Foe: The Triangle of Depreciated Opression

"Is there something in the condition of slavehood that invades the heart and makes a slave a slave for life...?"(85)

            The oppressor/oppressed theme is present in all of the Coetzee novels discussed thus far in this blog. In Foe, this theme takes a new shape- it is not a binary, but a triangle-relationship, I would argue: Crusoe --> Susan Barton--> Friday. Susan’s role in this triangle is dualistic- she is both an oppressor and an oppressed. Though ‘saved’ by Crusoe, she is also ‘enslaved’ by him, yet she doesn’t recognize her position of a slave. Instead, she feels ‘indebted’ to fate for abandoning her on his island instead of one “infested with lions and snakes, or on an island where rain never fell…” (25) This ‘depreciation’ of oppression is present throughout the novel. After Cruso’s death, Susan takes Friday to England with her, where he lives as her servant. Though she openly expresses doubt regarding her intentions behind any communication with Friday, unsure of whether she talks to him to “educate” him or to “subject him to [her] will” (60), Susan still refuses to consider him her servant, and by doing so, she refuses to consider herself his master. She says, “Friday was not my slave but Cruso’s… He cannot even be said to be a servant, so idle is his life.” (76)

            Even Cruso doesn’t consider himself a slave-owner, nor does he consider Friday’s situation unfortunate for Friday, for him, or for anyone else for that matter; after all, who would be left to “pick the cotton and the sugar-cane… [if Providence didn’t] sometimes wake and sometimes sleep…” (23) And, just like Susan looks for the ‘silver lining’ in her story, Cruso finds one in Friday’s story; after all, Friday could have found himself “under the planter’s lash, or in Africa, where the forests teem with cannibals”, but instead he found himself a “lenient master” (23).

             This triangle of oppression operates as a system hereditary rule, in which Friday is at the bottom of the hierarchy, and though we aren’t quite sure who is at the very top in the whole picture of things (as Friday was handed down to Cruso by someone else), within this triangle- Cruso is at the top. 

            

If we were to read Foe metaphorically, yet universally and not just specifically in the South African context, couldn’t we then easily assign values to A, B and C:

a)     A= Great Britain, B= Newly formed United States, C= Natives

b)    A= Portugal, B= Brazil, C= Natives

c)     A=Europeans- British and Dutch, B= South African government, C= Natives

      Etc….

Note how ‘Natives’ always occupy ‘C’?