Unwanted Sympathy

          When Barton first learns that Friday’s tongue has been cut out, she is horrified by a certain aspect of the mutilation:

“now I began to look on him – I could not help myself – with the horror we reserve for the mutilated. It was no comfort that his mutilation was secret, closed behind his lips… Indeed, it was the very secretness of his loss that caused me to shrink from him. I could not speak, while he was about, without being aware how lively were the movements of the tongue in my own mouth… Sorely I regretted that Cruso had ever told me the story” (24)

Reading this passage, without the context of parts II and III, I was confused as to how a secret mutilation could be more repugnant or threatening than a visible one. I inferred that Barton might vacillate between remembering Friday’s mutilation and forgetting, and that this cycling could elicit more total emotion. However, Barton’s future anxiety about the absence of a story explaining Friday’s de-tonguing elucidates this passage for me. The “secretness of [Friday’s] loss cause[s]” Barton to “shrink from him,” not because the mutilation is more jarring because it is hidden, but because Barton fears the inability inherent in the mutilation to tell the story of it. She becomes aware of the movements of her tongue, and through her inability to speak Barton reveals concern for the faculties of her tongue, and imagines the horror of being unable to understand, create, and preserve oneself through storytelling. She regrets that Cruso tells her the story, because from his tongue, the story is incomplete and dubious. Barton needs to hear the story from Friday for her to assuage her unwanted sympathy.