Summary
In the opening of Foe, the novel’s protagonist, a woman named Susan Barton, washes up on the shore of an unknown island with nothing but her tattered petticoat. A man finds her on the beach. “A negro,” she says, “with a head of fuzzy wool, naked save for a pair of rough drawers” (6). Her first thought is that he’s a cannibal and that he’s going to eat her. This is Friday. As she describes the island (and through punctuation), it’s made apparent that she’s reflecting on events from a point in the future. The man leads her across the shore and carries her on his back up a craggy hill where she meet Cruso, a white man with burnt straw-like hair and green eyes. He wears short britches, homemade sandals, and a pointed hat. Unlike Friday, he speaks English. Friday doesn’t talk at all, but he seems to understand Cruso.
Susan tells him her story: she was traveling on a merchant ship where there was a mutiny (and where, she lets on to the reader, terrible things were done to her). The crew killed the captain by putting a stake through his eye and cast her off with his body in a rowboat. She rowed toward the island until her blisters were too hard to bear, at which point she dove overboard and swam and was carried by waves. She cries a little as she tells her story and is irritated by her crying. She asks Cruso if he has any implement to remove a thorn from her foot. He pulls a needle from his belt.
The island is barren. Cruso and Friday live in a hut surrounded by a feeble fence. In the hut there is one bed. Cruso sleeps on the bed, Friday on a mat of grass on the floor. They eat bitter lettuce that they grow, as well as fried fish. They keep a fire burning in a homemade wood stove. Cruso occupies himself with terracing land, though he doesn’t have anything to plant on the land. Friday fishes. Cruso warns Susan not to leave the fenced area as there are apes on the island and if they see a woman they’ll do something to her. Susan wonders whether or not apes differentiate between human genders, however she doesn’t dispute Cruso.
The first night, she sleeps on a mat beside Friday. She wakes in the night and tells herself that she’s safe. She’s on dry land. This thought soothes her. Susan reflects on her personal biography and how it is that she happened to be out at sea. She’s of Flemish decent, born in England. Two years earlier, her only daughter was abducted and taken to the New World by an Englishman. She went in search of her and landed in Bahia, but was met with denial from officials and subsequent threats. She found herself stranded and made a living as a seamstress. Eventually she boarded a merchant ship to Lisbon, but ten days from port, the crew mutinied, came into the room of the captain, and murdered him violently. They put her overboard in a row boat with the captain’s body. She questions why they threw her over with him and hints at the fact that she was raped, saying that they possibly did it because “those we have abused we grow to hate and wish never to lay eyes on again” (11).
She attempts to then recount Cruso’s story, but explains that it is a mad jumble. He tells her stories that don’t reconcile and he confuses his point of view with Friday’s. She concludes that isolation and old age have caused him to lose track. She does learn that Friday had been a slave since he was only a child and his ship went down. It seems that he was Cruso’s slave, though the details are unclear.
She notes that Cruso keeps no records, no markings of his days, and no writing. She discusses this with him and he argues that he has no need. He will leave behind his terraces and his walls that he builds. She argues in favor of keeping records. This is what defines human life.
Cruso warns her against wandering the island because of the apes. She goes out nonetheless. When she comes back, he’s angry with her. He declares that she must do as he instructs when she lives under his roof. She argues that it was only bad luck that brought her under his roof. This angers him more. She lets him cool, then apologizes.
Susan learns that Friday has no tongue. Cruso gets Friday to open his mouth and show Susan. She’s amazed and horrified. She asks what happened and Cruso tells her that the slavers who caught him cut out his tongue when he was a boy. But Cruso doesn’t know why. He smiles and says that maybe tongue was a delicacy to the Moorish slavers who captured him. Or maybe, he says, they didn’t want to hear Friday’s cries. Then he suggests that maybe they didn’t want Friday to tell his own story. Susan’s attitude toward Friday changes drastically after learning this about him. She is repulsed by him and disdainful of him. She obsesses over the thought of his tongue.
Susan makes her own sandals and begins to walk the shoreline alone. One day, Cruso is overcome by a fever. He lies in his bed ranting and raving. Friday stays away from the hut.
Friday has a whistle that he plays a tune on, over and over, always the same tune. One day Susan gets up and goes over to him while he’s playing. She grabs his whistle and throws it on the ground. She can’t stand the song any longer. It’s the first time that she’s ever been impatient with Friday.
Soon after that, Cruso gets up, having recovered from his fever. He begins to give Friday orders. A violent storm arrives and batters the hut for two days. They stay huddled inside, though Friday sleeps calmly. Susan sleeps in the same bed as Cruso at this time. Soon after, Cruso is taken by another bout of fever. Cruso begins to call out "Massa, Masa," though Susan claims she doesn’t recognize the meaning of this word. Friday comes back and plays his whistle. She feels that she’s in a madhouse. She lays down with Cruso “pressing his warm body to hers” (29). His trembling subsides and they both sleep. When she wakes, a hand is exploring her body. She confuses this hand with the Portuguese captain’s hand and thinks she’s still aboard the ship. She realizes that it’s Cruso. She says that she will let him do with her whatever it is that he wants. Then she goes out walking. She questions whether it’s the right thing to do.
One day when she’s out walking, she sees Friday putting flower petals in the water. Later, she looks under his pillow and finds a small bundle of flower petals and buds. She realizes that he was making an offering to whatever god of the waves brings him the fish.
Susan asks Cruso whether or not it would be possible to dive down and find tools on the ship that he and Friday came on. It is sunk near the island. Cruso dismisses this idea, declaring that they have no need of tools. They have a roof over their heads and all they need. She says that he speaks of tools “as if they were heathenish inventions” (32).
One day, Susan asks Cruso about the terraces he builds all over the island. They have no use. There’s nothing to plant on them, yet he labors over them every day. He says that they’re for future generations. She finds this insane.
She asks Cruso everything there is to ask of him, exhausting all his stories. He asks her nothing in return. She becomes thoroughly bored with him and declares that “Cruso rescued will be a deep disappointment to the world. The idea of a Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso, tightlipped and sullen in an alien England” (34).
Susan goes through a depression, spending her days walking along the cliffs. She notes that she’s in her youth, but making no use of it. But she doesn’t mourn this. Little by little she begins to apply herself to little tasks and recovers her spirits. Cruso doesn’t try to sleep with her again. She thinks though that if her days on the island had gone on much longer she would have offered herself to him and had children so as to keep herself from being bored out of her mind.
She asks Cruso one day whether or not there are any laws on the island. He says that the only reason for laws are to keep immoderate desires in check. She declares that she has an immoderate desire to leave the island. He doesn’t want to hear about it. She wonders to herself though what holds each of them back from doing brutal things to each other. Why doesn’t Friday beat Cruso over the head and bring an end to slavery? Why doesn’t Cruso bind her up and throw her over the cliffs? What holds Cruso back from tying Friday to a post like a dog. She reflects that the peace that they live in seems to be evidence of certain laws existing that they don’t recognize.
She frequently sees Cruso standing on the edge of the cliffs, looking out at the sea. It occurs to her that he is the king of this little island. Cruso enters another fever. She’s seen it before. She’s been there a year and this fever recurs.
A ship arrives. A group of sailors row to shore and Friday runs off. The ship belongs to a merchantman named John H. Obart. The crew takes Cruso onto the ship. Cruso comes to, and realizing where he is, begins to thrash about and fight for his freedom. Susan insists that the men go back and get Friday, that Friday has a right to come too. They do this. When Friday boards the ship, he’s scared, but Susan brings him into the room with Cruso. She tells the captain her whole story and the captain tells her to let it be known that Cruso is her husband. It will be better for her. Cruso’s fever gets worse. He’s mourning the island. He hates being taken away. Susan tries to soothe him by telling him that she’ll take him back there, but first they’ll go to England and get corn to plant on his terraces. This soothes him a little. But he still weeps. He dies of his fever. The crew gives him a sea funeral. Susan feels the crew sizing her up.
Analysis
Susan Barton is not explicit about her sexual history, but it becomes apparent that she has used her sexual appeal in cunning ways as a means of surviving as a single woman crossing back and forth on merchant ships over the South Seas and that she has done this with a remarkably practical attitude, without reflecting on or internalizing any of her previous struggle. She remains quintessentially civilized, without panicking about her loss of civilization. She is not drawn as an eighteenth-century female. Instead, she has a distinctly rational outlook typical of male stereotypes from that period.
There’s an intentionally anachronistic quality to her character. The notion of a woman traveling back and forth amidst pirates and slave traders, not only maintaining a semblance of independence, but also such an optimistic and upbeat attitude and deeply relativist view of things, is more than a stretch. Coetzee has drawn a character that reflects back the gendered nature of foundational literary narratives such as Robinson Crusoe. It must be asked: why is Susan Barton a woman? If she were intended to be a realist character, she would be arguably be a much more traumatized figure, considering all she has been through (e.g., traveling on merchant ships, surviving alone and penniless basically on the streets in Bahia, surviving a mutiny and likely many rapes). Her miraculous survival and her chipper demeanor permit a view of the Cruso experience that would not be possible if the story were intended to be that of an actual woman. Her character, shaped by lightness of attitude and rationalism, provides the reader with a window into classic narratives of male experience that turn out to be male fantasies.
Of course Robinson Cruso is no realist narrative either, yet it is a foundational one to the English literary canon and more importantly, the timeless fantasy of solitary survival on a deserted island. Susan Barton shows just how much a fantasy the idea of man alone with self (and handy slave) in nature actually is. Friday’s tongue is conveniently cut out so that he can’t argue with his master (as Susan does); Cruso himself is shown to be a raving madman with bouts of fever, a Sisyphean obsession with terracing unusable land, who has lost all differentiation between past, present, dream, and personal history.
Susan’s change of attitude toward Friday after discovering he has no tongue is striking. Whereas before she had no regard for him—or saw him as “any given house-slave,” now she says that she begins “to look on him with the horror that we reserve for the mutilated” (24). But the most fascinating, or horrifying point of his mutilation for her, is the fact that it’s concealed behind his lips. She says, “indeed it was the very secretness of his loss that caused me to shrink from him” (24). But the notable change in her attitude toward him is her perceptions of his hidden subjectivity. Though she’s horrified, she’s also curious. He has acquired an air of mystery. Before, he was to her a mere slave, someone whose story was of no consequence to her. She never asked about his story and therefore didn’t realize that he couldn’t even tell it if he’d wanted to. She was interested in the white man’s story because she automatically recognized his subjectivity as one of relevance. After learning of Friday’s missing tongue, Susan becomes hyper-aware of Friday, always alert when he comes near her. She grows awkward around him. She plays with her own tongue inside her mouth when she looks at him. She also wants to know what happened to him. Of course, Cruso can’t tell her because his stories are an incoherent mess; ironically, Friday’s story becomes the story of interest, but he can’t tell it either. But for the first time, Susan is looking at a black man as a person like herself—someone with a personal history, the thing that she has argued to be the most valuable aspect of existence. Her awakening to Friday’s humanity speaks to the dialectal nature of personality. If a person’s story is not recognized as a story of consequence, then what is its value?
Susan is being drawn to the revelation of Friday’s subjectivity in a variety of ways. The moment when she sees him give the offering of flower petals to the sea is another instance of her discovery of his socialization. His ceremony is something he has brought with him from somewhere else. That background or “culture” is the very stuff that she has argued goes into making a person. Ironically she sees Friday make this offering right after she has slept with Cruso. There are two men on the island and she has never considered being drawn to one of them, while the one who she chooses is literally raving mad and has no interest in tools, let alone an interest in leaving the island.
