Foe

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Island

At the beginning of Foe, Susan finds herself on a remote island. The island is relatively hostile, far from a tropical paradise. The sharp thorns immediately pierce her foot, and the seaweed that coats the jagged rocks is so pungent that it stings her nostrils. Furthermore, one side of the island is populated by aggressive apes. The hostility of the island is an important aspect of the novel’s attempt to reexamine traditional castaway tales. Unlike the trope of a tropical paradise with sun and sand, the island portrayed in Foe is a brutal place where life is hard. The constant wind howls in Susan’s ears, and she is in danger whenever she strays too far from Cruso’s camp. This brutal environment makes her dependent on Cruso; he and Friday have forged some kind of existence on the remote island, making what they can of their desperate situation. The reality of life of the island is a symbolic illustration of the isolation and suffering endured by these two men, which Susan witnesses firsthand. The island is an extension of Cruso’s psyche: cut off from the world, hostile to outsiders, and haunted by vicious beasts that he has pushed as far away as possible. Cruso’s shame and guilt over his past have turned the island into an example of pathetic fallacy, in which the hostile island becomes the symbolic extension of his emotional state.

Susan manages to escape the island, taking Friday and Cruso with her. Friday lacks the mental framework with which to understand why he is being taken from the island, while Cruso is too sick to comprehend or resist. Cruso dies in transit, meaning that Susan and Friday return to England alone. There, they are stranded once again. Susan struggles to find work, as the reputation of a female castaway is framed in misogynistic terms. She is denied the heroic veneration given to male castaways, meaning that she is denied job opportunities and presumed to be immoral. She is ostracized from society, driven into isolation with only the voiceless Friday at her side. In this way, the island of England is portrayed as being as remote and hostile as the island on which she was stranded. Indeed, Susan’s plight in England is even more desperate. On the island, she was able to meet her basic needs with Cruso’s help. In England, she starves for extended periods, she is forced to steal, and her clothes are turned into tattered rags. She is targeted by drunk men who try to sexually assault her, while any sea captain who agrees to take Friday to Africa—she suspects—is only seeking to sell him back into slavery. In many ways, England becomes an extension of the hostile, isolated, and lonely island on which Susan was stranded. This time, however, she does not have Cruso to help her. She must fend for herself in a world that is a symbolic extension of the brutality of the island.

Susan hints at Cruso’s past, though he never clarifies the actual truth. She comes to suspect that Cruso may have been an enslaver, perhaps even the person who cut out Friday’s tongue and mutilated him in other ways. This, she suspects, is the real reason for Cruso’s loosening grip on sanity. He is consumed by guilt for what he has done, so the island functions as a form of purgatory for him. The exile on the island is Cruso’s way of punishing himself, of separating himself away from a society that lacks the morality to punish him for the sins for which he believes he should be punished. In this purgatorial state, Friday is with him as a constant reminder of his sins. For Cruso, life on the island is a symbolic punishment.

The Ship

Susan’s narration does not specify how Cruso and Friday arrived on the island, often because Cruso’s stories contradict. He is not a reliable narrator of his own past. As such, Susan tries to imagine the physical objects that could support her theory that the pair were aboard the same slave ship, part of the Middle Passage journey that transported people from Africa to the New World for the purpose of enslaving them. She believes Cruso was an enslaver and that Friday was destined to be an enslaved person, a dynamic that was reconstituted when they exited the sinking ship and washed ashore on the island. As such, the sunken ship becomes a symbol of colonial violence. It represents the transportation of people like Friday by people like Cruso. This colonial violence is hidden beneath the waves, as British society attempts to hide the brutal reality of the empire. Cruso does not want to talk about his past and his sins, as British society—as experienced by Susan—does not want to talk about the violence used to maintain the British Empire. The ship is not just a symbol of the colonia violence; its hidden position at the bottom of the sea also symbolizes a desire to push said violence, and its tragic consequences, out of sight. Cruso does not want to dive down to the ship in search of tools for precisely this reason, as he does not want to revisit the hidden sins of his past.

Susan sees Friday scattering white petals on the sea while riding a log as though it were a canoe. His actions confuse her at first, but then she comes to see the gesture as a symbolic act. The petals are being scattered in an act of remembrance, making Susan realize that Friday was likely not alone on the ship. She believes that he is scattering the petals above the site of the sunken ship in memory of the many other African people who were aboard. Susan had presumed Friday to be unique in his suffering. She had struggled to think of a worse fate than being stranded alone with Cruso, especially after the violent removal of his tongue. When she sees Friday scattering the petals, however, Susan realizes that potentially hundreds of other people were chained aboard the ship. They died in chains, and their bodies remain chained; even in death, the sunken ship symbolizes, their bodies remain bound. From this, Susan extrapolates the sunken ship to symbolize all victims of the slave trade. The sunken ship is a symbol of the broadness of the brutality but also of the infrequency of remembrance. Friday’s act strikes her because she is not used to the idea of non-white people’s deaths being mourned, nor the image of a non-white person mourning. The sunken ship humanizes Friday in Susan’s mind and humanizes other non-white victims of the slave trade through this symbolism.

The final part of the novel is the shortest but extends the chronology of the novel beyond Susan’s lifetime. As the narrator moves outside of the apartment, noting the commemorative plaque in memory of Daniel Defoe, the linear passage of time is broken. Once the narrator moves into the abstract world of the sunken ship, everything becomes a symbolic act. As a novel, Foe interrogates the relationship between stories and agency. Friday, the character with the least amount of agency in the novel, has been denied the chance to tell his story. At first, the narrator tries to open Friday’s mouth while inside Foe’s lodgings. This does not work. Friday cannot reveal what is inside him. Only when the narrative moves into the realm of pure, abstract symbolism, when the narrator travels to the sunken ship and finds Friday bound in a corner, can Friday’s mouth be opened and his story be told. His mouth opens, and a constant stream of darkness engulfs the entire world. The reality of colonial violence—as symbolized by the ship—is let loose on the world.

Clothing

Life on the island provides the inhabitants with many things, but they must make their own clothing. For Susan, this proves to be a problem. She washes ashore dressed only in a petticoat, and she immediately lacks protection from the island’s hostilities, with a thorn pricking her foot on the way to Cruso’s camp. Her inadequate clothing is a symbol of how ill-prepared she is to survive on the island. In contrast, Cruso and Friday have adapted. Their clothes have been manufactured from their conquests: They are dressed in ape pelts and leathers, fashioned from the defeated enemies that they have chased to the other side of the island. They are able to make clothing, symbolizing their ability to survive the island’s hostilities. When Susan accepts clothing from Cruso and Friday, she is symbolically demonstrating her reliance on them for survival. Since clothing is such an important need in perilous circumstances, each character’s clothing symbolizes their relationship to the island and what they will need to do to survive.

After Susan escapes the island, she returns to England. There, clothing again functions as an important symbol of her changing circumstances. Susan is not able to return to her previous life. She wants to tell her story by writing a novel of her experiences as a castaway, but the author Foe advises her that she will need to change and sensationalize her experiences. Susan is against this. She does not want to lie about life on the island, and she is unwilling to bend the truth when it comes to telling her story. Her clothing suggests otherwise, however. In her letters to Foe, she writes about her increasingly desperate situation. She has no money, but she needs to eat and feed Friday. Deciding to sell Foe’s possessions, she feels that the only way she can do so is to dress as his widow. She dons black clothing and invents an elaborate backstory for herself and her fictional dead husband. This change of clothes symbolizes Susan’s growth as a writer. She is willing to manufacture a story to reach a greater truth. She is willing to lie in desperate circumstances. Susan’s mourning clothes are a symbolic line she has crossed, showing the point at which she will do the one thing she has sworn not to do.

Even after she has sold Foe’s possessions, however, Susan is struggling to get by. Her letters become increasingly more desperate, to the point where she is describing her journey to Bristol to try to send Friday to Africa. At this point, Susan finally notices how bedraggled she has become. Her clothes have turned to rags, and she can no longer pass for a widow. She is presumed to be an itinerant wanderer, and she is driven out of inns and pubs because people will not entertain someone dressed in such tattered clothing. Susan’s rags symbolize the extent of her poverty. Without necessarily realizing what has happened, she has sunk far lower and become far more desperate than she ever was on the island. While she may have been dependent on Cruso for clothing, she at least had clothing. While she may have been dependent on Friday to cook her food, she at least had food. In England, Susan’s clothing suggests that she is in an even more desperate situation than she was on the island. When she arrives at Foe’s house in Part 3, she apologizes for her disarray. Now, she accepts, she is at her lowest point. Even dressed in rags, however, she implores Foe to tell Friday’s story. Even at her most desperate, even dressed only in the rags she has on her back, Susan has rediscovered her morality. The ragged state of her clothes symbolically emphasizes her determination to tell Friday’s story.