Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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towards fairness. Given this, it seems odd that Crusoe has to police this fairness continually, always carrying his umbrella, which is “the most necessary thing I had about me, next to my gun.” The gun has already established Crusoe’s physical dominance on the island (and in earlier travels as well). His umbrella, manufactured from the skins of native goats, performs an equally crucial function as a visible sign of ideological dominance based on the color of his skin. Even if the “large pair of Mahometan whiskers” he sports are “monstrous” by English standards, and, perhaps, signify a potential fall into otherness, his clothing and general mien will now protect his dominant position.
Crusoe describes the clothing he makes for himself:
I had a short jacket of goatskin, the skirts coming down to about the middle of my thighs; and a pair of open-kneed breeches of the same; the breeches were made of the skin of an old he-goat, whose hair hung down such a length on either side that, like pantaloons, it reached to the middle of my legs. (134)
As with the umbrella, Crusoe uses materials furnished by the island’s animal population in order both to protect the fragility of his own skin—and, therefore, the fragility of his identity as an Englishman—and to insure by the most discernible display the limitlessness of his own power; he has been able to tame and husband a flock of goats for his consumption. These goats both nourish him and provide him with a protective skin, so to speak, against other hostile elements.4 The goats are figures of self-consolidating otherness—their skins establish Crusoe’s difference because as animals, quite naturally, they are available for exploitation and sustenance. It is also crucial to Crusoe’s narrative that they are goats and not sheep; breaking away from an English economy that is dependent on the consumption of sheep, Crusoe manages both to replicate a British cultural consumerism and yet to differentiate his own place within such an order as perfectly discrete. Crusoe makes a point of specifying the gender of the old he-goat that becomes his breeches; Crusoe, that sly old goat, can brandish the phallus even under cover of another, more “barbarous” skin. It is no accident as well that this item of clothing has “skirts”; skirting issues of the problematics of race and gender, Crusoe supplements British or European economies producing “legitimate” clothing with his own island fashions.
Skin operates as a place where identities are negotiated: Crusoe’s representation of a self directly depends on what he perceives to be visibly other. Crusoe, however, does more with the goats than use their skins: he also eats them, as well as turtles and birds. The difference between skin and flesh is strikingly marked in this novel in terms of consumption. While Crusoe is able to use the skins of the animals he eats—even the turtle’s shells come in handy—the reverse is not always true. One of his first encounters with wild beasts on this island presents interesting possibilities of reading the ways in which the natural and the feminine resist incorporation and ingestion.
Crusoe writes in his journal: “This day went abroad with my gun and my dog, and killed a wild cat; her skin pretty soft, but her flesh good for nothing” (63). Goats (and turtles, and dogs, and birds) are one thing, cats are quite another. While her skin is attractive, the feminine flesh of this cat is “good for nothing”: her meat is inedible, her loyalty suspect; even as a procreative member of his household the cat is resistant, forming, rather, a family of its own. As members of Crusoe's privileged household, cats (always female) are equally inconsistent and thoroughly unreliable. Crusoe proudly likens his table to that of “a king … attended by my servants,” who consist of his parrot Poll (the only one able to “speak” to Crusoe) and his dog, as well as his two cats. These cats, however,
were not the two cats which I brought on shore at first, for they were both of them dead … but one of them having multiplied by I know not what creature, these were two which I had preserved tame, whereas the rest run wild in the woods and became indeed troublesome to me at last; for they would often come into my house and plunder me too, till at last I was obliged to shoot them, and did kill a great many. (133–34)
Poll the parrot ventriloquizes his master's language, the dog provides for his master’s sustenance, the goats are husbanded for their flesh, but the cats are wild cards. Even Friday, whose skin and cannibalistic habits at first situate him as absolutely othered in relation to Crusoe, later (primarily because he gives up those habits) functions as the figure who most confirms Crusoe's ideological superiority.5
While Crusoe can consolidate these various other members of his household into predictable and fairly reliable reflections of his own position of power, the cats pose a continual challenge and threat to the integrity of this image. They function as border cases: tamed, and yet indistinguishable from their “native” counterparts. They don't need to depend on Crusoe’s household skills; they are, in fact, more than able to proliferate successfully (with unidentifiable creatures, moreover) in this “native” environment. Even their skins—the mark of their domestication and difference—are useless to Crusoe. At the end of the novel, Crusoe recovers his ability to monitor and regulate reproduction, previously threatened, perhaps, by those unruly cats, by bringing to the island women appropriate to its inhabitants:
I touched at the Brazils, from whence I sent a bark, which I brought there … and in it, besides other supplies, I sent seven women, being such as I found proper for service, or for wives to such as would take them. As to the Englishmen, I promised them to send some women from England, with a good cargo of necessaries. (275)
Crusoe repopulates the island with especial attention to likeness of skins. The Spaniards receive their due measure from the Brazils, while the Englishmen, who quite naturally could not expect to be serviced by seven Brazilian women, can anticipate their proper allotment from the next cargo Crusoe deploys.
Skin is cosmetic: it is superficial, it covers things up. Skin’s opacity functions to separate outside from in, and yet, curiously, it is this very opacity that enables skin also to negotiate between internal and external borders. Skin makes ideological differences perceivable ostensibly by making interiorities externally obvious. Jame Gumb from the film The Silence of the Lambs (and also from the Thomas Harris novel of the same name) constructs a suit of women’s skins in order to make clearly visible an interior identity—his sense that he “really” is a woman—despite his outward appearance. Robinson Crusoe assembles a suit of goat skins in order to cover and protect an identity based on external attributes that nonetheless supposedly embody an internal condition of being.
The solid ground of British national identity from which Crusoe claims his subjectivity becomes acutely contested territory particularly when it comes to the issue of colonizing property. The random problems of clothes, cats, and cannibals—three especially cogent forms of property for Crusoe—contribute both to assure and to destabilize Crusoe’s footing as the principal authoritative figure, prompting him to represent his island life rather xenophobically. His journal allows him to resituate himself on more familiar ground as colonist and patriarch rather than as shipwrecked isolate. More interestingly, his journal is also the place where he turns the material problems he encounters on the island—the impediments to his material authority—into the narrative that demonstrates his discursive authority. But, not surprisingly, this sublimation often depends upon a strategically employed xenophobia. Crusoe, faced with multiple material threats to his very survival, manages his own anxiety by defining these threats as the mere challenge of the foreign to his British ingenuity. Crusoe’s xenophobia, however, may also stave off his more compelling—and romantic—desire, his desire to give himself over to the other.6 Crusoe’s xenophobia may be a sign of his xenodochial desire: his desire to invite and entertain the foreign. His compulsion to establish visible difference vis-à-vis skin color, therefore, marks the territory of identity in clear, constative terms.
Thus Defoe’s great novel of moral psychological development replicates the emergence of identity—social, national, cultural, personal—as a process that sublimates external material problems into an internalized coherence. Quite a wrench from our conventional understanding of eighteenth-century literature as devoted to rational order, regularity, and the prevailing public arena, Robinson Crusoe in fact articulates romantic issues, if we are to understand romantic affect as traditionally invoking the internal workings of subjectivity. In fact, even if we consider the more specific definitions of romantic authorship,