Crusoe’s Shadow: Christianity, Colonization and the Other

Abstract

The rise of the British novel is inextricably linked to the growth of the European colonialist project. In fact, Edward Said has recently suggested that “[w]ithout empire … there is no European novel as we know it” (Culture 69). The fact that Daniel Defoe’s great novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), stands near the beginning of the rapid expansion of the novel as both a literary genre, and reflects the period’s imperialist discourse,¹ prompted Martin Green to begin his study of the relationship between empire and the novel with the argument “that the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energizing myth of English imperialism” (3).² While many studies of Defoe’s novel acknowledge this important link, very few adequately address Crusoe’s encounter with Friday. Such treatments briefly note that this meeting is a significant part of the novel, but then move on to other issues without examining the complex dynamic of their relationship. The expanding body of postcolonial criticism necessitates a proper examination of Robinson Crusoe’s representation of the meeting between a “civilized” European and a “savage” inhabitant of the New World since, as Helen Tiffin argues, this novel “was a part of the process of ‘fixing’ relations between Europe and its ‘others,’ of establishing patterns of reading alterity at the same time as it inscribed the ‘fixity’ of that alterity” (98).