Licenciada En Filología Inglesa

STATE OF NATURE IN SOCIETY (Travel Literature : R. Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pilgrim's Progress)


INTRODUCTION
If there is something fascinating about Travel Literature it is probably the introspective approach it gives us on the Age of Exploration, since it does not merely provide us an objective account of a voyage and its discoveries, like a travel log, but it depicts the evolution andinner workings of the traveler himself throughout his journey. Gulliver, Crusoe, Christian and Christiana all turn their apparently balanced lives upside down and achieve a different state of mind throughout their trip. But although this assertion seems obvious, some thinkers from the Enlightenment had a specific take on transforming through travel. The most representative figure is Rousseau, whobelieved in the existence of a state of nature, meaning the natural state of man before his socialization. Rousseau maintained that traveling could help getting to the core of oneself only if one went far removed from civilized society, which he believed deformed and perverted mankind. For Rousseau, a trip to one’s self had to be an individual experience. We witness this solitary journey in Part Iof the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, but Gulliver and Christiana, on the other hand both experience communal journeys. But despite this apparent concordance to Rousseau’s thoughts, the solitary kingdom that Robinson builds for himself or Christian’s absolute disregard for others seem far away from the state of nature, which does not know about avarice or egoism, or the ideal society itcan generate.
By returning to a supposed state of nature Crusoe is led to reproduce the same flaws of the Capitalist society he has left behind, such as greed and ethnocentrism. For Gulliver, the process seems reverted: it is by visiting different communities and realizing the relativity of his own culture, that he truly achieves a solitary experience and detaches himself from his originalsociety. In this paper, I will argument that a communal experience of travel brings one closer to Rousseau’s State of Nature than an individual one by focusing on Gulliver’s Travels, Robison Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In order to do so, I will first study how Part I of the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe apparently describe Rousseau’s state of nature and then focus on how they contradictit. Finally, I will study the aspects in which Part II of The Pilgrims’ Progress and Gulliver’s Travels are closer to the values of Rousseau’s State of Nature.














1. Rousseau’s Individualist State of Nature
If we were to subtract man from society, what would define him? Philosophers of the Enlightenment had different takes on what natural man was like. Some had arather pessimistic view of man, such as Hobbes, who considered that man was naturally chaotic and that it was society which kept him from committing barbarities. (page,oeuvre?) Rousseau, on the other hand, had a much more optimistic view of human nature: “God makes all things good, man meddles with them and they become evil” (5), he states in his treatise Emile, Or Education. In this same treatise,Rousseau also explains that man is moved by two innate instincts: a self-love that he calls amour de soi, meaning some kind of preservation instinct, and pity, which causes him to empathize with the suffering of his kind. It is only when immersed in society that man is inclined to compare himself to others. By doing so, his from amour de soi mutates into, amour propre, a selfish love of self thatdepends on how one is perceived (187-8).
But although Rousseau’s depiction of state of nature seems fairly idealistic, he did not preach the abandonment of social contract to retire to a savage existence as he believed that it granted important qualities to man such as morality or reason. In The Social Contract , he states: “the passage […] to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in...