Discussion Topic
Enlightenment Ideas and Characterization in Robinson Crusoe
Summary:
In Robinson Crusoe, Enlightenment ideas are illustrated through the protagonist's emphasis on reason, individualism, and self-reliance. Crusoe's practical problem-solving skills, his focus on personal improvement, and his ability to master his environment reflect the Enlightenment belief in human capability and rational thought.
What are some enlightenment-age ideas in Robinson Crusoe?
If we understand the Enlightenment as valuing reason over received authority, privileging individual thinking and reasoning, and relying on systems of classification (including, prominently, racial classification), then the novel in many ways illustrates enlightened thought of the early 18th century (which may not, in some ways, seem "enlightened" to us).
Robinson Crusoe's religious faith will grow as a result of his island stay, but when he first becomes shipwrecked, he initially responds very rationally to his predicament, by heading out to the wrecked ship before it sinks and gathering all the supplies he can, then carefully planning and setting up his new home. Unlike in Shakespeare's TheTempest, another story of shipwreck on a deserted island, there is no supernatural presence to make sure magical deliverance occurs. Crusoe is forced to survive by his own wits and his own rational calculations. He plans for what he needs to...
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plant, and what and where he needs to build. He uses reason and experimentation to learn to make pottery, and he finds way to keep track of time and measure out spaces. He acts as an economic rationalist, sacrificing leisure to grow barley and to dry grapes into raisins.
Even Crusoe's growing religious faith is enlightened, based on his own reason and interiority, not merely on accepting received authority from other people. As he is left for years without any human contact, he must learn to think for himself.
Finally, when Crusoe does meet and become friends with Friday, a native, the relationship is based on Enlightenment notions of race and hierarchy. While the two do become friends, the relationship is always predicated on Crusoe's sense of his superiority as a white European.
How is Robinson Crusoe characterized as Enlightened?
Robinson Crusoe's exploits are in part inspired by Locke, an Enlightenment philosopher whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding advocated learning through experience and perception. Crusoe deliberately does not heed his father's advice to stay in England and become a lawyer, and is eventually shipwrecked on an island where he must fend for himself. In so doing, he embodies Locke's ideas about how to improve one's knowledge. For example, in Chapter IV, when Crusoe arrives on the island, he goes about trying to saw off parts of the shipwrecked boat for his own use. He says, "But the hope of furnishing myself with necessaries encouraged me to go beyond what I should have been able to have done upon another occasion." His need to survive helps him learn more about his environment.
Locke advocates using one's perception of one's surroundings to develop more advanced abstract thoughts. Crusoe's efforts to rescue practical items he needs on the ship lead him to more abstract thoughts, such as the uselessness of money. Upon coming across money on the ship, he thinks:
I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me—no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap.
In the past, Crusoe has been driven by money to go on a slave ship, but his practical experiences as a shipwrecked sailor lead him to the abstract conclusion that money is useless to him. In the manner Locke prescribes, he understands the world better.
The book also includes the ideas of Hobbes, another Enlightenment figure who believed in absolute monarchy. Crusoe finds an escaped prisoner and names the man Friday. The man immediately becomes submissive to him. Crusoe describes Friday in the following:
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 so long as he lived.
Crusoe is a type of Enlightened despot who still believes in subjugating local people. In this sense, he embodies the Hobbesian idea of the absolute monarch and is an Enlightenment figure in this regard.
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