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Introduction

For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real—a real that may well not be determined…. It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one’s attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel—the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre—which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.

—Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Shortly after Robinson Crusoe makes his providential landing on the island, he takes stock of his situation and makes a list of the “good” and “evil” aspects of his circumstances. Most of his laments have to do with his complete isolation (or at least his isolation from anything recognizably British); but he also notes that he has no clothes. He reasons, however, that even were he to have them he could hardly wear them for the heat.¹

Of course this sort of reasoning doesn’t go very far with either Crusoe or the reader because the weather isn’t the point: clothes, quite obviously, mark the difference between Crusoe’s sense of himself as British and the great mass of naked savages he encounters in his many travels. What is curious, however, is to see how the issue of clothing collapses into his fetishization of skin: Crusoe’s need to make difference visible, if only to himself, primarily because of the increasingly attractive possibilities of not establishing visible difference.

Defoe’s champion of moral progress represents arresting problems of identity that post-colonial studies might usefully consider. Critiques of colonialism, despite their various disclaimers, tend to iterate imperialist models and attribute a monolithic agency to Eurocentric “legacies.”² What is often missing from these critical inquiries is an account of the profound insecurities upon which those legacies rest. These largely unnamed fears take shape in Defoe’s novel as strange episodic eruptions in the relatively contiguous narrative of literary realism. Crusoe’s general uneasiness with being a stranger in a strange land explodes into a series of arbitrary, incapacitating worries: his trouble with cats, his apprehensions about cannibals, or his anxieties about clothing.

Eventually Crusoe’s clothes rot off his body and he is forced to fashion others from the outlandish materials he has on hand. Indeed, he claims, “had anyone in England been to meet such a man as I was, it must either have frighted them or raised a good deal of laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at myself, I could not but smile at the notion of my traveling through Yorkshire with such an equipage and in such a dress” (134). With his clothes and skin here signifying his non-Englishness, Crusoe jokingly entertains the idea of positioning himself as the foreign body, thus implying a certain attraction to the idea.³ However laughable a figure he might cut for himself (as the only appreciative member of his audience), he insists on wearing this “equipage” even “though it is true that the weather was so violent hot that there was no need of clothes” (120). To explain this apparent perversity, Crusoe falls back on a naturalized physical inability to withstand the intensity of the sun, which we can read as a fairly clear ideological inability of an Englishman to be a “savage”: the “very heat,” he writes, “blistered my skin” (120). He goes on to describe “a great clumsy ugly goatskin umbrella,” which “after all, was the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun.” As for his face, he writes, “the color of it was really not so Mulatto like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it and living within nineteen degrees of the equinox” (135). These various incidental details concerning Crusoe’s outfit do far more than describe his physical person: they inscribe an ideological position that makes such a description possible. In some ways, however, these details return our focus to the presence of the physical body.

What concerns Crusoe the most is the problem of skin—or skins. He must protect a skin that doesn’t have the capacity to withstand extreme heat, and yet the very geographical location and meteorological conditions of this island may, if care is not taken, transform British fairness to an island “Mulatto.” Crusoe is quite meticulous on this detail: his skin is, in fact, not as Mulatto as the British reader would expect, even given the fact that he hasn’t been “at all careful of it.” There is, then, something “natural” about his skin’s inclination towards fairness. Given this, it seems odd that Crusoe has to police this fairness continually, always carrying his umbrella, which is “the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun.” The gun has already established Crusoe’s physical dominance on the island (and in earlier travels as well). His umbrella, manufactured from the skins of native goats, performs an equally crucial function as a visible sign of ideological dominance based on the color of his skin. Even if the “large pair of Mahometan whiskers” he sports are “monstrous” by English standards, and, perhaps, signify a potential fall into otherness, his clothing and general mien will now protect his dominant position.

Crusoe describes the clothing he makes for himself:

I had a short jacket of goatskin, the skirts coming down to about the middle of my thighs; and a pair of open-kneed breeches of the same; the breeches were made of the skin of an old he-goat, whose hair hung down such a length on either side that, like pantaloons, it reached to the middle of my legs. (134)

As with the umbrella, Crusoe uses materials furnished by the island’s animal population in order both to protect the fragility of his own skin—and, therefore, the fragility of his identity as an Englishman—and to insure by the most discernible display the limitlessness of his own power; he has been able to tame and husband a flock of goats for his consumption. These goats both nourish him and provide him with a protective skin, so to speak, against other hostile elements.⁴ The goats are figures of self-consolidating otherness—their skins establish Crusoe’s difference because as animals, quite naturally, they are available for exploitation and sustenance. It is also crucial to Crusoe’s narrative that they are goats and not sheep; breaking away from an English economy that is dependent on the consumption of sheep, Crusoe manages both to replicate a British cultural consumerism and yet to differentiate his own place within such an order as perfectly discrete. Crusoe makes a point of specifying the gender of the old he-goat that becomes his breeches; Crusoe, that sly old goat, can brandish the phallus even under cover of another, more “barbarous” skin. It is no accident as well that this item of clothing has “skirts”; skirting issues of the problematics of race and gender, Crusoe supplements British or European economies producing “legitimate” clothing with his own island fashions.

Skin operates as a place where identities are negotiated: Crusoe’s representation of a self directly depends on what he perceives to be visibly other. Crusoe, however, does more with the goats than use their skins: he also eats them, as well as turtles and birds. The difference between skin and flesh is strikingly marked in this novel in terms of consumption. While Crusoe is able to use the skins of the animals he eats—even the turtle’s shells come in handy—the reverse is not always true. One of his first encounters with wild beasts on this island presents interesting possibilities of reading the ways in which the natural and the feminine resist incorporation and ingestion.

Crusoe writes in his journal: “This day went abroad with my gun and my dog, and killed a wild cat; her skin pretty soft, but her flesh good for nothing” (63). Goats (and turtles, and dogs, and birds) are one thing, cats are quite another. While her skin is attractive, the feminine flesh of this cat is “good for nothing”: her meat is inedible, her loyalty suspect; even as a procreative member of his household the cat is resistant, forming, rather, a family of its own. As members of Crusoe's privileged household, cats (always female) are equally inconsistent and thoroughly unreliable. Crusoe proudly likens his table to that of “a king … attended by my servants,” who consist of his parrot Poll (the only one able to “speak” to Crusoe) and his dog, as well as his two cats. These cats, however,

were not the two cats which I brought on shore at first, for they were both of them dead … but one of them having multiplied by I know not what creature, these were two which I had preserved tame, whereas the rest run wild in the woods and became indeed troublesome to me at last; for they would often come into my house and plunder me too, till at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many. (133–34)

Poll the parrot ventriloquizes his master's language, the dog provides for his master’s sustenance, the goats are husbanded for their flesh, but the cats are wild cards. Even Friday, whose skin and cannibalistic habits at first situate him as absolutely othered in relation to Crusoe, later (primarily because he gives up those habits) functions as the figure who most confirms Crusoe's ideological superiority.⁵

While Crusoe can consolidate these various other members of his household into predictable and fairly reliable reflections of his own position of power, the cats pose a continual challenge and threat to the integrity of this image. They function as border cases: tamed, and yet indistinguishable from their “native” counterparts. They don't need to depend on Crusoe’s household skills; they are, in fact, more than able to proliferate successfully (with unidentifiable creatures, moreover) in this “native” environment. Even their skins—the mark of their domestication and difference—are useless to Crusoe. At the end of the novel, Crusoe recovers his ability to monitor and regulate reproduction, previously threatened, perhaps, by those unruly cats, by bringing to the island women appropriate to its inhabitants:

I touched at the Brazils, from whence I sent a bark, which I brought there … and in it, besides other supplies, I sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them. As to the Englishmen, I promised them to send some women from England, with a good cargo of necessaries. (275)

Crusoe repopulates the island with especial attention to likeness of skins. The Spaniards receive their due measure from the Brazils, while the Englishmen, who quite naturally could not expect to be serviced by seven Brazilian women, can anticipate their proper allotment from the next cargo Crusoe deploys.

Skin is cosmetic: it is superficial, it covers things up. Skin’s opacity functions to separate outside from in, and yet, curiously, it is this very opacity that enables skin also to negotiate between internal and external borders. Skin makes ideological differences perceivable ostensibly by making interiorities externally obvious. Jame Gumb from the film The Silence of the Lambs (and also from the Thomas Harris novel of the same name) constructs a suit of women’s skins in order to make clearly visible an interior identity—his sense that he “really” is a woman—despite his outward appearance. Robinson Crusoe assembles a suit of goat skins in order to cover and protect an identity based on external attributes that nonetheless supposedly embody an internal condition of being.

The solid ground of British national identity from which Crusoe claims his subjectivity becomes acutely contested territory particularly when it comes to the issue of colonizing property. The random problems of clothes, cats, and cannibals—three especially cogent forms of property for Crusoe—contribute both to assure and to destabilize Crusoe’s footing as the principal authoritative figure, prompting him to represent his island life rather xenophobically. His journal allows him to resituate himself on more familiar ground as colonist and patriarch rather than as shipwrecked isolate. More interestingly, his journal is also the place where he turns the material problems he encounters on the island—the impediments to his material authority—into the narrative that demonstrates his discursive authority. But, not surprisingly, this sublimation often depends upon a strategically employed xenophobia. Crusoe, faced with multiple material threats to his very survival, manages his own anxiety by defining these threats as the mere challenge of the foreign to his British ingenuity. Crusoe’s xenophobia, however, may also stave off his more compelling—and romantic—desire, his desire to give himself over to the other.⁶ Crusoe’s xenophobia may be a sign of his xenodochial desire: his desire to invite and entertain the foreign. His compulsion to establish visible difference vis-à-vis skin color, therefore, marks the territory of identity in clear, constative terms.

Thus Defoe’s great novel of moral psychological development replicates the emergence of identity—social, national, cultural, personal—as a process that sublimates external material problems into an internalized coherence. Quite a wrench from our conventional understanding of eighteenth-century literature as devoted to rational order, regularity, and the prevailing public arena, Robinson Crusoe in fact articulates romantic issues, if we are to understand romantic affect as traditionally invoking the internal workings of subjectivity. In fact, even if we consider the more specific definitions of romantic authorship, Robinson Crusoe fits the bill. Crusoe’s journal functions in its capacity as an inventory of his daily life, an empirical catalogue of “new” knowledge (even if this knowledge turns out suspiciously to replicate what Crusoe has always known). It is, however, also the place for introspection, a place made “safe” for convoluted expressions of xenodochial desire because of the emergence of a disembodied writing self. Such an example of rendering resistant desire “safe” by authorial reason occurs when Crusoe discovers an alien footprint that he at first reads as the sign of the devil, then of “some more dangerous creature, viz … the savages,” and finally, with (short-lived) relief, “a mere chimera of my own” (139–40).

There seems to be a moment in literary representation when ideas about the externality of difference shift toward the introjection of that difference as a strategy of national self-identification. Defoe’s novel is not only a tour-de-force celebration of eighteenth-century commercialism; it stands more insistently as just such a transitional text. Crusoe figures his island as a supplement to British economic structures, but part of its appeal (especially for Crusoe himself, the archetypal merchant adventurer) is that it both replicates and resists Britain’s imperial model and demonstrates the ways in which commercial traffic becomes a barometer of moral traffic.⁷

These moments from Robinson Crusoe serve to illustrate early imperial constructions and contestations of “race,” the “natural,” and the “feminine,” especially as they are manifested in Crusoe’s consumerism and husbandry. But especially at issue in this novel are two crucial features that mark it as a transitional text. First, is the relationship between xenophobia and xenodochy. The initial attraction of the foreign becomes frightening to the British subject, thus giving rise to the repudiation of the thing that provoked illicit or dangerous desire by xenophobia. The second feature is the striking similarity (and difference) this relationship has with the tenets of romanticism. Harbored within British cultural consciousness is the mutual dependence of self and other. In the first two definitions of “xenodochy” supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary, the “entertainment of the foreign” may take shape either as an expression of a mutual intertwining or as a form of maintenance. In either expression, foreign entertainment implies that the apparently radical differences between familiar and foreign are in fact contingent on each other and can therefore be the source of an equally radical anxiety on both parts.⁸ Xenophobia and xenodochy work as an economy because they are mutually constitutive, and it is through this economy that national and cultural identity is manifested. Particularly resonant with romantic discourse is the desire and loathing for the foreign thing that establishes a distinct place for the self.

Xenophobia is firmly fixed within the symbolic register of representation and its referents are produced through the paranoic construction of the “other.” Like the ways in which we erase the historical aspect of paradigms of race, however, the condition of xenophobia seems to exist similarly a priori as a psychic impulse or drive without the historicizing accorded most cultural events. Long perceived and accepted as a “phobia,” the fear of the foreign may, in fact, signify something quite different. This phobia may work as a fetish, as something in which we invest and cathect a great deal of cultural meaning in order to organize our own national identities. The fear of something foreign presupposes that “we” can understand what counts as foreign, but how are we to come to an understanding of the foreign without recognizing it within some signifying system that makes sense to us? Xenophobia is the process by which the “other” is constructed, but its definition is contingent on previous interest or attraction to the foreign (xenodochy). Freud’s understanding of the fetish help explicate the xenophobic drive. Freud writes:

One would expect that the organs or objects selected as substitutes for the penis whose presence is missed in the woman would be such as act as symbols for the penis in other respects. This may happen occasionally but it is certainly not the determining factor. It seems rather that when the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted—it reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesias. In the case of the fetish, too, interest is held up to a certain point—what is possibly the last impression received before the uncanny traumatic one is preserved as a fetish.⁹

The fetish first emerges as a “cover” for the missing penis; accidentally and arbitrarily a part of the scene in which the castrated woman is first observed, an object is literally dis-placed from its proper location and “stands in” for what is really absent. As such a disavowal of that absence, however, the fetish clearly also testifies to the knowledge of castration that it negates. The care and attention that Freud argues we give to fetish objects because they both signify and nullify castration—because they mark a troubling and disturbing eruption while simultaneously dismissing it—is evocative of the ways in which xenophobia constructs cultural identities through a grid of abjection: the fearful foreign body signifies our difference and negates the possibility of our own castration by negating the castration itself. In the case of eighteenth-century Britain, cultural difference was fetishized as color difference, and hierarchical codes were erected that could only benefit the British and abject the foreign. The complications of foreign identity and agency were thus reduced to the material body. Early modern infatuation with commercial traffic increased the physical boundaries of “home,” but it also supplied multiple opportunities for contaminating domestic identity with xenodochial desire. Nineteenth-century industrialism may have been, therefore, compelled to divorce the sordid details of exploitation and dominance from commercial enterprise and fetishize its moralizing aspects. Such a focus would then have provided a way of situating English cultural identity as the body of an idealized imperial authority.

It should not be possible to think about romanticism without invoking xenophobia. Perhaps philosophical models of the production of knowledge, especially a model that is an acknowledged “bridge” between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought in the philosophical tradition, may help us understand how such a claim is possible. Kant is one of the clearest systematizes of the Enlightenment, and yet the dualism between the noumenal and the phenomenal that, according to his logic, makes room for God, also happens to accommodate an early model for the split subject: the unconscious. It is this split that profoundly influenced romantic formulations of subjectivity. This model may also help locate the histories of the internalization of psychic space. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason, at the beginning of the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant describes the intuitive mediation of phenomenological knowledge: “In whatsoever mode, or by whatsoever means, our knowledge may relate to objects, it is at least quite clear, that the only manner in which it immediately relates to them, is by means of an intuition.”¹⁰

It seems that Kant, spending his entire life in Königsberg, never venturing forth from this tiny East Prussian town, would have been hard put not to have developed an entire critique of reason that turned the internal processes of the mind into a transcendental object, a representation of the sublime.¹¹ His sequestered material life demonstrates the dramatic turn self-definition took toward the end of the eighteenth century both across Europe and in Britain—a turn that privileged a radical implosion of the external world into the consciousness of the individual. In early eighteenth-century Britain, a primary strategy of national self-definition was the xenophobic differentiation of self from nonwhite colonial others; the strategy was naturalized. By the end of the eighteenth century, as we see with Johnson and his strong influence, self-definition, nationalist or otherwise, involved a conviction of the existence of an essential inner self—and of existence as an essential inner self, ostensibly independent of any external context or dependence on an “other.” These beliefs were wholeheartedly espoused by British and European intellectuals. Kant’s notions of the sublime, of pure reason, and the domain of the transcendental aesthetic, produced in this milieu, reflect these changing accounts of subjectivity. Such an aesthetic shift promised an existential or subjective freedom to the individual imagination and suggested, in part (though class difference in literary production was always an issue), a liberating departure from the rigid standards of poetic practice established by eighteenth-century men of letters. In short, this aesthetic shift reflected other forms of revolution that championed the emancipation of the individual; for example, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and the French Revolution itself.

Kant continues his explication of the intuitive. On the transcendental exposition of the conception of time, he writes:

I shall add that the conception of change, and with it the conception of motion, as change of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time; that if this representation were not an intuition (internal) a priori, no conception, of whatever kind, could render comprehensible the possibility of change…. Time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, the intuitions of self and of our internal state.¹²

Embedded in the understanding of an a priori category is a curious trust in the stability and universality of the mind. In fact, the notions of both “intuition” and “a priori” rest in unknowing, on the opposite side of eighteenth-century reasoning that purports to use external cultural properties to shape individual or private sentiment. “Intuition” suggests by definition an immediacy of reaction or the lack of a conscious process of reasoning: an unconscious response. “A priori” (especially as Kant popularized the term) also defines the categories as innate to the mind, not based on visible experiential evidence.

These terms upon which he sustains his critique of “pure” reason are conditioned by Enlightenment thinkers (such as Kant himself) who understood difference as only an external phenomenon and therefore inconsequential and ephemeral, while the internal structure of the mind and reason were universal, eternal, and essential. The faith in this belief justifies imperialism, material and imaginative, as the overcoming of “mere” material differences (of the natives) by means of education: as “we” educate the other to use his divinely sanctioned reason, he will become more like us because while we are the embodiment of realized reason, “natives” are only reason in potentia. But the fact that such reasoning depends on the representation of difference embodied by the “native” suggests that there is something suspect about disembodied reason. We may have to account for the success of Enlightenment reasoning because of the threat that difference posed to Western beliefs in the infallibility of their system. In other words, the idea that difference existed, even if it was cast as cultural inferiority, raised the specter of an always differential identity in the seamless integrity of European (and, in the context of this argument, specifically British) mastery. If something could be visibly different and if that difference were crucial in producing the notion of an internalized, transhistorical identity, it spelled an inability of the all-knowing capacities of Western discursive practices to account for phenomenology.

The Kantian model of mind, certain of its own universality and trusting the legitimacy of its constitution of the outside world, nevertheless acknowledges the existence of its own internal “other”: what will come a hundred years later to be called “the unconscious,” Kant called “the thing” itself. Although Kant claimed the noumenal to be outside the scope of human knowledge, many of the romantic philosophers and artists who followed him could not resist the appeal of the unknown self. Little wonder that almost a century later Freud began using these aesthetically produced ideas in order to define the psyche in a scientific discourse. It seems then that Kant’s understanding of the outside world—of a world outside Königsberg or Eastern Prussia or Europe—could only exist, a priori, as an internal projection. In this way, his Critique of Pure Reason can so glibly and successfully exclude history. This exclusion, of course, is nothing new; the cultural privilege Western nations place on historiography may well portend other forms of the successful exclusion of history. Latent anxieties that the impingement of an other, unknown world poses to the integrity and coherence of the “known” world are mitigated by historiographical discourse: our understanding of “universal” events is defined by what we know about ourselves and project onto others. Such a discourse consequently produces Western fantasies of its own political and cultural control. In the case of Kant and the romantic writers who deployed his understanding of the transcendental sublime through poetics, however, the putative incorporation of exotic otherness effectively masked an intense xenophobia that structures the internal life of the mind and the unconscious.¹³

The belief in an essential internal life of the mind that is able effectively to transcend the material circumstances of its own production has served the academy well, both in Kant’s time and ours. Cultural studies, however, identify the ways aesthetics are politically motivated and manifested as products of power. But while the field of romanticism acknowledges the crucial need for such politicizing, it also holds some particular “truths” to be self-evident. Prominent among these professed truths is the successful foreclosure of xenophobia as a constitutive factor in the production of romantic ideas about subjectivity, inwardness, and authorship. It strikes me, however, that articulations of such “truths” may also usefully uncover the complexities of xenophobia as a cultural phenomenon. Following Freud’s accounts of the processes of incorporation and introjection in which the first notion provides the bodily model for the second psychological operation, xenophobia dictates how (foreign) objects are situated and resituated within domestic discourse. Thus the bodily incorporation of difference that is identified as a “thing” is itself later transposed to its sublime form, the introjection of an idea. Our language embodies the cultural unconscious that rests both within and without the privileged internal space of individual agency.¹⁴ In other words, as part of the symbolic, language acts as both basilisk and signpost to conscious ideas and unconscious impulses that make up what we define as “personal” subjectivity, one that may turn out to be more public than private.

A perfectly disembodied and idyllic “life of the mind” will always crucially depend on the dirty work performed by the “life of the body” for its articulation, resting precisely on material hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality that it purports to transcend. Romantic writing—especially its preoccupation with subjectivity, the sublime, or other forms of transcendental philosophy—also rests on the messy material hierarchies that are both invoked and eradicated by xenophobia. Despite the radical changes cultural studies have wrought in the academy, it may nonetheless unconsciously retain older formulations of subjectivity that both depend on and reinforce notions of the internal and the external for their articulation. Romantic writing in particular struggles with its attachment to the imagination: a privileged internal space of unproblematized knowledge (as in Kant’s exposition of the transcendental aesthetic), uncomplicated by the problems that race and gender pose to the production of epistemology. The meaning of race in early eighteenth-century Britain takes shape only as a projected materiality, an external reality far removed from ideas of Cartesian subjectivity. Color that is mapped out on an external skin functions exclusively in relation to the “uncolored” or white body privileged with the capacities of an internal life and a clearly defined “self.”

But exactly how do these internal and external spaces get codified as hierarchies in cultural discourse? One way of addressing this problem is to look at Lacan’s formulations of the unconscious. One of the most difficult—and most transparent—claims Lacan makes about the unconscious is its externality: the fact that the “unconscious is outside.” Like the anatomical navel whose material presence marks a prior connection with someone other and therefore visibly contests the notion of an autonomous body, the ultimately unknown center of a psychic truth is equally visible: only available as a representation, it is out there, waiting to be uncovered, recovered, and situated within some ideological matrix. Ideological assumptions about the difference between external and internal sites of identity have privileged the internal: the enduring Enlightenment belief that the internal carries more meaning than the external turns out, according to Lacan, to be exactly the opposite.

Governed by epistemological interests in order and knowledge produced through a largely taxonomic discourse, Enlightenment thinking focuses on the empirical study, the Cartesian paradigm. Romanticism has been commonly understood as a reaction against Enlightenment reasoning, focusing on the erratic and the uneven rather than the regular, harkening back to older models of romance (medieval) for its paradigmatic shift. M. H. Abrams writes, for example:

in the several decades beginning with the 1780s, however, a number of the keenest and most sensitive minds found radically inadequate, both to the immediate human experience and to basic human needs, the intellectual ambiance of the Enlightenment, with (as they saw it) its mechanistic world-view, its analytic divisiveness (which undertook to explain all physical and mental phenomena by breaking them down into irreducible parts, and regarded all wholes as a collocation of such elementary parts), and its conception of the human mind as totally diverse and alien from its nonmental environment.¹⁵

While I believe that the “minds” that produced these objections certainly perceived themselves as making radical moves away from Enlightenment ideology, perhaps those moves were not quite as radical as they might appear. Or, conversely, perhaps the very radicalness of their representation is a sign of disturbing contiguities. Embedded within romantic discourse is a commitment to the idea of the author produced through inward contemplation, celebrating the imagination as the primary space for a revolt against a secured public arena of thought. It is against the popular eighteenth-century understanding of the author as voicing the collective thinking of a reasoning public that romanticism has come to be conceptualized.

Interestingly, however, as Robinson Crusoe makes abundantly clear, these ostensibly different discourses of Enlightenment and romantic thought share many similar currents, particularly in relation to their definitions of national identity. Appropriating the old meaning of “romance” from “romans/romauns,” the vernacular language of France (as opposed to Latin), romantic writers consecrate the colloquial or common tongues, firmly believing these languages to articulate “true” feeling. That is, the historical motives for the “original” turn to the vernacular among medieval and renaissance writers, philosophers, politicians and the like had to do with the rise of nation states. Speaking the vernacular as an expression against Latin, against another authority, also suggests the production of one community in opposition to another one that has since been linked to the emergence of nation.¹⁶ Likewise, Crusoe’s taxonomic efforts, recorded in his journal as putatively free from any colonizing desire except “necessity,” appropriate island artifacts (with crucial exceptions) and translate them into an eighteenth-century British commercial vernacular.

Wielding the technical facility Crusoe enjoys as a British subject to fashion his circumstances according to models of trade and commercialism, Defoe makes quite visible the ways in which subjectivities are fabricated through the fetish of xenophobia. Conscious of the outlandish figure he cuts with his goatskins, Mahometan mustaches, and not-quite-Mulatto skin, Crusoe is still able both to acknowledge his othered position (as when he becomes enslaved earlier in the novel) and to brandish the kind of authority granted a British subjectivity. We may be able to situate Defoe on the cusp of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century formulations of the self in relation to others. Eighteenth-century constructions of subjectivity reproduce selves in relation to external reflections of exotic others. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, for example, depicts the national and what we would now term cultural differences inhabiting the bodies of Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, or Yahoos as externally manifested in the smallness, largeness, or darkness of their bodies, all of which are so conceptually distinct from Gulliver’s own British body as to be incapable of sharing the same epistemological space.¹⁷ Even if romantic conceptions of the self also deploy national identities as ways of insuring the discreteness of the self, the crucial difference is in their capacity to identify with otherness and incorporate it within the boundaries of the self. Thus when Wordsworth expresses his “personal wish / To speak the language more familiarly,” it takes shape as his gradual withdrawal into the French revolutionary cause: “I gradually withdrew / Into a noisier world, and thus did soon / Become a patriot—and my heart was all / Given to the people, and my love was theirs.”¹⁸ Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, performs the important task of negotiating between these positions, which reinforces the argument that the “origins” of romantic identity may be deeply embedded in eighteenth-century epistemology.¹⁹ My particular contribution to the large and longstanding literature on this subject is to argue that the shared inflections between these ostensibly incompatible discourses are primarily xenophobic and get represented in terms of nation.

The phenomenon of xenophobia remains largely untheorized in current postmodern and postcolonial studies; this telling absence may well attest to the ways in which it functions so successfully in social structures. This book will demonstrate the ways our academic belief in romantic principles (inward subjectivity, the solitary voice, the authority of writing) can be understood only through xenophobia and the language it produces.

Recent critics have persuasively claimed the influence of imperialism, orientalism, and colonialism on the production of romantic literature after Jerome J. McGann’s important study, The Romantic Ideology, “precipitated a return to historical and political readings of the Romantic period.”²⁰ John Barrell, Marilyn Butler, Nigel Leask, Robert Young, Jerome McGann, Saree Makdisi, Charles Rzepka, Alina Clej, Josephine McDonagh and others address the importance of attending to historical materialism in relation to romanticism, thus shifting our understanding of the discipline as a field without history. Collections such as Tim Fulford’s and Peter J. Kitson’s Romanticism and Empire, Sonia Hofkosh’s and Alan Richardson’s Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, or John Beer’s Questioning Romanticism, among others, conduct very useful cultural inquiry into the concept of romanticism, and problematize the material conditions of romantic discourse. Few arguments, however, have addressed the psychological conditions attendant upon imperialist ideology that make possible the production of romanticism. Little work in romantic studies or in the field of history has addressed the relationship between imperialism and nationalism that together with historical materialism forms the ideological apparatus for cultural representation.²¹ Leask and Saree Makdisi make important arguments regarding Britain’s sense of national self-enclosure: that imperial cultural incomparability results from internal or domestic anxiety about empire (Leask) or that the move away from trade and commerce and entry into industrialism happened well before the mid eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Makdisi). I place my own study in relation to these as an investigation of the psychological structures set up to account for these internal anxieties about national identity—for example, Johnson’s trepidations about language or Defoe’s uneasiness with trade—and claim that these concerns are historically based on an economy of xenophobia and xenodochy.

I will argue that British romantic writing, produced from imperialist ideology, is also constituted through the psychological hinge between imperialism and nationalism: xenophobia. The aesthetic focus dominating representations of romanticism (both of the literature and the critical discourse but also of more recent cultural and material readings) have emerged as a result of territorial claims. Not unlike the historical ways in which unknown worlds were incorporated—and introjected—within the parameters and perimeters of a “known” culture, academic definitions of historical periods as intellectual (or historiographical) territories repeat the imperial impulse to nationhood. As early eighteenth-century novels like Robinson Crusoe demonstrate, however, the connections between discourses long believed to have been antithetical to one another may also demonstrate the ways in which we lock certain paradigms of identity into fixed meanings, whether or not we associate them with a specific literary period. It stands to reason, then, that the romantic period is not simply an isolatable historical phenomenon which we have since “passed.”

Saree Makdisi argues that the

distinction between modernism and romanticism … is not so much in their engagement with modernization … but rather in that romanticism merges with the beginnings of modernization and persists alongside it to the end; whereas modernism emerges specifically at the climax of that process and helps to constitute that climax in overall cultural terms.²²

I would add, however, that romanticism does not simply give way or fade out to modernism but is continually renewing itself according to new historical models even in the guise of modernity and postmodernity. For example, Makdisi locates the “much earlier, more deeply and stubbornly held view about overseas European hegemony” near the end of the eighteenth century. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, however, demonstrates a much earlier belief in the epistemological superiority of British national subjectivity (one that develops from trade and commercial activity, but that later evolves into a form of island industrialism—the manufacture of skins into textiles). This belief is contingent upon a romantic understanding of the internalized self as wholly sufficient to articulate British national hegemony. What happens earlier than the end of the eighteenth century is also possible on the other end of the historical spectrum: that romantic celebration of the “archaic” at whatever point of “eradication” (as Makdisi argues) is an ongoing process that makes possible new definitions of (post)modernization (10).

My question addresses why the belief in the romantic understanding of an essential, inward authorial subjectivity and a persistent belief in aesthetic sensibility as a free-standing phenomenon is so enduring, particularly in the face of a postmodern culture with increasingly sophisticated capacities for self-consciously reinventing aesthetics. What epistemological ends does this tenacity serve?

This study addresses these questions by analyzing the ways xenophobia has historically created and sustained the belief in an essential authorial subjectivity. How xenophobia disarticulates and rearticulates this need, I argue, is crucially connected to the strategic and complex understanding and definition of orientalism and imperialism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. I am especially concerned with the ways the idea of containment—most often figured as containment of the literal mass of territories that constitute Britain’s ideological imperial identity—is prominently represented in romantic literature. That is, to contain something—to draw boundaries around that “thing”—is to give it definition, whether this definition is produced discursively (lexicography), economically (commerce), or ideologically (nationality).²³

Definitions, especially as they emerge as representations of containment, are critical to the ways in which colonial relations operate. Britain’s relation to India seems to offer a particularly convincing example of how containment works. The relation India has had to Britain has been understood as politically, culturally, and aesthetically subordinate. However, India was crucial to the production of British identity: one has only to remember Gauri Viswanathan’s crucial contribution to postcolonial studies when she argued that the solidification of a canon of literature marking English cultural identity was principally invented in India before it was deployed in Great Britain.²⁴ According to this model, there are no independent freestanding nations of “Britain” and “India” because their political, aesthetic, and cultural identities are mutually constitutive. It is not possible to “have” an India free from the cultural signification with which Britain has endowed it, or the reverse.

The popular dualism between “England” and “India,” often postulated as the binary relation between “self” and “other,” has conventionally situated these locales as utterly distinct from one another, sharing only a colonialist relation based on dominance and subordination. If we think of these territories, however, not as endpoints or fixed modular units but only as spaces for cultural negotiation—as intermediary planes occupying “in-between” spaces, in which neither place is automatically endowed with a natural(ized) authority over its own meaning—then the ideological structures sustaining beliefs about dominance and subordination become more transparent. The same insecurities defining the subaltern space for the British also delineate their own domestic space. Thus, from a British standpoint, what connects the “home” country, the domestic habitat (in the sense of native) to its fantasy of the East (an India that is continually being reinvented as ever more foreign), also subjects the domestic to a need for continual recontainment.²⁵ The ideological circuits that attach far-flung colonies to their “mother” country entangle those faraway places with the home base; foreign colonies, therefore, may not always be figured as outlandishly different from the mother country. These circuits also problematize the material things that identify the domestic space (the incorporation of tea, for example, as a signifier of Englishness); in short, they deterritorialize the domestic. While it is true that the national identity displayed by both colonial and postcolonial “India” is constructed within a European discourse, it is also true that British national identity is absolutely dependent on those “Indias” for its articulation. I argue that any British insistence on its own domestic interiority—or at least on the independence of that interiority from the colonial exterior—requires a disavowal or repression of the material practices that define Englishness.

As an academic discipline, romanticism is no longer understood as the self-referential celebration of art and the dehistoricized artist. Rather, romanticism provides us with ways of making things outside the scope of that nucleus, outside our domesticated space, “safe” for our consumption. Xenophobia similarly operates as a crucial ideological force in the task of organizing a space, of making and remaking the territories that, among other things, demarcate what is and what is not “home.”

I am arguing, however, that xenophobia is not a free-standing entity, out of which is produced imperialism. As I’ve suggested earlier, xenophobia also depends on an economy with another less familiar term, xenodochy. Articulations of xenophobia—such as those occurring in imperialism—thus crucially depend on inviting the “foreign” to inhabit domestic grounds. Nigel Leask and John Barrell both argue that the consumption of the other is a form of maintenance; in Leask’s terms, sporting “the sign of the Other in order to disengage the signifier from any semantic substance, to parody it, and also to innoculate himself and his culture from the threat which it poses” accounts for the sustained interest in and often excessive consumption of Oriental artifacts in tandem with a continual abjection of Oriental identity.²⁶ The difference my argument brings to their important formulations is in thinking through and historicizing the psychic impulses that drive such forms of consumption and vilification.

Slavoj Žižek argues that fantasy “constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates … teaches us how to desire.”²⁷ What one incorporates or introjects within one’s desire is always going to be articulated in the context of phobic markers. Crusoe’s desires to resituate himself within a foreign signifying system take shape as the intense phobias that mark his difference. For example, Friday’s habits, particularly his predilection for cannibalism—a practice that for his people is a way of negotiating political power—need to be instantly and radically relearned because of the threat they pose to Crusoe. Despite the fact that Friday willingly learns Crusoe’s lessons and is an admirable companion to him, Crusoe remains skeptical, fearing the return of other savages even while admitting to the pleasantness of his life.

But to return to my new companion: I was greatly delighted with him and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper…. now my life began to be so easy that I began to say to myself that could I but have been safe from more savages, I cared not if I was never to remove from the place while I lived. (188–89)

Such fears remain as the introjected phobic markers that critically mark the difference between Crusoe and Friday despite Crusoe’s desires for assimilation.

The two parts of this book examine the ways xenophobia informs the relations between colony and mother country through the reification of romantic authorship. British romantic ideology, I argue, is first codified in the heart of the Enlightenment.²⁸ Later, during the period customarily understood as romantic, this ideology may have been more dramatically exemplified by its “outcasts” than by the main characters themselves. In other words, while Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, for example, write about the relation between romanticism and orientalism, more marginal figures like De Quincey, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley demonstrate the incorporation of oriental exoticism within English intellectualism. Foucault’s injunction to seek history (genealogy) in “the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history” suggests that a field’s central texts are not the only persuasive representations of literary movements.²⁹ The authors and texts I choose to examine, therefore, do not belong to a conventional roster of romantic writers; in fact, because I am situating the “origin” of romanticism well within the Enlightenment, I spend a good deal of time discussing the eighteenth century. I am arguing that the initial codification of romantic ideology as an articulation of xenophobic/xenodochial drives occurs within eighteenth-century documents. I am not examining literary texts that self-consciously raise the specter of the Orient (for example, Johnson’s Rasselas or Byron’s Eastern Tales), but, rather, am interested in the unselfconscious invocation of Oriental metaphor.

The first chapter situates the beginnings of a romantic ideology in the mid-eighteenth century with attention to Johnson’s corpus. Although there have been many compelling arguments about eighteenth-century imperialism in Johnson’s work, I argue that his imperialism informs romantic ideology and the shifting strategic deployments of imperial identity. Chapter One uncovers the ways in which his Preface to the Dictionary, London, and the Life of Savage institutionalize Englishness in its most invisibly authoritative form—the reference work—as well as in the more visible (works with identifiable authors) genres of poetry and biography through a self-consciously strategic xenophobic apology. These genres radically depart from earlier eighteenth-century representations that figure otherness and the exotic as external. Johnson clearly demonstrates the romantic move toward incorporating otherness within the self and the importance of exclusionary sensibilities to a “stable” national identity. His fictional and nonfictional works define the necessity for a privatized authorial space, dominated by his own sense of possessing an internal psychic self plagued by the vicissitudes of the unconscious.

This eighteenth-century hypostatization of the unconscious constitutes what we should recognize as the beginning of romantic ideology. The move Johnson makes toward interiorization may have been appropriated ex post facto forty-five years later to formulate the structures of a “new” romantic ideology.³⁰ Thus while his corpus figures mightily in the established history of eighteenth-century men of letters, it is also clear that it gestures toward a romantic ideology; ironically, he may embody an Oedipal figure against which “canonical” romantics rebel even as they carry on his legacy.

In some ways, De Quincey’s relation to romanticism, while more obviously canonical than Johnson’s, is less trustworthy because of his infamous addiction to opium. That is, his autobiographical confessions to opium-eating demonstrate a pathological relation to romantic scholarship, as John Barrell and Nigel Leask have so provocatively uncovered. It is this addiction, however, that keenly problematizes his romantic xenophobia. My second chapter demonstrates the internalization of exoticism in De Quincey’s works, particularly his Confessions. I argue that his obsession with cultural monstrosity—“exotic” creatures like tigers and crocodiles that for him blur the boundaries of animal and human—functions as part of an impulse to derive histories of meaning that serve to situate, contextualize, and eventually mythologize the place of British imperial history. De Quincey’s traffic in opium, his problems with addiction, and his struggle to maintain his intellectual status in the circle of Lake District poets all manifest the ways in which the xenophobia is institutionalized through the process of xenodochy. In other words, the fear of the foreign that informs so much of British cultural identity is negotiated in De Quincey and other romantics only by entertaining that which is most feared: the foreign. Thus De Quincey is able to slide between registers of familiarity and difference—between the domesticity of Dove Cottage and the network of oriental fantasies it produces—with ostensibly writerly ease. The Zizekian symptom of phobic markers of desire and loathing for the foreign that Crusoe deploys to his advantage returns in De Quincey’s writing to mark off the limits of a “stable” identity.

What difference does gender make to the ways in which xenophobia is produced in romantic culture? Perhaps our attention should turn to the paradigms of xenophobia that depend on notions of reproduction. Maternal bodies represent the national body: more specifically, the mother’s body provides colonialism with a material identity and imbues imperial authority with the innocence typically attributed to motherhood. Romantic models of solitary, inward-looking authorship are more vexed in relation to female writing because the material conditions providing such roles for authors were simply not commonly available to women in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries (although both Mary Wollstonecraft and Shelley defy these conventions). Mary Wollstonecraft’s relation to romanticism is, therefore, more overtly political. Like Wordsworth’s interest in the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft’s political, fictional, and personal writings all addressed the interests of common citizenry that the Lake District poets endorsed. Such articulations are, however, particularly vexed by gender. On the one hand, writers like Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Wollstonecraft, and others demonstrate a keen sense of identification with the social oppressions wrought by imperialist traffic such as the slave trade. On the other, their own authorial positions are contingent upon same the kinds of power structures associated with imperialism.

In these interests, the second half of this study examines the mechanism through which a recently disclosed “female” canon complicates but does not overcome the xenophobic erection of such models of imperialism. Feminist recovery of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, while very crucially shifting the parameters of the canon, may have foreclosed our attention to some of the difficulties of her fictional and nonfictional work. For example, even while vociferously speaking for the need for women’s political and intellectual agency in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s own xenophobia determines the boundaries of which groups of “women” can claim subjectivity. Her fictional work, focusing on problems of mothering and female education, similarly reflects the insidiousness of the ideological structure of imperialism. Wollstonecraft’s interest in romantic politics is primarily centered around the overtly political causes Wordsworth and Coleridge ended up discussing in their Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. The French Revolution with its concerns of republicanism and enfranchisement dramatized for poets like Wordsworth a material means to engage his revolutionary poetics. For Wollstonecraft, her interest in radical views on education, particularly those of Rousseau, her unorthodox ideas about marriage and domesticity, her attachment to Richard Price, place her within the intellectual parameters that have come to be known as romantic. Her anti-Jacobin An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution seems to align her with De Quincey’s similar sentiments, though her opposition to the tyranny of the politically disfavored and the poor alike seems much less encoded by class (and gender) than De Quincey’s. However, they share an untroubled sense of British hegemony articulated by xenophobia. Here the paradigm Samuel Johnson uses to formulate conceptions of the definitive other through a self-assimilating francophobia is repeated by both De Quincey and Wollstonecraft (ironically for the latter, given her attachment to Talleyrand and Rousseau).

I begin my argument on female authorship with Wollstonecraft partially because of her stature in a canon of “feminist” writing. Like Johnson, Wollstonecraft carves out a new lexicography but her feminist language is subject to the same ideological conflicts complicating Johnson’s project. Specifically, I examine Wollstonecraft’s representation of mothering as a phenomenon informed by general maternal images of the body of colonial power. These images are complicated by her equally fervent representations of the Rousseauian model that advocate a specific relationship between mothering, patriotism, and national (imperial) identity on the one hand, and a resistance to the entire practice of mothering as the only important form of female occupation on the other.

The simultaneous beatification and vilification of the maternal colonizing body is, ironically, most dramatically achieved in Wollstonecraft’s own issue, so to speak: her daughter, Mary Shelley, makes almost painfully clear the cultural and psychic vicissitudes of xenophobic reproduction in Frankenstein. Though many critics have read this novel in the interests of cultural critique, and though my reading takes those ideological issues into account, I am specifically interested in the ways that maternity functions in the xenophobic figuration of romanticism. Do maternal bodies, because they serve the interests of nation by reproducing its citizenry, also perpetuate the xenophobic elements of national identity? Do they also critically resist the reproduction of imperialism? How complicit or implicit is maternity in the production of imperialist ideology?

The problems with the maternal, the xenophobic, the colonial, and the romantic body by no means end with the advent of late romanticism. Domesticity and its discontents, education and its oracular effects equally complicate popular readings of female-authored fictional works. What Mary Shelley articulates as “female” marginalization is further complicated by Charlotte Brontë. Villette in particular has been privileged as the text that most thoroughly investigates the female writer as marginalized subject. Set in the typically Gothic “foreign” space, Villette demonstrates with breathtaking concision the ways Lucy Snowe’s national affiliation to Britain, no matter how vexed by gender, is determined by xenophobia. Providing a transitional text into Victorian ideologies of gender, Brontë’s work articulates romantic ideals of identity, demonstrating similar xenophobic paradigms that inform early Victorian culture.

Reading women’s work without understanding how technologies of race and gender inform representation is a lot like imagining that one’s desires originate from oneself. There is no “outside” space in which to place the arena of women’s work; to imagine that such writing is not a product of the same kinds of ideologies informing men’s work is simplistic. To imagine that such work can remain “outside” the parameters of gender is also obfuscating. There is a significant body of work done by scholars of gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies that has established the ways gender often mediates strategies of othering. What is less clearly established is the rendering of gender into a thing capable of such agency. Looking at the production of women’s writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century discloses the same xenophobic systems that structure imperialism in the works of male authors. The reification of gender roles in the eighteenth century may have allowed women to claim an “agency” that discouraged them from questioning the xenophobic construction of national identity. Even the most overt appeals to end slavery, cast by Ann Yearsley, Hannah More, and others, do not question the deeply embedded structures of xenophobia within the frame of Britishness. Even if she chastises British “fancy” as the underlying material “cause” of slavery in her “Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade,” for example, Yearsley does not critique the system that produces a “renegade Christian” slavemaster.

Demonstrating the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality and nationalism inform and get informed by xenophobic drives, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, lays the groundwork for the institutionalization of xenophobia and provides compelling evidence for the argument that romanticism may have been extension of rather than an antidote to ideologies of conquering “nature” and “other.” In the next chapter I discuss how thirty-six years later, Johnson codified xenophobic drives within the parameters of lexicography.