Defoe: Writer as Agent (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 239 Katherine A. Armstrong. Defoe: Writer as Agent. No. 67, English Literary Studies. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1996. 156pp. $10.50. ISBN 0-920604-86-2. In Defoe: Writer as Agent, Katherine Armstrong argues that Defoe's fiction grows not out of a desire to be innovative with prose fiction but out of the urge to comment upon current political and economic affairs and shape public response to those affairs. Armstrong steers away from a "rise of the novel" approach and towards a reading of Defoe's fiction as "political interventions" (p. 129). Her method is implicit and understated: neither earlier contextual critics nor those interested in generic development are extensively debated. Armstrong acknowledges both earlier contextual studies such as those by Secord, McKillop, Novak, and Starr, and earlier generic studies such as those by Watt and McKeon. Her study engages a series of Defoe's works—"The True-Born Englishman," Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Robinson Crusoe—proposing for each a matrix of political, social, and economic concerns. Armstrong assumes that Defoe routinely aims to shape his contemporaries' thinking about matters of public policy. Moreover, she asserts, readers who understand Defoe's aims will better make sense of such elements as irony or verisimilitude in the works. A discussion of "The True-Born Englishman" introduces her methods and approach; she points out Defoe's anti-Stuart, anti-French rhetoric and promotion of William and his Protestant loyalties. Memoirs of a Cavalier, likewise, Armstrong demonstrates, contains an anti-Catholic and antiFrench agenda, with specific details to shape the reader's thinking about the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and the Thirty Years' War. Particularly in the second part of Memoirs, the Cavalier (though on the Royalist side) reveals weaknesses in that side and in the histories of it, such as Clarendon's. Armstrong's treatment of the four remaining works of fiction follows this pattern . Captain Singleton she discusses as addressing issues such as absolute rule, shared governance, and the contract—topics of contemporary debate and topics examined in Locke's Treatises. The nature of property and the threats of piracy, Armstrong argues, also absorb Defoe in Singleton. Moll Flanders Armstrong sees as both a warning to citizens who may be potential victims of crime and a commentary upon Moll's relative lack of control in a society that educated and cared for orphans minimally. Interestingly, she argues that in Moll Flanders Defoe offers no support for the widely proposed expansion of capital offences (p. 88). During the Walpole administration such expansion did take place, and Colonel Jack, Armstrong claims, argues for Defoe's preference for transportation, and against corporal punishment, as deterrent and rehabilitation. Armstrong reads Robinson Crusoe as Defoe's warning against financial speculation but more significantly his argument in favour of travel and commercial expansion. Armstrong's argument is often subtle and interesting, pushing well beyond a simple statement of economic and political background. In both Crusoe and Moll Flanders, for instance, she uses contemporary religious and economic debate to explain the apparent contradiction between spiritual reform and material 240 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 advancement that many readers have commented upon. She thus sees the irony of the narratives as part of a fictional code allowing Defoe to comment safely upon matters that he could not have examined in such detail while writing polemical non-fiction. What is both most interesting and most problematic in Armstrong's work is her characterization of Defoe's fiction. On the one hand she makes the sensible argument that readers who perceive Defoe to be a primitive practitioner of a craft better managed by Fielding, Richardson, and later novelists are coming at his fiction with the wrong assumptions. On the other hand, she routinely speaks ofDefoe's major works of fiction as novels and does not speculate upon whether our understanding of the novel as a genre might properly be expanded to include the kind of argumentative, policy-shaping works she finds Defoe's to be. This possibility, combined with the "writer as agent" trope, deserves more detailed scrutiny than Armstrong has afforded. Her work's subtitle contains the basis for...