Defoe's America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Defoe's America Shawn Thomson (bio) Defoe's America by Dennis Todd New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii+230pp. US$95. ISBN 978-0-521-19581-2. In William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (1630-50), the servants John Howland and William Butten receive brief but telling mentions that serve to punctuate the extremes of indentured servitude in America. Howland, whose life is saved after he is thrown from the Mayflower, becomes in time a wealthy member of the church. In contrast, Butten was briefly mentioned as the only passenger death of the Mayflower, and a minor one at that. These two figures, one lost in the literal brine of history, and the other, the great populator (eighty-eight grandchildren) and lifeblood of the Boston Brahmins, show the promise of wealth and social position and the stark reality of indentured servitude in the New World. Dennis Todd examines the figural and literal meanings of the indentured servant in Daniel Defoe's novels Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack, and Moll Flanders. Todd flips between the spiritual dimension of the indentured servant's life of imposed discipline, hard work, and persistence and the shifting meaning of the servant within "the social, legal, and economic realities of the New World" (13). Todd's view of these two seemingly oppositional approaches as two sides of the same coin makes this work a rich examination of Defoe's belief in the [End Page 278] indentured servant as a "symbol of the voluntary subordination of the self " (157). In chapter 1, Todd examines how Defoe shapes the emblematic meaning of plantation servitude of Crusoe's years of toil and misery on the island against the actual terms of Jack's indentured servitude in Chesapeake Bay. This chapter is the centrepiece of the work and offers an intriguing reading of Crusoe's spiritual progress "as a narrative of transportation, indentured servitude, and the establishment of a plantation" (10). Todd explores the indentured servant as emblematic of the progress if not the plateaus of Crusoe's life on the island. Todd reads Crusoe's arc in terms of the servant's bondage of "four to five years and freedom dues of specified amounts of food, clothing, tools, and weapons" (8). This stipulation of "freedom dues" serves as Todd's anchor into the spiritual progress and provides a reading of the shipwreck as marking Crusoe's release from servitude to ownership of the plantation. Crusoe represents the figurative servant whose servitude imposes a discipline over his passions that have led him to the island in the first place. Though at first the reading of the shipwreck as freedom dues seems dubious, Todd's argument gains a critical momentum and plays this symbol-specific reading against historical context and significance of indentured servitude in early America. Crusoe's mastery of the object world and heroic individualism, a foundation for Benjamin Franklin's model for the aspiring class of tradesmen and entrepreneurs in colonial America, becomes subsumed in Todd's emphasis on Crusoe's deference and subservience to God. In resurrecting the Crusoe of J. Paul Hunter's The Reluctant Pilgrim (1966), Todd recalibrates the meaning and value of mercy, deliverance, and freedom within this symbolic indenture. My strongest criticism of Defoe's America is its unwillingness to argue against Hunter's reading of Crusoe as an Everyman when in fact Crusoe in this reading is a specific class and circumstance of English immigrant. The indentured servant structures the spiritual narrative and places Crusoe in the context of the literal, albeit fictional, New World of Defoe's imagination. But where Crusoe represents the hard work and toil of indentured servitude and the surrendering of self to the mercy of God, Jack and Moll have a relatively easy time of it in their ascent from their low beginnings as servants to successful landholders. Todd argues that Defoe's view of servitude is anachronistic to both the reality of indentured servitude as a short-term form of slavery and the Atlantic economy that becomes increasingly controlled by Creole gentry enriched by vast slave plantations. Todd states that the Chesapeake Bay, once "touted as the best poor man's country in the...