Daniel Defoe: When Exlusion Leads to Inclusion

Year 2024, Volume: 6 Issue: 1, 1 - 9, 21.11.2024

Fatma Said

Abstract

Fatma Saeed
Daniel Defoe’s fiction: when exclusion leads to inclusion
Charity schools were one of the main features of eighteenth-century Britain that many writers and thinkers prided themselves on. Charity schools used, in fact, to teach religion and social conduct to orphans and poor children. Nevertheless, some different observers reveal another truth completely different maintaining the idea that the economic and social system of the period was not providing the best supervision through charity schools. The objective of such “promoters of charity schools was not to rescue their charges from the necessitous condition in which they had been born, but to give them a religious upbringing which would reconcile them with their continued poverty” (Philip Harth. The Fable of the Bees. Introd.) Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), pushes further his criticism of the social system and dramatizes it through his characters; namely through Roxana, one of his female characters, who would be forced to prostitute herself because of a selfish social system in Britain: “a hundred terrible things came into my Thoughts; viz. of Parish-Children being Starv’d at Nurse; of their being ruin’d, let grow crooked, lam’d, and the like, for want of being taken care of” (Roxana 52). When one takes Defoe’s novel under study, it is striking to notice that almost all his characters are prostitutes, thieves or pirates. At the margin, they could be depicted as a perfect illustration of moral and social exclusion. Nor do they take any part in the economic system; they are, in fact, marginals/excluded that strive to survive. Yet, ironically enough, Roxana, Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton and even Colonel Jack will prove that by prostituting themselves and by stealing they manage to regain the center; to be included. In this context, economy and morality can never coexist but the natural need to survive goes beyond all consideration and triumphs one way or another. One of the main objectives of this paper would be to show how all the characters of Defoe struggle against moral, social and economic exclusion and how, through an eccentric behaviour, they actually undertake their “inclusion” in society.

Keywords

exclusion, inclusion, marginal, system, society, criminal, conformism

References

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