Robinson Crusoe and the hand/heart dichotomy

At first glance, Robinson Crusoe appears to be what we know to be true: it is an adventure story, plain and simple. Like the Swiss Robinson family. Like Kidnapped. Like all those late 19th century adventure stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. Even like Gulliver’s Travels, another 18th-century novel. But Gulliver’s Travels is more than just a guy tied up by little people. There is also a floating island and many philosophers to make fun of. And we can’t forget about the smart horses and the stupid human Yahoos.

Daniel Defoe’s novel doesn’t have all the episodic wackiness like Gulliver’s Travels, but it’s more than just a guy stranded on an island. And not everything is internal things like Tom Hanks in Castaway. This book is also about politics. And we’re talking about 1719 politics here.

Ann Van Sant’s essay “Crusoe’s Hands” in the scholarly journal Eighteenth-Century Life presents an intriguing way of reading Robinson Crusoe that is both insightful and relatively easy to understand. First, Van Sant places the novel in the history of ideas about work by noting the difference between the head and the hands. The head represents intellectual activity, while the hands represent manual activity or manual work, what we would generally call work:

“The hierarchy of head and hand is part of a long tradition backed by authority from both Greek and Latin antiquity. The tradition extends and reworks Aristotle’s view that theoretical knowledge is superior to productive knowledge and that the manual laborer works without knowing why he works. Such work is menial… The bias against manual labor was never simple or monolithic, but despite various kinds of modifications, it can be seen as a recurring cultural bias.” (121)

This distinction between the head and the hand, between intellectual and manual work, was reflected in the distinction between classes, since gentlemen were valued over the lower classes: “it was said that the separation of the gentleman from the non-gentleman was based on the distinction between those who did, and those who didn’t, have to work with their hands” (121). The only place this hierarchy broke down was in science, especially the Royal Society, which was a gentlemen’s club that met to discuss science and also published science proceedings. Like all good science, the Royal Society valued experiment and observation, but such experiments involved the work of the hands, were, in fact, very similar to manual labour. Dissections, annotations, tabulations, contraptions for experiments, all required the kind of manual labor done by hand. So the Royal Society was a gentlemen’s club that did some lower class work and took in some members of the lower classes.

Now that the eighteenth-century setting is set, we can talk about Defoe’s novel. Crusoe himself has to do a lot of work with his hands. He is stranded on a desert island for much of the book and he has to build everything he has: that’s manual labor if ever there was such. His descriptions of the weather, his inspection of the island, his records of everything he does are similar to Royal Society publications, too: “Defoe’s uses of the hand are a striking example of what the early novels seldom included: detailed attention to work” (129). For Van Sant, the author of this essay, Defoe was writing in a different way, combining many elements or modes that make the novel stand out:

“In Defoe’s novels, especially Robinson Crusoe, in the equally new genre of scientific reporting, and in Georgian materials of the time, we can see an emerging interest in process and method. That interest brings to view the work of the hands in a new way, despite the counter-tendencies of the cultural tradition that places such work below the work of the head…As a remnant that persists over a long period, the hierarchy of the head and the hand may it served the interests of change both by continuing to accentuate and by being a sign of an old stability What Defoe is able to imagine in Robinson Crusoe, by separating character from social structures, is a world in which this traditional concept it has no application temporarily. The work of the hands is both necessary and interesting in itself.” (132)

Thus Defoe creates a place, the desert island, where there is no distinction between hand and head, between intellectual and manual work. And that’s a novel way of reading.

VanSant, Ann. “Crusoe’s Hands”. 18th century life. 32.2 (Spring 2008): 120-137.