‘All Day, All Night the Body Intervenes’: Representation of Friday in Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Foe by J. M. Coetzee and ‘Wyspa’ by Olga Tokarczuk

Abstract

This article explores representations of Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), J.M Coetzee’s novel Foe (1986) and Olga Tokarczuk’s short story ‘Wyspa’ [‘The Island’] (2001). In all three works, Friday is mediated and filtered by the process of narration. This article demonstrates how the narrator(s)’s understanding of corporeality affects the representation of the companion, from a source of useful manpower to a silent reservoir of stories, to a trigger which necessitates crossing gender boundaries. Friday’s corporeality reflects the contemporary philosophical understanding of the relation between body and mind, debates around the status of the colonial body, and, more recently, human relations to the environment around us, in tune with new materialist sensibilities.