Individualism in Robinson Crusoe

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Name: Joshi Tejasvi A

Paper no:-02

Roll no: 24

Sem: o1

Assignment Topic:

Individualism in Robinson Crusoe

Submitted to:

Department of English

Introduction about the writer

        Daniel Defoe was born in 1660, in London, and was originally Christened Daniel foe changing his name around the age of thirty-five to sound more aristocratic. Like his character Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was a third child.

Robinson Crusoe was based on the true story of a Shipwrecked seaman named Alexander Selkirk and was passed off as history, while Moll Flanders included dark prison scenes drawn from Defoe’s own experiences in New gate and interviews with prisoners. His focus on the actual condition of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Daniel Defoe wrote 100 best Novel. No 2 is Robinson Crusoe. Defoe died in London on April 24, 1731 of a fatal “lethargy” an unclear diagnosis that may refer to a stroke. 

Individualism in Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is both the narrator and main character of the tale. Crusoe narrates in both the first and third person, presenting what he observes. Crusoe occasionally describes his feelings, but only when they are overwhelming. Usually he favours a more factual narrative style focused on actions and events.

Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel. With Robinson Crusoe’s theme of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation.

Defoe deals with the growth and development of individual in solitude. Crusoe becomes ‘everyman’ and readers see the solitude of a human soul. Crusoe becomes the king, the lord, the master, the emperor etc. Crusoe becomes the creator of the world. Defoe believes in religious, political and social freedom of every individual. The novel is the narrative of spiritual and emotional growth within the ‘self.’ Crusoe realizes that he is self-dependent. By living in island Crusoe has to stop wandering. He acquires a sense of place and a sense of self. Crusoe becomes the human representative. The novel helps readers to develop an optimistic outlook towards an unfortunate situation.

The story was to begin with the shipwreck and to end with the rescue: Emile’s book would be less instructive if it ended in the way it actually does with a return to civilisation. Defoe himself gives two main explanations for Crusoe’s solitude. At times Crusoe feels he is being punished for irreligion, at others for his filial disobedience in leaving home in the father adventures he even accuses himself of having ‘killed his father.’ But Crusoe as a man isolated from God. When he was going to the Island than the hero, alone on his Island, deprived of all assistance from his fellows, and nevertheless able to look after himself, is obviously a figure that will enthral readers of all ages. The book’s consequent entertainment value renders palatable its moral and philosophical merits which are Rousseau’s main concern. It actually does with a return to civilisation. Defoe of course, would have been surprised at this canonization of his story. His surprise would have been increased by Rousseau’s other references where Crusoe becomes a sort of John the Baptist, who in his solitude made straight the ways of the final incarnation of the extravagancies of romantic individualism. For Crusoe is after all a ‘solitaire malgrelui’, as Paul Nourrison points out in his Jean-Jacques Rousseau ET Robinson Crusoe. He is an involuntary and unappreciative prisoner of the beauties of nature.

He finds himself on a desert Island, but he has no intention of letting it remain as such Rousseau wanted to flee the complication and corruptions of the town, to take refuge in a solitary pastoral retreat: Defoe’s solution of the dilemma is much more deeply representative of our culture. For the main processes by which man secures food, clothing, and shelter are only likely to become interesting when they have become alien to his common, everyday experience. Defoe’s interest in part of the ideology of a new and vast historical process, the dignity of labour is ultimately the creed of the religion of capitalism. In this religion Marx figures as the arch-schismatic who-like all heretics-became so by taking one part of the creed too seriously and trying to apply it universally and inconveniently.

Defoe’s readers, perhaps, from their own ordinary experiences of solitude, may suspect as much, even if in a less dramatic form. But as they read Robinson Crusoe they forget that isolation can be painful or boring, that it tends in their own lives towards apathetic animosity and mental derangement. Instead, they rejoice to find that isolation can be the beginning of a new realisation of the potentialities of the individual. Their inertias are cheered by a vicarious participation in Crusoe’s twenty-three years of lonely and triumphant struggle. They imagine themselves to be sharing each representative step in his conquest of the environment, and perform with him a heartening recapitulation of humanity’s success story. To all who feel isolated, those who get tired of their Job-and who at times does not-the story has a deep appeal and sends our critical faculties asleep.  Inspired by the theme, and blinded, perhaps, by our wishes and dreams, we forget the subtle ways by which a consolatory unreality has been made to appear real.

Crusoe is not actually a primitive or a proletarian or even a professional man, but a capitalist. He owns freehold, an estate which is rich, though unimproved. It is not a desert Island in the geographical sense; it is merely barren of owners a or competitors, and, above all, the very event which brings him there, the shipwreck, which is supposed to be a retributive disaster, is in fact a miraculous present rendered particularly felicitous by the death of all the other passengers.

The possession of this original stock, which Defoe’s imitators usually retain, on a more lavish and less utilitarian scale, is a major practical unreality overlooked by many of his admirers of the classic idyll of individual enterprise. Yet it alone is enough to controvert the myth’s wishful affirmation of a flagrant economic naivety- the idea that anyone has ever attained comfort and security entirely by his own efforts. This version imposes a severe strain on the credulity of its readers; at least on that of anyone who does not live in philanthropy. But even if we grant the possibility of an isolated man reaching a high technological level unaided, there remain other more drastic difficulties in interpreting Robinson Crusoe as a myth of autarkic individual enterprise-difficulties based on the fact that the Island is, after all, an Island, and that whatever happens there is exceptional and does not seem to happen anywhere else on the Island there is-with one exception to which we shall return-only real wealth. The perplexities of money and the price mechanism do not exit. There, as perhaps nowhere else, a direct relation between production and consumption. That is one obvious reason why we should did not go to the Island, and once there, doesn’t want to stay. The fact that he was forced to be a model of industry does not mean that he likes work.

         In Brazil, he had soon tired even of the tasks of a sugar plantation owner, and it was his quest of the more spectacular rewards of the slave trade which took him to the island. It is only on his Island that Crusoe shows the regulated diligence combined with accurate planning and stocktaking which is so important in modern economic organisation. Defoe knew this theoretically; he dealt with such matters in his economic manuals. But he himself had not been able to carry out his economic ideals into practice. They were realised only on Crusoe’s ‘island of despair’ which is actually a utopia, though of a new and peculiar kind. The new utopia is the answer, not to the easy and expansive yearnings of the heart for individual happiness and social harmony, nor even to Crusoe’s acquisitive instincts, it is the answer only to a very rigorous conception of what kind of life Defoe feels is good for other people. If we leave the Island, we find a very different picture, the other adventure of Robinson Crusoe, and the lives of Defoe’s other heroes and heroines do not point in the direction of the dignity of labour. Defoe knew very well that the normal social conditions of his time caused very different adjustments to the environment. Moll Flanders, Roxana, and colonel Jacque satisfy their needs in ways which no one would propose for imitation. Indeed their exploits demonstrate quite another type of political economy, and point the moral that- to those outside Crusoe’s Island and without his heaven- bestowed capital – ‘La propriete,c’est le vol,’

      The Economic Individualism in Crusoe

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe takes an important place in the history of the English novel, because it was the first time that a continuous prose narrative had been written with the specific aim of creating the illusion of day-to-day living. Crusoe struggles with practical problems. Crusoe is, after all, a British urban citizen suddenly thrust into the wilderness. We can observe that Defoe portray in Robinson Crusoe diverse elements of the individualism firstly, Robinson Crusoe is an illustration of homo economics, that is, economic man that symbolizes the new outlook of individualism in its economic aspect. The story begins Robinson Crusoe is going to his Brazilian plantation, however his ship was wrecked and he was the only survivor in an Island. And in this Island, he regards the Island primarily as a property to be developed for his own use.

Defoe, then, is a realist about the individual and his economic environment. He has no illusions about the dignity of the labours of most people in the England of his day. He expressed their lot in a moving passage which William Morris used as epigraph to his lecture on ‘The art of the people’ The key to the basic motivation of his characters and the hypothesis that best explains their history both apply to Crusoe for he is only a special case of economic man. Homo economics is, of course a fiction. There has long been a conflict about the utility of the abstraction. Briefly, the classical political economists found in the idea of Robinson Crusoe, the solitary individual on a desert island, a splendid example for their system-building. On the other hand, their critics who, like Marx, were concerned to prove that economics can be a guide to reality only when it is a historical and social science, have denied the relevance of Robinson Crusoe to any realistic economic thinking.

The protestant ethic involves a through systematization of behaviour according to rational norms of personal profit is very similar, and so is Tawny’s picture of the acquisitive society composed of individuals pursuing their individual interests without any recognition of social or moral solidarity. But these theoretical formulations had long before been anticipated by literary realization. Crusoe treats his personal relationships in terms of their commodity value. The Moorish boy, Xury, for example, helps him to escape from slavery and on another occasion offers to prove his devotion by sacrificing his own life.

Defoe’s view of the individual was too completely dominated by the rational pursuit of material self-interest to allow any scope either for natural instinct or for higher emotional needs. Even when Crusoe return to civilisation, sex is strictly subordinated to business. Only after his financial position has been fully secured by a further voyage does he marry, and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction. It is therefore no accident that love plays a very miner part in Crusoe’s own life, and is eliminated from the scene of his greatest triumphs. One could illustrate the ideology of homo economics at much greater length from Robinson Crusoe. Everything is measured from the rational, a social, and anti-traditional standards of individual self-interest, and some of the results are not pleasant the need to obscure the regrettable social and psychological corollaries of the rise of economic individualism must explain much of the very general disinclination to see the darker side of Defoe’s hero.

              To conclude, the elements of the individualism, showing in Crusoe, Defoe represents exactly the kind of attitudes, which were eventually to make Britain the richest country in the world and lead it to establish a vast empire, and illustrates the attitudes of a eighteenth century British Citizen. Indeed, Crusoe is one of the classics of world literature, which portrays that prudence rather than heroism is the key to hero’s actions. He is, in fact, the first significant example in English literature of the prudential hero, or, to it another way, the economic individualistic hero.

             “Robinson Crusoe” was the great early document of radical individualism, the story of an ordinary person’s practical and psychic survival in profound isolation. The novelistic enterprise associated with individualism. The search of or meaning in realistic narrative-went on to become the culture’s dominant literary mode for the next three centuries. “New economy by reimagining the social order as a collection of self-reliant individuals with a direct relationship with God, but by 1700, as the British economy thrived, it was becoming less clean that individuals needed God at all. It’s true that, as any impatient child reader can tell you, many pages of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ are devoted to its hero’s spiritual journey. Robinson finds God on the Island, and he turns to him repeatedly in moments of crisis, praying for deliverance and ecstatically thanking him for providing the means of it. And yet, as soon as each crisis has passed, he reverts to his practical self and forgets about God; by the end of Robinson Crusoe’s vacillations and forgetfulness is to see the genre of spiritual autobiography unravelling into realist fiction.” The mode of the book is a “true” story, and in the details Defoe makes us experience the sweat and isolation, the grinding solitude of existence. The images are so vivid that they have stayed with us for centuries since, from “Gilliganls Island” to “lost.” Could we survive on our own? Crusoe says no-in fact he never would have survived if not for God, and never could have made it off the Island were it not for the mishaps with a mutinous crew that finally finds him. Modern sensibilities find something familiar in Crusoe, because no matter the circumstances, everyone knows loneliness, even if great crowds. The piety of the castaway may have been expected in his day, but Crusoe learns more, such as the inscrutable ways of God, which find renewal even in certain destruction.                    

Crusoe’s merits are combined with a stolid and inhibited self-sufficiency which is disastrous both for the individual and for society. That is Crusoe’s hubris- a defect not unlike Rousseau’s ‘hypertrophie du moi’ there is, even on Crusoe’s own showing, very little content or peace in this way of life. The bitterness of isolation as the primordial fact repeatedly moves Defoe to a great fervour of communication. One of the passages seems a particularly moving commentary on the isolation which the pursuit of individual self-interest creates in the human spirit.         

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