The Englishman in the New Worlds: Reforming Aliens and Savages in English New-World Fictions

Abstract

This essay examines four English ‘new world’ fictions—New Atlantis, The Man in the Moone, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels—against the backdrop of early modern Europe’s shifting outlooks on the new worlds and their inhabitants. The unique Earth-centered finite universe/world envisioned by pre-modern Christendom became increasingly untenable with discoveries of new worlds on Earth by Columbus and in the moon and beyond by Copernicans, thus giving way to the idea of plural Earths/worlds. Encounters with new world inhabitants also raised questions as to their origins and salvific status, for they did not fit into the biblical history of all humanity as Adam’s descendants in need of salvation for their Original Sin. Concurring with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era, these developments ushered in a race of missions, to the New World in particular, between Catholics and Protestants. Seen in this context, the English new world fictions proceed from depicting Spanish travelers’ ill-fated mission to exulting at the culmination of the English mission in Crusoe’s Protestant Friday. Gulliver’s inverted conversion to Houyhnhnmism serves as a two-way critique of Spanish atrocities in the New World and the Protestant mission, as projected by Robert Boyle, to reform the (new) world in the image of the Englishman.