The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe

Abstract

The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe* HOMER O. BROWN I Names “A fine Story! says the Governess, “you would see the Child, and you would not see the Child: you would be conceal'd and discover'd both together." {Moll Flanders)1 Names, false names, absence of names seem to have special importance for Daniel Defoe’s novels. None of his fictional narrators, with the exception of Robinson Crusoe,2 tell their stories under the name he or she was born with. The narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year is anonymous, signing his account at the end with the initials “H. F.” In the other novels, the narrators receive their names in something like a special christening. Bob Singleton is given his name by one of the series of “mothers” through whose hands he passes after being kidnapped from his true parents. Colonel Jack receives the name “John” from the nurse who is paid to take him by his real parents, who are unmarried “people of quality.” Unfortunately, all three of the nurse’s “sons,” one of them really hers and the other two paid for, are named “John.” Moll Flanders’ real name is too “well known in the records, or registers, at *See the note on p. ix. This essay is reprinted from £/>//, 38 (1971) by permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press. 69 70 / HOMER O. BROWN Newgate and in the Old Bailey,” so she chooses to write under the alias “Moll Flanders” and begs the reader’s patience “till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.” It is by the revelation of this true name (to Moll but not the reader) that Moll recognizes her real mother, who had also adopted an alias, and discovers that she has married her own brother. “Moll Flanders” is the name she takes during her time as a thief in London, when, though already a middle-aged woman, she falls under the tutelage of a woman who refers to her as “child” and whom Moll calls “mother. The title page of Roxana is a veritable catalog of her aliases throughout her career. Curiously, the name “Roxana” is the name she bears for the shortest time and one she did not give herself. She received it, in the presence of the king, from the spontaneous cry of a group of men at a masked ball in appreciation of the costume she was wearing. But Roxana is a special case, for the reader does learn at least her true Christian name because it is also the name of her daughter, who pursues her through the last part of the book. At the moment of narration few of Defoe’s narrators are living under the name by which they “sign” their stories. Secrecy seems to be an absolute precondition of self-revelation. Or, to put it in a less perversely contradictory way, these narrators seem under a double compulsion to expose and to conceal themselves. Certainly it is a literary convention, a premise of fictional narration, aimed at convincing the reader of their veracity, since Defoe published all these books as the “real” memoirs of their narrators. But it is a curious convention, since it goes beyond a mere premise of narration and becomes an important theme in the narration, an event in the story itself. Moreover, literary convention cannot explain this practice of concealment in the life of the true author of these fake memoirs, Daniel Defoe, which was not, incidentally, his real name. Before and even after he took up the writing of these books at the age of sixty, Daniel Foe served as the agent of various interests, parties, governments, writing and acting under innumerable assumed names and points of view, to the extent that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction in our knowledge of his own life and impossible to go beyond certain limits in ascertaining what he actually wrote. Robinson Crusoe is a somewhat special instance of Defoe’s habit of concealing the true name of his narrators. Robinson has purportedly related the events of his own life under his own name through two volumes-Zze...