I. Robinsonades before the Twentieth Century
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century exploratory stories, as Derrick Moors points out, have three common kinds: “genuine travel accounts,” “imaginary or extraordinary voyages,” and “a third group which might be termed travel liars, or pseudo travellers,” who intend to deceive readers (8).16 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe belongs to the second type, imaginary voyages, which are “not generally written to deceive” but “have . . . done just that” (8). Although the novel describes imaginary voyages, it is not entirely fictional but is partially based on something realistic.
Robinson Crusoe creates the illusion of historical authenticity in its frequent mention
of specific times, locations, and even longitude or latitude. Because of these specific time references and geographical indexes, many readers in Defoe’s time believed that Crusoe’s adventure was a true story. Moreover, the editor (a fake one) also endorses the truth of this story. As stated in the preface to Robinson Crusoe, “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact” (Defoe 3). Yet, the Crusoe story is, in fact, a fictional creation, although it is based on real experiences. In The StrangeSurprizing Sources of Robinson Crusoe, David Fausett traces the sources of the
Crusoe story and reveals that the story is partially a series of accretions of multiple sailors’ experiences of shipwrecks and sea journeys. According to Fausett, the sources include Captain Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712), Captain Woodes Rogers’s and Richard Steele’s account in The Englishman of December 1713, and the Spanish-Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal
16 Moors further points out that imaginary voyages can be categorized into three types: “the ‘fantastic’
voyage,” which is out of the “writer’s imagination”; the “more ‘realistic’ voyage,” which is the extension of the imagination and might be true; and the “satirical or allegorical narrative,” which presents an ideal place, a utopia, or a setting that promotes “non-conformist ideas” (9).
Commentaries (1688) (4-5). Defoe’s fictional character Robinson Crusoe, as most
critics would agree, was mostly inspired by Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish privateer marooned on a deserted island of the Juan Fernandez Islands, where he would live alone from 1704 to 1709 (Fausett 4; R. Phillips 23).17Although the subgenre Robinsonade is named after Robinson Crusoe, it does not mean that Robinson Crusoe is the first work of the subgenre. By the time
Robinson Crusoe was published, there had been works that dealt with similar themes
of the island, shipwreck, and castaways. The theme of the shipwreck in RobinsonCrusoe, generally speaking, comes from “a wider European tradition” that can be
traced back to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (R. Phillips 172n26). Both works not only involve shipwrecks but also the master-slave relationship; Crusoe is to Friday what Prospero is to Caliban.18Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668) is often regarded as “the first Robinsonade prior to Defoe’s work” and “a likely source for Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe” (Moors 9; Boesky 166).
19 This text, expanded “from nine pages to 24 and finally to 31,” has different editions, in each of which Neville “complicated” the plots and “combin[ed] elements of authentic travel and the imaginary voyage” (Carey 26-27). The Isle of Pines, reminiscent of “the Old Testament legend of Noah,” is a utopian story about an English man named George Pine who, along with his four female companions, drifts to an unknown island where they procreate their generations and form a society of their own (Boesky 165).20 In fact, it is a story17 For more details on the Selkirk’s story, see Souhami’s Selkirk’s Island.
18 For a fuller discussion on the comparison and contrast between Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, see Jean-Jacques Hamm’s article “Caliban, Friday and Their Masters.”
19 Some critics argue that Robinson Crusoe’s precursor can even be traced back to an Arabic novel called Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (The Improvement of Human Reason), written in the early twelfth century by Ibn Tufail. See Attar 19-27 and Baeshen’s dissertation entitled “Robinson Crusoe and Hayy Bin Yaqzan:
A Comparative Study.”
20 For more details on how The Isle of Pines retells the legend of Noah, Ham, and Cush, see Boesky 165-66.
within a story. During a sea voyage, Van Sloetten, a Dutch explorer, discovers an island on which inhabitants are naked and are able to speak English. Subsequently, he is greeted and welcomed by a man called William Pine, the grandson of George Pine and the governor of the islanders. Before his death, George Pine, the first settler and founder of the island, wrote a manuscript about his life on the island and hoped one day outsiders would read it, so the history of his people would not be forgotten.
Following the will of George Pine, William Pine reveals to Sloetten his grandfather’s manuscript that describes how the island was populated and where the names of the four tribes on the island came from.
The Isle of Pines is likely to be easily interpreted as “pornotopia” or
“wish-fulfilment” of a heterosexual man (Bruce xli). Whereas Defoe’s Crusoe is a productive worker who devotes his energy to fertilizing the land and enhancing the yield, George Pine channels his energy into reproduction. While stranded on the island, George Pine, around twenty years old upon arrival, has sexual relationships with four women, first with one maid and the other maid, then with the master’s daughter, and finally with a negro slave woman. In his manuscript, George treats the island as a “paradise,” and he himself admits that “[i]dleness and a fullness of everything begot in [him] a desire for enjoying the women” (Neville 197). The four women bear him forty-seven children; thereafter the population of the island increases and reaches 1,789 individuals by the time he has reached approximately eighty years of age. His children are given last names according to their mothers’ surnames;
therefore, his descendants are divided into four tribes—the English, the Sparks, the Trevors, and the Phills.
Like Crusoe, George plays the role of a governor and builds his kingdom on the island. The island serves as a projection of colonial imagination and fantasy. As Amy Boesky points out, The Isle of Pines is a kind of “colonialist fiction” (171). Among
the four women, the master’s daughter, named Sarah English, is favored the most by George and her descendants belong to the tribe of the English, the tribe that
suggestively represents the continuity of English identity and the highest class among the four tribes. In contrast, the descendants of the negro woman impliedly have the lowest social status. The negro woman has no surname; therefore, the name of her descendants, called “the Phills,” comes from her Christian name, “Philippa.”21 The Phills are associated with sin and crime because major riots on the island are
provoked by the Phills. It is at this point that The Isle of Pines intersects with issues of national identity, race, and class. The female negro’s descendants become the
scapegoats of sin and are positioned as the Other that validates the English as a superior race (Boesky 172). As Boesky comments, “Pine’s island becomes a place where English identity can be preserved only through the experience and rejection of the Other” (171). Moreover, although George Pine’s island, as most critics agree, presents a utopian world, it is not a place without chaos. When Henry Phill, the third generation of Phills, rapes the wife of a man from another tribe and stages an uprising, William Pine, the Pine leader who thinks that he is too weak to confront Henry Phill, seeks the Dutch visitors’ assistance and force to quell the riot. Compared with
Crusoe’s island, which presents a relatively pure version of a utopian world, Pine’s island is not an entirely utopian place but rather is a place tinctured with dystopian elements.
During the eighteenth century, Robinson Crusoe, which has been translated into many different languages since its publication, was regarded as suitable reading material for boys and girls to help them develop adventurous and independent spirits in their young minds. For instance, in Emile (1762), Rousseau praises Robinson
21 Bethany Williamson observes that the female negro, among George Pine’s four women, is “the only woman treated as neither ‘person’ nor ‘wife’” (15).