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.