ABSTRACT
An appraisal of Daniel Defoe’s extraordinary talent as a meticulous investigative journalist, as displayed in The Storm, requires an acknowledgement of that work’s obsessional nature and of its function as a defence mechanism against the threat of self-destructive masochistic morality. There is no shortage of clinical material to help us explore the aetiology of voyeurism. Defoe, was wiser; he renounced some of the pleasures of exhibitionism for the secondary and safer delights of voyeurism; he looked but did not crudely display for that could have provoked fatal retaliatory responses. But the smouldering gaze was possessed of no gentle mien; it was charged with all the energy of the suppressed exhibitionism. Whatever voyeuristic and spoiling desires are gratified in witnessing the primal scene are also guilt-ridden and generate an anxious need for punishment. These powerful emotions create a conflict between wishing to observe the parents’ sexual relationship and wishing to turn away in denial of its reality.
