Veronica Ramirez

Dialogue between Texts: If Only Lucy Could Talk to Crusoe...

How does reading about Lucy’s sexual exploits against the backdrop of Crusoe’s tales of slave trading help a student studying Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature? Well, at first I wasn’t very sure, and it was one of the reasons why I was excited to take this course.  Dr. White’s webpage for the course explained that “Classical texts of First-World colonialism are read in dialogue with Postcolonial texts from the Developing World” and having read Lucy in a previous course, reading Lucy with Robinson Crusoe seemed to be an odd match.  Reading the texts in dialogue has been instructive and had a powerful effect, more than the first time I read Lucy, no offense to the Minority Literature Class.  This time has been a different experience having the two texts, one an 18^th century novel and another a late 20th century novel, talk to each other and it has the added bonus of mediating the old cannon and new cannon of Literature ( Obj. 1a) .

Reading texts in dialogue allow you to trace the common subject thread, in this case colonialism, and see it in its own historical and political environment and see the same subject within a different text.  Intertextuality also allows comparisons and analyzes of common themes across the two texts and thus can detect colonialism inspired attitudes in both texts. While Crusoe did not have direct contact with Lucy’s ancestors, the texts can still be looked at from a Historicism angle by looking at Colonial history and Crusoe together, and then Lucy as a modern response to them in Post Colonialism.

Understanding the socioeconomic viewpoint of colonization during Defoe’s time turns Robinson Crusoe into a complex story dealing with colonizing and slaves rather than the basic story of a shipwrecked mariner from York.  Without knowing his previous dealings with land in Brazil, and his slave trading adventures, all you get is a hardworking man struggling to survive. If you look at all of his previous dealings with slaves and trade, and keep Kincaid in the background, the focus is not a single man’s survival but the empire’s influence throughout the novel.

 Crusoe after his initial worries about survival, calls himself king and is in search of natives to make slaves out of.   Even when Crusoe finds his way home, he returns to the island, in  “I revisit my Island”  Crusoe calls the island “my new colony”, and states the he “saw [his] successors the Spaniards.” Crusoe mimics the British Empire’s act of the partitioning  of India shown in class links, as he “shared the island into parts with them, reserved to [himself] the property of the whole, but gave them such parts respectively as they agreed upon;” and then he “left them there.”  Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnahan exhibited the same imperialistic thinking in “The Man Who Would be King.”  Dravot explains his plan for the future, “I won't make a Nation,' says he.  I'll make an Empire!” ....They're the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they've grown to be English.” (2.42)  There is never a thought for the effects on the colonized or a concern for the future of the native inhabitants by Defoe or Kipling.

By reading Robinson Crusoe and The Man Who Would be King, you see what a colonizing attitude can achieve, things such as wealth, slaves, and kingdoms, and when you read Kincaid you see all the damage along the path to success by others. The casualties of these exploits are hidden in the details of the literature by the colonizer, but when books are read in dialogue with each other, as Buxton in her essay “The Dialogue between Colonial and Postcolonial Texts” states, “it allows formerly colonized people to relate their own stories rather than relying on the colonizer’s version of their history.” Kincaid in “A Small Place” can force the colonizer to see the damage as “millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods.... and worst and most painful of all, no tongue” (94).   Lucy in turn, rises above a coming of age story, to a woman’s retelling of what the colonizer has done to her culture, her spirit and her identity

Even though Lucy and Crusoe seem to be exact oppositions to one another, they do have things in common; They are transnational migrants and Lucy goes on to exemplify Objective 1b. To extend the colonial-postcolonial transition to a contemporary third wave of transnational migration. Both Lucy and Crusoe are isolated in a distant place that is not their original home, yet represent the opposite sides of the spectrum, of the colonizer and the colonized.  These designations, become part of their view of the world, as the self and other, and I believe drive the characters to do what they do in the texts. 

One more way that Lucy and Crusoe are related to one another, is that they can be discussed in terms of imperialistic attitudes in their personal relationships, such as relationships with the other sex.  Crusoe mentions in  “I Revisit My Island” his marriage, his children and his wife’s death, all within a paragraph, noting nothing but this and his future travel to the East Indies.  In contrast, Crusoe is more detailed in describing delivering supplies to his new colony, as he states that along with “supplies , [he] sent seven women, being such I found proper for service or for wives to such as would take them.”  Also he promised the English men, that if they would “apply themselves to planting” he would reward them with “some women from England, with a good cargo of necessaries.” 

Crusoe treats women as part of the colonizing and trade culture within which the novel is set.  The women are sources of sex, they can be traded as goods, and bare children that will become labor to improve Crusoe’s island.  While reading “A Small Place” I found something that refers to slave trading, but mirrors Crusoe’s treatment of women and especially his wife, “The human beings they traded, the human beings who to them were only commodities, are dead” (93). 

On the other hand, Lucy goes into great detail about the personal relationships she has been in and her personal thoughts about each one. All of the men in Lucy are directly tied to either Lucy or Mariah or her mom, their effects on these women are highlighted, but the men themselves don’t stand out as individual characters.  Lucy goes out of her way to distance herself from, and remain superior to the men in her life. This idea that she must remain unattached and be the boss comes from living as a subordinate to another country that colonized her people. Louvier summaries Lucy perfectly by stating that it is a story about a “personal struggle to become a woman and the story of a post-colonial West Indian struggling to understand a world that refuses to recognize the impact of colonization”.  This fits in with Objective 3, but instead of being restricted to America, I believe that amongst these four texts by Kincaid, Kipling and Defoe, it applies to all post-colonial countries.

Lucy has a general distrust for men inculcated from her youth in Antigua   “Everybody knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people. It was why men like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things-they need a guide....If the guide gives them advice they don’t like, they change the guide.”(141) Lucy feels great hatred for and repressed by men, and sees sex as a freeing experience. She can assert her independence from men.  Lucy and Robinson hold the other sex aloof, Crusoe because he sees women as things to be owned and for their monetary value, and Lucy because she finds men untrustworthy and thinks they want to own her. This is just one example of the connections that come from looking at the intertextuality between Robinson Crusoe and Lucy.  

Reading all of these texts together not only creates a dialogue between the texts and through time but also creates a greater impact with the reader. By reading Defoe, Kincaid and Kipling, it illustrates that colonialism extends throughout the world and its impacts are still felt to this day. The response a reader studying these texts in dialogue rather than as autonomous texts was also strengthened by the presentation that was given by Dr. White about the Colonial-Postcolonial History of Libya. This presentation showed just how recent instances of colonization have occurred, and the issues affecting current nations.

Midterm Sources

·       Camille Buxton  “The Dialogue between Colonial and Postcolonial Texts” 2009

·       Alice Catherine Louvier of Midterm Essays 2009 “The Effect of Colonial Writing”

·       Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe  ( no page numbers in essay,  used online version)

·       The Man Who Would be King by Richard Kipling ( no page numbers in essay, used online version)

·       A Small Place  (selections) by Jamaica Kincaid – handout

·       Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid