Daniel Defoe

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Categoria:	Letteratura Inglese
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Data:	28.05.2007
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Daniel Defoe
His life
Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 into a family of Dissenters, a Protestant sect which refused the authority of the Church of England. He was educated at Newington Green, in a one of the best Dissenting Academies, where he studied practical subjects such as modern languages, economics, geography, besides the traditional ones. He started to write in Whig papers; as a journalist his greatest achievement was The Review, periodical which he published two or three times a famous and well-paid intellectual by writing political essays and pamphlets till the reign of Queen Anne, but the queen didn’t approve this, had him arrested, tired and imprisoned. He denied his Whig ideas so as to be freed and became a secret agent for the new government. When he was about sixty, he started to write novels, which were very successful. In 1719 he published his first novel, Robinson Crusoe, which was followed by Capitan Singleton (1720), the voyage story of a captain who becomes a pirate. In 1722 he published Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack. Thanks to the money earned with these works, he could afford a comfortable standard of life. He died in 1731.
The structure of novels
Defoe’s long narratives are fictional autobiographies always pretending to be “true” stories through the biographical details and memories provided by the protagonist. The structure of the novels is characterised by a series of episodes and adventures held together by the unifying presence of a single hero. Defoe’s method of retrospective first-person narration and the fact the author’s point of view mainly coincides with the main characters, affect characterisation.
Characterisation
The characters are presented from the inside and through their action rather than from the outside. They usually appear in isolation, either physically like Robinson Crusoe, or socially like Moll Flanders, in their struggle for survival or daily bread. Defoe is generally regarded as a father of the English novel, the representative of a new social class that wanted to see its life and ideals portrayed in literature. His narrative technique was original and became the basis for the development of the realistic novel.
Robinson Crusoe
The plot
The main character in Defoe’s novel is Robinson. He was born in 1632 of a German father and an English mother. At the age of nineteen he decides to leave his home, his family and his prospect of a comfortable life for a series of voyages. His first voyage leads him to Guinea and then back to England. During his second voyage he is captured by Moorish pirates but manages to escape and is finally rescued by a Portuguese ship and brought to Brazil. During this journey he is shipwrecked on a desert island where he will remain for twenty-eight years. The rest of novel tells how he gradually rebuilds the kind of society of his country. To maintain an ideal contact with his motherland, he writes a diary where he records his experiences and debates contemporary ideas addressing himself, the reader and even God. After twelve years of solitude he decides to find the human footprint on the shore, and he finds the cannibals and decides to attack them, but they escape and leave one of their captives whom Crusoe calls Friday, after the day of his rescue. Robinson teaches him English, as well as the reading the Bible. When other cannibals land on the island, Robinson and Friday attack them and free two of their prisoners, one of whom turns out by Friday’s father. The novel ends with the Robinson’s return to England.
The new middle-class hero
The new hero belongs to the middle class, “the middle states” which his father praises as “the best state in the world”. What Robinson has in common with the classical heroes of travel literature is his restlessness, the search for his own identity in alternative to the model provided by his father.
The island
The island is the ideals place for Robinson to prove his qualities, to demonstrate that he deserved to be saved by God’s Providence. Secondly, on the island Robinson organises a primitive empire, thus becoming the prototype of the English coloniser: his stay on the island is not seen as a return to Nature, but as a chance to exploit and dominate Nature.
The individual and society
The society Robinson creates on the island is not an alternative to the English one, on the country it can be read as an exaltation of 18th-century England and its ideals of mobility, material productiveness and individualism. Defoe shows that thought God is the prime cause of everything, the individual can shape his destiny thought action.
The style
Defoe concentrates his description on the primary qualities of objects, especially solidity, extension and number, rather than on the secondary ones. The language is simple, matter-of-fact and concrete to reinforce the impression of reality conveyed by the first-person narration.

Summary of a part of the novel
When Robinson wakes up, the heaven was clear and the sea was calm. The storm was ended. Because of the flood ride, the ship had been lifed off in the night from the sand bank where it has laid, going adrift mean the rock where Robinson, the day before, had been tossed. It was far from him about a mile and it has seemed immobile on its keel. Robinson decided to go there. So he climbed down the three and saw that there was a neck or inter of water between him and the boat, which was about half a mile broad. So he came back and decided to go on the ship to look for something to ear.
After midday the sea was calm and the ride was law. Robinson has trough crying, about his travelling friends. They were dead; instead he was alive and alone. Then Robinson decided to go on the ship. At the beginning he turned twice around it, but then he saw a rope. Then he saw that the ship was bulged and trough it has entered the water. The bird was dry and things that was there were untouched. He began to look for some room, that he found some biscuits. Then he began to think about a way to bring hot things on the islands. There weren’t ships, so he decided to create a raft using two trees and some plants and put them together thank to a rape. It was seated to sustain Robinson’s weigh, but not a great weigh. So Robinson reinforced it and than he returned it and on island. So Robinson decided to use it to climb the ship.
Moll Flanders
The plot
Moll Flanders was born in Newgate prison, the daughter of a thief sentenced to death. When her mother manages to have her sentence changed and she is transported to Virginia, Moll is brought up in the house of the Mayor of Colchester. She is very pretty and clever and, at the age of fourteen, she is sent into the service of a rich family. After being seduced by the eldest son of this family, she goes through five marriages, as children, becomes a prostitute and a thief in order to survive, is imprisoned and deported to Virginia, where she works very hard and becomes a rich plantation owner. The first time she does this, her husband goes bankrupt and leaves her on her own with his blessing to do the best she can and assume he is dead. The second time, she makes a match that leads her to Virginia with a kind and good man who introduces her to his mother. After two children, Moll begins to discern that her mother-in-law is her biological mother, which means her husband is her brother. She flees back to England and goes to live in Bath to seek a new husband. She finally goes back to England where she leads a respectable life. After her repentance she recollects he experiences as examples of mistakes to be avoided.
Major themes
Moll Flanders often causes the reader to question if doing something amoral out of necessity is really amoral at all; still, the reader should not underestimate the twist that her wicked deeds are told in a way to have compassion with her even when she intentionally harms and takes advantage of the kindest people.
The novel as a reflection of its time
The story develops around several characters and described urban society. Moll is Crusoe’s female counterpart: like Crusoe’s, her reflections have an economic basis and are carried on in strict logical sequences. She has many of the traits that are usually regarded as middle class; she is obsessed with gentility and keeping up appearances, she is characterized by restless individualism; she regards poverty as a sin.