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.
Pages 220-330Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 220-330 Summary
The Dutch Merchant arrives at the Quakers’ abode and claims that he has been looking for Roxana all over England. Roxana, who thinks she may have a chance of marrying him, is anxious that he does not learn of her infamous lifestyle in London. She has a design of settling with him incognito in the countryside.
Meanwhile, a letter arrives from Amy, who Roxana sent to Paris to look for the Dutchman. Amy states that Roxana stands to do better than the Dutchman if she marries the Prince, who is still alive, wealthy, and gone to Germany, where he would make her a princess. The idea of becoming a princess is extremely seductive to Roxana, and she keeps the Dutchman at bay without wholeheartedly rejecting his suit.
Amy later delivers the news that the Prince has been severely injured in a wild boar hunt and has entered a state of repentance, where he cannot conceive of reuniting with his former mistress. Roxana is irritated at the Prince’s change of heart but consoles herself with marrying the Dutchman and the thought that she could potentially obtain the title of Baronet’s Lady in England or Countess in Holland. The couple stay at the Quakers’ lodgings for about a year, with the plan of going to Holland.
Although Roxana’s wealth and the Dutchman’s combine once they are married, Roxana reserves some money to provide for her two daughters from her first marriage, and she charges Amy with its distribution. One daughter thinks that Amy is her real mother and is devastated to learn that she is not. The daughter vows to find her mother, and upon learning this fact, Roxana hastens to go abroad.
The daughter, however, surprises Roxana on the ship to Holland, where she is posing as a friend of the Captain’s wife. Roxana recognizes her as a maid in her London house and worries that her past is closing in on her. The daughter is “impertinently inquisitive” (281) in asking about Roxana’s whereabouts. The girl begins to gossip that Roxana resembles her infamous London employer who entertained men in her Turkish dress. A panicked Roxana pretends to her husband that she is feeling unwell and may be pregnant. They decide to get off the ship and return to English soil until she is certain of her condition.
Meanwhile, the ship’s Captain tells Roxana’s husband that he has overheard the women gossiping that Roxana has a daughter. The Dutchman passes on the report to Roxana but stipulates that he believes it to be untrue. Roxana creates a diversion through several towns in Southeastern England to prevent her husband and the Captain from talking further and to get away from her daughter.
However, the daughter is relentless in her desire to speak to Roxana and she confesses their relationship to the Quaker woman with whom Roxana is staying. The daughter also harasses Amy, threatening to follow her mother to Holland if that is what it takes to be recognized. Amy suggests to Roxana that they may need to use violent means to get rid of the daughter and the threat of exposure she represents. When Roxana protests—“I wou’d not murther my Child, tho’ I was otherwise to be ruin’d by it” (313)—Amy says that she would, if she were given the opportunity.
One day, Roxana resolves to tell her spouse that she is not pregnant and will go with him to Holland at the earliest opportunity. Her daughter catches her at the Quaker woman’s house just as she is getting ready to leave. Amy, on hearing the news, resolves to deal with the girl, without asking for her Mistress’s permission. Amy pays the daughter off to keep her from following her mother, but she does so in plain sight of an assassin who robs and murders her. Roxana mourns for a month and resolves to keep her surviving children in good living conditions. When she greets one of her surviving daughters, who resembles her, Roxana professes to be overcome with affection and maternal instinct.
When Roxana finally leaves England, she feels relief, and she and the Dutchman pretend that they have been married for eleven years to secure their son’s legitimacy. However, after some “Years of flourishing” (329), Roxana and Amy are miserable by what they have done to her daughter and spend the rest of their days in penitence.
Pages 220-330 Analysis
The last section of the novel displays the tension between Roxana securing a life of comfort through the formerly abhorred post of wife, and the threat of her exposure and ruin.
After the last possibility of “being a Princess” (234) is dangled in front of her and then snatched away, Roxana settles for a more modest but comfortable living with the Dutchman, who promises to procure her a title. In Holland, where the couple propose to live with their newly legitimate son, Roxana hopes to put the infamy of her London past behind her, whilst also providing for her remaining legitimate children.
However, Roxana’s plans are threatened when one of her legitimate daughters, who was a cook maid at Roxana’s salacious London abode, insists that Roxana identify herself as both the famous courtesan and her own mother. The daughter’s persistence and success in tracking down Roxana in her numerous hiding places is almost superhuman. She seems not only a flesh and blood character, but the cipher of truth who “haunted” Roxana “like an Evil Spirit” (310). Roxana and Amy, who acts as her agent, defer their own evilness onto this exposer of truth, and Amy finds that the daughter’s death is the only solution. While Roxana protests that the cost of her reputation is the possible termination of her own child’s life, she does not explicitly prohibit Amy from putting her in danger. In denying the daughter, both her truth and her life, Roxana chooses the illusion of honesty rather than honestly facing up to the consequences of her actions.
The implication of their shared guilt—“[t]he Injury done the poor Girl, by us both” (330)—further wounds the already faltering relationship between Amy and Roxana. Roxana becomes aware that Amy is increasingly an independent agent of her own, and with her considerable resources and information on Roxana’s intrigues, she is a threat to Roxana’s reputation. Roxana’s suspicion of Amy is conveyed throughout the text in the epithet, “Jade” (20), a term that means contemptuous woman. Though the term could equally apply to herself, she defers her feelings of wickedness onto Amy. This change of heart, in relation to Amy, shows how Roxana’s accumulated deception over the years has turned Amy into an accomplice who has the power to destroy her.
Nevertheless, the tension of the threat to Roxana’s livelihood is lessened by the Dutchman’s complete indifference to the evidence of her deception. Even when the Captain goes as far as sharing the rumors about Roxana’s daughter, the Dutchman pays him three or four guineas to have “no more” (296) discourse on the matter. His continued deliberate ignorance of the clues around him imply that Roxana’s marital security would not be threatened by the Dutchman’s discovery of the truth. In the ambiguous morality of Defoe’s text, the husband’s denial, in addition to that of the Quaker woman who mirrors his response, implies that Roxana is surrounded by people who do not hold her accountable for her crimes.
The novel’s final sentence shows that Roxana pays the price for her misdemeanors internally, rather than on worldly terms: “[M]y Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime” (330). In other words, Roxana’s only punishment is her own misery, as she is not brought to justice by the world that would claim moral superiority over her. Readers may feel divided over this ending: While private misery and guilt isolate Roxana from her comfortable surroundings and could be punishment enough, she has gotten away with the gross deception and murder that have real consequences for those in her life.
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