Self, Possessed: Intoxication, Slavery, and Split Personhood in Defoe's Colonel Jack

Abstract: A key episode in Defoe's Colonel Jack disassembles the strained metaphor of "possessing" a self through the contrast between two ways of losing one: slavery, which expropriates one's property in one's own body; and intoxication, which decouples consciousness from liability. In the test cases for Jack's plantation reform scheme—two enslaved Africans whom alcohol renders "out of the Government" of selves they do not own—the novel separates out these senses of self-ownership to generate fragmented, stipulated forms of personhood, then fashions them into a more intensive regime of racialized subjection: a dispossessed mirror of the first-person narrator's formal self-doubling.