I came late to Daniel Defoe. I did not read A Journal of the Plague Year during our Plague.
But this week I raced through Roxana, Defoe’s last novel, published in 1724, the rowdy, rollicking autobiography of Roxana, a-deserted-wife-turned-courtesan who delights in luxury but repents her sins. In fact, she is looking back in middle age at her life, saddened by her pride, vanity, and avarice. If she and her five children, whom she had left with unwilling relatives, had not been starving, she wouldn’t have become “a whore.”
As I read this, I couldn’t help but think of Zola’s Nana, published in 1880, a novel about a courtesan, the ninth in Zola’s series, Les Rougon-Macquart. Nana, the daughter of alcoholics (her parents are the main characters in Zola’s L’Assommoir), worked as an apprentice flower-girl and loitered in the streets with unsuitable friends while her parents drank themselves to death. Finally, in Nana, she gets work at the Theatre des Varieties playing the role of Venus. Male hangers-on love her: she bcomes a courtesan and earnes dazzling riches. But it doesn’t end well, of course.
Defoe’s Roxana, on the other hand, is a feminist who has analyzed the independent role of being “a whore.” Her reason for not remarrying is her wish for financial freedom. Over the years, Roxana, who has a good head for business, has become rich. When a Dutch merchant proposes, she explains that marriage is abhorrent to her. She knows the marriage laws in the 18th-century, which require women to hand over their money to their husbands. (Her father gave her dowry to her husband, who spent it all and deserted his family.)
Defoe’s journalism made him familiar with the law. He may also have been a feminist. Certainly Roxana was, whether he intended it or not.
…and I told him, I knew no State of Matrimony, but what was, at best, a State of Inferiority, if not of Bondage; that I had no Notion of it; that I liv’d a Life of absolute Liberty now; was free as I was born, and having a plentiful Fortune, I did not understand what Coherence the words Honour and Obey had with the Liberty of a Free Woman; that I knew no Reason the Men had to engross the whole Liberty of the Race…
Roxana mourns her past, hates her sins. And, just when she’s turned her life around, having changed her name and lodged with a Quaker woman, she is stalked by one of her daughters, Susan, who makes Roxana’s life a living hell. Susan’s obsession is like something out of a Stephen King novel. After Roxana’s maid, Amy, meets with Susan about financial matters, Susan intuits that Roxana is her mother. She tracks Roxana even when she goes on a vacation, and she harasses Amy and Roxana’s Quaker landlady, who repeatedly tell her to go away. And Roxana grieves: Susan has the power to make public Roxana’s identity and destroy her now quiet life.
The strange ending has the dream-like, or nightmarish, mood of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. Not that Lucy Snowe, Charlotte’s heroine, is the least bit like Roxana. but both women will mourn losses, and both have struggled with depression and/or nervous breakdowns at various times. Though Roxana is at last happily married, and has made contact with another of her daughters, she is very depressed by the past. “Here, after some Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circumstances, I fell into a Course of Calamities…”
David Blewett, the author of the introduction to the Penguin, says that Roxana is obsessive, paranoid, and descending into madness. That’s not how I read it, but then the 18th century is not quite my thing.
This novel’s new to me! Sounds mildly interesting, although I doubt I’ll ever get around to reading it (the 18th century isn’t quite my thing either, although I do intend to give Tristram Shandy a try)