Fashioning Friday

• Published in: Queen's quarterly 2008-04, Vol.115 (1), p.9
• Main Author: Cohen, Derek
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blacks; Children; Color; Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); English; English literature; Face (Body); Lips; Literary criticism; Novels; Oral cavity; Persuasion; Reading; Religion; Writers
• ISSN: 0033-6041

[Crusoe] describes the man in careful detail, noting that he is not an African, but, implicitly, a being of a somewhat higher order. He is tall, well-built, and strong-looking, with an immediately noticeable sweetness of expression that appeals greatly to Crusoe the rescuer. He possesses, Crusoe hilariously notes, the "Sweetness and Softness of an European in his Countenance." Friday's visible inner sweetness of nature marks him as redeemable. Though he is a savage and though he likes to dine on human flesh, he is superior to the murdering maneating monsters who intend to eat him. Crusoe notes his skin colour which, he observes, is not black, but rather tawny, "and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians and other natives of America are, but of a bright kind of a dun olive Colour that had in it something very agreeable." His hair is not "curled like Wool" like that of a negro, but straight, long, and black. His face is plump; his nose is small, "not flat like the Negroes, a very good mouth, thin Lips, and his fine Teeth well set, and white as Ivory." Each reference to a positive, measurable physical characteristic is followed by a moral judgement. His skin colour has something "agreeable" in it; his countenance is sweet and soft, not fierce or surly; his mouth is "very good"; and he is commendably grateful, and thus pleases and flatters his rescuer, to whom he keeps making gestures that indicate "Subjection, Servitude, and Submission." Crusoe is very satisfied with him. "I made him know his name should be Friday," that being the day on which "I saved his Life." It is more than merely curious that Crusoe doesn't think to ask the man his name. He simply provides him with one. Though Crusoe knows that savages do have names, he blithely supplies his new companion with an English name that is not a name at all. The effect is to make Friday a part of the systematized world Crusoe has built around himself. Slowly Friday is prepared for his ultimate entrance to the larger European world which Crusoe still hopes one day to rejoin. The idea of rebirth is unmistakable. Friday's own world is of little interest to his master except as a negative point of reference. One of Friday's first lessons is to learn the shame of nakedness. He is given a pair of linen drawers which Crusoe had retrieved from the last shipwreck near his shore. Crusoe makes him a jerkin of goatskin and a cap of the skin of a hare. The Edenic resonances of this pas