Roxana The Fortunate Mistress by Daniel Defoe (review)

422 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 sometimes too readily assumes his readers' assent as well as prior knowledge; a good many paragraphs call out for illustration andlor argument; see for example the interesting paragraph contrasting Catholic anagogy and Protestant typology (pp 25- 6). I found myself following this reasonably cheerfully until the sentence 'Imaginatively speaking, as examples of truth, the prototypes of the Bible were less profuse, and their mythological figures tended to be less personal than those in Catholic anagogy: at which point some discussion of the meaning in this context of 'profuse' and'personal' would have been welcome. Similarly with the statement (p 32) that 'the baroque world was not so much a counterstatement to the nascent physical sciences; itwas actually the accompanying philosophical statement of that scientific truth: Such statements are either self-evident to most of a book's intended readership, or they need more argument than they are given here. A similar problem arises when Raspa cites poetic texts; it is not always perfectly clear that they illustrate his theme in the ways he suggests, as for example on P 40: is it so very clear that all the cited passages represent pleas 'for the use of the senses to write poetry according to the requirements of the meditative psychology'? Is it an accurate reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Why are wee by all creatures waited on?' to say that in it all earthly creatures are subject to man, not because he rules, but because he meditates (see P 46)? I cannot myself see what in the poem would support such an interpretation. We all need to internalize that liber amicus of whom Horace spoke, and to school ourselves to temper zeal with discretion. (ALAN RUDRUM) Daniel Defoe. Roxana The Fortunate Mistress. Edited by David Blewett. Penguin Books 1982. 416. $5.95 Serious students of Defoe at all levels now have available to them a substantial number ofmoderately priced modern editionsofDefoe's major texts. The Penguin English Library is responSible for some of the best of these classroom texts including a Robinson Crusoe, a Moll Flanders, a Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, and a Journal of the Plague Year. David Blewett's edition of Roxana, in the same series, is a welcome newcomer. As Blewett's readable introducton makes clear, Roxana, Defoe's last novel, is one in which the reader's attention is firmly focused on the social and moral implications of the heroine's choice of life - 'the opposite circumstances of a wife and a whore: to borrow Defoe's graphic phIase. Defoe emphasizes the ways in which the vanities of female beauty and worldly ambition can destroy personal relations, normal human affections , and inner peace. Blewett, supplementing the chapter on Roxana in HUMANITIES 423 his recent book, finds structural parallels in the novel which intensify this basic theme of Roxana's moral choice between virtuous poverty and respectable marriage on one side and sinful prosperity and glamorous whoredom on the other. These structural parallels are both spatial and temporal. Blewett even provides his reader with a map of London to illustrate the geographical and spatial parallel to Roxana's moral choices which he finds in the physical distance between the dissolute and aristocratic West End and the respectable prosperity and bourgeois morality of the City. He also asserts a deliberate and conscious decision by Defoe to underscore Roxana's choices in life by contrasting France, with its dissolute aristocratic values, to Holland, with its antithetical bourgeois mercantile values. Rather less tidy, but more complex and more convincing , is Blewett's argument that the novel's double time scheme, which ostensibly sets the novel in the reign of Charles II, thus evoking the atmosphere of the Restoration Court and its masquerades, is intended to draw attention to Defoe's view of the moral decline of the age of George I, compared with the moral probity of the courts of King William, one of Defoe's heroes, and that of Queen Anne. As Blewett puts it: 'Shortly after the arrival of George I in England, as it seemed to Defoe, many of the morally deplorable practices of Charles II'S time...