Presented by: Baraa Merheb

Engl. 310Literary Theories and

MethodsDr. Mazen Naous

2013-2014

,THE CAPITALIST, A WORKING CLASS EDUCATOR AND MENTOR

THE THREE LITERARY THEORISTS INVOLVED

Terry Eagleton*Literary Theory: An Introduction

Karl Marx*The German Ideology, *The Working-Day, *Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Frederich Jameson *The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially

Symbolic Act

Terry Eagleton views literature as having a more significant role than simply being concerned with “beauty and spiritual uplift” (Reader, 2137). He thinks that literature is not simply “an innocent, pleasurable entertainment” (Reader, 2138), but it has political effects and social significance that reinforce the “dominant social order” (Reader, 2138). It reflects the social conflicts of the lower classes, and even more, it controls the middle and working classes.

“Eagleton asserts that the discipline of literature, like formal religion, is deeply involved in the production of the dominant social order” (Reader, 2137), thus, lining with the Marxist theory in the value it gives to the historical and social connections of literary texts that can “actively produce ideology” (Reader, 2138).

Karl Marx and Frederich EngelsMarxism is mainly interested in the material or economic structure of a society. Marx stresses that “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” (Reader, 648)

Moreover, Marx and Engels argue that “economic and social forces shape human consciousness” (Reader, 648).

HOROUGHGOING

Marx explains that ideology naturally conceals “the reality of class struggle from our perception and consciousness; and insofar as working-class people unconsciously absorb bourgeois values, they are unwitting carriers of ‘false consciousness’”(Reader, 649).

Marx points out that “under capitalism, human relations are increasingly characterized by more or less thoroughgoing alienation, monetization, and commodification” (Reader, 649).

Frederic Jameson

Jameson calls for a revival of Marxism that used to focus on the external connections of literary texts with society, politics, and history, and not just on the texts internal features. He argues that “the political and economic history form the subtexts and allegorical meanings of literary works” (Reader, 1818). He “sees Marxist criticism not as exclusionary or separatist but as comprehensive, assimilating a compendium of sources [social, political, and economic]and thereby achieving greater ‘semantic richness’” (Reader, 1819).

Frederic Jameson

In his interpretation, Jameson refers to three levels:

“Jameson focuses on ‘the individual work… grasped essentially as a symbolic act’” (Reader, 1819).

He also considers the text is “the ideolgeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes” (Reader, 1819).

Finally, Jameson considers the work of literature is linked with the mode of production by “the ideology of form” (Reader, 1819).

As all the above theorists agree in their belief that literature has a far more intriguing function, a more complicated one, than just entertaining the public, I thought it relevant to incorporate them in proving my thesis. Though the character of Crusoe is represented by Defoe as the rebellious young man who sought transcendence from his middle social class, Robinson Crusoe is meant to establish the dominant social order and shape the political and economical ideology of the working class of the time.

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The message conveyed by Robinson Kreutznaer in Robinson Crusoe is a multifarious message. It presents, discusses, and teaches social, political and economical ideas indirectly.

The way of life of the “king” Crusoe on the island and his feelings and thoughts all foster the political policies of the Kingdom at the time the novel was written.

1 When Crusoe left his father’s house, he was the rebellious young man who wanted to transcend his social level. He suffered all kinds of punishments; he survived all the shipwrecks, witnessed the death of all his companions, and lived for more than twenty years alone in exile on a far, uninhabited island.

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This description of the harsh new land and the dangers it has on the European represents the political ideology of the time the novel was written about new conquered lands.

On his first landing on the island, Crusoe acted as if he possessed it. He described his first dwelling as “a thick bushy tree like a fir, but thorny… where I resolved to sit all night, and consider the next day what death I should die…” (Defoe, 26).

However, despite the aggressive nature of the island, Crusoe walked trough and searched it for water which he found and drank. This act represents the raping of the natural resources of the colonized countries by the Europeans. Moreover, Crusoe calls the place he dwelt “my apartment in the tree” (Defoe, 27), illustrating by this the appropriation of the land by the colonizers.

This appropriation of the land was also represented by Crusoe’s killing of the “wild beasts”, the original inhabitants of the island.

He says, “I had no sooner fired, than from all parts of the wood there arose an innumerable number of fowls, of many sorts, making a confused screaming and crying…” (Defoe, 29).

Crusoe confirmed his power over the inhabitants of the island, and scared them out in order to secure himself against these “savages” and “beasts”, thus establishing his superior and dominant social class.

Moreover, the appropriation of the land allowed Crusoe to build a “home (…my tent and my cave)” (Defoe, 53).

He called the place he built there “my house” (32), “my habitation” (34), “my country house and my sea-house” (53) later his castle and fortifications, eventually the whole island becomes his island. He finally expresses it clearly that “I might call myself king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of…” (66)

Moreover, the novel seems to spread important ideas concerning the social structure of a community. A person can transcend his social position and become a wealthier person by working hard and devoting himself to work.

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Defoe transplants this idea within his novel to mislead the working class and make them work harder to realize their dreams of wealth, thus incorporating in the progress and evolution of their capitalist society. He wants the lower and middle class people to feel like realizing their dreams through literature, thus relieved in reality.

Crusoe can do in the novel what many of the working class people can not do in reality. He left his father’s house, and thus his middle class position, to become a wealthier person.

Throughout the novel, we see Crusoe growing wealthier and gaining position. He becomes an owner of plantation, the king, governor, and commander of the island, a slave owner, and a wealthy trader.

“Crusoe and Friday … are depicted as autonomous, rational individuals who voluntarily enter into mutually beneficial trade once they discover the benefits of specialization in production” (Samson, 146).

Crusoe “was the prototypical 'rational man.' He accepted and worked within his limitations, and he exploited all of the resources available to him (including the wreckage of his ship)” (Samson)

“After twenty-five years of solitary existence Crusoe was almost a self-made man” (Samson).

“Once Friday arrived on the island, … Crusoe now had another person who performed labour for him in order to help him achieve his own goals of producing for his subsistence and escaping from the island. This Crusoe, who was dependent on the unpaid labour of another person, had much more in common with men in the real world …” (Samson)

In Robinson Crusoe, by isolating first his hero and then a small group of settlers and returning them to a state of nature, Defoe was attempting to illustrate some of his most basic economic concepts, which for convenience may be divided into three economic principles: a theory of invention, a theory of value and an economic theory of society” (Novak, 473).

“It was necessity alone, Defoe argued, which destroyed sloth and gave birth to society” (Novak, 475).

Crusoe's often-analyzed departure from his father's house is a rejection of the social order into which he was born. His predilection for the sea represents his fascination with a liminal state in which the seemingly rigorous shipboard order required for safety and successful commerce is persistently threatened by nature, by the fragility of social bonds far from home, and by an ambiguous political order (Zimmerman, 506).

extreme responses to cannibalism are often quite properly taken as a reflection of the attitudes undergirding colonialism and thus relevant to Defoe's endorsement of an imperialistic commercial society.

Cannibalism may also, however, be taken as a reflection of Crusoe's fears about the consequences of the untrammeled pursuit of individual wealth” (Zimmerman, 508).

Works Cited

*Novak, Maximillian E. "Robinson Crusoe and Economic Utopia." The Kenyon Review (1963): 474-490.

*Samson, Melanie. "Towards a 'Friday' Model of International Trade: A Feminist Deconstruction of Race and Gender Bias in the Robinson Crusoe Trade Allegory." The Canadian Journal of Economics 28.1 (1995): 143-158.

*Zimmerman, Everett. "Robinson Crusoe and No Man's Land." The Journal of English and Germanic Philosophy 102.4 (2003): 506-529.

Presented by: Baraa Merheb

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