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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Emerging in recent decades from under the shadow of its more popular siblings, Daniel Defoe's final novel, Roxana (1724), has enjoyed a noticeable rise in critical fortune, despite the tragic misfortune of its eponymous heroine. Finding in the story of a woman's meteoric ascent from destitution to prosperity both the psychological depth and narrative complexity missing from Defoe's earlier masterpieces, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), scholars have brought to bear on the novel a wide range of theoretical paradigms and historical contexts, deeply enriching our sense of Defoe's artistry by illuminating his multifaceted understanding of, and engagement with, the economic, social, political, and religious concerns of the early eighteenth century. Yet, in many studies of the novel, a heightened appreciation of the novel's complexity has often rendered an accompanying sense of uneasiness or confusion about its meaning, particularly with regard to the unhappy, and extremely abrupt, ending--a conclusion readers have interpreted in diverse and often mutually exclusive ways. Yet, whether viewing the novel's denouement as, among other possibilities, incomplete, retributive, or simply a return to an earlier misogynist tradition, (1) critics agree that Roxana's downfall has everything to do with her engagement in relations of commerce, broadly defined as accumulation, investment, and the social relations that surround these economic transactions. (2)
To unravel those relations in their myriad of social and economic intricacies is to uncover at the novel's core Defoe's profound ambivalence towards his heroine, an ambivalence which derives, at least in part, from the tensions between, on the one hand, his sense of the need for women's subordinate and devalued economic role in the emerging middle-class enterprise and, on the other hand, his reluctant, perhaps even repressed awareness of the severe constraints and injustices of that role. It is not business relations per se that destroy Roxana--Defoe's earlier, and successful female protagonist, Moll Flanders, engages in a wide range of financial activity, both criminal and legitimate, and Defoe's Complete English Tradesman, published two years after his final novel, expressly advocates the involvement of women in their husbands' businesses. (3) What distinguishes Roxana from these other women is not, then, economic activity as such, but the ability to detach such activity from a domestic or marital context. Moll, by contrast, can combine economic prosperity with moral tranquility because her material stability functions in the context of the family unit comprised of husband and son. (4) Roxana, however, purchases and sustains her affluence at the cost of a categorical denial of wife- and motherhood. Unlike Michael Boardman, who sees Roxana's sin as "clearly a feminine transgression" stemming exclusively from sexual passion (52), I contend that her greatest (yet also related) transgression is her desire for an economic existence independent of men, whether they be fools, such as her brewer husband, or exemplars like the Dutch merchant. By attacking marriage as a form of servitude and failing to marry in order to make an "honest woman" of herself, Roxana both challenges and ominously threatens a developing order based on women's supposedly inherent difference from men, a difference embodied "naturally" in both their sexual vulnerability and financial dependence. (5)
By shunning the male control of her money mandated within marriage, Roxana calls into question not only the broad contours of patriarchal control over women embodied in what Carole Pateman has termed the "sexual contract," (6) but also the more specific model of middle-class marriage, in which men's position as exclusive breadwinner increasingly limited women's productive economic role. Roxana, like its feisty and eponymous protagonist, is vexed by the failure of a system, namely marriage, which is ostensibly designed to safeguard, rather than destroy, the interests of women and children. Yet, the investment of both Defoe and the emerging novel genre in a gender division of labor that militated women's placement into a domestic sphere increasingly separated from the workplace means that such insolvency of the system itself cannot be acknowledged. Instead, the failure must be extirpated through the destruction of the very woman who attempts to function outside its boundaries.
Operating as both a symptom of, and a solution for, the economic tensions at the heart of Defoe's novel stands the figure of the Amazon. (7) As Laura Brown has noted, "women are not always or even often seen as Amazons, but Amazons haunt the frontiers of the representation of women at various levels and in various modes of discourse" (Ends of Empire, 144). (8) By naming Roxana an Amazon, Defoe projects onto his heroine both his own and the culture's fears about female independence from men. Like the mythic Amazons, whose martial prowess, economic self-sufficiency, and non-monagamous, matrilineal sexuality (they kept only the girl children and killed, maimed, or rejected the boy babies) threatened Athenian patriarchy, Roxana's refusal to remain within the sphere of "proper"--which is to say chaste and dependent--sexual and economic behavior poses a similar threat to emerging eighteenth-century beliefs about women's proscribed domestic role.
It is crucial to recognize, however, that Roxana's Amazonian status emerges neither from her role as mistress nor from her position as "She-Merchant"; it arises, instead, out of her refusal to marry. After having several times rejected a marriage proposal from the "honest" Dutch merchant by whom she is pregnant, Roxana subsequently rebuffs the offer of her financial advisor, the historical figure Sir Robert Clayton, to find her "some eminent Merchant" who, already possessing a "flourishing Business, and a flowing Cash," would not need her money, but would settle it all on herself and her children, while enabling her to live "like a Queen" (211). Bent upon adding to her assets by becoming a "kept Mistress" (210), Roxana then restates her earlier points with even greater vehemence: "that I knew no Reason the Men had to engross the whole Liberty of the Race, and make the Women, notwithstanding any desparity of Fortune, be subject to the Laws of Marriage, of their own making; that it was my Misfortune to be a Woman, but I was resolv'd it shou'd not be made worse by the Sex; and seeing Liberty seem'd to be the Men's Property, I wou'd be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou'd die so" (211-12). (9)
Roxana's radical terminology does not fluster the phlegmatic Sir Robert who, unlike the Dutch merchant, has no real investment in her capitulation to the conjugal norm: Sir Robert "smil'd, and told me, I talked a kind of Amazonian Language; that he found few Women of my Mind, or that if they were, they wanted Resolution to go on with it" (212; original italics). While the Penguin editor, David Blewett, interprets Sir Robert's phrase as meaning "aggressively feminist (from the legendary race of female warriors)," (10) I contend that Roxana's association with the mythic Amazons can take us even further in understanding the complex gender negotiations at work in Defoe's novel. Indeed the term itself provides a gloss on one of the Dutch merchant's earlier comments to Roxana, after he finds out that she has become pregnant from their affair. Repeating and adding to his earlier statement--"But I have been surpriz'd with such a Denial, that no Woman in such Circumstances ever gave to a Man; for certainly it was never known, that any Woman refus'd to marry a Man that had first lain with her, much less a Man that had gotten her with-Child"--he adds his harshest remark: "yet I must own, there is something in it shocking to Nature, and something very unkind to yourself; but above all, it is unkind to the Child that is yet unborn; who, if we marry, will come into the World with Advantage enough, but if not, is ruin'd before it is born" (196).
As a "Man-Woman" Roxana is neither male nor female, but is herself "something ... shocking to Nature"--monstrous, indeed inhuman. Like the ancient Amazons, who are often represented as geographically elusive, living at the margins of the known world, Roxana too exists on the edge, yet at a sociological, rather than geographical, extreme. Moreover, just as the Amazons use men solely for reproductive purposes, Roxana controls and exploits her own sexual attractiveness. Employing her body to gain wealth while eschewing marriage, Roxana threatens not only because she desires to accumulate capital, but also, and more dangerously, because of the independence such accumulation allows. By obviating the need for marriage, she challenges the foundation of male control and ownership of women's property--understood as both her body and her money; in addition, she breaks the chain of patrilineal succession by failing to legitimize the offspring of her sexual encounters. In her refusal to join the "civilized" state that would both restrict her sexuality to one man and grant that man control of her considerable economic assets, as well as of her children, Roxana perfectly fits William Blake Tyrrell's description of the ancient Greek Amazons as "beautiful women who arouse men sexually," yet whose "erotic appeal cannot be civilized in marriage, its proper sphere, and so is loose, socially unproductive, and dangerous" (66). Thus Tyrrell reads the Amazon myth as providing an ideological resolution to the conflicts inherent within Athenian marriage: "The Amazon myth explains why it is necessary for the daughter to marry by creating a scenario of the dangers inherent in her not marrying" (xiv).
Defoe's creation of the mythic Man-Woman Roxana performs, I wish to suggest, a similar ideological function. By aligning his protagonist with those powerful and independent Amazons who encroach--physically, sexually, politically--upon realms designated male, Defoe establishes the very parameters of those realms; moreover, by depicting Roxana as an example of monstrous, unnatural, and at times dangerous womanhood, he also establishes the need for, and the seeming justice of, male control. Unlike Moll Flanders, Roxana never succeeds in recreating a secure domestic economy, one in which financial and familial interests can harmoniously coexist. Serving instead as "a Memorial to all that shall read my Story" (201), Roxana represents the dissolution of familial, and hence--given the times--patriarchal stability, her narrative a black hole which sucks into itself the possibility for any happy ending.
"Not Bred to Work": Domestic Economy, Economic Passivity
To understand the ways in which Roxana construes an empowered femininity as inimical to an emerging capitalist enterprise entails not only taking account of the financial dealings so exactingly...
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