"Some Such Thoughts as These Occurred to Me"

Wikipedia has been kind enough to offer me the following distinction: “First-person narrations may be told . . . in the guise of a person experiencing the events in the story without being aware of conveying that experience to an audience; on the other hand, the narrator may be conscious of telling the story to a given audience, perhaps at a given place and time, for a given reason.”  I fell to “wikipediaing” first-person narration for these nuances while reading Robinson Crusoe because of its relevance to my willingness to rely on Crusoe as a narrator.  In fact, after reading Crusoe this time around, the difference between a first-person narrator who presents his or her journey to a reader as it unfolds and one who relates his or experiences only after they are complete seems so significant that I am extremely surprised to be unable to find common, distinct names for these respective types of narration.    

Evan R. Davis, in his introduction to the text, notes, in regards to Crusoe’s oft vacillating actions and suppositions, that there are “few apologies for his quick turns of mind.  Crusoe regrets his actions and thoughts frequently enough, but rarely in a terribly sustained way” (31).  As Crusoe’s narration is ostensibly of the latter kind of the two types of first-person narration aforementioned, such oscillation seems rather nonsensical; if Crusoe is relating to us the nature and effects of his twenty-eight years stranded on a remote island only after these years have passed, then should not his ultimate reflections upon his time there be relatively stable?  One perhaps easy way to reconcile this troubling aspect of the novel is through Defoe’s inclusion of Crusoe’s journal, the effect of which, as Davis asserts, is to create “moments when it becomes impossible to know whether we are reading the journal or a later commentary” (23).  I think, however, that there is more to it than this. 

When I first began exploring this idea, I was convinced that, as I went back through my annotations of the novel, I would find many examples of moments when the rescued Crusoe, relating his Strange and Surprising Adventures after this first round of them is over, would offer contradictory bits of wisdom directly to his reader.  I was surprised to find such contradiction in only a few aspects of his narration.  More striking was the fact that, when Crusoe makes strong statements such as “It is God that has made it all” and “[T]his was the Station of Life the infinitely wise and good providence of God had determin’d for me” and “How wonderfully we are deliver’d, when we know nothing of it,” they are usually prefaced with such introductions as “[S]ome such thoughts as these occurred to me . . . ” and “I considered that this was . . . ” and “This renew’d a Contemplation, which often had come to my Thoughts in former Time . . . ” (124; 179; 194).  In short, instead of offering his reader those reflections that could be borne only from the whole of his experience, Crusoe primarily offers us, in his narration, a linear presentation of the thoughts of his less experienced, younger self.  My question in observing this is simply why, then, Defoe chose to construct the novel from the point of view of one so uniquely experienced as the aged Crusoe if his reader cannot then benefit from the wisdom ostensibly gleaned from this experience?  Without the advantage of this perspective, why not simply have Crusoe relate his story “in the guise of a person experiencing the events in the story”?  What does it mean that the Crusoe writing at the end of these adventures is so careful to attribute his earlier conclusions to his earlier thought processes?   One of my many last, lingering thoughts is that somewhere in Robinson Crusoe, an unreliable narrator may be afoot.  (No pun intended.) 

Praise in Excess?

I was surprised, when reading Love in Excess, by many of Haywood's characterizations and representations of Count D'Elmont, and these observations gave me pause to consider, admittedly for the first time, some of the unique creative opportunities available to an author when choosing as her medium the novel. While reading Love in Excess, I often observed a dissonance between the narrator's descriptions of D'Elmont's character and what I would likely have inferred to be the quality of his character based solely on his actions. I believe this troubled me throughout my reading of the novel, but it first became strikingly apparent when D'Elmont, questioned by Frankville regarding his and Melliora's relationship, and in an effort to pacify the concerned brother, "entertained him with the whole history of his adventures . . . disguising nothing of the truth, but some part of the discourses which had passed between him and Melliora that night when he surprized her in her bed" (185). The narrator goes on to offer the following justification of D'Elmont's significant omission: "[H]e was too tender of Melliora's honour, to relate any thing of her, which modesty might not acknowledge, without the expence of a blush" (185). This moment led me to more closely consider Haywood's choice of the novel as her form for, had this interaction instead been represented, for instance, on stage in the form of a dialogue between the two men, D'Elmont's decision to not relate to Frankville the extent of his and Melliora's dalliances would certainly have been perceived as an effort to avoid the further ire of a protective brother. Contributing to this conclusion, too, is D'Elmont's earlier response to Frankville's accusations of impropriety: "That I do love your sister is as true, as that you have wronged me – basely wronged me. But that her virtue suffers by that love, is false!" (181). As he here conveniently fails to mention to Frankville that this statement is true only because his best efforts to the contrary were unsuccessful, it seems quite clear that it is not, despite the narrator's claims, only Melliora's interests D'Elmont wishes to protect. I find it interesting that I, as a reader, doubt the statements of an omniscient narrator; certainly, though, my doubt renders the character of D'Elmont only ambiguous in my view. Were he a character in one of Haywood's many plays, however, and had I only, barring the excessive use of soliloquy, his dialogue and actions, and not the direct characterization offered by the narrator, by which to judge his character, I would likely, by this point in the novel, have denounced him as thoroughly a scoundrel. I am wondering, then, if Haywood's use of the novel form allows her to play a bit more liberally with her characters.

While I, for the moment, am simply intrigued by the possible conflict between direct and indirect characterization perhaps more readily found in the novel than in other literary forms, Manley, in a preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah, takes a firm stance: "['T]is not by Extravagant Expressions, nor Repeated Praises, that the Reader's Esteem is acquired to the Character of the Heroe's, their Actions ought to plead for them; 'tis by that they are made known, and describe themselves" (36-37).

The validity of this statement is perhaps best evidenced by the relatively short scene in Love in Excess in which D'Elmont is represented by the narrator as falling rather victim to the seduction of Ciamara. While the narrator insists that "it was impossible for any soul to be capable of a greater, or more constant passion than he felt for Melliora, tho' no man that ever lived, was less addicted to loose desires," certainly, had this scene unfolded on stage, where an audience would bear witness to D'Elmont's giving "his hands a full enjoyment" of Ciamara's "charms," the purity of his desires would have been rendered far more dubious than they are in the novel (225). It is for moments such as these that Love in Excess leads me to consider the potential in a novel for significant tension between what a narrator pleads for his or her characters and what their actions plead for themselves.

Oroonoko: A Special Slave

Laura Brown writes, "On the face of it, the treatment of slavery in Oroonoko is neither coherent nor fully critical.  The romance motifs in Oroonoko's story, based up on the elitist focus on the fate of African 'princes,' render ambiguous Behn's attack on the institution of slavery" (240).  Certainly Behn's description of Oroonoko's physical appearance,  his skin "not of that brown, rusty Black which most of that Nation are" and his nose "rising and Roman, instead of Arican and flat," coupled with that of his character, "He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, but in all Points address'd himself, as if his Education had been some European court," contribute to what Brown calls "Behn's description of Oroonoko as a European aristocrat in blackface" (Behn 13; Brown 234).  Also speaking to Behn's ambivalence, though perhaps less obviously, are certain emphatic qualifiers she includes in these early descriptions.  When she attests to the nobility of Oroonoko's character, she is careful to interject, "I . . . do assure my Reader," and in her efforts to render his appearance akin to that of Europeans, she stresses that his lips are "far from" those of other Africans.  With these statements, she seems to be apologizing to her audience for her audacity in attempting to humanize a black man or to be reassuring her readers that hers is an effort only to offer an exception to certain perceptions of Africans, rather than an attempt to humanize the entire race.  A simple explanation for this may be that Behn viewed such appeasements as a pragmatic means of combatting slavery from within existing paradigms, of presenting her readers only with that which they were more readily inclined to hear in order to ultimately effect, if slowly, change.  Indeed, Brown writes that Behn's description of a European-like Oroonoko, "does not necessarily change the novella's emancipationist reputation; precisely this kind of sentimental identification was in fact that staple component of anti-slavery narratives in England and America for the next century and a half" (234).  More troubling, then, perhaps, and more puzzling to me in terms of Behn's views, is the way in which she represents Oroonoko's own perception of slavery.

Clearly, Oroonoko has no qualms with the institution as the novella opens, as he is an active participant in the slave trade; all enemies that his army "took in Battel, were sold as Slaves" (Behn 11).  His later speech inciting his fellow slaves to flee reveals his logic in considering such a system just: "'And why . . . shoul'd we be Slaves to an unknown People?  Have they Vanquish'd us Nobly in Fight?  Have they Won us in Honourable Battel?  And are we, by the chance of War, become their slaves?" (52).  To be the losing party in a fair fight, then, is, to Oroonoko, to be deserving of the fate of slavery.  (That he is here disputing the legitimacy of the Europeans' ownership of these slaves raises questions as to how he originally viewed his selling of them, as his committing such a transaction without conceiving of it as a legitimate transfer of ownership does not seem in keeping with his character.  Had his views on the justness of taking enemy combatants as slaves changed through his own experience of captivity, this would be less puzzling, but as his speech makes clear, this is not the case.)  What I was most struck by, however, in what can certainly be seen as anti-slavery work, was Oroonoko's contempt for and disregard of other slaves, even when he himself has become one. 

There is, of course, the fact that, when Oroonoko learns of Imoinda's pregnancy and becomes increasingly anxious for his and his family's freedom, an immediate recourse is to offer Trefy "a vast quantify of Slaves" in exchange for former’s liberation (40).  Even more surprising is the fact that Oroonoko seems to posit slaves as weak, as "he accus'd himself of having suffer'd Slavery so long; yet he charged that weakness on Love alone" (42).  Implied here is the idea that slaves are somehow complicit in their captivity, a view that would certainly do little to engender empathy in Behn's early audiences.  This is reinforced when Oroonoko and the other slaves are overcome by the white militia, and only he, Imoinda, and Tuscan continue to resist.  The actions of his fellow escapees render Oroonoko “asham’d of what he had done, in endeavoring to make those Free, who were by Nature Slaves” (56).  The notion that individuals possessed by a fear for their lives or those of their family, which, if a weakness, is certainly a very common, very human one, deserve to live those lives in servitude to others, would unlikely be of any efficacy in creating anti-slavery sentiment; it suggests that slaves are only such because unwilling to risk their lives for their freedom and are, if Oronooko himself is to be believed, therefore fit to be slaves.  Behn, then, through her representation of Oronooko’s own views of slavery, speaks less of the injustice of enslaving human beings than of the injustice of enslaving human beings of a certain caliber.  Even the title of the novella suggests as much: This is not a story of slaves or of slavery, but of a special slave, a royal slave.