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Chapter 2

The Creature

Domestic Politics and the Novelistic Character

In Robert Zemeckis’s film Cast Away (2000), Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who does what Thomson does with wilderness, though on a smaller and more intimate scale: he composes society, and he does so by way of personification. When his plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific, Noland is marooned for four years on an uninhabited desert island, where he survives with the aid of material remnants of the society he has lost: the contents of FedEx packages that wash ashore. Frustrated by his efforts to make fire, Noland picks up the contents of one of these packages—a Wilson volleyball—and flings it against a tree. Later, he notices that his bloodied handprint has given the ball a kind of face, whose features Noland then accentuates, highlighting the outlines of eyes, nose, and mouth. Finally, Noland animates this figure with a question posed in the second person: “you wouldn’t have a match, by any chance, would you?”¹ In Hanks’s account of the film, from the moment that Noland addresses “Wilson” with this question, “there is a new person created in Chuck’s head.”² Noland spends the rest of his time on the island in Wilson’s company. When Wilson is lost at sea, Noland grieves his loss.

In many respects, Cast Away is remarkably faithful to Defoe’s original castaway narrative. But there are significant differences between Zemeckis’s film and Robinson Crusoe. As Hanks tells it, he first conceived of Cast Away as a film of “pure behavior and action”: the tale of “a character who would spend the bulk of his time onscreen doing rather than talking.”³ He remembers being assaulted by “suggestions on how to embellish his spare drama by helping the protagonist find somebody to trade quips with. ‘It would be like, “Well, what if he had a monkey?”’”⁴ As one critic remarks, the “closest thing Chuck gets to a Man Friday”—or, to a monkey—“is a Wilson volleyball.”⁵ Noland’s island is notable for its lack of any living creatures. Crusoe’s, by contrast, is populated by all kinds of animals: “two or three household Kids,” “several tame Sea-Fowls,” which were “very agreeable,” three parrots including Poll, whom Crusoe describes as “a sociable Creature,” a dog that he calls “a very pleasant and loving Companion,” and “two or three Favourites” out of the cats on the island which, Crusoe says, “were part of my Family” (112, 141).

Despite the presence of so many animate creatures whom he describes in explicitly social terms, Crusoe, like Noland, often complains of his “solitary Condition” (110). Crusoe makes clear what is missing when a passing ship is wrecked on the rocks: “O that there had been but one or two; nay, or but one Soul sav’d out of this Ship, to have escap’d to me, that I might but have had one Companion, one Fellow-Creature to have spoken to me, and to have convers’d with! In all the time of my solitary Life, I never felt so earnest, so strong a Desire after the Society of my Fellow-Creatures, or so deep a Regret at the want of it” (147). Crusoe boards the wreck to see if “there might be yet some living Creature on board,” but is “disturb’d” and “desperate” with “Disappointment” when he discovers only a dog, “where I had been so near the obtaining what I so earnestly long’d for, viz. Some-Body to speak to” (154). By “the Society of … Fellow-Creatures,” then, Crusoe does not mean the company of “some living Creature” like a dog, but the conversation of someone to whom he might speak. By limiting society to those who can speak, Crusoe would seem to designate a solely human domain, quite different from the expansive animal system of Thomson’s animated earth.

As the narrative proceeds, however, Defoe brings the company of animate creatures and the society of “Some-Body to speak to” much closer together. According to his own narration, at least, Crusoe does seem to have “Some-Body to speak to” on the island, and this somebody is both like and unlike Noland’s Wilson. Early during his island sojourn, Crusoe reports that “I diverted my self with talking to my Parrot, and teaching him to Speak, and I quickly learn’d him to know his own Name, and at last to speak it out pretty loud P O L L, which was the first Word I ever heard spoken in the Island by any Mouth but my own” (94). Crusoe continues to pass his time on the island both speaking and being spoken to: “I had taught my Poll, as I noted before, to speak; and he did it so familiarly, and talk’d so articulately and plain, that it was very pleasant to me; and he liv’d with me no less than six and twenty years” (141). In spite of such descriptions of his creaturely company and conversation, critics frequently take Crusoe’s complaints of his solitary “silent Life” at face value (123). As Irene Basey Beesemeyer puts it, “not withstanding ‘conversations’ with Poll, the dog and cats, maybe even the goats, Crusoe is his own sole correspondent for much of the text.”⁶ David Marshall and Eric Jager similarly set Crusoe’s conversations with animals in scare quotes, identifying Poll as Crusoe’s “talking signature,” or his own “‘othered’ voice.”⁷ Such readings understand Crusoe’s animal companions not as “Some-Body to speak to,” but as products of Crusoe’s own projective imagination—“poignant yet humorous reminders of the absent conversation that he desires during his many years of solitude.”⁸ For Jager, most explicitly, Crusoe’s conversations are “conversations” because they proceed by means of personification. By “personifying the other,” Jager writes, “Crusoe acquires a ‘diverting’ semblance of society, though it is no more than a semblance.”⁹

Jager’s comments get at an important aspect of Robinson Crusoe: its interest in the operation that constitutes persons and society around conversation or the capacity to speak, an operation that is usefully thought of in terms of personification. Yet Cast Away helps us to be more precise about Defoe’s use of this device. For if Noland and Crusoe both personify the beings to whom they speak, the status of their personifications differs. Made from Noland’s handprint, of Noland’s blood, Wilson is literally an effect of his creator’s physical and psychological state, a projection that results from but does not end Noland’s isolation. Despite the vividness of Wilson’s persona or the animation of Noland’s address, there is never any question that Wilson is, in a strong sense, only in Chuck’s head. Neither monkey nor man, Wilson never does become “somebody to trade quips with” (in Hanks’s terms) or “Some-Body to speak to” (in Crusoe’s). The same is not true of an animate creature like Poll. Poll may be imprinted (and so given speech) by Crusoe’s voice, much as Wilson is imprinted (and so given face) by Noland’s hand. But Defoe locates this imprinting in the interaction of two living creatures, rather than with the action of a human being upon an inanimate object. The difference between talking to a volleyball and talking to a parrot signals that Defoe uses personification neither to index Crusoe’s psychological state nor, as critics often imagine, to divide true society from its mere semblance. Instead, Crusoe’s personification of Poll arises from uncertainty about the distinction between speaking and moving, and it ultimately opens the possibility that “the Society of … Fellow-Creatures” might be composed of animals as well as human beings. With its focus on a lone individual and a putatively presocial state of nature, Defoe’s novel seems a long way from Thomson’s vision of the great “social Commerce” of the whole “Earth animated” (A, 834; Su, 292). But like Thomson, Defoe suggests that personhood itself is a quasi-figurative status, and one that might extend to all animate creatures.

The stakes of this suggestion, for Defoe, are explicitly political. In particular, the connections Defoe draws between personification, speech, and animal motion make significant trouble for the Lockean political philosophy he is frequently seen to endorse. Locke’s account of civil society turns on the distinction between political authority (a relation between human persons that is constituted by consent) and property right (a relation between persons and things that is constituted by appropriation). In condensed form, Locke construes these two modes of relation as speaking and eating; these relations in turn rest on the putatively natural distinction between human persons and all other things. Locke’s own work often undercuts this simplified Lockean schema, as I argue in this chapter and at greater length in Chapter 4. But it is this basic Lockean paradigm that Defoe both invokes and undermines in Robinson Crusoe. Rather than picture a world divided into persons and things—on the model of Locke’s Second Treatise, and also Zemeckis’s Cast Away—Robinson Crusoe composes a domestic and creaturely society that does not clearly sort humans from animals, speaking from eating, consent from coercion, family from food. In this respect, Defoe’s social vision resembles Thomson’s, imagining as it does a society that extends beyond human beings, and granting personification a central role in its constitution. But the domestic society that emerges on Crusoe’s island is not the expansive and affirmative social vision of The Seasons. Instead, it is a sign of the breakdown, or the impossibility, of Lockean politics.

The claim that Defoe sketches a distinctly un-Lockean world may sound strange to readers of Robinson Crusoe, more accustomed to viewing Defoe’s text as a sympathetic novelization of Lockean political philosophy. There are good reasons to hold this customary view. It is certainly the case that Crusoe wants society to work as Locke outlines. An obsessive maker of contracts even in the most unlikely of circumstances, he seeks both to secure and to legitimate his dominion over other people by construing his dominion as Locke would construe it, in terms of consent. But Defoe undercuts the Lockean longings of his own protagonist. He does this in the narrative by replacing Locke’s category of the human person with the more capacious category of the creature, and by associating speech with the figure of personification, and with the creaturely activities of moving and eating. He does this too at the level of form—particularly, in the creaturely form of his “Allegorical, though also Historical” central character, a direct representation of the species “Man,” or even the more abstract and nonspecific “Life.” I will have more to say about what this means in the next section. For now, I mean to note simply that it is by novelizing Locke’s political philosophy that Defoe undercuts its logic. Character is the formal site of a conclusion that sets Robinson Crusoe apart from the political individualism of Locke’s Second Treatise (and, from the psychological individualism of Cast Away): the conclusion that it is impossible to be solitary or sovereign, secure in oneself and in one’s species, one who speaks and is not eaten. It does not matter where we are—on a desert island, at the center of an English metropolis, on a plantation in Brazil—we are incorporated in the kind of domestic society that Robinson Crusoe pictures, for this is simply what we are: lives made of and by others.

Fellow Creatures and the Novelistic Character

In his remarks on Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented that the greatness of Defoe’s character is that he is a “representative of humanity in general”: he “makes me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, [and] raises me into the universal man.”¹⁰ Though in some respects Defoe clearly does attend to specificities of class, character, and circumstance, Coleridge’s kind of claim has followed the novel since its inception. Readers from Rousseau to James Joyce have continued to assert Crusoe’s representative status.¹¹ In doing so, they celebrate an achievement that can seem at odds with Ian Watt’s still influential account of the genre, in which Defoe is the first novelist in part because he—like Locke, on Watt’s account—privileges “the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual” over “the ideal, the universal, and the corporate.”¹² Certainly, one might read Coleridge’s remark in a way that is wholly compatible with Watt’s individualist logic—if, for example, Defoe arrives at universal representativeness by way of an inductive process of aggregation, adding together so many discrete particulars to compose first smaller groups (Coleridge’s “specific class”) and then the species as a whole. The greatness of Crusoe, on this view, would consist in its greatness of scope: Crusoe moves past “the various forms of traditional group relationship, the family, the guild, the village, the sense of nationality” to stand for the whole of the species, conceived of as an even bigger group.¹³ By this account, the difference between family, guild, nation, and species is a quantitative one. All are collectives differentiated by degree, and the basic unit, in each case, is the discrete and particular individual. This would be to take Coleridge (and Defoe) to articulate a modern logic of generalization associated with the empiricism of Locke or Bacon before him, in which individuals come first, and are then composed or collected into groups.

In Robinson Crusoe, however, Defoe develops something quite different: a representative novelistic character that is not derived from empirical particulars but is a direct representation of the species—a character that is at once abstract and realistic or, in Defoe’s terms, both allegorical and historical. It is Crusoe who describes his character this way, in the third volume of his narrative, Serious Reflections During the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe:

I have heard, that the envious and ill-disposed Part of the World have rais’d some Objections against the two first Volumes, on Pretence … that (as they say) the Story is feign’d, that the Names are borrow’d, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place, or Circumstances in any Mans Life; that it is all form’d and embellish’d by Invention to impose upon the World.

I Robinson Crusoe being at this Time in perfect and sound Mind and Memory, Thanks be to God therefore; do hereby declare, their Objection is an Invention scandalous in Design, and false in Fact; and do affirm, that the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical; and that it is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World, sincerely adapted to, and intended for the common Good of Mankind, and designed at first, as it is now farther apply’d, to the most serious Uses possible.

Farther, that there is a Man alive, and well known too, the Actions of whose Life are the just Subject of these Volumes, and to whom all or most Part of the Story most directly alludes, this may be depended upon for Truth, and to this I set my Name.¹⁴

Few readers make much of Crusoe’s peculiar assertion that his story “though Allegorical, is also Historical.”¹⁵ From Charles Gildon to Catherine Gallagher, they tend to argue that Defoe is caught in a lie and belatedly tries to switch genres, recasting Crusoe’s castaway narrative as the secret history of Defoe’s own life.¹⁶ This reading resolves the apparent incompatibility between Crusoe’s two claims—that his adventures are “literally true” and also that they are “allegorical”—by taking Crusoe to mean that his adventures refer indirectly but truthfully to a particular living person.

Such a reading has the benefit of resolving Crusoe’s curious formulation into good common sense. But it does not exhaust the possibilities of this passage. Against those who charge that “there never were any such Man … or Circumstances in any Mans Life,” Crusoe insists that Robinson Crusoe is the true “Representation of a Life,” the real and historical story of “a Man.” In light of the novel’s interest in the logic that organizes both inter- and intraspecies relations, I think we are invited to read the indefinite article as such, and take “a Man” to mean not this man (Defoe) but simply a man. In other words, we might read Robinson Crusoe as Coleridge suggests, as the story of “a representative of man in general.” Though Gallagher herself does not read Crusoe in this way, her work on the novelistic character is helpful in considering what it would look like if we did. In “The Rise of Fictionality,” Gallagher begins where Watt’s account of the novel’s rise most clearly falters: with Fielding, and in particular, with Fielding’s claim (from Joseph Andrews) “that he describes ‘not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species” (341). Gallagher identifies Fielding’s claim as a major turning point in the emergence of fiction, which clearly distinguishes the realist novel from the factual historical narrative by articulating a set of ambitions for the new genre—above all, its capacity to “refer to a whole class of people in general” (342). Against Watt’s sense of the novel’s commitment to particular individuals, Gallagher gives us the realist novel as a genre shaped by the logic of the general, the type, or the species.¹⁷ Intriguingly, novelistic generality takes two slightly different forms in Gallagher’s account. On the one hand, Gallagher presents Fielding’s “species” as “a whole class of people,” understood as a collection of logically prior individuals—much like Coleridge’s “specific class” or Watt’s “aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.”¹⁸ On the other hand and more unusually, she presents Fielding’s “species” not as an effect of aggregation but as an entirely different kind of figure: “the form of the fictional Nobody, a proper name explicitly without a physical referent in the real world.”¹⁹ Citing Barthes and Searle for different versions of the idea that in fiction, proper names “refer to what they … are simultaneously creating,” Gallagher suggests that this new novelistic character is not a collection of particular and prior persons, composed by aggregation or induction (353). Created in and by the fictional text, the novelistic character is a general but crucially not a collective form. It is the nonempirical and indefinite species creature that Gallagher calls a “Nobody.”

On Gallagher’s view, Defoe comes too early to participate in the Fieldingled rise of fictionality. Still, he articulates something close to the general form of Gallagher’s Nobody when he has Crusoe identify his story as both allegorical and historical, the real story of “a Man” or “a Life,” “to which I sign my Name.” Crusoe’s allegorical logic is not simply the one-to-one correspondence of secret history (Crusoe stands for Defoe), nor is it the one-to-many correspondence of class (Crusoe as the sum of many individuals, their lowest common denominator, their average or mean). It is a species logic that understands “species” not as a collection of particular individuals, but as an abstract and indefinite term: a Man, a Life.²⁰ At stake here is a logic of literary characterization that is neither individualist nor humanist but is nonetheless realist, claiming some reference to historical and material reality. As a representative of man in general, Crusoe is closer to an allegorical personification than a particular person, the embodiment of an abstraction (Man) rather than an aggregate or average term (a representative of men).²¹ What’s more, in the indefinite generality that forgoes the specifics of class, character, and circumstance, even the specificities of species begin to give way. A general form that does not start from individuals need not stop, it would seem, with the human species. Crusoe is thus the representation of not only “a Man” but also “a Life”—a more inclusive and indeterminate category, which Defoe designates by the term “creature.”

Turning to the narrative itself, we can start to apprehend more precisely what it means to conceive the character Crusoe on the model of the creature, as the (abstract and material, allegorical and historical) “Representation of a Life.” Creatureliness is a major thematic preoccupation of the novel, and the central telos of its plot.²² At the start of his adventures, Crusoe is a “young Man” in the company of men (6): his father, “a wise and grave Man” (5), a host of “Seafaring Men” who are also called “Seamen” or simply “Men” (8, 10–13), the ship captain, “an honest and plain-dealing Man” (16), and the Moor and Xury, whom Crusoe calls “the Man and Boy” (19). Yet the moment that Crusoe departs from known territory, making his escape with Xury—the “Boy” whom Crusoe promises to make “a great Man” but ends up selling to slavery—he encounters other beings, which he calls “creatures” (21). These appear for the first time when Crusoe and Xury drop anchor for the night, at the mouth of a river near shore:

We heard such dreadful Noises of the Barking, Roaring, and Howling of Wild Creatures, of we knew not what Kinds…. In two or three Hours we saw vast great Creatures (we knew not what to call them) of many sorts, come down to the Sea-shoar and run into the Water…. We were both more frighted when we heard one of these mighty Creatures come swimming towards our Boat, we could not see him, but we might hear him by his blowing to be a monstrous, huge and furious Beast; Xury said it was a Lyon, and it might be so for ought I know…. I perceiv’d the Creature (whatever it was) within Two Oars Length, which something surpized me, and taking up my gun fir’d at him. (22)

In this passage, Crusoe seems to use “creature” to mark the epistemological predicament that results from conditions of both perceptual obscurity (“we could not see”) and conceptual uncertainty. Even when they “saw” the creatures, Crusoe reports, “we knew not what to call them”; again, when he “perceiv’d” the creature at only two oars’ length, he still could not identify it (“whatever it was”). Crusoe’s arrival on the island is marked by a series of similarly indistinct creaturely encounters—with “two or three Creatures like Hares” and “a Creature like a wild Cat,” as well as with “two Fowls like Ducks,” “a Sea Fowl or two, something like a brand Goose,” and “Hares, as I thought them to be, and Foxes, but they differ’d greatly from all the other Kinds I had met with” (44, 45, 58, 76, 87). In all these moments, Crusoe would seem to use “creature” to mark his uncertainty in the face of the new.²³

From the start, however, Defoe indicates that “creature” signals something more than a terminological solution to the problem of classifying unfamiliar particulars. A few pages after Crusoe and Xury encounter the “vast great Creatures” that Crusoe shoots at but does not name, they meet natives, whom Crusoe calls “People” and “Negroes” (25, 26). This second encounter suggests that whatever the earlier “vast great Creatures” were, they were not human, a species that Crusoe seems able to recognize and to designate as such. But this designation falters momentarily when Crusoe describes what happens when “two mighty Creatures” once again run into the water, and Crusoe once again fires his gun: “It is impossible to express the Astonishment of these poor Creatures at the Noise and Fire of my Gun; some of them were ready to dye for Fear, and fell down as Dead with the very Terror. But when they saw the Creature dead and sunk in the Water, and I made Signs to them to come to the Shore; they took Heart and came to the Shore and began to search for the Creature” (26). Only after a moment of indistinction between “these poor Creatures” and the “two mighty Creatures” does Crusoe distinguish human from animal, going on to relate how the “Negroes” dragged the creature’s body to shore to discover “a most curious Leopard” (27). In his descriptions of both nonhuman and human responses to his gun, Crusoe extends this sort of creaturely indeterminacy further still. Of the first encounter (with the “vast great [nonhuman] Creatures” at the mouth of the river), Crusoe writes: “it is impossible to describe the horrible Noises, and hideous Cryes and Howlings, that were raised … upon the Noise or Report of the Gun, a Thing I have some Reason to believe those Creatures had never heard before” (22). Of the second encounter (with the “poor [human] Creatures” on the shore), he writes: “it is impossible to express the Astonishment of these poor Creatures at the Noise and Fire of my Gun” (22, 26). Human and nonhuman creatures alike are astonished by Crusoe’s gunfire in a way he finds “impossible to express” and “impossible to describe.”

Set together, these scenes signal that the term “creature” does more than index Crusoe’s epistemological uncertainty. It is also the novel’s word for an ontological determination effected by exposure to external force. The creatures in these episodes are identified as such because that is what they are, not simply because Crusoe does not know what else to call them. The humans who are astonished by Crusoe’s gunfire, the “vast great Creatures” at which Crusoe shoots—as well as the “Creatures like Hares” and “Creature like a Wild Cat” that will later come under Crusoe’s fire—are all creatures in the sense that Julia Reinhard Lupton outlines in her discussion of “the politico-theological category of the creaturely,” which associates the creature with embodiment, vulnerability, and especially, with subjection to a radically superior power (the Creator).²⁴ It might appear that Crusoe is patently unlike the creatures he encounters, given that he wields the gun that constitutes them as such. But in both of these scenes, Crusoe’s gunfire is followed by a striking symmetry of response. Unable to describe or express the response of different creatures at the noise and fire of his gun, Crusoe is as incapacitated and astonished as they.²⁵ Ultimately, Crusoe’s gun serves to indicate his insecurity rather than his sovereignty—to indicate, most simply, that that he is a creature too, one vulnerable living body among others. In Defoe, “creature” works much as Thomson’s personifications do in The Seasons, to identify all beings under (and in contrast with) “Mysterious Heaven.”

To make this claim is again to work against one dominant strain of both secular and religious readings of Defoe’s novel. Critics often dispute the sincerity of Crusoe’s religiosity, but they usually agree that he proceeds by means of a set of analogical relations—between literal and metaphorical, material and spiritual, human and divine—toward God, whom he becomes or becomes like, as he ultimately achieves a quasi-divine mastery over others.²⁶ Critics also agree that the turning point in Crusoe’s movement toward mastery occurs during his illness, in the moment of conversion when he first conceives of himself in relation to God. Crusoe marks the start of this moment with a question: “Lord, what a miserable Creature am I?” (72). He marks its conclusion, in turn, with God’s answer, which Crusoe discovers when he opens the Bible and reads at random: “Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me” (75). On this reading, Defoe configures a relation of resemblance that will come to facilitate Crusoe’s movement between positions: a creature with respect to his Creator, Crusoe becomes Creator with respect to the rest of creation.²⁷

I am arguing, by contrast, that over the course of the narrative Crusoe’s development proceeds toward not divine omnipotence but creaturely identification with the humans, lions, leopards, hares, and cats that are subject to his gun. This is indicated by the vocabulary of creature indeterminacy that sets in as soon as Crusoe leaves European society. It is also signaled at the moment of his conversion, for the psalm to which Crusoe turns is as likely to prevent as to promote his identification with God:

Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify against thee: I am God, even thy God.

I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt offerings, to have been continually before me.

I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds,

For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.

I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine,

If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fullness thereof.

Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?

Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay your vows unto the most High:

And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. (Ps. 50:7–15)

It is this last line that Crusoe cites in the text, and on its own, the line seems to accord with a fairly conventional schema in which one submits to God and becomes master of others. Defoe certainly invokes this schema here, but his particular textual choice complicates that gesture. By stressing the impropriety of merely physical sacrifice for a God who, unlike humans, does not feed on flesh, this psalm emphasizes a significant difference between Crusoe and God—a difference that turns on relations of owning and of eating. The way that the beast and cattle and fowls are God’s is fundamentally unlike the way that Crusoe makes them his, with decidedly undivine acts of material eating and drinking. Similarly, Defoe does not simply mark a moment of regression into doubt when Crusoe goes on to compare himself to the children of Israel who asked, “when they were promis’d Flesh to eat, Can God spread a Table in the Wilderness?” (75). He also articulates a relation between creature and Creator that is not one of distance but of categorical difference, of kind and not degree: between God, who will not eat, and human beings, who must.

Eating may not seem a likely or sufficient ground for the sort of “radical separation of Creation and Creator” that Lupton outlines in her work on the creature, and around which Defoe organizes his novel.²⁸ But Robinson Crusoe is a novel obsessed with eating, in both its metaphorical and literal senses. This is most obvious in Crusoe’s seemingly inordinate preoccupation with cannibalism. Many critics point out that Crusoe’s fear of finding himself as food for another is less extravagant if one understands it as the displacement of his quite plausible fear of finding another as food for himself. In order to consider eating and being eaten together and in political terms, however, such readings move quickly into a metaphorics of consumption, in which “eating” figures various kinds of relations between human beings.²⁹ Crusoe’s anxieties about cannibalism certainly intimate that his activities as capitalist, colonizer, or slave trader involve the metaphorical devouring of other people. But Defoe repeatedly insists that eating is not only a figure for human relations.³⁰ From the moment that Crusoe arrives on the island, his narrative is filled with frequent and extended accounts of what and how he literally eats: the effort he expends protecting his crops of barley and rice; gathering and drying grapes; mastering the tasks required to make a loaf of bread; and hunting or taming turtles, pigeons, and goats. And such activities occupy Crusoe’s time as much as they do his narrative: he reports that his “Morning Walk with my Gun” to bring home “something fit to eat,” “generally took me up three Hours each Morning”; the “great Part of the Day” was then spent “ordering, curing, preserving, and cooking what I had kill’d or catch’d for my Supply” (60, 91).

Just as eating occupies much of Crusoe’s time on the island, it also plays a central role in the political-philosophical imaginary of the novel, in ways that bring Defoe’s engagement with Locke into sharper focus. For Locke invokes eating as his first example of the natural dominion of persons over things, which he calls property: “The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life.”³¹ In his reading of this key passage from the Second Treatise of Government, Wolfram Schmidgen remarks that Locke uses “the ingestive act as a vivid figure for a property that is inalienable because it is physically tied to the body.”³² Indeed for Locke, eating is at once a “vivid figure” for property and also a primary mode of appropriation. This means that eating occupies a strangely central place in Locke’s account of political society, and particularly, in his crucial distinction between political authority and property right. This distinction would seem to proceed from given and natural grounds: from the distinction between (human) persons and (all other) things. But the distinction between persons and things does not come to Locke ready-made, as it might seem from the Second Treatise alone. Instead, Locke strives throughout his First Treatise of Government to constitute the kind of being on which his politics comes to depend: a being defined by its a capacity for speech and—more peculiarly—by the specter of cannibalism.

Locke constitutes this being—the human person—by working through the same territory of creatureliness and cannibalism that shapes Robinson Crusoe. He begins by attacking Robert Filmer for sanctioning anthropophagy: “If God made all Mankind slaves to Adam and his Heirs, by giving Adam dominion over every living thing that moveth on the Earth, Chapt. I. 28. as our A—would have it, methinks Sir Robert should have carried his Monarchical Power one step higher, and satisfied the World, that Princes might eat their Subjects too, since God gave as full Power to Noah and his Heirs, Chap. 9.2. to eat every Living thing that moveth, as he did to Adam to have Dominion over them, the Hebrew words in both places being the same” (160). In this passage, Locke’s move against Filmer seems sensationalist and somewhat slight: he shocks his readers by literalizing a common figure of speech, that of a sovereign consuming his subjects. But as Locke proceeds, the charge of cannibalism becomes a serious first step in an extended exegetical discussion of our God-given right to eat. The first passage to which Locke refers is God’s donation to Adam at creation: “And God Blessed them, and God said unto them, be Fruitful and Multiply and Replenish the Earth and subdue it, and have Dominion over the Fish of the Sea, and over the Fowl of the Air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” (Gen 1:28, qtd. in Locke 156). On the basis of this passage, Filmer insists that there is only one kind of dominion, which is granted by God and wielded by the monarch over the earth and every living thing (fish, fowl, or human): “Adam, having here Dominion given him over all Creatures, was thereby the Monarch of the whole World” (Filmer, Patriarcha, qtd. in Locke 157). By contrast, Locke argues that there are various types of dominion, not all of which are divinely instituted. To support this claim, Locke looks to God’s second covenant, with Noah. As with Adam, Locke points out, God grants Noah “dominion” over “every living thing that moveth.” For Noah, however, this dominion includes the right to eat, while Adam’s dominion did not even permit him, as Locke puts it, to “make bold with a Lark or a Rabbet to satisfie his hunger” (167).