Summary
Susan and Friday have arrived in England. Susan goes by the name of Mrs. Cruso. They have meager lodgings, Susan on the top floor, Friday in the cellar. She brings him his meals. She feels for him, for his disorientation in the city. She thinks that she couldn’t have left him on the island, but it’s painful to see him away from it.
It’s made clear that the narrative is a series of letters being written by Susan, addressed to a man named Mr. Foe. She wrote the first chapter for Mr. Foe. This second chapter is less a story, and more distinctly epistolary with a more frequent second-person address. Susan explains to Mr. Foe that she heard of him as an “author who hears many confessions” (48). She describes how she went to his door and had a brief conversation with him, telling him of her story. He decided to hear her out. Now she appeals to him for lodgings in his house, asking “Can you not take me in as your close servant and Friday as your gardener?” (51)
She claims that she sometimes feels something she never dreamed she’d feel: despite all the tedium she has described, she longs for the island. She conjures it and analyzes her reasons for missing it.
Susan muses that in describing all the events to Mr. Foe, she has been too concerned with Mr. Cruso’s story and hasn’t told her story: the story of searching for her daughter, going to Bahia, being nearly without a home, surviving on ships. She remarks that she brought nothing back from the island. “All I have is my sandals,” she says (51). She asks for Mr. Foe to tell her story. “Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty,” she declares (52). She points out that he’s the one to write her story as he’s the one with a desk and a window and no distraction—the requisite elements for literary creation.
Susan answers questions that Foe has apparently asked her about her means of survival on the island. In answering these questions she reminisces at length about the island and Cruso. She mentions then that Friday is wearing the pantaloons and watchcoat and jerkin that she acquired on the ship. His cellar opens onto a yard. He’s free to go outside but he doesn’t, she says, because he’s still terrified of his new surroundings. She has no idea what he does in the cellar all day, but she knows that a rumor has gone around Clock Lane that a “cannibal” is in the cellar. One day she finds a bunch of kids outside his door trying to peer in. They have a chant she hears that goes: “Cannibal Friday have you at your mum today?” (55) Susan is worried about Friday. He’s depressed and growing old before his time.
She teaches him how to wash her clothes to keep him from dying of idleness and while she does this she teaches him words. She says, “Watch” and “do.” She feels terrible though that he no longer has the freedom he had, hunting and fishing and collecting birds eggs in the sun. She reflects on the pity that Cruso never taught Friday words. Cruso said, “Friday had no need for words,” but she says, “Cruso erred” (56). He could’ve communicated with Friday even though Friday had no tongue.
Friday is becoming a great lover of oatmeal and he’s growing a little soft in the belly. As she continues to teach him more language, she wonders if he merely thinks she’s making noises like the chattering of birds. Does he think that language has any purpose, she wonders. She shows Friday how to use a spade, to level garden beds, and to trim hedges. But she shows him all these not for their purpose, but for the purpose of telling him the purpose. She explains everything she teaches him.
Her last letter has been returned, she tells Mr. Foe. She hopes this one won't be. In the next letter, she writes that she has gone to Mr. Foe’s address in Stoke Newington and found the bailiffs there waiting for him. She sees that this is why her letters have been returned. Now she wonders where to send the next letters and most importantly, whether or not Mr. Foe will continue to write her and Friday’s stories. She also wonders if she and Friday are the only subjects of Mr. Foe’s who he keeps settled in lodgings while writing their stories.
She starts to give her letters to a woman at Mr. Foe’s house named Mrs. Thrush, hoping that the letters will make it to him. But the bailiffs are camped out in his library. One of them, Mr. Wilkes, wonders if she’s in contact with Mr. Foe and he corners her in the hall and threatens her. Susan implores Mr. Foe to continue writing her story so that she can be freed from her drab existence and so that Friday can go back to Africa. She feels herself writing into the void. Days pass.
Susan returns to Foe’s house and finds it closed up and emptied of everyone. She and Friday take up residence there. There are carrots and beans growing in the garden, though it’s all covered in weeds. Susan sits at Foe’s writing desk, by the window, writing to him with his own paper and pens. The desk is different than she imagined though and she meditates at length on the difference between imagination and reality. All of her thoughts and meditations are addressed to “you,” Mr. Foe. She continues to apologize to Mr. Foe for taking over his house.
One morning, Susan draws two pictures. One is of Cruso in his peaked hat. At his knees is a black man having his tongue cut out. The other picture is of some Moorish slave traders cutting out a black man’s tongue. She takes her drawings downstairs to Friday. Is this true, she asks him, and shows him the first drawing. When he looks at it, she sees him react. But maybe he’s only reacting, she thinks, because she’s never done anything like this to him. She shows him the second one and he doesn’t react, so she considers that her depiction of the slave traders may be wrong. Maybe Moorish slave traders don’t have hooked beards. On top of this, she is asking Friday which drawing is “true” and she realizes that he might not understand the meaning of the word "truth." She may not get to the bottom of how Friday lost his tongue, she realizes. She wonders what she’s doing with her life. She reflects on how much time she’s been spending waiting. First on the island, now for Mr. Foe to write her story. She tears the pictures up in front of Friday. He stares at her. For a moment she longs for him to hold her. He has no reaction to her at all.
A man named Mr. Summers comes by the house. She tells him that she’s the housekeeper and Friday’s the gardener. This seems true enough considering that the house is looking well kept and Friday is in the garden.
A small girl has been standing outside of the house watching the house. Susan wonders if the bailiff has sent spies to the house, but she decides that she must be a spy for Mr. Foe. She takes all the letters she’s written to Mr. Foe and gives them to the girl, but the girl shakes her head. Susan asks the girl who she is. The girl whispers that her name is Susan Barton. Susan thinks the girl must be mad. She asks the girl why she stands there all day. The girl says, to speak with Susan. Susan asks what her own name is and the girl says that it’s also Susan Barton. Susan asks if Mr. Foe sent the girl. The girl says that she doesn’t know Mr. Foe. Susan demands to know why she’s there. The girl asks whose child Susan thinks she is. Susan says she has no idea and the girl bursts into tears. “You do not know me! You do not know me!” she says (74). The girl claims that she has followed Susan everywhere, including the island. When the girl says this it’s as though Susan has been struck in the face. The girl says she also knows about Bahia. Susan can’t take this and slams the door on the girl.
Later, Susan asks again if Mr. Foe sent the girl. The girl says no. The girl tells Susan about her nurse, a woman named Amy and her father, Mr. Lewes. Susan says she’s never heard of these people in her life. The girl insists that she and Susan look alike. Susan disagrees. She invites the girl in for the night in Mr. Foe’s house.
She sits on the bed with Friday and delivers a long narrative soliloquy on what it’s like to speak to the void and how she wonders about Friday’s desire. Friday shows no reaction to her. She questions Cruso’s choice of building a bed and not a table in his shack, and why no pen. She wonders about Cruso’s feelings about Friday and his fear of cannibals. Cruso obsessed over cannibals. She asks Friday why he submitted all those years to Cruso’s rule.
The girl returns to her post outside the house and Susan tries to ignore her. She meditates on the craft of writing and its strange powers and challenges.
She and the girl trudge into a forest together. The girl begs to know where they’re going. Susan tells her she’s taking her to her mother. The girl says that Susan is her mother. The girl doesn’t like the dark forest. Susan insists that they’re almost there. The girl grows more and more upset. In the darkest part of the forest, Susan stops and spreads out her cloak and they sit on it. The girl is scared. Susan tells the girl that she’s not her mother, that she is “father-born” (91). The girl says she’s never heard anything like it. Susan wakes in London with the girl’s last words in her ears. Has she gotten rid of the girl forever, she wonders.
Analysis
The mechanisms behind the façade of literary narrative become exposed and scrutinized in the second chapter, from the function of storytelling, to the construct of subject, to the function of language itself. Susan is asking a writer who famously “hears confessions,” Mr. Foe, to tell her story. While she’s expressly doing it for money (seemingly an enterprising woman who recognizes the potential to sell it), she nonetheless becomes invested in transmitting her personal experience because of her emotional connection to that experience. After telling Mr. Foe about Cruso’s story, she feels that she has done a disservice to her own story. She implores Mr. Foe to “Return to [her] the substance [she has] lost” (52), as though to suggest that the telling of stories might reanimate a past, personal history.
The narrative of Foe has a metafictional premise to begin with, as a self-conscious revisiting of Robinson Crusoe. In the first chapter, the story departs from traditional narrative through the anachronistic aspects of Susan’s character, as well as the nonlinear effects of its epistolary form. The dimensions of the narrative really begin to fan out in the second chapter. As Susan’s appeals to Mr. Foe to write her story evolve, so do her questions about why stories are told, what they are for, who they are for.
The nature of language is also examined in this chapter as Susan attempts to teach Friday the meaning of words. But the question arises of how language is understood when it physically can’t be produced. For an adult who has hardly heard language and who doesn’t have the ability physically form words, how is human communication perceived? Do sentences merely sound like the chatter of birds? For someone who has survived in arguably ideal conditions without language, does civilization and all its chatter come off as a problem, excess, redundancy? Though Friday doesn’t speak, the questions that arise from his physical condition and his presence are some of the most pressing and profound. While Susan is desperate to have her story told, Friday’s experience, as he lies depressed in a cellar in a city, feels like the most intriguing experience, indeed the one around which everything at this point in the story quietly revolves.
The chapter separates the various elements of fiction and we have them all floating in parts. The element of mystery is added to the mix, just in time to keep us going: that fact that Mr. Foe is missing and a wanted man feels like a conscious addition on the part of the author.
The arrival of the girl in the story feels like a visitation from the imagination of the author—but which author is not quite clear. Susan believes that the girl has been literally sent by the author Foe. But perhaps the girl is someone who Susan herself has conjured in her own writing and marks a point in which her writing begins to interweave with her life.
The passage in which Susan takes the girl into the forest comes after a long meditation on the powers of writing. The passage stands out as the most drastic departure from the narrative insofar as there is no explanation as to how they’ve arrived in the forest and what happens to the girl after she leaves her there. In this section, it feels as though Susan is writing the girl out of her story, by writing her into the forest. It seems here as though Susan might be the author of the girl, even though the girl is an intrusion and annoyance and she wants the girl to leave.
