ABSTRACT

The central question in much of Defoe’s fiction appears to be about religious conversion: will Moll stop thieving and follow God’s path? Will Roxana cease to be a whore? Will Bob Singleton give up his life of piracy? The problem of representing conversion in Defoe has, for modern critics, been generally understood as a problem of prose genres; I will argue that it is also a question that links Defoe’s poetry and his prose. G.A. Starr showed Defoe to be wrestling with the problem of connecting the paradigm offered by dissenting Christian narratives of the struggle with sin with fictional tales of roguery, seduction, and crime. Spiritual autobiography was an invaluable tool for seventeenth-century Protestants who sought to see the divine plan in their own lives and to identify and repent their inevitable sins, but also to search for signs that their repentance was durable (G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography 43). While only in heaven might one truly be free from change, the onslaught of the passions and the snares of temptation are the stuff of human life. Life writing by Puritans and other Nonconformists sought to impose order on such ceaseless changes, using the patterns offered in the Bible or given by other Christians’ experience. But within Protestant theology there were challenges to recognizing conversion and redemption, because no sinner knows the extent of God’s grace, and no one could be certain to receive it: true repentance and conversion are a gift, and spiritual autobiographies faced the “task of reconciling the genuineness of […] rebirth with all the backslidings that follow” (Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography 43). The challenge of recognizing conversion also involved the public legibility of sin and redemption: the community of the church was a community of the elect, and congregants had to learn to recognize the signs of salvation in others as they sought the signs of God’s will on earth. 1 Beyond problems of doctrine, in the context of fiction, the challenges of representing conversion expand, for, as Leopold Damrosch puts it, Defoe is caught in “the tension between invented narratives and the divine structure of meaning that human life was supposed to embody” (2). 2 To borrow Damrosch’s terms, God plots for human beings; Defoe plots for the human imagination.