4
The Antinovel Discourse and Rewriting Reading in Roxana
"They became what they beheld."
—Blake, Jerusalem
"My consumers, are they not also my producers?"
—Joyce, Finnegans Wake
By the 1720s the success of novels on the British print market, and the peculiar powers attributed to absorptive novel reading, made reaching, knowing, and influencing the reader a central preoccupation of printmedia workers and cultural critics. But what is a reader? Within their mobile and transient co-articulation, reader and text dissolve into the act of reading, leaving no trace of what they have been to and for each other. Most reading simply disappears. Only through the belated secondary elaboration of writing—commentary, criticism, letters to the editor, or autobiography, for example—does a reader translate reading into graspable form. But even when this translation is ventured, there is no one to vouch for its success. The discrepancy between reading and writing persists, and in fact may be irreducible. Little wonder that there is a fundamental difficulty in knowing the reader and shaping his or her reading practices. Whether for the opportunistic projector on the eighteenth-century print market or for the historian of reading practices, a purchase upon novel reading comes only indirectly, through a study of the remnants of writings left in the wake of reading. By first mapping the cultural struggle around novel reading that opened in the 1710s and 1720s—from the antinovel positions of Shaftesbury and Pope to the pronovel positions of Manley and Haywood—I will then be in a position to interpret the tactics Defoe used to rewrite novel reading in response to the success of the novels of amorous intrigue. In Roxana , Defoe assembles a series of novels in which the machinations of the scheming ego reach such extremes that they short-circuit the pleasures of absorptive novel reading.
Over the course of the long eighteenth century, between the Restoration and the early nineteenth century, novel reading came to rival play-going as
a principal form of entertainment. In order to pursue their careers as entertainers, Haywood and Fielding follow Behn in migrating from the theater to novel writing. Because the unease with the novel reader extends an earlier unease with the spectator of drama, it is instructive to compare them. In both, it is supposed that pleasure puts moral conscience to sleep. Both antitheatrical discourse and antinovel discourse warned that beguiling but morally irresponsible representations could seduce the spectator or reader into an unconscious emulation—into, in Blake's succinct formulation, "becoming what they beheld." But the novel's dependence upon print media gave a specific new turn to the antirepresentational discourse directed against it. If plays could cause riots, novels could act at a distance. If plays put too much control in the hands of the playwrights, actors, and directors of the theater, novels put too much power in the hands of the reader, and of those who wrote and sold what they read. If plays offer an unseemly spectacle of vice, novels invite readers to produce this spectacle within their own head. While the play's concentration of spectacle increased its danger, it opened it to state control. The very diffuseness of novelistic spectacle made its effects uncertain, and its control nearly impossible.[1]
Novels do not achieve their distinctness as a species of entertainment because of their plots or their subject matter. Like the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often used plots rife with intrigue and sex. What sets novels apart from plays is their particularly opportunistic use of the print medium. While publication of dramatic texts could enhance the popularity and influence of a live play, novels inhabit print as their primary medium (Benjamin, Illuminations , 87). So in order to deepen our understanding of how novel reading became an early instance of media culture, and in order to map the coordinates of the reformation of novelistic narrative attempted by Defoe, it is necessary to inscribe the struggle to shape novel reading within a more general interpretation of print media.
[1] Another study would be required to determine the many interconnections between the antinovel discourse of the early modern period and the antitheatricalism that precedes it, and that continues to develop throughout the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, the worry about emulation enunciated by Shaftesbury concerning the theater is also a commonplace of the antinovel discourse; Shaftesbury described "the English stage . . . from whence in all probability our youth will continue to draw their notion of manners and their taste of life . . ." (II: 314). On the difference between concentrated and diffuse spectacle, within a very different context, see Debord, The Society of the Spectacle .
Novels as Print Media, Only More So
Since ancient times, writing has had a decisive role in enabling trade, constituting civil and religious authority, and accumulating knowledge (Inglis, Media Theory , 6–10; Martin, History and Power of Writing ). Writing may be the sine qua non of complex social organization, but from Luther's translation of the Vulgate to the penning of the Declaration of Independence, it has also served as a means of contesting instituted authority. The French historian of reading, Roger Chartier, suggests that there is an "internal contradiction" at work between, on the one hand, the controlling efforts of author, bookseller-publisher, commentator, and censor, and on the other, the practice of reading, which, he claims, "by definition is rebellious and vagabond":
The book always aims at installing an order, whether it is the order in which it is deciphered, the order in which it is to be understood, or the order intended by the authority who commanded or permitted the work. This multi-faceted order is not all-powerful, however, when it comes to annulling the reader's liberty. Even when it is hemmed in by differences in competence and by conventions, liberty knows how to distort and reformulate the significations that were supposed to defeat it. The dialectic between imposition and appropriation, between constraints transgressed and freedoms bridled, is not the same in all places or all times or for all people.
[Chartier, Order of Books , viii]
While this passage risks situating reading within too stark and too romantic a polarization of constraint and liberty, it reflects the larger stakes of the market's emancipation of reading, and the resulting struggle around the licensing of novel reading in eighteenth-century Britain.
Too often, literary histories of the novel make a foray into the history of reading so as to provide a context and backdrop for the main event—the rise of the novel as a literary type. Reading practices are seen as one of many global changes sweeping across late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century culture, and converging to produce "the" novel. These changes include: new ideologies characterized as progressive, empiricist, secular, and modernist; more and cheaper print commodities facilitated by the end of licensing and the eclipse of patronage; and changes in the location and nature of reading as it becomes increasingly prevalent and acquires its distinct modern character as silent and private (Watt, Rise of the Novel , chapter 2; Hunter, Before Novels , chapter 3; Chartier, Order of Books , 21–22). While few would dispute the importance of these changes, my study sug-
gests that a struggle around reading practices is not a subsidiary circumstance but, instead, is the central event in the novel's eighteenth-century history. Chartier's three-part program for "a history of reading" allows one to grasp the several components of novel reading in their complex and often conflictual imbrication. He calls for three areas of study which "academic tradition usually keeps separate: first the analysis of texts, be they canonical or ordinary, to discern their structures, their themes, and their aims; second, the history of books and, beyond that, the history of all objects and forms that bear texts; third, the study of practices that seize on these objects and these forms in a variety of ways and produce differentiated uses and meanings" (2–3). If we consider novel reading under these three rubrics, we can see how the cultural struggle around licensing novel reading carries its effects into the form and content of novelistic texts, the material shape of novels as books to be read, and the reading practices which proliferate around novels.
The spread of print produces general shifts in the content of books, enabling books to become the favored form for novels. Kaufer and Carley offer a synthesis of the effects of print on a previously scribal culture in which, with writing both "scarce" and expensive, the watchword of culture was "make sure [writing] does not become dated," "mundane," or compromised by ideas of tenuous authority (Kaufer and Carley, Communication at a Distance , 29). This helps explain why, within scribal culture, writing became the vassal of the timeless, the lofty, and the generally accepted. According to Kaufer and Carley, the spread of print subverted these assumptions about textual content, and developed previously concealed possibilities. Now texts could render content that had three new traits: timeliness, practicality, and originality. By the seventeenth century, this stress on the quotidian is made explicit by the very names of many of the new print genres: "war journals, newsbooks, dailies, newspapers, periodicals, and novels" (ibid., 32). In addition, a whole category of writings derived their value not from being about an extra-mundane spiritual world, but by being practical guides to living; among these were the new periodicals (such as the Spectator ), conduct books (such as A Lady's Calling ), cook books, books designed to aid the occupations (such as Defoe's Complete English Tradesman ), and so on. Finally, rather than accumulate authoritative, already assimilated cultural knowledge like that found in almanacs or Bibles, classical texts or legal commentaries, the new books could devote themselves to writing—whether scientific or fictional—that claimed to be original or new. Chartier's account of the development, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the cheap chapbook sold by
pedlars offers an inventory of these new uses of print and the shift in reading tastes they imply. In his wide-ranging study of the cultural contexts of English fiction, Hunter confirms that the young, mobile, ambitious urban reader most ready for the novel was developing a strong inclination for texts that were timely, practical, and new (Hunter, Before Novels , 75–81).
This mutually imbricated threefold shift in the content of printed texts is reflected in the novelistic writing of Behn, Manley, and Haywood. The French heroic romances (of D'Urfé, La Calprenède, and de Scudéry) that were in vogue before their eclipse by the seventeenth-century novella emulated the complex structure of classical epic, promoted a sublime idealization of romantic love, and purveyed a courtly version of assimilated social wisdom. By contrast, Love Letters , the New Atalantis , and Love in Excess were timely (the first two with a vengeance), claimed to offer a cynically practical view of sex and love in the beau monde , and promised an entertainment that pleased through its novelty. The oppositions Kaufer and Carley use to schematize those changes are relational, and the shift from one to the other should not be viewed as secure or unidirectional. Thus, Defoe's Roxana will later claim to trump the novelistic secret histories of Behn and Haywood by being still more timely, practical, and original than theirs. When claims to timeliness and novelty put the novel in danger of being trivial, Richardson and Fielding will have recourse to Christian tragedy and classical epic form in order to invest Clarissa and Tom Jones with the timelessness, exalted status, and assimilated knowledge associated with high art (see conclusion).
Modern media theory has put special emphasis on the way in which changes in the precise form of media modify the cultural practices improvised in their wake. In the twentieth century, for example, after its development in the 1920s, radio shifted from being a large furniture console for the parlor (in the thirties) to being lodged in the dashboard of the automobile (by the forties); from there it shifted to being portable (in the fifties), and to being the boombox and Walkman of the seventies and eighties. Each new mutation of the radio set provided a matrix of possibility for new cultural uses of radio, and these new uses supported the expansion of radio programming. Thus the enhanced portability of the radio seems to have been the condition of the possibility of radio's widely recognized role in sponsoring a popular music targeted at teenage consumers, and for the birth of what we have come to call "youth culture."
Scholars of the history of reading have been at pains to remind literary critics that when it comes to the book, one can discern the same crucial interdependence of form, content, and cultural practice sketched above with
radio. Texts—the immaterial idealities that are the objects of both scholarly editions and critical analysis—only reach the hands and minds of readers through the physical medium of the book (Chartier, Order of Books , 10). The eighteenth-century spread of novels was contingent upon their format. The recent study by Edward Jacobs of a 1757 circulating-library catalogue of the bookseller William Bathoe—claimed to be "the first of its kind in London"—suggests the way in which three distinct format levels—descending from folio to quarto to octavo and duodecimo—were used as broad organizational categories to divide books according to the cultural prestige they embodied, the durability of the knowledge they claimed, and the expense they entailed.[2] By the late seventeenth century, novels settled into the duodecimo or octavo format, a niche between the grander bound-book formats and the modest chapbook. These two formats, which novels held for most of the eighteenth century, had several advantages: they produced small, portable volumes that were much less expensive than the quarto or folio volumes, yet flexible in accommodating novels of vastly different length. Thus, for example, leaving aside front matter, Haywood's Fantomina (1725) was 35 pages in length in duodecimo, while the seven volumes of the first edition of Clarissa , which varied in length from 309 to 405 pages per volume, totaling 2,474 pages (Sale, Samuel Richardson , 45–48), was also in duodecimo. The relative cheapness of small formats opened books to broader readership, while their small size made them easy to carry in one's pocket into private-reading spaces, such as bed, the garden, or on a journey.[3]
[2] Jacobs' analysis was developed in a paper presented at the 1994 ASECS annual meeting entitled, "Buying into Classes: the Construction of Genre and Tradition by Circulating Libraries, Catalogues, and the Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England."
[3] The short novels published by Haywood in the 1720s could be as cheap as one shilling (1s. ), while in the same decade, five of the six novels published by Penelope Aubin in duodecimo cost one shilling and sixpence (1s. 6d. ) each. When Richardson published Pamela and Clarissa in the 1740s, his standard price in the duodecimo format was 3s. per volume. Accepting Roy Porter's estimate that three loaves of bread would cost 1s. and a dinner 1s. 6d. , and given that one of Richardson's volumes in duodecimo would cost slightly more than a pair of women's shoes or a pig (Porter, English Society , xxv; C. Turner, Living by the Pen , 145), then one must conclude with Watt that eighteenth-century novels remained costly by modern standards (Watt, Rise of the Novel , 42). But even before the circulating library brought novel reading within the reach of most people with some discretionary income by the middle of the century, if a novel was popular, less costly means of publishing were available: it could be published in its entirety or as an excerpt in magazines, or it could be published in parts, as weekly or monthly "numbers," wrapped in blue covers and priced at between a few pence and 1s. each (C. Turner, Living by the Pen , 146). In addition, then as today, books were often available as "remaindered" items or through second hand sale (ibid.). The duodecimo and octavo formats varied in size from about 4 × 7 inches to about 51/2 × 8 inches. Authors and booksellers moved novels freely between the two formats. Thus Haywood published in both, doing a more expensive collection of her novels and poetry in octavo format in 1742. While most of his novels were published in duodecimo format, Richardson published more lavish editions in octavo of both Pamela (the sixth edition, with engravings) and Clarissa (the fourth edition).
Just as booksellers published personal devotional works in the small-book format, so they also facilitated the privatizing of novel reading by offering novels in the octavo/duodecimo format.
From the beginning, the popularity of novels gave them special currency on the print market. By limiting copyright to two renewable fourteen-year terms, the Queen Anne Law of 1710 circumscribed the perpetual copyright traditionally claimed by the London booksellers and undercut the legal grounds of the royal monopoly traditionally enjoyed by the Stationers' Company. Although booksellers battled throughout the century to regain the perpetual copyright once protected by royal authority, and only lost the decisive legal battle with Donaldson v. Becket in 1774, the new legal order meant that as old copyrights lapsed, booksellers had economic incentives for finding copyrights to shore up their lists with new works. It was this same thirst for the new that had once pushed printing from Latin to the vernacular (Inglis, Media Theory , 15). Novels had several advantages in meeting the press's thirst for new material. First, as Haywood's publication of thirty-six novels in the 1720s demonstrates, the use of variations on proven formulas could provide a steady stream of new print commodities (C. Turner, Living by the Pen , 177–182; see also above, chapter 3)- Second, the novel's ability to assemble a diverse group of readers—women and men, the learned and the barely literate, the young and the old—enabled the successful novel to build a large general audience. Finally, the sheer speed with which readers could read novels and with which authors could write them enabled novels to best serious writing as a means of meeting the accelerating demand for print. All three factors allowed novels to flourish on a print market in which "more is better" because quantity provides economies of scale that augment the bottom line. The importance and profitability of novel publishing is suggested by the fact that most booksellers, from the most prestigious ones (Dodsley, Millar, and Cadell) to the most disreputable (Curll), published novels (ibid., 89–90). In both Britain and America, over the course of the century, novels constituted an increasingly large proportion of printed matter.
Throughout the early modern period, commentators worried that changes in printing and reading practices threatened the serious writer who
cleaved to the higher callings of print culture. Thus, in "A Modest Plea for the Property of Copyright" (1774), Catherine Macaulay worried that the Donaldson decision would encourage the print market's tendency to produce "trifling wretched compositions as please the vulgar; compositions which disgrace the press, yet are best calculated for general sale" (ibid., 41). The market's exploitation of timely, novel, and practical subject matter, and its development of the potential offered by the small-book format, seemed to Leibniz, as early as 1680, to presage a "barbarous" disorder in culture. Leibniz saw "that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing" as putting in question values at the center of humanistic culture:
the hope of glory animating many people at work in studies will suddenly cease; it will be perhaps as disgraceful to be an author as it was formerly honorable. At best, one may amuse himself with little books of the hour which will run their course in a few years and will serve to divert a reader from boredom for a few moments, but which will have been written without any design to promote our knowledge or to deserve the appreciation of posterity. I shall be told that since so many people write it is impossible for all their words to be preserved. I admit that, and I do not entirely disapprove those little books in fashion which are like the flowers of a springtime or like the fruits of an autumn, scarcely surviving a year. If they are well made, they have the effect of a useful conversation, not simply pleasing and keeping the idle out of mischief but helping to shape the mind and language. Often the aim is to induce something good in men of our time, which is also the end I seek by publishing this little work. . .
[McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy , 302–303]
Hovering between tolerance and condemnation, acceptance and dread, this passage gives expression to Leibnitz's two incompatible thoughts about the "mass" of these "little books of fashion" which have suddenly flooded his culture: he worries that by turning readers and writers from serious study, they menace an order of print organized to privilege the arduous ideals of lasting knowledge and "honorable" authorship; and yet, he finds that these books have the transient charm of flowers, and that they might be turned, like conversation, to improving use. Anticipating the ambivalence felt by many later cultural critics toward seductive new market-based entertainment, this passage moves from high-minded condemnation ("horrible mass") to an equivocal reconsideration ("At best one may amuse . . .") or resigned acceptance ("I do not entirely disapprove"), and then to a final complicity. Leibniz himself is writing the preface to his own "small book." It is precisely because of their diminutive size, their charming power to "amuse," and their insidious way of changing reading practices one book at
a time that these little books have an irresistible power to unsettle an old print media order of knowledge. By sanctioning a host of new pleasures, they erode the earlier discipline of books.
Once novels establish themselves on the market, many readers view novel reading with the same double feeling Leibnitz evinces for little books. When cultural critics attack the dangerous effects of novel reading, it could shock the devotees of fiction. Thus, in Shaftesbury's Moralists: a Philosophical Rapsody (1709), Philocles is bewildered that his interlocutor, Palemon, "damned even our favorite novels: those dear, sweet, natural pieces, writ most of them by the fair sex themselves" (Characteristics , II: 11). Because they appear "dear," "sweet," and feminine, these novels are especially liable to insinuate themselves as personal favorites of the private reader. Thus, when the Spectator warns women against the dangers to their chastity posed by the month of May, it adjures its "fair readers to be in particular manner careful how they meddle with romances, chocolate, novels, and like inflamers, which I look upon as very dangerous to be made use of during this great carnival of nature." This way of warning against novels makes them appear as seductive as May's "gay prospects of fields and meadows [which] naturally unbend the mind, and soften it to pleasure" (no. 365, April 29, 1712). In the first decades of the century, few justified novels as transmitters of knowledge, but many were finding their pleasures as irresistible as chocolate.
Critics of the new reading practices develop a characteristically modern alarm at changes which appear both global and inevitable. In his Advice to an Author (1710), Shaftesbury's use of the first-person plural implies that he cannot himself stand outside the general effects of the commercialization of print media that he laments: "We go to plays or to other shows, and frequent the theater as the [fair] booth. We read epics and dramatics as we do satires and lampoons; for we must of necessity know what wit as well as what scandal is stirring. Read we must; let writers be ever so indifferent" [italics mine]. As a high cultural critic, Shaftesbury is dismayed at the threefold lack—of a discerning public, of authors who aspire to greatness, and of a critical "standard" all might accept by "mutual consent." Shaftesbury attributes this decline in culture to the author's position as supplier of the print market's assembly line of entertainments. The reader's lax compulsion to consume—"read we must"—may, Shaftesbury speculates, "be some occasion of the laziness and negligence of our authors, who observing this need which our curiosity brings on us, and making an exact calculation in the way of trade, to know justly the quality and quantity of the public demand, feed us thus from hand to mouth; resolving not to over-stock the
market, or be at pains of more correctness or wit than is absolutely necessary to carry on the traffic" (Characteristics , I: 173). By offering criticism and advice to authors, Shaftesbury summons them to a new kind of vigilance about the effects of written entertainments, and anticipates the mid-century efforts by a broad spectrum of novelists and critics to institutionalize authorship as a system for controlling the effects of reading (see chapters 5 and 6, and Conclusion). To counteract the worry about market-based novels, a broad spectrum of readers justifies novels as a necessary self-indulgence. As a young woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu yearns to get her hands on the second part of the New Atalantis in spite of its questionable value (Manley, New Atalantis , v); as a mother, she asks her daughter to send a list of novels, for though most are "trash" or "lumber," "they will serve to pass away the idle time" (Watt, Rise of the Novel , 44). Whether viewed as "trash" or as "dear sweet natural pieces," novels had come to appear to many as an inevitable enjoyment. In the preface to The Noble Slaves (1722), Penelope Aubin, though a lay preacher, rationalizes the publication of her novels as a way to allow the reader "to pass away that time that must hang heavy on our hands: and books of devotion being tedious, and out of fashion, novels and stories will be welcome" (C. Turner, Living by the Pen , 50). Once the prohibition of novel reading has lost its efficacy, the reform of novel reading becomes an urgent cultural strategy.
In the early eighteenth century, novels are associated with a shift in the technique and location of reading. Because of their explicitly erotic character, the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood seem to require silent, private, individualized reading. Hunter has suggested that it was Protestant respect for the individual, combined with developments in eighteenth-century domestic architecture, that supported a "culture of the closet" as a space apart for "secret contemplation and private reading" (Hunter, Before Novels , 157). But once institutionalized, this shift in the location of reading could facilitate novel reading as well as prayer. Solitary reading also enabled what one might call compulsive reading—like that undertaken by Manley's Charlot alone in the library (see chapter 3), and like the mesmerizing effects of reading Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison described in testimonials sent by Lady Bradshaigh and Colley Cibber to Richardson (Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson , 182). Rousseau dates his emergence into continuous self-consciousness from the time of his atavistic late-night novel reading with his father (Rousseau, Confessions , 7–8). In the eighteenth century, readers began reporting, "I couldn't stop reading until I turned the last page." The idea of other people reading novels in a place of sanctioned solitude produced worries about, in Hunter's words, "idleness
or, worse, stimulation of the mind and imagination toward improper longings" (Hunter, Before Novels , 158). In other words, solitary readers might do what Rousseau claims he resisted doing during his apprenticeship—namely, withdraw from a circulating library any of those "dangerous books that a beautiful woman of the world finds awkward, because one can only, she says, read them with one hand" (Rousseau, Confessions , 40).[4]
It is but one short step from the need to read to the right to read. Behind the diverse positions on reading epitomized here in the apprehensions of Leibniz and Shaftesbury, the admonitions of the Spectator , the apologies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Aubin, and the testimonials of addicted novel readers, there lies an assumption crucial to the early-modern emancipation of reading: that every mature literate adult has the right to choose his or her own reading. The effort of Charles II to implement licensing practices on the French model after the Restoration—by appointing Roger L'Etrange as royal licenser and by cutting the number of booksellers from between thirty-nine and fifty during the Commonwealth to twenty (Martin, History and Power of Writing , 276)—was the last British effort to control reading from above. With the political transformations of 1688 and the lapse of the licensing act in 1695, there was a decisive victory for "unlicensed printing" (Milton, Areopagitica , 486) and for an arduously Protestant testing of the individual reader through an unfiltered and robust exposure to the diversity of books. Every author, printer, and bookseller who set out to incite and gratify the new need to read would, at the same time, be advancing this right to read.
It is tempting to see absorbed, addictive novel reading as simply resulting from a new market-sustained system of print entertainment. Then the subject matter of love and sex plotted into intrigue provides the novel's alluring content; the medium-priced book, in duodecimo or octavo format, and transmitted by the postal system and the turnpike, provides the physical means by which the novel reaches an enlarged group of readers; and silent, solitary reading practices provide the preferred mode for consuming the novel. Taken together, these changes compose the novel as a distinct form of enthralling entertainment and promote the "right to read." But cultural critics are right to be wary of a techno-determinist print-media
[4] I have been aided by Elizabeth MacArthur in my translation of the Pléaide edition. Chartier warns that the distinctly modern shift toward silent solitary reading was far from complete or unidirectional (Chartier, Order of Books , 20). In the nineteenth century, making novels collectively readable was part of a strategy undertaken by authors such as Dickens to make novels socially accountable.
explanation of historical changes in reading practices (Hunter, Before Novels , 156 n.30; M. Warner, Letters of the Republic , 4–19; Czitrom, Media and the American Mind ). The size or price of a book does not predetermine what books will get written and published, or how readers will read those books. The previous two chapters describe the inventive tactics devised by Behn and Manley to intervene in their political culture, as well as the compositional changes that enabled Haywood's new formulation of the novels of amorous intrigue. In other words, the market for printed books does not have the character of a self-regulating totality such that, in Laclau's words, "the transformation of the system, as in any self-regulating totality, can only take place as a result of the development of the internal logic of the system itself" (Laclau, New Reflections , 52). The print market is not the insidious and pervasive agent, whether benign or 'demonic, of our modernity. The print market is no one thing. Instead, it is a cultural as well as an economic space, allowing for plural, antagonistic, nondialectical forms of articulation. By what they write and read, and by what they demur at reading and writing, authors and readers are constantly displacing print culture. In the spaces of the market all the elements of novel reading that have been examined in this study—the form and content of novelistic texts, the shape and character of the book, and the diverse effects of novel reading—become focal points of manifold efforts to reshape or redirect reading practices. And each of these factors inflects the writing of novels. In a circuit that none fully comprehends, readers and writers reshape a culture they can never control.
The Scandal of the Novel-Reading Body
A specter haunted early-modern Europe: that of the novel reader reading. This specter—cast as characters ranging from Don Quixote to Madame Bovary—is understood to be mindlessly absorbed by the text he or she reads, and compulsively addicted to its pleasures. Whence comes this abject figure of the novel-reading automaton? The new order of print culture that has been sketched in this chapter—including the form and content of texts, the small-book format, and the shift in reading practices—subverts the efforts by church and state to control print in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. In order to critique an earlier humanistic tradition, as well as transmit ancient and modern knowledge, eighteenth-century writers, booksellers, and readers harness print media to pursue their ambitious educational project. However, the new print medium also threatens this Enlightenment project. Thus, as the passage from Leibniz quoted above
suggests, a suspicion develops among a broad range of cultural critics that reading small books for pleasure may menace the Enlightenment educational project from within. As a symptom of the shift of reading practices examined in this chapter, the phantasm of the errant novel reader appears along the fault line between good and bad reading.
We can begin to probe the meaning of this figure by noting that from the beginning of the antinovel discourse, the novel-addicted reader in Britain is usually gendered female. The contingent fact that most of the popular novelists were women may have contributed to gendering the reader feminine. But the currency of this topos should not lull one into accepting it as an historically accurate account of reading. In two recent feminist studies of women's writing and reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Cheryl Turner and Kate Flint find compelling reasons for separating the cultural icon of the (dangerously susceptible) woman reader from the diverse practices of actual women. Flint's study of autobiographies of women writing about their reading, and of novels aimed at women shows how a broad range of texts—from studies of physiology and psychology and advice manuals to pedagogical writing and the periodical press—produce a discursive construction of the "woman reader" in view of her reformation. But "although many commentators chose to believe or desire that women read in certain ways," Flint suggests a variety of reading practices which cannot be simply described as absorptive and escapist; they can be improving, self-conscious, critical, and community-building. As such, they offer "resistance" to the figure of the woman reader (Flint, Woman Reader , vii–viii).
In her study, Cheryl Turner complicates the eighteenth-century stereotype of the woman reader by offering evidence that women read texts other than novels, and often chose to read critically (C. Turner, Living By the Pen , 137–139). Such a critical rearticulation of women's reading is an explicit theme in such novels as Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752) and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811). Turner also cites a range of evidence suggesting that from the beginning of the century to its end, from Haywood's eroticism to More's didacticism, and in spite of the larger role women assume in authorship as the century proceeds, novels were written to appeal to both sexes. Thus, she shows that men as well as women confessed to, or were accused of, reading novels in a voracious, absorptive manner: Boswell has Noble send him "a fresh supply of novels from his circulating library, so that [he is] . . . well supplied with entertainment"; Leigh Hunt describes himself as a "glutton of novels"; and the Gentleman's Magazine of 1767 frets that "It must be a matter of real concern to all consid-
erate minds, to see the youth of both sexes passing so large a part of their time in reading that deluge of familiar romances" (ibid., 131). Finally, in spite of the cliché of the woman novel reader haunting the circulating library, Turner finds a discrepancy between this stereotype and the records of John Marshall, a leading bookseller of Bath, who kept records of subscribers between 1793 and 1799 that show 35, 30, 29, 30, 32, 22, and 29 percent of his members to have been women during those years. Turner concludes that, since "men were the main subscribers at an establishment in a fashionable spa town where one might expect to find an unusually high proportion of women with the leisure and education to read, the contemporary preoccupation with female readers should not be interpreted literally as describing a numerical dominance" (ibid., 136). Instead, she argues that this preoccupation expresses cultural tensions around two issues. The first of these is that women's leisure reading, as evidenced by circulating library use, upset those who wanted women doing useful domestic or commercial work. Second, circulating-library use might not just transmit romance delusions—it could also give women access to reading that could put in question traditional cultural authority (ibid., 137).
Given the novel's address to and success with a broad spectrum of general readers, the question arises as to why, in eighteenth-century Britain, writers so often circulate this stereotype of the novel reader as female. No doubt, like contemporaneous critiques of vanity and luxury, writers mobilize a powerful vein of misogyny to locate the responsibility for the commodification of reading in women (L. Brown, Ends of Empire , 103–134). Recruiting certain themes of eighteenth-century misogyny can help consolidate the figure of the woman reader. If, following Turner, Flint, and others, we understand the eighteenth-century topos of the woman novel reader not as a representation of what was, but as a discursive formation, what function does this figure serve? First, it allows for a simplification of reading. Through the assumption that woman are easy to understand, or, as Pope writes, that "women have no character at all," it is supposed that the female reader will easily receive the impressions to which she is exposed, and will therefore imitate novels most automatically. But second, by attributing novel reading to the female sex, reading is mystified: the woman reader becomes a fascinating enigma. Finally, the figure of the woman reader eroticizes reading through the presumption of an automatic relay: if a reader reads erotic novels, then she will act out by having sex. This figure of the woman reader can function as an admonitory figure for men as well as for women: because novels render readers sensitive and erotic, they menace men with feminization.
Of course, the assumptions about reading encoded in the "woman reader" are partly contradictory—how, for example, can reading be both simple and productive of mystery? But the different aspects of the woman reader are made plausible by the commonsensical notions of gender difference, and help promote a containment of novel reading. The abject figure of the woman reader allows those who circulate such a figure to sort reading into the good and the bad, that which is to be encouraged and that which is to be suppressed. In other words, the cultural struggle around novel reading is the secondary effect of a more global effort to institutionalize book reading. The specter of the novel-reading automaton is an inverse afterimage of the Enlightenment project of a rationally motivated reading; the latter produces the former as its own particular nightmarish phantasm. Ironically, in order to promote their own improvement of reading, some twentieth-century feminist historians of reading have repeated the same eighteenth-century patriarchal bifurcation of reading which they critique.[5]
[5] The issue of how to take account of the activity of the reader/audience/spectator has become one of the Gordian knots of cultural studies. Because Flint's Woman Reader offers a fundamentally different account of reading from my own, it will be useful to offer a brief critique of her study. Through a sequential account of reading models, reading practices, and novelistic reflections upon women readers, Flint's study stages a dialectical exchange that carries the woman reader beyond a constricted pedagogy toward a feminist self-enlightenment. Flint's female reader eludes the clichés about the woman reader by reading in a different way: "Reading, in other words, provided the means not only . . . for the Victorian woman to abnegate the self, to withdraw into the passivity induced by the opiate of fiction. Far more excitingly, it allowed her to assert her sense of selfhood, and to know that she was not alone in doing so" (330). What's wrong with this picture of reading? First, Flint assumes what is never demonstrated: that men and women read in fundamentally different ways. By bifurcating and gendering the reader who is the focus of her feminist study, Flint follows the same trajectory she traces in the ideological construction of the woman reader by those who would rein in her freedom to read (for example, the writers of patriarchal conduct books); in other words, she turns the reader into a writer. Speaking in the name of subjectivity as self-production through writing, Flint reforms the woman reader. Although this exchange between reading and writing valuably suggests the complex interconnections of the two, the antisocializing, eccentric, individualistic, perverse, aleatory side of reading gets lost along the way. In the last pages of Flint's book, the bonding among women becomes the telos of women's reading, allowing its recuperation for a feminist politics. By producing too stark a polarity between reading that is enslaving because it submits to the itinerary of a patriarchal conduct discourse, and reading that is liberating for the way in which it helps rewrite women's identity as feminist, Flint's study evolves into a guide on how women should read. But by turning "the woman reader" into a potential woman writer, Flint's study suppresses the question of the individual or group (of whatever gender) reading for pleasures which will not be subordinated to another's scribal project. (For a feminist critique of eighteenth-century "gendered strategies" compatible with Flint's study, see Runge, "Gendered Strategies.")
De Certeau suggests that a particular concept of the book lies at the heart of the enlightenment educational project: "The ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation. This myth of Education inscribed a theory of consumption in the structures of cultural politics" (De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life , 166).
This Enlightenment project is structured around a certain concept of education as mimicry, with a "scriptural system" that assumes, in De Certeau's words, "[that] although the public is more or less resistant, it is molded by (verbal or iconic) writing, that it becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and like the text which is imposed on it" (ibid., 167). By De Certeau's account, the expansion since the eighteenth century of the powers that inform (from standardized teaching to the media) has reinforced the presumption that only producers (educators, artists, revolutionaries, and media workers) initiate and invent. Correlatively, this model assumes the idea of the consumer as a passive receptacle (ibid.). In developing his techno-determinist account of the influence of media on culture, McLuhan cites Blake's formula that forms one of this chapter's epigraphs, "They became what they beheld" (McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy , 265). In McLuhan's formulation, each new technology could hypnotize its consumer, producing an "identification of viewer and object," a "somnambulist conforming of beholder to the new form or structure" (ibid., 272). The early-eighteenth-century antinovel discourse promotes the fear that the novel reader will become absorbed in an unconscious mimicry. But both the danger of novel reading and its teaching opportunity, both its currency as media culture and its potential for elevation, arise from the same idea: that a reader/consumer can be made to conform to the object.
De Certeau develops a counterimage of reading so as to overcome the stark polarities—production/consumption, active/passive, empowered/disempowered—that have conducted cultural hierarchies from the eighteenth century to the present (De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life , 166–167). He does so by using the opposition writing/reading as the "general equivalent and indicator" of the opposition production/consumption. This has the effect of putting in question the controlling authority of writing as active production. Thus De Certeau offers reasons as to why reading resists
being policed: it cannot be known in advance, determined in its effects through writing, or studied with certainty. Though reading is taught, made the object of certification, and given various instrumental functions, it has that about it which confounds and exceeds these efforts. De Certeau advances an account of reading which is nomadic, eccentric, and active. In the introduction to his book, he describes reading as a kind of self-loss rather than a self-consolidation:
In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words, leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments "lost" in reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's body. Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an "invention" of the memory. . . . The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place. [xxi]
Indebted to Barthes' account of the perverse itineraries of reading in Pleasure of the Text (1973), this passage, by insisting on the way reading practices can also be irregular, singular, and improvisational, puts in question the educational idea(l) of reading as an activity which can be instituted as normative. De Certeau's image of the reader helps explain the resistance to reading for entertainment which appears in the culture of the novel's first circulation. Novels cannot be comprehended as communications of information complicated by fantasy or by unconscious desire that is understood as a kind of "noise." Instead, they seem to be written in order to incite a pleasure in excess of any possible closure around a signified communication. For this reason, novel reading provoked the worry as to how pleasure infects the knowledge-centered, improving potential for reading. Novels are particularly problematic vehicles of cultural reform.
If reading can be wasteful rather than accumulative, transitory rather than enduring, casually appropriative rather than responsibly disciplined, then it is entirely appropriate that Leibniz would find the new reading of small books to be a menace to the higher calling of Renaissance book culture, that Shaftesbury would reproach authors as pimps gratifying the
reader's lazy compulsion to read, and that many critics characterize the act of novel reading as feminine. But if reading "pluralizes" the reader rather than consolidating his or her social or psychic identity, then the admonitory figure of the woman reader as a pleasure-seeking automaton will not in fact account for the practice of early-modern readers. Readers drift across the gender divide that is drawn by eighteenth-century misogyny and assumed by twentieth-century feminist studies of that misogyny. De Certeau's account of the anarchic potential of reading offers an alternative to that instrumental educational itinerary that requires that we read in order to do something else. By contrast, in De Certeau's account, when one picks up a written text and exercises one's autonomy through reading, one achieves a local inversion of the hierarchy that had been presumed to operate through reading. The line from the end of Joyce's Finnegans Wake that forms the second of this chapter's two epigraphs—"my consumers, are they not also my producers?"—might be transformed into—"my readers, are they not also my writers?" Because of the larger field of market exchanges that bear up and sustain them in reciprocal embodiments that may be transgressive, irresponsible, or merely whimsical, consumers reach back along the loop of products to influence producers. It is not merely through what they buy, it is also through how they read that readers, through a certain deferred action, write their writers, retroactively. In doing so, readers confound any simple opposition or hierarchy of writing and reading.
De Certeau's concept of reading means there may be something in the very nature of reading which eludes analysis. The sheer range of eighteenth-century efforts to shape reading practices offers indirect evidence of reading's uncontrolled plurality. Thus, for example, doubts about the nature of readers provoke the Spectator 's market analysis in a familiar passage from Spectator No. 10. There, Addison ends an articulation of his periodical's aims by describing the three types of readers he seeks to address: the fraternity of fellow Spectators, the "blanks of society," and the female world. Such attempts to produce a typology of readers, in order to anticipate their responses, in fact imply their errancy and unpredictability. Different typologies of audience are attempted later in the century by Fielding and Hogarth. In our own period, reading has proven resistant to becoming an ordinary object of pedagogy or historical study. While modern media and communications make earlier ideals of literacy appear increasingly elusive or wishful, many contemporary readers practice a species of "aliteracy" that would have been unthinkable in the eighteenth century: they know how to read but choose not to (Siskin, "Eighteenth Century Periodicals"). In a rejoinder to Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier offers skeptical reservations about
any positivistic program for a history of reading (Chartier, Order of Books , 18 n.24). Chartier notes that even literary critics—those who have a large disciplinary stake in understanding reading as interpretation—have theorized the existence of limits, internal to the process of reading, to any convergence of reading around semantic content.
Rewriting Reading
If reading is the empty center of early-modern print culture, like a particle with a short half-life it can be known indirectly, through its traces as writing. The critics I have cited suggest the existence of a broad public censure of novel reading before 1720. On the competitive print market of the early eighteenth century, texts contend to shape what reading is and should be. In the unruly critical exchange that ensues, texts modify each other so that, for example, novels develop a symbiotic relationship with the antinovel discourse. Thus, when the antinovel discourse produces the figure of the absorbed novel-reading automaton, Manley and Haywood introduce that figure into the narrative as an object of seduction and erotic interest (see chapter 3). Then this eroticized recuperation and the antinovel critique fuse to become the stereotype of the absorbed novel reader.
Writers of the 1720s pursue very different strategies for shaping those inchoate reading practices licensed by the print market. Some writers appear to stand apart from the scandal of novel reading; Pope's corpus, for example, seems to be as different from the novels of amorous intrigue as writing can get. However, the whole neoclassical project—its concept of the decorum of writing according to the clear separation of generic types, its dependence upon classical models for writing, and its suspicion of the new—seems conceived to offer a stay against the accelerating market production of books to pander to the transient and vulgar tastes of the reader. Pope's vastly successful subscription publication of his translation of Homer's Iliad gives him independence from the print market. Through the publication of Homer, the classic text par excellence, Pope articulates his poetry with a text of timeless aesthetic value, grounded in several millennia of critical acclaim, and offered to his subscribers as "grade A" cultural capital. In the 1717 preface to The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope , Pope reflects upon the "unreasonable" expectations of the writers and readers of books: "The first seem to fancy that the world must approve whatever they produce, and the latter to imagine that authors are obliged to please them at any rate" (147). He then proceeds to sketch a contract for a civil exchange between an independent author and a disinterested, critically informed
reader. By offering his poetry as an exemplar of literary culture, Pope seeks to write from a strategic cultural position far above the field of novel writing and other vulgar, abject effusions of the print market.
But Pope's poetry also capitalizes on some of the same reading tastes that were incited and gratified by the early novels. Thus, two of the poems first published in the 1717 Works—Eloisa and Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady —take up the theme of unrequited love in a tone of impassioned extremity similar to that found in the Love Letters from a Portuguese Nun to a Cavalier and Behn's Love Letters . While the line in Rape of the Lock —"As Long as Atalantis Shall Be Read"—intends to deflate the pretensions of the baron's cutting of Belinda's lock, this work (written between 1712 and 1714) offers a mock-heroic exploitation of the gender strife, disguised intentions, and amorous battle found in the novels of amorous intrigue.
By elevating and sublimating some of the themes of earlier amorous fiction, Pope's poetry purifies writing, while disdaining to take note of its vulgar practitioners. But when Eliza Haywood attacks Pope's dear friend Martha Blount with insinuating scandal, Pope makes Haywood the prize in a pissing contest between booksellers in the 1728 Dunciad (Mack, Alexander Pope , 411). In The Dunciad , Pope does not assume a strategic position outside the terrain of debased grub-street writing. Instead, he accepts vulgar print culture as his habitat. De Certeau has elaborated the difference between strategic and tactical intervention in terms that help explain the stealth and cunning of Pope's writing: "The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal . . ." (De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life , 37). Here, Pope's foreign powers are the grub-street booksellers, Haywood, as one of their most successful authors, and the debased reading both encourage. By making Haywood the erotic prize in the pissing contest, Pope condenses female authorship, easy virtue, and cultural filth. Haywood's fecund posture and her position as a prize in a phallic display of profit-hungry booksellers allow Pope to offer an ironic celebration of her prolific production and spectacular popularity in the 1720s. As Ros Ballaster has shown, it is Haywood's textual promiscuity, rather than her personal life, that makes her a type of Dullness, the poem's explicitly feminine goddess of cultural disorder (Ballaster, Seductive Forms , 160–162). Although Pope would seem to wish to expunge novels from culture, attacks such as these make novels come to appear as impure cultural objects tinged with a stain of evil which enhances their cultural power. Novel reading
acquires a magical impurity, thereby giving the figure of the novel reader an aura of transgressive importance.
By the 1720s, novel reading had become a scandal, but also an opportunity. The public-sphere debate about the dangers of novel reading meant that anyone who had the temerity to write a narrative that could be accused of being a novel felt obliged to offer in its preface a defense of the text being introduced. In his preface to A Select Collection of Novels in 1720, for example, Samuel Croxall notes that "the great Abuse of Novels (as no good thing in the world escapes being perverted) require[s] a few words to be premised, for the removing of such prejudices as that abuse has occasioned against all performances of this kind" (Williams, Novel and Romance , 71). In his broad study of the prefaces to eighteenth-century novels, Joseph Bartolomeo suggests several reasons to be skeptical about the claims made in these prefaces: they can offer thin alibis in order that sexy scandal can pass the censor; their rhetoric often appears as contradictory, occasional, and opportunistic as the novels they introduce; and they rarely offer a conceptually systematic groundwork for their own writing practices (Bartolomeo, New Species of Criticism , 19–20). But incoherence has its uses. Bartolomeo suggests that the various, obliquely incompatible ways in which the preface to Robinson Crusoe defends reading should be understood as a way to expand readership: "An exotic, moral, and true story told in modest language would presumably appeal to a variety of readers in a variety of ways" (ibid., 36).
If one reads the prefaces of the most popular and prolific British novelists of the 1720s (Haywood, Defoe, and Aubin) as developing a defense of fiction against the charges of untruthfulness and the introduction of indecent examples, one can trace the emergence of an apology for novels. In order to counter the accusation that novels are dangerously delusive lies, the novelists rejoined that their narrative actually happened just as it is told (Defoe, Haywood, Aubin); or that, although it may be fictional in incidental particulars, "the foundation of this is laid in truth of fact" (preface to Roxana ); or (most cunningly) that even though it may be untrue, it has eschewed romance improbabilities and will have an improving effect on the reader (Williams, Novel and Romance , 74). To the accusation that novels would induce the reader's dangerous imitation of the wicked actions of the hero or heroine the novelists rejoined, first, that the providential design of the plot, wherein the good triumph and the evil are punished, produces a warning against wrongdoing and an incentive to emulate virtue (Defoe and Aubin [Bartolomeo, New Species of Criticism , 32]); and second, that representations of vice (such as the wiles of a thief or a libertine) offer a practi-
cal warning to the unwary (Haywood and Defoe). To the accusation that certain representations and language must have a pernicious effect on their reader, novelists offer a defense of hot and alluring subjects. Haywood defends her "warm" scenes by insisting that "without the expression being invigorated in some measure proportionate to the subject, it would be impossible for a reader to be sensible how far it touches him, or how probable it is that he is falling into those inadvertencies which the examples I relate would caution him to avoid" (Dedication of Lasselia , 1723, quoted in Williams, Novel and Romance , 79). Conversely, Defoe's editor cleans up the language of one of his most disreputable memoir writers, Moll Flanders, by providing her with a new linguistic "dress."
Rewriting the Novels of Amorous Intrigue
By 1720, the success of the novels of amorous intrigue was salient enough to provoke many of the epoch's leading cultural players to respond to them. In the rest of this chapter I will consider how Daniel Defoe sets out to reform novel reading. He accepts the premise that the most powerful way to reform novel reading is to write novels differently. Late in a long career of writing for the print market Defoe writes, in a brief five years, the texts that make him a central figure in the history of the British novel: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Memoirs of a Cavalier and Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year and Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1714). At least since Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance , the critical reception of these novelistic narratives has been determined by the effort to situate Defoe within the narrative of the novel's rise and development. The spectacular and enduring success of Robinson Crusoe seems to require a prominent place for Defoe, but Defoe's narratives do not make the ambitious, self-conscious claims to be practicing a "new species" of writing made by Richardson, Fielding, and their critical defenders after 1750. The solution developed in the literary histories has been to give Defoe an honored place apart, as a storyteller who is able to carry "the air of authenticity to the highest pitch of perfection" (Walter Scott, quoted in Peterson, Daniel Defoe , 61–62), but whose fictional illusion of "reality" and "life-likeness," "vividness or distinctness" results from a documentary attention to "details and minutiae" (William Caldwell Roscoes, quoted in Peterson, Daniel Defoe , 61–62).
The central labor of criticism of Defoe since the mid-twentieth century has been to contest the idea of him as an isolated and eccentric original, by disengaging readings of Defoe from the anachronistic aesthetic teleology of
an earlier literary history. As with Behn, Manley, and Haywood, the question of what this narrative contributes to the formation of "the novel" makes much of what is found in Defoe appear primitive and naive, odd or useless. The sustained effort to read Defoe in relation to his avowed purposes and the discursive contexts of his own epoch has enabled scholars to find alternative grounds from which to value the compelling coherence of his early novels. In the rigorously historical studies of Defoe (from those of Watt and Novak to those of Backscheider, Bender, and Faller), as well as in more recent studies of gender (Pollak) and colonialism (Hulme, L. Brown), the very coarseness of Defoe's narrative filter allows his writings to conduct a more ample and complex documentation of eighteenth-century realities. But these historicizing studies do not address the role his novelistic narratives play in the history of eighteenth-century reading.
The cultural struggle around novel reading in the 1720s offers a context for grasping why the narrative form of Defoe's novels offered an effective vehicle for shaping reading practices. If Haywood's Love in Excess was a best-seller of the year 1719, so was Robinson Crusoe . While Haywood follows up her success by publishing another novel of amorous intrigue nearly every three months throughout the 1720s, Penelope Aubin publishes seven novels designed to uplift the virtue of their readers, starting with The Life of Madam de Beaumount (1721).[6] Within this competitive setting Defoe's novels, like Aubin's, are shaped to produce an ethical alternative to prevailing patterns of reading for entertainment. Defoe's ability to produce such novels depends upon the particular form of memoir he develops in Robinson Crusoe and uses in all his subsequent novels. The evidentiary authority of the narrative is grounded in one axiom: since the memoir writer lived this experience, he or she is close to it. The primary narrative voice actualizes this presence to the facts by telling his or her personal history as a sequence of events, with a maximum of transparency, and in the present tense (Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary , 47–50). This primary narrative voice embodies the young, libidinous, venturesome protagonist of the action, presenting past life in broad summary or in detailed scenes of action and dialogue, strung together from the beginning to the end in the order in which it was lived. The relative simplicity and apparent naturalness of this narrative technique produce an illusion of immediacy for which Defoe's novels have been admired since their publication. Schol-
[6] Paula Backscheider has noted certain parallels between Haywood's Love in Excess and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , as well as the relation of both to Aubin (Backscheider, Daniel Defoe , 225–228).
ars (for example, Raleigh, Davis, and Paul Hunter) have derived its traits from the protocols of early modern science, journalism, and spiritual autobiography.
But in order to prevent his narrative memoirs from spinning off into a disconnected episodic series of scenes and adventures, and in order to prevent the reader from becoming absorbed in mere entertainment, Defoe develops a second retrospective voice within the narrative, which enters the text periodically to reflect upon the larger direction and meaning of the protagonist's life. This voice is critical, synthetic, and judgmental, and often invokes fate or Providence to suggest the larger patterns into which the individual's life has flowed, in spite of its conscious intentions. The interplay between these two "voices" of Defoe's narrative has been a central critical problem in his reception (Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel ). Because of the ironic tension that subsists between the two voices of Defoe's narrative, each can seem to be a contrived performance. Though the two voices or strata of Defoe's narrative cannot be made to "add up," they are nonetheless indispensable to the effects of Defoe's text (Watt, Rise of the Novel ; Marshall, Figure of Theater ; Faller, Crime and Defoe ; Paulson, Beautiful, Novel, and Strange ). Most crucially for this study, Defoe's development of the double-voiced memoir narrative enables him to make a particularly cogent intervention on the print market of his day. His narratives indulge what they censure, repeat what they proscribe. His double-voiced narrative allows him to write other print genres, like criminal biography and the erotic secret history, to which he has moral objections. At the same time, he can offer his own moral texts as a corrective and substitute for the pleasures of the narratives he would replace. Most crucially, the second admonitory voice in the text allows the reader to resist being absorbed by the fictional lures of a particular genre: the enticement to adventure and new beginnings of travel writing, the liberating effect of criminal transgression, and the devious and furtive lubricity of sexual intrigue.
How does Defoe's Roxana rewrite the reading experience provided by the novels of amorous intrigue? Critics have noted the affiliations between Defoe's text of 1724 and the secret histories made popular by Behn, Manley, and Haywood. The third-person narratives of Behn, Manley, and Haywood take the reader into an affect-laden, supercharged sympathy with the thoughts and sensibilities of the characters. Their narratives reach an extreme of sympathetic identification in the big scenes of sex, in which purple-prose passages encourage absorption in the erotic rhythms of the action. Although both Manley and Haywood develop a critical counterpoint within their narratives—through the staged discussions of the "moral" of
each biography in the New Atalantis , and the sudden disasters at the end of Love in Excess II and Fantomina —neither attempts the sustained ethical critique of Defoe's novels. Defoe's double-voiced narrative allows him to make Roxana one who not only lives, but after living, recollects and interprets. This double-voiced narrative projects Roxana as a character absorbed by her experience as an absorbed reader, as well as a narrator who subjects that character to analytical control through an act of writing. By editing Roxana's narrative, Defoe subjects the naive absorbed reader to critique and reformation. The violence of this cultural project is evidenced by the problematic sudden ending of Roxana , which offers less a conclusion than a collapse of the narrative. For this reason, it has posed the most serious critical problem for those arguing the text's relatively advanced status as "a novel" in the modern evaluative sense of a self-consciously conceived unity.[7]
If one considers Roxana as a single novel, it offers a somewhat haphazard sequence of episodes, with cross references and a progress of sorts, woven together by the secondary retrospective narrative. But as with Love Letters , the New Atalantis , and Love in Excess , there are fundamental problems with treating Roxana as a single novel: the questions arise as to whether the novel is consistent with itself and whether the central character is self-identical. Instead of writing Roxana as a unity, Defoe fashions a "serial" named "Roxana" that effects a parodic repetition of the novels of amorous intrigue. In Roxana , Defoe performs an experiment: he applies the modus vivendi of the novels of amorous intrigue (the ego at play for advantage, disguise, erotic intrigue, and so forth) in a world ordered upon different principles. What results at its most prosaic level is a practical critique of these novels as actual models for social behavior: through them, we learn that beauty cannot last for ever; men throw off their mistresses when they lose their charms; sex leads to pregnancy; and so on. None of these mundane realities prevents Roxana, the leading character of the "series," from achieving spectacular successes; nor do any of them precipitate the
[7] For an essay arguing the greater aesthetic control of Defoe's Roxana in comparison to Behn's Love Letters , see Novak, "Some Notes Toward a History of Fictional Forms." Paradoxically, many critics have characterized Roxana as the most psychologically, ethically, and aesthetically coherent all of Defoe's novelistic narratives (see, for example, Faller, Crime and Defoe , 202). Zimmerman shows how it expresses the ethical quandaries the earlier novels had pretended to resolve through the "sleight of hand" of repentance (Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel , 155). I would argue that at least some of the coherence of Roxana results from precursor texts: compared with travel narratives and criminal biographies, the novels that Roxana imitates (those of Behn, Manley, and Haywood) are long, artful, and psychologically complex.
sudden disaster which befalls her. While the discrete novels comprising the series acquire a certain continuity and resemblance, it is its rewriting of the novels of amorous intrigue that gives this series of novels its deeper unity.
A sequential inventory of the several parts of Roxana reveals, first, a (failed) novel of courtship, followed by the five novels of amorous intrigue, and, finally, a novel of pursuit. This sequence of more or less discrete novels can be plotted in terms of the issue of power. As a background to the central action, Roxana marries a fool and comes to realize that the patriarchal systems of property transmission leave a woman like herself essentially powerless (5–25). To this extent, she assimilates her husband's dominant trait: she declares herself a fool for having married a fool and having put her fortune in his hands. The rest of the series will describe her effort to retrieve her fortune in the double sense of wealth and luck. After Roxana and Amy solve the problem of dispensing with Roxana's children, the action proper can begin. In the first novel, which I'm calling "The Landlord Husband," Roxana, with Amy's help and urging, puts her body "in play" in order to realize her income potential (25–58). In the second novel, "The French Prince," Roxana, disguised as "La Belle veuve de Poictou," wins a limited mastery by accepting the servitude of being a kept mistress (58–111). In the third novel, "The Dutch Merchant," Roxana wins and holds equal power with the male by refusing to enter the scenario of courtship and rejecting the Dutch merchant's proposal of marriage (111–162). In the fourth novel, "High Life as Roxana," Roxana realizes an apogee of social mastery by fashioning herself into a spectacle that is irresistible to the king (162–208). In the fifth novel, "Roxana's Reformation," Roxana effaces her dubious reputation (as the notorious "Roxana") by becoming, or dressing as (the two are nearly the same in this text), a Quaker, beginning to ameliorate the situation of her abandoned children, and finally marrying the Dutch merchant, returned from his departure in "The Dutch Merchant" (208–265). In "Susan's Supplement" to the fifth novel, at last, and unexpectedly, the series reaches its limit. Here, the narrative collapses into a retroactive sequence of flashbacks offering an account of Roxana's oldest daughter Susan's demonic quest for the recognition of her mother (265–330).
While the segments of this series recount strikingly different adventures, each of the novels can function as part of a series because they share certain recurrent features: a commercial stocktaking by which Roxana translates her adventure into cash; a new beginning in a new geographical and social setting, where the secrets of the past (pertaining to marriage, jewels, or affairs) pose a danger to the present; and the use of masquerade
as both a necessity and a source of pleasure. In each novel the action reaches a climax around a moment of seduction, involving a choice and moral casuistry, and Roxana always chooses the path that is sinful and transgressive, lucrative and mobile. These choices lead her into a future to which the secondary voice of the narrative gives a sense of proleptic fatality. The plot's forward movement out of one place, situation, and novel into the next invents a kind of freedom as mobility. To be able to change disguise and move is to be free. This anthologized series of novels acquires a trajectory of moral decline, with Roxana's fall suggested at the end of the text. At the same time, the plausibility of both the moral sentiments voiced by Roxana the character and the moral interpolations of Roxana the narrator are vitiated by that which propels her life through an uncontrollable seriality: the compulsion to capitalize upon the income potential of her body; the will to go as far as she can, whatever the cost. Utterly absorbed by the adventure she is determined to live, Roxana advances in a hectic way that echoes the novel reader's compulsion to read on.
Such a summary might well lead one to question the interpretation of Defoe's text as a parodic or critical displacement of the novels of amorous intrigue. With Roxana , Defoe faithfully repeats the tendencies and formulas of much of Behn, Manley, and Haywood's fiction: the seriality of its action-centered plots, the foregrounding of the scheming ego of the protagonist(s), a turning of the social into masquerade, and finally, the gratification of fantasy, here involving not so much sex as the power and wealth accumulated through Roxana's success as a mistress. As with Haywood and Manley, serial form erodes ideological content: the author's moral judgments are put in question by the next installment of the narrative. In sum, Defoe so successfully embeds his narrative in the media culture of the novels of amorous intrigue that his critique of them may appear equivocal at best. This is of course a familiar aspect of Defoe. Later in this study, I will claim that Richardson and Fielding develop a fully self-conscious authorial response to media culture. Nonetheless, if one looks more closely at Roxana , and especially at what finally overtakes Roxana's effort to exercise full control of her own life, this text can be seen to offer a nuanced and compelling reading of the novels of amorous intrigue.
Roxana's Transgressions
Roxana transgresses the social order more completely than any libertine before LaClos and Sade. Like Behn's Silvia and Manley's Charlot, Roxana is initiated into her career as a mistress through an episode of seduction.
But the fall of Defoe's heroine is strikingly different from that of these precursors both by what is absent and by what is present. Unlike Silvia when she is seduced by Philander or Charlot when she is seduced by the duke, Roxana is not an isolated and naive virgin, suddenly confronted with the novelty of the intoxicating physical and psychological pleasures of sex, and persuaded by the discourse of love, clever contrivances of circumstances, or allures of an erotic present to follow the desire suddenly legible in her own heart. Instead of absorbing central character and reader in a narrative sequence that confers upon seduction a dreamlike sense of continuity and inevitability, Defoe inscribes seduction in rational dialogue. Thus the whole sequence in which the landlord seduces Roxana, including his first kindnesses, the generous supper, his first kiss, and his formal proposal of contractual settlements, unfolds in counterpoint with a series of clearheaded, ethical dialogues. In these debates, Amy urges the practical necessity of sexual compliance and the landlord argues the essential propriety of their affair, while Roxana insists that it would make her little better than a "whore." This dialogue among characters provides a reflective critique of the action, before and as it unfolds. Interspliced with this diegetic action, the secondary voice of the narrative echoes Roxana's warnings about the danger of the affair and gives the reader intimations of the fateful long-term consequences of this "fall." When Roxana finally succumbs to the landlord's campaign, her relenting is presented as an effect of his generous proposals and her "gratitude" for his help. Their first sex goes unnarrated. The moral interjections of Roxana, in both of her roles, as character and narrator, give this seduction a sense of weighty consequence and premeditation absent in the breathless present tense of Haywood's fiction, in which seduction moves forward with the desire-laden logic of an intense dream. In Behn, Manley, and Haywood, negative reflections tend to arrive too late to be of real use.
Roxana achieves her exteriority to the social order through one of the most notorious scenes in eighteenth-century fiction: the episode in which she strips her maid, Amy, and thrusts her into bed with her landlord "husband." Richetti has offered the most compelling reading of this scene: "the purpose of such a scene is to separate herself from those who have hitherto arranged her survival, to expose by her own arrangement the inadequacy of those who have arranged and defined the moral world she now lives in" (Richetti, Defoe's Narratives , 209). The landlord reminds Roxana that both he and she have been deserted by their respective spouses, argues his earnest love, and insists that their design for living is the practical equivalent of marriage. Amy promotes this living arrangement as more than a
practical way to elude poverty. After the landlord's sumptuous supper, Amy is so "transported" with happiness that she rises from bed "and danc'd about the Room in her Shift" (32). A devil-may-care attitude gives a "wild" cast to the very syntax of her speech. Of the proposition that Amy have sex with the landlord on Roxana's behalf, she tells Roxana: "if he asks me, I won't deny him, not I; Hang me if I do" (39). Amy here adopts the libertine posture she will use to promote Roxana's subsequent adventures: that if opportunity invites and desire beckons, damn propriety, and just do it.
Roxana breaks out of this simulation of marriage by stripping Amy and thrusting her into bed with the landlord. The words with which this scene is narrated invoke the moral and social bonds that must be severed to enable Roxana's subsequent movement through her world:
and at last, when [Amy saw] I was in earnest, she let me do what I wou'd; so I fairly stript her, and then I threw open the Bed, and thrust her in. (#1)
I need say no more; this is enough to convince any body, that I did not think him my Husband, and that I had cast off all Principle, and all Modesty, and had effectually stifled Conscience. (#2)
Amy , I dare say, began now to repent, and wou'd fain have got out of Bed again; but he said to her, Nay, Amy , you see your Mistress has put you to Bed, 'tis all her doing, you must blame her; so he held her fast, and the Wench being naked in the Bed with him, 'twas too late to look back, so she lay still, and let him do what he wou'd with her. (#3)
Had I look'd upon myself as a Wife, you cannot suppose I would have been willing to have let my Husband lye with my Maid, much less, before my Face, for I stood-by all the while; but as I thought myself a Whore, I cannot say but that it was something design'd in my Thoughts, that my Maid should be a Whore too, and should not reproach me with it. (#4) [46–47]
This scene offers a rewriting of the most shocking feature of the novels of amorous intrigue: their direct representation of sex. The interplay of a shocking action (reported in paragraphs #1 and #3) and the ethical commentary of the narrator's secondary voice (reported in paragraphs #2 and #4), the counterpoint of Roxana's force and Amy's tentative resistance, produce a highly erotic scene. But the effect is utterly different from that produced by Behn, Manley, or Haywood. Instead of presenting sex as a spontaneous effect of desire, rendered in language shaped to draw the reader into an absorbed experience of its pleasures of arousal and climax, Defoe's narrative shows Roxana using sex to achieve an exteriority from the constraints of social values—indexed with the words "Principle," "Modesty," and "Conscience"—and of predetermined social roles—denoted with the words "Wife," "Husband," and "Maid." This scene is inscribed into a larger
movement that makes sex subsidiary to Roxana's determination not to be defined by others. Richetti notes that Roxana's "pleasure, in effect, flows from that power and not from within the pleasurable acts themselves" (Richetti, Defoe's Narratives , 211). By instrumentalizing her body, her pleasure, and her experience, Roxana masters herself and others through a cool act of voyeurism: she does not join the two in bed, nor does she avert her eyes so as to leave them to their own pleasure; instead, she "stood-by all the while" the landlord does "what he wou'd" with Amy. Roxana's power comes from standing apart but nevertheless watching. It is this exteriority to the scene she contrives that is offered as evidence that Roxana lies outside any binding discourse of marriage.
This scene shows Roxana perfecting the most basic relation to her experience—what Richetti describes as her "ability to move through her narrative . . . and to remain outside it" (ibid.). It is this technique that will enable her life and memoir to have a serial structure. Roxana's exteriority to the social order is not just an effect of that secondary voice of the narrator, which provides commentary upon the present-tense action from a judgmental retrospective vantage point. Often, as in this passage, the utterly conventional ethics of this voice soften and recuperate the radicality of Roxana's position outside the social. Roxana's will to take her life beyond the confines of the present and into the next episode of her life explains what has been noted in this scene: her standing apart from the codes of social, moral Law (such as modesty) and the codes of romantic love and the itch of sexual pleasure. This compulsion to move on means that Roxana never mourns. After her move to France with the landlord jeweler, Roxana accepts with a chilling facility the death of the jeweler, the loss of her lover the prince, and the need to dispense with unwanted babies. Roxana's will to move on is not consistently explained by any character trait (such as her insecurity or her avarice) or justified by any goal (such as acquiring wealth, independence, or a higher social position). The seriality of Roxana's life is prior to the ideas that might be invoked to explain it. This is most spectacularly evident in her refusal to marry the Dutch merchant.
Roxana's Freedom
In refusing a proposal from the Dutch merchant, Roxana expresses her freedom from social convention in conceptual form. This third novel in the series is quite different from the previous two or the two that follow: there is little of the wonder of high life that is present in those other novels. Instead, Roxana strikes up a frank and honest friendship with the Dutch
merchant who helps her escape from Paris with her wealth. Because of their equality and affection, and because both their spouses have apparently died, Roxana as narrator presents the action in such a way that the character Roxana is confronted with a fateful choice: either reform through a marriage that would take her toward respectability and the closure of her history, or hearken to the call of future adventures. Roxana's agent and alter ego Amy writes from London to promote the second option: "and now, Madam, . . . you have nothing to do but to come hither, and set up a Coach, and a good Equipage; and if Beauty and a good Fortune won't make you a Duchess, nothing will" (132). Within the admonitory autobiography that Roxana seeks to narrate, the central action of the "Dutch Merchant" novel is her refusal of his proposal of marriage, a choice that is defended in the debate at the novel's center. But a closer look at this debate shows that it is neither a genuine choice (Roxana never really considers marrying him) nor an authentic debate (Roxana disavows the very positions she articulates). Instead, Roxana's feminist arguments against marriage allow her to break through all conventional values invoked by the Dutch merchant, so that she is able to elude their constraints.
Here is the content of the debate between Roxana and the Dutch merchant in its antithetical purity: Roxana 1: Marriage gives all power and liberty to the man, divesting women of both (147–148); Dutch merchant 1: Because men do the work, and women enjoy the fruits, women "had the Name of Subjection, without the Thing . . ."(148); Roxana 2: As single, women are "masculine in [their] politick Capacity," and are therefore able to enjoy the pleasure of independence (148–149); Dutch merchant 2: Where there is sincere affection one can avoid all she says as to being "a Slave, a Servant, and the like . . . [for] where there was a mutual Love, there cou'd be no Bondage; but that there was but one Interest; one Aim; one Design; and all conspir'd to make both very happy" (149); Roxana 3: Once a woman gives her affection there is "one Interest; one Aim; one Design"—the man's; woman is to be but a passive creature, and if his welfare flounders, so does hers (149–150); Dutch merchant 3: With safe management such disaster can be avoided; and Roxana can guide their common "Ship" "Bottom" if she wishes (150); Roxana 4: Broadening her critique from the content of their particular contract to the way in which women are positioned by the social order in general, Roxana rejoins that individuals cannot so easily step outside of custom and the law: "It is not you, says I , that I suspect, but the Laws of Matrimony puts the Power into your Hands; bids you do it; commands you to command; and binds me, forsooth, to obey; you, that are now upon
even Terms with me . . ." (151); Dutch merchant 4: "Marriage was decreed by Heaven" as a way to find felicity for both parties and transmit property to legitimate progeny. Roxana's feminist critique frees her from the commonsense assumptions about gender relations harbored by her Dutch admirer: "if we have sex, she will want to marry"; "if I let her keep her property, she will marry me"; and "surely if she gets pregnant she will want to marry me." In spite of sex, pregnancy, and iron-clad assurances about property, Roxana rejects his proposals, and chooses freedom.
In spite of the critical celebrity of Roxana's defense of her autonomy, the text of Roxana vitiates the feminist rationale for her refusal of the Dutch merchant in at least three ways. First, the occasion for this debate subverts its content. When the Dutch merchant surmises Roxana is loath to give up control of her money, he offers to relinquish any claim on her wealth. Roxana admits to the reader that this "putting my Money out of my Hand, was the Sum of the Matter, that made me refuse to marry." This fact being "too gross for me to acknowledge," she decides to "give a new Turn to it, and talk upon a kind of an elevated Strain" (147). The feminist critique of marriage follows as a kind of ruse to throw the Dutch merchant off the scent of her actual designs. Second, there is further evidence that Roxana does not accept her own feminist argument. Earlier in this same episode, the narrator's adjudication of the difference between a mistress and a wife has given a check to (the character) Roxana's quest for personal power. As a character, Roxana declares she would rather be a mistress than a wife, for while "a Wife is look'd upon, as but an Upper-Servant, a Mistress is a Sovereign . . ." As a rejoinder to this social satire upon marriage, Roxana as narrator immediately rejoins with the counterargument: while the mistress has no rights by law or social convention and must be seen in secret, and is dropped when the man reforms, the "Wife appears boldly and honorably with her Husband; lives at Home, and possesses his House, his Servants, his Equipages, and has a Right to them all, and to call them her own" (132). Lincoln Faller notes that "modern readers easily sympathize with Roxana's feminist declaration of independence, but, as it falls into a libertine tradition that was highly suspect, the original audience would likely not have been similarly inclined. One of the devil's general ruses according to Defoe, was 'to infuse notions of liberty into the minds of men; that it is hard they should be born into the world with inclinations, and then be forbidden to gratify them'" (Faller, "Toward a History," 226, citing Defoe, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe , 281). Third, the future direction of the plot lends irony to the rationales for Roxana's refusal of marriage: Roxana
marries this very same Dutch merchant years later When it suits her changed purposes, Roxana casts off this specious, masklike functionality of her feminist critique of marriage.[8]
Roxana goes even further than the libertine heroines of the novels of amorous intrigue in refusing to make men, marriage, and sex the telos of a woman's life. She not only rejects a central social ethos of the novels of Behn and Haywood, usually affirmed through their virtuous heroines, that the fully reciprocated love of a man is the goal of both female desire and narrative plotting; in the third novel of this series, she also eludes the codes of courtship and marriage that prevail in the "woman's novels" of the 1710s and 1720s written by Jane Barker and Penelope Aubin (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics , 183–184). Roxana's refusal of marriage does more than refuse narrative closure for her life. Like the act of her putting Amy to bed with her landlord-husband, Roxana's refusal of marriage is based in, and helps to rationalize, the seriality of her life, in terms of its efficient, and profitable, movement from one adventure and "fortune" to another Roxana keeps her life something ever about to be. Her self-proclaimed alibis and purposes—independence, wealth, and social position—are not consistently applied to either the living or the telling of her life. All are pulled into the ethos of seriality, motivated in advance by what might be called Roxana's ambition.
Roxana's Ambition
The narrator presents Roxana's refusal of marriage as a decision to try her luck in further adventures: "I wou'd try my Fortune at London , come of it what wou'd" (161). In this sentence, "Fortune" means "luck" or "chance," and shows that Roxana has the tolerance for risk so essential to the new economic order Defoe promotes everywhere in his writing. Every time she moves from one social role and cultural location to another, Roxana moves investments—of her wealth, body, and energy—so as to maximize the return on "capital." But from the retrospective vantage point of the narrator, it is precisely Roxana's refusal of the Dutch merchant and her restless will to go on, "come of it what wou'd," that threaten her fortune in the second sense of "material wealth or financial conditions" (American Heritage
[8] For an alternative way to read the incoherence of Roxana's feminism, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire , 153–155. Brown shows how the characterization of Roxana's feminism as amazonlike, and her implication in murder, allow her to function as a scapegoat for the violence of the "masculine" economic acquisitiveness she practices.
Dictionary ): she admits, "I might have settled myself out of the reach even of Disaster itself . . ."(158–159), and, "I threw away the only Opportunity I then had, to have effectually settl'd my Fortunes, and secur'd them for this World" (161). In this text, the word "fortune" often slides between "luck" and "wealth"; although these two senses of "fortune" are the primary ones engaged by the subtitle of Roxana —"the fortunate mistress"—the narrator also actively solicits its third major sense, for while seeking her "fortune," Roxana also pursues her "fate" or "destiny." In trying to interpret her perverse refusal of the Dutch merchant, an action which has come to appear fateful, the narrator speculates upon Roxana's motives, exhausts rational explanation, and has recourse to odd nonreasons and moral absolutes: "But my Measure of Wickedness was not yet full" (159). Finally, the narrator steps back from her own character and recuperates the story for the admonitory power of its negative example: "I am a Memorial to all that shall read my Story; a standing Monument of . . . how dangerously we act, when we follow the Dictates of an ambitious Mind" (161).
Ambitious for what? What does Roxana want? Nothing that comes to her, neither wealth, nor independence, nor fame, gratifies her ambition. Neither does her crowning success in becoming the king's mistress arrest her restless movement. Roxana's ambition is not an object but a vector: rather than "the object or goal," her ambition is an "eager or strong desire" (American Heritage Dictionary ). To explore this ambition, we must ask not what Roxana wants, but how she wants. Roxana's desire is to be a "mistress." What precisely is entailed in being a mistress and how this role serves and incites Roxana's ambition are suggested in the scene that is the climax of Roxana's metamorphosis into the prince's mistress. In the scene of Roxana's investiture in her role as mistress, she allows her lover to play Pygmalion, while she submits to being the "idol" he adorns. Her changed dress signifies more than a changed social position: it denotes the assumption of a new self. The prince completes this change, and makes Roxana's image "perfect," by placing a diamond necklace around her neck. The prince's gift is bestowed in such a way as to make it the climax of Roxana's initiation as his mistress. By the mystery of its arrival, the pain it produces, and the magical transformation it effects, this necklace functions as an equivocal emblem of ambition:
at last he leads me to the darkest Part of the Room, and standing behind me, bade me hold up my Head, when putting both his Hands round my Neck, as if he was spanning my Neck, to see how small it was, for it was long and small; he held my Neck so long, and so hard, in his Hand, that I complain'd he hurt me a little; what he did it for, I knew not, nor had I the
least Suspicion but that he was spanning my Neck; but when I said he hurt me, he seem'd to let go, and in half a Minute more, led me to a Peir-Glass, and behold, I saw my Neck clasp'd with a fine Necklace of Diamonds; whereas I felt no more what he was doing, than if he had really done nothing at-all, nor did I suspect it, in the least: If I had an Ounce of Blood in me, that did not fly up into my Face, Neck, and Breasts, it must be from some Interruption in the Vessels; I was all on fire with the Sight, and began to wonder what it was that was coming to me. [73, italics mine]
In this scene Roxana confronts more than the discipline of beauty—the pain or labor required to turn one's body into an icon of beauty for the gaze of others. Instead, she submits to a mysterious initiation by allowing herself to be led into "the darkest part of the room," to be held by her "long and small" neck so "long" and "hard" that it "hurt." These words give the prince's touch some of the character of strangulation. By submitting to a symbolic death as the "widow" of the jeweler, she is brought back to life as a woman of beauty. The magic spontaneity of this metamorphosis comes not only from the artful sleight of hand which conceals the prince's contrivance, but also from the way in which this gift returns Roxana to herself as an image that has an uncanny completeness: she tells the reader to "behold" the image that condenses a new Roxana and realizes her unconscious ambition. The shock of recognition makes her "all on fire with the Sight."
Roxana's blush signifies the pleasure she feels at this sudden gratification of her vanity: if she is not a princess, she is at least the bejeweled mistress of a prince. But this necklace is also a kind of halter of servitude, making her enslavement to her "Master" all too explicit. Her blush certifies an ambivalent mixture of pride and shame at a possession that at once enslaves and glorifies. To master her future she must accept this servitude. Roxana's necklace is made of diamonds because of the way in which they conduct white light yet refract it into every color, giving them an enigmatic transparency. They suggest all possible futures, while disclosing none. But what her ambition will entail remains obscure; she is in a state of wonder—amazement and doubt—as to "what it was" that is coming to her. The "it" of her ambition, that obscure object of her desire, is accessible through the affairs she undertakes and the duplicities she practices. Because it shifts content, "it" cannot finally be named. Roxana's ambition is traversed by a desire that harbors the negativity of this "it" within itself as its own condition of possibility and limit. This "it" is what Roxana will pursue, but, to her surprise, it also comes to pursue her.
The absoluteness of Roxana's ambition, as it comes to shape her life, throws her into a retroactive temporality. The future as the site for the
realization of one's ambition determines the actions and choices of the present (for example, accepting the prince, saying "no" to the Dutch merchant, and dispensing with infants), and requires a fastidious erasure of the past (for example, evidence of an old husband, and her life as "Roxana"). Once she has passed into a new theater of life, Roxana finds her past can threaten her new performance. The multiplicity, variety, and profitability of her futures depend upon her mobility between performative spaces. This is why, as she acquires wealth, her movement to the next scene of adventure requires Whig financial instruments, which can turn jewels and silver plate into paper that accrues interest. When Roxana wants to cash in on her French earnings—as the "Wife" of the murdered jeweler and as the mistress to the prince—she turns to the Dutch merchant. But here, opposition takes the form of an old-style money changer, a Jewish jeweler who knows too much. The narrator's blatantly anti-Semitic depiction of this figure does not obscure the essential correctness of his accusation of Roxana: she is selling jewels she has allowed to be reported as lost to the thieves who murdered her jeweler "husband." The morbid melodrama of the narrator's account of the accusation of Roxana, and of her horrified response, suggests that the negativity of this raging Jew is being intensified by something within Roxana:
the Jew held up his Hands, look'd at me with some Horrour, then talk'd Dutch again, and put himself into a thousand Shapes, twisting his Body, and wringing up his Face this Way, and that Way, in his Discourse; stamping with his Feet, and throwing abroad his Hands, as if he was not in a Rage only, but in a meer Fury; then he wou'd turn, and give a Look at me, like the Devil; I thought I never saw any thing so frightful in my Life. [113]
Speaking an unknown language, contorting his body into a "meer Fury," and giving her a look "like the Devil," this figure acquires its uncanny power from Roxana's own superego. Though the diegetic action will solve the problem of this unsettling representative of a rigid Old Testament Law—he is first tricked by the Dutch merchant and then mutilated by the French prince—he anticipates a much more compelling expression of the remorseless superego: Roxana's eldest daughter, Susan.
Where does Roxana come closest to realizing her ambition? Her memoir narrative gives pride of place to her dance in the habit of the Turkish princess, and critics have long viewed the scene as a crux for interpreting Roxana and its opportunistic central character.[9] There is no doubt that the
[9] Critics find what they are looking for here—whereas, for example, Max Novak finds evidence in this scene of a provisional unity to the novel, Laura Brown sees Roxana appropriating the "costume of an exotic and exploited other" in order to wear "the spoils of an expansionist culture" (Novak, "Some Notes Toward a History"; L. Brown, Ends of Empire , 147–148).
narrator presents Roxana's performances as the Turkish princess as the moment of her greatest power and freedom. Here, through a triumph of pure fictionality, her ambition achieves its most intoxicating gratification. Roxana realizes the fantasy of the fungibility of identity so central to the novels of amorous intrigue: the notion that you can be what you want by dressing that way. If Roxana is not queen for a day, she is at least a princess for a night or two. Within the rhetoric of the memoir narrative, these scenes also function as a kind of boast. "Here," Roxana seems to say, "I reached the apex of celebrity and social importance." However, this scene is also the one in which she is christened "Roxana" and receives the more problematic notoriety this novel exploits.
In these scenes, Roxana achieves mastery by fascinating the gaze of the powerful Other—here, the king. But how does she know this grand but disguised Other is out there in the audience, and confirming her centrality with his gaze? He never declares himself directly; his existence is a kind of act of faith, first for Roxana, and then for her reader. She is aware of his presence only indirectly—by the way his companions and messengers are "silent as Death" as to his identity (176); by his being "the only one with his Hat on" (180)—and, retroactively, by the liaison that results from her triumphant performances. Thus the centrality of this performance arises in part from the later unnarratable "Scene" for which it substitutes: the scene in which Roxana becomes the king's mistress. The Turkish dance precipitates that intimate sexual linkage with power and the Law, and it occurs just before the lacuna in the narrative that such a relationship mandates: "There is a Scene which came in here, which I must cover from humane Eyes or Ears; for three Years and about a Month, Roxana liv'd retir'd . . . with a Person, which Duty, and private Vows, obliges her not to reveal" (181). The third-person-singular usage of "Roxana" makes this sentence appear to be an editorial aside within the first-person memoir. It removes the protagonist beyond the reader's ken. Roxana's Turkish dance offers an enticing aestheticized sublimation of the action of that other "Scene," Roxana's affair with the king, the hidden place where the father suspends the Law while he enjoys, with an obscene absence of guilt, the woman who has seduced him. This other "place" might be the utopic space of popular fiction—the impossible place without prohibitions—but Roxana can't show it. The censoring
out of this "Scene" underlies the whole system of print and representation that enables the publication of this disguised story.
Is it the case that these scenes of apparently pure performativity and self-creation allow Roxana to achieve her ambition? No. For while we are told that Roxana's dance produced a voluptuous spectacle, the narrator does not offer the reader an enticing description of the dance. Instead, this dance is presented as a kind of ruse of the scheming ego. We as readers are taken behind the scenes, where we see that Roxana's orchestration of an illusion of erotic power is dependent on an orientalist masquerade: an ordinary English girl, by wearing the outfit of a Turkish princess and dancing a new Parisian "figure" to a French tune, appears as irresistibly exotic (Trumpener, "Rewriting Roxane"). While this dance is a tribute to Roxana's finesse and nerve, her own analysis of the rhetoric of her dance demystifies its erotic singularity.
Roxana's deft exploitation of this dance inscribes her in networks of repetition which finally prove uncontrollable. When she returns from being the king's mistress, the heroine finds that tongues have begun to wag, that many suspect she is a "meer Roxana " (182). Roxana now realizes that her "honor and virtue" and the renown of her independent fortune were necessary constituents of the allure of the spectacle of Roxana (182). While the king was wise enough to order only one repetition of the Turkish dance, Roxana, like a fading star, returns incessantly to her moment of glory. Even after her withdrawal from "the World," she cannot resist putting on the habit of the Turkish princess and showing it off to the Quaker and her Dutch husband (247–248). It is these nostalgic re-enactments of her triumph that propel the plot in a fateful direction. Roxana discovers that from the spectatorial side of her masquerade/performance an "other" self is watching, and she recognizes Roxana. It is her own daughter and the person named after her, Susan. Susan sees her mother—without recognizing her—for the first, and apparently only, time during her service in Roxana's household, while she performs this dance (206). Susan's memory of the costume—described with pride to the Quaker—becomes the detail that certifies the validity of Susan's claims on Roxana, and forecloses the efficacy of Roxana's masquerade.
Roxana's Last Mask
Roxana's reformation pivots upon her attempt to go from being a reader to being a writer of novels. Where among cultural practices does one find the relation to life we find in the main character of Roxana ? Roxana moves
through an experience she remains outside of; she is transgressive yet pays no penalties; she progresses from success to success without feeling the gravitational tug of "reality"; she encounters boundless variety, and yet remains restlessly determined to find more. Roxana has the same relation to her life that a reader has to the "life" in a novel he or she reads. Like a print-media junkie, Roxana develops an ethos that facilitates the serialization of her life into a sequence of absorbing adventures. While she inhabits each of the novel-like episodes, her life takes on the autonomous, dreamlike continuity of novels as they are experienced by an absorbed reader. At the end of each novel-like episode, Roxana moves on to new "fortunes" with the same ease and curiosity with which a reader passes from one novel to another. It is as if she can live her own life with the provisional indifference most appropriate to the way in which a reader consumes the lives of novelistic characters.
Roxana—unlike the heroines of Manley and Haywood—is not represented as a novel reader. Nonetheless, she simulates the life of a character from the novels of amorous intrigue by imitating the immunity of lives lived according to the imperatives of fantasy. The central illusion of this place of fiction is of the self's essential autonomy, of life as a free ride: one can have experiences which leave no traces and accrue no debts. This sense of steady, cost-free accumulation of experience is expressed within Roxana through the magical efficacy of capital accumulation. Roxana's financial advisor, Sir Robert Clayton, shows her how, if she returns part of interest earnings to principal, she can support herself handsomely and progress spontaneously toward ever greater wealth (167). By putting this method to work, Roxana becomes a woman of vast wealth.
But while Roxana's capital appreciates, her reputation becomes notorious. She begins to dread the moment of recognition when some stranger shouts, "D——— me, if that's not Roxana!" In order to secure a tranquil retirement, Roxana's reputation needs laundering. Her repentance is shadowed by the same critical skepticism that dogs Moll Flander's Newgate conversion: it seems to be motivated by a cost-benefit analysis. It is only after she has begun to grow old, and after she can no longer attract a monarch, that Roxana finds herself haunted with the unsettling question, "What was I a Whore for now ?" (201–203) Roxana's reform program splices together the language of God-fearing seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography and twentieth-century public relations. As many critics have noted, her repentance is vitiated by her failure to develop within her "new" life either a new set of values (for example, honesty) or a new modus vivendi. Roxana's reformation is managed with the same sort of scheming
and disguise, and the same adroit management of others through surrogates, that made her earlier successes possible. She tries to assume the honesty and honor of Quaker life by dressing and speaking as a Quaker, but there is a dangerous flaw to such a strategy: by going still further with disguise, Roxana confers upon truth, as a stripping away of disguise, a potentially disastrous force.
Roxana's written narrative originates within the fifth novel's attempt to retrieve her reputation. Only by constituting herself as one who initiates a sober reflection upon her past can she develop the secondary voice of the narrative. Roxana's memoir—by assembling a variety of lives and fortunes into one narrative series—requires the same kind of agile compositional skill exercised within this fifth novel of the narrative. In it, she takes her personal connections (with the prince and with the Dutch husband), the scattered remainders of her sex life (her children), and the vast "fortunes" (i.e., wealth) acquired during her adventures, and forges all of these into her life as the respectable, wealthy, and titled wife of the Dutch merchant. This re-formed, artfully com-posed life is the object of Roxana's last schemes, and motivates the writing of her memoir. But it has the essential character of a new disguise. On the title page, her claim to successful reformation is expressed through her last title, "the Countess de Wintselsheim." This narrative is Roxana's last mask.
Roxana: the Fortunate Mistress has the basic rhetoric of self-justification and exculpation. By balancing the first-person experience of the protagonist against the moralizing interpolations of the older and wiser courtesan, this memoir alibis the first with the moral saws of the latter. Throughout most of Roxana it is implied that the protagonist's last performance—as the reformed Roxana—makes her story a legitimate source of moral wisdom. By writing a narrative about her past, Roxana seeks to convert the "fortunes" (i.e., wealth) of each adventure into one Fortune (or destiny) which is "Fortunate" (i.e., lucky). The editor of the narrative, respecting that ambition, refuses to spoil the story by disclosing its final catastrophe and therefore effaces any sign of Roxana's disastrous final encounters with her daughter from the novel's title-page description of the whole narrative, from the first six novel-length segments of her history, and even from the moral defense of the whole text offered in the preface. The editor's deceit indulges Roxana's narrative disguises and sets up the surprise that greets the reader at the end of the novel.[10]
[10] The long eighteenth-century title-page summary of plot so often used by Defoe has many functions: like the summary on the sleeve of a video rental or on the back of a book, it offers a preview to the potential consumer, and thus should be understood as part of the discourse of advertising. As in the present epoch, unpleasant turns of the plot are often hidden from potential viewers.
Only at the end of the fifth novel, after Roxana has successfully established her new life in Holland and apparently dispensed with the threat to her tranquillity posed by Susan, does the reader receive clear signs that something is profoundly amiss. A severe new tone inflects the narrative: Roxana feels guilty for mixing her "ill-got Wealth, the Product . . . of a vile and vicious Life of Whoredom and Adultery" with "the honest well-gotten Estate of this innocent Gentleman " (259); she finds "there was a secret Hell within, even all the while, when our Joy was at the highest" (260); reflections upon her own past "gnaw'd a Hole" "quite thro"' her "Heart" and "made bitter every Sweet, and mix'd my Sighs with every Smile" (264). These disquiets seem mysterious and somewhat uncalled-for, as they cut against the comic denouement of the romance with the Dutch husband and their titled positions at the end of a life of hurry and labor. Obscure forces prevent this text from being controlled by the compositional designs of the reformed Roxana. The effort to recast Roxana's life into a comic pattern was at best a wishful feint, at worst a disguise. Arriving at the "end" of her story, Roxana's profound disquiets suggest all has not been told: "I must now go back to another Scene, and join it to this End of my Story" (265). What complicates and confounds this movement toward closure, toward entitling her life as the "fortunate mistress," is the need to go back to events and facts which the narrative of the fifth novel has obscured. But rather than ending the story, this supplement only succeeds in reopening it.
Roxana's (Self-) Division
What is it that disrupts not only Roxana's life, but its telling in memoir form? What is it that terminates the hopeful, carefree movement toward the new that is built into the very nature of seriality? And finally, what is it that enables Defoe to break the fictional allure of the novels of amorous intrigue? The answer lies not with anything from outside the central character, but with something that erupts from within, splitting both Roxana and her compositional project asunder. To understand how this happens, it is necessary to go back to an as-yet-undiscussed feature of this text and join it to this analysis. Nothing is more characteristic of the novels of amorous intrigue than the way in which a scheming ego takes over the direction of the plot. Nothing is more important for Roxana's ability to do this than her use of
surrogates. When she needs to dispose of children, recover property, investigate a husband, dispense some largesse, or end an affair, she has at her disposal Amy, who is always ready to busy herself for her mistress. Much of the critical literature on Roxana has found the relationship between Roxana and Amy to be one of the most striking features of the novel.
Over the many different contexts and episodes of Roxana , Amy is much more than the facilitator of Roxana's life of intrigue. Beyond being soul mates, surrogates, or alter egos, Roxana and Amy gradually become doubles. At different points in the narrative diegesis, it is easy to see Roxana and Amy as expressing different sides of one human character. As the deserted mother of starving children, Roxana is paralyzed by pathetic sentiment, but Amy is inventively active; during Roxana's wooing by the landlord, Amy plays the bawd while Roxana clings to respectability; when their ship is caught in a storm on the way to Rotterdam, Amy sees their peril as a judgment for past sins, while Roxana continues on her way after the ship's repair. As long as Amy suffers for and serves her mistress, her extreme loyalty can be interpreted within the coordinates of the servant/mistress relation. When they do things in parallel—have affairs, dress in finery, or grow wealthy—they evidence a mutual identification. But when Roxana strips Amy and puts her into bed with the landlord, we catch the first glimpse of a demonic potential to their relationship. There is also something compulsive, ruthless, and excessive in Roxana's determination to make Amy share the self-pollution Roxana herself feels. At the end of her story, Roxana as a narrator takes note of the antipathy between their two characters. While Roxana suffers the disquiets and persecutions of a bad conscience, Amy seems immune from troubling reflections: "for tho' Amy was the better Penitent before, when we had been in the Storm; Amy was just where she us'd to be, now , a wild, gay, loose Wretch, and not much the graver for her Age; for Amy was between forty and fifty by this time too" (265). As in the divergence between character and portrait in Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray , Amy maintains a vibrant sexuality and licentious youth, while her double, Roxana, bears the weight of sin and age.
What does this doubling of the central character accomplish? By dividing one character into different roles, Roxana expands the variety of her experience and the range of her possible fortunes. Doubling herself helps free Roxana from the limitation of having one particular body, history, or future. But doubling the central character blurs the moral responsibility of social exchange: it makes every social posture and emotional state seem arbitrary and reversible, and by loosening the force of social convention, it opens the plot to more options and enhanced mobility. When, in the
Supplement to the fifth novel, Amy relinquishes her role as indispensable surrogate, the Quaker assumes it in her place. But the narrative does not convey the sense that Roxana has corrupted the Quaker. Instead, "Roxana" has simply "expanded" to acquire a certain stock in the Quaker's respectability. In the last paragraphs of the text we learn that Roxana has to take Amy back into her life, even after Amy's unspeakable crime—the murder of Susan. Roxana can't really survive without her double.
In the final Supplement to Roxana , the double haunts the social with the possibility of radical evil. What kind of narrative supplement is "joined" to the fifth novel in order to complete its account? Viewed from Roxana's side, the final narrative is offered as a story of providential retribution: it describes the gradual steps by which Roxana and Amy are drawn into the unspeakable crime censored from the account of the same action in the previous novel: the murder of Roxana's daughter. But from Susan's vantage point, the narrative recounts a failed quest for a lost parent. In this way, it inverts the comic plot of countless romances, novels and dramas, and anticipates Romantic novels such as Godwin's Caleb Williams and Shelley's Frankenstein . What gives Susan's quest its disturbing power is the way it fuses together two antithetical postures. In nearly every scene in which Susan tenders her claims on Roxana, the narrative presents this quest in two very different ways. First, there is a plaintive sympathetic desire to be recognized by her true mother: "what have I done that you won't own me, and that you will not be call'd my Mother? . . . I can keep a Secret too, especially for my own Mother, sure . . ." (267). But there is also a demonic cast to Susan's investigation. Through a blend of brilliant surmises, lucky hunches, and resolute chase, Susan advances her search in spite of the admonitions and evasions of Roxana and her two agents, Amy and the Quaker. Thus in her very first interview with Amy, Susan's surmises are punctuated with an obsessive claim to an uncanny knowledge: Susan declares "I know. . . . I know . . . I know it all . . . I know it all well enough" (268). Susan's oddly powerful investigation into the hidden truth of Roxana's past means that decisive control of the plot shifts from Roxana's elaborate efforts at damage control to Susan's relentless pursuit of her mother.
Susan appears as the side of Roxana that her whole career has needed to suppress: the original unmasked self, carrying her own given name, "Susan." The rupture in Roxana's narrative progress appears to comes not from the social, but from the inside of her self, in the form of a demonic Other. Susan's address to Roxana takes the form of a demand that Roxana pay a symbolic debt. Viewed retroactively, Roxana's rejection of Susan (and
the other younger children) was the condition of the possibility of Roxana's brilliant career. All these years, Susan has been paying the price for Roxana's freedom, pleasure, and good fortune(s). Now the debt must be paid. Susan will not accept an anonymous legacy; she won't be bought off with money, or with any object. Her demand is more primordial. She wants the one thing Roxana won't give: recognition of her as Roxana's daughter.
As the narrative supplement proceeds, it is evident that Susan, like Amy, cannot be seen simply as other than Roxana. As another side of the divided Roxana, Susan displays an uncannily increasing quantity of power and knowledge. Through a perverse intrapsychic economy, the more energy and deceiving wit Roxana, Amy, and the Quaker put into defending Roxana against Susan, the more knowledge and power Susan acquires (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics , 196). Susan assumes the position of a remorseless and punitive superego, an emanation of a Law that Roxana cannot elude, because it comes from within the self. This law gets its peculiar force from its form: it arrives as a truthful antithesis of the generic ground rules of the fictive narrative. In the novels of amorous intrigue, the intriguer's transgressions depend upon suspending any of the necessary weight of the self's social position, role, history, or relation to others. By using disguise, the ruse, and the lie, the protagonists fashion the social into a space of pleasure, with control going to the most cunning. As masters of these techniques, Roxana and Amy turn every element of the social into an instrument of their progress. Why, then, is Susan such a threat to Roxana? It is a threat because Susan's demand, if accepted, subverts all the modes of Roxana's control; that is, if she gives in to Susan's demand, she loses her control over her social identity (as a virtuous wife and worthy holder of a title, instead of the notorious "Roxana"), over her relationship to her surrogate and alter ego Amy (they fight over what to do about Susan), and even over the narrative of her past (which she exercises in this writing). But given that Susan claims she could keep a secret for her own mother, why does she appear as a traumatic antagonist to Roxana? Roxana claims that if she acknowledged Susan, she "must for-ever after have been this Girl's Vassal, that is to say , have let her into the Secret, and trusted to her keeping it too, or have been expos'd, and undone; the very Thought fill'd me with Horror " (280). Roxana feels horror at the loss of control to another, one with an utterly different agenda. Susan refuses to abstract the past, present, or future into a purely instrumental value. Thus the particular form of Susan's dangerous demand: she articulates her self as an end in itself. In wanting nothing from Roxana but recognition as her daughter,
Susan confronts her with the fundamental ethical relationship: the form of the face of the other as a self, articulated as a demand for human recognition as such.
As the one spectator at Roxana's Turkish-princess performance who was unseduced, as the one person who cannot be bought off, Susan becomes the single "stain" upon Roxana's life, and one with the power to disrupt its closure and mastery: suddenly and uncannily, an obscure kernel with the social symbolic returns the gaze (
[11] The ending of Roxana has been a problem since the eighteenth century. Its anonymous 1745 continuation vitiates the power of Defoe's text by effacing the murder of Roxana's daughter and turning Susan from a double to just another character; by contrast, Godwin draws upon Roxana for the drama Falkland , which becomes the kernel for Caleb Williams (see Peterson, Daniel Defoe , bibliography). In The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot , David Marshall offers a somewhat different interpretation of Roxana 's ending, developing an analogy with psychoanalysis to index the oddity of what I am calling "Susan's Supplement": "Like the patient in the psychiatrist's office who says, five minutes before the end of the hour, 'by the way, there's something I haven't mentioned,'" (146) Marshall's discussion demonstrates how Defoe's recourse to firstperson narrative reroutes the problem of truth and lie in narrative into the problem of false impersonation. Within the thematic that guides Marshall's reading, Susan appears as an embodiment of an audience that won't let Roxana escape from the condition of an essential theatricality (149). While Marshall's study gives theatricality the character of a global problematic of writing, representation, and culture, my study seeks to show how the early novelists translate the general problem of truth and error in performance into specific writing strategies for confronting the antinovel discourse.
Roxana's Failure
At text's end the failure of closure comes not as an ambitious choice but as a kind of short-circuit. Thus the text's last paragraph does not conclude, but instead marks its own failure to win an ending to the story or a resolution of its ethical meaning:
Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy Circumstances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also; the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem'd to follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low again, that my Repentance seem'd to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime. [329–330]
Why does Roxana fail to deliver any "sense of an ending"? Why does the novel fail to conclude? Rather than seeing this ending as a failure of authorial design or novelistic "structure," I am suggesting that the catastrophe that engulfs this narrative is a symptom of the crisis within early modern culture around licensing reading for entertainment. The rupture of the narrative in Roxana implicates three agents: the failure of Roxana as a character to secure her fortune (in both senses, of luck and wealth), the failure of Roxana as narrator to turn a retrospective narrative of her past crimes into a new species of moral wisdom; and, finally, the failure of Defoe to rewrite the novels of amorous intrigue in such a way that the improvement of the novel reader is assured. Another way to put this is that "Susan's Supplement" is a revelation of the bad repetition necessarily involved in any seemingly carefree seriality. Over the course of this uncontrollable series named "Roxana," the problem of true and false performance haunts Defoe's effort to write improving fiction in the guise of the novel—in other words, to do what Roxana attempts most spectacularly in her Turkish-princess dance: enter the space of popular entertainment and come away unscathed.
The historical coordinates designated at the end of the title page—"Being the Person known by the name of Lady Roxana in the time of Charles II"—suggest that Roxana's world comes to her pre-formed by an earlier body of secret histories written by Behn and Manley. If the historical "Roxana" belongs to the time of Charles II, the textual character named "Roxana" indexes novels written with the loose morals and ludic intrigue associated with the Restoration. But if we understand the intertext of the novels of amorous intrigue as a code Roxana manipulates instrumentally, then she as a character, performing as a Turkish princess, and Roxana as the narrator describing that triumph, both occupy the position of Daniel Defoe, who rewrites the novels of amorous intrigue. This exteriority (to an earlier history, to an earlier body of novel writing) confers a certain ludic character on Roxana's gambit: can Roxana play the game she has learned from these texts, but elude their most constraining axioms? Can she, for example, grow rich as a female courtesan in the patriarchal system biased against women? And finally, can Defoe write a critically enlightened series of amorous novels in such a way as to elude their dubious ethical tendencies?
The exteriority to the social that proves so problematic to Roxana as a character also implicates Defoe. The separation this text contrives between Roxana the character—who goes from being a girl to being a naive and deluded wife to being a manipulative courtesan and shrewd investor—and Roxana the narrator—who shapes the narrative of the diegetic present according to the future toward which her life tends in order to claim access to a deeper moral wisdom—produces a book-length face-off between a desiring subject and an ethical one. This rift is at once temporal, epistemological, and ethical. For however vehement the ethical warnings of the narrator, the reader should have doubts about motive: does this narrative produce an honest confession that accepts the force of ethical law, or a cunning exculpatory "story" that evades that law? In such an imbroglio of character and narrator, the defense's case bleeds into the prosecution's indictment.
Roxana 's intimate entanglement of transgression and the Law, pleasure and its foreclosure, puts into question Defoe's project to reform the novel of amorous intrigue. In the preface, the very last text, one surmises, that Defoe wrote after "Susan's Supplement," he suggests that the ultimate efficacy of novel writing becomes hostage to the response of that unruly and unpredictable interlocutor, the reader. There, Defoe admits that "Scenes of Crime can scarce be represented in such a Manner, but some may make a Criminal Use of them . . ."; asserts his authorial intent—"but when Vice is painted in its Low-priz'd Colours, 'tis not to make People in love with it, but to expose it . . ."; and concludes, "[therefore] if the Reader makes a wrong
Use of the Figures, the Wickedness is his own." Here in the preface, Defoe only hints at what "Susan's Supplement" will acknowledge: the existence of an incorrigible evil. Rather than assuming authorial responsibility for the effects of his text—as Richardson and Fielding attempt to do in the 1740s—Defoe packages his text with a warning to all consumers: This narrative contains criminal scenes which may be harmful . . . to the wicked reader. By washing his hands of some readers, Defoe evinces suspicions of the novel reader's dangerous autonomy and license. By reiterating this theme of the antinovel discourse, Defoe implicates his own reform project. But does Roxana reform the novel of amorous intrigue, or does it simply exploit its appeal? Does Defoe achieve a certain autonomy and exteriority to the print-market entertainment he attempts to rewrite? This question is similar to the question that has dogged Roxana: Can she develop an instrumental control of the adventures which enriched her, and pass through "repentance" to reform? The collapse of the narrative puts the projects of character, narrator, editor, and author into question, and suggests that the common answer to these questions is "no." The failure of Roxana throws the novel reader into ethical reflections that challenge the whole system of print entertainment, the whole mise-en-scène of the ego securing its ends within a masquerade of the social, the whole possibility of a carefree absorption of the reader in novel reading. By discrediting the pleasure of the reader's fantasy participation in the novel as a simulacrum of the social, Roxana overwhelms the implicit contract between novel reader and novel writer. It is perhaps appropriate that Roxana is the last novel Defoe would write.