Looking at the
prevailing obsession with money, the getting and managing of it (and what
happens when you can’t pay your debts), in eighteenth century English
literature – with specific reference to female heroines in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782).
We left Roxana last time (just to recap) having accepted a
contract of cohabitation, written up legally, from the landlord-jeweller. She had removed her competition in terms of
Amy, by causing her to be belittled in both her own and the landlord-jeweller’s
eyes (‘the bedding’ – read, the rape of Amy).
We now come to what happened next – what else will Roxana do to guarantee
her own safety, materially…and emotionally, so she imagines? The landlord-jeweller does not last long now
she has learned the lesson she needed.
They both decide to move on to other ‘transactions’. Roxana meets a Prince.
***
And just in case you’re a trifle lost – here are the earlier
posts in this series, which is really the world’s longest almightiest waffliest
dissertation style essay; I totally forgive you for having lost track of where
we are!
=> that’s the Introduction and Abstract to this mammoth
undertaking!
=> that’s Roxana, Part 1…in a galaxy far far…etc…
And this is Roxana, Part 2!
Welcome! Let’s get back to it!
***
Roxana has learned that to deal with people as transactions,
preferably linked to actual cash and/or goods is a far cleaner way of relating,
for her. This lesson is honed in her
involvement with the Prince, who in terms of his financial acumen is a dinosaur. Not only does he load Roxana down with so
much portable wealth that she actually devotes quite a lot of page space to
worrying how to transport it all (settling on a rather impractical chest which
may be stolen) when they travel: “I had a terrible Difficulty upon me […] in
what manner to take Care of what I had to leave behind me; I was Rich […], very
Rich, and what to do with it, I knew not” (p.100). The trouble with her liaison with the Prince
is that while it makes her very rich indeed, it’s all portables (plate, glass,
jewels, furs etc – pp.70-2) and not money that makes money. Dijkstra presents the liaison as one which
teaches Roxana to capitalise on the area of aristocratic financial stagnancy,
saving the profits for more fruitful reinvestment. Roxana is aware that she herself could fall
out of favour with the Prince at any moment, and so must preserve her “harvest”
(p.75). She has already learned enough
to roundly criticise the Prince’s over lavish gifts and his lack of a sense of
the value of commodities – in which she includes herself, clearly:
…they raise the Value of the
Object which they pretend to pitch upon by their Fancy; I say, raise the Value
of it, at their own Expence; give vast presents for a ruinous favour, which is
so far from being equal to the Price, that nothing will, at last prove more
absurd, than the Cost Men are at to purchase their own Destruction. (p.74)
An early bank in Amsterdam, acknowledged to be the start
of the banking revolution in Europe and the beginning of
the growth of rapacious capitalism, still with us today.
The liaison with the Dutch Merchant is the height of her
learning about economic matters from a relationship; after this liaison she
will be independent of men for a while.
Defoe would have been well aware that Dutch trade was the envied model
of operations in England
at the time Roxana was written: not
only did they have a fully operational banking system, but they understood all
forms of capital management and international transfer of funds[1]. England had aspirations of forming
a similar banking system, and the incident that leads to Roxana’s involvement
with the Dutch merchant serves to emphasize why ‘paperwealth’ is preferable to
portable wealth. For someone who values
her privacy as Roxana learns to, the lesson is worth remembering[2]. The complicated incident of saving her jewels
from someone who is trying to pretend she stole them so he can keep them for
himself teaches her much about both discretion, and the vulnerability of those
who carry hard assets about with them.
Considering how much more portable wealth she has after her relationship
with the Price, it is vital that she learns the lessons of ‘bills of exchange’
– to be able to convert her cumbersome actual wealth to symbolic and clean
(non-traceable and non-accountable) bills.
It is not until she spends her year in Holland, learning the financial system, that
she begins to refer to herself as a “woman of business”, a “she-merchant”
(p.131). She resists the temptation to
form a partnership with the Dutch merchant, arguing in a twenty-paged debate
against marriage for herself, which Dijkstra notes is “in effect as if we are
witnessing two merchants trying to outwit each other in a context of commercial
rivalry” (p.26).
Beth Swan sees Roxana’s insistence on not marrying at this
point as part of an “ongoing critique of law with reference to financial matter
in fiction”, that she sees running through the literature of the whole century[3]. She argues that Defoe’s contemporary readers
would have well understood issues like settlement laws, maintenance of
children, dower and jointure. I concur
with her view (I’ll show it with Amelia’s
entanglement’s with debtor’s prison; and Cecilia’s
plaguey inheritance). Without an
understanding of the basics of the law that stands like that sword of Damocles
over the heads of Roxana’s children at the start of the book; and later, the
disposal of income commensurate with a normal marriage contract, one cannot
fully appreciate Roxana’s determination not to marry. She knows that in her society marriage is
largely “a matter of cost-benefit analysis” – as even the merchant’s arguments
about inheritance imply (p.151) – and that the arrangements have little to do
with any law but economics[4].
Roxana’s period in England is marked by her platonic
association with real-life scion of progressive English capitalism, Sir Robert
Clayton. He teaches her how to invest
and accumulate, in advice that exactly anticipates advice Defoe later provides
in A Plan of English Commerce (1927)
and The Compleat English Tradesman (1728). Following his advice to stay on the same path
that made her rich (not that he is actually aware of the details), she
continues her “depredations on the aristocracy”[5]
that worked on the Prince so well. This
time she snares a King. After this foray, and later a Lord, she decides she
needs to retire, referring to herself as “an old Piece of Plate […] tarnished
and discolour’d” (p.82). Her realistic
assessment of herself as a created commodity with a shifting market value, and
her awareness of its true current earning abilities, has been commented on by
several feminist critics, such as Sandra Sherman:
As a whore, a commodity, she
expands her wealth fabulously. Tutored
by England’s
foremost financier [Sir Robert Clayton] Roxana becomes a construction of the
market […] emerging as a site in which Defoe configures the discourse of the
market through a woman’s capacity to sustain open-ended narrative.[6]
This painting of Sir Robert Clayton by Gainsborough in 1769, when he had just ascended to his Baronetcy.
However, in contrast to the connection Sherman makes between Roxana’s economics and
her gender, Paula Backscheider sees Roxana’s use of the market as
quintessentially male. She pays men in
sex sometimes “because she had rather part with her body than her money” – which
is more valuable to her, as it represents that part of herself and her
circumstances which she can keep firmly in her control[7].
Despite her great wealth she still feels insecure, and
begins to hanker after titles: an even greater form of material security, in
the form of respect and respectability.
Her Dutch merchant reappears and cleverly offers her two titles, one in England and one in Holland, both of which can be bought – saving
her from the need to marry into aristocratic blood. She sees, after this scheme has worked well,
that it may now be time to marry again, as she now has enough wealth to even be
able to give some up if necessary.
Though she has a genuine affection for the merchant, she has been
determined to wait to marry until in a position of financial strength (another
bit of advice urged in Defoe’s Compleat
English Tradesman). She comments to
herself that if she had allowed herself to marry earlier, “I shou’d not have
been half so rich” (p.243).
Critics have been in disagreement over what the many
enumerations of Roxana’s wealth signify for her character within the text. For Dijkstra, who argues that Defoe’s
presentation of the couple’s accounts to each other manifests the “true climax”
to the novel, it is a way of ignoring the emotional side of her personality –
and the consequences this part of her identity suffers by the close of the
book. Hence his eliding of the true
ending of the novel; it does not fit with his reading of events[8]. Mona Scheuermann too views the counting of wealth
as “among the most joyous [sections] in the book”; however, whilst she
acknowledges the able businesswoman in Roxana, she does not pretend to ignore
the cost to Roxana of these many calculations[9]. It has been suggested that Roxana hides her
true self – whatever that may actually be seen to be – behind the transactions and her enumerations of her wealth. For example, Madeleine Kahn argues that her
‘disguises’ (the whole ‘Roxana’ identity, when her real name is Susan, as is
her daughter’s) and her quest for goods are “act[ing] out this fantasy of the
free self in her quest for money”[10]. This is allied with a parallel disregard and
denial of her now grown up daughter, who is catching up with her and will spell
the end of her compartmentalization of herself.
No longer will she be able to juggle the woman, the wife, the whore, the
businesswoman – and “use all of these as a shield against the role of mother”
which she gave up at the start of her financial disasters[11].
Influential feminist reading of Roxana - yet to me, incomplete in its portrayal of her
However, it is at this late stage of the book that she
undergoes a sea change of attitude.
Though she has already begun to experience (intermittently) a paralysing
guilt about the source of her wealth (as discussed earlier in these posts: her
“secret Hell within”, p.260), it is not until the pursuit by Susan that she
begins to crack under the strain. Her
daughter has been searching for her ever more assiduously, and unlike her other
children who have been fobbed off with presents and gifts of security, Susan is
determined to have her real mother in the flesh. Paradoxically, although Roxana entered
prostitution in the first place to ensure that her remaining children had some
money coming to them and were well provided for, she has been content to view them
from a distance – but the child is set on exposing her. Since Roxana’s financial framework now
includes a desperate desire for quiet respectability, she is terrified by this
child’s demands – demands that threaten her “Secret History” (p.317). Thus, her quest for material well-being has
become circular. That is, her movement
from poverty to riches may have involved a gradual but marked expansion in her
horizons – an expansion quantified in terms of large houses, elaborate foods,
expensive trinkets/baubles, and finally, titled friends and gaining a title
herself. Nevertheless, towards the end
of the book, Roxana is so fearful of discovery by Susan, that to avoid
detection she becomes almost reclusive.
A victim of her own renown, she hides in confinement from “that
vexatious Creature, my girl” (p.316).
Thus, towards the end of the book, her life closes her in,
no longer bringing her independence from poverty or the snares of others; or
any kind of happiness – the child threatens to take from her any kind of
security she spent her whole adult life accumulating. James R. Sutherland postulates a persuasive
idea: that all of Roxana’s actions and
reactions in this book are pure economics – all must be paid for; there is
no free lunch. That Roxana’s retribution
at the hands of Susan is all part of the ‘deal’ she must have known she was
making with Providence when she first entered a life of crime, a breaking of
the norms of her society by her chosen profession – be that as whore or businesswoman in a man’s world[12]. He argues that towards the end Roxana becomes a novel of
retribution. This is backed by the text
itself, with the limp and poignant last paragraph including the lines: “I was
brought so low again that my Repentance seem’d only the Consequence of my
Misery, as my Misery was of my crime.”
Not only does Roxana’s lifestyle need to be paid for, but it appears
that Amy may well have murdered Susan for Roxana’s sake. Ironically, Roxana entered prostitution to
protect her children’s security, and
ends up an accessory to murder of her own child to protect her own.
In this way, Roxana is almost entirely defined and framed by
her
need for financial security, leading to her pathological need for privacy,
causing the fear of exposure by her daughter – thus her destiny has been shaped
by herself from the first to last pages of the book. She has always mistaken monetary security for
psychological security. The punishment
(harsh) for this is that she loses all the security she gained: “I fell into a
dreadful course of Calamities, and Amy also, the very Reverse of our former
Good Days” (pp.329-330).
Maxamilian Novak – a staunch disapprover of Roxana’s moral
choices – believes that her predicament is the just consequence of her moral
decline; that she has done nothing but compromise after her initial foray into
prostitution[13]. However, Novak’s reading fails to recognise
the power of Roxana’s financial imperatives.
Her upbringing has made her so fixated on financial matters and their
importance to her that virtually any happening of importance in the book – and
many of little import at all – are couched within the vernacular of banking or
law. Here are three examples out of a huge number of possible instances.
When the Dutch merchant does not insist on their marriage
immediately, when he and Roxana meet again in the second half of the book, she
expresses her relief in a purely monetary way, ever mindful of obligation and
balance, and how debt can be paid:
…Opportunity to discharge the
only Obligation that endanger’d me, […] I hop’d he was satisfied I had paid the
Debt, by offering myself to be chain’d; but was infinitely Debtor to him
another way, for letting me remain free. (p.225)
Indeed, Roxana’s motivations and justifications are ALWAYS
couched in financial terms. Thus when
she decided to give a gift to her friend, the Quaker, on her marriage to the
Dutch merchant, she does so, but first complains the allowance they settle on
her is “a little too much” (despite her own personal riches! [p.250]). She then
decides to give the Quaker and Amy some of her plate – but only because she is
worried her husband might think she had suspiciously too much…
…he might be apt to wonder what
Occasion I cou’d ever have for so much, and for Plate of such a kind too; […]
as cost a hundred and twenty pound […] what I gave the Quaker was worth above
sixty Pounds […] and yet I had a great deal left for my Husband. (p.254)
Finally, when near the end of the book, she quarrels with
Any and sends her away, what she notices foremost is not the lack of her
friend; but the absence of her book-keeper: “I had lost my Right-Hand; she was
my Steward; […] did all my Business, and without her, indeed, I knew not how to go away” (p.318). These kinds of examples are telling: they
show someone in whom normal human relationships have been almost entirely
eroded by an obsession with acquiring (and holding onto) money.
There has been a dual focus at the core of Roxana all the
way through the book. It is undeniable
that there are jaunty passages, where Roxana seems very happy with all she has
accumulated and achieved. Critics like
Dijkstra, and to a lesser degree the feminist Scheuermann, take their cue from
Roxana’s positive appraisal of her life.
Scheuermann makes the vital point that:
Defoe insists in both Moll Flanders and Roxana that a woman’s potential for productive work is limited only
by society’s definition of what means for earning money are available to her.
[…] She is an economically capable human being[14].
But this sunny evaluation is only half the story: the other
side of the tale is the chronicling of an obsession for acquiring security and
money – an obsession that ignores all cost to human relationships. Both Dijkstra and Scheuermann are so keen to
fit Roxana into a mold of female empowerment; they neglect to count the cost to
her of her actions. To say that Defoe conveys
the high cost of Roxana’s economic compulsion is not the same as saying Defoe
or the novel condemn her – here, I depart from the more lurid and judgemental
bias of Starr, and to an extent, even Richetti.
But Defoe made clear that Roxana’s original motivation of the survival
and protection of her children slides chillingly into murdering one of them.
The ending of Roxana
is harrowing in its brevity – in one sentence, the vibrant and flamboyant
career of Roxana is over (pp.329-330): she loses everything, and is thrown into
jail for non payment of a debt, where she repents, tells her tale to a friend,
and dies, penniless but strangely harrowed or cleansed. I wouldn’t say it counts as a repentance
novel – a theme still so beloved as a motif today, and whilst much has been
made amongst certain critics of her being a Protestant and the famous line of
her being a ‘Protestant whore’, as opposed to a Catholic whore, and therefore
with less guilt, it has been implied, I think this nod to religion misses much
social historical and economic reality, by trying to steal retribution/
repentance as the main theme of the novel.
Dijkstra makes no mention of this pathetic end, a thorough
reversal of fortune for Roxana and Amy; it is left to other critics to note
that:
[…] the novel ends without
enclosing its disturbing narrative within the commonplace repentance and
prosperity theme. Her attempt at self determination can only be purchased at
the cost of social and psychological alienation[15].
Novak encapsulates the emotional element of Roxana’s
character that Dijkstra and Scheuermann have ignored, when he reminds us that
the ending of Roxana is charged “with
the kind of raw anguish that the British novel usually avoids”[16].
A Hogarth impression of debtors imprisoned in the Fleet in London, 1757. Roxana was in an Amsterdam jail, but it would have been as squalid - and more lonesome, as she had no one but a s last minute made friend to visit her as she lay dying; not surrounded by her whole family, as shown here...
The book shows both the cost of ruthless economic conquest,
and the socio-economic motivations that a woman can labour under. In the next novel I examine, Amelia, what
happens to the heroine provides a retrospective endorsement of Roxana’s
obsession with finances – as it shows what happens within a marriage of that
period if the wrong financial choices are made by the party with the most
control over them: the male.
[1] Porter,
p.186 (see previous post for full book title etc).
[2] In
A Polite and Commercial People, 1727-1783,
Paul Langford comments on England’s
quest to become a ‘Paperwealth’ like Holland
– and indicates we were well on the way (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 this
edn.), p.568.
[3]
Beth Swan, Fictions of Law
(Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), p.74.
[4] W.
Austin-Flanders, Structures of
Experience: History, Society and Personal Life in the Eighteenth Century
British Novel (Colombia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina
Press, 1984), pp. 58-59.
[5]
Dijkstra, p.56.
[6]
Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality
in the Early Eighteenth Century: Acoounting for Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp.157-158.
[7]
Paula R. Backscheider, ‘Roxana’, in Critical
Essays on Daniel Defoe, ed. Roger D. Lund (New York: G.K. Hall & Co,
1997), p.251.
[8] Dijkstra,
p.65.
[9]
Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn:
Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen (Kentucky: University Press
of Kentucky, 1993), p.54.
[10]
Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism:
Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth Century English Novel (London:
Carroll University Press, 1991), p.75.
[11]
Carol Houlihan Flynn, ‘Defoe’s Idea of Conduct: Ideological Fictions and
Fictional Reality’, in the Ideology of
Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy
Armstrong and Lennard Tennenhouse (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp.73-96
(p.87).
[12]
James R. Sutherland, ‘The Conclusion of Roxana’, in Daniel Defoe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Max Byrd (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall Inc., 1976), pp.132-143 (p.140-1).
[13]
Novak, pp.108, 111, 112-13 (see previous post for full book reference).
[14]
Scheuermann, p.13.
[15]
Clive T. Probyn, English Fiction of the
Eighteenth Century: 1700-1789 (Harlow: Longman, 1987), p.42.
[16] Maximilian
Novak, ‘Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. John
Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, this edn. 2002), pp.41-72
(p.66).
