37 pages • 1 hour read
Daniel DefoeRoxana: The Fortunate Mistress
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1724A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction and PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
John Mullan, an English professor at University College London, argues that Defoe’s contemporary readership regarded Roxana as problematic, because the infamous heroine’s “penitence might merely be a ‘Consequence’ of ‘Misery’ rather than a proper growth of conscience” (xi). During the course of the novel, the heroine, who prostitutes her virtue to several rich men, “failed to regret her sins while she remained ‘fortunate”’ (xi). This ending, which scandalized publishers steeped in notions of Christian morality, was so unpalatable that a half-century after Roxana’s publication they took it upon themselves to change it. The multiple alternative endings show Roxana truly repenting and making peace with God. Mullan argues that the text was “susceptible to adaptation, because it did not officially have an author” (x), as the only names that appeared on the title-page were those of the bookseller and the narrator’s pseudonym.
While the first-person narrator’s real name is Susan, the name she and the book title go by is Roxana. In 18th-century novels “a name is frequently a sign of self-fashioning individuality” (xix), meaning that the protagonist adopts the name that is best suited to the person they have become rather than their given name. Defoe deemed Roxana an appropriate name for his protagonist because “it was used in the drama of the late seventeenth century as a generic name for an oriental queen” (xvii), in addition to being a common reference to a “courtesan or mistress” (xviii). In becoming Roxana, Susan gains the aura of exoticism and promiscuity.
From a stylistic perspective, Roxana is a garrulous first-person life testimony that reads as though it is being narrated in real time. Mullan writes how “the absence of chapter divisions […] means they are devoid of landmarks; […] Roxana is an undivided flow of recollection and comment” (xxv-xxvi). This, in addition to the relative lack of full-stops compared to semi-colons, gives a sense of indecision as “neither Roxana, nor her sentences, can always reach the conclusions that they would wish” (xxvi).
Preface Summary
The “Writer” claims to tell the true, factual “History” of the “Beautiful Lady […] whose words he speaks” (1). Acting as the Lady’s mouthpiece, the Writer nevertheless states that it has been “necessary to conceal Names and Persons” (1) lest the main actors in the story be identified. He then claims that he knows that at least the “first Part of the Story to be Truth” (2) because he has been acquainted with his subject’s first husband, who is his father.
Turning to the Lady herself, the Writer attests that he does not “recommend her Conduct […] except her Repentance” (2). He then contradicts himself, saying that the lady “met with unexpected Success in all her wicked Courses” and that the favors she attained “cou’d quiet her mind, abate the Reproaches of her Conscience” (2).
The Writer then defends himself against the notion that his narration of the Lady’s biography will corrupt his reader, saying that “when Vice is painted in its Low-priz’d Colours, ’tis not to make People in love with it, but to expose it” (2). He then lays responsibility with the reader, saying that if they make “a wrong Use of the Figures, the Wickedness is his own” (2).
Introduction and Preface Analysis
Both Defoe’s Preface and Mullan’s Introduction highlight Roxana’s troubling moral ambiguity. In the Preface, the Writer claims that he has written a cautionary tale and that Roxana, the woman whose mouthpiece he has become, is repentant and “does not insist upon her Justification in any one Part of […] her Conduct” (2). He further states that the consequences, both moral and material, of the Lady’s vice have been so clearly illustrated that the “Virtuous Reader” (3) stands to improve from reading the work, in line with the eighteenth-century belief that literature stood educate the reader, who would learn from fictional characters’ fates and adventures.
However, from the outset, Defoe’s Preface shows that there will be a less innocent side to this “diverting” story of a “Beautiful Lady” (1). The word “diverting” (1), used twice in the first paragraph, signals both an entertainment and distraction from the straight and narrow path of morality. Concerned as it is with an enticing beauty and her scandalous exploits, the tale stands to provide both kinds of diversion. Further, the Writer detracts from his claim that the Lady is entirely repentant when he alludes to her repeated “Success” in her “wicked” endeavors, and to the fact that “the Wealth she rowl’d in” (2) was comforting enough for the greatest part of her life. As Mullan writes, the Lady’s penitence was “a ‘Consequence’ of ‘Misery’ rather than a proper growth of conscience” (xi).
Defoe therefore implies that the ensuing History will be a portrait of a woman who profits from a life of vice and does not repent it until her circumstances change enough to make her do so. Moreover, while the Writer also attests the virtue of his text, which in being a “History” ought to be a factual autobiography, he contradicts this too, stating that he knows “the first Part of the Story to be Truth” (2) because he has spoken to the Lady’s first husband, who was concerned in it. That the Writer makes no such claims for other parts of the autobiography leaves the reader to conclude that some of it may be less reliably factual, or even the woman’s invention.
Mullan’s introduction confirms that the Writer did not do enough to portray the Lady’s penitence when he states that booksellers, the publishers of Defoe’s work, took it upon themselves to write alternative endings to circumvent what was “testing and troubling” (x) about the original. The Preface’s demonstrations of doubt in the memoir’s veracity is mirrored in the booksellers’ appropriation of Defoe’s text, given that it was “cut loose from the claims of any author” (x) for the half-century following its initial publication. The overriding impression of Defoe’s text is one of unreliability, as the Lady’s narrative is potentially dubious and has an ambiguous moral stance. This requires the reader to not passively absorb the text, but to question both the truth and virtue of its narrator.
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