Leah Guillory

October 4, 2009

Revised October 7,2009

            Crusoe’s and Lucy’s Happiness

            The lack of ability to accept circumstances in life that they both view as stifling, together with their need for experiencing something bigger - allowing for full self-expression - whether financially or creatively (something outside the realms of possibility for their parents) forces both Crusoe and Lucy to act in rebellious response to their child-rearing and set out on a journey to change their lives imposed by restrictions for change, movement and improvement. That is to say, Crusoe and Lucy, assert their own authorial say-so;  one character, in opposition to colonization, albeit post; the other character, as colonizer.         

            To begin, Lucy tells the story about a nineteen-year-old post-colonial au pair  from the Caribbean who meets the United States naïvely and feels bamboozled; because of this, we see Lucy naturally experiencing the difficulty of opening herself up to a new culture when the innocent pale-yellow sun deceives her into thinking that it is “the sort of sun…she was used to,“ thus tricking her into wearing an unsuitable dress: “It was all wrong. The sun was shining but the air was cold…but I did not know that the sun could shine and the air remain cold; no one had ever told me” (5). This hidden incident sets the tone for Lucy’s life in America who she views as wronging others and whose unfair oppressive practices has left her out of the know - an understanding of life as her colonizers understand it: “[she is] no longer in a tropical zone and [she feels] cold inside and out” (6-7).

            It follows then that Lucy, resistant to America, “[has] to smile with [her] mouth turned down at the corners,” and so we are not surprised when Mariah, taking great pleasure in showing Lucy daffodils despite the fact that she knows that Lucy might not like them as much as she does, causes Lucy to remember a poem about daffodils that she was forced to memorize in her British dominated colony. Lucy’s contempt toward Mariah and Mariah’s love for the  daffodils, a flower that never grew on Lucy’s island even though she was forced to act as if it did, forced to improvise under British rule, underscores her indigenous anger toward her colonizers from whom she rebels, setting in motion Lucy‘s inability to endure being controlled again by someone, namely, Mariah - since their outlooks on life basically boils down to the fact  that where [Mariah sees] beautiful flowers [Lucy sees] sorrow and bitterness” (30).

            Moreover, Mariah is unable to see the colonizer’s role in Lucy’s “unfulfilled promise of repair” that Kinkaid describes in A Small Place considering the fact that she is a woman for whom everything has always come easily, a woman who is descended from colonizers who views her life and the lives of the people in her circle her as sunny and cheerful. Her unawareness that her easy life is linked to the uneasy lives of colonized others is the reason she does not know that her husband wants to leave her but tricks her into doing it herself.  Sadly, Mariah is left like a “pale-yellow sun, as if the sun had grown weak from trying too hard to shine” (5).

            In contrast, nothing for Lucy has come easily, but perhaps because her life oppositely mirrors Mariah’s, Lucy’s quest for making her life better does not include men; the men in Lucy’s life are not like Crusoe who is an ingenious, creative designer of his life - and none has the ability to help her make her life better. Furthermore, she is especially angry at her father for being the misogynistic man that he is and at her mother for putting up with him, for allowing herself to end up widowed without any money. In Lucy’s view, men are ubiquitous “swine” who are not to be trusted since she believes their primary motivations behind their actions is to satisfy their own needs as she wants to explain to Mariah: “Your situation is an everyday thing. Men behave in this way all the time. The ones who do not behave in this way are the exceptions to the rule” (141).  

            When the novel concludes, Lucy no longer naïvely confronts her post-colonial world even though her negative feelings have not yet subsided; thus, when she takes out a blank journal that Mariah has given her and writes her name after she moves out of Mariah’s house, her shameful tears momentarily blur her acute awareness of herself as worthy, leaving the reader to wonder whether or not she will experience satisfaction on her journey toward independence if her unworthy, negative feelings continue to go along with her for the ride.

            In a similar way, Crusoe's debate with his father at the beginning of the novel, although it may seem to some more like a lecture, extends the question that Lucy raises: if one can not be happy with one's given lot in life, should one cut himself a different path. Clearly, Crusoe's father attempts to persuade him to be satisfied with being born into the middle class's comfortable situation that he didactically refers to as the “upper Station of Low Life” and remain there since it was “ the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness” (5). Crusoe, it seems to me, clearly refutes his father’s message about Happiness since we see him making his own life, albeit with difficulty; but although, Crusoe does not refute his father dialogically, when we consider all that he encounters, does he not apparently assume that happiness is not without “Miseries and Hardships, [not without] the Labour and Sufferings of the mechanik Part of Mankind, and [not] not embarrass’d with the Pride, Luxury, Ambition, and Envy…” (5)? To illustrate, Crusoe convincingly proves that perseverance pays off when he spends months building a canoe, and months practicing pottery, staying with both until things turn out well despite the difficulty involved.  Additionally, his resourcefulness in building a home, a country house among other things from not much of anything speaks volumes about Crusoe‘s determination to make it. Likewise, Crusoe’s shows us that his readiness to take on new business ventures is no less admirable as his knack for staying alive and living well. Crusoe, in fact,  manages to make it rich in Brazil despite the fact that the hasn‘t been there for twenty-eight years, not to mention the gold he still has, leaving  the island a very rich man. 

            In effect, Lucy goes to New York City to work as a nanny in an effort to escape her severely restrictive life that her mother seems to be not bothered by, and Crusoe goes to sea for economic adventure  despite his controlling father who demands that his son live an economically motionless life. Both characters, however, gradually but bravely go beyond their immediate “states” of knowledge in the direction of creative and economic transnational awareness.

            To conclude, studying Robinson Crusoe as colonial literature has been an enjoyable but challenging  task. I ‘ve never read his story before now which comes as a surprise to me since it seems that most people know this story. What’s funny though is that many people do not discuss the fact that Crusoe was a slave trader. When they do talk about it, I mostly here them say that slave trading was simply what one did in the eighteenth century to nurture one’s economic development. I concede though that Slavery in Crusoe is a problematic subject to discuss; on the other hand, I whole-heartedly endorse his clever ability to survive; essentially, one could read Crusoe as a how-to survive the current economic crisis effecting people transnationally.

            As a final point, it would seem that future economic success belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - a mind like Crusoe’s: imaginative - inventive - big picture thinking. Modern-day Crusoe’s who are creatively adroit will reap the richest rewards in our emerging world; that is, if, unlike Lucy, they can relinquish the contempt they have for others and most importantly themselves.