Roxana - Daniel Defoe

Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Defoe, 1724)

Defoe's final novel might be his best, yet it is his most frustrating. Often lumped together with Moll Flanders, I found Roxana to be an entirely different book. Nowhere else does Defoe's uneasy tension between worldly success and moral justice take such a striking center stage, and nowhere else does his subtle realist artistry find a better showcase.

Roxana starts life as a beloved daughter of a wealthy family -- the polar opposite of Moll Flanders, the abandoned child of a convicted felon.  As a young, beautiful girl, Roxana makes her fatal mistake by marrying, in her words, "a fool".  Her handsome yet vapid husband squanders all their wealth and then abandons her and their five children. Thrust suddenly into desperate circumstances, Roxana tricks her husband's relatives into taking the children and then prepares to eek out an existence through whatever work she can get, which isn't much. The horror of poverty leads her into the life of a kept woman, mistress to rich merchants, noblemen, even royalty at one point, which she turns into vast personal wealth. Finally "settling down" in her fifties and marrying for the trifecta of love, money, and social status, her happiness is jeopardized by her efforts to atone for her past.

Defoe doesn't seem to know what to do with Roxana.  He obviously admires her practicality, worldly wisdom, ambition, and economic savvy, because he turns everything she does into gold. Unlike Moll, whose luck fluctuates at the drop of a hat, Roxana really doesn't suffer many setbacks after her initial abandonment. She is, indeed, "The Fortunate Mistress". Though she admonishes throughout that her case is extraordinary, it's tough not to see the narrative as an approval of her choices, rather than a cautionary tale.

Yet Defoe's realism includes several subtle (and some shocking) incidents that reveal Roxana's own internal discord.  She rejects honorable proposals and even corrupts her maid's chastity to reinforce her own picture of herself as a lost woman. Even in her happiest times, she upbraids herself, and when she is in a position to help her grown children, she does it clandestinely, ashamed to let her children know how she got her money. This shame results in some of the tensest scenes in literature, and ultimately in a horrible tragedy that is referenced but never reached:  the book just ends abruptly, almost as if Roxana/Defoe could not continue the narration.

That bizarre ending is what makes the book frustrating.  I can't help but wish Defoe had brought the book to a real conclusion, but it seems he just couldn't figure out how to do it. Yet he provides enough information for us to piece things together. If this had been written in the early 1900s, I can't help but think it would have fit right in with the literary experiments of the Moderns like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.  Not something you would expect from one of the earliest examples of the novel.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 vapid husbands