In Foe, J. M. Coetzee reimagines Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway and the lone female witness to Cruso’s time on an abandoned island. When Susan returns to England in the early 1700s, she is desperate to have Mr. Foe—a famous London writer of adventure stories—write and publish Cruso’s tale. But Foe is initially less interested in Cruso than he is in Susan’s life before the island, which she spent searching for her kidnapped daughter in Bahia, Brazil. Susan is hesitant to share any details about her relationship with her daughter, but Foe is determined, even trying to convince Susan that a young girl she has never met before is her daughter—because he believes the story will be more satisfying if it ends with a reunion between mother and daughter.
As Susan and Foe fight for creative control over Susan’s story (and over the facts of Susan’s family life), the gender norms of the era are confused and complicated. On the one hand, Susan insists that the young girl is not her daughter but is instead “father-born” by Mr. Foe, because she is a product of his scheming and imagination. On the other hand, Susan insists that she is the “father” of her story, while Mr. Foe is the mother; she “begets” it, but it is Mr. Foe’s job to write it and (metaphorically) carry it to term. And while Susan remains financially and materially dependent on Mr. Foe, when the two begin a romantic relationship, Susan experiments with sexual dominance, explicitly equating her power in the bedroom with her power as a storyteller. In claiming creative control, Susan is therefore able to subvert the strict, misogynistic gender roles of her era, suggesting that artistic invention is a venue for women to seize agency denied to them in other realms of life.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Gender and Creation Quotes in Foe
“The planting is not for us,” said [Cruso]. “We have nothing to plant—that is our misfortune…the planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground and piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness…I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart.”
Did they truly think of me as Cruso’s wife, or had tales already reached them—sailors’ haunts are full of gossip—of the Englishwoman from Bahia marooned in the Atlantic by Portuguese mutineers? Do you think of me, Mr. Foe, as Mrs. Cruso, or as a bold adventuress? Think what you may, it was I who shared Cruso’s bed and closed Cruso’s eyes, as it is I who have disposal of all that Cruso leaves behind, which is the story of his island.
Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of us who live in a world of speech to have our questions answered! It is like our desire, when we kiss someone, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us. Otherwise would we not be content to bestow our kisses on statues, the cold statues of kings and queens and gods and goddesses? Why do you think we do not kiss statues, and sleep with statues in our beds, men with the statues of women and women with the statues of men, statues carved in positions of desire? Do you think it is only because marble is cold? Lie long enough with a statue in your bed, with warm covers over the two of you, and the marble will grow warm. No, it is not because the statue is cold but because it is dead, or rather because it has never lived and never will.
I must go, Friday. You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr. Foe’s desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks and disposed them according to another scheme), and so forth, day after day; all of this because Mr. Foe has run away from his debts. Sometimes I believe it is I who have become the slave. No doubt you would smile, if you could understand.
“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”
“Father-born,” [the girl] says—”It is a word I have never heard before.”
I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire.
I calmed Foe. “Permit me,” I whispered—”there is a privilege that comes with the first night, that I claim as mine.” So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets, I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.
“A bracing ride,” said Foe afterwards—”My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before I resume.” “It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits,” I replied—”she must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.”
“But since we speak of childbearing, has the time not come to tell me the truth about your own child, the lost daughter and Bahia? Did you truly give birth to her? Is she substantial or is she a story too?”
“I will answer, but not before you have told me: the girl you send who calls herself by my name, is she substantial? You touch her; you embrace her; you kiss her. Would you dare to say she’s not substantial? No, she is substantial, as my daughter is substantial and I am substantial; and you two are substantial, no less and no more than any of us. We are all alive, we are all substantial, we are all in the same world.”
“You have omitted Friday.”
