"I wou'd be a Man-Woman ": Roxana 's Amazonian Threat to the Ideology of Marriage

Emerging in recent decades from under the shadow of its more popular siblings, Daniel Defoe's final novel, Roxana (1724), has enjoyed a noticeable rise in critical fortune, despite the tragic misfortune of its eponymous heroine. Finding in the story of a woman's meteoric ascent from destitution to prosperity both the psychological depth and narrative complexity missing from Defoe's earlier masterpieces, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders(1722), scholars have brought to bear on the novel a wide range of theoretical paradigms and historical contexts, deeply enriching our sense of Defoe's artistry by illuminating his multifaceted understanding of, and engagement with, the economic, social, political, and religious concerns of the early eighteenth century. Yet, in many studies of the novel, a heightened appreciation of the novel's complexity has often rendered an accompanying sense of uneasiness or confusion about its meaning, particularly with regard to the unhappy, and extremely abrupt, ending—a conclusion readers have interpreted in diverse and often mutually exclusive ways. Yet, whether viewing the novel's denouement as, among other possibilities, incomplete, retributive, or simply a return to an earlier misogynist tradition,¹ critics agree that Roxana's downfall has everything to do with her engagement in relations of commerce, broadly defined as accumulation, investment, and the social relations that surround these economic transactions.²

To unravel those relations in their myriad of social and economic intricacies is to uncover at the novel's core Defoe's profound ambivalence towards his heroine, an ambivalence which derives, at least in part, from the tensions between, on the one hand, his sense of the need for women's subordinate and devalued economic role in the emerging middle-class enterprise and, on the other hand, his reluctant, perhaps even repressed awareness of the severe constraints and injustices of that role. It is not business relations per se that destroy Roxana—Defoe's earlier, and successful female protagonist, Moll Flanders, engages in a wide range of financial activity, both criminal and legitimate, and Defoe's Complete English Tradesman, published two years after his final novel, expressly advocates the involvement of women in their husbands' businesses.³ What distinguishes Roxana from these other women is not, then, economic activity as such, but the ability to detach such activity from a domestic or marital context. Moll, by contrast, can combine economic prosperity with moral tranquility because her material stability functions in the context of the family unit comprised of husband and son.⁴ Roxana, however, purchases and sustains her affluence at the cost of a categorical denial of wife- and motherhood. Unlike Michael Boardman, who sees Roxana's sin as "clearly a feminine transgression" stemming exclusively from sexual passion (52), I contend that her greatest (yet also related) transgression is her desire for an economic existence independent of men, whether they be fools, such as her brewer husband, or exemplars like the Dutch merchant. By attacking marriage as a form of servitude and failing to marry in order to make an "honest woman" of herself, Roxana both challenges and ominously threatens a developing order based on women's supposedly inherent difference from men, a difference embodied "naturally" in both their sexual vulnerability and financial dependence. ⁵

By shunning the male control of her money mandated within marriage, Roxana calls into question not only the broad contours of patriarchal control over women embodied in what Carole Pateman has termed the "sexual contract,"⁶ but also the more specific model of middle-class marriage, in which men's position as exclusive breadwinner increasingly limited women's productive economic role. Roxana, like its feisty and eponymous protagonist, is vexed by the failure of a system, namely marriage, which is ostensibly designed to safeguard, rather than destroy, the interests of women and children. Yet, the investment of both Defoe and the emerging novel genre in a gender division of labor that militated women's placement into a domestic sphere increasingly separated from the workplace means that such insolvency of the system itself cannot be acknowledged. Instead, the failure must be extirpated through...