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Abstract: Historian and theorist
Henri Lefebvre has written that
even if there is no general code of
space, inherent to language or to all languages, there may have
existed specific codes, established at specific historical periods
and varying in their effects. If so interested ‘subjects’, as
members of a particular society, would have acceded by this means at
once to their space and to their status as ‘subjects’ acting within
that space and (in the broadest sense of the word) comprehending it.
Building on Lefebvre, and other
theorists, I have developed the concept of ‘spatial persona,’ that
is, the linkage of a person’s identification with a specific
location, or locations, as a means of verifying identity and
informing the act of contact. My paper examines the development of
the British spatial persona in the early eighteenth century, as seen
through the works of Daniel Defoe. I initially turn to Defoe’s Tour,
selecting several moments to detail the British spatial persona in
the metropolis. I then travel across the Atlantic to show how the
British spatial persona was played out during the colonial
experience, both in fiction as seen in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and
in the real-life experiences of British settlers in the American
Southeast as seen in the following quotation from Philip Thicknese,
a British colonist who briefly settled in the new colony of Georgia
in 1736, and commented in his memoirs:
the Indians sometimes visited my
Island for a day or two, and then I had plenty of venison, which
they boil’d down, and eat dipped in wild honey, this was a true
Robinson Crusoe line of life. Philip Thicknesse.
Lefebvre, Henri, (Trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith), The Production of Space, (Blackwell, 1991), p. 17 |
