The Solitary, the Sick, and the Dead: A Study of Bodily Figures in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

Abstract

In Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), John Bender argues that the novel resembles the penitentiary in its effort to construct the fiction of self-identity consequent on a set of external, often forcible conditions. The narrative arrangements for outlining selfhood stand analogous to what the penitentiary tries to enforce as strict daily regimes—including solitary confinement in which each inmate is compelled to internalize the inspecting authority as part of his selfhood as a site of ideological subjugation. To support this view, Bender reads Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as a story that offers ‘the conditions of its possibility [the penitentiary’s] by formulating the network of subjective circumstance under which reformative confinement becomes part of the institutional texture of the city.’ This article takes issue with Bender’s reading by drawing attention to sites of solitude in which the narrator’s self-awareness is beset by what can be seen as an unruly dimension of human corporeality. In fact, the narrator’s bodily anxieties continue to crop up in Defoe’s narrative. Constrained by the puritanical ethos of self-discipline and temperance, these anxieties only surface in modes of figural transference or displacement where his bodily desire implicitly merges with the signs of other sickly bodies banished to the outskirts of representation. By conceptually elaborating this bodily ambivalence, I want to argue that Defoe’s narrative is not so much a fictional embodiment of self-reflectivity in modes of ideological subjugation, but as a radical failure of it, one that offers a different outlook on selfhood bound in its corporeal aspects.