugal subjection, Samson terms this ‘matrimonial treason’.31 Similar tropes are deployed in Defoe’s satirical portrait of the fop Fletumacy, who Supinely Sleeps in Diadora’s Arms, Doz’d with the Magick of her Craft and Charms; The subtil Dame brought up in Vice’s School, Can love the Cully, tho’ she hates the Fool.32

Like Jack, Fletumacy is ensnared by a Circean woman. Fletumacy’s prostitute Diadora is meant to confirm his self-conceit as a self-assured urban libertine, yet his enervate and effeminate passivity and Diadora’s ‘subtil’ skill at his expense actually confirms his failure. Moreover, Fletumacy as a ‘Cully’, fails to perform a normative authoritative (and hierarchical) role in courtship or marriage, and is symptomatic of Defoe’s delineation of proper and improper performances of patriarchal sexual hierarchies.33

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), book IV, l. 311; book X, ll. 147-48. 31 John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1971), ll. 410-11, 930-35, 959. For the anxieties surrounding male subjection to female power in Milton’s writings, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 221-26. 32 Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr, ll. 1112-15 (SFWS, 1:186). 33 A ‘Keeper-Cully’ was ‘one that maintains a whore or a mistress, and parts with his money very freely to her’. Thomas Dyche, A New General English Dictionary (London, 1735). 30


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Jack gets near to a happy marriage in his fourth marriage, to Moggy; yet this marriage still reveals anxieties over male authority and female chastity. Jack compares his fourth wife favourably against his previous three wives, commenting that ‘I was really more happy in this plain country Girl, than with any of all the Wives I had had’ (249). However, Moggy becomes part of his narrative of unchaste wives, if only in retrospect: yet such was my Fate in Wives, that after all the Blushing, and Backwardness of Mrs. Moggy at first, Mrs. Moggy had, it seems, made a Slip in her younger Days, and was got with Child ten Year before, by a Gentleman of a great Estate in that Country. (249)

Ames again provides a succinct satirical epithet for Jack’s fateful narrative, for the husband is ‘a Cuckold by Predestination’.34 However, Jack acknowledges that since this happened so far before his marriage, that ‘it was of small Consequence to me one way or other and she was a faithful, virtuous, obliging Wife to me’(249). After she has died, he reiterates his lack of concern for her ‘former Miscarriages’ (250). The past sexual ‘Slip’ is a curious detail to invent for this marriage, given Jack’s ostensibly mature reaction to Moggy’s past. Yet the seeming need to repeat this detail suggests the very opposite, and that this scenario in fact replicates a patriarchal ideology of sexual suspicion. This retrospective projection of a narrative of cuckoldom – ‘my Fate in Wives’ – onto his marriages clearly involves deep anxieties over effeminacy: as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has perceptively put it, ‘to misunderstand the kind of property women are or the kind of transaction in which alone their value is realizable means, for a man, to endanger his own position as subject in the relationship of exchange: to be permanently feminized or objectified in relation to other men’.35 Help meets and sexuality Why marry at all? Flying in the face of experience, Jack feels the need to marry again and again. This is strikingly clear when Jack, in a disconsolate mood, acknowledges his dissatisfaction with a solitary life: I was not the easiest Man alive, in the retir’d sollitary manner I now liv’d in; and I experienced the Truth of the Text, That it is not good for Man to be alone; for I was extreamely Melancholly and Heavy, and indeed, knew not what to do with my self. (233)

Ames, The Folly of Love, p. 17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 50-51. 34

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The biblical injunction to marry underlies the societal pressure under which Jack labours. Moreover, the reference to Genesis 2:18 also implies what Jack lacks: ‘an help meet’. The allusion is central to an ideology of companionate marriage echoed in many of the tracts and pamphlets supporting family religion and marriage.36 Included in these should be Defoe’s scathing satire Conjugal Lewdness (1727), where, expounding on the marriage vows, he remarks that in the ‘first Institution’ God intended man and woman ‘to be a Help meet to one another’. Defoe explicitly rejects the language of subordination in marriage when he says ‘I am so little the Friend to that which they call Government and Obedience between the Man and his Wife’, and argues that between man and wife ‘the Obligation is reciprocal, ’tis drawing in an equal Yoke; Love knows no superior or inferior, no imperious Command on one hand, no reluctant Subjection on the other’. 37 Most vociferously, through the voice of Roxana he railed against marriages in which ‘a Wife is look’d upon, as but an Upper-Servant’.38 In Colonel Jack, Jack’s continual insistence that marriage is an ideal state for a man echoes the pressures of an ideology of affective marriage; his continual failure, however, reflects a misogynistic ideology in which suspicion of female sexuality is central. A most telling example of the relationship between female desire and companionate marriage is in a surprising place: Defoe’s academy for 36 The Batchelor’s Directory also praises the wife as help-meet: ‘the Wife is to an afflicted Husband, the most comfortable thing of the world’; Anon., The Batchelor’s Directory: Being a Treatise of the Excellence of Marriage. Of its necessity, and the means [to] live happy in it. Together with an Apology for the Women against the Calumnies of the Men (London, 1694), p. 12. This is one of a number of tracts urging men to marry and that were responding to a perceived culture of libertine bachelorhood. For example, see also Anon., Marriage Promoted, In a Discourse of its Ancient and Modern Practice, Both under Heathen and Christian Common-Wealths. Together with their Laws and Encouragements for its Observance. And how far the like may be Practicable and Commodious in the Preservation of these Kingdoms (London, 1690); ‘Castamore’, Conjugium Languens: or, The Natural, Civil, and Religious Mischiefs Arising from Conjugal Infidelity and Impunity (London, 1700); Anon., The Levellers: A Dialogue between two young Ladies, concerning Matrimony, proposing an Act for Enforcing Marriage, for the Equality of Matches, and Taxing single Persons. With the Danger of Celibacy to a Nation. Dedicated to a Member of Parliament (1703), introduction by Michael S. Kimmel, Augustan Reprint Society, no. 248 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1988). 37 Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom. A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, ed. Maximillian Novak (Gainsville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), pp. 27, 25-26, 26. As Genesis 2:18 makes clear, it is the male – Adam – who requires the help-meet: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’. Defoe’s subtle transformation of Genesis and his emphasis on mutuality is an attempt to sidestep the problematic hierarchy between Adam and Eve. 38 Daniel Defoe, Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 132.


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female education in An Essay on Projects. In it he argues that it is ‘the sordid’st Piece of Folly and Ingratitude in the world, to withhold from the Sex the due Lustre which the advantages of Education gives to the Natural Beauty of their Minds’ (PEW, 8:129). Foreshadowing his later criticism of female servitude in marriage, he declares that ‘I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious Creatures, and furnish’d them with such Charms, so Agreeable and so delightful to Mankind, with Souls capable of the same Accomplishments with Men, and all to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks and Slaves’ (PEW, 8:132). Immediately after this Defoe offers a caveat: ‘Not that I am for exalting the Female Government in the least: But, in short, I wou’d have Men take Women for Companions, and Educate them to be fit for it’ (PEW, 8:132). Couched in the language of companionate marriage this nevertheless indicates that female education is to provide men with fit wives, seen clearly in a starkly utilitarian image from earlier in the piece: Methinks Mankind for their own sakes … shou’d take some care to breed them up to be suitable and serviceable, … Bless us! What Care do we take to Breed up a good Horse, and to Break him well! and what a Value do we put upon him when it is done, and all because he shou’d be fit for our use! And why not a Woman? Since all her Ornaments and Beauty, without suitable Behaviour, is a Cheat in Nature. (PEW, 8:130)

Such an image of servitude sits uneasily next to an ideal of companionate marriage. Defoe’s academy for women may well be part of what Emma Clery has termed the ‘feminizing project’ of the late 1690s and early 1700s.39 Defoe’s bluntness, however, is uniquely his; and he was not immune from a dominant misogynist scepticism regarding female virtue; as Ellen Pollack has noted, ‘Defoe … sees women not as rational subjects but as affective agents’.40 The women of the academy must be separated from men because ‘Inclination,’ he notes, ‘does sometimes move a little too visibly in the Sex’, adding that ‘Custom with Women ’stead of Virtue rules’ (PEW, 8:127). There is no such thing as innate female virtue, only innate female desire. Such ambivalences are also apparent even in Conjugal Lewdness (which for the most part does not distinguish either men or women as especially resistant to lust), where there is a striking image of the ‘sensual’ and ‘fleshly’ body as ‘Nature … set with her Bottom upward’.41 For Defoe, the ideology Clery, The Feminization Debate, pp. 26-50 (p. 42). Ellen Pollack, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 52. 41 Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness, p. 271. Carol Houlihann Flynn argues that ‘the material he most fears is women’. ‘Defoe’s Idea of Conduct: Ideological Fictions and Fictional Reality’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 73-95 (p. 82). 39 40


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of companionate marriage is complicated by the intractability of sexuality. Yet while male sexuality is not unproblematic, in the both of these tracts it is female sexuality that is most problematic. In Colonel Jack, the idealism of companionate marriage is undermined by a kind of fatalism of female sexuality: a fear confirmed in Jack’s fateful narrative of sexually unruly wives. However much Jack’s continual insistence upon marrying may reflect social pressures, the contrary tensions between the languages of manliness and the ideals of companionate marriage are visible in Jack’s disastrous marriages and his anxieties concerning the usurpation of male rule in the domestic sphere. Where the rule falls There is, however, another way to read Jack’s marriages. His first four marriages take place against the background of Jack’s progressively deeper involvement in Jacobitism (with its French and Catholic associations). Jack’s passivity in his first marriage parallels his careless attitude to his Englishness (he adopts the name ‘Colonel Jacque’ which he is given by the French, 185) that foreshadows his unwitting slide towards Jacobitism.42 Later, Jack leads a company of an Irish regiment on the French side of the wars of the Spanish Succession: his subsequent capture neatly parallels his passivity in the courtship of marriage to his second wife, aptly described as ‘impolitick’ (222). In addition, it is during this marriage that he is ‘insensibly drawn in’ to join the Pretender in the 1708 diversionary invasion (223). When Jack marries his third wife, he goes by the name of ‘Mr. Charnock’ (234), an allusion to the actual Jacobite Robert Charnock. All these wives commit adultery: Defoe is making a point, over and over, about Jack’s bad political choices and his bad marital choices. Jack’s effeminate passivity in his marriages is the ironic punishment for adhering to the kind of ideologies of subordination and passive obedience favoured by Jacobites and High Church Tories, and encapsulated in the classic Patriarchalism of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings. His fourth marriage to Moggy is particularly interesting in this regard. He is married to her in Lancashire – a hotbed of Jacobite and Catholic allegiance – by a ‘Romish Priest’ (248), and during this marriage he participates in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion. That Jack chooses to marry a woman who, while ‘very pretty’, was ‘plain’, ‘not Young’ and ‘not a Beauty’ (249) suggests his confidence and happiness rest upon her not being a sexual subject, in contrast to his previous adulterous See also Shirlene Mason, Defoe and the Status of Women (St Alban’s, Vermont: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1978). 42 Sailing from his plantation in Virginia he is captured by a French privateer and eventually released as an exchange prisoner to travel through the Spanish Netherlands. ‘Colonel Jacque’ is the name the French community call him in London, and what is on his certificate of exchange.


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wives. This fourth marriage, therefore, is based upon Jack’s authoritative mastery. Moreover, it is a mastery underlined by the language of servitude. Moggy was a former servant, and Jack had explicitly set out ‘that my next Wife should only be taken as an upper Servant’ (245), in spite of Defoe’s strictures against this kind of marriage in his other tracts. While Jack retrospectively notes that this was said in a ‘rash foolish Humour’ (245), her initial position as a servant significantly parallels her passive sexuality. It may seem, then, that in this marriage Jack finds his ideal: Jack’s answer to his lack of agency and mastery in his previous marriages is by reducing his fourth wife to servant. Yet this is no answer at all, since Jack is replicating precisely the political hierarchies of passive obedience favoured by Jacobitism (and High Church Tories). While Defoe reverses the direction of his irony – at Jack’s preservation of male authority rather than at his passivity in his former marriages – the Jacobite context ensures the strength of that irony throughout. For Defoe, the discourses of Jacobite or Filmerian socio-political structures cannot enable a manly (or properly English) selfhood. Indeed, in a diatribe against the High Church Tories, Defoe envisioned such a government as a ‘Petticoat Government’, explicitly aligning theories of passive obedience with female – and, implicitly, effeminate – stereotypes: ‘Tyranny in Government, and Non-Resistance in Subjects, are Doctrines more Natural, more taking, and more suitable to the Women, than the Men’ (Review, 9 May 1710, 7:69, 71). While Defoe was anxious to reject the interpenetration of gender and politics, as seen, it is clear that this could be achieved only by demarcating a clear distinction between government in the domestic (affective) realm and government in the political realm. This distinction was first advanced by the winner of the seminal argument between classic Patriarchalism (represented by Filmer’s Patriarcha) and contract theory, John Locke.43 Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, is careful to distinguish male authority in the family from a Filmerian patriarchy that gives the father absolute power both in the family and the state. Paternal rule in the domestic sphere is entirely distinct from political rule: by Locke’s logic a husband’s rule is not political, but based on laws of nature. ‘It can be no other Subjection than what every Wife owes her Husband’, Locke writes on Eve’s subjection, noting that Adam’s power, ‘can only be a Conjugal Power, … not a Political Power of Life and Death over her’.44 However, the freedom of individuals within affective, rather than political bonds, still raised questions. While Locke’s theory may be, as Christopher Flint puts it, ‘a figural act of patricide’ it did not mean an end to the

For a detailed account, see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). Schochet ranks Defoe as a strict anti-patriarchalist, pp. 216-17. 44 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), First Treatise, §48, p. 174. 43


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power of men.45 The distinction drawn between political theories of hierarchy and gendered hierarchies – between political patriarchy and sex/gender patriarchy – is a purely ideological one that left male authority supreme in the domestic sphere: as Zillah Eisenstein succinctly put it, Lockean contract theory became a ‘patriarchal antipatriarchalism’.46 There were, however, a few voices from the early eighteenth century that pointed out precisely these consequences. Most famously, Mary Astell’s Reflections Upon Marriage offered an incisive critique of Locke and the inconsistency of the separation of political and domestic spheres: if Absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in the Family? or if in a Family why not in a State; since no Reason can be alleg’d for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other? … is it not then partial in Men to the last degree, to contend for, and practise that Arbitrary Dominion in their Families, which they abhor and exclaim against in the State?47

Astell recognised that the collapse of classic Patriarchalism had put in place a system of social order that excluded the rights of women, and was in essence a new masculinist order.48 Mary Chudleigh’s poem The Ladies Defence (1701) asked, in language designed to reveal the disavowed link between political and domestic patriarchy, ‘Must Men command, and we alone obey, / As if design’d for Arbitrary Sway’. Chudleigh goes on to more explicitly declare that, Passive Obedience you’ve to us transferr’d, And we must drudge in Paths where you have err’d: That antiquated Doctrine you disown; ’Tis now your Scorn, and fit for us alone.49

45 Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 41. 46 Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981, 1993), pp. 33-54. For two important gender critiques of Locke’s political theories, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), especially pp. 77-115; and Ruth Perry, ‘Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23/4 (1990), 444-57. See also Mark E. Kann, ‘John Locke’s Political Economy of Masculinity’, International Journal of Social Economics, 19/10-11-12 (1992), 95-110. 47 Mary Astell, Reflections Upon Marriage (3rd edn, London, 1706), p. 11. 48 The term ‘classic Patriarchalism’ is Carole Pateman’s and is used to distinguish Filmer’s political theories from the modern patriarchalism that is the product of postLockean theories of civil society. See The Sexual Contract, pp. 19-38 (p. 24). 49 Lady Mary Chudleigh, The Ladies Defence: Or, The Bride-Woman’s Counsellor Answer’d: a Poem in a Dialogue between Sir John Brute, Sir William Loveall, Melissa, and

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While men now conceive passive obedience as a political error, such subordination remains exclusively enjoined on women in the domestic sphere. Lockean contract theory, in its separation of political and conjugal power, naturalises not only the gendered separation of the two spheres but also central aspects of manliness. This is seen in Locke’s resolution to the problematics of domestic order and the ideal of affective marriage; power must reside somewhere: But the Husband and Wife, though they have but one common Concern, yet having different understandings, will unavoidably sometimes have different wills too; it therefore being necessary, that the last Determination, ie. the Rule, should be placed somewhere, it naturally falls to Man’s share, as the abler and the stronger.50

Drawing upon normative ideologies of biological difference, Locke places authority in men. In The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, Bishop Fleetwood expressly sets out the argument for companionate marriage when he says that ‘mutual Fidelity is so essentially necessary to Marriage’. However, authority must be invested in one person: ‘every Family … must have its proper Superiour, whom all the rest must need obey’. And, like Locke, Fleetwood naturalises gender norms: ‘this Superiority … is well and rightly plac’d in Husbands’, where ‘Nature … has given the greatest strength and abilities’. 51 Manly authority in the domestic sphere is guaranteed by biological difference. Such an implicit admission of a defining difference at the heart of the ostensibly egalitarian project of contract theory reveals more about prevailing gender stereotypes and the social structure than either Locke or Fleetwood were able to address or to admit. Such tensions between affect and hierarchy are more bluntly played out in Jack’s re-marriage to his first wife, and exhibit, in extreme form, the novel’s anxieties concerning male authority – and therefore manliness – in marriage. It is also significant that while Jack’s first four marriages are set against his participation in Jacobitism, his final marriage parallels his turn to the house of Hanover. ‘Vastly improv’d in the school of affliction’ After the death of his fourth wife, Jack returns to his Virginia plantation. Here he becomes, once again, a successful master and planter, and it is here that his first a Parson (London, 1701), p. 3. 50 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, §82, p. 321. 51 William Fleetwood, The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants, Consider’d in sixteen Sermons (London, 1705), pp. 318, 167-68, 168.


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wife arrives as a transported felon. Her status as a slave on his plantation enacts the text’s investment in manly superiority and female subordination in marriage. When she reveals herself to him, her abasement is in complete contrast to her former behaviour: forgive said she, for God’s sake the Injuries I have done you! I have paid dear for all my wickedness, and ’tis just, ’tis righteous that God should bring me to your Foot, to ask you Pardon for all my brutish doings: Forgive me Sir, said she, I beseech you, and let me be your Slave or Servant for it as long I live. (255)

Her slavery and servitude are presented as a just chastisement for her former misdemeanours against Jack. It also suggests that normative male–female relations are restored: male as master, female as subservient. Repentant, she offers to be nothing other than his servant. Her character, too, has undergone change: ‘she was vastly improv’d in the School of Affliction, and was all the bright Part, with a vast Addition of Temper, Prudence, Judgment, and all that she formerly wanted’ (260). His ex-wife is now all that could have been wished. From her status as his legal property, the novel goes on to narrate how this is transformed into that of a wife in ostensible equality. Just as Jack begins to fall in love with her, his overseer (Jack’s former tutor) asks for his consent to marry her. Before Jack has the chance to grant or withhold his consent, however, she refuses the overseer’s offer. As she explains to Jack later, ‘let me be your Slave rather than the best Man’s Wife in the World’ (261), adding, ‘I was once yours, and I will never belong to any Man else in the World’ (261-62). By having his former wife declare her loyalty to him in the strongest possible terms of self-abasement, Jack’s ‘own position as subject in the relationship of exchange’ is secured, and the threat of being ‘feminised in relation to other men’ is averted; in stark contrast to his first three marriages.52 Her self-subjection to Jack at once acknowledges that she is his property still, yet transforms this master–slave relationship into a willing subjection that becomes the basis for marriage. The language of her initial abasement – ‘’tis righteous that God should bring me to your Foot’ (255) – is strikingly reminiscent of Friday’s self-subjection to Crusoe: laying himself down again on the Ground, with all the possible Signs of an humble thankful Disposition, making a many antick Gestures to show it: At last he lays his Head flat upon the Ground, close to my Foot, and sets my other Foot upon his Head, as he had done before; and after this, made all the Signs to me of Subjection, Servitude, and Submission imaginable, to let me know, how he would serve me as long as he liv’d.53

Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 51. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Donald J. Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1983), p. 206. 52

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Friday’s voluntary subjection ideologically naturalises colonial slavery.54 However, George Haggerty’s suggestive analysis highlights Friday’s function as a sign of Crusoe’s successful performance of masculinity: Friday becomes a fetish that wards off the threat of castration by the unruly cannibal other.55 In this light, Jack’s wife’s subjection is also a sign of Jack’s now successful seduction that reverses the earlier threat posed by her as a female snare: his wife is now the guarantor of a manliness based upon sexual, political and domestic mastery. Underwriting this is the spectre of an older form of patriarchalism redolent of Filmer. ‘If we compare the natural duties of a father with those of a king, we find them to be all one’, claims Filmer, who aligns ‘the father over one family’ with the ‘father over many families’. This fatherly power, handed down from Adam, encompasses the ‘power of life and death’.56 In contrast to Locke’s separation of familial and political power, Jack aligns both discourses in his remarriage to his first wife. Jack’s first wife implies the kind of subjection to manly authority that is echoed in the political sphere, for this Filmerian power is exactly the kind of power Jack has over her by virtue of his ownership of her as a slave. Jack has the power to confer forgiveness or punishment on her for her previous faults, and decides to offer her mercy: From that minute I resolv’d that I would certainly take her again to be my Wife as before, I thought she had fully made me amends for her former ill Conduct, and she deserv’d to be forgiven; and so indeed she did, if ever Woman did, considering also, what dreadful Pennance she had undergone, and how long she had liv’d in Misery and Distress; and that Providence had, as it were cast her upon me again, and above all, had given her such an Affection to me, and so resolv’d a Mind that she could refuse so handsome an offer of Deliverance, rather than be farther separated from me. (262)

Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 205-06. The relations between slavery and gratitude are displayed when Jack is an slave overseer on his first visit to the Virginia plantation, where he takes care ‘to imprint Principles of Gratitude on their Minds’ (134); see pp. 133-50. For a rigorous discussion of slavery, sympathy and race in Colonel Jack, see George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 75-94. 55 George Haggerty, ‘Thank God It’s Friday: The Construction of Masculinity in Robinson Crusoe’, in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005), pp. 78-87. 56 Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha. The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 12, 7. 54


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Jack extends the hand of forgiveness, much as monarchs extended the hand of mercy and forgiveness to repentant and reformed Jacobite rebels. Jack’s forgiveness goes hand in hand with his offer of marriage, but it is a marriage whose apparent naturalness – it is ‘Providence’ that has ‘cast’ her to his foot – is based upon a huge disparity in power. After their marriage, Jacobite prisoners arrive on the plantation, and this provides an opportunity for Jack and his wife to display some extent of mutual obligation. Jack trusts his wife with the knowledge of his involvement in Jacobitism, declaring ‘I was now going to put my Life into her Hands, … it would be in her Power to deliver me up into the Hands of my Enemies’ (268). She responds by arranging his safety and a pardon. This repayment of obligation is partially undermined when she declares: you shall find me the same faithful humble Creature, which I should have been, if I had been still your Slave, and not had any Hopes of being your Wife; and that in all my Scheme which I have laid for your Safety, in this new Exigence, I have not proposed your going one Step, but where I shall go, and be always with you, to assist, and serve you on all Occasions, and to take my Portion with you, of what kind soever our Lot may be. (270)

Her reminder that she would still be his slave sits uneasily with the language of mutuality. Further, his obligation to her for contributing to his safety is undermined when he receives a pardon direct from George I, unrelated to her intervention. The close proximity of Jack’s ex-wife’s reconciliation and their marriage with the scene of Jack remembering his part in the 1715 invasion, his pardon by George I and his reconciliation with the house of Hanover invites a revealing analogy. On Jack’s wife’s return to him, and his turn to Hanover, Lincoln Faller is perceptive: In the first instance Jack pardons, in the second he is pardoned, and in both instances gratitude provides the basis for a strong bond between the subordinate, pardoned person and his or her superior. Jack’s wife will be a better wife because she has recognized the error of her ways and because Jack has so graciously forgiven her; in the same way Jack will be all the more loyal a subject to George I.57

What Faller underplays, however, is the extent to which her penitential femininity, coerced by imprisonment, transportation and slavery, depends upon patriarchal ideology. While a number of critics have noted the distinction between Defoe’s fiction and his conduct books, Carol Houlihann Flynn’s analysis of the narratives in his The Family Instructor books (Part I, 1715 and Part II, 1718) bears an uncanny similarity to the narrative of Jack’s final marriage: ‘less willing subjects are brought to the patriarchal good through “accidents” providentially plotted Faller, Crime and Defoe, p. 180.

57

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… Once chastened, they usually become necessarily abject, ready to assume their duties with all the ardour appropriate to affective domestic structures.’58 For all Defoe’s arguments against marriage as a state of female servitude, the reappearance of Jack’s rebellious first wife as a slave on his Virginia plantation and their subsequent marriage suggests a considerable investment in the conjoining of political and familial discourses to support the ‘Arbitrary Dominion’ of men that Mary Chudleigh and Mary Astell abhorred.59 The novel has ironised Jack’s previous marriages in which he was either passive or authoritative, since Defoe had aligned either position with Jacobitism and theories of passive obedience: in both cases, Jacks failed to exhibit a properly honourable English (in other words, pro-Hanoverian) manliness. With his remarriage to his first wife, however, the novel legitimises her subordination by ideologically obscuring the extent to which the ostensible mutual obligation expressed by Jack and his wife is founded upon patriarchal coercion. As we have seen, contract theory’s modern version of patriarchy is itself founded upon an appeal to the ‘natural’ superiority of men. For Defoe, Jack’s manliness is guaranteed only in the combination of two intertwined factors: his unrivalled mastery in the domestic sphere and his honourable subordination to the Hanoverian line; yet these have required considerable narrative manoeuvring. The dreams of a gouty gentleman However, the novel does not end with his remarriage. Fearing recognition by transported Jacobite rebels, Jack had sailed away for the British West Indies. Sailing back to Virginia after his pardon, a storm drives Jack into a bay off Spanish-held Cuba and he is arrested, even though he protests that he never actually touched Spanish land. Jack eventually has some goods relayed to him, and he bribes his way out of trouble. This is the foundation for Jack’s ‘secret clandestine Trade’ (288) with the Spanish American colonies; what he calls, ‘my West-India Project’ (292).60 After his second lucrative voyage he reflects that, 58 Flynn, ‘Defoe’s idea of conduct’, pp. 74-75. See also Christopher Flint, who argues that while Defoe clearly supports the ideal of companionate marriage, such mutuality in fact depends on the wife’s voluntary self-subjection in an ideological move that naturalises patriarchy as companionate and mutual. Family Fictions, pp. 134-36. 59 Astell, Reflections, p. 11. 60 This episode can be set against the hot and cold war between Spain and Britain that lasted from around 1713 to the 1730s and that extended into the West Indies. British trading concessions to the Spanish were very limited by the Treaty of Utrecht in the wake of the War of the Spanish Succession. However, after 1713, an illicit and profitable trade had sprung up. In response, Spanish authority coast guards, and Spanish privateers acting in collusion with local governors, harassed British traders, appropriating 180 British ships between 1713 and 1731. William Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760


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Now was my time to have sat still contented with what I had got; if it was in the power of Man to know when his good Fortune was at the highest; and more, my prudent Wife gave it as her Opinion, that I should sit down satisfy’d, and push the Affair no farther, and earnestly perswaded me to do so; but I that had a Door open, as I thought to immense Treasure, that had found the way to have a Stream of the Golden Rivers of Mexico flow into my Plantation of Virginia, and saw no hazards, more then what was common to all such things in the Prosecution; I say to me, these things look’d with another Face, and I Dream’d of nothing but Millions and Hundred of Thousands; so contrary to all moderate Measures, I push’d on for another Voyage. (296-97)

Jack cannot see clearly his ‘good Fortune’; he ‘saw no hazards’; ‘these things look’d with another Face’. Dazed by a vision of the ‘Golden Rivers of Mexico’, Jack ‘Dream’d’ of huge riches. Nowhere in his fiction does Defoe come closer to the archetypal effeminized man caught up in the arms of bewitching wealth so central to the discourses of civic humanism.61 J. G. A. Pocock’s description of economic man who ‘does not even live in the present, except as constituted by his fantasies concerning a future’ applies to Jack’s project, and is echoed in Defoe’s own scepticism towards speculation: ‘All Credit built upon the Foundation of Project, is a Deceptio Visus upon the Imagination, an Ignis fatuus, … and there needs nothing but a little Day-light to undeceive them’ (Review, 22 October 1706, 3:503).62 The parallels with the schemes of easy and limitless returns offered by the South-Sea share schemes are inescapable, and present us with a fiction that is embedded within a post-Bubble scepticism regarding the capability of men to resist irrational desires. Jack’s vision of ‘Golden Rivers’ and his dream of riches (296) echo the images of ‘golden Dreams’ (and variants such as ‘airy Dreams’ or even ‘golden Mountains’) that were a recurrent trope in commentary on the SouthSea scheme.63 Moreover, the image of an inexhaustible ‘Stream’ of gold is, as (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 234; see also Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 123-24. 61 ‘Economic man … was seen as on the whole a feminized, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites’. J. G. A Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 114. 62 Pocock, Virtue, p. 112. 63 See, for example, Anon., An Essay for Establishing a New Parliament Money; With Some Thoughts for the Service of the South-Sea Company (London, 1720), p. 45; ‘Faithful Subject of the Best of Kings’, An Essay Towards Restoring of Publick Credit (London, 1721), p. 21; Elisha Smith, A Religious Consideration of the Pursuits, and Possessions of this World the best Improvement and Consolation under South-Sea Calamity (London, 1721), p. 7; Anon., Some Considerations on the Late Mismanagement of the South-Sea Stock (London, 1721), p. 5. The variants are from, respectively, Allan Ramsay, A Poem

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Robert Markley points out, an ‘ideology of abundance’: one that gives the lie to the value of toil inscribed within the first part of Robinson Crusoe.64 An Impartial Enquiry into the Value of South-Sea Stock declared that the scheme offered the prospect of ‘inexhaustible Treasures’ and ‘pleasing Dreams of growing Rich without Labour and Industry’.65 Jack’s playing down of the ‘hazards’ of his scheme suggests a similar fantasy of accumulation. Deceptive and illusory dreams: Jack has been here before. Defoe is clearly drawing parallels with Jack’s other delusions of grandeur under the Jacobites: there it was status; here, however, it is wealth. The question, then, is how does Defoe narrate the transformation of Jack from irrational and effeminized dreamer of riches to manly and rational creature who can see such things in the clear light of day? If the misogynistic images of sexualized women earlier in the novel indicate the effeminizing threats posed by the South-Sea scheme and their fictionalized containment, the last part of the novel offers a more complex solution. There is no emblem of woman as threat – indeed Jack’s wife is the voice of prudence – instead, the novel focuses on Jack’s masculinity. Jack’s projected fantasies are balanced by retrospective narration: ‘so contrary to all moderate Measures, I push’d on for another Voyage’. This is the novel’s clearest signal of moral distance from Jack’s trading project. And his final mission is a failure: pursued by Spanish frigates, he is landed with some of his goods near Vera Cruz and taken in by a Spanish merchant, essentially exiled in Mexico. Maximillian Novak interpreted this entire episode as evidence of Defoe’s hostility to the trade to the Spanish colonies, which ‘destroyed the normal circulation of goods and money between England and Spain’. Novak claims Jack was ‘violating the rules of mercantile morality’ and that for Defoe this was a ‘far worse crime’ than Jack’s childhood career as a thief: Jack’s exile in Mexico is the ‘punishment’.66 However, Defoe’s attitude to trading relations between Britain and the Spanish Colonies in the Americas was, perhaps characteristically, both changeable and ambivalent in his non-fictional work.67 Moreover, it is a mistake to reduce on the South-Sea (London, 1720) and Anon., An Essay for Discharging the Debts of the Nation (London, 1720), p. 67. For a succinct summary of the South Sea Bubble, see Speck, Stability and Strife, pp. 196-201. 64 Robert Markley, ‘“So Inexhaustible a Treasure of Gold”: Defoe, Capitalism, and the Romance of the South Seas’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 148-67 (p. 150). 65 ‘A. B.’, An Impartial Enquiry into the Value of South-Sea Stock (London, 1720), p. 8. 66 Novak, Economics, pp. 123, 125, 127. 67 Throughout 1711 and 1712 Defoe was certainly against trading relations, though not out of economic theory, but pragmatism: Spain would never agree and it would not be as profitable for England as the huge gains to be made by the annexation and colonising of lands in South America. See especially his An Essay on the South-Sea Trade (1712) and A New Voyage Around the World (1725). In his otherwise pugnacious Plan of the English Commerce (1728), Defoe was ambivalent: on the one hand he admired the ‘prodigious’


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Defoe’s writings to mere emblems of mercantile economics. As I’ve suggested with Robinson Crusoe, Defoe has some sympathy with Mandeville’s position that ‘Content’ is the ‘Bane of Industry’, even if he would never state it so baldly.68 And the novel’s attitude towards Jack’s ostensible trading immorality, compared to its attitude to his earlier life of crime, is substantially more muted.69 The novel’s ambivalence towards Jack’s dreams of gold is clear in the portrayal of his life in exile: while ‘exile’ is supposedly a punishment, it is here that Jack’s life reaches its high-water mark. Here, he realizes huge profits, claims friendship with his Spanish host, and actually seems to be happy: ‘I was now in a very odd Condition indeed, my Circumstances were in one Sense indeed very happy; Namely, that I was in the Hands of my Friends, for such really they were’ (299). Jack’s happiness is founded on a homosocial world of ‘uncommon Friendship’ (306) and the exchange of magnificent (and well-detailed) gifts.70 The negative aspects of exile fade from view compared to the other advantages of life in Mexico: ‘I had here now a most happy, and comfortable Retreat … here I learn’d to look back upon an ill-spent Life’ (307). The issue of retreat and reflection is a clichéd one and is perhaps treated as perfunctorily as Jack’s religious reformation (accomplished in the last two pages of the novel). However, the issue of rationality and clarity of moral vision is raised in an unusual way: Here I wrote these Memoirs having to add, to the Pleasure of looking back with due Reflections, the Benefit of a violent Fit of the Gout, which as it is allow’d by most People, clears the Head, restores the Memory, and Qualifies us to make the most, and just, and useful Remarks upon our own Actions. (307)

The gout as a ‘Benefit’? The gout here is part of a moral economy: the attack is associated with a clearing of the moral vision, and self-reflective autobiography is the result. Gout, however, was an over-determined sign. It was at once a symptom of excess, denoting the sufferer’s vice; a sign of success and gentlemanliness; and a purge of excess, denoting the sufferer’s natural well-being.71 A number success of this ‘secret’ trade; on the other, he demurred over the economic principles of this ‘Clandestine Commerce’ (PEWS, 7:288, 296). 68 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 75. See also Daniel Defoe, The Commentator, Friday, 20 May 1720; Daniel Defoe, Caledonia, &c, A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation, ll. 1183-84 (PEW, 4:264). 69 See Faller’s rigorous discussion of the formal and ideological issues raised by the last part the novel. Crime and Defoe, pp. 180-95. 70 See my discussion pp. 118-20. 71 For an excellent study of the representations of the gout in the eighteenth century, see Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).


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of treatises emphasized the moral pathology of gout; Richard Blackmore, for instance, adduced its cause to ‘the dissolute and voluptuous Indulgence of sensual Appetites’.72 Ideologically, such a pathology of gout is a civic-humanist one, in which excess is equated with slavery to luxurious and effeminizing pleasures. The implication for Jack would be that gout is a symptom of excess: of his desire for wealth ‘contrary to all moderate Measures’, and also of his life amongst the Spanish, for ‘no Men in the World live in such Splendor, and wallow in such immense Treasures’ (301-2). Defoe, however, chooses to ignore this dominant reading of gout, and instead contrarily emphasizes its positive moral-physiological effects; as did the tract The Honour of the Gout: ‘BLESSED Gout; most desirable Gout; Sovereign Antidote of murdering Maladies; powerful Corrector of Intemperance; deign to visit me with thy purging Fires’.73 Indeed, Defoe’s few references to gout include two similarly positive representations: Crusoe’s gouty father is a ‘wise and grave Man’ (4); and in The Family Instructor (1718), a Minister who is an uncle to a family is struck with the gout: the attack enables him to stay and give religious instruction to the rebellious household.74 Defoe’s description of the restorative powers of Jack’s Gouty attack is reflected in a later treatise, which argues that ‘A fit of the gout terminates symptoms which threaten something worse; and the head and stomach are cleared by it, instantly, after long oppressions’.75 The fit of gout enables Jack to see with religious clarity: ‘I Who had hitherto liv’d, as might be truly said, without God in the World, began now to see farther into all those Things, than I had ever yet been capable of before’ (308). Similar to Pocock’s description of the South-Sea Bubble as a ‘psychic crisis’, in which an economy’s excessive ambitions for future riches was suddenly revealed as so many fantasies, Jack’s gout is also a crisis that precipitates his rational and religious clarity of vision that suddenly reveals his life of ‘Wickedness’ (308).76 However, such a revelatory crisis is only partly realized in the novel, since Jack undergoes no searching process of moral or spiritual reflection, and his excessive dreams of riches are not alluded to all. The civic-humanist pathology of fantasy, excess and accumulation is obscured by redirecting the reader to the natural – and naturalizing – moral-physiological event of the gout. Sir Richard Blackmore, Discourses on the Gout (London, 1726), p. 60. ‘Philander Misaurus’, The Honour of the Gout: or, A Rational Discourse, Demonstrating, that the Gout is one of the greatest Blessings which can befal Mortal Man (London, 1735), p. 7. 74 Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor. In Two Parts (London, 1718), p. 28. 75 John Hill, The Management of the Gout (London, 1771; first published 1758), pp. 34-35. Jack’s ‘fit’ also bears some similarity to two other cases of sudden physiological attack and subsequent relief: Crusoe’s vomiting at the sight of human remains after cannibal ‘Feastings’ (165) and when he discovers his vast wealth and needs to ‘let Blood’ (285). Such fits owe something to the idea of re-balancing of humours. 76 Pocock, Virtue, p. 113. 72 73


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Jack’s gout also implies certain issues of status. These are reflected in a treatise of 1720: George Cheyne’s Observations Concerning the Nature and Due Method of Treating the Gout. He too employed a moral pathology: ‘it is the Rich, the Lazy, the Voluptuous, who suffer most by the Gout’, but also flattered his sufferers: ‘Gouty Persons are People of good Natural Parts, large Feeders, and long-liv’d’; the elite, in other words.77 The title of the tract referred to earlier, The Honour of the Gout, was only half-joking since it reflected the perception that it was an illness of the gentleman. All were agreed that gout, in Porter and Rousseau’s words, ‘hobnobbed in high society’: some even saw it as a desirable escutcheon of their gentility, ‘fit ... for a man of quality’ as one Reverend put it.78 Gout was also allied to pedigree. For example, in William Hogarth’s Marriage-a-la-Mode, occupying the centre of plate one (‘The Marriage Settlement’) is the father-figure, gouty foot on stool, displaying his family tree, with the material signs of inheritance all around. The issue of Jack’s gentility only seems to have been left behind with his Jacobitism.79 His honour and virtue are secured as a Virginia planter and merchant loyal to Hanover. Yet the progressive narrative hinted at here is overlaid by a different conception of status. Jack’s attempts to transform himself into a gentleman are doomed to failure because they are founded on pretence and illusions of gentility. This is clear in Jack’s appearance in exile: ‘Here I was dress’d like a Spaniard of the better sort, had three Negroes attend me, and was call’d Don Ferdinand de Villa Moresa’ (301). Jack’s attempt to pass as a gentleman foreshadows Defoe’s description in The Complete English Tradesman of a rich tradesman who, attempting to mix with men who are gentlemen by birth, ‘borrows the Feathers of the Gay, the Polite, the Manly, and the Mannerly; and in spite of Nature, and his Want of Brains, claims not to pass for what he is, but for what he neither is, or is capable to be’.80 What, then, has happened to the question of Jack’s origins described at the beginning of the novel, where he is told of an ‘oral Tradition … that my Father was a Man of Quality’ and that he was to ‘remember, that I was a Gentleman’ (3)? Jack’s potential gentle birth is reactivated by the well-understood folklore surrounding gout’s relationship with gentility. The ambiguity towards the issue of Jack’s status reflects, to use Michael McKeon’s term, a ‘conservative ideology’ that is sceptical about both a progressive ideology that turns tradesmen magically into

George Cheyne, Observations Concerning the Nature and Due Method of Treating the Gout (London, 1720), pp. 7, 96-97. 78 Porter and Rousseau, Gout, p. 5. The Revd. Edmund Pyle is quoted on p. 72. 79 Two earlier critics of gentility dismiss the last section of the novel: see McBurney, ‘Colonel Jacque: Defoe’s Definition of the Complete English Gentleman’, pp. 336-37; Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, p. 177. 80 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727), 2: i.248. 77


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gentlemen, and the aristocratic ideology that simply equates birth with honour.81 Defoe wants his man to earn riches, and yet not get caught up in delusions of status or fantasies of easy wealth. Jack’s gout reforms and evades the volatile nature of desire and colonial capitalism, while simultaneously confirming his status as a gentleman: in effect the narrative arc ideologically naturalizes Jack’s success at amassing wealth as a fate of his gentility. Yet the resolution of these problems comes only at the cost of the resolution of Jack’s manly mastery in marriage: his happiness as a rich gentleman reaches its apogee while amongst the homosocial world of fellow merchants in Mexico, away from his wife.82 Looking at Jack Colonel Jack is a rambling and restless novel that brings together a kaleidoscopic range of contemporary issues. It is this very attempt at comprehensiveness that renders it one of Defoe’s most complex works, and yet this makes it one of his most revealing – if also difficult to pull into focus. Indeed, in its multiple images, the kaleidoscope provides a fitting image of this novel, and one gets the feeling that its form, like this novel, depends upon other, obscure forces. Rather than trying to find a single cohesive vision of Jack, this reading has aimed to make visible these forces of otherness: following Pierre Macherey, it has attempted to expose the presence of a relation, or an opposition, between elements of the exposition or levels of the composition, those disparities which point to a conflict of meaning. This conflict is not the sign of an imperfection; it reveals the inscription of an otherness in the work, through which it maintains a relationship with that which is not, that which happens at the margins.83

At the ‘margins’ of Colonel Jack are the ideological aporias of Defoe’s time: the hierarchies between man and women; female sexuality and male agency; hierarchies between subject and ruler; gentility and the meanings of honour; men’s pursuit of wealth. The analogies between and across these elements, and the conflicts that these analogies give rise to, make visible the diverse and contrary ideological forces that shape early-eighteenth-century attitudes to men – the tensions behind the scenes, as it were, of Jack’s narrative. In Colonel Jack, Defoe has delineated a figure who desperately seeks a stable and manly identity, yet one who, for much of the narrative, is contrarily unable to see clearly what that might be. Jack is drawn to inauthentic or illusory masculinities 81 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 21, 174. 82 See my discussion, pp. 118-20. 83 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. by Geoffrey Wall (1966; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 79.


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that consistently fail to match Defoe’s ideas of manliness. While Defoe himself is sharp-eyed enough to draw these failures in some realism, the narrative has a substantial investment in the ideal of manliness too – naturalizing men’s subjection to the right monarch, men’s sexual authority in marriage and, finally, gentility and the pursuit of riches. But, as we have seen, only with considerable ideological and narrative strain. Such strains reveal, as Jonathan Rutherford points out, the illusionary myth of manliness and ‘its attempt to pass itself off as natural and universal, free of problems’.84 Seeing so many contrary and fragmented forces within Jack has only been possible by looking in the margins. For a novel so centrally concerned with illusions and delusions, it is perhaps fitting that this reading has depended upon looking askance.

84 Jonathan Rutherford, ‘Who’s That Man?’, in Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, ed. by Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), pp. 21-67 (p. 23).


Conclusion

Contrary Men

What, … is perhaps not always sufficiently stressed by biographers is a quality in Defoe which we may, for want of a better phrase, call his intellectual ‘contrariness’. P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens A man, and not a woman; effeminate, soft, delicate, supine; impotent in pleasure, in anger, talk, pusillanimous, light, changeable, etc; but the contrary to this in each particular … Manhood, manliness, humanity – manly, humane, masculine. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Throughout Defoe’s Writings and Manliness I have threaded the word ‘contrary’, hoping to explore the different strands of thinking that lay behind Defoe’s representations of men by playing on the two senses above: one a characteristic of Defoe’s writerly attitude; the other indicating a matter of gender definition. As Shaftesbury’s notes reveal, crucial to any understanding of manliness was its opposition to effeminacy. We should perhaps refine this rather static sense of contraries to conceptualise manliness as a continual agonistic process, in a repetitive dialogue with its other, effeminacy. Moreover, as we have seen, both manliness and effeminacy were surrounded by, articulated through, and in dialogue with, a myriad of other concepts, tropes and discourses. In this book, this has included virtue, trade, credit, status and rank, reformation, gentility, politeness, manners, violence, sodomy, friendship, discontent, adventure, retirement, courage, reason, rationality (and irrationality), sin, subordination, marriage, colonialism, patriarchy, Jacobitism, Providence, Christianity (and atheism), High Church Tories, Whiggism, stoicism, the vapours, the passions, gardening, lust, labour and luxury. Each of these ideas had its own language: often overlapping and in dialogue with some, at other times in contrary tension with others.

P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 142. See also P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), p. 9. The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophic Regime of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London: Swan Sonenschein, 1900), pp. 216-17. Cited in Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 4.


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On the definition of manliness, Defoe’s attitude largely reflected his own time’s. This definition encompassed physical vigour, personal courage, rationality, a belief in (the Christian) God, an adherence to the role of authority in marriage, self-control over desire (speculation, emulation, luxury consumables, sexual lust, fame), and an ethic of civic or national utility. Yet Defoe never drew a picture of a man that unequivocally combined all of these qualities. You could certainly say that his representation of, say, Dr Samuel Annesley encompassed a number of these qualities; one might also be tempted to suggest other figures like the merchant at his most idealised in The Complete English Tradesman, Robinson Crusoe or H. F. – yet none of these are unproblematic since they, at best, embody some of these facets only some of the time. Instead Defoe was drawn to failings of masculinity: one need only think of Sardanapalus in Jure Divino; the trader as hypocrite or as mimic-gentleman; Prigson; Colonel Jack. But, while these texts sometimes offer satire, irony, or religion as a means of indicating clear moral intent, Defoe’s attitude is never that simple, for his clarity of vision did not let his readers easily off the hook. Defoe choose to illustrate his period’s conception of manliness by contrarily representing men behaving badly, or by creating scenarios and narratives that test and probe the complex forces surrounding ideas of manliness. Such portrayals are resonant with a perverse energy, and it is this quality that P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens have described so well as ‘a queer kind of excitement at the spectacle of a trap without an exit’. In the end, Defoe’s readers are not spared the understanding that all men have ‘thwart Lines’ that can so easily erupt to disturb men’s mask of rational rectitude. This attitude towards representing men and the world, a kind of obstinate representational perversity, transforms these constructions of masculinity into something more complicated than the dominant (and somewhat stereotypical) ideals of the time. To a large extent, these complex and sometimes ambivalent constructions are an effect of Defoe’s breath-taking and comprehensive grasp of his culture. Magpie-like, he draws upon every available source of a language of masculinity: Christianity, classical virtue, civic humanism, what we might now call liberal economics, debates on status and gentility, and gender folklore. At times Defoe achieves an idiosyncratic synthesis between these sources, for example, Crusoe or Annesley. More often, this same comprehensiveness unwittingly reveals tensions within the ideologies of manliness: attempts at syntheses break down because these sources ultimately pull in contrary directions. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a case in point; but these contrary forces are also illustrated by Defoe’s shifting perspectives on trade and history, or the atomised models of manliness in A Journal of the Plague Year, or the difficult ideological negotiations in Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack.

Furbank and Owens, Canonisation, p. 146. Daniel Defoe, The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy: with a Preface. Written by one of his Hearers (London, 1697), ‘Preface’.

Conclusion: Contrary Men

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Yet despite such representational contrariness, ideologically, Defoe was a conservative. In A System of Magick, Defoe’s attack on atheism, he lays out the logical consequences of religious fragmentation and heterodoxy: Thus we live in a general Disguise, and like the Masquerades, every Man dresses himself up in a particular Habit, not two appear a-like in the whole Place; and that the Simily may be perfect, the Humour carries it on to the minutest Part; as the Habits are not alike, so they are always particularly remarkable for being directly opposite to the Person they cover; … In the Appearance of the superior Part it is much the same: Mimickry, and opposite Capacities engross Conversation; the Beau turns Polemic, the Atheist disputes Principles, the Actress practices Modesty, and the Pedant panegyricks upon Wit: Fools write Satyr, as Clowns teach Manners; the Fops are the Men of Weight.

His diatribe against masquerade and mimicry has a more fundamental resonance beyond atheism since it is deeply imbricated within a wider fear of the fragmentation of identity and the proliferation of inauthentic selves. That Defoe – who fashioned his own gentle status with the addition of ‘de’ to the family name, who seemingly delighted in his career as a secret agent, who bruited opinions on every topic of the day in a dazzling variety of voices, and who was regularly accused of political deception and religious hypocrisy – should lambaste the inauthenticity of contemporary identity, might seem to be an unflattering irony. But this would be to seriously underestimate the insistent and rigorous streak of conservative moral didacticism in Defoe’s work. In reaction to this scenario of inauthentic men, there is evinced in a swath of Defoe’s writings a powerful wish for stability and order that led him to mobilize normative ideologies of manliness. As I’ve discussed in relation to a number of issues – for example, status or patriarchy – Defoe’s attitude to manliness and effeminacy is largely conservative and is dominated by a concern for agency and authenticity in the face of contrary forces and temptations. Michael McKeon’s comment on Robinson Crusoe can stand for much of Defoe’s writing on masculinity: it ‘emits the aura of irony because, like all ideology, it is dedicated to the instrumental disclosure – in Defoe’s case with unparalleled penetration and candour – of a complex of contradictions that it is simultaneously

Daniel Defoe, A System of Magick, SFWS, 7:242. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) (the ‘mobility of property’), pp. 103-23; Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986), passim; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) (‘status inconsistency’), passim; Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (the ‘Ancien Régime of identity’), passim.


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dedicated to mediating and rendering intelligible’. This is a doubled vision of Defoe’s writings – they both support and reveal gender ideology. Defoe had the clarity of vision to see the workings of and the contrary tensions within masculinity and manliness all around him, and the stubborn contrariness to represent these in ways that were uniquely his, but he and his writings were deeply imbricated within those very same forces. To be contrary is to be against a norm, but it is a knowing kick against the pricks. It is to be aware of the parameters of both sides, of heterodoxy and orthodoxy, to willingly ply between the hegemonic and the transgressive, the ideal and the corrupt. It required of Defoe an unflinching eye: the purpose of such contrariness, in part, was to test the norm. Yet, in a crucial way, it was to serve and demonstrate the norm: contrariness in the name of orthodoxy.

McKeon, Origins, p. 332.

Bibliography Selected works of Daniel Defoe Defoe, Daniel, An Argument Shewing, that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, PEW, vol. 1, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, Augusta Triumphans, PEW, vol. 8, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, Caledonia, &c, A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation, PEW, vol. 4, ed. D. W. Hayton (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, By way of Elegy: with a Preface. Written by one of his Hearers (London, 1697) ———, The Commentator, 1 January – 16 September 1720 (London, 1720) ———, The Compleat English Gentleman, ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London: David Nutt, 1890) ———, The Complete English Tradesman, 2 vols (London, 1726/1727) ———, Conjugal Lewdness; Or, Matrimonial Whoredom. A Treatise on the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed, ed. Maximillian Novak (Gainsville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967) ———, The Double Welcome, SFWS, vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) ———, Due Preparations for the Plague as well for Soul as Body (London, 1722) ———, An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, SFWS, vol. 8, ed. G. A Starr (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005) ———, An Essay on the South-Sea Trade, PEW, vol. 7, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, Essay Upon Projects, PEW, vol. 8, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, An Essay Upon Publick Credit, PEW, vol. 6, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, The Family Instructor. In Three Parts (2nd edn, London, 1715) ———, The Family Instructor. In Two Parts (London, 1718) ———, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in Robinson Crusoe Parts 1 & 2, ed. Frederick Brereton (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1953) ———, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) ———, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, ed. Manuel Schonhorn (London: Dent, 1972). The 1724 title page bears

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the name ‘Captain Charles Johnson’. Probably by Defoe, but the attribution is questioned by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). ———, The History and Remarkable Life of the truly honourable Col. Jacque commonly call’d Col. Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; 1989) ———, The History of the Union of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1709) ———, A Hymn to Victory, SFWS, vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) ———, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; 1990) ———, Jure Divino: A Satyr, SFWS, vol. 2, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) ———, The King of the Pirates, foreword Peter Ackroyd (London: Hesperus, 2002). Probably by Defoe, but the attribution is questioned by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). ———, The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies, of the Famous Captain Singleton, ed. Shiv K. Kumar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969; 1990) ———, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Donald J. Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1983) ———, Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972; 1991) ———, Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (London, 1717) ———, The Mock Mourners. A Satyr, by way of Elegy on King William, SFWS, vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) ———, The New Family Instructor; in Familiar Discourses between a Father and his Children, on the most Essential Points of the Christian Religion (London, 1727) ———, A Plan of the English Commerce. Being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of this Nation, as well the Home Trade as the Foreign, PEW, vol. 7, ed. John McVeagh (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) ———, The Political History of the Devil, SFWS, vol. 6, ed. John Mullan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005) ———, The Poor Man’s Plea in Relation to all the Proclamations, Declarations, Acts of Parliament, &c which have been, or shall be made, or publish’d, for a Reformation of Manners, and suppressing Immorality in the Nation (London, 1698) ———, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr, SFWS, vol. 1, ed. W. R. Owens (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003) ———, Religious Courtship: Being Historical Discourses on the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives (2nd edn, London, 1729) ———, Review, ed. Arthur W. Secord, 9 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938)

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Index

Adam, 8, 59, 65, 69-78, 86, 90, 142, 145 n.36, 148, 152 Addison, Joseph, 3, 44, 47, 54, 113, 126; see also The Spectator Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, 64 agency, 3-4, 8, 13, 16-17, 21, 32, 37, 40, 45, 59-61, 74, 78, 93, 113, 131-39, 148, 160, 165 Ames, Richard, 142, 144 Anderson, Hans H., 15 Anne (queen of England), 135 Annesley, Samuel, 54-57, 93, 105, 164 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 115 Arbuthnot, John, 115, 120 aristocracy, 6-7, 25-26, 35, 40, 42-43, 48, 51, 61 n.6, 83, 99-101, 138 Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse, 59 n.13, 101 Astell, Mary, 149, 154 autonomy, 10-11, 16, 83, 125, 140 Barbon, Nicholas, 28-29 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 94 Barish, Jonas, 25 Barrell, John, 4-5 Baxter, Richard, 126 Behn, Aphra, 42, 65 n.17 Bell, Ian, 60, 86 n.76 Bender, John, 92, 107 Beverley, Robert, 65, 68-69 Bible, books of the Genesis, 65, 66, 69, 70 n.32, 72, 74, 145 Jeremiah, 96 John, 79 Kings, 109-11 Luke, 79 Proverbs, 21 Psalms, 71, 73, 105-6 Ruth, 124 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 158

Blewett, David, 79, 132 n.4 Boyer, Abel, 89 Bray, Alan, 12, 115 and Michel Rey, 123 Budgell, Eustace, 116 Bunyan, John, 22, 73, 98 Burnet, Gilbert, 95 Burton, Robert, 103 Butler, Judith, 90 Byrd, William, 69 Captain Singleton, 12, 89, 113-30, 164 civic virtue, 117, 125, 127, 129 disguise, 113, 125, 130 gift-giving, 116-24, 130 home, 113, 118, 124, 126 homoeroticism, 114 homosexuality, 115 homosociality, 12, 117, 119, 122-23 love, 115-17, 119, 121, 128-30 marriage, 119, 124, 126, 130 mutuality in friendship, 123, 125-30 piracy, 113 public / private aspects of friendship, 115, 118, 120, 124-30 riches, 114, 119, 128, 129 secrets, 124-29 self interest, 117, 120, 121, 123 sodomy, 128, 129 Carey, Henry, 43 Casid, Jill, 64 Cato, 54 civic humanism, 4-5, 12, 14, 15-17, 27, 47, 67, 83, 85, 90, 155, 164 civic virtue, 23, 29-30, 32, 63, 93, 98, 107, 108, 112, 117, 125, 127, 129 Chambers, Douglas, 72 Charles II (king of England), 34, 91, 99, 101 Cheyne, George, 84, 159 Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 149, 154

192


Clark, Katherine, 22, 28, 31, 93 class, 11, 20, 26, 40, 99-102, 107; see also status classical models of male virtue, 4, 14, 54, 56, 164; see also Cato; Hercules; Telemachus Clery, E. J., 15, 146 Collier, Jeremy, 44, 116, 129 Colonel Jack agency, 131, 133, 135, 138-39, 148, 160 contract theory, 148-50, 154 delusions and dreams, 131, 133-34, 155-58, 160, 161 drunkenness, 142 female sexual desire, 139-47, 156, 160 friendship, 118-20, 157 gentility, 131-32, 134-35, 138, 159-61 gentlemanliness, 135, 137, 157 gout, 154-60 homosociality, 157, 160 honour, 132, 134-38, 154 Jacobitism, 1, 131, 132-38, 147-48, 153, 156 marriage, 131, 138-54, 160-61 mercy, 135-37, 152-53 Patriarchalism, 147-49, 152 sex / gender patriarchy, 138, 143-44, 149, 153-54 status, 132, 134-35, 137, 156, 159, 160 subordination, 138, 145, 147, 150-51, 154 trade, 118-19, 135, 154, 156-57 wealth and riches, 131, 155-56, 158, 160-61 commerce, 14-15, 26-29, 31, 34-36, 51, 79, 117-19, 157 n.67; see also trade contrariness, 1, 10, 13-14, 60, 163-65 credit, 3-5, 15-17, 19, 20-21, 36, 63, 78, 141 n.25, 155 Curtis, Laura A., 115 Davenant, Charles, 16, 29, 67 Defoe, Daniel on adventure, 62 Andrew Moreton, persona of, 52 on atheism, 50, 52-53, 165 contrariness of, 13-14, 163-65

on credit, 5, 17, 20-21, 155 didacticism of, 13, 36-37, 57, 165 on discontent, 62-63, 87-88 on duelling, 45 on education, 42-47, 57, 146 on effeminacy, 27, 31, 35, 43, 51 on female sexual desire, 145-46 on friendship, 122 n.32, 126 on fops, 18-19, 24, 27, 40-41, 47-48, 51, 165 on gratitude, 122 n.32, 136-38, 152 n.34 irony, use of, 15, 164, 165 on Jacobitism, 133, 136, 138 on Lady Credit, 17, 21, 78, 141 n.25 on marriage, 145-46 martial and physical prowess, admiration and support of, 23, 30, 32, 94, 110 n.58 on reason, 8, 85, 121 satire, use of, 5, 7, 14, 32, 36, 39, 48, 57, 130 n.54, 143-44, 145, 164 on the Societies for Reformation of Manners, 33-34, 49-52, 98-99 on sodomy, 11 tendency to depict human failings, 1, 14, 164-65 on virtue (or ‘vertue’), 6, 42, 44, 45, 48, 54, 100, 138 works An Argument Showing, that a Standing Army, with Consent of Parliament, is not Inconsistent with a Free Government, 5, 29-30, 31, 32, 36 Augusta Triumphans, 43, 51-52, 57 Caledonia, 63, 78, 87, 157 n.68 Captain Singleton, 12, 89, 113-29, 164; see also main entry The Character of the late Dr Samuel Annesley, 1, 8, 54-57, 105 Colonel Jack, 12, 13, 45 n.23, 89, 118-19, 131-61, 164; see also main entry The Commentator, 63, 88, 157 n.68 The Compleat English Gentleman, 7, 18 n.8, 19 n.13, 26 n.29, 42-47, 48-49, 52, 54, 57

Index The Complete English Tradesman, 5, 7, 16, 17, 19 n.12, 20-27, 28, 36, 41, 51, 53, 110, 159, 164 Conjugal Lewdness, 145, 146 The Double Welcome, 33 Due Preparations for the Plague, 97, 102, 105 An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions, 51, 81-82 n.68, 103 n.41 An Essay on the South-Sea Trade, 156 n.67 Essay Upon Projects, 5, 30, 32, 94, 110 n.58, 146 The Family Instructor. In Three Parts (1715), 108, 153 The Family Instructor. In Two Parts (1718), 153, 158 The History of the Union of Great Britain, 33 n.50 A Hymn to Victory, 33, 36 A Journal of the Plague Year, 10-11, 81, 91-112, 164; see also main entry Jure Divino, 5, 8, 33, 36, 85, 86, 110 n.57, 121, 164 Memoirs of a Cavalier, 14, 43 n.14 Memoirs of the Church of Scotland, 33 Moll Flanders, 5, 7, 18, 40-42, 126 The New Family Instructor, 43 A Plan of the English Commerce, 16, 27, 28, 34-36, 52, 62, 66, 156 n.67 The Poor Man’s Plea, 34, 50, 55, 57, 99 Reformation of Manners, 7, 18-19, 33 n.48, 34 n.53, 39-40, 46, 50-51, 57, 99, 143 Religious Courtship, 7, 48, 57 Review, 5, 11, 13, 17, 27, 30-32, 34, 36, 41 n.7, 45, 50, 78, 101, 122 n.32, 126, 133, 136, 141 n.25, 142 n.26, 148, 155 Robinson Crusoe, 7, 8-10, 59-90, 111, 113, 151, 156, 157, 164, 165; see also main entry

193

Roxana, 5, 19, 23, 26, 41 n.8, 67 n.19, 145 Of Royall Educacion, 30 n.41 A Secret History of the October Club, 133 n.7 Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 47, 51, 52-53, 56, 57, 73, 87 n.81, 88, 93 A System of Magick, 130, 165 A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 71, 110 n.58 The True-Born Englishman, 6, 27, 42, 54, 100, 138 Derrida, Jacques, 118, 119 Dijkstra, Bram, 26 drinking, 6, 48-49, 64, 96-97, 142 Dryden, John, ‘The Cock and the Fox’, 39, 102-103 The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, 33 n.52, 56, 72 Virgil’s Georgics, 72, 77, 82-83 duelling, 44-45 Dunton, John, 134-35 Dyche, Thomas, 18, 43, 143 n.33 Edward II (king of England), 33 Eisenstein, Zillah, 149 effeminacy; see also fops class, 6-7, 40 concepts and definitions of, 3, 18, 163 gentry, 31-33, 39-40, 43, 51 indolence, 51, 67-68 irrationality, 16, 39-40 luxury, 4, 16, 27-37 politics, 135, 148 sex with women, result of, 18-19, 142-43 superficiality, 5, 18-19, 24, 39-40, 43, 51, 52 trade, 5, 15-17, 27-37 tradesmen, 24-27 Elias, Norbert, 6 Elliott, John H., 69 Etherege, George, 24 Eve, 59, 63, 74-77, 88, 142 Fabricant, Carole, 76

194


Faller, Lincoln B., 21, 132, 153 femininity; see also women emblem of economic volatility, 5, 16-17, 37, 56, 141 emblem of nature and landscape, 75-78 hierarchy, 146, 148, 151, 154 sexuality, 13, 37, 66 n.19, 74 n.44, 139, 141 feminisation, 4, 6-7, 39-40, 43, 59, 104 Filmer, Sir Robert, 147-49, 152 Fleetwood, William, 150 Fletcher, Anthony A Discourse of Government, 29-32 Gender, Sex and Subordination, 3, 95 Flint, Christopher, 78-80, 148-49, 154 n.58 Flynn, Carol Houlihann, 109 n.54, 146 n.41, 154-55 fops; see also effeminacy concepts and definitions of, 7, 18 gentry, 39-40, 43-44 mimicry, 18-19, 36, 57, 164-65 religion, 47-52 sex with women, 143 trade, 18-19, 24-27, 33 Foucault, Michel, 6 n.21, 97 n.20, 107 friendship, male-male, 11-12, 113-29, 157 Furbank, P. N. and W. R Owens, 14 n.42, 86, 163-64 Galen and his ideas, 53, 77 n.55, 81 n.76, 89 gentility, 5-8, 39-57, 132-38, 154-60; see also gentlemen; gentry gentlemen atheism, 40, 49-54 education, 42-47 effeminacy, 31-33, 39-40, 43, 51 gentlemen-tradesmen, 18-19 godliness, 7, 47-57 gout, 159 honour, 5-7, 41-45, 54-55, 132-38, 154, 158-60 indolence, 26, 41, 46, 51 Jacobitism, 132-38 luxury, 30-35 manly gentlemanliness, 40, 47, 49, 57 politeness, 6-7, 14, 24, 43-45, 47, 84 political corruption, 31-33, 46-47

reformation of manners, 30-31, 34, 35, 49-52, 57 self-control, 46, 55 superficiality, 39-40, 42-43, 48-49, 51 gentry, history of, 5, 28-36 George I (king of England), 135, 137 Gibson, Edmund, 96-97 Gill, Jeremiah, 98, 105 godliness, 47-57, 91-111 Gould, Robert, 140, 142 Greated, Timothy, 11, 116-18 Gregory, Jeremy, 47, 93 Haggerty, George, 80 n.63, 115 n.5, 152 Henry III (king of England), 45 Henry VII (king of England), 30-31 Henry VIII (king of England), 31-21 Henry, Matthew, 97-98 Hercules, 3, 7, 21-22, 33 n.52, 72, 76, 142 Hickeringill, Edmund, 68, 80 Hill, John, 158 Hirschman, Albert O., 121 Hobbes, Thomas, 121 homoerotic, 114 homosexuality, 11-12, 115 homosociality, 11-12, 44, 117, 119, 122-23, 157, 160 Hulme, Peter, 10 n.32, 63 n.13, 64 n.14, 80 Hunt, Margaret R., 21 n.17, 22, 102 n.57 Hunter, J. Paul, 14, 70 n.33 hypochondria, 11, 60, 80-85, 103-4, 133; see also spleen; vapours indolence, 19, 26, 41, 46, 51, 67-68, 76, 89 Ingrassia, Catherine, 141 irrationality, 1, 8-11, 59-60, 64, 81-82, 87, 90, 93, 102-104, 108-109, 111-12, 132-33, 135-36, 155-56, 163 James I (king of England), 99 James II (king of England; a.k.a. the ‘Chevalier’), 132, 134, 138 John (king of England), 45 Johnson, Samuel, 2, 18 n.9, 56, 72 A Journal of the Plague Year civic virtue, 93, 98, 107, 108, 112 class, 99-102, 107 courage, 98, 100-2, 104-5, 108, 111

Index court, of Charles II, 91, 93-95, 101-2, 105, 107 of William III and Queen Mary, 94-95 effeminacy, 93, 95, 98-100, 103-4, 111 godliness, 10, 92-93, 98, 102, 108, 110-12 hypochondria (and vapours), 103-4 irrationality, 93, 102-4, 108-9 martial prowess, 93-94, 110-11 national judgement, 91, 96-97, 105-7 providence, trust in, 92-93, 102-3, 105-6, 109, 111-12 rationality (and reason), 93, 102-4, 107, 109-12 Robert the water-man, 93-94, 100-101, 104-5, 107-8, 111-12 Societies for Reformation of Manners, 91-99, 102, 107, 111 three men of Stepney, 93-94, 108-12 typology, 109-111 Juvenal, 33 n.32, 53, 56, 72, 83 labour, 3, 22, 61, 67, 69, 71-73, 75, 78, 80-85, 163 L’Estrange, Roger, 7, 22 libertinism, 11, 40, 50, 53, 111, 143, 145 n.36 Lillo, George, 119-20 Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 43, 48 Two Treatises of Government, and colonial possession, 69-70 n. 32, 86 n. 76 and domestic order, 12-13, 148-50, 152 luxury, 4-6, 15-16, 24, 26-37, 45-47, 52, 61, 66-68, 79, 82, 84-85, 88, 95, 163-64 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 75 Macherey, Pierre, 160 McKeon, Michael, 5, 25, 42, 159, 165 Mandeville, Bernard, 28, 35-36, 62 n.9, 95 n.13, 157

195

manliness contraries of, 3, 8, 14, 17, 24-26, 52, 105, 114, 130, 131, 147, 160, 163-66 definitions of, 2, 56, 73 ideologies of, 22, 54, 56, 72, 131, 135, 164-65 Markley, Robert, 87, 156 marriage, 12-13, 19, 26, 119, 124, 126, 130, 131, 138-54, 160-61, 163-64 martial arts, 23, 30, 110 n.58 masculinity, as neutral analytical category, 1-2 masquerade, 25, 126, 165 mastery, 10, 17, 59, 80, 140, 143, 148, 152, 154, 160 Mauss, Marcel, 122 middle class, 6, 26, 40, 100 middle station, 59, 61-62, 82, 102 middling sorts, 6-7, 14, 21-23, 25, 26, 53, 43, 47, 49, 51, 57, 61, 101, 111 Milton, John, 63 Areopagitica, 53, 88 Paradise Lost, 65 n.17, 73-76, 143 Samson Agonistes, 13, 143 Monod, Paul Kléber, 132, 134 n.11 Monsarrat, Gilles D., 55 Nairne, Thomas, 67 North, Dudley, 29, 62 Novak, Maximillian E., 22 n.22, 92, 93, 99, 156 Nussbaum, Felicity, 142 Owens, W. R., 52; see also Furbank, P. N. passions, the, 3-4, 8, 16, 20, 23, 36, 46, 53, 55-56, 59-62, 64, 79, 81, 85-89, 120-21, 163 Pateman, Carole, 12-13, 149 n.48 Patten, Robert, 133 n.5, 134-35 patriarchy, sex / gender, 12-13, 138, 143, 144, 149, 153-54, 163, 165 Philips, John, 72-73 pleasure, 3, 21, 25-26, 29, 44, 46, 68, 70, 74, 76-77, 82, 89, 97, 117, 125, 157, 163 Pocock, J. G. A., 4-5, 16-17, 63, 78, 155, 158

196


politeness, 6-7, 14, 24, 26, 43-45, 47, 57, 84, 159, 163; see also refinement Pollack, Ellen, 146 Pope, Alexander, 120 Porter, Roy and G. S. Rousseau, 159 rationality, 8-9, 11, 23, 39, 56, 60-61, 82, 87, 93, 102-104, 107, 109-110, 111-12, 121, 132-33, 136, 156-58, 163-64; see also reason reason, 8, 40, 59, 82, 83, 85-88, 102-104, 105, 110, 121, 133, 142, 163; see also rationality refinement, 7, 40, 44-45, 84; see also politeness reform, culture of, 6-7, 11, 28, 29-34, 40, 49-52, 91-99, 111-12; see also Societies for Reformation of Manners Richetti, John J., 10 n.32, 92, 112, 139 Roberts, David, 131 Robinson Crusoe Adam, 59, 65, 69-70, 70-78, 86, 90 agency, 59-61, 74, 78 civic humanism, 67, 83, 85, 90 colonialism, 59-70 criticism and myths of masculinity, 9-10 cultivation, 59, 63-66, 69-75, 77, 81-82, 90 discontent, 60-63, 79, 87, 88, 89-90 Eden, 64-66, 70-71, 74-76 Eve, 59, 63, 74-77, 88 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (part two), 80-90 feminised landscape, 63-64, 66, 74-80 Georgic mode, 70-74, 81 hypochondria, 60, 80-85 irrationality, 59-60, 64, 81-82, 87, 90 labour, 61, 67, 69, 71-73, 75, 78, 80-85 The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (part one), 59-79, 89-90 luxury, 59, 61, 66-68, 79, 82, 84-85, 88 middle station, the, 59, 61-62, 82 New World, the, 64-69 passions, the, 59-62, 64, 79, 81, 85-89

retirement, 70, 74-75, 79, 82-84, 87-90 Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 73, 87 n.81, 88 stoicism, 59, 68, 85 virtue, 61, 65-67, 73, 75, 80, 83, 85, 88-90 Rogers, Pat, 71 n.34, 92 Rousseau, G. S., 128, 159 Rutherford, Jonathan, 2, 161 Sardanapalus (king of Assyria), 33, 34, 164 Schonhorn, Manuel, 93, 115 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 6, 11, 13 n.40, 40, 127, 144 Seed, Patricia, 69 self control, 3, 8, 24, 46, 54-55, 79-80, 82, 102, 164 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 54, 116-17, 128-29, 163 Shakespeare, William, 136 Sherman, Sandra, 17 n.6, 21 Shewen, William, 126 Shower, John, 50 n.6, 94-95 Sill, Geoffrey, 53, 60 Societies for Reformation of Manners, 6-7, 29, 33-34, 35, 49-52, 92-99, 101-2, 107, 108; see also reform, culture of sodomy, 6, 11, 49, 94, 128-29, 163 Sontag, Susan, 97 Soper, Kate, 77 South-Sea Bubble, 4, 141, 155-56, 158 Speck, William and T. C. Curtis, 102 Spectator, The, 116, 119, 126-27 Spenser, Edmund, 75 spleen, 81-82 n. 68, 103; see also hypochondria; vapours Sprat, Thomas, 100 Starr, G. A., 73, 92, 132 n.1 status, 5-6, 11, 17, 20, 25-26, 40-42, 48, 61, 93, 99-101, 131, 134-36, 137, 156, 159-60, 163, 164, 165; see also class Steele, Richard, 47, 54, 56 Stillingfleet, Edward, 29, 103, 104 stoicism, 7, 49, 52-57, 59, 68, 85, 100, 108, 163

Index Switzer, Stephen, 83-84 Sydenham, Thomas, 84 n.74, 104 Taylor, Jeremy, 117, 119, 123, 126 Telemachus, 127 Tindall, Matthew, 113, 129 Tosh, John, 2, 93 trade, 3-5, 15-17, 20, 22-37, 50, 113, 119, 135, 154, 156, 163, 164 tradesmen credit, 16-17, 19, 20 effeminacy and foppery, 16, 18, 24, 27 honesty, 20 status, 18, 19 n.12, 20-21, 24-25 subject to the market, 17, 21 virtue, 20-23, 25-26 Turley, Hans, 9 n.20, 87, 114-15, 124 n.36 vapours, 8, 10, 81, 83, 87, 133, 163; see also hypochondria; spleen Wainwright, V. L., 100, 107 n.49 Ward, Edward, 39 n.1, 67 Watt, Ian, 9, 115 n.10 Watts, Isaac, 55, 62

197

wealth, national, 23, 27, 30, 34, 62, 67 wealth and riches, men’s individual pursuit of, 3, 5, 16, 25, 27, 29, 42, 80, 86-87, 90, 114, 119, 128, 129, 140, 155-56, 158, 160-61 Weber, Max, 9, 21 William III (king of England), 34, 49, 94-96, 133, 138 and Queen Mary, 34, 49 Williams, Carolyn D., 8, 13 n.40, 39 n.3, 127 n.46 women, 12-13, see also femininity domestic and political hierarchies, 144-50 emblems of nature and landscape, 64, 66, 75, 77, 81, 84 n.74 gender definition, 2, 3, 93 hypochondria, 81, 104 male friendship, in relation to, 119, 126-27 men becoming like, 1, 33, 42, 43 sexuality, 139-50, 156 Woodward, Josiah, 94 Zimmerman, Everett, 106, 109 Zuckerman, Michael, 67

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