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Student Research submissions 2015 (2015 research options) |
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Jeanette Smith
28 Nov. 2015
An Examination of Exiles in
Robinson Crusoe
and Lucy
A recurring theme in both colonial and
post-colonial narratives is the story of the exile. According to Michael Seidel
in his article “Crusoe in Exile,” the story of the exile has fulfilled “a
traditional pattern of sustained risk, trauma, and return, a pattern of falling
away, turning around, and coming home” (365). This idea of “coming home” often
generates feelings of nostalgia for the reader. Literature has embraced the
story of the returning exile in texts such as Homer’s
The Odyssey and the Bible’s story of
the prodigal son. But with the emergence of post-colonial literature,
particularly the literature of Caribbean transnationals, the idea of the exile
has experienced a significant change.
In Katherine Sugg and Rey Chow’s article
“‘I Would Rather Be Dead’: Nostalgia and Narrative in Jamaica Kincaid's
Lucy,”
they suggest that “the discursive and ‘real’ landscape
of exile serves the double function of evoking a nostalgia for "home" that
highlights cultural differences in colonial terms of civilization versus native
and of offering the privileged (white male) subject the freedom to roam through
the distant and alienating colonial landscape (where he has many
self-aggrandizing adventures)” (157). Sugg and Chow theorize that colonial
literature has been gendered, communicated from a patriarchal viewpoint of the
exile’s necessity to return home.
For them, “Lucy, in fact, reads as a pitched
battle against the assumptions that shape many of the oppositional narratives of
exile and displacement . . . that have become central to both postcolonial and
Caribbean literary canons: namely, that the alienating experience of ‘exile’
leads inevitably to the celebrations of ‘return’ . . . a function of colonial
history and the controversial role of homeland, of desires for origin and
identity” (Sugg and Chow 156).
Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe represents
the traditional romanticized narrative of an exiled Englishman who, after many
years on an island, returns home. Jamaica Kincaid’s
Lucy, the narrative of a Caribbean
immigrant, on the other hand, defies the traditional narrative where there is
“an insistence on female rootedness in the home and homeland” (Sugg and Chow
160).
By creating a dialogue between Defoe’s colonial novel,
Robinson Crusoe, and Kincaid’s
post-colonial Lucy, these opposing
interpretations of exile can be more fully understood.
Both Crusoe’s and Lucy’s exiles are
self-imposed. Crusoe’s reasons for leaving England are two-fold: he desires to
escape his middle-class family while at the same time he desires for adventures
as a seaman. According to Christopher Flint in “Orphaning the Family: the Role
of Kinship in Robinson Crusoe,” Defoe's novels are “all written in the form of
autobiographical memoirs . . . beginning with an initial loss of or escape from the
family [and] present stark instances of this domestic alienation. In
Robinson Crusoe, for instance, the
hero's adventures occur only because he rejects the secure life proposed by his
parents; he obstinately (and guiltily) plays the part of the prodigal son”
(381).
Crusoe does eventually return home as the repentant
prodigal son at the end of the novel. Lucy, on the other hand, does not return to
her homeland of Antigua. Kincaid’s novel rejects the idea of Lucy as the
repentant prodigal “son.”
Both Crusoe and Lucy begin their exiles with
the rejection of parental authority. In the beginning of the novel, Crusoe
rejects his mundane British life. His father “designed me for the law; but
I would be
satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so
strongly against the will, nay, the commands of my father,
and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends,
that there seemed to be
something fatal in
that propensity of nature, tending directly to
the life of misery which was to befall me” (1.3). Flint asserts that “he
[Crusoe] retreats from the middle station sanctioned by his father to indulge
his wandering inclination perhaps because he cannot view his father’s
comfortable life as anything but a preconcerted history that, instead of giving
him a satisfactory identify, presupposes a convenient identify for him” (387).
Crusoe’s decision to retreat from a “convenient
identity” is one that he frequently questions later in the novel.
Contrastingly, Lucy’s exile from Antigua initiates
less from a youthful rebellion and desire for adventure as from a desire to
escape the colonizing influence of her mother—a mother who, adopting the
patriarchal society in which she lives, treats her sons with dignity but
considers her only daughter as the “other.” Lucy sees her mother, not like Crusoe’s parents
who want the best for their child, but as a traitorous “Mrs. Judas” (30).
Sugg and Chow suggest that “her mother embodies the
voice of a colonizing authority” who tries to make Lucy understand “her ‘place’
in Caribbean society” (158).
While she loves her mother, her anger at not
being treated as a valued individual allows Lucy to establish both a physical
and psychological distance between her and her mother: “I had come to feel that
my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and
I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an
echo of someone” (36).
Both
Robinson Crusoe and Lucy are
narratives of memory.
Crusoe’s memories of home are not filled with
anger as are Lucy’s but are filled with guilt.
He is unable
to dismiss the “loud calls from my reason and my more composed judgment to go
home” (1.32).
Flint states that Crusoe “begins to attribute his
actions to his neglect of origins, blaming himself for his disobedience to his
father and his ignorance of God” (385).
Crusoe
laments that he “began now seriously to reflect upon
what I had done, and how justly I was overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my
wicked leaving my father's house, and abandoning my duty. All the good counsels
of my parents, my father's tears and my mother's entreaties, came now fresh into
my mind; and my conscience, which was not yet come to the pitch of hardness to
which it has since, reproached me with the contempt of advice, and the
breach of my duty to God and my father” (1.13).
One way that Lucy defies the traditional exile
narrative is in the way her memories materialize in opposition to Crusoe’s. Hers
do not center on feelings of guilt even though they are often “heavy and hard”
because they are filled with hatred (Kincaid 25). She fights a “pitched battle”
to discard her painful memories of Antigua. We see this when her employer Mariah
remarks, “What a history you have,” and Lucy replies, “You are welcome to it”
(Kincaid 19).
Her battle is difficult because everything in
America reminds her of home. There is a particular moment in the novel when
seeing daisies brings back the painful memory of being forced by her teacher to
recite the Wordsworth poem To the
Daisy.
Veronica Majerol states in “Jamaica Kincaid’s
Lucy and the Aesthetics of
Disidentification” that when Lucy remembers this childhood memory, she becomes
troubled because she “is obliged to assume a position of privilege—that of a
white, western, male poet—that is in contention with the reality of her own
circumstances – i.e. she is a black ‘Third Word’ female . . . the insistence that
she speak the poem as the poet forces her to duplicate the conditions of
colonization” (22).
In
contrast, Crusoe has no qualms about assuming a position of the colonizer and
goes about duplicating the conditions of colonialism on his island. Jason Pearl
states in “Desert Islands and Urban Solitudes in the Crusoe Trilogy,” that when
Crusoe begins his adventures, “the national borders dissolve, and Crusoe plunges
into—or is plunged into—the very world of power relations that he left
behind. The choice is frightening clear to him: kill or be killed, dominate or
be dominated” (132).
Patriarchal power relations are never far from
Crusoe’s mind in the novel. Flint asserts that that even before his shipwreck,
Crusoe seeks paternal surrogates such as the master of the first ship who
exhorts him to go back to his father or he “will meet with nothing but Disasters
and Disappointments till your Father’s words are fulfilled upon you” (389).
While Crusoe refuses to learn from his biological father, his surrogate
shipmaster father
“took delight to instruct me, I took
delight to learn” (2.5).
According
to Flint, God also becomes a type of surrogate father to Crusoe: “The paternal
relation that he rejects when he abandons his father’s house is partly
recovered, though only on a symbolic level, with his acquiescence to the Divine
Father” (390). Though Crusoe begins to depend on God while on the island, it is
also clear that he can treat him, like his biological father, as someone he
cannot fully trust. For instance, when Crusoe sees human footprints
on the island, he decides that God is not trustworthy: “Thus
my fear banished
all my religious hope, all that former confidence in God” (11.23).
Crusoe’s
relationships with those on the island, both the natives and God, appear as
constructs of colonialism:
“They
[the cannibals] were national, and I ought to leave them to the justice of God,
who is the Governor of nations, and knows how, by national punishments, to make
a just retribution for national offences, and to bring public judgments upon
those who offend in a public manner” (12.18).
Pearl suggests that Crusoe’s
relationship with Friday is an example of the colonial self and other: “Crusoe
never wants a real companion, an ethically equal other. He wants ‘a Servant, and
perhaps a Companion, or Assistant,’ as though the distinctions were meaningless,
and Defoe complies by reducing Friday, and most other characters, to simple
projections of wish fulfillment” (Pearl 129). Crusoe’s wish in the novel never
strays from wanting to be the one in power—the colonizer.
According to Flint, though, Crusoe rejects his father, “Paternity in Crusoe’s
life turns out to be omnipresent” (390):
“Crusoe transfers his patriarchal attitude toward his
animal 'Family' onto the later residences of the island, especially Friday”
(391).
His patriarchal attitude is best seen when Friday
appears on the island: “His [Friday’s] very Affections were ty’d to me, like
those of a Child to a Father” (Flint 392). Even though he shows some affection
toward Friday, Crusoe views Friday as the colonized “other,” a slave who “in a
little time . . . was able to do all the work for me as well as I could do it
myself” (15.4).
Crusoe’s colonialist attitude also appears in his
dealings with Xury, whom Crusoe claims
“made me love him ever after” (2.25).
Xury
becomes a capitalistic commodity to Crusoe when he sells him to slave owners for
less than the price of his boat. He later regrets his decision, not because he
loves him as he claims earlier, but because he needs a slave for his own
Brazilian plantation: “But
we both wanted help; and now I found, more than before, I had done wrong in
parting with my boy Xury” (3.16).
Later
in the novel, Crusoe considers the idea of “rescuing” one of the savages that
appears on the island, but his motives are less than noble: “[I] fancied myself
able to manage one, nay, two or three savages, if I had them, so as to make them
entirely
slaves to me, to do whatever I should direct them”
(14.11).
The idea of home is dealt with differently in
Robinson Crusoe and
Lucy. Crusoe attempts to construct a
replica of his former home on the island, while Lucy tries to construct a
different kind of home in Antigua.
Immediately after he is shipwrecked, Crusoe
begins to recreate the comfort of his former bourgeois home in England.
He begins managing his household affairs and
goods and starts furnishing his makeshift house.
His island becomes “my
country seat, and I had now a tolerable
plantation“ (11.12). And like a wealthy Englishman, he even secures a country
home:
“Whenever I had occasion to be absent from my chief
seat, I took up my country habitation” (11.12)
Setting up the island as a replica of a British
kingdom, complete with a dog and two cats as his “subjects,” he proudly
announces:
“It would have made a Stoic smile to have seen me and my little family sit down to dinner. There was my majesty, the prince and lord of the whole island; I had the lives of all my subjects at my absolute command; I could hang, draw, give liberty, and take it away, and no rebels among all my subjects. Then, to see how like a king I dined, too, all alone, attended by my servants!” (11.1)
Flint
claims that “The point of these designations is familiarity; Crusoe reacts
almost immediately to a hostile and desolate environment as if he had only to
transform it into an English estate” (387).
Crusoe shows his capitalistic attitude again by
relishing the idea of accumulating wealth:
“I found about thirty-six pounds value in money—some
European coin, some Brazil, some pieces of eight, some gold, and some
silver.
I
smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!"
said I, aloud, "what art thou good for? Thou
art not worth to me—no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is
worth all this heap; I have no manner
of use for thee—e'en remain where thou art, and
go to the bottom as a creature whose life
is not worth saying. ‘However, upon second
thoughts I took it away.” (4.25)
Lucy, on the other hand,
views her former home, Antigua, not as something to be duplicated in America but
as an unbearable prison. Her new home in America would be"something completely different from what you are
familiar with, knowing it represents a haven” (Kincaid 95).
Sugg and Chow claim that Lucy has “a radically
different relation to home and homeland” than traditional narratives—one that
is “pragmatic" (159). Lucy begins to understand that her healing and realization
of a new self would be a day to day happening through the act of creating new
memories.
By distancing herself from her past (something
Crusoe is unable to do), she might “be free to take everything just as it came
and not see hundreds of years in every gesture, every word spoken, every face”
(Kincaid 31). While she has memories of home, she comes to realize that
“sometimes there is no escape, but often the effort of trying will do quite
nicely for a while” (Kincaid 36-7).
Lucy
views the places that she encounters upon first arriving in America, not as
places that she can duplicate her past life in Antigua, but as “lifeboats to my
small drowning soul” (Kincaid 3). For
example, Lucy’s reaction to her first experience with snowfall shows not her
guilt about her past but her guilt about feeling happy in the present. To her,
the snow made the world “seem soft and lovely and—unexpectedly, to me—nourishing. That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was
more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept” (Kincaid 23). She does
not have to change the natural world as Crusoe tries to do, but instead embraces
it and allows its beauty to assist in her healing.
According to Carine Mardorossian in “From
Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature,” “Lucy cannot simply or nostalgically
remember the past as a fixed and comforting anchor in her life, since its
contours move with the present rather than in opposition to it. Her identity is
no longer to do with being but with
becoming” (16). This contrasts with
Crusoe’s attempts at reinventing his colonial past as a way to comfort him.
Lucy’s memories, unlike Crusoe’s, are less memories of regret as they are
memories of mourning , and it is the act of mourning that allows her to create a
new identity for herself.
“Lucy's is a nostalgia that works through
negativity, through feelings and actions of refusal; but that is not to suggest
that Lucy denies her experience of nostalgia. In fact her persistent invocations
of the past and the mother, as well as the motherland, indicate a veritable
embrace of a certain version of nostalgia, one that highlights its deep ties to
the affective work of melancholia and mourning” (Sugg and Chow164).
Lucy’s ability to mourn her past instead of
yearning for it as Crusoe does eventually becomes her “ticket to freedom” (Sugg
and Chow 166).
Lucy’s
relationships with those she meets in America also differ from Crusoe’s
relationships on the island. She, unlike Crusoe, feels no need change or control
others. For instance her relationship with her friend, Peggy is one of mutual
respect and acceptance: “We told each other everything, even when we knew that
the other didn’t quite understand what was really meant” (Kincaid 63). Peggy is
everything Lucy is not, but that doesn’t seem to bother Lucy. This contrasts
with Crusoe’s relationship with Friday, someone he cannot relate to until
he remakes him into an Englishman.
Crusoe gives Friday a new name, attire,
language, and religion. He attempts to remake Friday into a true Englishman,
someone just like him. If he can’t, Friday will always be seen as Crusoe’s
“other.”
Lucy’s relationship with Mariah, her employer,
while difficult in the beginning, later becomes one of mutual respect and
acceptance. Mariah’s approval of Lucy’s relationship with Peggy becomes a
changing point in their relationship: “This was a way in which Mariah was
superior to my mother, for my mother would never come to see that perhaps my
needs were more important than her wishes” (Kincaid 64).
Edyta Oczkowicz, in her article “Jamaica
Kincaid's Lucy: Cultural 'Translation' as a Case of Creative Exploration of the
Past” claims that “Lucy’s independence from Mariah is further assured by her
clear sense of their being inscribed by the colonial dichotomy” of self
and other (148).
But she also states that Lucy “recognizes
that Mariah is also the victim of one of the many variations of colonial
dichotomy, that of man-woman” (149). As Lucy sees Mariah experience the pain of
her husband’s betrayal and abandonment, she finds common ground that allows her
to no longer see Mariah as her colonizer but as her equal. Additionally,
Oczkowicz states, “I look at Kincaid's novel as a form of retracing Lucy's
identity to its post-colonial beginnings and opening for her the possibilities
of creating a new self through actual exploitation of her post-colonial
experience. Although the heroine is not always fully conscious of what is
happening to her, the novel clearly defines the whole process of change that her
person undergoes” (144).
Lucy’s distanced relationship with her mother
changes in the novel as well as she realizes that for many years she “had been
mourning the end of a love affair, perhaps the only true love in my life I would
ever know” (Kincaid 132). Her recognition that she both loves and hates her
mother helps her deal with the separation that she knows must take place. Sugg
and Chow suggest that “In addition, their shared role as black women, the
quintessential 'other' to colonial culture and discourse, positions both mother
and daughter as the uncanny 'echoes' of the colonial order of things. Lucy is
repulsed by reminders of this prescribed position of 'echo' in relation to both
maternal and colonial authority, and tries to reject the daughterly script that
would force her complicity in a colonial regime of racist and patriarchal social
reproduction" (162).
Instead of feeling angry about her past, Lucy begins to experience an anguished
“schism, an amputation” of her past that allows her to view
her American experience as “my past, my first real past – a past that was my own
and over which I had the final word” (Sugg and Chow 166; Kincaid 23).
). In contrast, Crusoe embraces patriarchal
social reproduction which never allows him to create anew a past of his own.
Sugg
and Chow claim that the “dominant trope in these national imaginaries has been
the woman who becomes a 'cold' and materialistic social climber, who 'forgets'
her history and severs her connections to family and community, and who becomes
in the process a paradigmatic figure of colonial self-hatred and cultural
alienation” (160).
Earlier in
Lucy, it does appear that this is
what Lucy is becoming. But Kincaid does not allow this kind of transformation to
continue in Lucy.
Oczkowicz posits that “though abandonment of
her former self is the necessary condition for Lucy's liberation, the consequent
exploitation and appropriation of her past and present are the vital formative
determinants in the process of reinventing her new self. They require a form of
mental re-colonization of her past and present as a means of repossessing them
on her own grounds" (143-4).
Thomas
Kavanaugh brings up an interesting idea in “Unraveling Robinson: The Divided
Self in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe” that
allows another contrast of Crusoe and Lucy to take place. He asserts that
Crusoe’s experience as an exile is “circular and oscillatory, never linear”
because of his “obsessive repetition” (420). Because of his circular mindset,
Crusoe is unable to recreate himself on the island. Instead of looking ahead to
a new future, his prayers are focused on returning home:
“How canst thou be such a hypocrite . . . to
pretend to be thankful for a condition which, however thou may’st endeavor to be
contented with, thou would’st pray heartily to be be deliver’d from” (Kavanaugh
420). Seidel
claims that “Crusoe's accumulated property allows him to return [to England], in
a sense, properly islanded. Perhaps in a still broader sense, Crusoe's
substantial return to his native place allows Defoe to realize the full
allegorical potential of a narrative form in which the fictional subject, both
abroad and at home, is always king . . . . Crusoe's actions at the end reveal a
homeward turn of mind” (371). In contrast, Lucy never prays to be returned home
to Antigua. And while her thoughts do turn to home often in the novel, it is
clear that she is on a linear path toward a happier and more hopeful future.
The differences between the exiles, Crusoe and
Lucy, are clear. Crusoe returns home as the prodigal son, monetarily richer from
his exploitations but still holding on to his “convenient identity”: “I
am a man, an Englishman”
(17.18).
Conversely, Lucy does not return home nor has she
grown rich from the exploitation of others.
Despite the burdens of a bitter history which
she admits may always linger, she begins her quest to create an improved history—this time, one of her own making:
“Those
things had changed, and I did not yet know them well. I understood that I was
inventing myself
. . . I could not count on precision or
calculation. I could only count on
intuition. I did not have anything exactly in
mind, but when the picture was complete, I
would know. I did not have position, I did not
have money at my disposal. I had memory,
I had anger, I had despair.” (Kincaid 134).
Works Cited
Defoe, Daniel.
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719).
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731copo/default.htm
Flint, Christopher. “Orphaning the Family: the Role of
Kinship in Robinson Crusoe.” ELH,
55.2 (1988): 381-419. JSTOR.
Kavanaugh, Thomas. “Unraveling Robinson: The Divided
Self in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 20.3 (1978): 46-432. JSTOR.
Kincaid, Jamaica.
Lucy. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1990. Print.
Mardorossian, Carine M. “From Literature of Exile to
Migrant Literature.” Modern Language
Studies, 32.2 (2002): 15-33. JSTOR.
Oczkowicz, Edyta. “Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy: Cultural
"Translation" as a Case of Creative Exploration of the Past.”MELUS
21.3 (1996): 143–157. JSTOR.
Pearl, Jason H. “Desert Islands and Urban Solitudes in
the Crusoe Trilogy.” Studies in the
Novel, 44.2 (2012): 125-143. JSTOR.
Seidel, Michael. “Crusoe in Exile.” PMLA, 96. 3 (1981): 363-374. JSTOR.
Sugg, Katherine, and Rey Chow. “"I Would Rather Be
Dead": Nostalgia and Narrative in Jamaica Kincaid's
Lucy”. Narrative 10.2
(2002): 156–173. JSTOR.
