Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress

Amy, Roxana’s maid from the time of her first marriage, is loyal to Roxana “as the Skin to my Back” (25). When Roxana is destitute and cannot pay her wages, this blindly loyal servant stays with her and acts as the agent who finds care for Roxana’s children. Indeed, as Roxana rises in fortune and brings Amy with her, Amy continues to be responsible for providing for Roxana’s children whilst ensuring that they do not get close enough to harm their mother’s reputation.

Nevertheless, while Amy commits extraordinary acts of loyalty to Roxana and is her primary confidante, she is also an agent provocateur. When Roxana is receiving the Landlord’s money and food but has not yet slept with him, Amy is the one who brings up the suggestion of a more lascivious arrangement. She then offers to sleep with the Landlord herself to protect her mistress’s virtue and then retracts, saying that it would not be ignoble for Roxana “to consent to lye with him for Bread” (28). Although Roxana makes the decision herself, Amy functions almost as a voice in her mistress’s head that condones a scandalous course of action. Amy performs a similar function later in the narrative when Roxana has resolved to settle for the Dutchman. Amy then dangles the possibility of marrying the Prince before her mistress, knowing how living “in all the Splendor of a Court” (234) would persuade her. Amy overall functions as a voice that tempts Roxana to have more, take more.

Although Amy seems sexually aware enough to tease Roxana about being with the Landlord a year and a half without falling pregnant, it is Roxana who forces Amy’s sexual initiation, when she “fairly stript her” and “thrust her in” (46) to the bed where the Landlord awaits. Roxana’s divestment of Amy’s “Modesty” (44) is a strategy to stop Amy from judging her, as a fallen maid is more likely to remain loyal to her than a virtuous one. While Amy initially laments being “ruin’d and undone” (47) as the novel progresses she learns to use her sexuality to gain favor and influence, taking up with one of the Prince’s men in France and enjoying “a wild, gay, loose” (267) old age in Holland. In describing Amy’s loose sexual proclivities, Roxana intends to divert the reader’s attention from her own. Instead, she gives the impression that both inhabited a climate of sexual permissiveness and modeled themselves on each other. 

If Amy functions as the scapegoat onto which Roxana’s sexual proclivities are divested, she is also the “thousand Devils, and Monsters, and hard-hearted Tygers” (324) that Roxana knows herself to be, following the business of dispatching her daughter. Amy therefore goes from being Roxana’s trusty agent to an abhorrent reminder of the person she, herself has become.

Roxana’s first husband, the Brewer, whom she marries at the age of 15, is handsome and a prolific father, giving her five children in a short space of time. However, he is also “a weak, empty-headed, untaught Creature” (7) who wrecks his business, loses her personal dowry, and abandons his impoverished family. Although he does not play an active role in the narrative after the first twelve pages, Roxana’s memory of his incompetence cements her attitude towards husbands and marriage for the rest of her life. Until she is threatened with social isolation and the loss of her reputation, Roxana goes out of her way to evade another marriage, preferring the role of an adored mistress who has control of her own finances. 

The Landlord is a middle-aged jeweler whose wife has “been parted” from him “for some Reasons, which make too long a Story” (33). This evasiveness with regard to his first marriage makes him a morally dubious character, as does his protracted courtship of the starving Roxana, whom he plies with meals and gifts until she consents to become his mistress. In the insistence of his courtship, which goes beyond merely ensuring Roxana’s survival to catering to her luxurious tastes, he creates the conditions in which “it was fit for a Woman of Virtue and Modesty, for such he knew me to be, to yield” (33). Nevertheless, once Roxana is with him, she gains all the advantages of a wife without the restrictions, and she expertly manipulates his feelings when she forces him and Amy into bed together. The result is that he learns to “hate […] [Amy] heartily” and Roxana becomes the treasured “Wife of his Affection” while Amy becomes “the Wife of his Aversion” (47). 

In the narrative, the Landlord’s death has an important function, because the riches Roxana inherits from him set her up as a wealthy widow able to continue with her adventures.

The gallant French Prince, whom Roxana meets in Paris following the death of the Landlord while she poses as a bereaved Widow, woos her with consoling statements, compliments on her peerless beauty, and a sequence of gifts, beginning with “a silk Purse” of “a hundred Pistoles” (58). 

The Prince, who already has a legal wife, leads a double life and has several country abodes where his mistresses can go when they are pregnant with his illegitimate children. When he and Roxana go abroad, he claims that she has kept him “Honest” (104) because he would have otherwise visited the prostitutes of Naples and Venice, where whoring is less of a crime. However, when his legal wife dies, he decides to turn his back on sin and “wou’d retire into some Religious House, to end his Days in Solitude” (110). To Defoe’s Protestant England reader, the Prince’s oscillations between lasciviousness and extreme penitence would make him a stereotypical Catholic, guided by passions rather than rationality. 

Although Roxana does not hear from the Prince for years, when she is at a crossroads in her life and resolves to find a husband, the Prince, who has by this stage moved to Germany, is floated up as a possibility. However, a wild-boar-hunt accident gets in the way of this dream coming to fruition. Arguably, the Prince represents the culmination of Roxana’s fantasies of adoration and public promotion; however, given that there is nothing legal binding their contract, he enters and leaves her life like a mirage. 

The Dutch Merchant, “a Person of great Reputation for a Man of Substance, and of Honesty” (111), is an instrumental character who persuades Roxana to sleep with him after he has ensured the safe passage of her inheritance from the Landlord. However, he greatly misunderstands her when he supposes that “his Project of coming to-Bed to me, was a Bite upon himself, while he intended it for a Bite upon me” (144), as she refuses his entreaties to become his wife and secure legitimacy for the child resulting from their union. He therefore functions as an agent who offers Roxana legitimacy and stability, and thereby a form of salvation from whoredom. She rejects this, however, until eleven years later, when marriage is the only option that can keep her bad reputation at bay. The Dutchman continues to misunderstand Roxana when he rejects the Captain’s tale of her ill virtue, preferring to pay money to silence the truth. The Dutchman’s denial is therefore instrumental to Roxana’s ability to get away with her crimes.

Roxana’s daughter from her first marriage, who has worked as a cook-maid in her mother’s London house, is determined to meet and be recognized by her mother. Her role in the novel is to disrupt Roxana’s pretensions of honor at the moment when she has married the Dutchman and believes herself free of her past. The Daughter insists that Roxana is “so like a Lady that she had the Honour to know” (283) in the house where she worked and spreads the tales of Roxana’s misdemeanors to the ship’s passengers. While Roxana perceives that the Daughter wishes to expose and defame her, in reality, the Daughter has a deep emotional need to find her mother, displaying “Tears in her Eyes” (283) both on the ship and at the Quaker’s door. The tragedy of the Daughter’s situation is that her mother only embraces her as her child after she has been murdered. The Daughter’s murdered body, “in a hundred Shapes and Postures […] with her Throat cut […] her Brains knock’d out” (325), haunts Roxana, and her loss hangs in the air at the end of the novel when Roxana is brought to repentance.