Novel Poetics and Pantomimes

Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe appeared eight years after Steele’s Spectator No. 11 and, according to Catherine E. Moore, it is conceivable that “Defoe’s imagination would have responded to and his memory stored away the little anecdote which appeared in the Spectator.” While Moore’s suggestion that Defoe was influenced by Steele’s essay is purely speculative, the similarities between Inkle and Crusoe cannot be ignored. Both are third sons of prominent families and young merchants seeking to improve their fortunes by participating in global commerce, and both are representative western males in their lust for power, control and profit. ¹ In the beginning of Defoe’s novel, Crusoe experiences his first mishap at sea and is imprisoned by pirates. While Crusoe eventually escapes from slavery with the help of Xury, a young Moor, he callously betrays Xury’s loyalty by selling him to a Portuguese sea captain. Xury and Yarico differ in race and gender, but there is nevertheless a thematic similarity between these two anecdotes in that both Xury and Yarico are considered “savages” and treated as commodities by the Christian Englishmen whose lives they helped to preserve. ² But unlike Gilroy, who transforms a periodical essay into a first-person captivity narrative to attack the sense of Britishness that contributed to, even enabled, colonial brutality, Walcott transforms Defoe’s (Crusoe’s) first-person narrative into verse and a dramatic work, thereby forcing two distinct reinterpretations of the figure of Crusoe, whom literary critics traditionally read as one of the first colonial minds in English fiction.