Mobility and stasis

The publication of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) helped to define and popularise the prose form that was later to be called the novel. Its connection with mobility is obvious – both Robinson Crusoe and its sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published later the same year, use journeys as a framework. Critics have argued much of the drama of the narrative is a result of its ambivalence between what Martin Price called ‘the adventurous spirit and the old piety’, when the traditional insistence on ‘keeping one's place’ was being loosened by the ethos of circulation and trade that helped drive a nascent capitalist economy. Robinson Crusoe formulates his journey in precisely these terms; he sees leaving his family as his ‘Original Sin’ and worries his vicissitudes at sea are a punishment for his ‘wandering Inclination’ and his rejection of traditional, paternal authority. Robinson Crusoe is also highly responsive to the changes experienced in mobility in the second decade of the century. Defoe's novels debate the relative advantages of moving by sea or land at a time when roads were becoming much more important for internal transport in Britain, rivalling the ships that skirted the coast and the boats that worked the river routes. The shifts between motion and stasis, and moving alternately by sea and land, pattern the narrative and give it much of its power. In the surprising sea section, the gradual development on the island, or the exciting denouement set along the strand, something new is glimpsed in Robinson Crusoe: the beginnings of a poetics of mobility, of an investigation of the self in transit.

Much of the long history of Crusoe criticism has concerned itself with precisely this problem; what is it that motivates him to move, what drives himfrom place to place? It is a critical debate that is impossible to recount in all its complexity but the fact that it is constantly being regenerated suggests both the rich suggestiveness of Defoe's story and also the fact that the various theories deal only in partial truths.