Roxana

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve's  Love for Love, 1771, Yale Center for British Art

By Daniel Defoe, ed. with an intro. and notes by John Mullian, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 356

Defoe took a while to grow on me.  Immediately, however, I loved the 18th-century punctuation (e.g., the first sentence reads: "I was Born, as my Friends told me, at the City of Poictiers, in the Province, or County of Poictou, in France, from Whence I was brought to England by my Parents, who fled for their Religion about the Year 1683, when the Protestants were Banish'd from France by the Cruelty of their Persecutors.") We have traveled a long way from German's injunction that all nouns be capitalized!  There is so much feeling expressed through italic font, capitalizations, and apostrophes. 

This is one of the England's first novels, and the characters' psychological development seemed a little rough and ready. Smiley claims that sex is the engine in the rise of the novel and here, like in Clarissa, Defoe is focused on the moral and material situation of women.  The novel was originally titled Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress, or a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, afterwards called the Countess de Wintselsheim in Germany Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II.  

The mechanics of the first-person narrative are quite complex.  The story is told as the self-condemning reflections of a woman who made her way in the world as an expensive mistress.  Her tale is edited by a "relator" who vouches for the veracity of the history.  All of Defoe's novels are presented as transcriptions of a character's story and not as the creative inventions of an author.  There is, furthermore, a difference  between the the protagonist whose story we are reading about and the first-person narrator. The story ends with Roxana claiming that her life was crushed.  The reader doesn't know the details of her tailspin.  As Mullian perceptively notes in the introduction, we don't know how the main character became the person telling the story. There is a narrative break, a lack of reconciliation between the past wicked self and the present wiser self.  The protagonist and the narrator remain different people.  

The self-estrangement at the center of the narrative combines with Defoe's treatment of proper names to produce a very dark mood of shifting ambiguity in Roxana.  The narrator's name is Susan.  She becomes Roxana, a generic name in 17th century drama for an "oriental queen," at a masked ball.  Susan was performing before a crowd when they hailed her as"Roxana."  This symbolizes Susan's new identity in aristocratic French circles.  All the other characters in the novel, save Roxana's lady's maid Amy, are addressed as types.  Lovers are called The Prince or The Dutch Merchant, and a friend is called The Quaker.  

Characters are also identified by their social titles with their name blanked out, for example Sir R---.  Defoe is borrowing from a late 17th century  fashion for "secret histories."  These stories centered on lives of the rich and famous that thinly veiled the protagonists' identities through blanks and pseudonyms.  I always thought that these types of identifications in novels marked off a specific cultural type (e.g., Joseph K in The Trial), so its fun to consider that this could indicate a secret of a famous person.  This blog entry is rambling.  I grew to appreciate, in summary, Roxana's intricate techniques of story telling and Defoe's place in the rise of the novel.