Defoe’s Failure to Justify Providence
Essay title: Defoe’s Failure to Justify Providence
Even if we accept that Defoes intention is to justify and honor Providence, the question still remains whether he carries out his intention. Leopold Damrosch, Jr. thinks not:
Defoe sets out to dramatize the conversion of the Puritan self, and he ends by celebrating a solitude that exalts autonomy instead of submission. He undertakes to show the dividedness of a sinner, and ends by projecting a hero so massively self-enclosed that almost nothing of his inner life is revealed. He proposes a naturalistic account of real life in a real world, and ends by creating an immortal triumph of wish-fulfillment.
Damrosch does not attribute Defoes failure to carry out his intention to insincerity; rather it stems in part from a failure in Puritanism, which changed from an ideology which wanted to transform the world (e.g., founding Massachusetts Bay Colony as Gods commonwealth on earth) to a social class motivated by self interest.
John Richetti offers a different explanation for what he sees as Defoes failure. Richetti identifies Crusoes mastery of himself and nature as the novels central concern; this concern, he believes, invalidates Crusoes religious beliefs and experience. Defoe was unable “to allow Crusoe to achieve and enjoy freedom and power without violating the restrictions of a moral and religious ideology which defines the individual as less than autonomous.”
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