ABSTRACT
This anecdote highlights the question of personal identity, bourgeois self-control and its historical socio-genesis. It suggests, above all, that identity is somehow shaped or determined by sites of discourse. The patterns of discourse represented in Defoe’s anecdote are shaped by the specific sites of assembly: the shop and the family. In discourse analysis, every site is a social place. Sites as different as the shop, the alehouse, the coffee-house, or churches, law courts, libraries or drawingrooms of country houses do not only belong to heterogeneous socio-economic, cultural or political fields but call for different modes of communication, different manners and morals. All social places function as discursive spaces that define and redefine identity through the interplay between the self and the other. In their Politics and Poetics of Transgression Peter Stallybrass and Allon White remarked:
Although Defoe’s shop appears to be a relatively insignificant site, the anecdote reveals that the tradesman is in fact master of the upper regions of his house, whereas the material and cultural conditions of the shop are determined by the economic interests of his customers. The tradesman, his body and his tongue have to speak at least two different languages.
