The Dialectics of Inside and Outside: Dominated and Appropriated Space in Defoe’s Historical Fictions
George A. Drake, Central Washington University
Volume 14, no. 2, January 2002
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Daniel Defoe’s two historical fictions, A Journal of the Plague Year and Memoirs of a Cavalier, have been tangential to most histories of the historical novel. The Journal represents an event largely outside historical causality, and even though the Memoirs deals with great historical events, most readers have found it little more than a pastiche of existing accounts. But if the two works do not quite qualify as historical novels, they nonetheless register historical changes, particularly in the experience of space. The fictional authors of the Journal and the Memoirs, H.F. and the anonymous Cavalier, enact Defoe’s ambivalent fascination with spaces dominated by official power and spaces appropriated by individual practices. The Cavalier is enthralled by military power, wanting nothing more than to see with its gaze. And yet he remains in crucial respects an outsider, unwilling to be wholly “player” or “observator” in the wars, though also uncomfortable with everyday life. H.F., who reluctantly accepts an official role in the quarantine, is equally enthralled by the appropriations of those too poor or powerless to escape London during the plague year. The indecisiveness of the two narrators embodies contradictions in seventeenth-century social space.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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