Roxana

“I retain’d nothing of France, but the language: My Father and Mother being people of better Fashion, than ordinarily the people call’d Refugees.”

Roxana

————-

Daniel Defoe

———————

Lifespan: b. 1660 (England), d. 1731

First Published: 1724

First Published by: T. Warner (London)

Original Title: The Fortunate Mistress

———————————————————-

“While Roxana, Defoe’s last and most complex novel, in less familiar among general readers than Robinson Crusoe, it has been well known to those interested in the development of the novel, because of its frank portrayal of its heroine’s fate – early destitution and the exchanging of her body for food and shelter, her many children and their abandonment, her lovers her failed reformations, and her enormous wealth.

Perhaps more important, however, than this list of sexual, social, and financial adventures is the voice that Defoe lends Roxana. In a notorious scene, Roxana puts her maidservant Amy into bed with her landlord-lover, saying to herself, and to us in effect, “I’m not a wife, but a whore, and I want my maid to be a whore to, and yet I am a wife and Amy is not a whore but a victim, and yet we’ll do it all again”.

Such a voice, both self-estranging and self-engaging, becomes the string on which the events of the novel are strung, including relations with a French Prince, with the King of England, with a leading financial adviser, with an honest Dutch merchant. Scandalously, Roxana gets her children out of the way almost as soon as she has them, but towards the end, her daughter Susan, who has found employment as a servant girl in Roxana’s own house, comes back to haunt her mother with a child’s cry for recognition. Significantly Roxana’s name is also Susan, and in this climax of self-confrontation the novel descents inconclusively towards a final abandonment.”

—————————————

#1001beforeyoudiecollections #1001beforeyoudiecollection #1transcribedtext #1001andmore #literature #a1culturel