The fortress of American solitude: Robinson Crusoe and antebellum culture

Abstract

In The Fortress of American Solitude: Robinson Crusoe and Antebellum Culture, Shawn Thomson analyzes a wide range of antebellum literature offering critiques of the Robinson Crusoe story and its attendant myths. Through the lens of the Crusoe topos, Thomson explores the underlying tensions within bourgeois culture between the restraints of the home and freedoms of the open world. Thomson argues that Robinson Crusoe functioned to normalize the maturation process for boys as they directed their adolescence toward greater expressions of autonomy and self-reliance and allowed women to enter into this masculine terrain and understand the landmarks of men's lives. In examining a wide range of major authors, including Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Emily Dickinson as well as non-canonical authors and newspaper accounts of the period, Thomson demonstrates the power of the Crusoe topos as an animating construct of nineteenth-century United States culture. Shawn Thomson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American.