Self-possession in Robinson crusoejecs

Abstract

This biocultural reading proposes that Defoe's polarised treatment of selfishness and altruism in Robinson Crusoe is a fictional response to two interconnected problems with personal autonomy: the extrinsic problem that even the most self-serving individual is dependent on other people, and the intrinsic threat of internal regress as the self attempts to assume control of itself. Defoe solves both problems by instigating remarkably symmetrical relationships between the secular world, the sacred and the self: God relates to Crusoe as Crusoe relates to his own objectified self, and this self, in turn, stands in the same relation to the surrounding world. © 2010 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.