Life-Debt as Rhetorical Resources for Contractarian Discourse in Daniel Defoe’s Narrative Fictions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Defoe’s fictional Englishmen turn to the notion of a life-debt as rhetorical resources for spinning fictions generative of reliable contractarian bond/bondage. This article explores what vexes Defoe as tough questions: how to set the conditions of a newfangled tie-up between complete strangers in the New World, or how to adjudicate broken political contracts between the Crown and the outlaws. In the era when the Civil War denaturalised the existing discourse on man’s duty to his monarch, Defoe strives to address early modern crisis of political obligation by reformulating a classical concept of a life-debt into a cement that would hold together precarious social relations into a sustainable form of paternalism. In the thick of their checkered criminal and colonial career, Defoe’s protagonists often slip into the Hobbesian states of nature that present itself in the form of major confrontations with the national sovereign and racial others. Thus, Defoe’s characters reconstruct them into sentimental hierarchies, suggesting a life-debt as a rationale for voluntary subjection. Furthermore, Defoe’s fictional narratives including Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack demonstrate how such contractarian discourse necessarily produces fiction-writing moments and rhetorical exemplars that complicate the morality of the author’s writings.