Introduction

      For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real—a real that may well not be determined…. It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one’s attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel—the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre—which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.

      —Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

      Shortly after Robinson Crusoe makes his providential landing on the island, he takes stock of his situation and makes a list of the “good” and “evil” aspects of his circumstances. Most of his laments have to do with his complete isolation (or at least his isolation from anything recognizably British); but he also notes that he has no clothes. He reasons, however, that even were he to have them he could hardly wear them for the heat.¹

      Of course this sort of reasoning doesn’t go very far with either Crusoe or the reader because the weather isn’t the point: clothes, quite obviously, mark the difference between Crusoe’s sense of himself as British and the great mass of naked savages he encounters in his many travels. What is curious, however, is to see how the issue of clothing collapses into his fetishization of skin: Crusoe’s need to make difference visible, if only to himself, primarily because of the increasingly attractive possibilities of not establishing visible difference.

      Defoe’s champion of moral progress represents arresting problems of identity that post-colonial studies might usefully consider. Critiques of colonialism, despite their various disclaimers, tend to iterate imperialist models and attribute a monolithic agency to Eurocentric “legacies.”² What is often missing from these critical inquiries is an account of the profound insecurities upon which those legacies rest. These largely unnamed fears take shape in Defoe’s novel as strange episodic eruptions in the relatively contiguous narrative of literary realism. Crusoe’s general uneasiness with being a stranger in a strange land explodes into a series of arbitrary, incapacitating worries: his trouble with cats, his apprehensions about cannibals, or his anxieties about clothing.

      Eventually Crusoe’s clothes rot off his body and he is forced to fashion others from the outlandish materials he has on hand. Indeed, he claims, “had anyone in England been to meet such a man as I was, it must either have frighted them or raised a good deal of laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at myself, I could not but smile at the notion of my traveling through Yorkshire with such an equipage and in such a dress” (134). With his clothes and skin here signifying his non-Englishness, Crusoe jokingly entertains the idea of positioning himself as the foreign body, thus implying a certain attraction to the idea.³ However laughable a figure he might cut for himself (as the only appreciative member of his audience), he insists on wearing this “equipage” even “though it is true that the weather was so violent hot that there was no need of clothes” (120). To explain this apparent perversity, Crusoe falls back on a naturalized physical inability to withstand the intensity of the sun, which we can read as a fairly clear ideological inability of an Englishman to be a “savage”: the “very heat,” he writes, “blistered my skin” (120). He goes on to describe “a great clumsy ugly goatskin umbrella,” which “after all, was the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun.” As for his face, he writes, “the color of it was really not so Mulatto like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it and living within nineteen degrees of the equinox” (135). These various incidental details concerning Crusoe’s outfit do far more than describe his physical person: they inscribe an ideological position that makes such a description possible. In some ways, however, these details return our focus to the presence of the physical body.

      What concerns Crusoe the most is the problem of skin—or skins. He must protect a skin that doesn’t have the capacity to withstand extreme heat, and yet the very geographical location and meteorological conditions of this island may, if care is not taken, transform British fairness to an island “Mulatto.” Crusoe is quite meticulous on this detail: his skin is, in fact, not as Mulatto as the British reader would expect, even