A Sermon by the "Queen of Whores"

Daniel Defoe's Roxana seems to resist interpretation, though it has been scrutinized for its likeness to a trade manual, a spiritual autobiography, and a "'woman's novel.'" ¹ Leopold Damrosch, for instance, remarks with some exasperation on his attempt to define Roxana's "inner logic": "We cannot know exactly what Defoe thought he was doing in this enigmatic novel, but we do know that it was his last. As one critic puts it, 'Defoe stopped when he reached the end.'" ² One prominent debate concerns the novel's religious allusions, as when Roxana reflects: "So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in Wickedness, until we grow invulnerable by Conscience." ³ At issue is the influence that Defoe's Puritanism exerted on the text. Polarized opinions on this subject emerge in two seminal studies of Defoe. In the monograph Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (1962), Maximillian Novak presents Defoe as guided by the religious precepts of Puritanism; Novak, thus, is not loath to pronounce Roxana "guilty of two economic sins: avarice and luxury." ⁴ Contrary to Novak, Ian Watt claims in The Rise of the Novel (1957) that Defoe substitutes the literary schema of "formal realism" for Puritanism's providential order, making his writings "ethically neutral." ⁵ Roxana's unsatisfactory plot "dénouement," Watt says, shows that Defoe "prefers and certainly achieves the inconsequential and the incomplete." ⁶ Recent studies tend to view Roxana as informed by Defoe's Puritanism, particularly in its sober tone, even while they suggest that the novel is a departure from strict religious discourse toward aesthetic expression. As Malinda Snow comments in "Arguments to the Self in Defoe's Roxana" (1994), "Defoe's narrative method encourages us to seek a 'right way' to talk . . . about our choices rather than seeking a 'right choice.'" ⁷ In The English Novel in History (1999), John Richetti concludes that, despite debate, Roxana's meaning remains ambiguous: "Some critics consider her agonized reflections as Defoe's warning about the moral decadence of early Georgian England, but others just as plausibly discount the chorus of guilty reflections as conventional moralizing." ⁸

Diverging from current thinking on Roxana, this study affirms Novak's proposition that Defoe's Puritanism provides a template for a coherent analysis of the text. I contend that the novel's "inner logic" (to borrow Damrosch's phrase) is based on the sermon, specifically the Puritan jeremiad sermon. I place Roxana within the context of Defoe's other late works to subdue the notion that Roxana represents a dead end for Defoe, particularly concerning the moral content of his writing. I show, instead, that Roxana incorporates Calvinistic tropes decrying against luxury and promoting charity, rhetoric that also appears, for example, in Defoe's The Complete English Tradesman. Lastly, I argue that, as "the Queen of Whores," Roxana becomes an allegorical representation of England, which, according to the novel, is a nation prostituted by its nobles and king, whose behaviors are mirrored in the actions of commoners. As Novak observes, Roxana's plot "revolves about the decline of Roxana's moral character, a decline that is contrasted with her worldly success. But although the focus of the novel is mainly on Roxana's hardening conscience, the course of her career implies the moral decline of the entire society." ⁹

As a narrator, Roxana frequently digresses from her story to moralize about her lack of integrity. Her most poignant remark no doubt is the novel's closing line: "my Repentance seem'd to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime" (p. 330). From early on, however, she depicts herself as a reprobate. She says of taking her landlord's supposed charity in exchange for sex: "I did what my own Conscience convinc'd me at the very Time I did it, was horrible unlawful, scandalous, and abominable" (p. 39). Shortly afterwards, she reiterates...