The Editor and the Eyewitness: Embodiment, Disappearance, and the Gendering of Novelistic Realism in Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe

Abstract

The divergent canonical fates of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe are often attributed to the biased tastes of their readership. That is a true explanation as far as it goes, but it treats the authenticating technique shared by the two writers as neutral ground, a method rewarded in one and punished in the other for reasons altogether outside the method itself. This paper argues instead that the asymmetry is inscribed in the form of the authenticity claim. Defoe authorises his fictions by withdrawing the author behind an editorial mask, presenting the narrative as a document that a nameless editor has merely transmitted; Behn authorises hers by advancing the witnessing body of a narrator who was present, who saw, and who reports what she saw. Both are strategies of authorial self-effacement, versions of what Catherine Gallagher calls the writer’s becoming nobody, but the field that received them read the effaced male editor as objective and the appearing female witness as exposed. Through close readings of the prefaces and narrative frames of Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, and by supplementing Gallagher’s account of authorial dispossession with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the embodied habitus and John Guillory’s model of canon formation, the paper contends that a shared epistemology of circumstantial realism was gendered at the level of narrative embodiment. That formal difference, ratified by Ian Watt and the twentieth-century histories of formal realism, hardened into the settled asymmetry by which Defoe founds the English novel and Behn merely precedes it.