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Providence, Patriarchy, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son

A Parabolic Approach to Defoe’s Family Instructor

The Family Instructor, Vol. 1, was, apart from Robinson Crusoe, the most popular of Defoe’s books during the eighteenth century. While its innovative use of narrative and dialogue differentiates it from many other conduct manuals, its end-ing remains problematic. A ‘parabolic’ examination of some of Defoe’s key thematic concepts (Providence, passion, and patriar-chy), as well as his use of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, allows us to construct ‘matrices’ that indicate that two of the narra-tive ‘arcs’ of the text, whatever their primary diegetic function might be, are also predicated on an implicit critique of Catho-lic Mariology.

Brian Heinrich

I. Introduction

The Family Instructor, Vol. 1 (fi 1) was written and published at a crucial point in Daniel Defoe’s career:1 in August 1714, he experienced a caesura in his journalistic career for the first time

since undertaking the Review early in 1704. Nevertheless, he remained productive: P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens list ten items they attribute to Defoe between August 1714 and April 1715.2 All the items published between the passing of the Schism Bill in June 1714 and the publica-tion of fi 1 in some way or other mount a defence of Defoe’s disgraced patron, Robert Harley; in the months following its appearance, Defoe’s

1. Published in late January 1715, fi 1 was ‘ill Printed’ (fi 1 43); a second edition, ‘Corrected by the Author’ (fi 1 41), followed in September. (For more information on the first printing, see Ewing.)2. Items 164(p)–173(p) (the first and last items are probable attributions). (John Robert Moore’s Checklist includes a number of items deattributed by Furbank and Owens between the same two terminal points.)

2 Providence, Patriarchy, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son

focus begins to shift. fi 1 was, then, written and published at a time of renewed political tension and uncertainty following Queen Anne’s death on 1 August 1714, five days after Harley’s dismissal as Lord Treasurer (v. Defoe, An Appeal 3, 5).3 In addition, the efforts he took to try to remain anonymous as its author (fi 1 16) suggest that the publication of fi 1 held especial importance for him. These peculiarities surrounding its publication make fi 1 an ideal entry point into Defoe’s work. In it, we find him renovating – re(in)novating – a conventional, conservative form, using narrativised dialogue to rejuve-nate the conduct manual by injecting dramatic conflict into it. As with The Family Instructor, Vol. 2 (fi 2 [1718]), Religious Courtship (rc [1722]), and Conjugal Lewdness (cl [1727]), while ‘moral precepts may be clear and simple, individual motivation is far more difficult to distinguish and to judge’ (cl 17): except for A New Family Instructor (nfi [1727]), Defoe’s conduct manuals concern themselves with familial relations in ‘a world of increasing irreligion’ and ‘domestic disharmony’ (rc 3). In order more clearly to understand the problems posed by these works, we need to shift our methodological approach towards a kind of ‘parabolic’ polytextuality that is more sensitive to the subtle and sometimes idiosyn-cratic ways in which Defoe both deploys and reframes concepts such as Providence, passion, and patriarchy;4 their parabolic interplay within this specific sociohistorical context, in which an Augustinian conception of Providence was under attack5 at the same time the Revolution Settle-ment of 1689 was making moribund the kind of patriarchy espoused by

3. The term breaches appears with some frequency in The Secret History of the White-Staff (1714), The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre (1715), and An Appeal to Honour and Justice (1715), Defoe’s apologia pro vita sua; the Pretender, Jacobites, and ‘the French Interest’ (An Appeal 25) – and therefore questions of religion and absolutism – all preoccupy Defoe during this period. (The dramatic action of the outermost parts of fi 1 is initiated by a breach within the family over the sudden – and unilateral – decision by the father to impose family-religion.)4. The parabole here has both figurative and geometric dimensions, as the para-ble, the allegorical and metaphorical, and as the parabola, which can (figuratively) be inscribed across multiple texts.5. The ‘assault on providential religion, and an active God and Devil’ during the Age of Enlightenment (System of Magick 19) would have been particularly acute in Britain during Defoe’s lifetime, where the ongoing paradigm shift of the Sci-

Providence, Patriarchy, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son 3

Sir Robert Filmer, can help us understand the abrupt and schematic con-clusion of fi 1 and open up new paths along which we can explore Defoe’s body of work.

II. ProvidenceDivine Providence is central to any understanding of Defoe’s Welt anschauung and work. While it plays a significant role in Robinson Crusoe (1719), Defoe would more clearly elaborate his perspective on Pro-vidence in the Serious Reflections (sr [1720]), with its appended Vision of the Angelick World (vaw), as well as in the trio of works on the super-natural from the last years of his life.6 While a belief in ‘the Sovereignty of Providence’ ‘in directing and disposing both Causes and Events in all things relating to the Government of Mankind, or indeed of the whole World’ (cl 257; sm 169) was an integral part of the society into which he was born, by the time Defoe was writing, its significance – and significa-tion – was changing as philosophy and science came to be less ‘subservient to theology’ (Lloyd 235). Providence, however, continued to retain a per-sonal psychological and spiritual relevance. In the Age of Enlightenment, as human reason came into ascendency, if God hadn’t exactly become the obscure(d), ghostly figure imagined by Stephen Dedalus (Joyce 215), his Providence had certainly begun to recede from view.7

Perhaps the best way to approach how Defoe understands Providence is to look at the Serious Reflections, in which the space surrounding us is ‘throng’d with Spirits’ ‘of divers kinds, some good, some evil’ (246 [vaw];

entific Revolution intersected with the rationalism of the Enlightenment in the activities of the Royal Society.6. The Political History of the Devil (phd [1726]), A System of Magick; or, a His-tory of the Black Art (sm [1726]), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Appa-ritions (1727).7. And likewise the Devil, who, ‘in Defoe’s “system” of magic’, ‘has been reduced, like the Deist’s God, to the role of passive observer [ . . . ]. The Devil has become obsolete, his place firmly usurped by man’ (sm 12–13). ‘Defoe was keen to mini-mise the role played by the Devil in human affairs, stressing instead human free will and the disposition of mankind to perpetrate acts of evil without the formal assistance of the great seducer, Satan’, who is reduced ‘to the role of mischievous instigator of evil thoughts’ (7).


sm 215), each attempting to influence us in a constant, unseen battle.8 The means employed by the combatants are similar, and Defoe sug-gests that Satan, ‘cunning Fellow’ and ‘diligent Devil ’ that he is (sr 228 [vaw]; phd 160), has simply mimicked and imitated God’s own providen-tial methods.9

In sr, Defoe (in the character of Crusoe) focusses on receptivity – sen-sitivity – to the voice of Providence (180–200), which whispers to us in dreams and other hortatory and monitory hints and intimations (194; 185), and to which we should listen because it ‘determines all other things for our Advantage’ (183). In the play of necessity and free will that is its domain, Providence permits us subjective agency while still fulfilling Divine Necessity. Defoe does not believe in chance, circumstance, or hap-penstance (v. sr 184); in a truly providential universe, there are – and can be – no accidents: the traveller robbed and abused by highwaymen is no more a victim of chance (as the Devil would have it) than his more for-tunate companion is the beneficiary of good luck (sr 197–98, 199). In a providential universe, that is, everything is meaningful. What changes between The Storm (1704), in which the storm is both a provi-dential judgement and a natural disaster, and the Serious Reflections is the way in which the manifestations of Providence are understood. Perhaps under the influence of rational theology, Providence begins to lose its revealed dimension and increasingly takes on a natural and indeed a social aspect (v., e.g., 260–72 [and 258–59]). It increasingly becomes an imma-nent Providence, integral to the knowable operations of the natural world, rather than a transcendent, supranatural Providence. As such, it is capa-ble of being temporalised and therefore narrativised.

8. See, e.g., sr 239–40, 242, 244–45, and 250–51 [vaw], as well as Starr’s com-ments at 2.9. (See, e.g., phd 257; v. also sr 244–45 [vaw] and sm 90, 93, 103.) While the Devil is merely ‘imitating the superior Revelations’ of God when God ‘inspire[s] the Minds of Men with divine Ideas’ (sm 101), the question of mimesis remains unresolved: ‘how near he might come to imitate the Visions and Revelations of God,’ Defoe writes, ‘is what I cannot undertake to determine’ (108).


The Family of Parts 1 and 3

fi 1 begins with what would appear to be an innocent enough event: a father encounters his youngest son, Tommy, gesturing in a way that suggests he is trying to situate himself – figure out his place – in the world (47–48). In speaking with him, the father becomes conscious of his neglect of the religious education and instruction of his family and household (66–67).10 A passionate, impulsive man who appears to consult his passions rather than his reason (fi 2 35),11 he resolves to effect a reli-gious revolution – a veritable Reformation – in his home. The result is a breach within the family: the younger son and daugh-ter (Will and Betty) are pleased to have this opportunity present itself, while the eldest son and daughter (George and Mary) are both more worldly and more set in their ways. Mary’s story traces a conventionally comic arc: after her marriage,12 she is reconciled with her father (301–02, 307–08) and achieves the domestic bliss of ‘a religious life’ – ‘the only Heaven upon Earth’ (rc 61; v. fi 1 308). The success of that process of reconciliation is as important to the outcome of her story as its failure is to the tragic trajectory traced by her brother’s.13

III. Pride and PassionDefoe’s work tends to be organised around mediated binary oppo-sitions; most importantly (if quite conventionally), Providence mediates between the Divine – necessity – and the natural – contingency or inde-

10. ‘[T]he End and Meaning of ’ matrimony, Defoe writes in Conjugal Lewdness, ‘is the raising Families, procreating Children to be brought up religiously’ (226).11. The eldest son, George, is later described as ‘pursuing the Dictates, not of his Reason, but of his Passion’ (243).12. By ‘an unforeseen Providence [ . . . ], her Uncle’s Eldest Son by a former Wife [i.e., not her biological cousin] fell in Love with her, and by consent of his Father a Proposal of Marriage was made between them’ (244).13. Letting a tragic narrative arc (v. rc 11 and fi 1 308, 314) play out imputes noth-ing either to God or to his Providence. Defoe is explicit: ‘Providence itself, not-withstanding the Crimes of Men, is actively concern’d in no Evil’ (sr 183); while ‘every Crime puts the Criminal in some Measure into the Devil’s Power’ (135), the criminal (regardless of Satan’s insinuations) still takes the decision to com-mit the crime.


terminacy. This opposition presupposes others, including that between reason and the passions: reason is of God, while the passions are of man’s Postlapsarian nature – because of Adam’s sin, we all bear a ‘corrupt Taint’ that ‘we bring into the World with us, and which we find upon our Nature, by which we find a Natural Propensity in us to do Evil, and no Natural Inclination to do Good’ (fi 1 59 [but cf. rc 76]). Between the two, the Paraclete moderates.14

Defoe places modesty and decency – propriety15 – in opposition to pride and passion. And first and foremost among those passions, having pride of place, is rage.16 It is in relation to the way in which ‘Pride swells the Pas-sions’ (phd 284) that we need to understand the well-known apophthegm from fi 1: ‘Liberty [which George, perhaps foreshadowing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has just called ‘a Native Right’] to do Evil is an abandon’d Slav-

14. Derived from the Greek παράκλητος (advocate or intercessor), the term is usually applied to the Holy Spirit but can be applied to Christ (v., e.g., fi 1 89).15. The French propre (from the Latin proprius, which has a range of meanings: one’s own, personal, private; characteristic, particular; appropriate, proper) has also acquired the meaning of ‘clean’, such that the translator of Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror at times translates le corps propre as ‘“one’s own clean and proper body”’ (ⅷ). This cleanliness manifests itself in honesty, which ‘is a general Probity of Mind, an Aptitude to Act justly and honourably in all Cases, religious and civil, and to all Persons superiour or inferiour’ (sr 74). To be dishonest, to act unjustly or dis-honestly, is to be immodest, indecent, and improper – to be obscene.16. In fi 2, a distinction is made between righteous anger, directed at a sin, and passionate rage, directed against the person sinning (133–34); in rc, rage is replaced by the more generic passion (102–03). Defoe goes as far as to say being ‘in a Passion at our Children’ is ‘all Distraction, and an Abomination’ (103) – a word he uses elsewhere in respect of cannibalism and marital sodomy, and that he also associates with profaneness (fi 1 129) and criminality (Secret History of the Secret History 314). An abomination is that which is obscene, unclean; in Leviticus, those who commit such abominations (including incest, adultery, coition with an ‘unclean’ woman, human sacrifice, sodomy, and bestiality [18.6–23]) ‘shall be cut off from among their people’ (v. 29) – that is, will be subject to direct divine judgement, to execution, or possibly to banishment, which might be understood in relation to the scapegoat of Lev. 16, or possibly in relation to the banished Cain, who is ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ (Gen. 4.12, 14).


ery, the worst of Bondage; and Confinement from doing Evil is the only true Liberty’ (134).17

Parents and Children

The parents and eldest children of the family with which fi 1 is primarily concerned are contrasted with the second daughter and son, who show us that not everything is a product of the interplay of education and envi-ronment: they have an innate sense of propriety and virtue lacking in their older siblings, and willingly and cheerfully ‘make their Duty be their Choice’ (111). Where Mary is ‘in a violent Passion’ with her mother for burning her novels and plays (99), her younger sister, Betty, gladly sacri-fices their scandalous and salacious pages to the flames (106, 117–18; v. nfi 66–69 and sr 123–28). Most of the drama plays out between the parents (the father in partic-ular) and the two eldest children. All four are passionate creatures, wil-ful and rash, and sure in their convictions. Both George and Mary are old enough to feel the sudden revolutionary Reformation (v. 129) in their family as an unwelcome and unpleasant restraint on both them and their liberties,18 which brings out the central problem of the book: children are to honour their parents no matter what – no matter how old they may be; no matter how undeserving the parents might be.19 The duty owed

17. In Conjugal Lewdness, Defoe writes that ‘Christian Limitation is the true measure of human Liberty; where Heaven has had the goodness to leave us with-out a limitation, he expects we should limit our selves with the more exactness’ (55). This limitation is a self-imposed constraint, because ‘Our Moderation in Diversions shall introduce our Children’s Excess’ (fi 1 71). In Patriarcha, Filmer (who believes the patriarchal monarch to be above – out-side – the law) writes that ‘the greatest liberty in the world (if it be duly con-sidered) is for a people to live under a monarch. It is the Magna Charta of this kingdom; all other shows or pretexts of liberty are but several degrees of slavery, and a liberty only to destroy liberty’ (55). Needless to say, Defoe sees such liberty as nothing but slavery and bondage.18. In fi 2 (109), the citizen’s friend, Sir Richard’s brother-in-law, speaks of ‘the Effect of the natural Witchcraft, with which our corrupt Inclinations seize upon us in our Youth, when neither GOD’s Grace or Parent’s Instructions intervene.’19. (See the Westminster Larger Catechism, q 127, 128, and 130 [Confession 211–13, 215–16]; fi 1 81, and Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons’ 6.)


by children to their parents is a theme that runs throughout the conduct manuals: ‘Children ought not to fail in their Duty, on the pretence of the miscarriages of their Parents’ (fi 2 179);

A Son can never argue that the breach of Duty in his Father is a Supersedeas to his Obligation: Obedience of Children to Parents is a natural Law; ’tis a first Principle, neither Humanity or Chris-tianity can subsist without it; nor can any Defect in the Conduct of the Father discharge that Duty [. . .]. [. . . . L]et the Infirmi-ties and ill Management of their Parents be what they will, they can never be discharg’d of the Duty to them; their Reverence and Respect to their Parents cannot abate, without a horrible Breach upon their Morals and their Consciences, and without abandon-ing Humanity and Religion. (157, 180)20

The tone for what follows is set by the father. We don’t know how pas-sionate he might normally be (i.e., before his conversation with Tommy), but passion and rage seem to be no strangers to him; the difference here seems to be one of degree: their father has never been quite this passion-ate, this enraged,21 this repentant before (148).22 But passion engenders passion(ate responses) in others, and much of part 1 reads like a series of

20. The sacredness of this duty of child to parent is noted by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer:

The crimes that, according to the original sources, merit sacratio [capitis, which would render the offender homo sacer, banned or excom-municated from the community] (such as [ . . . ] verberatio parentis, the violence of the son against the parent [ . . . ]) [. . . .] constitute instead the originary exception in which human life is included in the politi-cal order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed [but without being sacrificed (in a religious rite)]. (85)

(See also Filmer, Patriarcha 57 and Anarchy 287.)21. See 154 and ff., and 148, where Pru, Mary’s maid, fears that the father ‘will go distracted’.22. George refers to ‘this new Whimsie’ of their father’s (147) and to his ‘Enthu-siastick Fits of Repentance’ (148). This very enthusiasm to religious reformation complicates our response to the text. So, too, does George’s character: like Sir Richard in fi 2 and the suitor in Religious Courtship, he ‘hate[s] Hypocrisie and Dissimulation’ (140); he has ‘never prevaricated’ with his father, nor dissembled with him (156).


angry arguments that only come to an end when the parents (particularly the father) have so alienated George and Mary that they leave home, like people ‘gone into voluntary Banishment from their own Country’ (259). The rash vows he takes – a kind of swearing that is, in its own right, a profanation (cf. fi 1 23) – are a product of his passion.23 The contractual nature of such oaths, with God himself as witness, make them all but impossible to break without breaking faith with God.24

In this particular case, the rash vows the father takes – as when he tells George that ‘if ever you set your Foot without the Door on this Account [i.e., refusing to submit to what George calls ‘his Patriarchal Authority’ (143)], you never get leave to set your Foot within it again, but upon your Knees, and with the humblest Repentance and Submission both to God and your Father’ (135) – prolong and perpetuate his passion indefinitely: he is able neither to forgive nor to forget.25

This lack of hypocrisy should make him, like them, a good candidate for con-version; the difference is that George, ultimately, is not honest with himself. Pride and loyalty to mistaken notions of honour and what it means to be a gentleman prevent him from submitting to his father, because he sees such submission as an abasement or abjection (v. 318). By the same token, the tyrannical patriarch simply expects complaisant compli-ance – passive obedience and nonresistance – as indefeasibly both his right and his due. Religion becomes the means whereby, perhaps perversely, he asserts his authoritarian sovereignty, much as did James Ⅱ when he tried to impose a new religious order.23. While Defoe notes that ‘Blasphemy is the Extream of Prophaneness’ (sr 117), it is, in light of his later condemnation of marital sodomy in Conjugal Lewdness (200), perhaps worth noting that he calls bawdry ‘that Sodomy of the Tongue’ (sr 120; v. cl 220, where the phrase is used in respect of ‘talking Lewdly of conjugal Actions’, and cf. fi 2 95, where the friend of Sir Richard’s sister has ‘accustom’d herself to a most abominable Looseness of the Tongue’). Defoe’s concern about manners and their reformation extends back to his earliest pub-lished pieces, as the long title of The Poor Man’s Plea (1698) makes plain, and was renewed in the 1720s.24. The father ‘enters into a secret Engagement between God and his own Soul ’ to correct ‘the Neglect and Omission of his Duty to his Children and Family’ (67). It is only later that he discusses his plans for a religious reformation with his wife (88–90), although he has already made his vow to God.25. One of Defoe’s favourite expressions is ‘Be angry, and sin not’, taken from Eph. 4.26–27: ‘Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your


The parents and their eldest children mutually provoke and antagonise one another, resulting in a non–zero-sum game with no possible victor. This is clearest in the battle of wills – and passions – in which George and his father engage. Although old enough to be his own man, he lives under his father’s roof and is therefore subject(ed) to his father(’s laws).26 In order to have his way, he would have to violate his father’s fiat and thereby align himself against God(’s Law).27 Nor can the father have his way without either alienating or disowning his son. External intervention will be necessary in order to resolve the impasse. We see here the opening up of the narrative possibilities of an imma-nent, naturalistic Providence. But if, in order to renew Providence, Defoe finds himself having to refurbish and renovate – renew – the concept, the very dramatic situation he creates is predicated upon another traditional concept that likewise required rejuvenation: patriarchy.

IV. PatriarchyIn writing against Sir Robert Filmer in Two Treatises of Govern-ment, John Locke argues from ‘reason and “natural rights”’ (Defoe, Con-stitutional Theory 35; v. also Jure Divino 24), which allows him – along with other writers who favoured a contract theory of government, includ-ing Defoe28 – simply to posit the legitimacy of government based on property rights: ‘Property is the foundation of power, and government

wrath: neither give place to the devil’ (Zondervan kjv Study Bible). Rage, then, is both a sin and a succumbing to Satan’s insinuations.26. See Filmer’s discussion of Hugo Grotius in Observations Concerning the Orig-inall of Government (268–69).27. The omnipotence of God can be seen in epitome in the puissance of the patri-archal father. The father in fi 1 makes this parallel plain when he says to his wife, ‘as God will not be mocked by us [v. Gal. 5–7], so we must not be mocked by our Children’ (90). (See also Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons’ 6–7.)28. Defoe’s theory of government has ‘some affinities to Locke’s, though also with some marked differences’ (Constitutional Theory 20; v. Jure Divino 22). There are few direct references to Locke in Defoe’s writings: a footnote to Jure Divino (1706), for instance (108n(b) [n. to 2.209]), and at least one passage in the Review (10 Sep. 1706, qtd. at Constitutional Theory 29). Defoe most clearly articu-lates his position in The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of Eng-land (1702).


loses its authority if it attempts to invade private property’ (20). Usufruct (one sense of ‘jouissance’) and improvement to property through labour are central to Locke’s argument,29 counterbalancing the rather different conception of a sovereign right of enjoyment (jouissance) articulated by divine-right theorists. That Filmer understands this right to be absolute is clear from his examples, which are intended to demonstrate that such right in the state is simply an extension – and expansion – of the same right in the patriarchal family.30

Defoe, particularly in his anti-Jacobite pamphlets of 1713,31 desires to discredit patriarchy as a valid political ideology, which means he can-not simply assert its validity within the oikos. For Defoe, the political is rooted in property, while the family is relational and relative, so for patri-archy to hold valid within the household but not in the polis involves aligning it more closely with the relative relation between God the Father and humanity, which is the fundamental point of the long central section of Crusoe: he becomes a new Adam and restages an original innocence in an always already lost Eden.32

Filmer’s definition of patriarchy comes close to the kind of libertin-age D.-A.-F. de Sade would articulate towards the end of the eighteenth

29. See the Second Treatise, cap. 5, esp. § 27–28, 32–33, 35, 45, and 51 (287–89, 290–91, 292, 299, and 302).30. See (e.g.) Patriarcha 77–78 (paraphrased from Jean Bodin). Filmer elaborates the story in the Observations on Aristotle’s Politics, referring there to the ‘sacred and inviolable’ ‘monarchical power of the Father over the children’ (210). (Agam-ben also comments on this absolute patriarchal power [87–88 (v. also 81, 88)].)31. Reasons Against the Succession of the House of Hanover; And What If the Pre-tender Should Come?; and An Answer to a Question that No Body Thinks of, viz. But What If the Queen Should Die? (For Defoe’s assessment, see An Appeal 27–36.)32. This impossible attempt to recover that which has always already been lost relates Crusoe to the masochistic tableau. The phantasy-cum-fantasy of an inde-pendent (rather than dependent), self-sustaining innocence is shattered by the arrival of the Other, much as the masochistic tableau is shattered by a Third. Rather than a threat of castration, the Other here threatens Crusoe’s corporeal consistency as the potential victim of cannibalistic sacrifice. In the Original Power, Defoe writes of ‘when Governours devour the People they should protect’ (119; at fi 1 133), and Crusoe’s behaviour towards the Span-iards on the mainland and the captain and crew of the mutineered English ship in the final section of his island narrative show clearly that his aversion to canni-balistic consumption extends to figurative as well as literal anthropophagia.


century, in which the libertine has full rights – both of enjoyment and of possession – over the other.33 In rejecting absolute monarchy and all that is associated with it (e.g., an abject, ‘masochistic’, nonresistive pas-sive obedience [v. Constitutional Theory 23–24]), Defoe needs to reframe patriarchy within the oikos, and does so by constructing an agapē that decisively moves patriarchy in the direction of paternalism.34 It is less relations of authority and subordination (fi 2 161; v. cl 124) that predom-inate within this renewed and enlightened patriarchy than it is – ideally – mutual relations of parental and filial love (agapē). Paradoxically, the only way to move children to their filial duty and obligation is ‘to move Par-ents not to expose the Paternal authority to Contempt’ (fi 2 180) by abus-ing it. In Defoe’s rejuvenation of patriarchy, it is less a matter of the father’s occupying the position of Φ, of the Law-of-the-Father (la loi du père), than it is of the father’s commanding respect through propriety and restraint. While obedience of children towards their parents (and ‘not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts, and especially

33. Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s Politics leads him to posit zoē as ‘bare life’ or ‘naked life’ (la nuda vita) and bios as ‘politically qualified life’ (1–3). Mary, much like woman in Aristotle’s Athens, is excluded from the very distinction itself (‘Would I were a Man as you are,’ she tells George [144]), such that woman’s being can be understood in relation to the alterity of a zone of indistinction because she is irreducibly other: ‘In Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men’ (Agamben 7). But the exclusion of woman from the bios/zoē distinction, as the one who is enjoyed without enjoying, who is possessed without possessing, subordinated to the will and abjected to the desire of her father or husband, equally founds the city of men. Framed otherwise, the distinction between the normative feminine desire to be Φ (the Phallus – the signifier sans signified) and the normative masculine desire to have Φ (Lacan, ‘Signification’ 583 [Écrits (1966): 693, 694]) implies their phan-tasmatic inversion: a perverse feminine desire to become Φ (i.e., the phantasy of the female Sadeian libertine) and a perverse masculine desire to be had by (i.e., to be enjoyed or possessed – but not incorporated – by) Φ. In a sense, the desire to be(come) Φ is also a desire to be(come) bios, and the desire to be had by Φ, a desire to be(come) zoē.34. The difference between patriarchy and paternalism, in repsect of power, can be seen in the Gramscian distinction between coercion and co-option, which would seem to epitomise the shift from a transcendent to an immanent Providence.


such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth’ [Larger Catechism q 125 (Confession 209–10)]) is an absolute duty, parents are to evoke or elicit that obligatory duty of respect through love of their children. Refurbishing patriarchy in this fashion decouples it from the figure of the father qua (symbolic) Father; paternalism would not then be inher-ently related to the father as biological father, but rather to the paternal function – the Law-of-the-Father, which always already presupposes the Name-of-the-Father (le nom du père).35 While this would seem to sug-gest the possibility an enlightened patriarchy that could be generalised under the rubric ‘parentage’, in practice, because of the way in which the Desire-of/for-the-Mother is elided, so that she is always already dis-placed from her place in the oikos (and has no place in the polis), the parental conflates with – collapses into – the paternal.36

Mary and Matrimony

Both Mary and George wilfully choose not to be bound by their father’s determination to impose family-religion – both family-worship and reli-gious instruction – on his household, and both leave: Mary, at her own

35. Le nom du père contains two homophonic puns: les non-dupes errent (the non-duped err/the names of the father [sic]) and le ‘non’ du père. It may therefore be preferable to distinguish between the Law- and the Name-of-the-Father. The Law-of-the-Father would refer to the father’s No!, his proscriptive Thou shalt not!, prohibiting, first and foremost, union with the mother, while the Name-of-the-Father would refer more generally to filiation, particularly in respect of the law of naming. The two intersect, the Law-of-the-Father existing in roughly the same relation to the oikos that the Name-of-the-Father does to the polis. But the Law-of-the-Father also elides the Desire-of/for-the-Mother (le désir de la mère) by occupying the place of her absence (Lacan, ‘On a Question’ 465 [Écrits (1966): 557]). (Taking advantage of an orthographical quirk of Latin scripts, the figure of the father in the transcendental position of the Father (i.e., as occupying the position of Φ) could be called the ‘ffather’, conflating both the biological father and the transcendental imaginary–symbolic Father.)36. This shift from a patriarchal family to a paternal(istic) family may help us bet-ter understand the seemingly sudden sentimentalising ‘feminisation’ of the man

– or, rather (because, in being feminised, he loses his subjective specificity), the man – within a decade of Defoe’s death. (Compare phd 74.)


request, is permitted to go to her aunt’s (159), while George, with nei-ther his father’s consent nor his blessing, leaves in the teeth of his vow that George shall never re-enter his house – his domain; his dominion37 – except he repents of his sinfulness in refusing to submit to the father’s rightful (and, implicitly, righteous) authority over him. In either case, the father ‘resolved they should neither of them have ever come into his House again, till they had humbled themselves, and acknowledged both their Sins against GOD, and their Contempt of ’ – their impious lack of respect for (v. fi 2 160) – ‘their Father’ (247; v. also 251). The key incident in Mary’s story – the one that opens up the possi-bility of reconciliation with her father – is the conversation her husband has with him (290–94). Mary has reverted to her contrarian ways, much to the consternation of her husband (277–79 and the dialogue with her husband that follows at 280–88); her father, more inclined to patriarchal authority than parental–paternal government, has all but disowned – dis-possessed – her, as the discussion he has with his son-in-law, especially in respect of her marriage portion (292–93), makes plain. While the idea of woman as moveable property – as part and parcel of her father’s or her husband’s goods and chattels,38 to be possessed and enjoyed – is almost viscerally repugnant to most in contemporary Western/European socie-ties, this very desubjectivised, objectified status, and the tension engen-dered between her father’s patriarchalism and her husband’s paternalism,39 is precisely what makes reconciliation father possible.

37. Having just referred to ‘the Authority of a Father, as Governour’ (133), he tells George, ‘if you will not submit to my Government, you must quit my Dominions’ (134), recalling Defoe’s statement in The Original Power that freeholders could force a man to ‘fly the Nation’ by refusing to allow him to ‘come upon their Land’ (and ‘Indict[ing] him for a Trespass’ if he does), or by refusing to ‘Lett him a House for his Money’ (123).38. On children as alienable property, see Patriarcha 77, Observations 231.39. Father and husband can implicitly be equated, given the tendency at the time – at least amongst some social classes – for wives to be considerably younger than their husbands: ‘when we are young,’ says one character in Conjugal Lewd-ness (165), ‘we always say, the Man should be at least ten years older than the Woman.’ In a letter to Charles Montagu, Baron Halifax, dated 5 Apr. 1705, Defoe refers to his brother-in-law, Robert Davis, as ‘my Brother’ (Healey 81 [letter 30]; v. Moore, Citizen 11, and cf. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe 220), so it is not entirely


Mary’s pious, temperate husband becomes a Christine figure,40 a para-clete mediating – acting as advocate or intercessor (v. 266) – between the sinful daughter (whose name is doubly suggestive, first in respect of the Revolution Settlement, and then in respect of Defoe’s own sentiments regarding Catholicism)41 and the tyrannical ffather, figure of the jealous, vengeful God of the Old Testament. Without a socially sanctioned medi-ator with a proprietary–proprietorial interest in her, there is but a neg-ligible chance that any mediation between father and daughter could be successful. The way in which Defoe rejuvenates–renovates patriarchy here is cru-cial, because he has disentangled it from questions of absolute authority, nonresistance, and passive obedience (in the polis) while still retaining relative duties within the household, particularly those of children to parents and of parents to children. If, within the oikos, we have a shift to a parental–paternal mode from a patriarchal one, with its tyrannising sover eignty, in the polity the cognate shift is from absolute to constitu-tional (i.e., ‘limited’ or ‘mixed’) monarchy. In both, we see repeated in epitome, at a microcosmic level, the way in which the jealous, patriarchal Lord of the Old Testament becomes the loving, forgiving Father of the New – a God whose grace and mercy nevertheless do not foreclude his sole and sovereign right to judge.

V. The Parable of the Prodigal SonIn the triptych that comprises fi 1, parts 1 and 3 can be read as a prodigious gloss on the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11–32), which is explicitly invoked in the text (249, 260, 272), even as it is in A New

surprising to find the father-in-law here becoming the father, such that the son-in-law simply becomes the son. (See also fi 1 127.)40. ‘Instead of stereotypically masculine, physical aggressiveness [such as that in which George is implicitly implicated by joining the army; v. sr 73], Defoe prizes strength of mind under pressure; his model of courage (and heroism in general) is at once more “feminine” and more Christlike’ (rc 10n15; v. fi 1 316).41. Given the eldest son’s name, there may also be a glance here at the relations between George Ⅰ and the Prince of Wales; certainly their dislike of each other was known by the time the King arrived in England in late September 1714 (v. Plumb 42).


Family Instructor, when the son who foolishly ignores his father’s advice and has been seduced by Catholicism has his eyes opened to ‘the Empti-ness of Popery’ (195) and returns to the true fold as ‘a Penitent’ (198).42

The parable permits of at least two readings,43 one focussing on the prodigal’s penitence (vv. 18–19), the other on the father’s compassion (v. 20). The emphasis, as in nfi, is on penitence, but here the father’s compas-sion, despite the protestations of the text (e.g., 311, 317 [and cf. 314]), is all but nonexistent, his just resentment (v. 312) and his sense of justification in maintaining it for some five years (317), trumping whatever compassion he might feel. It is the failure of the interplay of penitence and compas-sion and the resulting impasse that points us towards the peculiarity of the book’s conclusion. Even after his providential misfortunes – even after his father’s ban has been re-enforced after he has returned to England (312) – George is too proud to beg forgiveness of his father and admit of his error to him; more significantly, perhaps, he was also too proud – too caught up in a false understanding of honour and what it means to be a gentleman (e.g., 314, 316, 318) – to pay heed to the voice of Providence that spoke to him so plainly both in his dream (261–63; v. also 312–13, 314, 315) and (as reported by Mary [272]) in his aunt’s prediction. At the same time, his father is too proud – too passionate; too much subject to the tyranny of his own sovereign authority – to relent, to repent of his rash vow and to extend forgiveness and show compassion towards his wayward and war-broken son by lifting the ban he has imposed.44

42. The fact that his repentance, like Mary’s, involves a near-death experience (297, 299; Mary was quite ill earlier, too [249–50]) is not coincidental, explicitly evoking the words of the prodigal’s father to his elder son that ‘this thy brother was dead, and is alive again’ (v. 32), and stands in contrast to George’s case (as well as that of the citizen’s wife in fi 2 [see 53–55 regarding her breakdown and her husband’s concerns as to whether she had the opportunity, while still lucid, to repent]).43. A third possible reading would focus on the response of the elder son, and would relate the parable to various Old Testament stories of elder and younger sons in which one – usually the latter – is favoured: if George has been disowned

– disinherited (260) – Will is, by the law of primogeniture, next in line to inherit. (See also Backscheider, ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons’ 7, 17.)44. George’s physical ‘dismantling’ links him to le corps morcelé, the body in/of pieces, and thus to Kristeva’s abject. The abject implies submission as well


This is clearly in distinction to the parable, where the father’s supererog-atory compassion towards his son overwhelms the prodigal’s desire for forgiveness; here, the father remains implacable, inexorable in his resent-ment and self-righteousness. The result is an impossible impasse, both father and son consumed by their pride: there is no compassion on the one side, no penitence on the other. Any possible reconciliation must be negotiated, and the role of mediatrix falls to Mary.45

George and the Failure of Marian Mediation

The problem is that even in a paternalistically enlightened patriarchy Mary is incapable of functioning in a mediatorial capacity: the prop-erty cannot, with propriety, negotiate with the proprietor;46 as a married woman, ‘she is a Mistress, she is a Mother, she is a Wife’ (cl 46), but lacks the individuating subjective specificity that would allow her active agency outside the domestic realm, that would allow her to participate in public (i.e., political) life (Agamben 89, 90), as already witnessed by the aunt’s abject failure when she tries to negotiate with the father on behalf of the daughter (254–56). Defoe chooses to have Mary’s husband encounter her father, resulting in the essentially commercial exchange (of her marriage portion) that establishes a relationship between them, just as the relationship between father and son is also reduced to such a commercial exchange, albeit one that is carried out unilaterally from father to son, through Mary.47

as corporeal vulnerability, and thereby suggests externally imposed dependence. (See also the passage in The Fortunate Mistress in which the Dutch merchant gives Roxana an account of the misfortunes that befall the Jew [119–20/Roxana 133–35].)45. In Catholic Mariology, Mary is both mediatrix and co-redemptrix.46. As would become evident with the rise of labour movements in the latter half of the nineteenth century.47. His father allows George ‘50 l. a Year for his Subsistence [ . . . ]: Thus he is left entirely free, either to comply with his Father, or not [ . . . ], as GOD shall please to influence his Mind; he can complain of no Force or ill Usage on my Side’ (321), and gives her £10 to give to him. In repeating this to George, Mary says ‘that however you refuse or decline your Duty to him, he will do his Duty to you’


He also chooses to put Mary in the position of serving as intermediary between George and their father, and to have her attempt to act ‘as an Ambassador, or a Mediator’ (317), as George’s advocate and intercessor with their father, fail.48

The father continues in his resolve (which he does not see as the prod-uct of a rash vow because he does not see the vow itself as being precip-itant) that George will be allowed back into his home only if he submits; penitence here becomes synonymous with abjection before the sovereign authority of the ffather:

will he [George] acknowledge his Sin against GOD and his Father, in resisting the just Measures taken for the Reformation of our Family, and his leaving the House upon that Account. For which I solemnly declared to him, That if he went away upon that Score, he should never return, but as a Penitent. (320)

tell him, he knows the Reason, why I cannot agree to take him Home; which Reason it is in his Power to remove when he pleases; tell him that when he thinks fit to remove it effectually, he shall be received with as much Affection and Kindness as he can expect; but that it is below me to take Advantage of his Mis-ery to oblige him to that Submission [v. 265], tho’ I have good Reason to do so:49 [ . . . ] he is left entirely free, either to comply

(323). Duty here would seem to preclude responsibility; it also, unlike the duty of children to parents, carries no connotation of obligation.48. In fact, Mary fails doubly in her role as mediatrix, both in representing the father to George and in representing him to their father. However, if she fails as mediatrix, such that there would seem to be little hope of redemption for George, she does, ironically (if not perversely), succeed as an agent of a naturalistic Prov-idence, ensuring that his providential dream will come to pass to the extent that there is no reconciliation between him and his father.49. This passage is one that renders problematic the very possibility of a straight-forward reading of the text, since the father here appears to disclaim any respon-sibility he might have in respect of his son – even though he is responsible for George’s lack of instruction, which allows his corrupt inclinations to seize upon him (fi 2 109). And yet fi 1 was seen as an unproblematic text (see Chalmers [51] and Wilson [3: 404–08]), and Wilson attests to it continuing popularity, stating that editions ‘have been very numerous. Large numbers have been disposed of for prize books


with his Father, or not to comply with him, as GOD shall please to influence his mind. (321)

That last phrase (v. 152 [and cf. 159]) is as much as a curse as a prayer, all but abandoning George to God’s foreordained determination as to whether or not he is one of the elect, predestined to be saved, or one doomed to damnation. When Mary tells him that their father ‘leaves you to your Liberty’ (322) – that is, abandons the son who had banished himself – we are perhaps to be reminded of an earlier use of the word: ‘Liberty to do Evil is an abandon’d Slavery, the worst of Bondage ’ (134). But the slavery and bondage here are to one’s own gust, to ‘an unbridled perverse Inclination’ (fi 1 85) that naturally and necessarily inclines us towards evil (v. Rom. 7.15–23).50

This becomes clear in the work’s final paragraph:

he grew melancholly, and disturbed, and offered two or three Times to destroy himself; [ . . . ] and God having not pleased to grant him either the Grace of Repentance for his former Sins, or to prevent future; he fell into an extravagant life,51 ill Com-pany, and drinking, and died in a miserable Condition, Atheisti-cal and Impenitent; having never seen his Father [since his return to England],52 nor so much as desiring it, till on his Death-bed,

in schools, for which it is well adapted; nor can a more useful work be found for general distribution’ (3: 408).50. In Conjugal Lewdness, Defoe writes that ‘We are not limited or directed to what, when, or how much we shall eat or drink; but all Excesses in either are sin-ful’ (161); we ‘are ruined in our Morals by lawful Things; the Excesses of our law-ful Enjoyments make them criminal’ (215). Our inability to constrain ourselves

– our transgressing the bounds of propriety even in lawful enjoyment (jouissance) – makes us obscene.51. ‘Extravagance’ (308, 311) is what originally reduced George ‘to the last Extrem-ity of Mistery’ (308).52. The father here clearly conflates with God the Father: the worst thing about the fate of the fallen angels – and therefore of all who are maudite, both doomed and damned – is to be denied the sight of the face of God; that is, to be deprived of the presence of the greatest good (sr 247 [vaw]): ‘eternal Absence from God,’ Defoe writes in the Serious Reflecions, ‘is Hell in the Abstract’ (134); ‘the Absence of the supreme Good is a compleat Hell’ (phd 167).


being delirious, he cried out for his Father! his Father:53 That he had abused his Father! That he might ask him Forgiveness! But he died before his Father, who happened to be in the Country, could be sent for. (324)

The very schematic nature of this suspiciously abrupt ending is sugges-tive, and the fact that the father experiences no remorse – cannot com-prehend that he might not be (in the) right – is similarly suspicious.54 This suggests that there is a subtext to fi 1 that comes closest to the sur-face in this peculiar ending. And that subtext would appear to be an ‘alle-goric’ condemnation of the certain damnation offered by ‘that meaner and more ignorant Idolatry call’d Popery’ (sm 110),55 and an affirmation of the necessity and ineluctability of God’s righteous decrees. ‘What a continued Series of Ecclesiastic Magick has been acted among the Romish Clergy, and in the whole Papal Hierarchy!’ Defoe writes in sm:

Popery itself seems to be to be one entire System of Antechris-tian [sic] Magick; its Constitutions are all Sorcery and Witch-craft; they prevail upon Sense by Nonsense, upon the Head by the Tail, upon Zeal by Enthusiasm; and upon Christian Doctrine by the Doctrine of the Devil. (252)

53. This may be intended to recall Christ’s ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ (Matt. 27.46; v. Mark 15.34 and cf. Luke 23.46, John 19.30). Compare also at 250, where Mary, in her first illness, cries out for her brother; he, however, ‘would not come unless his Father would send for him’.54. If George’s passion and mistaken conception of honour prevent him from being honest with himself, so does his father’s all-consuming rage and self-right-eousness prevent him from seeing how the intemperance of his own enthusiasm has been the cause – providential or otherwise – not just of his son’s sin but also of his impenitence. (See also Lloyd 146–47, where she quotes from Augustine’s De Libero Artibrio Voluntatis (3.23.147), although Augustine is there thinking of young children.)55. In part 2 of rc, the widowed daughter repeats one of her husband’s arguments in favour of conversion to Catholicism (209–10; v. also 292n172): Protestant the-ologians held that Catholics could be saved, while Catholics believed that Prot-estants could not.

21

VI. ConclusionDefoe’s attempts to maintain the validity of old verities in the face of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment can at times lead to impasses in his thought. At one and the same time, he clearly believes in Providence – and in election and predestination – but he also believes that human agents are responsible for their actions, that they have a responsibility both to and for themselves as well as to and for others. This responsibility, however, necessarily requires free will: my decision to do or not to do a thing is, in a sense, independent of the insinuations of Satan and the promptings of Providence, since the decision is, gener-ally, one taken of my own free choice, even if that choice can be consid-ered forced because plays out in relation to the determinations of Divine Necessity. While Defoe may resist the Enlightenment degradation of Providence, the division between an immanent, naturalistic Providence and a tran-scendent, supernatural one is still marked in his work, although the immanent is informed by the transcendent, as in the tale of the atheisti-cal students in the Serious Reflection (260–72 [vaw]; v. also the anecdote at 258–59), rather than abandoned to the knowable natural causes of the sciences. Defoe, that is, is a man inextricably caught between modernity and (a fantasy of ) a past that is irrecoverable – a fantasy that is also clearly marked in his rejection of the sovereign authority of patriarchal absolut-ism both in the household and the polity in favour of a limited, restrained government. 1. Despite this liminality, Defoe’s way of thinking about the world is very different from ours. Defoe’s is still a world – albeit in its twilight – that is alive and filled to overflowing; a world in which Divine Providence is still always at play. This irrecoverable difference between past and present is marked in a well-known passage from the Serious Reflections in which Crusoe suggests that his story is an allusive ‘Allegorick History’ (53)56

56. Later in sr, Defoe will write of ‘The telling or writing [of ] a Parable, or an allusive allegorick History’, which ‘is quite a different Case’ from the telling of false, feigned stories because ‘it is design’d and effectually turn’d for instructive and upright Ends, and has its Moral justly apply’d’ (126; v. nfi 66–69), while of fi 1 he writes that ‘Tho’ much of the Story is Historical, [ . . . ] the Author [ . . . ]


– ‘the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical’, Defoe writes in the guise of Crusoe (51). There is a fundamental duplicity here: the allegory is historical at the same time the history is allegorical; moreover, the alle-gory–history is itself only allusive.57 These partial allegorical–metaphori-cal correspondences, in which history becomes figurative and polytextual and which would have given contemporaneous readers a sense of depth and resonance, of complexity, form networks within – and polytextual ‘matrices’ between and amongst – works. 2. These ways of construing the world are often parabolic. Within and amongst texts, Defoe inscribes these networks and matrices, sometimes directly (as in certain themes, such as morality, to which he repeatedly returns), sometimes more parabolically, obliquely and tangentially. These thematic parabolas incised in his body of work give it its almost Joycean sense of complexity and depth, intricating it within the bric-à-brac of everyday life, even as his use of incidental detail can give it a vivid sense of realism: much as with Joyce’s Dublin, you feel as though early eight-eenth-century London could be reconstructed by a careful reading of Defoe. But these parabolic matrices, which allow us to generate various transformational meanings and readings, also give us insight into Defoe not simply as a sociohistorical cultural construct but also as an individual with an idiosyncratic habitus. 3. Defoe was the product of a conservative culture that was in the midst of a paradigm shift. We too readily forget the importance of allegory in the literature of the time, even though The Pilgrim’s Progress58 was published during Defoe’s lifetime. Similarly, we overlook the fact that the best-

has been obliged to leave it Uncertain [ . . . ], whether it be a History or a Para-ble’ (47; v. also 198, 243).57. In the double time scheme of The Fortunate Mistress, the best example of such an allusive, ‘parabolic’ reference is when Roxana tells her princely lover that he can, if he so desires, be present in the room at the time of her parturition (77/Roxana 77), explicitly recalling the persistent warming-pan rumours regarding the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart in 1688.58. Defoe would, in sr, directly compare The Family Instructor to Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘Parables, and the Inventions of Men publish’d Historically, are once for all related, and the Moral being drawn, the History remains allusive only, as it was intended, as in several Cases [The Pilgrims Progress] may be instanced within our time [The Family Instructor and others] and without’ (127 [Defoe’s footnotes interpolated in brackets]; but v. 340n307).


selling books of Defoe’s day were religious and didactic works, includ-ing works of practical divinity such as conduct manuals.59 In A New Fam-ily Instructor, two of the children debate the value of ‘the Reading or not Reading Romances, or fictitious Stories’ (66), and, as their discussion makes plain, the very function of fiction was problematic for readers at the time. If intended solely ‘as a Diversion’, such fictions were scandal-ous: to ‘deceive the Reader’ into confusing falsehood for fact is ‘criminal and wicked, and making a Lye [Rev. 22.15]’. Otherwise, fiction is of value only in respect of its ‘End and Use’, that is, if ‘the Moral of the Tale is duly annex’d’ (66). With a predilection for disguise and deception, it is not surprising to discover that Defoe, whom Maximillian E. Novak has called a ‘master of fictions’, should also have a talent for the kind of dissimulation required to survive and thrive as a writer at a time when those in power could read-ily oppress and suppress the not-yet-named Fourth Estate – to comment on tensions within the royal household, say, by way of a news item pur-portedly about the familial travails of Peter the Great (v. Lee 2: 61–63, 63–66; and v. Plumb 51–56).60 The idea of an allusive allegoric history is then more than just a quaint turn of phrase; it condenses an entire meth-odology: ‘the yoking together of allegory and history’ – the ‘paradoxi-cal joining of categories that seem mutually exclusive’ – is part of Defoe’s ‘habit of mind’, whereby ‘normally disjunctive terms’ are treated as ‘con-junctive’ (sr 9). 4. Strictly historicist readings are as unlikely to discover these parabolic ele-ments as are parochial critico-theoretical readings. The approach we need to take to Defoe could be considered cognate to a Foucauldian archaeol-ogy. Historical knowledge is necessary to any understanding of the work of a man so deeply involved with and at times implicated in the issues and controversies of his day, but historicism on its own cannot recover the parabolic resonances, often unconscious, that resound and echo within a 59. Conduct manuals, of course, continue to exist, often in the guise of self-help or self-improvement books. But the emphasis has shifted: nowadays, they exist in respect of our selves; for Defoe, they existed in respect of our relations with oth-ers, including our relationship with God, and are therefore fundamentally ethical as they try to inculcate morality and propriety.60. The point here has to do with an entire modus operandi, a way of thinking, of writing and reading, rather than whether or not the items are by Defoe.


vibrant, living culture. Nor can rigid, nonecumenical critico-theoretical accounts. But in sifting through the detritus of the midden-heap of history (and recognising that much of Defoe’s writing belongs to the ephemera sloughed off by print culture), a sensitivity both to historico-cultural con-text and to the often indeterministic and contingent ways in which dis-courses, like memes, propagate, disseminate, and evolve and mutate, the ways in which they can be understood and interpreted, can engage us in readings that recover some of the resonances of otherwise dead words. Rather like listening to the voice of Providence. . . .

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25

Works Cited61

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford up, 1998. Print. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, eds. Trans. of Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1995.

Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: His Life. Baltimore: John Hopkins up, 1989. Print.

———. ‘Defoe’s Prodigal Sons.’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.2 (1982): 3–18. Print.

Chalmers, George. The Life of Daniel De Foe. London: John Stockdale, 1790. Corr. with adds. Facsim. ed. New York: Garland, 1970. Print. [Orig. pub. 1786.]

Confession of Faith. [The Confession of Faith [and] The Larger and Shorter Catechisms, with the Scripture Proofs at large, together with the Sum of Saving Knowledge (contained in the Holy Scriptures, and held forth in the said Confession and Catechisms,) and Practical Use thereof; Covenants, National and Solemn League; Acknowledgement of Sins, and Engagement to Duties; Directories for Publick and Family Worship; Form of Church Government, etc.[;] of Publick Authority in the Church of Scotland; with Acts of Assembly and Parliament, relative to, and approbative of, the same; with the special words of the proof-passages printed in Italic type.] [Edin-burgh?]: Pubs. Comm. of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scot., 1967. Print. [The work of the Westminster Assembly orig. pub. 1643–49.]

Defoe, Daniel. An Answer to a Question that No Body Thinks Of, viz. But What If the Queen Should Die? London: J. Baker, 1713. Constitutional Theory 207–27.

61. Long titles (in brackets) are given as per full-title pages, but usage of ital-ics, all-caps, and all small-caps has been regularised. (Except for the Westminster Confession of Faith, words in all small-caps are assumed to be in lower case, unless following terminal punctuation.) In cases where more than three booksellers are given on the title page, only the first is listed, followed by ‘et al.’ Works by Defoe published by Pickering and Chatto are from: The Pickering Masters: The Works of Daniel Defoe. W. R. Owens and P[hilip] N[icholas] Fur-bank, gen. eds. 44 vols. 2000–09. They are indicated by a reference to ‘The Pick-ering Defoe’ at the end of each appropriate bibliographical entry.


———. [As Daniel De Foe.] An Appeal to Honour and Justice. [An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Tho’ it be of His Worst Enemies. By Daniel De Foe. Being A True Account of his Conduct in Publick Affairs.] London: J. Baker, 1715. Facsim. ed. Ann Arbor: Univ. Microfilms Intl., 1976. Print [microfilm-xerography].

———. And What If the Pretender Should Come? [And What if the Pre-tender should come? or, some Considerations of the Advantages and Real Consequences of the Pretender’s Possessing the Crown of Great-Britain.] London: J. Baker, 1713. Constitutional Theory 187–206.

———. Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom.62 London: T. Warner, 1727. Ed. Liz Bellamy. London: Pickering, 2006. Print. Vol. 5 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.

———. Constitutional Theory. Ed. P[hilip] N[icholas] Furbank. Lon-don: Pickering, 2000. Print. Vol. 1 of Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 8 vols. 2000. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Family Instructor, Vol. 1. [The Family Instructor[.] In Three Parts; I. Relating to Fathers and Children. II. To Masters and Serv-ants. III. To Husbands and Wives.] 2nd ed. London: Eman[uel] Mat-thews, 1715. Ed. P[hilip] N[icholas] Furbank. London: Pickering, 2006. Print. Vol. 1 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Family Instructor, Vol. 2. [The Family Instructor. In Two Parts. I. Relating to Family Breaches, and their obstructing Religious Duties. II. To the great Mistake of mixing the Passions, in the Management and

62. Conjugal Lewdness was reissued later in the same year with a new title page, bearing the rather less enticing title, A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed: Shewing I. The Nature of Matrimony, its Sacred Original, and the True Meaning of its Institution. II. The Gross Abuse of Matrimonial Chastity, from the Wrong Notions which have Possessed the World, Degenerating even to Whoredom. III. The Diabolical Practice of Attempting to Prevent Child-bearing by Physical Prep-arations. IV. The Fatal Consequences of Clandestine or Forced Marriages, through the Persuasion, Interest, or Influence of Parents and Relations, to Wed the Person they have no Love for, but Oftentimes an Aversion to. V. Of Unequal Matches, as to the Disproportion of Age; and how such, Many Ways, Occasions a Matrimonial Whore-dom. VI. How Married Persons may be Guilty of Conjugal Lewdness, and that a Man may, in effect, make a Whore of his own Wife. Also, many other Particulars of Family Concern. (Title taken as it appears at Conjugal Lewdness 283.)


Correcting of Children. With a great Variety of Cases relating to setting Ill Examples to Children and Servants. Vol II.] London: Eman[uel] Mat-thews, 1718. Ed. P[hilip] N[icholas] Furbank. London: Pickering, 2006. Print. Vol. 2 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Fortunate Mistress. [The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History Of The Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes Of Mademoiselle de Beleau, After-wards Call’d The Countess de Wintelsheim, in Germany. Being the Per-son known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II.] London: T. Warner et al., 1724. Ed. P[hilip] N[icholas] Furbank. London: Pickering, 2009. Print. Vol 9 of The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2008–09. The Pickering Defoe.

———. Jure Divino: A Satyr. In Twelve Books. London, 1706. Ed. P[hilip] N[icholas] Furbank. London: Pickering, 2003. Print. Vol. 2 of Sat-ire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe. 8 vols. 2003–05. The Pickering Defoe.

———. A New Family Instructor. [A New Family Instructor; in Famil-iar Discourses between a Father and his Children, On the most Essen-tial Points of the Christian Religion. In Two Parts. Part I. Containing a Father’s Instructions to his Son upon his going to Travel into Popish Coun-tries; And to the rest of his Children, on his Son’s turning Papist; confirming them in the Protestant Religion, against the Absurdities of Popery. Part II. Instructions against the Three Grand Errors of the Times; Viz. 1. Asserting the Divine Authority of the Scripture; against the Deists. 2. Proofs, that the Messias is already come, &c; against the Atheists and Jews. 3. Asserting, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, that he was really the Same with the Messias, and that the Messias was to be really God; against our Modern Hereticks. With a Poem upon the Divine Nature of Jesus Christ, in Blank Verse.] Lon-don: T. Warner, 1727. Ed. W. R. Owens. London: Pickering, 2006. Print. Vol. 3 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England, Examined and Asserted. London, 1702 [for 1701]. Constitutional The-ory 99–128.


———. Party Politics. Ed. J. A. Downie. London: Pickering, 2000. Print. Vol. 2 of Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 8 vols. 2000. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Political History of the Devil. [The Political History of the Devil, as well Ancient as Modern: In two parts. Part I. Containing a State of the Devil’s Circumstances, and the various Turns of his Affairs, from his Expul-sion out of Heaven, to the Creation of Man; with Remarks on the several Mistakes concerning the Reason and Manner of his Fall. Also his Proceed-ings with Mankind ever since Adam, to the first planting of the Chris-tian Religion in the World. Part II. Containing his more private Conduct, down to the present Times: His Government, his Appearances, his Manner of Working, and the Tools he works with.] London: T. Warner, 1726. Ed. John Mullan. London: Pickering, 2005. Print. Vol. 6 of Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Daniel Defoe. 8 vols. 2003–05. The Pickering Defoe.

———. The Poor Man’s Plea. [The Poor Man’s Plea, In Relation to all the Proclamations, Declarations, Acts of Parliament, &c. which Have been, or shall be made, or publish’d, for the Reformation of Manners, and sup-pressing Immorality in the Nation.] London, 1698. The Poor Man’s Plea [and] The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d. Ed. J. A. Downie. London: Pickering, 2007. 21–37. Print. Vol. 6 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.

———. Reasons Against the Succession of the House of Hanover. [Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover, with an Enquiry How far the Abdication of King James, supposing it to be Legal, ought to affect the Person of the Pretender.] London: J. Baker, 1713. Constitutional Theory 165–86.

———. Religious Courtship. [Religious Courtship: being Historical Dis-courses, on the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives only. As also Of Husbands and Wives being of the same Opinions in Religion with one another. With an Appendix Of the Necessity of taking none but Religious Servants, and a Proposal for the better Management of Servants. London: E. Matthews et. al., 1722. Ed. G. A. Starr. London: Pickering, 2006. Print. Vol. 4 of Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2006–07. The Pickering Defoe.


———. Robinson Crusoe. [The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account of how he was at last strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.] London: W. Taylor, 1719. Ed. W. R. Owens. London: Pickering, 2008. Print. Vol. 1 of The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2008–09. The Pickering Defoe.

———. Roxana. [Roxana[,] The Fortunate Mistress[;] or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess de Wintelsheim in Germany[.] Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II.] London: T. Warner et al., 1724. Ed. and intro. Jane Jack. 1964. Oxford: Oxford up, 1981. Print. The World’s Classics.

———. The Secret History of the Secret History of the White Staff, Purse and Mitre. London: S. Keimer, 1715. Party Politics 295–314.

———. The Secret History of the White-Staff. [The Secret History of the White-Staff, Being An Account of Affairs under the Conduct of some late Ministers, and of what might probably have happened if Her Majesty had not Died.] London: J. Baker, 1714. Party Politics 263–94.

———. Serious Reflections. [Serious Reflections during the Life And Surpris-ing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with his Vision of the Angelick World. London: W. Taylor, 1720. Ed. G. A. Starr. London: Pickering, 2008. Print. Vol. 3 of The Novels of Daniel Defoe. 10 vols. 2008–09. The Pick-ering Defoe.

———. The Storm. [The Storm: or, a Collection Of the most Remarka-ble Casualties and Disasters Which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land.] London: G[eorge] Sawbridge, 1704. Ed. and intro. Richard Hamblyn. London: Allen Lane–Penguin, 2003. Lon-don: Penguin, 2005. Print. Penguin Classics. [Inc. The Lay-Man’s Sermon upon the Late Storm; Held forth at an Honest Coffee-House-Con-venticle (1704) and The Storm. An Essay (1704).]

———. A System of Magick. [A System of Magick; or, a History of the Black Art. Being an Historical Account of Mankind’s most early Dealing with the Devil; and how the Acquaintance on both Sides first Began.] London: J. Roberts, 1727 [for 1726]. Ed. Peter Elmer. London: Pickering, 2005.


Print. Vol. 7 of Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the Supernatural by Dan-iel Defoe. 8 vols. 2003–05. The Pickering Defoe.

Ewing, Dessagne C. ‘The First Printing of Defoe’s Family Instructor.’ Papers of the Bibliog. Soc. of Amer. 65.3 (1971): 269–72. Print.

Filmer, Robert. The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy. [The Anar-chy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy[;] or A succinct Examination of the Fundamentals of Monarchy, both in this and other Kingdoms, as well about the Right of Power of Kings, as of the Originall or Naturall Liberty of the People. A Question never yet disputed, though most necessary in these Times.] London: [Richard Royston], 1648. Patriarcha and Other Polit-ical Works 275–313.

———. Observations Concerning the Originall of Government. [Observa-tions Concerning the Original of Government, Upon Mr. Hobs Levia-than[,] Mr. Milton again Salmasius[;] H. Grotius De Jure Belli. London: R[ichard] Royston, 1652. Patriarcha and Other Political Works 237–74.

———. Observations upon Aristotles Politiques. [Observations upon Aristo-tles Politiques Touching Forms of Government[;] Together with Directions for Obedience to Governours in dangerous and doubtfull Times.] London: R[ichard] Royston, 1652. Patriarcha and Other Political Works 185–235.

———. Patriarcha. [Patriarcha. A Defence of the Natural Power of Kings Against the Unnatural Liberty of the People.] Patriarcha and Other Polit-ical Works 51–126. [Orig. pub. London: Walter Davis, 1680. Written c. 1635–42.]

———. Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer. Ed. Peter Laslett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1949. Print. Blackwell’s Political Texts. C. H. Wilson and R. B. McCallum, gen. eds.

Furbank, P[hilip] N[icholas], and W. R. Owens. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. London: Pickering, 1998. Print.

Healey, George Harris, ed. The Letters of Daniel Defoe. Oxford: Claren-don P, 1955. Print.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Print. Viking Crit. Lib. Malcolm Cowley, gen. ed. [Rpt. of 1968 ed. pub. by Viking.]


Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia up, 1982. Print. European Perspectives. Trans. of Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Paris: Seuil, 1980.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink in collab. with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: Nor-ton, 2006. Print. Trans. of Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.63

———. ‘On a Question Prior to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.’ Écrits 445–88 [531–83]. Trans. of ‘D’un question preliminaire a tout traite-ment possible de la psychose.’ [1957].

———. ‘The Signification of the Phallus (Die Bedeutung des Phallus).’ Écrits 575–84 [685–95]. Trans. of ‘La signification du phallus (Die Bedeu-Bedeu-tung des Phallus).’ [1958.]

Lee, William. Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings, Extending from 1716–1729. Ed. Lee. London: John Holten, 1869. Facsim. ed. 3 vols. New York: Franklin, 1969. Print. Burt Franklin: Research and Source Works Ser. 369. Sel. Papers in Lit. and Crit. 28.

Lloyd, Genevieve. Providence Lost. Cambridge: Harvard up, 2008. Print.Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Haslett. 2nd ed.,

amended. Student ed. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 1988. Print. [Orig. pub. 1690.]

Moore, John Robert. A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe. 2nd ed. Hamden: Archon–Shoe String, 1971. Print.

———. Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the Modern World. Chicago: U of Chi-cago P, 1958. Print.

Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. His Life and Ideas. Oxford: Oxford up, 2001. Print.

Plumb, J. H. The First Four Georges. London: Batsford, 1956. Print.Wilson, Walter. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel De Foe: Contain-

ing a Review of His Writings, and His Opinions upon a Variety of Impor-tant Matters, Civil and Ecclesiastical. London: Hurst, 1830. Facsim. ed. 3 vols. New York: ams, 1973. Print.

The Zondervan kjv Study Bible. Gen. ed. Kenneth Barker. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002. Print. King James Version [kjv]. Orig. pub. 1611.

63. References to page numbers in the 1966 edition of Écrits are given in brack-ets following those of the English translation. Publication dates, in brackets, fol-low French titles.

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