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“THE FATE OF THIS POOR WOMAN”: MEN, WOMEN, AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN MOLL FLANDERS AND ROXANA
A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
by
Peter Christian Marbais
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Dissertation written by Peter Christian Marbais B.A., Ohio Wesleyan University, 1995 M.A., Kent State University, 1998 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2005
Approved by Vera J. Camden, Professor of English, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Donald M. Hassler, Professor of English, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Thomas J. Hines, Emeritus Professor of English
Ute J. Dymon, Professor of Geography Accepted by Ronald J. Corthell, Chair, Department of English Darrell Turnidge, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………….……………………...... iv
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……….1
I. DEFOE AND FATE…………………...………………………………………25
II. DEFOE’S WOMEN IN THE MYTHOS OF FATE AND
INTERSUBJECTIVITY……………………………..………………...…….77
III. MUTUAL RECOGNITION WITHIN THE FATAL MATRIX AND
BETWEEN THE SEXES: MOLL, MOTHER MIDNIGHT, AND
JEMY……………………………………………………………………….149
IV: “THE MISERIES OF FATE”: ROXANA AS MISTRESS OF MEN AND
MISTRESS OVER AMY………………...………………..……………….211
V. THE REWARDS OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION: MOLL CONFRONTS
HER FATE AND OWNS HER SELF…………………...…………………267
VI. TEARS OF MISERY: ROXANA CONFRONTS HER FATE AND HER
SELF.……………………………………………………………………….301
WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………..……347
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the following people and institutions for their comments,
encouragement, and support. Special thanks goes to my dissertation director, Vera
Camden, for having the patience to read draft after draft and for observing how my own
battles have helped me gain insight into intersubjective psychoanalysis. My gratitude
also extends to Shawn Banasick for serving as moderator for my defense and to my
readers, Ute Dymon, Thomas Hines, Donald Hassler, and Beth Wildman, for all of their
suggestions, comments, and dedicated reading. Thanks also to those who responded in
person, by e-mail, or by phone to a persistent doctoral candidate’s enquiries, particularly,
Eugene Bales, Richard Cook, Margaret Ezell, Galen Johnson, and the Spiro Peterson
Center for Defoe Studies. Thank you to all of the librarians, students, university staff,
and colleagues who aided my research, especially Dawn Lashua. Thank you to Kent
State University for making a thousand-mile commute bearable, to Bethany College for
my convalescence, and to Hutchinson Community College for providing a home. Thank
you to Ohio Wesleyan University, especially Jan Hallenbeck, Donald Lateiner, Joseph
Musser, and Natasha Sankovitch, for directing me towards graduate studies, and to my
high school teachers who directed me to college. To my family, church, and friends who
have assisted me in innumerable ways, thank you. Most of all, my love and appreciation
goes to those determining influences who have guided me throughout my life: James and
Margaret Marbais.
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INTRODUCTION
G.A. Starr’s percipient observation that the mother figure is every bit as important
to Moll as Providence is to the isolated, paranoid Robinson Crusoe anticipates my
argument that Defoe’s female characters play crucial fatal roles and his male characters
play key providential roles in Moll Flanders and Roxana.1 These deterministic
influences on Defoe’s heroines help them construct their histories and their selves as they
navigate through brutal circumstances, the demands of necessity, and the interwoven
threads that connect them to others. My dissertation is dedicated to examining both the
interwoven relationships within both novels and how fatal and providential elements
influence the heroines’ lives. Rather than focus primarily on Providence or on Fate, I
examine how both forces operate within these texts, how various characters embody
these forces, and how by employing both feminine and masculine controlling forces in
his narratives, Defoe creates texts in which his characters are bound to and constructed by
others who play feminine and masculine roles. Ultimately, Moll succeeds because she
accepts both forces, both sexes, and all the attendant roles, aspects, and functions of these
seemingly oppositional groups as part of her life; Roxana fails because she divides
everything in her life into mutually exclusive components that do not allow her to accept
multiple possibilities in her life.
1 G.A. Starr, introduction, Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe (1722; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971) x. For ease of reference, whenever I refer to Defoe’s texts, I will abbreviate the citations as follows: CJ for Colonel Jack, MF for Moll Flanders, R for Roxana, and RC for Robinson Crusoe.
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In order to navigate the skeins of self and other interwoven throughout the web of
intersubjective relationships in Defoe’s narratives, this introduction will define the terms
I employ throughout the dissertation; contextualize my critical analysis within
intersubjective psychoanalysis, historical gynocriticism, and feminist theory; summarize
the six chapters I devote to Defoe’s heroines; and assert my contribution to Defoe studies:
an understanding of how Moll Flanders and Roxana are gynocentric texts based upon the
intersubjective claim that the modern subject must be an overinclusive individual who
owns her past and accepts responsibility for her actions by acknowledging her
interrelatedness with other subjects. This contribution is conveyed by analyzing a
woman who recognizes the roles of both Fate and Providence in her life and a woman
who disowns her past and fails to see how both forces manifest in her life. To understand
why one woman fails and one woman succeeds, I examine the roles of both men and
women and both Fate and Providence in their narratives by situating this examination
within the critical framework of intersubjective psychoanalysis, a theoretical system that
allows for both/and relationships between what at first appear to be mutually exclusive
components.
Fate and Providence are critical components of both narratives, as a number of
critics have noted over the years. Of these voices, the most influential works on
Providence in Defoe’s writing include Leo Damrosch’s God¶s Plot and Man¶s Stories:
Studies in the Imagination from Milton to Fielding (1985), J. Paul Hunter’s The Reluctant
Pilgrim: Defoe¶s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (1966),
and G.A. Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (1965). Unfortunately, until Robert
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A. Erickson’s seminal work, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-
Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, Sterne) (1986), appeared, precious little
consideration was given to Fate in Defoe’s narratives. This critical omission is peculiar
given the many ways in which Defoe employs Fate within his narratives. Defoe was well
aware of literary uses of Fate, and though a Puritan schooled in the tradition of
Providence, he employs Fate as much as he employs Providence in order to create texts in
which masculine and feminine forces and characters interact and interrelate.
Although Chapter One will go into further detail about Fate, Providence, and, to
some extent, Fortune as Defoe employs them, a brief definition of these terms is in order.
When I capitalize Fate, I use it in one of three manners: a reference to one of the three
Greco-Roman sisters, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; an adjective or noun complement
that likens a character to one of these deities; or the abstract force, “principle, power, or
agency by which, according to certain philosophical and popular systems of belief, all
events, or some events in particular, are unalterably predetermined from eternity”
(“Fate,” def. 1a). I often refer to Fate figures, characters who embody one of the aspects
of the Fates or who act in a fatal manner. Uncapitalized, fate is “the predestined or
appointed lot” of an individual (“Fate,” def. 3b). This definition of fate is synonymous
with destiny: “[one’s] appointed lot of fortune” (“Destiny,” def. 2). Thus, I may refer to
Fate determining Moll’s fate in order to convey how the three sisters or the abstract force
controls Moll’s lot, her fortune or destiny, in life.
In much the same way, I refer to Providence and, less frequently, Fortune.
Providence, when capitalized, indicates “The foreknowing and beneficent care and
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government of God (or of nature, etc.); [and] divine direction, control, or guidance”
(“Providence,” def. 3). I refer to Providence figures who act as agents of Providence,
men and women who help draw the heroines to God through deliverance or drive them to
God through punishment (Hunter, Reluctant 68). In the lower case, providence is “An
instance or act of divine intervention; an event or circumstance which indicates divine
dispensation. [More specifically, a] special providence [is] a particular act of direct divine
intervention” (“Providence,” def. 5). I differentiate special and general providences in
Chapter One, and I must note that in the lower case, providence is often regarded as one’s
assigned lot in life (“Providence,” def. 3b), although Defoe infrequently employs
providence in this manner. Providence is crucial to Moll and Roxana, and it coexists
with Fate throughout both narratives. Fortune also appears in both narratives. When
capitalized, it is the Greco-Roman goddess: “the power supposed to distribute the lots of
life according to her own humor” (“Fortune,” def. 1a). In lower case, fortune refers to
wealth, luck, or good standing; it also refers to one’s lot in life, much as the case with
fate, destiny, and providence (“Fortune,” def. 5). The latter concept appears in Defoe’s
fiction, but it is employed in such a general sense that it becomes little more than an
accoutrement of the narrators; certainly it is something both heroines seek and gain, but it
does not have as great an impact on how their histories and their very selves are
intersubjectively created.
Of the three controlling forces, Fate is the most prevalent in Moll Flanders and
Roxana. Both heroines acknowledge others as having fatal powers, and many characters
are, in fact, Fate figures who help determine the fate of each heroine. Moll’s fate is her
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unconscious desire to reclaim her past, to acknowledge whence she was born by
confronting Newgate, and to be reborn as a penitent. Often, I condense this meaning to
her unconscious desire to confront Newgate. Roxana’s fate is disastrous because she
chooses to disown her past by denying her daughter. More significantly, both heroines
and other characters in their stories act as Fate figures, individuals who literally or
figuratively create, apportion, and destroy the lives of others. Fate also appears in the
metaphors of spinning and weaving, which are ideally suited to the connections between
characters in these narratives because the strands woven by the various Fate figures
intertwine, crossing over one another again and again until it is difficult to determine who
is responsible for a given outcome. This interconnectedness necessitates a shared
responsibility, indeed a shared agency, in which the characters at times assume the
responsibility for one another’s actions and at times deny this shared agency.
Despite the fluidity of the relationships between the narrators and others, not all of
the relationships in these stories are as open as an entirely fatal system would allow, for
Defoe also employs the more rigid providential system in his narratives. Providence
figures such as Jemy and the Dutch merchant guide the narrators to take ownership of
their past. To repent, they must tell their stories and take responsibility for how they have
affected others. Moll embraces Providence and becomes a penitent by relating to Jemy
and Mother Midnight even as she performs a number of fatal roles, thus embodying both
Fate and Providence. Roxana splits her self from others and aspects of her self from her
self, thus making it impossible to accept both Fate and Providence. She splits everything
in her life into either/or dualisms; when she sees both Fate and Providence in her life, she
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chooses to embrace the former concept alone because it binds her to women rather than
men and affords what she believes to be independence. In the end, Moll embodies both
systems; Roxana is condemned by both. Defoe does not place his characters solely in
either a gynocentric universe governed by Fate or a phallocentric, providential realm in
which God the Father controls man through a predestined plan; he places them within a
universe in which they must accept both systems as vital to survival.
To understand how the characters interrelate within stories governed by two
controlling forces, one must adopt a critical approach that allows for multiple possibilities
rather than one that limits interpretation to binary oppositions and hierarchical dualisms.
Intersubjective psychoanalysis meets this challenge, for its focus is on the third space
created between individuals when they interact rather than on one side or the other of
these interactions.2 Although rooted in the androcentric tradition begun by Freud,
intersubjective psychoanalysis moves beyond creating oppositions of male/female or
good/bad and focuses on the relationships between others as well as the relationships
within the mind of an individual (Benjamin, Bonds 20). This relational branch of
psychoanalysis is much like Defoe’s narratives about women; it maintains tensions
between supposed opposites. For this quality alone, it is ideally suited for analyzing two
narratives in which the tension between Fate and Providence is maintained in healthy
relationships and broken down in pathological ones. It further allows us to comprehend
the interwoven, often tangled, relationships Defoe’s heroines create with others within
2 Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995) 9; Muriel Dimen, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power, Relational Perspectives Book Ser. 22 (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2003) 4.
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the fatal matrix of interconnected bonds in their lives along with the less flexible but
mutual relationships offered by the Providence figures in their lives.
The intersubjective approaches developed by Jessica Benjamin and Muriel Dimen
help unravel the skeins of the webs woven within Defoe’s narratives. Their approaches
foremost claim “that the individual grows through the relationship to other subjects” not
just objects (Benjamin, Bonds 19-20). Intersubjective theory offers an understanding of
the various relations within the web of interconnectedness between Defoe’s heroines and
other characters because it focuses on the “unexplored territory in which subjects meet”
(Benjamin, Bonds 25). Benjamin explains how intersubjective theory differs from earlier
psychoanalytic models that maintain an intrapsychic perspective that “conceives of the
person as a discrete unit with a complex internal structure” and claim the individual
grows through relationships between herself and others she perceives as objects (Bonds
20). Intersubjective psychoanalysis can be maintained along with the intrapsychic
approach by revealing the interaction between like subjects in addition to the interaction
between the subjects and others she perceives as objects, for subjects can perceive others
as objects and subjects simultaneously (Benjamin, Like 6). The basis of intersubjective
relationships are the mutual bonds created by like subjects, people who “recognize the
outside other as a separate and equivalent center of subjectivity” (Benjamin, Like 7).
Understanding how mutual bonds are maintained between like subjects and
distorted into hierarchical relationships between subjects and objects allows the reader to
comprehend why Moll succeeds and Roxana fails; after all, their success and failure is
directly tied to how they interact with others and whether they own their experiences,
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their histories, and their selves by attesting to these bonds. Moll becomes an
overinclusive character, one who can accept “both/and” rather than “either/or”
relationships that allow her to maintain tension between any supposed opposites such as
Fate and Providence or mother and whore (Benjamin, Like 9). Roxana, on the other
hand, limits herself to splitting everything she perceives and experiences into mutually
exclusive components; she cannot maintain the tension between such apparent opposites
as Fate and Providence.
Intersubjective psychoanalysis reveals the strength of the mutual bonds Moll
forms between herself and others. Every individual seeks acknowledgement from outside
herself “by being with another person who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her
intentions, her existence, her independence” (Benjamin, Bonds 21). Furthermore, every
individual needs mutual recognition, acknowledgement from a subject who recognizes
her as a subject and whom she recognizes as a subject, in order to differentiate herself
from others as a distinct individual (Benjamin, Bonds 23). Herein lies what dualists
would see as a paradox: “at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are
dependent upon another [who is likewise independent] to recognize it” (Benjamin, Bonds
33). The relationships between Moll, Jemy, and Mother Midnight reveal this paradox: to
be independent and to become penitent, Moll relies upon these two characters to help her;
she is dependent upon others to gain independence. Moll recognizes others who function
as Fate figures and as Providence figures, and through this recognition, she becomes a
penitent Fate figure who embodies elements of both systems. She can become such a
figure only because she maintains mutual bonds with others.
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Roxana’s failure to create mutual bonds because she resorts to splitting and
projection is also best understood via intersubjective psychoanalysis. Rather than
maintain mutual relationships with others in which she and they both recognize and assert
themselves, she breaks down the tension between her self and others and creates
complementary relationships. She first establishes a mistress-slave relationship with her
maid, Amy, by dominating her and treating her as an object, then she establishes a
master-mistress relationship with her first lover by submitting to his will and acting as an
object to him. Roxana either asserts herself or recognizes the other, but she never does
both simultaneously, for once she creates complementary bonds of domination and
submission, she cannot maintain mutual relationships.
For the reader who is unfamiliar with psychoanalytic terminology, a brief
definition of the terms I most frequently employ is necessary. Relational psychology
employs four terms concerning the individual: self, subject, other, and object. The two
most easily confused are the self and the subject. The self is a mental construction, “a
historical being that preserves its history in the unconscious” (Benjamin, Like 13).
Although the self possesses “multiple positions and voices,” it can be perceived as a
“person’s singularity, his or her […] unique idiom” that essentially defines a person
(Benjamin, Like 13). The self is constructed by the subject, which is a construct of the
individual’s physical and psychological faculties and interactions with others, be they
objects or subjects.
Unlike the self, the subject is mental and physical, conscious and unconscious;
Benjamin calls the subject “a locus of experience, [...] that need not be centrally
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organized, coherent, or unified” (Like 12-13). The traditional psychoanalytic view of the
subject is of an active capacity, as in Hoffman’s definition: “the capacity to posit the self
as the independent agent who determines or controls thoughts and actions” (qtd. in
Benjamin, Shadow 39). This model allows for the polar opposition of active
subject/passive object to persist, so Benjamin modifies this notion of agency to include
authorship and ownership in “a symmetry between two active partners” (Shadow 40).
These active partners are like subjects, individuals who recognize one another as
independent beings and not mere objects (Benjamin, Like 7). Intersubjective theory
views the subject as motivated by the “need to create or maintain bonds to others.”3
Through this interaction, the subject shapes the identities of others and fulfills their need
for intersubjective bonds. In essence, the constructivist nature of intersubjective theory
views the subject as more than a single, essential core in which we have faith.4 The
intersubjective self is an open system shaped by other subjects; she is a subjective
construction born into a complicated web of relationships.
The other is important to the self, and it is often confused with the object, for the
former may be object, but the former may also be a subject. The mutual, non-
complementary self is dependent upon the other “because the self is trying to establish
himself as an absolute, an independent entity, yet he must recognize the other as like
himself in order to be recognized by him” (Benjamin, Bonds 32). Intersubjectively, the
other is another subject; the person who is “truly perceived as outside [the self], distinct
3 Peter Buirski and Pamela Haglund, eds, Making Sense Together: The Intersubjective Approach to Psychotherapy (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001) 2. See also Lewis Aron, A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. 1996) ix. 4 Noelle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000) 139.
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from our mental field of operations (Benjamin, Like 29). Also, it is the other subject that
gives the self recognition, “which it cannot have without being negated, acted on by the
other, in a way that changes the self, making it nonidentical” (Benjamin, Shadow 79).
Although alike in many ways, subjects can recognize the difference of the other without
reducing the other to a mere object. Intrapsychically, as “the otherness within,” the other
is an internalized object that belongs to the self (Benjamin, Like 13). This is due to
splitting, in which “the subject now fills the position of the other [...] not with an outside,
differentiated being but with the self’s disowned, unconscious experience, which appears
as a threatening Other” (Benjamin, Like 18). An object, then, is an internal, mental
representation of an other (Benjamin, Bonds 12). The object is “the psychic
internalization and representation of interactions between self and objects” (Benjamin,
Like 28). Both intrapsychic and intersubjective approaches enable us to analyze how a
subject relates to others. If the subject fails to relate to others intersubjectively, though,
she will confine herself to objective relationships. A subject can maintain both
intersubjective and intrapsychic relationships and must do so in order to survive.
Analyzing how the bonds between Defoe’s female and male characters form
requires insights from other critical approaches, particularly feminism and historical
gynocriticism. I rely on Defoe scholars and critics of the early modern novel for their
valuable insights, but I draw much of my observations about the bonds formed between
Defoe’s characters from the work of those who investigate the bonds between early
modern men and women. To understand feminine agency, particularly the many roles
women play, I rely upon theories of early modern motherhood and maternal agency
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developed by Toni Bowers in The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture,
1680-1760 (1996) and by Felicity A. Nussbaum in Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality,
and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (1995). I also draw upon
Elizabeth Bergen Brophy’s exploration of the relationships between women in early
modern fiction and reality in Women¶s Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel (1991)
and Helene Moglen’s groundbreaking work on the formation of the novel within the
context of gender splitting in the early modern period, The Trauma of Gender: A
Feminist Theory of the English Novel (2001). These works and the critical responses
they have inspired offer valuable insights into the relationships between male and female
characters and men and women of Defoe’s day. I employ these valuable critical insights
in my own reading of the bonds between men and women in Defoe’s narratives in order
to reveal the dynamic nature of the relationships he creates within his narratives about a
woman who succeeds and a woman who fails.
Examining the bonds between Defoe’s men and women within the context of Fate
and Providence reveals how tightly constructed each narrative is in terms of psychology
and soteriology. Moll establishes relationships with like subjects, people who mutually
recognize her and enable her to become a penitent after she confronts her greatest fear:
returning to Newgate. Roxana forms complementary bonds with others she treats
objectively and who, in turn, treat her as an object. She fails to become a penitent
because she wishes to remain enmeshed only in the fatal bonds she shares with other
women and refuses to act according to the direction of Providence figures in her life.
Defoe creates a myth about the individual needing others in order to survive that suits
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readers who view this need for others in terms of the psyche and readers, especially
Defoe’s contemporary Puritan audience, who understand this myth in terms of the soul.
My first chapter on Defoe’s new myth grounds my argument in the language of
Fate and Providence and establishes how I employ the intersubjective school of
psychoanalysis to Defoe’s narratives. I explain how Fate, Providence, and Fortune are
depicted in Western literature, and because too little has been done to explore the role of
Fate in Defoe’s fiction, I contextualize his use of it by noting significant conventions and
questions concerning Fate from Homer to Defoe. Fate is a creative, manipulative, and
destructive force, and Defoe explores all three qualities of Fate in the various roles
associated with women, particularly mothers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds, and
witches. He employs Fate to situate his heroines within a complex web of agency, but he
also employs Providence to situate them along the rigid chain of being connecting God
and mankind. In Western literature, Fate and Providence suffer the same split that
divides the genders: Fate is associated with femininity, and Providence with masculinity.
Roxana goes along with this split, choosing the fatal connections over the providential
ones, but Moll realizes that she can exist within both systems. Employing Fate as he does
allows Defoe to articulate how fluid the boundaries between self and other have become
within the more open network of relationships in modern society, and employing
Providence provides him with a more rigid framework on which to judge the actions of
his characters. By employing both controlling forces in Moll Flanders and Roxana,
Defoe, I contend, creates a new myth of agency for the modern person. It is an
overinclusive myth that insists characters must accept seemingly mutually exclusive roles
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as part of who they are in order to take ownsership of their histories and their very selves.
His heroines live according to the intersubjective myth that clarifies how the modern
individual needs the help and guidance of others in order to survive.
The myth Defoe creates with Moll Flanders and Roxana is truly intersubjective,
for his heroine’s stories are interwoven with those of other women and men; the fabric of
Moll’s tale does not tear because it is bound by mutual bonds that strengthen her self, but
the fabric of Roxana’s story is one of two complementary patterns that are split due to the
lack of mutual connectivity. Understanding how these differing fabrics are woven
requires a focus upon one set of threads after another, or else the reader may become lost
within the complex patterns, knots, and tangles that form within the narrator’s stories. In
Chapter Two, I focus on the women of the narratives who are often dismissed as
secondary characters, for their relationships to the narrators determine the patterns that
enable Moll to succeed and Roxana to fail. By first examining how these Fate figures
motivate, influence, and control one another’s lives in a web of shared agency, the reader
can begin to comprehend how each narrator develops her subjectivity and sense of self.
The first section of Chapter Two concerns how the Fate figures in Moll Flanders
prefigure Mother Midnight. From these women, Moll learns how to receive instruction
from others, to recognize limits imposed upon her by society, to assert her self within the
confines of the mercenary world, and to become a Fate figure herself. They teach Moll
how to create, apportion, and destroy via the traditionally feminine roles of mother,
spinsters, midwife, prostitute, bawd, and witch. This ability to learn from Fate figures
and help others in turn allows her to become a Fate figure who eventually patterns her
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own experience so that she can confront her past in Newgate. In prison, she confronts her
fate and become a penitent Fate figure who embodies elements associated both with Fate
and Providence. Before doing so, she receives guidance from others and meets two
figures who help her own her past once she reaches Newgate: Mother Midnight and
Jemy, the subjects of Chapter Three.
The second section concerns how Fate figures influence and serve Roxana. In the
very beginning of her story, the three comforters act as all three Fates, apportioning her
lot as Lachesis, disposing her children like Atropos, and delivering her into a new world
as Clotho. The Turk, who appears after Roxana creates the split that leads to her
destruction, is associated with the birth of the public identity that drives Roxana into
secrecy and a more literal infanticide. The Quaker is the woman whom Roxana uses to
remain safe from her own past and who unintentionally helps Roxana confront her
infanticidal self. Even the minor characters reveal how Roxana dominates others, uses
them as objects, and breaks down nearly every tension in her life. Her objective
treatment of others and breaking down of the tension between herself and others taints
her relationships with men and her constant companion, Amy, a process which I analyze
in Chapter Four.
Chapter Three concerns how Jemy and Mother Midnight enable Moll to survive
in the early modern period by acting as subjects who mutually recognize one another and
by helping Moll become overinclusive. They help her gain recognition and support from
others, giving her the ability to fulfill her fate: to confront Newgate and emerge as a
penitent Fate figure. I shift the focus to Moll’s relationships to Jemy and Mother
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Midnight in order to analyze how subjects can maintain tension within paradoxical
relationships. I begin by describing the paradox of independence and dependence within
mutual recognition and the dangers of breaking down the tension via splitting. To
illustrate how the tensions between male and female, self and other, and Providence and
Fate are maintained in Moll’s story, I focus upon Moll’s success in mutually recognizing
others, particularly Jemy and Mother Midnight, because she recognizes them as
individual subjects with desires of their own, and they treat her likewise. It is in her
relationship with these two characters that the intersubjective strands that connect Moll to
everyone in her story are most obvious and significant.
The first section concerns how Jemy, unlike men before him, is more than a mere
complement. He is like Moll in many ways, and although he leaves her, she recognizes
that like him, she is an active subject and not just a passive object. She recognizes him as
a like subject, another person who has similar desires to her own but who is nonetheless
different from her. This recognition allows her to become an overinclusive subject, a
woman who recognizes that she need not be limited to the gender roles assigned to her by
society and who embraces both/and relationships that allow her to act both as a mother
and a whore, both as a subject who needs others and a subject who can assert herself.
Jemy enables her to realize she possesses both active and passive capacities and both
masculine and feminine characteristics. This recognition, in turn, allows Moll to become
a character who is bound both to Providence and to Fate, controlling forces typically split
according to the division of masculine and feminine. She continues to seek the help of
Fate figures like Mother Midnight, but she also broadens her patterns of experience to
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include the advice of Providence figures. Both Jemy and Mother Midnight aid Moll
without serving as mere objects to be used by her. Both also contribute to her conversion
at the end of the story.
The second section concerns how Mother Midnight operates as a Fate figure who
leads Moll to her fate. Mother Midnight acts as a figurative mother and witch, and as a
literal bawd. She performs all three fatal functions as creator, apportioner, and destroyer,
shaping Moll as no other character has before. She is crucial to Moll’s development
during two key episodes: the birth of Jemy’s son and Moll’s embarkation on her career as
a thief. Moll’s pattern of illness, assistance, and transformation is repeated in these two
episodes, and it further develops in the final episode with Mother Midnight in Newgate,
which I focus upon in Chapter Five. The transformations Moll undergoes in these
episodes is great, for her decision to turn thief is the manifestation of her subconscious
desire to confront her place of birth. This decision is assisted by Mother Midnight, but
unlike Roxana, Moll does not blame others for what she does; instead, she accepts her
decisions as her own while simultaneously maintaining that her decisions impact the lives
of others.
Moll’s interactions with Jemy and Mother Midnight prepare her for her
confrontation with Newgate. They help her understand that she is an active subject in
control of her own life, thus a Fate figure who controls her own destiny, and they enable
her to accept both masculine and feminine roles, active and passive aspects of her self,
thus preparing her to become an overinclusive Fate figure, the final transformation I
analyze in Chapter Five.
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Chapter Four reveals the mirror-side of Moll’s acceptance of both Fate and
Providence. Like Moll, Roxana has a key female figure and a key male figure in her life,
but how she interacts with them determines her failure. Roxana becomes a destructive
Fate figure who determines everything in her life according to a reductive dualistic
system, thus breaking the necessary tension between her self and others, and the tension
between Providence and Fate. She splits everything in her life into complementary
opposites, reducing her relationships to others to ones of domination and submission.
The relationships she has with Amy and the men in her life must be read in
sadomasochistic terms of complementarity. She will neither submit to others nor
recognize their desires, so she ends up being master of a fragile existence based upon her
own delusion of omnipotence. Her domination of Amy and refusal to marry the Dutch
merchant when he first proposes to her reveal that she is unable to both assert herself and
recognize others—she can only submit or dominate, and she tries most often to do the
latter. Her failure to maintain the tensions between her self and others is due to the
splitting that develops in the three comforters episode, and it causes the prostitution
pattern she begins in the bedding scene.
The split in Roxana’s life begins with the three comforters episode, when Amy
and her accomplices counsel and act for Roxana. By allowing others to act for her,
Roxana begins to split what she accepts and rejects about her self, projecting onto others
what she despises about her self. This dynamic of division becomes the pattern that
shapes all of her relations within and between her self and others. Having split her self,
Roxana continues to divide everything in her life into complementary opposites. She
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divides men from women in the bedding scene according to the customary active/passive
split when she begins the prostitution pattern. This pattern leads to further splitting in
which Roxana becomes even more passive as she allows Amy and men to serve her while
acting as an object to them. She yields to her landlord’s propositions in the bedding
scene, establishing the prostitution pattern that she follows with every lover she
encounters. This pattern firmly establishes the complementary relationships between
Roxana and others. Both relationships are rooted in sadomasochism: Roxana acts as the
dominating mistress over Amy and the submissive mistress to men.
The splitting in these patterns ultimately leads to her failure to accept a
providential figure who offers a relationship based upon mutuality and overinclusiveness.
Her refusal to accept the Dutch merchant’s proposition when he first appears in her life
reveals two failures: first, the failure to recognize herself as part of two systems, that of
Providence and Fate, because she limits herself to fatal relationships by making either/or
split decisions; and second, the failure to heed the providential call to marriage, which
proves to the Puritanical audience that Roxana is a damned reprobate. Even when the
Dutch merchant employs the language of both Fate and Providence, she continues to
adhere to her decision to be a kept woman, thus ignoring the fatal and providential
intervention of an overinclusive character who offers her protection.
For Roxana, her sense of self is all or nothing: she can be a mistress in control of
her own finances and decisions, or a wife subject to the whims of her husband.
Ironically, although Defoe’s contemporaries often perceived the prostitute as a
masculinized woman, Roxana’s reality is not of an autonomous individual who, like a
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man, is free to do as she pleases. Instead, she is a passive, kept woman who is confined
to her quarters so she may be accessible to her lover whenever he pleases. She limits
herself to this realm of non-agency by refusing to relate to others as like subjects,
splitting her self from others and limiting her self from embracing paradoxical
possibilities such as becoming a penitent Fate figure. Her story is a dark narrative in
which the intersubjective bonds between her self and others are distorted by the
complementary dynamics of sadomasochism. The result of any sadomasochistic
relationship is abandonment or death,5 and this outcome becomes Roxana’s reality and
my focus of Chapter Six, which is on the fate of Defoe’s so-called “Fortunate Mistress.”
The final chapters concern the positive resolution of Moll Flanders and the
negative resolution of Roxana as the characters encounter their past selves. Moll finally
confronts her birthplace, Newgate Prison, and Roxana denies the daughter who signifies
both her infanticidal self and her years as a courtesan. Moll and Roxana prove their
characters psychologically and spiritually in the final pages of their narratives as one
overinclusively accepts the multiple possibilities and paradoxes of being a penitent Fate
figure and one refuses to acknowledge the multiple possibilities in life by splitting
everything and disowning whatever disturbs her. There are multiple reasons why Moll
succeeds and Roxana fails; chiefly, Moll is the heroine who delights in her remaining
days because she owns her story and Roxana is the tragic character who suffers because
she disowns it.
5 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988) 65-66.
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Chapter Five analyzes how Moll organizes her life through repentance, takes
ownership of her story, and becomes overinclusive. She tells her story in order to take
responsibility for her past actions. Despite her picaresque lifestyle throughout the first
two thirds of her story, she strives to be a good wife who is not a threat to the social
order; were she a threat, Defoe’s audience would expect her to suffer much as Roxana
does. Although her story is a social critique of the objectification and marginalization of
women in early modern society, she succeeds because she does what a good Christian
woman should do: repent and marry. However, she also succeeds because she takes
ownership of her story and her many selves through her repentance narrative. Even as
she becomes a penitent, she maintains her many roles as a Fate figure, continuing to
create, apportion, and destroy as a mother, midwife, and counselor to the others in her
life.
A joyful, sorrowful woman whose spirituality is expressed in sexual terms and
whose motherhood includes nurturing and infanticidal roles, Moll is the embodiment of
the paradoxical tensions that exist within an individual and between individuals. Because
she can maintain tensions, Moll need not subordinate Fate to Providence or woman to
man. Just as she can be both joyful and sorrowful, she can be both a Fate figure and a
penitent. Moll’s true self is her story, and she has played many roles as well as being a
subject to Providence and the eighteenth-century model of motherhood. As a heroine,
she remains multi-faceted. Moll shows that any woman who comes to terms with
intersubjective agency can possess such a seemingly paradoxical title as penitent Fate
figure.
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As a stark contrast to Moll, Roxana is a victim of her fate. Chapter Six explores
her fate of misery and isolation as the result of her failure to become an overinclusive
figure like Moll because she splits everything in her life into mutually exclusive
components, persists in shrouding her past in secrecy, and refuses to own her past.
Roxana fails to accept multiple roles and aspects of her self, confining herself to an ever-
lessening sphere of influence that ultimately traps her within a state of abject misery. As
such, she is a psychological failure, and she is also a spiritual failure. Because she has
repeatedly prostituted herself rather than seek marriage, she defies the social order and
proves herself a licentious reprobate. She is a failure because she proves herself a
reprobate and a woman trapped within the complementary limitations of omnipotence.
Roxana is a masterpiece of failure, a cautionary tale for those who would deny
their mutual bonds to others in favor of complementary, objective relationships. She
does not maintain necessary tensions in her life, choosing instead to disown roles and
aspects of her self in favor of those roles and aspects she wishes to embrace. She
struggles to define herself as a mother and a wife after a lifetime of being a whore, not
realizing that she is all of these roles and more. All her life, she chooses Fate and
mistresshood by ignoring Providence; once she accepts a providential figure, though, she
tries to limit herself to the roles of wife and mother because they are recognized as part of
the providential system. Such a limitation is not possible because of her daughter Susan,
who is a marker of Roxana as infanticidal mother and mercenary mistress.
Roxana’s story ends with her futile attempts to keep her past a secret and her
inability to repent because she disowns her past. Her past catches up to her in the form of
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Susan, the daughter named for her, the daughter whom she abandoned at the beginning of
her narrative and who worked for Roxana when she was dubbed “Roxana” by her courtly
audience at Pall Mall. Susan represents Roxana as both the infanticidal mother and the
most ambitious whore, so she must be denied in order for Roxana to keep her past a
secret. Because she will not own Susan, and therefore her past, Roxana cannot be a
penitent, let alone a penitent Fate figure. Roxana’s splitting of self and other, good self
and bad self, past and present leave her unable to unify and take ownership of her story
and her self. Fragmented, she ends with a miserable fate: that of a woman divorced from
her past and her self. Her story is one of the greatest explorations of the guilt and misery
caused by one person’s failure to own her past or to relate to others as anything but
objects.
Ultimately, Moll fulfills her fate and Roxana becomes a victim of hers. They vary
so greatly because of their relationships to others and their willingness to accept their
pasts. Intersubjective psychoanalysis provides the means by which to view the
relationships between these female characters and others. It reveals the strengths of
Moll’s mutual bonds with others, bonds which develop after she learns that she must
relate to others as like subjects in order to escape the limitations of objectivity. It also
reveals the negative consequences of Roxana’s splitting her self from others and limiting
her interactions with others to complementary, sadomasochistic bonds of submission and
domination. The twenty-first century reader may not appreciate the Puritanical thrust of
Defoe’s arguments about the penitent and the reprobate, but she can appreciate the
contrast in the lives of a woman who survives and succeeds in an antagonistic world that
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denies her subjectivity and one who survive and fails because she succumbs to the binary
oppositions that govern her world.
I wish to contribute to our understanding of what Toni Bowers notes has become
a critical commonplace: Moll’s story is a comedy and Roxana’s a tragedy (97). If viewed
within the context of the tension between Fate and Providence maintained within the
earlier narrative and broken within the latter, the failure reveals Defoe’s insight into the
modern individual’s need for others. Neither heroine is an isolated homo economicus
separated from others;6 they are dynamic women whose relationships to others determine
their fates. Moll’s story is a joyful triumph of mutual love and fulfillment found through
relations between like subjects. Roxana’s story is a schismatic dégringolade into abject
misery and total loss of self. These narratives reveal the importance of others to the
modern individual in strikingly different ways, depicting hope through embracing one’s
self and others and despair through severing one’s self and others.
6 Ian Watt, ““Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,” Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel 2nd ed (New York: Norton, 1994) 288-306.
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CHAPTER I
DEFOE AND FATE
Leslie Thomson notes the relevance of such abstract forces as Fortune to
contemporary thought and literature when she writes, “The idea that Fortune is in control
is one we can still understand because the realities and questions personified by the
emblematic figure of Fortuna are much the same today as they were four hundred years
ago” (8). Thomson’s impressive catalogue of classical through Renaissance texts
representing Fortune reveals that Shakespeare and Spenser pondered the same questions
personified by Fortune as did Socrates and Sophocles. Fortune, Caprice, Chance, Luck,
Fate, and many another deity, goddess, and abstraction from classical antiquity have
persisted throughout Western thought and literature.
As one of these concepts, Fate is not merely a popular literary convention, but an
integral part of the novel. C.C. Barfoot claims that in “the novel, the language and the
ideas of destiny cannot be avoided or evaded” (8). Destiny here means the appointed lot
of an individual, whether this lot is given by Providence, Fate, or whichever controlling
force pleases the author. Barfoot’s simple yet clever statement about destiny is rooted in
two facts: the English novel emerges from a literary tradition that relies on Chance,
Fortune, Destiny, Fate, and Providence, and the novel is a tightly controlled narrative in
which the god-like author shapes her or his characters’ lives, indeed their destinies, much
as the Fates or whatever governing forces we deign have control over us, control our
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destinies.7 Thus when these concepts surface in the writing of an author such as Daniel
Defoe, and within his world of Providence, they should not be dismissed as mere clichés
or mannerisms. My argument is that Fate is central to his providential science.
Particularly, Defoe employs Fate as a controlling force in Moll Flanders and Roxana by
embodying it in relation to his female characters and maintaining its importance along
with Providence. I will use intersubjective theory to analyze how Fate figures in Defoe’s
narratives enable his heroines to struggle to survive and realize who they are as
individuals in a world that denies women agency yet holds them responsible for their
actions.
By employing Fate in his narratives about women who survive the vicissitudes
of the modern world by simultaneously asserting themselves and relying upon other
women, Defoe, I contend, creates a new myth of agency for the modern person. In Moll
Flanders and Roxana, this web of shared responsibility and agency creates a community
of interconnectedness. To reveal how this gynocentric system of shared agency between
the narrators and other Fate figures operates, I will employ psychoanalytic and feminist
theories of agency and subjectivity. Of particular help in understanding the tangled
skeins of the web woven by the women of these stories is Jessica Benjamin’s
7 The author is the ultimate figure of Fate who creates his characters and their worlds, apportions good and evil in them, and severs their threads of existence by drawing the narrative to a close. Robert A. Erickson notes that the creation of a narrative is fatal: “If fate is in some sense the power which determines the outcome of events before they occur, a large component of that power, insofar as these novels are concerned, is linguistic, and resides in the generative process… of the author creating his texts”; see Robert A. Erickson, Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Defoe, Richardson, Sterne), AMS Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 10 (New York: AMS Press, 1986) 9. Homer O. Brown writes, “Defoe […] is also impersonating on another level Providence itself”; see “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,” ELH 38.4 (1971): 589-90. C.C. Barfoot also comments on how the novelist acts as a deterministic force by organizing everything in the fictional work into patterns; see The Thread of Connection: Aspects of Fate in the Novels of Jane Austen and Others (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982) 140.
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intersubjective theory of psychoanalysis, which foremost claims “that the individual
grows through the relationship to other subjects” not just objects.8 This focus on the self
and how it must be mutually recognized by other subjects in order to gain a sense of
agency asserts that the individual gains a sense of agency “by being with another person
who recognizes her acts, her feelings, her intentions, her existence, her independence”
(Benjamin, Bonds 21). Furthermore, the individual needs mutual recognition,
acknowledgement from a subject who recognizes her as a subject and whom she
recognizes as a subject, in order to differentiate herself from others as a distinct
individual (Benjamin, Bonds 23). Herein lies what dualists would see as a paradox: “at
the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent upon another
[who is likewise independent] to recognize it” (Benjamin, Bonds 33). The relationships
between Defoe’s heroines and other characters reveal this paradox: to be independent, the
heroines often rely upon the recognition of their closest agents.
Intersubjective theory offers an understanding of this paradox and the other
relations within the web of interconnectedness between female characters in these
narratives because it focuses on the recognition one subject needs from another and it
focuses less on autonomy than on mapping out the “unexplored territory in which
subjects meet” (Benjamin, Bonds 25). This theory serves as the ideal analytical tool for
examining the interconnected threads in the lives of Moll Flanders and Roxana because
8 Benjamin, Bonds 19-20. Benjamin explains how intersubjective theory, which emphasizes relations between subjects, differs from earlier psychoanalytic models that claim the individual grows through relationships between herself and others she perceives as objects, i.e. the infant in the preoedipal oral stage recognizing her mother not as a subject but as a breast that provides nourishment. This theory adds to and can be maintained in conjunction with the intrapsychic perspective that “conceives of the person as a discrete unit with a complex internal structure” by revealing the nature of the interaction of the self with others; see Bonds 20 and Like 6.
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these women are defined by their relationships to others, particularly their relationships to
other women. Moll and Roxana both need others who will act as friends, advisors,
servants, and agents; without these others, neither woman would come to realize she has
her own agency. They recognize others who function as Fate figures and through this
recognition, in time, become Fate figures themselves. Moll furthers this enterprise by
becoming a penitent Fate figure who accepts the roles of Fate and Providence in her life;
thus she becomes an inclusive figure. Roxana, however, remains trapped in a world of
split complements.
Defoe employs his Fate figures to create a community of women who control one
another’s lives within a providential realm where everyone is held accountable for their
actions; this microcosm is a model of the larger world in which each individual is
responsible for how she affects others within a complex interconnected network of
actions and reactions. To understand how he employs Fate and Providence to create this
interconnected model, I must describe the literary conventions of Fortune, Providence,
and Fate; the literary and philosophical traditions of Fate that Defoe inherited; and the
manner in which Defoe employs Fate as a literary convention.
FORTUNE, PROVIDENCE, AND CLASSICAL CONVENTIONS OF FATE
Critics often scrutinize Defoe’s narratives as realistic narratives that capture
socio-historic truths of his day. Such inquiry is often productive; drawing comparisons,
for instance, between Defoe’s fictional constructs of women and their historical sisters
helps us better understand female agency in his narratives and in the world in which he
lived. Novak comments on this fact, and he emphasizes, however, that beyond the
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surface realism of Defoe’s narratives, the “underlying material often belongs to a world
of abstract ideas, myth, and fantasy” (Realism 9). This world of ideas includes that of
Fate and Providence. It is in this underlying world of ideas that I contend the portrayal of
the problem of human destiny and the place of Fate and Providence play themselves out
in Defoe’s fiction. This problem, prevailing as it does beneath the surface realism, can be
variously interpreted depending upon one’s critical perspective. The underlying material
may be investigated in a number of ways: the picaresque scholar may focus on Fortune as
a theme in Defoe’s picaresque narratives, the Puritan scholar may reveal how exactly
Defoe portrays Providence, and the feminist scholar may note a peculiar presence too
often overlooked in eighteenth-century fiction but nevertheless an important figure in
both Moll Flanders and Roxana: Fate.9 All three concepts, Fortune, Providence, and
Fate, operate as controlling forces manifestly in Moll Flanders and Roxana; this
subchapter explores how each is employed as a controlling force in literature and
emphasizes the Classical conventions of Fate.
Fate continues to be a popular topic with a number of scholarly and mainstream
texts available on it and its conceptual siblings: Luck, Chance, Fortune, Providence, and
so forth.10 Novels such as Defoe’s narratives, some of the most widely circulated cultural
9 For picaresque interpretations, see Ian Bell, Defoe¶s Fiction (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1985); for studies on Providence, see Leo Damrosch, God¶s Plot and Man¶s Stories: Studies in the Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1985); and J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); for investigations of Fate in Defoe’s narratives, see Erickson; for Fate in English literature, see Barfoot, John Robert Reed, Victorian Will (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1989), and Leslie Thomson, Fortune: ³All is but Fortune´ (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Lib., 2000). 10 Leonard W. Doob’s Inevitability: Determinism, Fatalism, and Destiny (New York: Greenwood, 1988) is a psychological exploration of how we construct inevitability doctrines to explain uncertainties; Nicholas Rescher’s Luck: The Brilliant Randomness of Everyday Life (New York: Farrar, 1995) is a scholarly inquiry into how luck is a vital aspect of the human condition; Mark H. Bernstein’s Fatalism (Lincoln: U of
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artifacts in the eighteenth century, and films including those as vastly different as
Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris and the Wachowskis’ Matrix series, arguably the most
widely circulated cultural artifacts of today, often concern Fate.11 Today, Fate is
regarded in different ways by scholars, writers, and common people, much as in ancient
Greece, the natural law or moral code was associated with three possibilities by three
different classes of people: the poets usually attributed this code to the gods, the
philosophers associated it with law or “power of a less personal sort,” and the people in
general associated it with fate (Greene 4).
As a deterministic force, Fate differs from Providence and Fortune. In Ancient
Greece, Fate was the determinism of the general person and not just the common
person.12 This natural law provided a determinism against which free will could be
measured; in Puritan and Dissenter writings, the determinism is Providence. Providence
has its beginnings in Greek thought, and in the post-Hellenic world, either Fate or
Providence were considered manifestations of this determinism dependent upon one’s
philosophical or religious point of view (Greene 4). The only time Tyche, Chance, was
viewed as this determinism was in chaotic times, for she had little moral character; during
Nebraska P, 1992) and Michael Gelven’s Why Me? A Philosophical Inquiry into Fate (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 1991) are insightful, non-technical studies of how issues concerning Fate and fatalism are still significant to today. 11 Any number of films concerning Fate may be noted here; these two examples represent two distinct genres of film that have mass appeal. Charlie Chaplin is one of the most recognized icons of the early twentieth century, and the films in the Wachowski brothers’ trilogy are all large-grossing blockbusters. 12 I am referring to Greene’s comment in regards to Greeks in general, both literary and nonliterary, as accepting Fate as the determining agent of the universe; see William Chase Greene, Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1948) 4. Today, as in Defoe’s time, most people have a vague concept of Fate associated with one or more of the definitions I have noted. It is easy to find these notions of Fate in literature; the more difficult task is determining what the common person knows about Fate. Those who read texts or watched plays in Defoe’s day had some exposure to Fate; in the twenty-first century, more people are likely to be exposed to the conventions of Fate through film rather than through literature.
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the chaotic changes of the Renaissance brought on by exploration and development,
many writers sensed they were subject to a determinism akin to chance, “not to an
ultimately benevolent Providence but to fickle Fortune’s always turning wheel” (Greene
4; Thomson 8). Fate is the external controlling force many people recognize; like the
novel itself, the concept appeals to a wide variety of readers and has been employed by a
wide variety of writers. Its function as a controlling force had great appeal to writers of
Defoe’s day.
I focus on Fate primarily because of its significance to the construction of Moll
Flanders and Roxana, but also because Fortune is less essential to these two narratives
and Providence has been explored at great length by other Defoe scholars. Before
discussing the literary conventions of Fate from Classical literature through Defoe’s day
and how Fate operates in Defoe’s intersubjective universe, I will briefly define the roles
of Fortune and Providence in order to emphasize how their functions as controlling forces
in literature differ from the employment of Fate.
FORTUNE AS A CONTROLLING FORCE
Though often considered synonymous, Fate and Fortune are not alike; Fortune,
especially when viewed as a complement to the benevolent Providence, is a fickle deity
often blamed for the failures of the virtuous and the success of the fool. The Oxford
English Dictionary contains nine principal and several secondary definitions of the term,
of which the Greco-Roman goddess is the first: “Often […] personified as a goddess, [she
is] ‘the power supposed to distribute the lots of life according to her own humor’”
(“Fortune,” def. 1a). Often depicted with or emblematized as a wheel, Fortune is
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characterized as ever-turning, assigning the lot of each individual in arbitrary,
unpredictable ways. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 version of A Dictionary of the English
Language illustrates this definition of Fortune’s fickle nature as the primary one, for
Fortune is “the power supposed to distribute the lots of life according to her own humor”
(“Fortune”). From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, in times of great change,
“the sense of being subject not to an ultimately benevolent Providence but to fickle
Fortune’s always turning wheel was understandably vivid” (Thomson 8). Fortune often
rears her head in Shakespeare, but more pertinent to Defoe given his reliance on
picaresque conventions is how Fortune is depicted in the picaresque narratives of Spain
during the age of the Inquisition and the shift from feudalism to mercantilism; and in the
picaresque narratives of England penned after the Civil War, during the rise of capitalism
and Protestantism.13 In these works, Fortune is a controlling force that arbitrarily rewards
the foolish and punishes the virtuous. Certainly, given their generally chaotic mix of
circumstances, Defoe’s narrators often feel subject to Fortune.
As a writer borrowing heavily from the picaresque tradition, Defoe could not help
but to include the literary conventions of Fortune in these two narratives. However,
Fortune is too fickle to be of much use as the principal governing force in a narrative to
13 Critics often discuss fortune in Defoe’s narratives, especially since both title pages contain derivatives of the word fortune, and it has at least three meanings in each narrative: money (MF 63; R 59) and luck or chance (MF 66; R 13). But it does not function as a controlling deity as it does in Apuleis’s pre-picaresque narrative, The Golden Ass. Fortune is inextricably tied to the picaresque tradition, as in the first Spanish picaresque narrative: Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Misfortunes as told by Himself, and in the earlier The Golden Ass, so much Defoe criticism touches on the picaresque because of the picaresque conventions evident in his narratives. Bell’s Defoe¶s Fiction, Paula R. Backscheider’s Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 1986), and Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1964) all note Defoe’s picaresque conventions, but picaresque studies such as Robert Alter’s Rogue¶s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965) and Richard Bjornson’s The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1977) provide more insight into Fortune and the picaresque.
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anyone but the writer of a picaresque work; she has little place in a story of conversion or
one of guilt unless it serves to mock such seriousness, let alone in any story which
revolves around female agency. More often than not, in both Defoe’s narratives and
other eighteenth-century literature, Fortune is mentioned not as a deity, but merely as
luck or wealth. It does not operate on the same level as Fate, which functions as a
gynocentric controlling force. In Defoe’s narratives, Fortune is merely luck, wealth, or,
at most, a capricious deity often praised for people’s triumphs or blamed for their
tribulations. Defoe was familiar with the concept, as evidenced by his use of it in a
number of his writings from the first quarter of the eighteenth century.14 Defoe defines
credit as “Lady Credit,” a feminine figure akin to Fortune and one that can be objectified
and desired as an “object of attraction,” by “exploiting gender stereotypes in order to
engage masculine desire (O’Brien 614-15). O’Brien explains how dexterously Defoe
employs figurative language in order to capture the fickle nature of credit and character
and to criticize the political splitting between Whigs and Tories. Defoe’s use of a
feminine metaphor in his early writings proves his ability to figuratively employ a pagan
concept to prove a point. However, his use of the gender stereotypes, particularly
fickleness, also reveals how inadequate Fortune is for a controlling force in a narrative.
Fortune, then, is easily dismissed as a controlling force, but more must be said of
Providence given Defoe’s Puritan background and its significance in his earlier work,
Robinson Crusoe.
14 John F. O’Brien, “The Character of Credit: Defoe’s ‘Lady Credit,’ The Fortunate Mistress, and the Resources of Inconsistency in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain.” ELH 63 (1996): 603-31. O’Brien notes a number of writings by Defoe that include fortune, most particularly his Review dated 10 January 1706, A Review of the State of the British Nation (1711), and An Essay upon Publick Credit (1710).
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PROVIDENCE AS A CONTROLLING FORCE
In English literature, the transition from Fortune to Providence as a controlling
force was rocky at best. Fortune was explained away by the Christian church as a pagan
concept that emphasized chance and luck over God’s will and as a product of “ignorance
of God’s plan [that] led humans to explain the inexplicable by creating a goddess whose
primary quality and function was random change” (Thomson 8). Throughout the
medieval period, “Christians from Boethius to Dante had maintained the pagan tradition
of the goddess Fortuna side by side with a belief in God’s omnipotence, but for Tudor
theologians the very idea of Fortune was an insult to God’s sovereignty” (Thomas 79).
After the Reformation, Luck, Chance, and Fortune were employed less and less in
Christian texts and pushed more and more into the literary realm, where these
conventions became clichés as the idea of Providence grew stronger. Fortune may have
been eradicated from sacred writings within Christianity, but it has survived in literature
and popular culture.15
Writers who wished to conform to Christianity’s emphasis on Providence over
Fortune were provided with a less whimsical controlling force. Providence is far less
capricious than Fortune and is most often depicted as a caring, protective force, as in
Samuel Johnson’s first two definitions in his Dictionary, but in Defoe’s day, there was a
bit more to it than the agency through which God extends his benevolence to
15 Interestingly enough, emphasizing Providence over Fortune does not eliminate pagan influences on Christian thought, for Providence was a pagan concept long before it was Christian. Providence appears in various Greek writings from the Classical age onwards; as noted in greater detail below, Cleanthes distinguished Fate from Providence in the fourth century BCE.
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humankind.16 What Providence provides to the writer who wishes to employ a
controlling force is predictability: Providence, whether general or specific, punishing or
rewarding, is always employed to bring individuals closer to God through divine
judgments or punishments, or draw them to Him through divine deliverances (Hunter,
Reluctant 68). The arbitrariness of Fortune is less appropriate a metaphor for the novelist
and far more chaotic a controlling force for a narrative than are Providence or Fate.
Defoe wrote during a time when Providence was one of the key subjects about
which Deists, Anglicans, and Dissenters argued; to understand which forms of
Providence he employs in his stories, it is best to understand some of the main issues
concerning it. In 1678, John Flavell elucidated the nature of Providence “to assert the
Being and Efficacy of Providence against the Atheism of the times” (qtd in Hunter,
Reluctant 56). This defense, along with many others, addressed attacks on the nature of
Providence from late seventeenth-century deists, atheists, and others. To help understand
the nature of Providence, by the eighteenth century, theologians distinguished it in two
ways: “general (or ordinary) providences—in which God simply watched over
developments he had willed through his natural laws—and special (or extraordinary)
providences, in which a specific act or interposition was involved.”17 The former
concerns a governing force that ensures order in the universe whereas the latter more
dramatically illustrates God’s hand in earthly matters such as saving sailors at sea or
16 Johnson’s principle definitions are “1. Foresight; timely care; forecast; the act of providing [and] 2. The care of God over created beings; divine superintendence”; see Samuel Johnson, “Providence,” def. 1,2, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755; London: Times Books, 1983). Johnson’s third definition is secular and concerns prudence, frugality, and moderation. 17 J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe¶s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins P, 1966) 56. See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971) 80.
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punishing the wicked. By the time Defoe penned Moll Flanders and Roxana, special
providences were generally disregarded in favor of general Providence, as Damrosch
notes: “In the eighteenth century, […] there was an increasing tendency to define
providence as the general order of things rather than as a series of specific interventions”
(Damrosch 190). To combat this tendency, Dissenters and Anglicans alike wrote on
special providences, although they interpreted providences to suit their own interests,
often attaching vastly different meanings to similar examples of specific providences
(Hunter, Reluctant 58-9).
Special providences often occur in narratives to facilitate a character’s conversion
and in polemical religious texts to prove God’s direct influence in people’s lives. William
Turner advocated recording special providences to convince laymen by example of God’s
direct intervention in earthly matters, thus establishing the “providence tradition”
(Hunter, Reluctant 59, 60-61). These narrative accounts of special providences often
employed episodic stories of adventure and rescue, conventions characteristic of
romances; storms at sea and shipwrecks were especially popular because of “the favorite
Puritan metaphor of life as a voyage.”18 Defoe’s narratives provide numerous examples
of special providences: Robinson reasons that the crops which grow from seeds he spilled
earlier are due to an “unforseen Providence,” and Roxana briefly sees her survival of the
storm at sea as providential deliverance (RC 58; R 128). Granted, these examples differ
18 Hunter, Reluctant 62. Thomas quotes a passage illustrating the Protestant view of life as a voyage and the Christian appropriation of a pagan convention once used to describe Fate: “Life’s ship was never without a steersman; whether the passengers woke or slept, God was always at the helm”; see Thomas 79.
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from the literature of the providence tradition, especially Roxana’s deliverance, for her
“wicked Taste of Life return’d” after she was safe on land (R 128).
The inclusion of special providences in religious texts of Defoe’s day shows that
not all Puritans were adverse to telling stories.19 Two of the most influential men in
Defoe’s early years, the Foe family pastor, Reverend Samuel Annesley, and Charles
Morton of the Newington Green Academy, both employed fictional devices to make their
teachings accessible (Backscheider, His Life 17). Morton empahsizes the role of fiction
in education when he writes: “Romances, & parables, or fables, that have no truth In the
Matter, but Morall honesty In the Designe [and] [...] the Enlargment of stories by variety
of phrases, & manner of expression, (Provided they are not part of a testimony) are not
Lyes, but Ingenuous Poesie […]. The better to Inculcate the virtue, or expose the vice
they Designe to represent” (qtd. in Backscheider, His Life 17). Defoe repeats this
insistence that fiction can convey moral truth in the prefaces to his narratives. In Moll
Flanders, he writes that his story resembles plays that “are applyed to vertuous Purposes,
and that by the most lively Representations, they fail not to recommend Vertue, and
generous Principles, and to discourage and expose all sorts of Vice and Corruption of
Manners” (MF 3). “Lively representations” include those fictional stories Defoe,
19 Although the commonly held generalization that Puritans and some Dissenters were adverse to fiction due to its deceitful nature, the imagination and its fruits, particularly metaphor, had their place in Puritanism. Defoe’s immediate protonovelist predecessor, John Bunyan, turned to Luther’s metaphorical language of grace because “Puritan culture’s dominant suspicion of the imagination and the affections left Bunyan bereft of the atmosphere he needed to resolve his conversion crisis” Vera J. Camden, “‘Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience’: The Place of Luther’s ‘Commentary on Galatians’ in Grace Abounding,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 835. Luther’s metaphors, particularly those of Christ and the conscience as bridegroom and bride, enable Bunyan to convey his “affective and imaginative experience” and “to move forward in his narrative as in his life”; see Camden 845-46. The conventions of fiction rather than spiritual autobiography serve Bunyan well and certainly impact other more literary-minded Puritans and Dissenters.
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Annesley, and Morton use to reach their audiences. In both Moll Flanders and Roxana,
Defoe asserts that the virtuous reader will receive moral instruction from his fictions (MF
4; R 1). However, for his contemporaries who despised fiction in any form as deception,
Defoe claims the stories are true histories (MF 1; R 1). Granted, the latter assertion is a
bit dubious, but the former is easier to accept, for it places the blame for vice on the
reader, not the author. If a Puritan could accept fiction, even by qualifying this
acceptance by noting it must have a moral design, then the jump to writing a story that is
not solely confined to the providential universe does not appear so great.
Perhaps the twenty-first-century reader may not understand the need for a
controlling force in narrative, or she may find the controlling force too formulaic because
life, in her opinion, is random, unplanned, or mapped out only according to her own
agency and not that of some external governing force. Such a reader is thinking too
much like the twentieth-century readers Northrop Frye describes:
In ordinary life a coincidence is a piece of a design for which we can find
no practical use. Hence, though coincidences certainly happen in ordinary
life, they have no point there except to suggest that life at times is capable
of forming rudimentary literary designs thereby seeming to be almost on
the point of making sense. (Frye 240)
According to Frye, the twentieth-century reader believes that reality is chaotic and
fiction well planned. Damrosch notes that for many early modern writers,
particularly Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, “this formulation
would need to be turned upside down: nothing in life is random or pointless, and
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it is literary works which struggle to emulate the coherence of reality.”20 Defoe
was schooled to believe that reality is planned by God and fiction is a chaotic
construction of lies. The writers schooled in the Puritan tradition were taught that
Providence governs reality in both a general and a specific manner. Puritan
writers schooled in the “providence tradition” as Hunter calls it, were trained to
interpret specific instances in reality as signs of God’s direct intervention through
Providence. Defoe and writers of his ilk employed governing forces in their
narratives to give them a sense of what their readers saw as reality: a system
governed by an external agent that, depending upon the writer’s inclinations and
intentions, may or may not condescend to directly intervene in the system.
Given the puritanical insistence on life having an ordered design and the
emergence of the novel at a time when Dissenting and Anglican writers were defending
the manifestation of God’s will in everyday life and the cosmic realm, it is natural to
assume Providence is one of the chief governing forces of the novel. Although Defoe’s
narratives are generally described as episodic, Starr argues that his contemporaries would
read them as having a coherent pattern:
So long as the protagonist’s inward vicissitudes obeyed the traditional
pattern, either of growth or decay, and so long as individual episodes
contributed to this pattern with some consistency, an autobiography might
be regarded as structurally sound. [...] [W]ithin such a convention,
20 Damrosch 11. Thomas’s chapter on Providence also details this notion of the post-Reformation period as one in which the world is governed in an orderly manner rather than a random one; see Thomas 79.
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discrete, apparently random episodes might be held to possess a unity both
sufficient and meaningful. (Starr, Spiritual 126)
Defoe’s less cynical readers were more apt to see the conventions of spiritual
autobiography, they would see a providential pattern in his narratives, particularly
Robinson Crusoe, because he tells them in his prefaces to the works to look for the hand
of God rewarding those who do good and punishing those who do evil.
What seems to be chance to the twenty-first century reader, whether it’s
Robinson’s shipwreck, Moll’s first encounter with Mother Midnight, or Roxana’s
meeting Susan on the ship she is to take to Holland, is in fact a well-ordered set of
circumstances arranged by the author in order to show a progression in the character’s
development. Monk observes that spiritual and verisimilar texts employ governing forces
in order to eradicate chance through two different methods: “where the providential
narrative transforms random and casual experience into a sign of God’s will in order to
represent spiritual truth [of God’s plan], the realistic and verisimilar narrative transform
chance into fate in order to represent aesthetic truth [of the author’s plan]” (43).
Providence is the controlling force of the spiritual narrative, and Fate, most often, is the
controlling force of the verisimilar narrative. Both may occur in a narrative, but the
author may favor one force in certain contexts and another force for other contexts.
Defoe does stress how Providence operates in both Moll’s and Roxana’s lives, but he
favors Fate when establishing the connections between his female characters. Because he
uses both governing forces, his narratives are well-organized stories with coherent unity
of action and character; in each narrative, nothing happens by Chance. If Chance is
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“what happens,” Fate is what “was always already meant to happen” (Monk 43). In any
realistic or verisimilar narrative, what may first appear to be chance is actually a fatal
event or episode that serves the author’s purpose.
Both traditions of Providence and Fate are those of the individual within a
preordained universe (with varying degrees of free will assigned that individual, given
the doctrine she follows); however, there are key differences to these forces. The
providential universe is centered upon the masculine Judeo-Christian God’s control over
man through a predestined plan. Providence has a place in the story of a woman guided
to conversion by confronting the very “Emblem of Hell itself,” and the story of a guilt-
haunted mother who is tormented by “the Blast of Heaven” until her dying days, but
Defoe’s focus on women’s trials, their emotions, and their relationships to one another—
particularly how they advise, control, and serve as agents for one another—requires his
use of a controlling device that concerns female agency (MF 274; R 330). Defoe’s
schooling in the tradition of Providence and his exposure to the conventions of Fate
through literature and popular culture made it possible for him to employ a different
governing force in his narratives about women than in his story of a ship-wrecked man.
The puritanical emphasis on Providence as a controlling force allowed Defoe to create
systems of meaning in which one force governs all; his choice of Fate as the controlling
force in these narratives was based on his need to impose order upon a text about the
relationships between his female characters. Just as he changed the sex of his main
characters from male to female when writing Robinson Crusoe to Moll Flanders and
Roxana, so he changed the sex of his governing force.
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FATE AS A CONTROLLING FORCE
Defoe’s female characters have a strong basis in the Greco-Roman tradition of the
three sisters. Although the Fates do not appear in his narratives named as such, there are
many characters who act as Fate figures in his fiction. The three chief denotations of the
Greek term for Fate correspond with the three definitions of Fate I use.21 From Homer’s
epics on, the Greek term Moira is generally understood to be Fate as an abstract force
that maintains a moral order or natural law, but it also denotes the appointed lot of an
individual which many people use synonymously with destiny. The term Moirai is more
than the plural of Moira; it is a personification of Fate that refers directly to the three
sisters who appoint each individual his or her share of good or bad things. Modern
writers often designate this definition of Fate by using the terms “the three sisters” or “the
Fates.” Context determines which meaning of Fate the writer is using. As noted above,
Fate is often confused with Fortune and other abstractions or supernatural forces, and
Fate itself has a number of possible roles and functions, many of which appear in Defoe’s
narratives.
The Fates have a problematic place in Homeric writings, for their agency is often
equated with or subordinated to the agency of the Olympians. Nausicaa tells Odysseus:
“it is Zeus himself, the Olympian, who gives people good fortune, / to each single man, to
the good and the bad, just as he wishes” (Od. 6.188-89). Here Zeus is seen as the power
who apportions good and evil, yet most writers after Homer attribute the apportioning of
21 Nearly any scholarly text mentioning the Fates will note the Greek name Moirai, the Latin name Parcae, and the respective ages and functions for the three sisters. Spellings vary for the Greek names of the Fates; today, most scholars favor Moirai for the three sisters and Moira for the abstract force. The English word Fate is derived from the Latin Fata.
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lots to mankind as the role of a deterministic Fate, or more specifically, the Fates.
Gladstone notes that whenever the Olympians congregate, they share a “‘consciousness
of moral responsibility’ […]. For there stands behind the gods a shadowy reality, a fixed
order […], a divine conscience, […] at times dreadful and oppressive to man, the reality
known as Moira” (qtd. in Greene 13-14). This shadowy reality is at times
unacknowledged, as in Nausicaa’s statement, unless one considers Zeus as performing
the will of Moira. The Fates’ degree of power over gods and humans varies from writer
to writer, and is not always concurrent with the belief of the majority of the culture from
which that writer hails. Homer often makes the Fates and the gods interchangeable, but
most scholars read Moira in the context of ancient Greek writing as a moral law that
cannot be broken even by the Olympians. This interpretation is plausible given the
Sarpedon episode, in which Zeus fails to avert his son’s impending death (Il. 16.433-61).
Arthur Fairbanks notes that the debate over whether the gods are subject to Moira or the
Moirai rages throughout Archaic through Hellenistic writings. Basing his conclusion on
the Sarpedon episode, he summarizes the relationship between the Greek gods and the
Fates:
Everything that happens on the Trojan plain is referred to divine purpose;
at the same time Zeus does not feel free to save his son Sarpedon when his
fate comes to die (XVI, 433 f.); Ares acts…“beyond his due lot,” and
suffers for it, in exactly the same way that Patroclus goes too far, and for
Patroclus the penalty is death. Moira is a sort of natural law: man or god
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may act contrary to it; and if he does, man or god, the result is the same—
he pays the penalty for his folly. (Fairbanks 40)
In Homeric works, the role of Moira, although at times unclear, is that of a natural law to
which even the Olympians are subject.
Although Homer only once uses the term Moirai rather than Moira, the roles of
fate as a spinner, singer, and midwife are apparent in his epics (Il. 24.49). Homer
sometimes has the gods, Moira, or Aisa, a deity or force that represents what is
accomplished, spinning the fates of individuals (Il. 20.127; 24.209-10; 24.525; Od. 4.208;
8.579-80). Here the role of Fate as spinner is first written, though the role certainly is
older than Homer’s writing. Greene comments “And because mortal spinners often sing
over their work, it is natural for these superhuman spinners to sing, foretelling in words
what they are creating with their hands; hence the ‘Song of the Fates’ of later ages”
(Greene 16). Plato, Virgil, Catullus, and many others have noted the song of the Fates,
and it is especially pertinent to the act of writing, for the song is the transformation of the
physical act of spinning into the linguistic act of speaking; the writer then controls this
linguistic act further by transcribing it.
Hesiod and other later writers clarified the relationship between the Olympians
and Fate most often by subjecting the gods to the will of Moira. Homer treats fate as
every human’s individual, inescapable destiny; Hesiod regards the Fates as goddesses.22
22 Felix Guirands, Greek Mythology (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1963) 123. Generally, Homer is regarded as the earlier writer, circa mid-eighth century BCE, and Hesiod is dated around the end of the eighth to beginning of the seventh century BCE; see Gregory Crane, ed., Perseus Encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale UP, 28 June 2001.
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The Hesiodic Theogony is the first to give them their familiar names: “Clotho ‘the
spinner,’ Lachesis, ‘the Dispenser of Lots,’ and Atropos, ‘She who cannot be turned’”
(Hesiod 218). Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures it and apportions good
and evil to that life, and Atropos severs the thread, for “part of the meaning of fate is
always termination, closure, boundary—the image of finality” (Erickson 7). The ancient
Greeks most often depict the Moirai as deterministic, but a number of early Greek writers
often subordinate them to the Olympians or human will. Because of her function as the
apportioner of good and evil and the seemingly arbitrary manner in which good and evil
surface in our lives, Lachesis is sometimes associated with Chance, or a happening by
chance (Guirands 123). In the Theogony, the Moirai are portrayed either as a natural law
personified by three sisters who are above the gods or as the daughters of Zeus; placing
the Moiria in a hierarchy is never easy.
The Hesiodic Theogony creates two possible origins of the Moirai. The first is
generative and concerns the “struggles of the powers of Nature and the birth of
successive daimones [pre-Olympian deities or spirits]” (Greene 28). The other process is
a progression from anarchy to order, with the Olympians representing good triumphing
over the evil Titans and other earlier deities (Greene 28-29). First, they are the fatherless
daughters of Night, siblings to Moros (Destiny), the Keres (ailment-bearing daimones),
and Nemesis (indignation) and other powers (Hesiod 213-25). They are birth goddesses
who appoint an individual her share of good and evil upon her birth (Hesiod 218-19). In
the second origin, they are born to Zeus and his second wife, “radiant Themis,” along
with Lawfulness, Justice, and Peace, and they are “allotted high honors” by Zeus (Hesiod
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901-06). The second origin is developed less than the first, for the author of the Hesiodic
text is not so concerned with placing such forces as Moira under the authority of the
Olympians, who are supposed to represent order and justice. The earlier pedigree places
the Olympians under the Fates and thus subordinates order to earlier, often amoral natural
forces; however, in Olympian-centric myths, they are the daughters of Zeus and Themis,
and though given “high honors,” they are not above the Olympians.
A number of lyric poets elaborated on the roles of the Fates written in the
Homeric and Hesiodic texts, focusing especially on the control they exert over mortals’
destinies, their allotment of both good and bad to individuals, and their relationship to
other deities or abstract controlling forces. Archilochos asserts that Moira and Tyche,
Chance, are in control of man’s destinies, but it is the gods who “raise from their troubles
men / who lie upon the black earth, / and often they toss flat on their backs / even those
whose tread was secure” (Archilochos 130.2-5). This notion of Fate controlling each
individual’s destiny and the gods administering divine justice persists throughout Greek
thought on Fate; it allows both Fate and the Olympians a share of external agency in
humans’ lives. Solon notes that both good and evil in a person’s life comes from Moira,
and the justice of the gods is not to be questioned: “To mortal men Fate brings both good
/ and ill, and inescapable are the gifts / of the deathless gods” (Solon 13.63-65). People
have no right to question what Fate decrees or else they will suffer ate, which is a “hurt,”
or “wound” inflicted by the gods on those who defy them (Greene 21). Theognis goes so
far as to protest Zeus bestowing the same moira on the wicked and good alike (qtd. in
Greene 40). Again, Moira allots good and bad, but this time as an agent of Zeus.
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Theognis does not always protest the gods, for he also advises endurance: “We ought to
endure what the gods give mortal man and bear patiently either lot” (qtd. in Greene 45).
After all, the good and the evil alike will pass, for Moira has appointed it to be so. Pindar
also emphasizes that humans should be content with what is given to them, for “By
nature each of us is allotted a life that sets him apart: / one person has this, others that,
and it is impossible / for one man to succeed in winning complete happiness: / I cannot
name any to whom Fate has given such a prize” (Pindar, “Nemean 7” 54-57). No human
can alter what lot Fate has given him, but should endure the bad things in life and not
aspire to complete happiness. Although many early Greek poets tried to establish which
forces control people’s fates and which forces, in turn, manipulated those external
controlling forces, it isn’t until Aeschylus’s Oresteia that the pre-Olympian Moira and
the deities associated with it are fully reconciled with the Olympians in a manner that
emphasizes divine justice over natural law.
The three tragedians inherited and, in turn, modified the myths, traditions, and
conventions passed on to them, not the least of which was Fate. As the founder of
tragedy, Aeschylus was heir to many traditions and myths, mostly from Homer, but one
of the non-Homeric conventions associated with Fate that he and the other tragedians
employed was that of the hereditary curse (Greene 106). In the trilogy of the Oresteia, he
uses this convention associated with Fate to aid some of his greatest accomplishments in
tragedy: “of creating a foreboding atmosphere, of creating suspense, and of leading his
characters step by step to the inevitable doom that awaits them” (Greene 106). Yet the
foreboding, suspense, and doom are not the whole story of the Oresteia; in fact, the
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treatment of Fate in the last play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, serves as an interesting
example of how Aeschylus reconciles the Moirai with the Olympians.
In Aeschylus’s work, Fate is a natural order above Zeus that becomes reconciled
with Zeus in the final chorus of The Eumenides. Together, “All-seeing Zeus and Fate
embrace” the union of the Athenian people and their new benefactors, the Eumenides, or
“kindly ones” (Eum. 1055). This eventual union is preceded by instances in which Zeus
is subject to Fate. In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus tells the chorus that the Fates and
the Furies are “steersman of necessity,” and that Zeus “cannot escape what is fated” (515-
16; 518). Although Zeus is subject to Fate in Prometheus Bound, Fate is equated with
Zeus, perhaps subordinated to him, in The Eumenides, Aeschylus’s answer to the conflict
between the elder Moirai and the new rule of Zeus.
Here, the darker side of the Fates is exploited by Aeschylus, for he has the Moirai
manifested in the Erinyes, the Furies. Orestes, haunted by the Furies for killing his
mother in order to avenge his father’s death, seeks shelter from the Furies, long
associated with the Fates, by appealing to the Olympians. The Furies are associated with
two forces: “the baleful Keres, winged creatures that brought the infection of disease and
age and death, […] later […] identified with Fate” (Greene 10), and the Erinyes, “the
avengers of the murdered” (Greene 105). Often the Keres are mentioned as servants of
the Fates: “When the implacable deities [the Fates] had fixed the final hour, …the Keres
… would then seize the unhappy mortal, deliver the decisive blow, and carry him down
to the land of shadows” (Guirands 128). Since Atropos is the one who cuts the thread of
each human’s life, the Keres are directly linked to her; the literary depictions of the
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finality of the inflexible sister combined with the often violent depiction of the Keres
reflect how much the ancient Greeks feared her. The Fates then have a connection to evil
or destructive forces extending back to the Theogony, in which they are avenging spirits
who pursue murderers until the crime is punished, and they are powerful agents of Fate
who “declare [their] right / to steer the lives of men.”23 Here Aeschylus clearly equates
these avenging spirits with the Moirai, for traditionally, only the Moirai are the
steerswomen of a person’s life. One must keep in mind that these sisters of the Fates
represent only one aspect of Fate. Aeschylus takes this darker side of the older natural
law and reconciles it with divine justice under Zeus, for in The Eumenides, the Erinyes
become the Eumenides, guardians of law and justice.24 This resolution comes only after
Athena persuades Zeus to acquit Orestes; the Furies attempt to punish all of Athens for
the decision, but through persuasion, Athena convinces them to become protectors of
justice rather than spirits of vengeance. Thus, two vital aspects of Fate are brought under
Zeus’s control, and Aeschylus answers the question of who has greater control.
By the time of the three great classical tragedians, most of the conventions of Fate
were well established. Aeschylus’s reconciliation of Fate and the Olympians is the most
novel development concerning natural law and controlling forces; Sophocles and
Euripides, on the other hand, tend to be less concerned with the larger issues of Fate than
with personal issues concerning the individual and other philosophical and intellectual
currents of their time (Greene 138, 172). All three playwrights use conventions of Fate:
23 Eum. 309-10. The Erinyes are chthonic deities that originated long before the Archaic age of Greece. In addition to avenging the murdered, they are the “vindicators of curses, and indeed of law in general in an age before the gods or the polis have assumed a responsibility for a consistent code dealing with murder”; see Greene 104. 24 See Hesiod 217 on the sisterhood of the Erinyes and the Moirai.
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oracles, family curses, individuals trying to avoid their fates, and divine punishment and
reconciliation; however, Sophocles is less concerned with justifying the divine order than
with the issues of the personal world which the sophists were pursuing. His tragedies
primarily concern individuals “battling with circumstance or with opposing persons [to]
reveal their motives” (Greene 138). Often these conflicts are with external forces such as
Fate, which many characters try to outwit or avoid but ultimately confront.
Conventional references to Fate abound in Sophocles’ work. Oedipus tries to
avoid his fate by fleeing Corinth, yet he does not use common sense by avoiding killing
any man old enough to be his father or by not marrying any woman old enough to be his
mother. In the Antigone, the chorus comments on Antigone’s fate as being like that of
Danae and others, “the long-lived Fates bore hard upon her, too (Ant. 1001-10; 1040).
They also note she cannot avoid her fate because of the family curse on the house of
Labdacus both in and out of her presence (Ant. 642-56; 911). Oedipus is just as ready to
blame external agencies for his fall; before he accepts his own pride as his downfall, he
blames Fate for his peculiar doom and fears for his children’s lot (Oed. 1455-57; 1460-
65). Here, as in other works by Sophocles, the character’s emotions about Fate are more
important than the machinations of Fate itself.
Euripides alters traditional conventions and myths to focus on personal issues
concerning Fate much as Sophocles does, but he adds another contribution to the
portrayal of Fate. He does address Fate in his tragedies and melodramas, most notably in
the Hippolytus, the Philoctetes, and the Electra, but the treatment is fairly conventional.
Euripides’ contribution to the development of Fate in literature is his play on the Moirai
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being cheated out of King Admetus’s death: the Alcestis. Like his other tragic-comedies,
the Alcestis is a “world of miracles and artifice, of romantic and breathless escapade, of
flippant attacks on Delphi and on the Olympic divinities, of mischievous irony, of chance
events and surprising coincidences and happy consummations” (Greene 195). These
conventions sound more at home in New Comedy or Greek novels such as Xenophon of
Ephesus’ An Ephesian Tale, but they work as well for the comical satyr-plays of fifth-
century Athens. In the Alcestis, Euripides has fun at Fate’s expense.
Fate is cheated in this tragic-comedy and her conventions of necessity, morality,
order, and the need for endurance mocked. The play concerns King Admetus’s desire to
cheat the Fates of his death; his wife Alcestis volunteers herself as a substitute, but
Heracles rescues her from Death and reunites husband and wife. Unlike the end of
Aeschylus’s Eumenides, in which the forces of Fate are subordinated to Zeus via
reconciliation, here they are cheated their due. Despite the facts that Admetus has
fulfilled his allotted number of days (Euripides 695), his wife has agreed to be his
substitute in death (202, 250, 388), and nothing can bring the dead back to life (962-90),
she is restored to him through divine intervention. Greene interprets this intervention as
providential: “the Alcestis is a drama of providence, in which the Olympic divinities
overrule the Moirai and Ananke [Necessity]” (Greene 196). Whether or not providential,
the play does mock Fate in order to support the Olympian order.
Poets and tragedians certainly were not the only Greeks to address Fate; the
Classical philosophers also assigned Moira or the Moirai various attributes befitting a
governing force. Most of the pre-Socratic philosophic systems related either or both of
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them to a “living, divine causality,” but such was not often the case for Plato or Aristotle
(Greene 411). Aristotle addresses concepts associated with Fate but never Fate itself
(Greene 321). Plato directly addresses issues of which controlling forces are responsible
for good and evil: “the good [God] is cause not of all things, but of those that are well,
and no cause of those that are evil” (379c). Plato is one of the first Greek writers to
explicitly address evil, and once again, here evil could easily be attributed to Fate. In
Plato’s writings, Chance at times is credited with aiding mankind or harming it, so it is
doubtful he would consider Fate wholly evil; what is clear is that it coexists with God in
The Republic (Greene 299). The Moirai themselves appear in The Republic during the
poetic description of the causal forces of the universe. Plato has the spindle lie on the lap
of Necessity, “through which all the orbits were turned” (616E). The orbits of the
heavenly bodies are sung over by sirens and the Moirai, here best translated as “Lotter,
Spinner, and Neverturnback” (Plato 617E; Warmington and Rouse 419). Each soul
chooses his or her own lot for life from Destiny, and, Plato writes, “The blame is for the
chooser; God is blameless” (Plato 618B). In this passage, agency is granted to individual
souls, but once a soul makes its decision about how much good or evil will be in its life,
it must live by that choice, for that choice is fixed by the Moirai.25 Here, although God
and the Fates fix whatever choice a soul makes, neither force is wholly deterministic nor
wholly responsible for a person’s share of evil, for the person’s own soul is to blame.
Most of the systems of thought following Plato, particularly the Stoics, Epicureans, and
25 Plato depicts the souls as picking their individual lot in life from a vast pile of possibilities. An interpreter for the Moirai tells the souls that “No Daimon [spirit] shall cast lots for you, but you shall all choose your own Destiny; let him who draws the first lot first choose a life, and thereto he shall cleave of necessity” (italics added); see Plato, The Republic, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, Great Dialogues of Plato, ed. Eric H. Warmington and Philip G. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1984) 618A-B.
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the later Peripatetic writers and Neoplatonists touch on many of the same issues Plato
does on good, evil, Fate, and God.
The rise of the Epicureans and Stoics saw two major divisions in how to
acknowledge Fate. Many Epicureans dismissed forces such as Chance or Fate as too
disorderly to be part of the forces controlling the universe; after all, divinities were to
represent ataraxia, purity and passionless contentment, in order for humankind to
emulate them (Greene 335-36). Fate more often appears in Stoic thought, for Chrysippus
argues that forms of divination, especially oracles, are proof of Fate’s existence. Often,
Stoic thought is criticized by later philosophers as wholly fatalistic, yet even Chrysippus
argues that not everything is fated, for there is an element of free will in a person’s life
(Greene 347). Cleanthes places some blame for evil on Fate but none on Providence by
arguing that although everything providential is fated, not all that is fated is providential
(Greene 344-45). Many Greeks wanted to blame Fate for everything that happened and
only credit Providence with events that happened for the best. This thought manifests
itself in later Christian thought, for despite the vehemence with which Christianity has
suppressed earlier religious thought, the language of Fate is as much a part of Western
culture today as it was in Classical Greece. From its inception, the Christian Church has
incorporated Providence and other Greek concepts, yet it has not squelched the need for
individuals to assign responsibility to another source other than God. Just like Cleanthes,
people continue to desire to assign blame for evil on an arbitrary controlling force that is
not evil in itself; so long as that need for an arbitrary governing force remains, so will the
language of Fate.
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The degree of control or influence Fate has in any given literary universe is fixed
according to the desires of a writer just as it was in ancient Greek writing and thought.
Some place Fate above all other gods or abstractions as a natural law that cannot be
violated, as does Homer; others deify it and make it superior, equal, or subordinate to the
gods, as does Hesiod; others place it alongside God as a creative force that dispenses
good and evil, as does Plato; others accept it but do not address it, as does Aristotle; and
some acknowledge it as a force but note it is not the only force that controls our lives, for
we have free will, as Chrysippus is reported to do. Some, like Euripides in his Alcestis,
mock the various conventions of Fate. Such mocking of the place of Fate in a universe
controlled by a henotheistic deity continues throughout literature; however, many writers
have treated Fate seriously, maintaining the conventions of Fate in literature, philosophy,
and other modes of communication.
A brief list of texts authored in Hellenistic and Roman times concerning Fate
illustrates that it remained a serious topic for many centuries. Cicero’s De Fato is one in
a long line of works from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE on fate including
the first three books of Plotinus’s Ennead, Archbishop William of Moerbeke’s Latin
versions of Proclus’s De Providentia et Fato, Hierocles of Alexandria’s On Providence
and Fate and what is in Our Power or any number of Neoplatonist and Peripatetic
writings of that era. Boethius is one of the last true pagan writers to write on Fate, but it
does resurface in many Christian works, particularly in writings concerning Platonism or
Aristotelianism. Perhaps one of the most interesting works on Fate from a century before
Defoe is the Dutch theologian Hugo Groitus’s history of thought on Fate, Philosophorum
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Sententiae De Fato, a work that encompasses theories of Fate from the Pythagoreans to
the Christians. And in literature, of course, Fate as an idea, influence, and inspiration has
persisted in many forms since the Hellenistic Age.
Employing Fate opens many possibilities for the writer, and long before Defoe,
writers used Fate as they pleased. Greene notes this playing with a governing force in
Virgil’s works, claiming that Virgil “moves from one philosophy to another, or fuses
them at will” (Greene 366). Virgil draws on many of the earlier ideas about Fate, often
favoring one system over another. In the Aeneid, a pluralistic conception of Fate is
possible because whatever Jupiter or any other god says is “fated,” but since the gods are
often in conflict, various fates contradict one another and have to be reconciled under a
“more inclusive and ultimate power,” a “more universal destiny” (Greene 366-7). This
conception of destiny may not be far from a conception of God’s will, and the portrayal
of Roman gods decreeing cacophonous fates is not far from Defoe’s depiction of Fate
figures espousing what they believe to be true. Most importantly, Defoe employs a
number of conventions of Fate much as Virgil does. Why he does so may be found in the
pervasion of Fate in English literature and his exposure to the literary and popular
conventions of Fate.
The literary conventions of Fate continue to persist in Western literature, and the
issues concerning Fate have changed little over the millenia. These issues concern
whether Fate is deterministic; whether Fate as an external force is superior or subordinate
to the gods or free will; whether Fate should be depicted as the abstract controlling force
Moira or the personified Moirai; how the Moirai serve as spinners of destiny,
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apportioners of good and evil, and singers of the “Song of the Fates”; the placement of
the Moirai in the Greek cosmogony; Fate’s association with chthonic forces of death and
vengeance and Olympian ideals of peace and justice; their role in individual’s lives,
especially regarding issues of circumstance and whether the individual or some external
agency is to blame for those circumstances; their control or lack of control over
individuals’ destinies; and their relation to God and Providence. Other tangential issues
arise from these concerns, but this is a brief summary provided only to demonstrate the
literary tradition of Fate in Western thought that Defoe inherited.
FATE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND DEFOE’S FICTION
Fate is a popular literary device from Virgil onwards, and, like Virgil, many
writers employ it according to their whims. It is a concept which, as has been shown in
this study, is a controlling currency in the Western literary tradition from the Classical
period onwards.26 Cromwell may have found Fate “too paganish a word” for Parliament
to employ, but writers employ it freely throughout English literature (qtd. in Thomas 79).
Defoe inherited this tradition, of course, and responded particularly to certain key
conventions. These conventions include Fate as the appointed lot of an individual, an
abstract force, and the personified three sisters. A perusal of the Oxford English
26 There are a number of studies of Fate in literature that reveal its significance to English literature. These include the aforementioned works by Barfoot, Erickson, Reed, and Thomson. Reed and Thomson are particularly noteworthy for their insights into determinism and free will. Of particular interest to Defoe and novel scholars are Barfoot’s study, which focuses primarily upon Austen, and Erickson’s work, which focuses on Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne. Both studies make strong claims about Fate as a powerful literary convention employed in meaningful ways in English literature. Barfoot conveniently catalogues a number of late eighteenth through early nineteenth-century novels in an appendix which numbers the times terms associated with Fate appear in some works of Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, William Godwin, Ann Radcliffe, Robert Bage, Maria Edgeworth, and Susan Ferrier; see Berfoot 166-67. Because of Barfoot’s focus upon Austen, he does not mention earlier novelists including Defoe and Henry Fielding as often as he does Austen, her contemporaries, and her immediate predecessors.
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Dictionary or Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language reveals a number
of allusions and references to Fate and the Fates in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and
many others. This rich literary tradition is one of the most likely contributing factors of
why Defoe personifies the Fates in his female characters.
Personifications of Fate may be found in nearly any period of English literature,
including Elizabethan drama. Freud’s reading of Fate in King Lear explains
Shakespeare’s use of personified Fate figures. Freud reads Goneril as a Lachesis figure
when she asks her father to reduce the number of his attendants, thus allotting what he
may keep to signify himself as a ruler (Grinsten 84). More significantly, Cordelia is an
Atropos figure, for her actions are like a death sentence for her father. In his despair over
his lost love object, Lear is desperate for any affection, however feigned it may be, and is
quickly roused to anger over any perceived denial of love.27 When Cordelia refuses to
flatter him, Lear perceives her action as a denial of love, which, after having lost his
queen, is a virtual death sentence to him (Grinstein 85). This is but one reading of
personified Fate figures in English literature, and it serves well to illustrate how one of
Defoe’s forebears employed this literary convention of Fate. Defoe employs Fate figures
far more consistently than his forebears, which is noteworthy in itself, but for the most
part, his use of Fate was not unusual for an eighteenth century writer.
By employing literary conventions of Fate, Defoe was merely following in the
footsteps of English and Western literary tradition. He easily could have employed
27 Alexander Grinstein, Tales of the Unconscious (Madison, CT: International UP, 1999) 79. For this reading of the lost love abject, Grinstein draws many points of reference to the king in the 1605 play, From the True Chronicle of King Leir, which may have been one of Shakespeare’s sources for the tragedy. The king’s longing for the deceased queen, his love object, is far more apparent in Leir; see Grinstein 79-84.
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providential terms in the story to show conflicts between chance and necessity, and free
will and predetermination; however, to construct a story that relies heavily on imagery of
weaving, ensnaring, and the womb, he turned to the more appropriate metaphors of the
feminized Fate. This choice does not mean that Providence is excluded from his work; in
fact, Defoe’s prefaces make clear that the reader is supposed to profit from the
providential lessons in the story, and Moll especially claims that Providence has a great
influence over her by the end of her narrative. What is significant is Defoe’s consistent
use of Fate figures in narratives that purport to be wholly providential. His use of Fate
figures is not revolutionary, for many had done so before him, but it is novel in at least
one regard.
The conventions of Fate allow Defoe more freedom to write about women’s
agency and to focus on the intersubjective web of human relationships in his heroines’
lives. Defoe constructs this web more skillfully than any of his predecessors largely due
to the innovative conventions of the novel developing in his day. The conventions of
Fate are more readily adoptable to the novel than to other literary forms, for the novel has
an “inevitable bias towards patterns of event and behaviour that reinforce or reinstate
traditional concepts of fate” (Barfoot 140). This observation holds true because of the
novel’s deterministic nature. As with most literature, everything within the novel is
controlled by the Fate-like author who births, apportions, and terminates his characters’
lives and determines all that they will do. Unlike writers of many other literary forms,
the novelist adds to this determinism by presenting a unique illusion in which characters
appear to make choices of their own free will. The eighteenth-century novel’s emphasis
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upon characters making choices that impact their lives requires the reader’s willing
suspension of disbelief that fictional creations authored by the novelist actually have any
kind of choice at all. Through fiction, the novelist can ponder the questions which
continue to baffle philosophers and other intellectuals: to what extent do people have
control over their lives, their very destinies; how do necessity, circumstance, and free will
affect people’s moral decisions; and what forces govern this control these moral
decisions? Defoe, through Moll Flanders and Roxana, answers these questions by
detailing how other people influence the lives of the narrators and so shape their
individual destinies. By employing Fate within an intersubjective system, he transforms
Fate from a clichéd literary convention to a controlling force that manifests itself with
each of his female figures and especially the protagonists themselves. Defoe creates a
universe in which his characters make such choices based upon the advice of Fate figures
and upon reflections upon their patterns of experience that have shaped their subjective
worlds. His works are fascinating fictions, for his characters, their experiences, and the
relationships they share with others are situated within an intersubjective web of fatal
imagery and conventions.
How much Defoe knew about these conventions remains a problematic issue, for
little evidence of what he read exists. Due to the lack of certainty about his personal
library and the lack of literary allusions in his writing, it is difficult to argue exactly what
Defoe knew about the literary conventions of Fate, but it should not mire us as the
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questions of Providence and Fate have mired Milton’s fallen angels.28 Defoe’s personal
library would provide hard evidence of his at least possessing texts that note Fate;
unfortunately, after his death, his library was mixed with that of an Anglican clergyman,
Philip Farewell, therefore forever confusing those who wish to know exactly which texts
belonged to Defoe (Hunter, Reluctant 7-8). It is also difficult to ascertain which texts he
read through researching his works because he makes few literary allusions in his fiction
beyond those to the Bible. He generally favored allusions to historical events and people
over allusions to literature. Other issues concerning Defoe’s education and juvenile
readings make it difficult to determine which conventions of Fate he inherited from
English literature and earlier traditions.
Given his English-centered education at Morton’s Academy, it is difficult to
ascertain exactly which texts concerning Fate he did read. Defoe’s fiction reveals he
was aware of literary conventions of Fate, and some of this exposure must have occurred
during his schooling, particularly his years at Morton’s Academy. Backscheider notes
that Charles Morton, an Oxford graduate, employed a number of teachers who were the
intellectual equivalents of those at Oxford and Cambridge (His Life 15). Morton himself
preferred to teach in English in order to make education accessible, but as a student,
Defoe had to undergo the traditional university curriculum of the “Medieval Trivium
(rhetoric, logic, and Latin grammar)” and further studies in Greek philosophy and logic
during his five years of schooling at the academy (His Life 15). This schooling surely
28 Milton’s fallen angels, like many a scholar of Fate, free will, Chance, and so forth, find themselves “In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high / Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, / Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, / And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost”; see John Milton, Paradise Lost: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Scott Elledge, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1993) 2.558-61.
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exposed him to a number of Classical conventions of Fate. His juvenile readings also
shed some light on what he read before and during his schooling. The manuscript
“Historical Collections of Memoires of Passages & Stories Collected from Severall
Authors,” which Defoe gave to Mary Tuffley in 1683 before their marriage, does provide
some insight into which ancient stories he read as a youth (Novak, Daniel 38). Most of
these were heroic romances, but they do reveal that he was exposed to early Western
literature. Unfortunately, Defoe’s literary background will always be difficult to
determine, for, much like his own life, it is shrouded in the “utmost secrecy” (West 1).
Despite these problems, there is one method of determining what Defoe knew
about Fate that is foolproof. Defoe’s writing reveals that he was as immersed in the
conventions of Fate as was any other moderately well-read Englishman. Fate and its
literary cousins appear in the texts of many writers from Chaucer to the picaresque
writers of Defoe’s day; certainly, these works and any common knowledge of Fate shared
by many English people, both literate and illiterate, inspired Defoe to employ Fate as he
does. His usage of the traditional literary conventions of Fate obviously is not
coincidental. Focusing on how Defoe employs the conventions of Fate is far more
productive than trying to ascertain which texts about Fate he may or may not have
alluded to, let alone read.
FATE IN MOLL FLANDERS AND ROXANA
In the tradition of Western literature from the Homeric age to today, Fate is most
often defined as an individual’s appointed lot or destiny, as an abstract force that governs
humans’ lives, or as the three sisters of Greco-Roman mythology. Defoe employs Fate in
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these three conventional manners and develops one usage in particular. To understand
the notions of Fate in Defoe’s time, the definition of seventeenth-century mythographer
Gautruche serves well. He defines Fate not as an abstraction but as the three sisters of
Greco-Roman mythology: “Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos […]. These were the fatal
Goddesses, [… whose decrees] according to the Judgement of the Gods could not be
altered” (qtd. in Erickson 7). It is primarily this aspect of Fate that Defoe employs in
Moll Flanders and Roxana because his minor female characters often perform the
specific roles of the three sisters as they influence the narrators, and each narrator
becomes a Fate figure when she assumes responsibility for her actions at the end of her
story.
Defoe’s key placement of the term Fate, the conventions of Fate he employs, and
the relationships between his female characters make me conclude that Fate is the
governing force that operates within the interpersonal spaces between female characters
in both Moll Flanders and Roxana. Although both texts are situated within the realm of
Providence, Defoe emphasizes that these narratives are also organized by the
interconnected web of Fate by placing the words Fate and fatal themselves in key
passages of both narratives. When lamenting how the marriage market favors men, Moll
notes that women in England and America are “according to the Fate of the Day, pretty
willing to be ask’d [to marry]” (MF 70). When leaving America for England, Moll notes
“so my own Fate push[ed] me on” (MF 104). And Moll is troubled by “the Fate of this
Poor Woman,” for the woman to whom she refers is the master thief who apprenticed her
and is about to be transported for her crimes (MF 223). Fate occurs in a total of sixteen
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passages, and fatal occurs five times; the words are employed in key moments, such as
when Moll deceives the captain, her brother, into her marrying her, when Jemy leaves
her, and when she is transported to Virginia. Fate appears four times and fatal seven in
Roxana. When describing the plight of the whore, Roxana notes that she must dispose of
children and be left alone to “the Miseries of Fate” (R 132). When describing Amy’s
intentions to murder Susan, Roxana observes “she had a more fatal and wicked Design in
her Head” (R 311). She also notes Fate when arguing with the Dutch Merchant about
marriage, when she goes into hiding, and in times when she wishes her identity to remain
a secret. Defoe often has his characters acknowledge Fate as the primary controlling
force in their lives, and more importantly, he has women who function as Fate figures
guide his heroines throughout their lives.
Given the abundance of English texts that mention Fate, the emphasis on
governing forces in life and literature of the Augustan age, and Defoe’s usage of the word
Fate and its literary conventions, Fate is Defoe’s obvious choice of controlling forces.
But why exactly would he employ Fate in a time when providential discourse was more
prevalent? Why would a writer employing picaresque conventions favor Fate over
Fortune? In his decision to create a new mythic system, Defoe employs Fate because of
the complex web of agency it offers in contrast to the capricious connections in the
universe of Fortune. In Moll Flanders and Roxana, this complexity coexists with or the
rigid chain of being that connects God and Man in the providential universe. Employing
Fate allows him to better articulate how fluid the boundaries between self and other have
become and how the modern individual can survive only with the help and guidance of
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others; employing Providence allows him to emphasize how necessary it is for
individuals to take ownership of their actions through penitence.
Of the three ways Defoe employs Fate, the least significant is fate as the
appointed lot or portion of an individual. In this sense, fate may be read as synonymous
with destiny. Moll bemoans her fate as a young girl without friends, clothes, or help (MF
8). She often refers to her individual destiny as her fate, as when she says: “my Fate was
otherwise determin’d.”29 Roxana uses this meaning of fate only once, when she relates
the words of the man her son is apprenticed to: “that’s the Fate of his Circumstances” (R
191). Whether alone in the world or apprenticed to a mean trade, the individual has a
bleak destiny, but Fate often has a darker denotation.
Every individual is appointed his or her lot, destiny, or fate, and each individual’s
fate ends with death. Fate as a deadly force is generally signified by the adjective fatal.
When Moll is taken to Newgate, she describes the gallows as “the fatal Tree,” and
Roxana calls Amy’s scheme to kill Susan “a fatal and wicked Design” (MF 273; R 311).
Granted, fatal is often used synonymously with deadly, yet when it occurs in crucial
moments in a novel, the term must be given due consideration. The adjective fatal is
used many times in both texts to indicate something deadly, something directed by fate,
or both.30 The heroines’ calling their individual destinies their fates and referring to
certain circumstances as fatal may be mere coincidence, but Defoe’s placement of these
words in significant passages indicates that something more is at work in each narrative.
29 MF 203. In Moll Flanders, the instances of fate as individual destiny occur on 8, 104, 203, 208, 221, 222, 223, 303, and 304. 30 Fatal occurs five times in Moll Flanders: 91, 273, 293, 321, and 325. It occurs seven times in Roxana: 51, 59, 94, 160, 277, 279, and 311.
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The number of times Fate is noted as a governing force and the way in which it manifests
in Defoe’s female character more convincingly reveals how Fate is central to both
narratives.
Moll and Roxana both acknowledge Fate as a controlling force.31 In one of the
key passages of her story, Moll tells of Mother Midnight trying to persuade her to stop
thieving while she’s ahead, but she says “I know not what Fate guided me” to continue
(MF 262). Clearly, Moll believes some force has directed her to continue stealing until
she is caught and taken to Newgate, where she confronts her birthplace and the origin of
her life story. Roxana’s often anthologized diatribe on marriage versus whoredom
reveals many of the realities she, Moll, and women in their circumstances faced, and she
attributes them to Fate. She comments that the whore “is maintain’d indeed, for a time;
but is certainly condemn’d to be abandon’d at last, and left to the Miseries of Fate” (R
132). Later, Roxana believes she is out of the reach of Fate due to circumstances, yet the
novel ends with her left to the misery of her fate (R 202). Although both heroines lament
being victims of circumstance, neither novel is a story of mere chance or circumstance,
for Fate governs them from the very first pages in the text not as an unseen force, but as
an agency manifested in the female characters who help the women become who they
are.
Defoe’s greatest use of Fate is his manifestation of Fate in his female characters
who operate for and, at times, exercise control over other women. This convention was
popular in early modern English literature, as noted by Erickson, “Fate may be an
31 In Moll Flanders, Moll does so on 70, 79, 90, 156, 262, and 274. In Roxana, Roxana does so on 132, 152, and 302.
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inscrutable impersonal or supernatural force, or mere chance, but in eighteenth-century
fiction fate usually operates from within a human form” (Erickson 4). Erickson further
adds that this convention had been employed in literature for some time: “The ancients
[…] and poets and writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tended to
personalize, and humanize fate, to represent the power of impersonal or divine fate
through a human figure” (Erickson 8). These personifications of the Moirai correspond
to earlier writers’ descriptions of the three sisters: Clotho is the youngest who holds the
distaff and draws the thread of a person’s life, Lachesis is middle-aged and apportions a
person’s life by measuring it and winding it about the spindle, and Atropos is the elderly
one who appoints a person’s death by severing the person’s thread of life. Defoe has his
characters play the roles of the Moirai, for his narratives abound with characters
associated with the roles of Fate figures: mothers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds,
and witches.32
Moll Flanders and Roxana both concern the night and childbirth, two particularly
important aspects of the Fates. Erickson comments upon these concerns as they appear in
the description of the Moirai written by the seventeenth-century mythographer,
Gautruche, which is very similar to the early creation of the Moirai in the Theogony:
First of all, they are “the Daughters of Erebus [Darkness] and the Night; of
the strange Goddesses” located in the “lower Regions of the Earth ….
Nox, the Night, was she that had greatest command”; “she was held to be
32 Spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds, and witches abound in the English novel, and they are often regarded as Fate figures, as Erickson observes in Richardson’s Mrs. Jewkes and Mother Sinclair, and the midwives in Tristram Shandy; see Erickson 4.
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the Mother of Love, Deceit, Old Age, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Complaint,
Fear, Darkness.” Hence “Night,” in mythological terms, is the mother of
the emotional life as well as the Fates, and she is located within the greater
mother, Earth.” (Erickson 7)
Here, Erickson makes the references to the mother obvious. In ancient Greece, the
deities Night and Earth, and in later Western thought, the demythologized night and Earth
have traditionally been associated with women; thus, the Fates’ being born of Night who
is, in turn, located within Earth situates them within a strong matrilineal context. They
are born of the same matrix as many of the most powerful abstractions, including Destiny
and Nemesis; having such powerful maternal figures in their parentage necessitates they
have something to do with birth. Furthermore, any mother is a Fate figure, for her womb
is a matrix in which life is shaped (“Matrix,” def. 1, 2a, 2b, 4a). In her 1671 obstetrical
text, The Midwives Book, Jane Sharp makes this connection between the mothers and
spinners many times, for the mother’s womb is “knit” and “interwoven” with “fleshy
fibres” (55). The womb also knits membranes Sharp calls “coats” full of “wrinkles” and
“seams” for the fetus (77). Despite the spinning-womb connection, the Fates are not
mothers themselves; they are sisters who manipulate the creation, manipulation, and
termination of the strands that represent individuals’ lives. Clotho is the creative force of
the three, and her spinning of the thread of a person’s destiny is often likened to the
spinning of a person’s body within the mother’s womb. In this sense, all mothers are
Fate figures, for they, like Clotho, spin life into being.
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The mother figure is more than a creative force; she governs her child and
sustains him, helps him make good or bad decisions while raising him as she sees fit, and
holds his life in her hands. Lachesis is a mother figure in the sense that a mother can do
much to give a child good or bad qualities, raise her in a good or bad environment, and
provide her with no fortune or a good fortune. Both Moll and Roxana often comment on
how their children are provided for, but it is Roxana who most obviously operates as a
Lachesis figure when she maintains her children from afar. Atropos, on the other hand, is
the mother figure rarely discussed in polite society: the infanticidal mother. Both Moll
and Roxana act as Atropos when they sever the thread connecting themselves to their
children by disposing of or abandoning them, as Roxana makes evident when she laments
that a whore’s “Endeavour is to get rid of [her children], and not maintain them” (R 132).
Both Moll and Roxana get rid of their children not only when they are whores but when
they are widows; thus, they play the role of Atropos many times. Roxana is even more
like Atropos, for one of the key episodes of her story, indeed, the cause of her greatest
misery, is her hand in her daughter Susan’s death. Defoe has his heroines as mothers
enact the creative, sustentative, and destructive roles of Fate.
Although not mothers themselves, the Moirai are connected to childbirth because
of their matrix-like role as spinners and sewers of people. The metaphor of the Moirai as
spinners allows people to both imagine their individual fates as measured to a certain
predetermined length and to imagine their fates criss-crossing, intertwining, and perhaps
entangling with others’ fates. Although Gautruche mixes Greek and Latin terms, his
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account of the Moirai is noteworthy here, for it describes the role of the Moirai as
spinners:
the three Sisters [...] were more especially busied in handling the thread,
and disposing of the course of Mens Lives. The youngest held the Distaff
and did draw the Thread, the second in age did wind it about the Spindle,
and the third old and decrepit did cut it off; and this was followed with the
immediate death of the person living. (qtd. in Erickson 7)
Here, the role of the Fates as spinners and the specific function of each sister is obvious.
In addition to its association with the Fates, spinning is also a gynocentric metaphor
associated with birth and other forms of creation. Just as spinners are often depicted as
singing over their work, in The Republic, the orbits of the heavenly bodies are sung over
by the Moirai (Plato 617E), so to, under ideal circumstances, are women’s voices present
at birth. In the early modern period, perhaps singing did not always accompany a birth,
but as in most of Moll’s and Roxana’s births, a number of women including the midwife,
the midwife’s friends and apprentices, the women related to the mother in labor, and
female servants would all be in attendance, their voices accompanying the final few
moments of weaving the new life (Riley 130). Defoe has his characters weave new lives,
and he also portrays them as literal weavers: Moll’s childhood and adolescence in
Colchester is full of spinning and weaving, and Roxana, when destitute, thinks about
working “with [her] Needle” only to dismiss the notion due to her inexperience with
physical labor (R 15). Defoe incorporates the spinner in both narratives, for it is directly
tied to motherhood, the Fates, and female community.
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Unlike the spinner, the spinster’s role as a creator is wholly figurative. She has a
powerful role in both novels, for early in both narratives, the heroines rely on the advice
of old widows or old maids who spin for their bread. The lonely widow, or more
poignantly, the lonely old maid who has not spun her own children in her womb but
creates, manipulates, and severs the last thread of a textile item is very much a Fate
figure. She is most like Atropos, for Atropos is characteristically depicted as the eldest of
the sisters.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the spinster, or old maid, gained its
pejorative meaning by 1719 (“Spinster,” def. 2b). Moll notes the dreadful possibility of
“not being Marry’d at all, and of that frightful State of Life, call’d an old Maid.”33 In real
life, a spinster was rarely seen as anything more than a burden capable only of creating a
few textile goods. In literature, however, she can be invested with the power to create,
manipulate, and destroy, for her ancient kin are the Moirai, spinners themselves. Moll
learns to sew from her first mother figure, a woman who runs a school in Colchester (MF
10). Although no spinster figures are apparent in Roxana, the opening episode with
Roxana’s three comforters, concerns Amy and two women who are shunned for being
dependent much as spinsters are: an ancient widow and a poor woman whose welfare
depends upon the family of Roxana’s husband (R 15; 16). In the early modern period,
33 MF 75. Many critics have noted the shift in attitude to the spinster in the early eighteenth century. In the chapter “Spinsters and Widows,” Brophy elaborates upon the significance of this change of meaning; see Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Women¶s Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel, (Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1991) 198-232. Olwen Hufton has a similar focus in his essay on widows and spinsters, “Women Without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Between the Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood, ed. Jan Bremmer and Lourens van den Bosch (London: Routledge, 1995) 122-51. There is also a good discussion of spinsterhood’s new meaning in the oft-quoted The Rise of the Novel; see Watt 145.
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widows and spinsters were often considered the same by their relatives: burdens;
although widows generally were regarded as having a higher status than spinsters, for
they had at least fulfilled their “ordained role as women” by having been wives (Brophy
228). The poor old woman in Roxana is never directly addressed as a spinster, but her
status as a woman is not defined as having children, as is the case with most of the
women in Roxana’s story, so the reader must assume she is an old maid, and, if only by
association, a spinster.
Connected to both the mother and the spinner is the third role of Fate: the
midwife. In the early modern period, midwives were often seen as potentially good or
bad, and they were often linked to malicious roles including witches, bawds, and whores.
The Moirai have semantic connections and familial ties to midwives. Perhaps they
merely follow in their grandmother’s footsteps (Greek deities often do, as with Zeus
killing his father Cronos, who had killed his father, Uranus), for the ancient Greeks called
the Earth Maia, which means nurse or mother, and maia also means midwife (Erickson
7). More figuratively, the Moirai are present at one’s birth just as the midwife is. The
Moirai carry a needle, thread, and scissors, as do midwives, although midwives do so in
order to tie and cut the umbilical cord (Erickson 12). William Sermon recalls in his 1671
Ladies Companion, “a common saying among the hearty good women […] to the
Midwife, if it be a boy, make him good measure, but if a girl tye it short” (qtd. in
Erickson 12). Here, the apportioning Lachesis and the severing Atropos, as well as a
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social commentary, manifest themselves in a popular saying.34 The midwife is
significant to most births of Defoe’s day, but her significance to London’s underworld is
even greater in Moll Flanders and in early modern London.
Prostitutes are often called women of the night, much as the Moirai are the
daughters of Night, yet it is more than this weak analogy that ties the two together.
Erickson notes that “stitching, sewing, basketmaking, and basketweaving” are all
eighteenth-century metaphors for copulation (Erickson 30). Furthermore, in A Picture of
England, De Archenholtz notes a common characteristic of prostitutes: “ask who are [a
tailor’s] best customers […] [and he] will answer, that these unhappy creatures, who deny
themselves every necessary of life in order to furnish their wardrobe” (qtd. in Erickson
31). De Archenholtz notes these women, who may wear satin or silk, are not, as most
would suppose on first glance, gentlewomen (qtd. in Erickson 31). Like the fetuses
described in Sharp’s book of midwifery, prostitutes are creatures of clothes. Roxana,
although the highest class of a prostitute, is certainly as much a creature of clothes as the
cheapest London whore, if De Archenholtz’s assertion about all whores being creatures
of clothes is to be believed: “so I went away, and dress’d me in the second Suit, brocaded
with Silver, and return’d in full Dress, with a Suit of Lace upon my Head” (R 71). The
prince is enraptured by Roxana’s appearance; she can govern his actions as deftly as one
of the Moirai manages a skein.
A key episode in Moll Flanders illustrates several of these points about sewing
and prostitution. Young Moll’s desire to be a gentlewoman who can support herself by
34 The saying obviously indicates that women felt it best for a girl to have a short life. Presumably, this is so due to women’s treatment in the early modern period in England.
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spinning and sewing is humorous not only because of the impossibility of her being able
to do much more than sustain herself by her needle, or her misunderstanding of the bawd
as a gentlewoman, but it is also humorous due to the connotations of sewing in the early
eighteenth century. Moll uses the language of spinning, sewing, and weaving when she
describes her aspiration to be a gentlewoman (MF 11). This language teems with sexual
connotations related to motherhood, as evidenced by Jane Sharp’s terminology for the
womb, or of copulation, as noted by Erickson (30). Moll also points to a well-dressed
lady, who is really a bawd, and says “I would be such a Gentlewoman as that” (MF 14).
The irony is delicious, for Moll discovers she cannot earn her bread solely by the needle,
and she does end up having bastards and prostituting herself.
The prostitute is a Fate figure due to her dependence on clothes, which is closely
tied to copulative and procreative connotations, but there is more to connect whores with
the Moirai. The woman who creates and maintains whores and who often serves as a
midwife to them is the midwife-bawd. The midwife-bawd often appears in early modern
writing: in “The Character of a Town-Misse” (1675), she delivers a young woman a
bastard, in The Whores Rhetorick (1683), she brings men and women together to
copulate, and in The Whole Pleasures of Matrimony (c.1700), Ned Ward calls her Mother
Midnight (qtd. in Erickson 21). Even the apprenticeship of whores changed in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth century, according to the lament of Tom Brown’s ghost of
Madam Cresswell: “bawding of late years, which used to be a trade of itself, is now
grown scandalous and very much declined, by reason that midwives […] have engrossed
the whole business to themselves, […] Alackaday! What a pernicious age do you live in”
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(445). According to this literature, the bawd was nearly always a former whore, and most
often enough, a midwife. Defoe’s Mother Midnight is the epitome of the midwife-bawd,
and the following description, which is taken from a four-page definition for a bawd in
The London Bawd, could easily fit her: “she is such a cunning Angler, that she don’t fear
getting her Living by Hook or by Crook” (qtd. in Erickson 24). Mother Midnight
certainly is this kind of bawd; once a whore, she will get money by any means, as a
midwife, nurse, child-disposer, fence or bawd to Moll. She first ensnares Moll through
cunningly kind words and actions; however, Moll does not perceive her as wholly vicious
or evil, for Moll calls her a true friend and mother more than once. The midwife-bawd
figure is more important to Moll than to Roxana; even so, midwives do attend Roxana’s
illegitimate births, and Amy acts as a type of bawd for advocating Roxana’s first episode
of whoredom, as does Roxana, when she forces Amy to bed with the landlord (R 27-8,
46-7). The bawd typically introduces a young woman into prostitution, oversees her lot
in life, and disposes of the young women’s children, and often enough, the young
woman, thus performing all three roles of the Moirai.
The midwife has often had bad connotations, whether as an ignorant woman who
can barely deliver a child, a bawd who introduces young women to prostitution, or as a
witch.35 In this last example, the tie to the Moirai is most evident, for witches were
supposed to have malevolent powers to harm others, much as some blame the Moirai for
evil happenings in their lives. The “cunning woman,” or “wise woman,” Erickson
35 Negative connotations were often associated with midwives, and Mother Midnight in particular has a number of negative associations; see Paula R. Backscheider, The Making of a Criminal Mind, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990) 75.
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relates, had complementary powers of good and evil: she could bring new life into the
world as a midwife or inflict harm on others as a witch (Erickson 18). The belief in
witchcraft certainly is due to ignorance and superstition, but some midwives were so
ignorant of human anatomy as to harm the woman in labor, and some were willing to
dispose of the baby, so there were some reasons for early modern people to distrust
midwives (Erickson 17). This kind of midwife may be what Roxana fears the old woman
is when she describes her as “one set privately to dispatch me out of the World, as might
best suit with the Circumstance of my Lying-in” (R 77). Little other mention of the
witch-midwife occurs in either text. Clearly, Defoe avoids the malevolent midwife role
to show that the Fate figures in his narratives are helpful, not harmful, to one another.
The characters who represent the Moirai serve many functions in Defoe’s
narratives. Amy, Mother Midnight, the Quaker, and the many other women of each
narrative all function as one or more of the three Fates. The youthful, creative Clothos;
the older, apportioning Lachesis, and the elderly, terminating Atropos as spinners of
people’s destinies are all personified in Moll Flanders and Roxana, and they all have ties
to mothers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds, and witches. They represent the
entire range of good and bad roles a woman was limited to in the early modern age, for if
she were not a mother, midwife, or spinner, she was usually forced into whoredom.
Defoe artfully incorporates these figures into his texts to emphasize the degree of control
his female characters have over one another. Defoe’s use of Fate is not merely that of an
abstract governing force that determines each individual’s lot in life, but that of a force
manifested in the relationships between characters who influence one another’s lives and
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construct one another’s identities. His female characters create, manipulate, and destroy
within a complicated interconnected framework associated with multiple feminine roles.
Defoe’s use of Fate must not be ignored, nor must it be considered without its
relation to Providence. The Fate figures Defoe employs operate alongside Providence
figures, and to emphasize the importance of each, Defoe has Moll succeed by relating to
both types of figures and Roxana fail by confining herself to fatal relations alone.
Defoe’s myth of intersubjectivity and mutuality concerns how his characters relate to
fatal and providential influences. To explore these influences as thoroughly as possible, I
address the minor Fate figures first—for although abundant and important, they are often
overlooked—before I discuss the major Fate and Providence figures in the lives of Moll
and Roxana.
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CHAPTER II
DEFOE’S WOMEN IN THE MYTHOS OF FATE AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY
The interconnected framework of relationships Defoe creates allows him to
situate his characters within a gynocentric, intersubjective mythos. In order to analyze
this mythos, one must take into account two seminal critiques of myth in Defoe’s fiction.
Maximilian E. Novak reads myths as “those kinds of fictions that tend away from the
specificity of history toward general ideas, actions, and characters.”36 Robinson, Moll,
and Roxana are at once unique individuals and universal types with whom the reader may
identify. Novak further argues that it is unnecessary to use biblical sources as the key to
understanding their mythic quality because Defoe’s narratives are self contained and
create new myths of their own: “Robinson Crusoe, the isolated man; […] Moll Flanders,
the heroic female thief; Roxana, the quintessential courtesan—they force us forward
rather than backward in time. It is as if his characters have subsumed all prior myths and
make references to earlier models superfluous” (Realism 11). Defoe certainly does create
36 Maximillian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe¶s Fiction (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983) xiv. Given the lists of specific items and other realistic elements in both narratives, Novak’ s point about these narratives being removed from historic time may seem contradictory. Novak makes this claim largely based on Roxana as a character who is based on many historical characters from the Restoration through the early 1720s, and, “as a result [Defoe] resorted to a curious combination of mythic synchronic time and the particular serial chronology of history”; see Novak 116. It is now a general conclusion, thanks largely to Novak and to David Blewett, that Defoe was referring simultaneously to the courts of Charles II and George I in Roxana. Novak’s claim that Defoe “was reflecting on his own era through his picture of the Restoration” is shared by many others; see Realism 167. Novak references Blewett in both Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe¶s Fiction and his recent biography of Defoe, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas; see David Blewett, Defoe¶s Art of Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979) 121-27, and “The Double Time-Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 13, ed. O.M. Brack, Jr. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984) 115-17.
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new myths that may be analyzed on their own, but these myths are also contextualized
within earlier mythic systems.37 Although Novak’s statement about Defoe’s “characters
subsuming all prior myths” opens interesting avenues of interpretation, readers should not
wholly ignore the controlling elements Defoe borrows from earlier mythic systems, for
he often employs them to reveal characters’ emotions or thoughts, to influence
characters’ actions or decisions, or to craft characters into embodiments or parodies of
these controlling elements.38
Defoe employs Fate much as many of his contemporaries employ controlling
forces: to construct orderly, self-contained worlds. Novak claims that Defoe’s stories
“share the tendency toward self-contained systems in philosophy and law that developed
during the late seventeenth century. […] In creating their systems, writers like Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel Pufendorf had to rely on new kinds of
myths and fictions about man, nature, and society” (Realism 11). Defoe was creating
new systems of meaning largely because such creation was in vogue.39 Many other
writers in his day were creating new systems of meaning for the modern individual;
37 For analyses of myth that contextualize Defoe’s fiction within the mythos of Providence, see Damrosch’s God¶s Plot and Man¶s Stories; G.A. Starr’s Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965); and Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim. 38 The mutineer episode of Robinson Crusoe illustrates how one of Defoe’s characters may be read as both an embodiment of Providence and a parody of it. Robinson claims to be an instrument of Providence to the sailors he rescues when he says “All Help is from Heaven, Sir,”; see RC 183. Damrosch explains that Robinson becomes “an agent of Providence as well as its beneficiary” because he equates his desire to save the sailors with Providence itself; see Damrosch 198-99. Richetti interprets this episode differently, for he claims that Robinson not only identifies his desires with Providence but also becomes a parodic providential figure; see John Richetti, “Secular Crusoe: The Reluctant Pilgrim Re-Visited,” Eighteenth- Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2001) 75-76. Defoe’s ability to embody and parody a supernatural controlling force in his narrative demonstrates that he was insightful enough to see the weaknesses of a given mythos, and, presumably, the strengths of others. 39 Defoe was known for mimicking conventions of various genres and various styles in both his prose and poetry; see Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 61,68.
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Defoe is one of the must successful of these myth-makers.40 Given the amount of myth-
making in Defoe’s writings, Novak concludes, “Defoe was perhaps the most versatile and
prolific creator of systems in his age” (Realism 13). Defoe was also quite capable of
maintaining a central governing force in each story: for Robinson Crusoe, it is
Providence, for Moll Flanders and Roxana, it is both Fate and Providence.
Although twenty-first century readers may not expect ordered systems as did
Defoe’s contemporary audience, the myths in his narratives continue to be relevant for
two key reasons. Because the language of these governing forces persists in today’s
popular culture and academic and literary circles, Defoe’s narratives speak directly to our
need to understand whether we control our own destinies or whether they are
manipulated by outside forces. Robinson Crusoe speaks to those who believe in the myth
of the autonomous individual; whereas Moll Flanders and Roxana speak to those who
ascribe to the myth of interconnectedness and the bonds between people. I focus on this
latter type of myth, for others have written on the mythic figure of Robinson, but no one
has read the myths of Moll and Roxana within the relational framework of intersubjective
theory. The female characters in Moll Flanders and Roxana operate within a universe
governed by Fate, a gynocentric force that is figuratively represented in nets, webs, and
spinning, the same metaphors of intersubjective theory.41 The language of these
40 To illustrate Defoe’s success as a creator of myths, Moore notes “It is a striking thing that when Robert Louis Stevenson wished to describe the supreme moments in imaginative literature, he instanced only two examples from modern writers, and those two were writers were Defoe and Bunyan: ‘Crusoe recoiling from the footprint; Achilles shouting over against the Trojans; Ulysses bending the great bow; Christian running with his fingers in his ears; each has been printed on the mind’s eye forever’”; see John Robert Moore, Defoe in the Pillory, and Other Studies (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1939) 190. 41 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2002) 12. Aron employs similar metaphors when describing
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narratives alone is enough to prove Defoe had Fate in mind when he created these texts;
intersubjective theory allows us to understand how in a far more dynamic way than
earlier theories allow.
As a dynamic system, intersubjective theory focuses on the interconnecting bonds
formed between individual subjects who shape one another’s subjectivities through
mutual recognition and differentiation. The female characters in Defoe’s narratives
operate in such a system in which they constantly influence one another and operate as
Fate figures who possess the powers to create, apportion, and destroy. The narrators’
reliance upon others is one of the key components of the new myth of the individual
Defoe constructs: only with the aid of others may a person survive and understand who
she truly is. In doing so, they prove Dimen’s assertion, “The human species is not only
biological, not only cultural, it’s also relational” (Sexuality 106). This new myth moves
beyond the myth of autonomy, which is the myth best suited to intrapsychic oedipal
theory. Intersubjective theory progresses beyond Cartesian thought and the myth of the
autonomous self to the realm of bonds between subjects and the space created within the
preoedipal mother-child dyad; it provides a new insight into how the agency of Defoe’s
heroines can be fully comprehended.42
intersubjectivite theory as a “relational approach [that] uses the concept of the relational matrix, the web of relations between self and other, as the overarching framework within which to house all sorts of psychoanalytic concepts”; see Aron 33. In philosophical intersubjective inquiry such as George Butte’s phenomenological approach, weaving and knotting are often employed, as in his description of intersubjectivity as a “‘chiasmus,’ the knot of interconnecting, reversible threads [...] that embodies [Merleau-Ponty’s] sense of bordered seperatenesses”; see I Know that you Know that I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2004) 29. 42 For a brief explanation of the break from Cartesian thought in Freudian psychoanalysis to the emphasis in current psychoanalytic theory on the mind as intersubjective, see Robert Stolorow, foreword, Making Sense Together: The Intersubjective Approach to Psychotherapy, by Peter Buirski and Pamela Haglund (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001)xi-xiii. This liberating trend is foreshadowed in Defoe’s narratives,
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Because the identities of these heroines are formed within a complex web of
interconnected relationships, their stories are more relevant myths of the modern
individual than is Robinson Crusoe. Certainly, there are a number of Robinsonades, but
Moll and Roxana inspire myths to which more people can directly relate than those myths
of Robinson, the man who many believe can survive against all odds, when, in fact, he
lives on a lush tropical island about which most people can only dream: an island that he
also desires not to leave.43 As Novak claims, Moll is a powerful mythic figure: “master
criminal and master survivor, living on in chapbooks […] enduring all kinds of adversity,
managing to survive husbands and lovers, both bad and good, an indifferent economic
order, and her own destructive urge to marry a gentleman” (Realism 17). Moll is the
survivor many of us wish to emulate; she survives not only because of her
resourcefulness but also because she has a community of women who advise, nurture,
and serve her. Less palatable, but every bit as important to later characters in novels, and,
unfortunately, real life, is the myth of Roxana. She also survives because of a community
of women, but she is, as Novak reminds us, “the Fortunate Mistress” (Realism 17). The
myth of survival with the aid of others developed in these two narratives is more
palatable to the post-emancipation reader than Robinson’s survival at the cost of
enslaving others.44
for here, too, the myth of autonomy is abandoned for a myth based on interconnected stories and lives. McAfee also explains the distinctions between the Cartesian myths of autonomy and the essential “core self” model of subjectivity and the relational model of subjectivity proffered by intersubjective theory; see McAfee 2-3; see also Aron x. 43 Robinson often notes that he has everything he could desire but society and that he is content on the island; see RC 105, 108, 113. 44 Like Robinson, Defoe himself was not adverse to slavery. See Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe’s Theory of Fiction,” Studies in Philology 61 (1964): 650-58.
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I may not go so far as to claim the modern individual is a woman, as Nancy
Armstrong does, but I do wish to emphasize that the myths of Moll and Roxana’s relate
more directly to the modern individual than does the myth of Robinson Crusoe, for, as
Watt has revealed, the myth of homo economicus is based not on Defoe’s narrative but a
cultural understanding of the text which falsely implies Robinson embodies the virtues of
dignity in labor, going back to nature, and the self-made, economic man.45 Moll and
Roxana are more significant mythic figures than Robinson because their stories are not
situated within the false myth of autonomy but within the myth of the interconnected
community.
If Moll Flanders and Roxana are read as myths about Fate in which Moll becomes
the master survivor and Roxana the master courtesan in a world that allows women little
opportunity, then the reader has discovered the myth to which so many people in the
modern world can relate: only with the aid of external others can a person succeed in the
capitalist modern world. This myth is truly intersubjective, for these women’s
experiences are influenced by others who operate as Fate figures, and they also weave
their stories with those of other women, spinning the stories and lives of others. Through
this myth of the individual, Defoe emphasizes how each subject needs other subjects in
45 Armstrong argues that the novel is primarily concerned with the private sphere in which women were restricted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the novel is a cultural construct in which “written representations of the self allowed the modern individual to become an economic and psychological reality”; see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 8. Watt proves that the myth surrounding Robinson Crusoe is almost universally known by educated westerners, but few realize that the three virtues of “Back to Nature,” “The Dignity of Labor,” and “Economic Man” have little to do with the character Robinson Crusoe; if anything, he exploits nature, labors only as much as necessary to secure himself, and treats humans as commodities; see Ian Watt, “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,” Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel 2nd ed (New York: Norton, 1994) 288-306.
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order to survive the ordeals brought about by necessity and circumstance in the early
modern period; this chapter is about these others.
Recent criticism has helped expand our understanding of Moll’s and Roxana’s
stories as fables of autonomous individuals striking it out on their own. In particular,
twentieth-century readings have been challenged for making claims such as Richetti’s
point that Moll’s story is a “dialectic between self and other” in which the self triumphs
over societal constrictions that impede her (Richetti 96). Swaminathan argues this view
of self and other is based on “three false assumptions: 1. that the ‘self’ (Moll) is a self-
enclosed individual moving independently through the narrative; 2. that the ‘other’ refers
to the structures of society impeding the subject’s progress through the narrative, and 3.
that society functions uniformly against the individual” (199-200). Swaminathan does
not perceive a uniform society but one that is split into masculine and feminine networks
and counterworks; within this heterogeneous mixture, different social groups impose
upon one another. As such, the “other” in her reading is defined as “patriarchal
restrictions imposed by specific gender roles” (Swaminathan 200). Rather than read the
other as an oppositional force or an outcast group, I read it as any individual with whom
the subject interacts. These others enable Moll to survive miserable circumstances within
a world that affords women few opportunities to succeed. Despite this difference in my
reading from Swaminathan’s, we reach similar conclusions: “Critics [...] have grossly
overstated the degree of Moll’s autonomy[,]” and “Moll’s self is interdependent rather
than strictly individual” (Swaminathan 193, 200). This interdependency is also
characteristic of Roxana’s narrative, although it does become distorted by her will to
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dominate. In both cases, the metaphors, roles, and functions of Fate abound in the
narratives.
Defoe’s choice of Fate as a governing force situates his heroines within an
interconnected framework between subjects. Rather than develop narratives that rely
solely upon the more rigid, patriarchal conventions of Providence, he also employs the
fluid, feminine metaphors of Fate: interconnectivity, weaving, and entanglement. Due to
their associations with the womb, motherhood, and guidance over others, these metaphors
of Fate are more conventional, and arguably more appropriate, for relationships between
women than are those of Providence. Through these metaphors and the roles associated
with Fate and women (mothers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds, and witches),
Defoe embodies Fate within each of his female figures and especially the protagonists
themselves. Portraying women as Fate figures grants them more agency than they are
given in the realm of Providence, which forbids the last three roles entirely and limits the
first three to the positive function of creation, and at the most, a limited degree of
apportionment. The fatal universe grants women more creative, manipulative, and
destructive possibilities within traditional feminine roles.46 These possibilities allow
Defoe to give his characters a greater degree of agency, particularly within the fatal roles
of the mother, prostitute, and midwife. These feminine roles are not confined to
46 For an analysis of the multiplicity and meanings and constructions of self within these roles in the context of criminality, see Mary Jo Kietzman, “Defoe Masters the Serial Subject,” ELH 66.3 (1999): 677- 705. Kietzman reveals how Moll and the historical Mary Carleton operate as serial subjects who survive by “deploying personae with particular histories to meet the demands of specific situations”; see Kietzman 678. Female criminals in particular would construct elaborate identities in order to “resist the categorical definitions of identity that were theoretically necessary to sustain an indictment at law”; see Kietzman 680. Ironically, clerks who tried to fit female offenders within “ideological definitions of female subjectivity” such as “spinster,” “widow,” or “wife” would create loopholes through which the criminals could evade the law; see Kietzman 680-81.
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sentimental stereotypes of mothers and nurses, for each of the six fatal roles carries with
it the full range of creation, apportionment, and destruction; every Fate figure has the
capacity to be any or all three of the Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The women
have the ability to adopt positive and negative roles that allow varying degrees of control
over others and require the recognition that others have control over them, as well.
Through mutual exchanges with these Fate figures, and through the complementary
relationships that develop in Roxana’s narrative, the narrators are enabled by others to
fashion their patterns of experience, maintain fluid boundaries between self and other,
and survive the vicissitudes of the early modern period. Neither woman ever feels secure
when alone, for she knows she is part of a larger body, a matrix of interwoven stories,
experiences, and lives.
MOLL AND ROXANA’S PATTERNS OF EXPERIENCE WITH OTHER WOMEN
Envisioning a person’s life as situated within a matrix of interconnected stories
and lives reveals the importance of other individuals to that person’s story and life. This
critical view helps the psychoanalyst understand the significance of human relationships
within a patient’s life and enables the reader to understand how the author constructed
patterns of experience for his creations. Before Moll and Roxana can know who they
really are and control their own destinies, they must learn from their relationships with
other women. Their learning is accomplished both by receiving direction from others and
by helping others through various schemes they invent. These relationships of mutuality
shape how Moll and Roxana perceive and act within their worlds. As they submit to
direction from Fate figures, they organize these experiences into patterns which allow
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them to make meaning of the world around them and become Fate figures themselves by
learning how to direct the lives of others. Only by determining how these Fate figures
motivate, influence, and control one another’s lives in a web of shared agency can the
reader comprehend how each narrator develops her subjectivity and sense of self.
Intersubjective theory situates Moll and Roxana within a relational system of the
self that acknowledges a wide array of external influences on a subject’s sense of self.
The subject, according to scholars of the Kristevan tradition, is a subject-in-process, a
contingently, historically, linguistically constructed being always coming to speak and be
in relation to others (McAfee 16-17). To stress its fluid nature, Benjamin calls the
subject “a locus of experience,” both “conscious as well as unconscious [...] that need not
be centrally organized, coherent, or unified” (Benjamin, Like 12-13). The subject is
mental and physical, conscious and unconscious; unlike the self, which is a mental
construction. The self is constructed by the subject, which in itself, is constructed of the
individual’s physical and psychological faculties and interactions with others, be they
objects or subjects. Within intersubjective theory—as in many other relational theories,
the subject is not motivated so much “from the instinctual drives of sex and aggression,”
but from the “need to create or maintain bonds to others.”47 These needs exist because
the subject’s sense of self is formed by other subjects with whom she interacts. Through
this interaction, the subject likewise shapes the identities of others and fulfills their need
for intersubjective bonds. In essence, the constructivist nature of intersubjective theory
47 Buirski and Haglund 2. See also Aron ix.
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views the subject as more than a single, essential core in which we have faith.48 The
intersubjective self is an open system shaped by other subjects; she is a subjective
construction born into a complicated web of relationships.
This approach to understanding the self as an open system radically differs from
earlier intrapsychic models of the self. By emphasizing how other subjects control the
individual subject’s thoughts, actions, and, indeed, their very lives through their constant
influence, this concept of subjectivity contrasts with earlier intrapsychic conceptions of
subjectivity and its relation to self such as Leon Hoffman’s definition: “the capacity to
posit the self as the independent agent who determines or controls thoughts and actions”
(qtd. in Benjamin, Shadow 39). Hoffman’s definition allows for the split between active
and passive partners, but Benjamin modifies this notion of subjectivity to include
authorship and ownership in “a symmetry between two active partners” (Benjamin,
Shadow 40). Intersubjective theory emphasizes the relational dimension of subjectivity,
for it is the capacity to conceive of the self as an agent who determines or controls her
thoughts and actions, whose thoughts and actions are influenced by others with whom the
subject interacts, and who influences the thoughts and actions of other subjects. This
process of constructing the self may be complementary, peaceful, or violent, for the
subject regulates to some extent which influences she allows or forbids to shape her in a
“struggle to negotiate, reconcile, balance, or mediate antithetical potentialities of being”
(Jackson 13). Which influences she allows to shape her the most become part of her
48 McAfee 139. McAfee explains that belief in an essential self is just that: a belief; see McAfee 140. A subject who acts “more like himself” at a given time may be said by an essentialist to be himself; whenever he acts differently, the essentialist would note that he is “not himself today.” A constructivist would note the contrast in the individual’s subjectivity and emphasize that the subject’s self is constantly in flux according to socio-historical-linguistic phenomena.
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identity; this incorporation is due largely to how she organizes her patterns of experience
and how she develops through the processes of differentiation and mutual recognition.
Given a subject’s relational construction, no individual is the sole author of her
own experience. Hannah Arendt describes such an intersubjective relationship in The
Human Condition when she posits that each subject’s story comes into being within an
“already existing web of human relationships” (184). Arendt further explains, “Although
everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and
speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. [...] The stories, the
results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer
[...] nobody is its author” (184). An agent has control of her faculties; she can speak and
act on her own, but her life story is also constructed by those around her who tell her not
only what to do but also who she is. In effect, everybody with whom she interacts, rather
than nobody, is her author. The agent shares in this authorship but is not the sole shaper
of her story. These qualifications of author and agent are clear in both Moll Flanders and
Roxana. Both women speak and act, but both women are controlled and influenced by
others. Moll never would have met her mother and confronted Newgate as she did if not
for the way the women of Colchester shaped her consciousness during her years as a
child and young woman. Roxana never would have escaped poverty and starvation if not
for Amy and her two female companions. These women and many other female Fate
figures enable the narrators to reinvent their lives; through guidance and manipulation,
they help author Moll’s and Roxana’s stories.
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Extending the analogy of the subject’s life as a collaboratively written story
further enables the reader to comprehend how subjects edit and revise their narratives by
incorporating certain stories from themselves and others into their narratives. This
process of editing is experiential and perceptual: the subject experiences or perceives
certain phenomena, edits these phenomena by rejecting whatever seems unacceptable or
dangerous to her sense of self, gives meaning to these phenomena by organizing them
into patterns, and incorporates these patterns into her sense of self.49 The metaphor of the
self as an author who works collaboratively with others operates well here, but the
metaphor of a textile artist sharing her work with other artists, selecting pieces of fabric
and exchanging pieces of her own fabric with others while creating her own work is more
appropriate for Defoe’s heroines, for both narrators are women of the cloth, so to speak.
After all, Moll Flanders’ name is derived from Flanders lace, which she both spins and
steals, and as mothers, prostitutes, and Fate figures, both women are figuratively
associated with textile arts. Whichever metaphor works best for the reader, the reader
must acknowledge that these female characters organize their patterns of experience to
create and give meaning to their life stories.
Because Moll and Roxana organize their patterns of experience within
intersubjective frameworks, it is far more difficult to misread their narratives as stories of
isolation and false autonomy than it is to misread Robinson Crusoe. Because Robinson is
geographically isolated for so long, people have misread his story as one about the lone
49 The intersubjective approach elucidates the editing process by explaining how the subject experientially relates to the world rather than reacts to it from some “sealed-off, underground chamber of the Cartesian isolated mind”; see Stolorow xii.
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survivor making a place in the world for himself; ironically, he is every bit as connected
with others as Moll and Roxana are, for he longs for companionship nearly as much as
Moll longs for a friend and Roxana an agent. Defoe’s women of the cloth are far more
obviously enmeshed in an intersubjective community; the metaphors of fate and the
significance of others in their lives make this interconnectedness impossible to misread.
There is no denying the influence of others in their lives, just as there is no denying that
they both exert influence over others. Such give-and-take is not as obvious in Robinson
Crusoe, which makes the stories of these women are far suitable to the modern reality of
interconnectivity. Unlike Robinson, they do not appear to be self-made individuals, for
their stories are constructed by others, particularly Fate figures, their present
circumstances, and their past experiences.
As they tell their stories, Moll and Roxana reveal how their past experiences have
shaped them. Through their retelling, they allow certain patterns in their life stories to
emerge. In their work on intersubjective theory, Peter Buirski and Pamela Haglund stress
that the subject encounters certain patterns of experience that come to “describe [her]
subjective, personal reality”; these patterns are a “complex interweaving of individual
abilities and temperament, relational configurations with caregivers during infancy and
childhood, and the lucky or harsh realities of one’s life circumstances” (2). As the
subject develops, she “organize[s] and give[s] meaning to recurrent patterns [...] that
emerge from [her] formative relationships with caregivers and other significant players in
[her life]” (15). This ability to organize experiences into patterns with which she is
already familiar allows the subject to formulate how she will react to a given experience
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and so allow it to shape her sense of self. From childhood on, the subject bases her
expectations of the future upon how she organizes these patterns of experience, for
“without generating expectancies, experience is random and unmanageable, and every
new experience would require new learning” (5). These expectations are initially built
upon the experiences and perception of the experiences the subject shares with her
caregiver; later in life, other significant characters help her fit new experiences and
perceptions into these patterns in ever-changing ways. The caregivers and significant
players in both of Defoe’s narratives are the Fate figures who help shape, author, or
weave (depending upon which metaphor one favors) Moll’s and Roxana’s life stories by
influencing how the heroines react to their circumstances.
Each heroine reveals how she reacts to and organizes these patterns in her life,
and by doing so, reveals her “structures of experience—the distinctive configurations of
self and object that shape and organize a person’s subjective world” (Atwood and
Stolorow 33). These structures of experience are the basic organizing patterns of the
subject’s life story; in fiction, the reader may readily see these structures if she analyzes
how the character reacts to experiences, perceives them, and incorporates them into her
story. The character’s story is more than just an account of her life but what actually
constitutes her sense of subjectivity: how she organizes meaning to make sense of the
world around her and construct her very self.50 Although not everyone may accept this
idea of narrative construction, it is difficult to dismiss this insight in regards to fiction;
50 McAfee explains, “We are forever telling stories about who we are and what our purpose in this life is. These stories [...] do more than provide accounts of our lives; they help constitute our sense of subjectivity”; see McAfee 140.
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after all, the author employs experiences, especially those involving other characters, to
help the reader, and often the protagonist herself, comprehend who the protagonist really
is.
Noelle McAfee takes this notion of narrative construction a step further by
explaining we are constructed intersubjectively because we perceive “ourselves in the
stories others tell [...]. Not only do we live in a dense world of interconnectedness; we
come to be ourselves by virtue of that world” (140). An individual is shaped by what a
person says about him in his presence, and that individual is also shaped by what others
say about him in his absence. This point may seem obvious, but too few people
acknowledge the significance of how others affect the construction of a subject. In Moll
Flanders, such construction via others’ stories is made explicit in the Redriff episode
when Moll helps the captain’s fiancée. Moll realizes that this woman’s reputation and
her very sense of self can easily be blemished by the captain. If he were to tell others that
she were a poor match, they would treat her accordingly, and she, in effect, would
become a poor match due to their perceptions of her. This is but one example that
illustrates how individuals’ stories, and their very lives, can be shaped by their
experiences with others.
Even the most minor female characters, all of whom operate to some degree as
Fate figures, determine how the narrators make decisions, take action, and fashion their
life stories. Many scholars have noted the importance of women to Moll and Roxana,
and one of the foremost, Paula R. Backscheider, has emphasized the importance of
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women’s advice to the patterns of relationships in the heroines’ lives.51 Erickson claims
that Moll changes her fate so often by adopting new roles and new appellations that
require assistance from others that “She seems always to need a friend or a guide, and
often this friend is a woman” (48). Analyzing the interactions of Defoe’s heroines with
these women who give and receive advice allows the reader to see the function of the
relationships that shape how the heroines become who they become and how these
heroines give meaning to their experiences.
In Moll’s story, the minor characters all operate as Fate figures in one manner or
another. To analyze how these characters intersubjectively shape Moll’s identity, I
consider her relationships with the first Fate figures she meets: the Colchester nurse, the
Colchester family, the young woman of Redriff, and her mother. The first few women
are of primary importance because they help Moll give meaning to her experiences and
establish meaningful patterns in her life, but later figures are of great importance, too. I
devote an entire chapter to Mother Midnight given her significance as a Fate figure, but I
do not analyze every Fate figure, for they merely repeat the patterns the first few figures
establish.
The roles of female Fate figures in Roxana’s patterning of experience are as
important to her identity as are these roles in Moll’s patterning of experience. The three
groups of Fate figures second in significance only to Amy are Roxana’s three comforters,
the Turkish slave girl, and the Quaker. Because Amy is with Roxana from the very
51 Backscheider, Making 72-73. Others have noted the importance of women in general in Moll’s life. Erickson’s study is devoted to Mother Midnight, although he acknowledges that other women, particularly Moll’s mother, impact her life. G.A. Starr focuses on the mother figure, for he argues that the mother figure is every bit as important to Moll as Providence is to the isolated, paranoid Robinson Crusoe; see Starr, introduction x.
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beginning of the narrative, the other Fate figures do not foreshadow her relationship with
Roxana. With the exception of the two comforters who join Amy early in the narrative,
these Fate figures serve as complements to Roxana once she breaks down the tension
between self and other in the landlord episode. Although the fatal relationships in
Roxana differ greatly from those in Moll Flanders, reading the story in the context of
Fate allows the reader to understand the interconnectivity of the women in her story.
There are a number of significant male characters in each narrator’s life; however,
they do not allow the narrators as much possibility as do the Fate figures. For the most
part, the men in the narrator’s lives do not serve fatal roles, but they are often providential
figures employed by Defoe to encourage his narrators to become penitents; this function
is most clear with Jemy and the Dutch merchant. When she is in prison, seeing Jemy
prompts Moll to reflect upon her past, shed tears of repentance, and resolve to redirect
her life. Roxana acts differently, for she dismisses her Providence figure by refusing to
marry the Dutch merchant early in her narrative; later, she reflects upon this decision as
one of the worst ones in her life, for it is a missed opportunity for conversion
(Backscheider, Ambition 207). The cause of the chief difference between the narrator’s
reactions to these Providence figures lies in the limitations of eighteenth-century
femininity. Moll, the more traditionally feminine character, submits to the patriarchal
Providence; Roxana, whose chief public identity is the exotic other, tries to create a space
outside of patriarchy for herself but cannot maintain her existence in it and within the
maternal realm as it is defined by the patriarchy. Because Moll is willing to be both fatal
and providential, she benefits from her relationships with men and women. Roxana’s
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determination to split all relationships into the poles of mastery and submission makes
her a victim of eighteenth-century dualism. The contrast of how each woman responds to
men is best examined when analyzing the key characters in their lives: for Moll, it is
Mother Midnight and Jemy; for Roxana, Amy and the Dutch merchant. As each woman
struggles with how to relate to male characters, she relies upon her Fate figures to give
her advice and direction.
Because Defoe personifies Fate in even the most seemingly minor characters, they
deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. Swaminathan addresses more
secondary characters than earlier critics have, and others must take suit, for the minor
characters in both narratives help organize the patterns of experience in the narrators’ life
stories and serve a variety of roles which contribute to the process of Moll and Roxana
becoming Fate figures themselves.52 Both Moll and Roxana play different roles to the
minor and major female characters: at times, they advise or control the other women; at
other times, they take the advice and are controlled by the other women. Both characters
52 Srividhya Swaminathan, “Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.2 (2003): 185-206. Swaminathan groups the minor characters into three categories: “women who house Moll; [...] women who counsel Moll and facilitate her relationships with men; and [...] women who foster Moll’s criminal career”; see Swaminathan 194. Another critic who goes beyond dismissing the secondary characters as flat characters or stock devices is Deidre Shauna Lynch, in her work, The Economy of Character (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). Miriam Lerenbaum’s oft-quoted “Moll Flanders: ‘A Woman on her Own Account” remains one of the chief sources of critical insight on the episodes concerning Mother Midnight but few other secondary female characters in Moll Flanders; see Miriam Lerenbaum, “Moll Flanders: ‘A Woman on her Own Account,” The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, eds. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst, MA: The U of Amherst P, 1977) 101-17. A number of feminists and Marxists fixate upon the influence of economics and commerce on gender relations; see Lois A Chaber, “Matriarchal Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders,” PMLA 97.2 (1982): 212-26; William E. Hummel, “‘The Gift of My Father’s Bounty’: Patriarchal Patronization in Moll Flanders and Roxana,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 48 (1994): 119-41; Juliet McMaster, “The Equation of Love and Money in Moll Flanders,” Studies in the Novel 2 (1970): 131-44; Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684-1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003) 110-28; Mona Scheuerman, “An Income of One’s Own: Women and Money in Moll Flanders and Roxana,” Durham University Journal 80 (1988): 225-39.
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are fully capable of manipulating the fates and fortunes of others’ lives, but only after
receiving guidance from other Fate figures can they control their own lives.53
FATE FIGURES IN MOLL FLANDERS
The first of the Fate figures that appear to Moll is her Colchester Nurse. Moll
explains that the parish where she is abandoned is merciful, and she is fortunate to have a
nurturing caregiver in her childhood: “it was my good hap to be put to Nurse, as they call
it, to a Woman who was indeed Poor, but had been in better Circumstances, and who got
a little Livelihood by taking such as I was suppos’d to be” and raising them until they
were old enough to go into domestic service or other work (MF 9). Under the guidance
of this governing figure, Moll is taught to read and work. She and the children receive a
genteel education from her: “she bred them up very Religiously, being herself a very
sober pious Woman. (2). Very Housewifly and Clean, and, (3). Very Mannerly, and with
good Behaviour.”54 She stays with this woman until she is put to service with her future
in-laws, when she observes, “ABOUT the Time that I was fourteen Years and a quarter
Old, my good old Nurse, Mother I ought rather to call her, fell Sick and Dyed” (MF 16).
53 This convention of manipulating others’ lives only after receiving tutelage from a Fate figure continues in current texts about Fate, most fascinatingly in Jean Pierr Jeunet and Guillame Laurant’s award-winning Amelie. Like Moll and Roxana, Amelie manipulates the fate of others but cannot control her own fate without the aid of an external agent until the end of her story, in which she, like Moll, happily gains control of her destiny. 54 MF 10. Moll’s definition of genteel, like her definition of a gentlewoman, is an amusing interpretation: on 11, she thinks earning a living is being a gentlewoman; on 13, she thinks to be able to work for herself will earn her the title of gentlewoman; on 15, she thinks herself a gentlewoman because she earns her bread and pockets extra money by sewing and mending; and on 14, when asked who she thinks is a gentlewoman, she says it is a certain lady (without knowing the woman is a bawd) who supports herself with her industry. Moll’s definition of gentlewoman is very working class and liberating—if only in the eighteenth century that appellation were given to women who supported themselves and not to the indolent creatures Wollstonecraft describes as having the following cardinal virtues: “Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection”; see Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792; London: Penguin Books, 1983) 118.
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Moll then relates the horror of being forced into service, and how the parish children no
longer have a good woman to school them. The good nurse is the first mother to Moll,
and her lessons go beyond teaching English, etiquette, and domestic servitude.
The significance of the nurse is threefold: she functions as a Clotho figure who
acts as a surrogate mother and teaches her what appears to be the innocent art of sewing,
a Lachesis figure who apportions Moll’s life by giving her a rudimentary education and
setting limits to her fantasies, and an Atropos figure who possesses supernatural
perception. Moll works as the kind nurse’s apprentice in two traditionally feminine
capacities by teaching the other children, and by making some of her own money on the
side by mending and sewing for the ladies of Colchester: “they brought me Work to do
for them; such as Linnen to Make, and Laces to Mend, and Heads to Dress up, and not
only paid me for doing them, but even taught me how to do them” (MF 15). Erickson
comments on this characteristic of Moll: “Moll, like other archetypal woman characters
in fiction, is associated with the spinstress figure: she begins life as a seamstress and she
resumes the work, although reluctantly, as an adult” (45). The connection to the Fates is
especially clear here, for the seamstress is the human embodiment of Clotho, who spins
the thread of life. Moll is first taught how to spin by her good motherly nurse, and by the
ladies of Colchester, who also function as representations of Clotho. Clotho is the
youngest of the three sisters, so it is quite artful on Defoe’s part to have the Clotho figure
appear first in Moll’s narrative.
Even as a child, Moll is immersed in the metaphors of Fate. Her nurse treats her
much like a daughter and teaches her the art that figuratively represents sexual
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intercourse and reproduction. She is taught to spin for bread and board, but this lesson
has a double meaning given the sexual connotations sewing had in the eighteenth-
century, for sewing, basket-making, and stitching were all metaphors for copulation
(Erickson 30). Ironically, this protective mother figure could be read as Moll’s first
instructor in various vices. Already, Moll models herself after other Fate figures by
literally employing the arts of weaving and needlework, arts that develop figuratively into
her careers as mistress and wife. As her weaving becomes more figurative, she
transforms from a naive child who does not understand the connotations of her talk of
weaving and being a gentlewoman to a woman who is control of her own destiny.
As she learns to sew, Moll grows more aware of the opportunities she desires and
the pitfalls she fears in the greater outside world. At the age of eight, she undergoes a
crisis because of the conflict her fears and desires manifest: “I was terrified with News,
that the Magistrates, [...] had order’d that I should go to Service” (MF 10). She fears
being put to work as a mere drudge due to her age, and she begs her nurse to keep her at
the school, where she’ll work with her needle and thread: “I talk’d to her almost every
Day of Working hard; And in short, I did nothing but Work and Cry all Day” (MF 10).
Moll fixates on the art her nurse has taught her as a means of staying out of service, if
only for a few years. Sadly, Moll cannot follow in her nurse’s practice, for everyone in
Colchester laughs at her notion of a woman continuing such employment as this nurse
has practiced given the changing economy.55 By doing so, she wishes to defy the limits
55 Chaber analyzes the Colchester nurse, Moll’s mother, and Mother Midnight as economic models for Moll to follow, and reads the “the nurse [as] tied to the disappearing economic mode of cottage industry; therefore, despite her good character and her industry, her role is not a viable one for Moll”; see Chaber 219. Chaber emphasizes that each model grants Moll more autonomy by allowing her to become a creature
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placed upon her by the parish authorities, and, more immediately, by her nurse. Through
actively working and shedding tears, Moll asserts her desire to be recognized as a spinner
and not a mere drudge; her tears further signify her readiness to be delivered from her
circumstances. This shedding of tears establishes a pattern; each time she cries, a Fate
figure delivers her from her circumstances.56 Her nurse intervenes by temporarily
alleviating Moll’s fears and setting limits to Moll’s fantasy and reality.
The nurse recognizes the folly of putting off service forever, but she helps Moll
through this crisis in a manner that maintains Moll’s position in society without harming
her need to assert herself. Moll is undergoing a crisis similar to the rapprochement crisis
a two year old child endures as the “tension between asserting the self and recognizing
the other breaks down and manifests as a conflict between the self and other” (Benjamin,
Like 36). This struggle is about setting limits that define the self and other, and it can
have disastrous consequences if not handled well. If the other, who is usually the mother
or a mother figure, weathers this conflict by assuring the child she can both assert her self
and recognize others as other subjects and not mere objects, the child will be able to
maintain this tension between assertion and recognition and self and other. Benjamin
comments, “The paradox of recognition [which manifests in the rapprochement struggle]
is not solved once and for all but remains an organizing principle throughout life,
becoming intense with each fresh struggle for independence, each confrontation with
difference” (Benjamin, Like 94). It is a key defining moment in a person’s life that
of production rather than reproduction; the nurse’s model is the most conventionally feminine model of production, but given the masculine control of production in Defoe’s day, it is not a viable model for Moll. 56 These tears prefigure a number of literal and figurative births Moll endures. They also serve as a precursor to the tears of repentance that indicate her delivery into penitence.
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resurfaces whenever that person faces a conflict between self and other; at this point in
Moll’s life, she fears her future will be determined by others who have control over her
and can force her to submit to their will. Fortunately, her nurse helps her face these
forces without allowing Moll to believe that she can always control these forces as
though she were the omnipotent one.
The Colchester nurse weathers this crisis by allowing Moll to destroy her in
fantasy without retaliation or withdrawal. Moll perceives the nurse as an object that will
not allow her to assert her will, so she destroys this object through her fantasy of working
with her needle forever.57 The Colchester nurse allows Moll to do so without retaliating
against Moll’s attacks, which would make Moll think that the nurse and others are
omnipotent forces to whom she must submit in order to be recognized; she also does not
withdraw entirely from Moll’s attacks, which would make Moll believe herself an
omnipotent being to whom others must submit.58 Due to her ability to establish limits,
the rappochement mother is a Lachesis figure, and the nurse plays this role well. She
allots Moll’s portion in life by allowing her to continue to work and act as an assistant in
her school, thus keeping Moll within her social niche, but she also allows Moll to
determine her life to the extent that she may work under the nurse’s guidance rather than
57 Just as the paradox of recognition persists throughout life, so does the need to destroy the object. Elsa First explains D.W. Winnicott’s theory of destruction in his “The Use of the Object” as a development that occurs not only between mother and child but also between analyst and patient, and she notes the necessity of destroying the internal object in fantasy may manifest in any confrontation between self and other whenever the subject’s independence is at stake; see Elsa First, “Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott,” Representations of Motherhood, eds. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994) 157. 58 Benjamin develops this idea of surviving rapprochement from Winnicott’s theory of destroying the internal object; see Bonds 34-40, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998) 90-92, and Like 35-41. Of particular importance in Moll’s case is how the other helps the subject through this crisis without allowing the subject to believe herself omnipotent or dominated by omnipotent others; see Like 88-94.
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elsewhere.59 She continues to set limits in Moll’s life that will aid Moll’s transition into
service and, more importantly, enable her to endure any further crises of recognition.
When Moll begins to think that she can be a gentlewoman through her work with her
needle, the Colchester Nurse belittles her, reminding her that she cannot become a
gentlewoman through such work because the clothes of a gentlewoman alone would cost
more than a seamstress could earn. Moll remembers this lesson, even if in her naivety,
she does not immediately understand why being a gentlewoman is beyond the reach of a
woman who lives by the needle alone.
The Colchester Nurse provides Moll a foundation upon which to build her
understanding of what it is to be a Fate figure. The young Moll does not fully understand
what this Fate figure does for her, but the reflective narrator indicates that this woman
acts as a Fate figure in all three senses of the term. She teaches Moll to become a literal
embodiment of the spinner, Clotho; she apportions Moll’s life by teaching her an art that
will gain her meaningful employment; and she also functions briefly as Atropos. When
Moll expresses her desire to be a gentlewoman like the well-dressed bawd, whom Moll
does not recognize as a prostitute, her nurse replies, “POOR Child, [...] you may soon be
such a Gentlewoman as that, for she is a Person of ill Fame, and has had two or three
Bastards.”60 This fear foreshadows Moll’s life, and coupled with the sexual connotations
59 The Colchester nurse, like Moll’s birth mother and Mother Midnight, “shelter[s] Moll from the patriarchal authorities constantly impinging on her life”; see Chaber 219. Chaber notes the specific authorities respectively: “the local magistrates who would put her to service, the husband who would put her in an institution, the English judiciary who threaten her with the gallows”; see Chaber 219. 60 MF 14. Chaber reads Moll’s desire to be a working gentlewoman not as an ironic revelation to be a prostitute but as “a bit of black humor lashing a society in which sex is the only self-supporting profession for women” see Chaber 220. Moll is often the mouthpiece for Defoe’s social critiques; as such, Chaber’s
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of sewing Moll performs as a child, there is little doubt that what this Fate figure thinks
of Moll will come to be true. Her witch-like prognostication regarding Moll becoming a
mistress one day establishes her as an Atropos figure, for witches were often associated
with the Fates, particularly Atropos, the Fate with the power to terminate life. Like the
Fates, the witch possesses uncanny powers to see clearly into past, present, and future;
she also was associated with death, and has a common link to the Fates via the midwife,
which was associated with both witches and the Fates.61 Via these three functions of
Fate, this mother figure births Moll into a world of servitude and sexuality, prepares her
for her apportionment in life, and foretells her future as a mistress. This birth of Moll
leads directly to her lot in life as a maid, which occurs under the auspice of the Colchester
mistress.
The next Fate figure in Moll’s life fulfills the motherly roles of a nurturing
protectoress and acts as a determining force. The Colchester mistress, Moll’s second
employer and future mother-in-law, is described by Moll as a “generous Mistress, for she
exceeded the good Woman [the Colchester Nurse] I was with before, in every Thing, […]
except Honesty” (MF 17). Moll learns much from this woman and from all those within
her household, but she does not give her the affectionate title of Mother as readily as she
does the Colchester Nurse or Mother Midnight. This woman serves chiefly as a Lachesis
figure, for it is within her house that Moll’s life is apportioned. While at the Colchester
house, Moll receives all the advantages of a gentlewoman’s education along with some
observation regarding Moll’s desire to live by her work is in keeping with an author who willingly critiques social conventions throughout his writing. 61 See my earlier explanation of the connections between witches, midwives, and the Fates in Chapter One.
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more important lessons about marriage and men. This mother figure does not actively
apportion everything in Moll’s life while Moll is under the roof of her house, for nearly
everything Moll learns within her house is through Moll’s interactions with the mother’s
children. Nonetheless, Moll’s fate is fixed within this household, for here she learns how
to desire, to love “to Distraction,” to enjoy the attention of a man who sexually desires
her, and to rely upon women’s advice (MF 42, 23-24, 20). These are some of the most
important of the rudimentary lessons Moll learns about desire and trust, yet Moll shows
little appreciation for this Fate figure or her family, most likely due to her ill treatment by
the elder brother. After Robin dies, Moll is eager to leave the family from whom she
learned so much by departing with a simple “and that by the way was all they got by Mrs.
Betty” (MF 59). However, that is not all Moll gets by them.
The Colchester family precipitates the first major crisis in Moll’s life: the
beginning of her matrimonial career. Her behavior, Lerenbaum argues, during this
transition and in the face of three later crises is feminine, natural, and typical for an early
modern woman.62 The pattern she undergoes intensifies as she grows older and involves
three key stages: illness, assistance, and transformation. The first episode, which occurs
within the Colchester family’s household, is the only one of four such episodes that does
not involve Mother Midnight. It is significant because it is part of a pattern that repeats at
key moments in Moll’s life, and it is fatal in nature.
62 Lerenbaum defends Moll’s maternity, for “in her maternal role, as in other roles, Moll is at one with her female contemporaries”; see Lerenbaum 107. Lerenbaum’s reading contrasts greatly with earlier twentieth- century patriarchal readings that claim Moll is neither maternal nor even feminine. Such critiques are epitomized by Watt’s conclusion that Moll “is often a heartless mother”; see Rise 110.
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As when Moll cries when she fears beginning her career in service, her body
manifests signs of the stress her new position in society is causing her. Pregnant and
abandoned by the elder brother, Moll fears she will soon be without a job and at the
mercy of the parish. She describes fears and the stress of her abandonment by the elder
brother as the source of her illness: “These things oppress’d my Mind so much, that in
short, I fell very ill, the agonies of my Mind, in a word, threw me into a high Fever, and
long it was, that none in the family expected my Life” (MF 42). Indeed, she continues to
relate, she endures this fever for three weeks, suffers continual relapses, and is told she
may succumb to consumption. The loss she endures may be understood in simple terms:
as a maid, she will lose her employment due to her pregnancy and most likely never be
hired in service again; as a young woman, she is distraught because the older brother has
abandoned her and advised her to marry his younger sibling.63
This emotional trauma and the accompanying psychosomatic illness may be
dismissed easily enough as the hysterics of a naive young woman who has been betrayed
by her first love. Moll’s reaction, though, must be viewed in light of her loss of an ideal
love object. Benjamin notes that an adult ideal love is a love in which “woman loses
herself in the identification with the powerful other who embodies [her] missing desire
and agency” (Benjamin, Bonds 116). This ideal love is “a second chance, an opportunity
to attain, at long-last, a father-daughter identification in which their own desire and
subjectivity can finally be recognized and realized” (Benjamin, Bonds 116). The
63 Moll’s fear of losing her job if she has a child is legitimate; many employers would not hire mothers as maids, as is evidenced by Ann Hartland’s petition to the Foundling Hospital to take her child so she may enter service after “having had the misfortune of falling a Prey to the persuasions of a false man” qtd. in Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives, (London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 28.
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thwarted opportunity to identify with the father via identificatory love, a preoedipal love
for the father as an exciting, outside other, often “inspire[s] adult women’s fantasies
about loving men who represent their ideal” (Benjamin, Like 129). Through the elder
brother, and the men who follow, Moll attempts to regain a sense of freedom and
otherness, and, ultimately, recognition as a desiring subject. Unfortunately, ideal love is
based on submission to an “other who is what she cannot be,” in whom she hopes to find
“an ideal image of [herself].”64 She tries to find her own capacity to desire through the
desire of the men she encounters. When she loses the elder brother, she loses her
capacity to desire vicariously through him. It is a devastating loss that cannot be easily
replaced; fortunately for Moll, another love object enters her life in order to assist and
transform her.
Surprisingly enough, Moll is not delivered from this episode by a female Fate
figure; Robin acts as the first man who assists her. Effectively, he delivers her from this
situation much as Mother Midnight later delivers Moll from three precarious sets of
circumstances, although his solution is to assist her by marrying her. Robin argues
vehemently to marry Moll, and when his sisters press him about her worth to him, he
contends, “Beauties a Portion, and good Humour with it, is a double Portion, I wish thou
hadst half her Stock of both for thy Portion” (MF 43). His speech is both pecuniary and
64 Benjamin, Bonds 86, 107. For an in-depth analysis of the role the missing father plays in a girl’s development and the propensity of women to adore and submit to men in order to fulfill this role, see “Women’s Desire” in The Bonds of Love, particularly 107-23. Benjamin argues that until society allows both mothers and fathers to function as figures of separation and attachment rather than the male as the ideal of separation and the female as the ideal of attachment, children will not be able to identify with parents without gender confusion; see Bonds 112. In Like Subjects, she argues that we need to maintain a sense of overinculsiveness, the preoedipal condition in which children believe themselves capable of being both sexes, in our intrapsychic fantasies in order to overcome the polarities created through splitting self and other, male and female, active and passive, and so forth; see Benjamin, Like 53, 74-75.
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fatal; the monetary connotation of portion indicates the brother values her non-mercenary
qualities, and the threefold repetition for the synonym of allotment signifies Moll has
been thrice-blessed by Lachesis. He further acts the part of a figurative midwife by
delivering Moll from these circumstances through marriage. The fatal language he
employs and the fatal role he performs as a figurative midwife help indicate why Moll
finds him a poor substitute for the elder brother; as far as she is concerned, he is little
more than another woman.
Defoe artfully employs fatal language in the brother’s speech to effeminize him;
he is not the exciting, outside other that the father or other male figures traditionally
represent in Western culture. As a male with a lower status to his brother, Moll’s lover,
he is subordinate, therefore, feminized.65 By effeminizing Robin, Defoe exploits the split
in gender oppositions impressed upon modern subjects. In the preoedipal stages of
development, especially during rapprochement, the child perceives the mother as a
holding environment of attachment and caretaking, and as one who represents sameness;
the child views the father as “separation, agency, and desire” because he is a part of the
exciting outside world and so comes to represent everything that is exciting and outside
the child’s realm (Benjamin, Like 56-57). By associating Robin with fatal conventions,
Defoe makes him appear feminine to Moll. He does not represent the outside world to
her, nor is he, like the elder brother, an ideal, outside other, a lost father to her. Although
Moll seeks comfort, assistance, and direction from women, they do not satiate her desire
65 Dimen notes that lower-status men operate much as women in the myth of autonomy; every so-called autonomous man is supported by a number of women and men “whose subordinate status feminizes them”; see Dimen, Sexuality 67.
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for an ideal love object as do men such as the elder brother or her desire for mutual
recognition from another subject who is more than a mere love object as does Jemy. The
Fate figures enable Moll to survive in the modern world, but they do not fully satisfy her
desires.
This episode describes Moll’s transformation into a wife and her rescue from
certain poverty, and it contains further fatal allusions. Not once is Providence or
repentance mentioned, not even when a figure who could easily be read as a Providence
figure, Robin, delivers Moll from perishing in the parish. The lack of female Fate figures
during the assistance and transformation may be explained by Robin’s functioning as a
feminine figure, but there is not a complete lack of feminine influence during this
episode. In fact, one of the most important lessons Moll learns occurs during the
apportionment scenes of her education with and by the Colchester sisters. Despite their
lack of assistance during Moll’s delivery, the Colchester sisters do contribute to Moll’s
becoming a Fate figure.
The impact of the Colchester sisters is twofold: firstly, they help apportion Moll’s
lot in life by continuing her education, and secondly, one gives Moll advice after which
she patterns much of her life. At first, it appears that the chief lesson she learns from
them is that class and wealth do not a beauty make. She describes both Colchester sisters
indirectly when she relates the following:
Here I continu’d till I was between 17 and 18 […] and here I had all the
Advantages for my Education that could be imagin’d; the Lady had
Masters home to teach her Daughters to Dance, and to speak French, and
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to Write, and others to teach them Musick; and I was always with them, I
learn’d as fast as they; and tho’ the Masters were not appointed to teach
me, yet I learn’d by Imitation and enquiry, all that they learned by
Instruction and Direction. (MF 18)
Moll surpasses the sisters in their studies, and, she notes, “I was apparently Handsomer
than any of them. Secondly, I was better shap’d, and Thirdly, I Sung better” (MF 18).
The poor servant girl has something the noble daughters have not, but the Colchester
sisters are not as jealous of Moll as one may expect.66 Instead, they try to protect her
from the flattery of men such as their own brothers, who, as gentry, could easily have
their way with Moll and leave her with no recourse. The lessons she learns about the arts
of the wealthy woman are minor, but they do indicate the extent of her education in order
to make many of her later adventures seem more plausible. Without these arts, she would
not be as successful as she is later in life, but these lessons are minor compared to the
advice she receives from one of the sisters in regards to Robin’s advances on Moll.
The advice the Colchester sister imparts to Moll about women’s social condition
is such sound advice that she never forgets it. The sister reveals the truth about English
society to her brother and to Moll in order to emphasize how cruel are his propositions
towards a mere Miss Betty, a maid:
I wonder at you Brother, says the Sister; Betty wants but one Thing, but
she had as good want every Thing, for the Market is against our Sex just
66 After Robin and one of the sisters argue about Moll’s greater allotment of beauty and wit, Moll comments, “as he had said some very disobliging things to her, upon my Account, so I could easily see that she Resented them, by her future Conduct to me”; see MF 21. Nevertheless, this same sister argues that Robin should not toy with Moll’s affection because she should not be led to believe a woman with no money could marry a man such as he.
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now; and if a young Woman have Beauty, Birth, Breeding, Sense,
Manners, Modesty, and all these to an Extream; yet if she have not
Money, she’s no Body, she had as good want them all, for nothing but
Money now recommends a Woman; the men play the Game all into their
own Hands. (MF 20)
Moll never forgets this statement of practical wisdom, for she often remarks on the
vicious nature of the marriage market and the mercenary attitude men have towards
women. This allotment of women’s value proves how the Colchester sister functions as a
key Lachesis figure, for her statement apportions Moll’s life, indeed all women’s lives,
by determining women’s value as pecuniary. Moll remembers this practical advice and
paraphrases it in another key episode in her life.
One of the first women Moll influences suffers from the lack of good potential
husbands, a plight many women faced, according to Moll. While in Redriff, Moll is
eager to help a young lady friend, the captain’s fiancée, land a decent marriage. In order
to do so, she must use deceit, for many fortune hunters abound, and the lady does not
wish to lose all her fortune in a poor match. Recognizing this woman’s need for a friend
and realizing how important a female friend can be, Moll aids the woman in her first
manipulative act as a Fate figure.67 Here, within the first quarter of her story, Moll
demonstrates that she can artfully manipulate the fates of others. She has literally
manipulated threads through spinning and knitting before, but now she figuratively
manipulates the threads of others’ lives.
67 Friendlessness is one of Moll’s favorite litanies; see MF 8, 57, 66, 105, 128, 132, 160, 161, 189, 190, 219, 281, 282, 283.
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Moll is desirous and capable of helping another woman largely due to the impact
of the Colchester sister’s remark upon her. She explains women’s circumstances by
reiterating the Colchester sister’s remarks about the mercenary nature of the marriage
market: “as my Sister-in-Law, at Colchester had said; Beauty, Wit, Manners, Sence, good
Humour, good Behaviour, Education, Vertue, Piety, or any other Qualification, whether
of Body or Mind, had no power to recommend: […] Money only made a woman
agreeable” (MF 67). The paraphrase is not quite verbatim, for the Colchester sister’s
quote includes the following qualities: “Beauty, Birth, Breeding, Wit, Sense, Manners,
Modesty” (MF 20). Defoe changes the list to indicate that time has passed since she
started the narrative and to give the sense that Moll has added a few points based upon
experience. Moll’s paraphrase of the harsh truth for women in her day is that a scorned
man, even if he had no fortune to recommend him, could easily turn a town’s male
population against a woman by assaulting her reputation: “I found the Women had lost
the Privilege of saying NO [to marriage], that it was a Favour now for a Woman to have
THE QUESTION ask’d, and if any young Lady had so much Arrogance as to Counterfeit
a Negative, she never had the Opportunity given her of denying twice.”68 These harsh
circumstances force Moll and other women to take devious actions, especially since “the
Age is so Wicked, and the Sex so Debauch’d, that in short the Number of such Men, as
an honest Woman ought to meddle with, is small indeed” (MF 74). Backscheider notes
the parallels between this episode and Moll’s first pattern of experience regarding men:
68 MF 67. Moll explains that a woman’s reputation is all that she has and that men do not respect this fact. She voices this concern when the elder brother first assaults her: “I upbraided him, that he was like all the rest of the Sex, that when they had the Character and Honour of a Woman at their Mercy, often times made it their Jest, and at least look’d upon it as a Trifle, and counted the Ruin of those, they had their Will of, as a thing of no value”; see MF 33.
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“All three of these women [Colchester mother, London widow, captain’s fiancée]
reinforce the theme that money is now a preoccupation in proposals, and the [...]
experiences [of the captain’s fiancée] mirror the strategic maneuvering and sexual
warfare of Moll’s first relationship (Backscheider, Making 73). Moll goes so far as to use
men’s mercenary tactics against them and argues “it was but just to deal with them in
their own way, and [...] to Deceive the Deceiver.”69 By doing so, Moll joins the network
of women who “[form] mutually beneficial unions” in order to land decent marriages, for
women’s advice for one another is especially important regarding marriage
(Swaminathan 195-96). Once the necessity for such action is established, Moll artfully
guides this lady through her scheme.
This early scheme prepares the reader for Moll’s later artful deceits of her future
husbands. Moll devises a plan to destroy the reputation of a young captain who had quit
courting her lady friend once she asked her neighbors if they knew of his “Character, [...]
Morals, or Substance” (MF 68). The scheme works well, and the impertinent young man
yields all the lady wishes to know before proposing marriage; Moll and the lady delight
as the impertinent man suffers as women whose reputations were endangered suffered
(MF 70-72). Here Moll functions as a Fate figure who artfully manipulates men to get
what she believes a woman needs: a good marriage.
Moll’s experience with Robin earns her this wisdom; however, her wisdom about
marriage is due less to experience than to her relationship to the Colchester sisters and the
69 MF 77. Kietzman provides an excellent analysis of Moll’s ability “to plot competitively against threatening others” such as the elder brother and this captain as a parallel to Mary Carleton’s manipulations in various hearings and trials; see Kietzman 694.
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next Fate figure, who appears in an episode between Moll’s first marriage and her
scheme for the captain’s fiancée. When Moll paraphrases the Colchester sister, she
proves her ability to choose which lessons will most impact her. A more vacuous
creature may have believed her beauty was enough for any man as it was for Robin, but
Moll is more wise and pragmatic: she sees the truth in the Colchester sister’s remark
about the marriage market. She applies this experience to the life of another woman, thus
proving she can recognize the needs of others and assist them. This empowerment to
guide another individual allows her to take one of her first actions as a Fate figure. Here,
she acts as both Clotho and Lachesis by birthing a woman into a new role in life and
apportioning this woman’s lot by landing her a husband who, after having suffered under
Moll’s scheme, will respect his wife’s ingenuity and not drain her fortune. This episode
shows Moll implementing the lessons she has learned; the linen-draper episode further
reveals why Moll is so aware of the mercenary nature of the marriage market.
Within paragraphs after her first husband’s death, Moll places “no small value
upon [her] self” and enters the social scene in London (MF 59). She lodges with the
linen-draper and acquaints herself with his sister, with whom, she says, “I had all the
Liberty, and all the Opportunity to be Gay, and appear in Company that I could desire;
my Landlord’s Sister being one of the Madest, Gayest things alive, and not so much
Mistress of her Vertue, as I thought at first she had been” (MF 59). Moll follows this
woman’s example and allows her to name Moll the “pretty Widow” (MF 60). This
naming is important, much as it is in Roxana when Roxana is dubbed “The pretty Widow
of Poictou,” for a young widow would be assumed to have a good fortune and so would
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attract a number of admirers (R 57). Moll does make a regretful mistake in this scene of
her life when she ignores this Fate figure’s advice to whore herself to the landlord linen-
draper; instead, she marries another linen-draper who abandons her after bankrupting
himself: “I found I had much better have been Sold by my She Comrade to her Brother,
than have Sold my self as I did to a Tradesman” (MF 61). Opting to marry rather than to
whore, Moll loses because she chooses the role accepted by middle-class Protestants.
Despite this loss and regret, Moll continually remarries throughout her story because she
argues that only within marriage can a woman find economic stability. Due to this belief,
she does not follow all of the advice given by the sister of the linen-draper, but she does
allow this Fate figure to assist her in marrying a man with a fortune.
The linen-draper’s sister figuratively bears Moll into the world of a wealthy
widow. This episode illustrates how Moll patterns her life on the concept that “if a young
Woman have Beauty, Birth, Breeding, Sense, Manners, Modesty, and all these to an
Extream; yet if she have not Money, she’s no Body” (MF 20). At this point in her
narrative, Moll assumes all of her value is in her wealth; she learns from the Colchester
sister and the linen-draper’s sister that she is nobody without it. This investment is clear
when she notes “with a tollerable Fortune in my Pocket, I put no small value upon my
self” (MF 59). When manipulating her third husband into marrying her without a
fortune, a risky gamble given the marriage market at Redriff, she argues that no matter
how virtuous he finds her, her husband-to-be would not marry her unless he thought she
had a fortune: “But Money¶s Vertue; Gold is Fate” (MF 79). This telling sign reveals
how Moll believes money alone is a determining figure. At this point of her narrative,
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she may be a schemer capable of fooling men and aiding women, but her value is wholly
pecuniary. The next Fate figure in her life dramatically changes her sense of self. Moll
can no longer imagine that money alone makes the woman, for the past overwhelms all
else.
Moll’s third marriage brings her to America and her mother-in-law, who, after
revealing her story of being a transported criminal from Newgate, Moll discovers is her
birth mother. This woman is greatly significant, for she performs the roles of all three
Fates and enables Moll to confront her past, present, and future. As a Clotho figure, she
has brought Moll into being, and she reveals Moll is born of the same mother that
figuratively bore her: Mother Newgate. This revelation occurs when she tells Moll that
she was exposed to the vices of Newgate when she was sent by her mother “to carry
Victuals and other Relief to a Kinswoman of hers who was a Prisoner” (MF 87).
Furthermore, such visits had an effect on Moll’s mother, for she becomes one of the
multitude it bears: “there are more Thieves and Rogues made by that one Prison of
Newgate than by all the Clubs and Societies of Villains in the Nation; tis that cursed
Place, [...] that half Peoples this Colony” (MF 87). By connecting Moll to Newgate,
Moll’s mother also acts as a Lachesis figure, for her circumstances have determined and
continue to determine Moll’s lot in life: the life of a criminal’s illegitimate child is a poor
share. Finally, as an Atropos figure, her revelation to Moll that she is Moll’s mother
terminates Moll’s formerly happy life with her husband/brother. This termination makes
the coexistence of mother and daughter unbearable for Moll; Moll, fortunately, devises a
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means of escaping back to England, but when a similar mother-daughter crisis manifests
in Roxana, escape is not so possible.
The Atropos figure as a mother figure appears in both narratives; here, her
presence makes Moll’s life with mother intolerable and sends her back to England, closer
to her fate. To elucidate the function of the mother as an Atropos figure, Bowers goes
into great detail about how motherhood is a fatal relationship for mother and child by
noting numerous passages from Moll Flanders and Roxana to prove that motherhood is
“infanticide, suicide, and murder all in one” (119). These terms are literal and figurative,
as shown by the abandonment of the children both women execute as a form of
infanticide. To be marketable wives and mistresses, Moll and Roxana must abandon
their children, and even though they often provide for such children, infanticide is “the
elimination of children . . . however achieved” whether the child is actually murdered or
merely disposed of by some other means (Bowers 98). Both narrators also figuratively
kill a part of themselves when they claim that parting with children is death to them (MF
125; R 277). Bowers goes into greater depth about how the fatal relationship between
mother and child often demands one subject die for the sake of the other and how the
mother most often sacrifices her child for the sake of her autonomy (118-19). The literal
murder of Susan demands attention later, but the termination of Moll’s happiness in
America by her mother’s revelation is no less important.
The truth Moll’s mother delivers is ambivalent. It allows Moll to understand her
origins, but it also destroys her chances at happiness. Once Moll realizes that her mother-
in-law, this “good humour’d old Woman,” is her mother, she realizes her birthplace is
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Newgate (MF 86). At this moment, Moll is made aware of Newgate as part of her
identity, much as the scar on her mother’s hand indicates that she is a transported
criminal (MF 87). This realization triggers her desire to confront the place that gave birth
to her, a meeting which finally fulfills what she most needs: to face the past which has
helped fashion who she is. However, that desire cannot be fulfilled until Moll asserts her
desire to escape her incestuous marriage by accepting the truth rather than living by the
terms her mother suggests, terms that Moll finds unnatural and insufferable.
Moll’s perception of her marriage as unnatural terminates her chances at
happiness in the New World. After learning that her mother-in-law is her birth mother,
Moll bemoans her existence by commenting, “I know not by what ill Fate guided, [but]
every thing went wrong with us afterwards” (MF 90). Nothing between her husband and
recently revealed brother is tolerable any longer, and she asserts, “I knew that the whole
Relation was Unnatural in the highest degree in the World” (MF 91). Staying within this
relationship is not an option in Moll’s opinion, but her brother makes “a fatal Resolution”
to keep her in America despite her pleas to let her return to England.70 Moll’s mother
advises Moll to keep the story to herself, which she does for three years, and goes so far
as to try to revise Moll’s story, which Moll does not tolerate: “as if she had been willing
to forget the Story she had told me of herself, or to suppose that I had forgot some of the
Particulars, she began to tell them with Alterations and Omissions, but I refresh’d her
Memory, and set her to rights” (MF 96). During this episode, Bowers comments, “the
70 MF 91. Although the revelation Moll’s mother makes destroys her marital bliss, her mother does protect her from the brother-husband’s threat to institutionalize Moll. Chaber likens this protection “from the patriarchal authorities constantly impinging on her life” to the protection provided her by the Colchester nurse and Mother Midnight; see Chaber 219.
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narrative—hitherto Moll’s own—becomes a tangle of confused ‘relations,’ a story where
mothers and daughters cannot safely co-exist, and where there is no possibility for
unequivocally satisfactory or ‘natural’ choices” (102-03). Moll’s mother tries to redefine
their past “relations,” here both in the narrative and familial sense, but Moll does not
grant her this control over her life. She has survived a prior crisis of recognition with the
Colchester Nurse, in which she asserted her desire to work at her needle; now, she
withstands her own mother’s attempts to be the omnipotent one in control of the child.71
She accepts the unnatural reality of her situation and determines she cannot live in this
manner. Although her mother functions as Atropos, Moll does not allow her life to be
terminated along with her marital bliss; instead, she effectively takes on all three fatal
roles, survives the episode, and continues to follow her own fate.
As the embodiment of all three of the Fates, Moll is the source of her deliverance
from this episode; she also determines her brother’s lot in life and nearly brings him to
his death. Erickson argues, “By naming the dreadful secret she brings it out in the open,
gives it birth, rescues her own life, inflicts her husband with the knowledge of his incest
and thus contributes to his two attempts at suicide” (49). So dangerous is this unnatural
relation that Moll escapes to England, and, upon her eventual return to America, she
verifies her mother’s death before deciding upon where to settle. Only when she is “no
longer subject to the disquieting echoes of the mother’s story” can she live at peace in
71 By asserting herself, Moll does not submit to her mother’s attempts to redefine their relationship. She withstands this challenge to her independence and so does not become like the child who must always acquiesce to the omnipotent mother. Crises of recognition, particularly the rapprochement crisis, are always crises of omnipotence; one subject tries to maintain omnipotence by dominating the other; only through destructive fantasy can the crisis be overcome; see Benjamin, Bonds 35-36; Like 89. Fortunately, Moll has survived one such crisis, so she is well-equipped to survive this one.
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America (Bowers 104). Clearly, both Moll and her mother act as Fate figures in this
episode, but Moll emerges as the one in control over the situation. She accepts the reality
of her circumstances and determines a path that will allow her to survive. This path is
brought about both by her mother’s revelation of the truth that drives her away from her
family and her ability to resist her mother’s attempts to deny the truth. Moll escapes
this unnatural situation by fleeing back to England, where, certain of her birth place, she
can continue her inexorable journey to Newgate.
Although Moll quests for a mother figure, finding her birth mother does not fulfill
her quest.72 What it does accomplish is to let her know her origin so that she may
confront it and discover what it means to be born of “the utmost Infamy, the hellish
Noise, the Roaring, Swearing, and Clamour, the Stench and Nastiness, and all the
dreadful croud of Afflicting things […] an Emblem of Hell itself” (MF 274). Finding
her mother serves as a recognition scene that prepares her for her fate to face her maker:
Mother Newgate, the matrix to which Moll is inexorably drawn throughout her life. The
most significant Fate figure, Mother Midnight, provides Moll with the means to do so.
Moll’s unconscious desire to confront Newgate is strongest during the Mother Midnight
episodes, which begin shortly after Moll returns to England from her incestuous marriage
and end only after she is transported from Newgate.
After leaving America, Moll has proven she can control her own destiny by
resisting others, a lesson she adds to her previous lessons of how to manipulate the
72 Starr is one of the first scholars to note Moll’s quest to find a mother figure; see Starr, introduction x. Others have followed suit, and one of the most provocative readings argues the search for a mother is the search for a viable economic model for a woman; see Chaber 213. I likewise claim that mother figures are of importance to Moll, but I emphasize that Moll also seeks agency in other fatal roles.
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marriage market and how to assist, govern, and manipulate others. She does encounter
three more Fate figures, the innkeeper at Bath whose fatal role as a bawd foreshadows
Mother Midnight’s roles in Moll’s life; Jemy’s accomplice, whose deceit and schemes
serve Moll as models of manipulation; and the schoolmistress thief, whom Moll
“attend[s] some time in the Practise, just as a Deputy attends a Midwife without any Pay”
(MF 201). Others have acknowledged the significance of these women, as Chaber notes,
“Moll is surrounded by persons as manipulative, mercenary, and deceptive as she is—
from the governess-midwife who ‘comforts’ her [...], to the Bath lady who turns out to be
a pander [...], to Jemmy’s ‘sister,’ actually his whore” (213). Chaber’s observation could
easily be applied to most of the women earlier in Moll’s life, or to Moll when she helps
the captain’s fiancée. Although these three characters are significant, the first women she
encounters establish the patterns that make Moll a Fate figure.
With the exception of the schoolmistress thief, all of these Fate figures provide
Moll with basic structures of experience that influence her expectations about Mother
Midnight; by the time she encounters Mother Midnight, she already knows what to
expect from others; she readily trusts Mother Midnight based on her more positive
experiences with the earlier Fate figures. The experiences the Fate figures give her are
invaluable. From these women, Moll learns how to receive instruction from others, to
recognize limits imposed upon her by society, to assert her self within the confines of the
mercenary world, and to become a Fate figure herself. These relationships provide her
with the experiences that she patterns into a meaningful order. She acknowledges their
importance to her, for time and time again, she laments whenever she has no friend in the
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world, and she is at her best whenever she can operate under the auspice of another
woman. Even through minor characters, these women teach Moll how to manipulate
others and to rely on women for help. From these Fate figures, she learns how to create,
apportion, and destroy via the traditionally feminine roles of mother, spinsters, midwife,
prostitute, bawd, and witch. Learning from Fate figures and helping others allow her to
become a Fate figure who eventually patterns her own experience so that she can
confront her fate.
Like the women in Moll’s life, men shape Moll’s experiences, but in a different
manner. Jemy is a helpful character, but most of the men relate to Moll objectively.
Moll complains that a woman needs a man through whom she can act as an agent: “Men
can be their own Advisers, and their own Directors, and know how to work themselves
out of Difficulties and into Business better than Women; but if a Woman has no Friend to
Communicate her Affairs to, and to advise and assist her, ‘tis ten to one but she is
undone” (MF 128). She further observes that a friendless woman is like a “Bag of
Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway” (MF 128). If a virtuous man finds her, she will
be returned to her proper station; but if an unprincipled character finds her, she is
doomed. After her first encounter with a deceitful man, the elder brother of Colchester,
rather than just her luck with men, Moll always seeks the counsel of a woman first. Moll
relies on female agents, for men more often than not prove to be deceitful to her, and her
husbands tend to die, go bankrupt, run away from her, or otherwise prove unsuitable.
Men have their place in the narrative, but Moll learns how to survive and prosper
in early modern England from women. Chaber considers Moll Flanders a matriarchal
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novel because Moll breaks from her dependency upon men and the feminine cycle of
reproduction into the historical, social cycle of production unlike most eighteenth-century
protagonists, who rely upon paternal figures (213); she gains autonomy by becoming a
thief and occasional whore under the guidance of women who “determine Moll’s fate”
(219). Although Chaber’s Marxist reading sheds light upon the importance of women in
the text, its economic focus does not account for the fatal metaphors that persist
throughout Moll’s capital ventures. The bonds she forms with other women are the key
to her becoming a woman who controls her own fate; unquestionably, the experiences she
gains through her relationships with these Fate figures are what make Moll who she is.
As a Fate figure, Moll represents what the modern woman can become within an
interconnected community of women. Although she is not wholly autonomous, she has
the power to manipulate others in her life and the capacity to accept the aid of others.
Within the context of feminine relationships, she can mutually recognize others who have
desires of their own and not treat them as mere objects of her own will. To emphasize
the power women have to control their lives and manipulate the lives of others, Defoe
employs the feminine metaphors, roles, and functions of Fate. However, through Moll’s
fears of abandonment and desires to be with a man such as Jemy, he juxtaposes these
fatal feminine relationships against the limited roles of women within the realm of
Providence, which does not grant them the same fluidity between roles or multiplicity of
meaning within the roles of mothers, spinsters, midwives, prostitutes, bawds, and
witches. Fate and Providence will be reconciled with Moll’s story, but the roles of minor
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characters who function as Fate figures take on a slightly different meaning in his later
narrative.
FATE FIGURES IN ROXANA
There are fewer secondary characters in Roxana than in Moll Flanders, which
makes the significant characters stand out the more readily. Amy is of the most
importance to Roxana, and she is with Roxana from the moment the story unfolds, when
Roxana’s first husband abandons her.73 This ubiquitousness makes Amy “unique among
Defoe’s secondary characters in Defoe’s narratives in that she remains in the story from
the beginning to the end” (Hentzi 180). Rather than foreshadow Amy’s significance
through lesser characters, as he does Mother Midnight through earlier Fate figures, Defoe
emphasizes Amy’s importance from the very beginning. This leaves little room for other
significant Fate figures; however, they do appear. Roxana’s namesake, Susan, is one of
the most important Fate figures, for she serves a similar function as Newgate does for
Moll: she is the source of Roxana’s torment and the key to understanding Roxana’s
narrative and life. The only other Fate figures are the two “good Creatures” who help
Roxana dispose of her children by her first husband, the Turkish servant, and the Quaker
woman who operates as Roxana’s agent in the last third of the narrative (R 18).
Nevertheless, these women merit investigation because of their relationships to Roxana.
Due to their being so few women in Roxana’s narrative, a quick gloss will help
identify the Fate figures from those who serve as mere plot devices. This gloss serves
73 Given Bowers’ definition of infanticide as abandoning a child incapable of fending for itself, this action by Roxana’s husband may be read as a form of gynocide—abandoning a woman in a world in which she does not know how to by earn a living or fend for herself; Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760 (Cambridge: The U of Cambridge P, 1996) 98.
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only to note the significance of female characters who, unlike Amy, Susan, and the
Quaker, normally receive little credit in Defoe studies. Two of these minor characters are
potential Atropos figures, and one is a midwife. Roxana fears the old midwife provided
by the Prince because she presumably will murder her infant upon its delivery, so Roxana
has Amy find an English midwife and nurse (R 77). The influence of this potential
Atropos figure is thwarted, and Roxana may convince her eighteenth-century audience
that she made this decision not only to save herself but also her child because her
contemporaries believed midwives could be paid to kill the infant or the mother during
labor.74 While traveling with the Prince, Roxana mentions three female servants, one of
whom she calls an “old Witch,” an old “Harradan,” and “old hag” (R 107). She
introduces Roxana to several languages and “intrieguing Arts” and praises Roxana for
being able to keep the Prince to herself rather than share him with the other courtesans (R
102). To a degree, this woman acts as Lachesis, apportioning what Roxana learns while
abroad, and Roxana’s emphasis on the word old links this woman to Atropos; however,
the woman’s influence on Roxana is so underemphasized as to merit no further attention
here.75 The other two female characters receive brief mention; one is a plot device to get
Susan and Roxana together, and the other is a foil to Susan. The Captain’s wife, friend
of Susan, is merely a clever plot device to explain Susan’s presence on the same ship as
74 Erickson notes a number of early modern midwives including Jane Sharp wrote against horrific obstetric practices by ignorant midwives who understood little about the human reproductive system and resorted to sadistic measures during the labor process; he also notes the association the latter midwives had with witches, for both were viewed as creatures capable of harming both mother and infant; see Erickson 17. 75 This character serves as a plot device that makes Roxana’s travels more plausible. Such a servant who knows the languages, habits, and “arts” of the Continent is necessary to Roxana’s European education.
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Roxana.76 The foil to Susan is her own sister who begs Susan to stop harassing Roxana
for fear they will be cut off from Roxana’s charity (R 274). The women of Roxana’s
family are mentioned in the first episode, for her mother is dead and none of her
husband’s close relations are of any help. Only her husband’s aunt by marriage and a
poor woman assisted by the family’s charity provide any assistance to Roxana.
Roxana’s first assistance and guidance from Fate figures comes in the form of a
scheme devised by three women of little means: an ancient widow, a poor woman
dependent upon Roxana’s in-laws, and Amy. Obviously, these three women conjure an
image of the Moirai, with Amy as the youngest Clotho, the poor woman as the older
Lachesis, and the aunt as the elderly Atropos. The eldest comforter is the last relation
Roxana can turn to for help: “an Ancient Gentlewoman, Aunt-in-Law to my Husband, a
Widow, and the least able of any of the rest…[who said] That she would have help’d me,
but that, indeed, she was not able” (R 15-16). The aunt does plead Roxana’s case to the
family; however, it is to no avail, so she returns with Amy and a third woman, who
Roxana describes as “a poor Woman that had been a kind of a Dependant upon our
Family, and who I had often, among the rest of the Relations, been very kind to” (R 16).
These three women create a scheme to deliver Roxana from her circumstances into a life
free of the necessities associated with motherhood. Essentially, the episode can be
broken down into four stages that mimic those that Moll follows in her interactions with
the Colchester family and Mother Midnight: illness, assistance, deceit, and
76 R 274-75. Here, the author acting as a controlling force is very evident. As a Fate or Providence figure, Defoe directs the action as he sees fit; what makes it artful is that the reader is convinced that such a meeting could happen.
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transformation. To the illness, assistance, and transformation pattern Lerenbaum
analyzes (102), I wish to emphasize deceit as a distinct stage because it is especially
crucial to Roxana’s development into a woman who wishes to control her past by keeping
it a secret. The stages are part of the process Roxana undergoes to free herself from her
children; without her fatal assistants, she would have little other recourse to survive.
The three comforters episode transforms Roxana into an Atropos figure by proxy
because she abandons her children via Amy and her two assistants. This abandonment
brings the charge of infanticide, even if only in the figurative sense, against Roxana from
some readers; however, her decision to abandon the children comes only after she suffers
a period of illness and she gains the assurance that they will be protected.77 As young
mothers, both Roxana and Moll are naive about their circumstances, and both are assisted
through their transitions by women who perform fatal roles. Moll embarks on her
marriage career with the help and advice of the Colchester sisters, and Roxana begins her
career as an independent woman with the help of the three comforters. At this stage, both
experience a psychosomatic illness. Moll’s manifests itself as a fever and delirium that
lasts for five weeks, and Roxana’s manifests itself as anxiety and tears. Both women are
nursed through this period by female assistants who empower them to begin their fatal
journeys.
77 Many twentieth-century readings often limit gender roles by classifying Moll and Roxana as unfeminine. Roxana, in particular, suffers from oversimplifications about gender. Maynadier writes that Roxana “shows a calculating reticence which is most unfeminine”; see G.H. Maynadier, introduction, Roxana, by Daniel Defoe (1724; Philadelphia: Morris, 1903) xi. Likewise, Rogers contends that Roxana has masculine ego drives; see Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1982) 69.
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Roxana’s illness is the result of circumstance and necessity, two factors she often
blames for her actions. After several months, Roxana begins to fear her husband will
never return, and even if he were to do so, she is uncertain of what she must do: “I look’d
into my own Circumstances, [...]. What to do, I knew not, nor to whom to have recourse;
[...] I continued extremely perplex’d, melancholly, and discourag’d to the last Degree.”78
After a year in this condition, and after many failed attempts to gain assistance from her
husband’s family, Roxana dismisses two notions as possible solutions: to work with her
needle or to kill her children. The first solution is not feasible for a woman of her
background: “I would have done my Endeavour to have work’d for [my children] with
my Needle, [...] but to think of one single Woman not bred to Work, and at a Loss where
to get employment, to get the Bread of five Children, that was not possible” (R 15); the
second solution reveals the extent of her “Misery and Distress,” for she reasons that that
there is nearly nothing left to eat “unless, like one of the pitiful Women of Jerusalem, I
should eat up my very Children themselves.”79 The extent of Roxana’s despair is not
exaggerated, for a woman of her class would not have the same resourcefulness as would
a woman like Moll. In desperate times, Moll turns to her needlework, and although she
abandons her needle for the art of thievery, she does so less because of necessity and
circumstance than because of her fears of being a woman unable to bear children or
78 R 12-13. As a woman abandoned by her husband, Roxana is a figurative widow, and she is perceived by her family as much a burden to them as an actual widow would be. Without her husband to support her and with no family of her own beyond a brother who wasted their inheritance, she is considered a burden by her in-laws. Roxana can take little comfort knowing that widows generally were regarded as having a higher status than spinsters, for they had at least fulfilled their “ordained role as women” by having been wives; see Brophy 228. 79 R 17-18. Roxana’s allusion is to Lamentations 2.20: “Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long? shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?”
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attract a husband due to her lack of marketable assets. Roxana, on the other hand, has
had no such training in how to gain employment, so she does all she can do in order to
get bread for her family: she applies to her only relatives, all in-laws, for assistance; when
this fails, she turns to the three comforters, who counsel her to abandon her children.
Roxana’s illness is described less with such descriptors as “fever,” “distraction,”
and “delirium” than it is with the language of tears. She cries to such a great excess that
when Amy arrives with help for her, the three women find Roxana “crying ready to burst
[her]self” and “swell’d with crying”(R 17). She cannot explain her situation to them, for
upon seeing them, she falls “into another violent Fit of Crying” (R 18). These violent fits
render speech impossible and make her feel as though her body will burst, indicating
Roxana is in the process of a figurative labor. Her tears function much like the breaking
of the water that signals the delivery of a baby, for they signal that she is ready to deliver
her burden. Because Roxana is the one in need of delivery from her circumstances, she
needs others to assist her in this process. Therefore, her three comforters act as midwives
who deliver her from the pain that is causing the tears, deliver her from her
circumstances, and deliver her from her burden: her children.
The figurative midwives brought by Amy to attend Roxana empathetically join
Roxan’s discourse of tears. Upon their arrival, they find her crying “vehemently,” and
once Roxana explains why she is sorting through heaps of her belongings to sell for food
for herself and her five children, “they sat down like Job’s three Comforters, and said not
one Word to me for a great while, but both of them cry’d as fast, and as heartlily as I did”
(R 17). As in the case of an actual labor, there is “no Need of much Discourse in the
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Case,” for the problem at hand is quite simple: Roxana must be delivered of her burden
(R 17). Indeed, the old Aunt is “hardly able to speak for Tears” because she identifies so
with Roxana (R 18). United in their grief, they resolve to deliver Roxana from her
circumstances.
Although tears are her constant assistant, the most beneficial assistance given to
Roxana is linguistic. There is a greater connection between birth and language in the
discourse of fate than the simple but clear analogy of the mouth and tongue as the
generative organs from which words are birthed, for the women who attend a birth aid the
birthing process with their speech. After the women commiserate, they begin to shape
Roxana’s fate. Their counsel is characterized by the fatal conventions of birth and
language, and their words of counsel become a scheme to initiate the actions that deliver
Roxana of her burden. As they counsel Roxana, they conjure the birthing scene that
Erickson describes as a “communal affair of women, with, ideally, the mother’s and the
midwife’s friends or ‘gossips’ in festive and sympathetic attendance” (11). Granted,
Roxana’s figurative birth scene is not festive, but the women sympathetically attend to
her. Roxana’s lamentations are the cries of the laboring mother and her newly born
infant, and the comforters’ counsel is the language of the midwife, be it words of
comfort, direction, or incantation. Erickson clarifies this connection: “In the birth scene
through the ages there is the spectrum of, at one end, the inarticulate crying in pain of
mother in labor and child after delivery [...] to, in primitive times and later, the midwives’
incantations and charms [...], to the midwife’s words of encouragement to the mother,
and finally to the naming of the child at birth” (11). Like literal midwives, the Greek
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Moirai, the Roman Parcae, and the Norse Norns who are present in order to fix the fate
of the child at her birth, Amy and the other comforters are present at Roxana’s birth into
independence from her children.
Roxana relies upon these three comforters to devise a means of disposing of her
children; she grants them the power to act for her, and she shares with them the
responsibility that accompanies their actions. She reasons that the children and herself
are about to be starved: “So I agreed to go away out of the House, and leave the
Management of the whole Matter to my Maid Amy; and to them, and accordingly I did
so; and the same Afternoon they carried them all away to one of their Aunts” (R 19). The
comforters’ actions free Roxana for the moment, but they also lead to the consequences
Roxana suffers at the very end of the book: her years in torment and perpetual disguise,
and her misery from knowing her actions led to her daughter’s death. Just as Roxana is
not present at the actual murder of Susan, she is not present when her children are
abandoned; nevertheless, she accepts responsibility for these instances of infanticide.
Just as the tears give way to words, words give way to action in this episode. The
three comforters craft a scheme in which the poor woman lies about Roxana being
thrown out of doors, her children taken from her, and her being taken to “a Mad-House
by the Parish” for having “run distracted” after her children as they were taken from her
(R 22). Roxana explains their scheme:
That the children should be all carried by them to the Door of one of the
Relations […] and be set down there by the maid Amy, and that I […]
should remove for some days, shut up the Doors, and be gone; that the
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People should be told, That if they did not think fit to take some Care of
the Children, they might send for the Church-Wardens. (R 18)
Simply put, the children are forced upon their relatives, and, if the family will not care for
them, the children will have to be turned over to the parish. This lie convinces the man of
the house to which they deliver the remaining four children not only to take them in but
also to retrieve the one who had been taken by the parish. Most importantly, Roxana is
freed from her children with the assurance that they will be raised together by family
rather than by a parish nurse. Not only does this deceit free Roxana from the burden of
her children but it also serves as a key stage in a pattern of relying upon women that
repeats itself throughout her life. Although Roxana is clever, whenever she is in the most
trouble, she must rely upon female agents to save her.
In the three comforters episode, Roxana reveals her willingness to allow others to
act on her behalf. They act as all three Fates, apportioning her lot as Lachesis, disposing
her children as Atropos, and delivering her into a new world as Clotho. The episode
reads much like the fatal episodes in Moll’s narrative, and it is saturated with the imagery
and metaphors of Fate rather than Providence. Roxana suffers her first illness, receives
assistance, is delivered via deceit, and, ultimately, is transformed into an Atropos figure
free of her children.
This formative episode establishes Fate as the predominant force in the novel, and
Fate manifests in a significant manner with the next key Fate figure, who is associated
with the birth of the public identity that drives Roxana into secrecy and a more literal
infanticide. She appears in the first half of a paragraph and may easily be overlooked, but
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she is by far one of the greatest influences on Roxana’s life story: “[In Naples] my Lord
bought me a little Female Turkish Slave, [...] and of her I learnt the Turkish language;
their Way of Dressing, and some Turkish, or rather Moorish Songs, of which I made Use,
to my Advantage, on an extraordinary Occasion” (R 102). The Turkish slave garbs
Roxana in a figurative generation process, much like Sharp’s seventeenth-century
description of the womb clothing the infant (Sharp 77). She is the source of Roxana’s
public identity, indeed, the identity by which most people know her story; as such, she is
one of the most important Clotho figures, even though she appears briefly.
The Turkish servant is a matrix that fashions Roxana into a creature of clothes,
the epitome of a prostitute. The Turkish garb provided to Roxana by this Fate figure is
described in more detail when Roxana tells of the “extraordinary Occasion,” during
which she dances for the king and her other guests (R 173-74). It is exotic, loose-fitting,
and sexually provocative, earning her a name synonymous with courtesans. Although
she has been delivered into whoredom already, in this episode, Roxana is fashioned into
the epitome of the early modern whore because of her exotic and expensive clothing
(Erickson 29). Erickson explains the connection between whores and infants via clothing
conventions: “like the infant swaddled in the fabric of amnios and chorion in his
wombhouse, the whore too is a creature of clothes” (29). Clothing and naming are not
the only factors that determine Roxana’s status as a whore, for the language lessons the
Turk gives Roxana are lessons that aid the art of prostitution. After all, the whore is a
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“poet of sexuality” who uses pleasing language to manipulate her lover.80 Through
clothing and language, the Turkish slave births Roxana into higher levels of whoredom;
therefore, this barely-mentioned servant is one of the most powerful Fate figures in
Roxana’s life.
Clothed in her exotic dress, the narrator receives the name by which she is known
to her readers and her daughter. While dancing for the king and his court, the name
Roxana is fixed upon her(R 176). The name “Roxana” was commonly used for Oriental
women with political power in drama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries.81 Nussbaum elaborates upon the significance of Turkish women in European
drama as savage others who interfered with state politics, as in Racine’s Bajazet, in which
Roxana “is the commanding ruler of the seraglio who in Amurat’s absence wields both
sexual and political authority. […] The name ‘Roxana’ signaled a sexual, public, and
exotic persona with influence over political decisions” (34). With this new identity
woven into her life, Roxana becomes the courtesan of courtesans, and her fabricated self
becomes more vain, self-seeking, and self-denying. Like the children who return to haunt
her, the dress and name of this episode are not easily shed; the split created between
mother and other leads to the most literal breakdown of tension: death.
80 Erickson 35. Erickson explicates a number of passages from The Whores Rhetorick (1683) to illustrate how the early modern prostitute was perceived as a creature of words who manipulates words in order to equivocate and redefine the language of virtue and honor into the language of seduction; see Erickson 35. This equivocation may be read in the language of virtue employed by Roxana and the landlord in the seduction scenes immediately following the three comforters’ episode. 81 Mullan claims that Defoe’s most immediate source for the name was the Memoirs of the Life of Count de Grammont; see John Mullan, explanatory notes, Roxana, by Daniel Defoe (1724; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 349.
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By incorporating aspects of the exotic other into her public identity, Roxana
precipitates the conflict that will ultimately destroy her. Backsheider explains how it is
now a commonplace “that Roxana becomes her clothes [...]. Her Turkish costume
becomes the sum of her character and an identity so firm that Susan can use it to stalk
her” (Backscheider, Ambition 197). She becomes a sexualized other in public, but this
identity collides with her earlier maternal role and ironically marks her as Susan’s
mother. Nussbaum also comments upon this conflict of identities: “Roxana’s
impersonation of a Turkish dancer [...] ostensibly signifies her sexuality but paradoxically
becomes the marker of her maternal identity and the point of a fatal contest with her
daughter. In Roxana, pretending to inhabit the body of the sexualized Other breeds
violence within the domestic sphere.”82 Although Backscheider’s language associates the
violence with Susan, both scholars explain the importance of the dress to the conflict
between the maternal and sexual realms in the early modern period. As does Moll’s act
of transvestism when a thief, Roxana’s disguise indicates “the dangers and advantages of
transgressing class and gender roles” (Stadler 469); she becomes the sexualized other, the
epitome of a scheming courtesan, but she also remains a mother. This transgression
brings into direct conflict eighteenth-century constructions of sexuality and maternity.
By donning the Turkish garb, Roxana adopts a public role that is suited to the
woman she has become through her machinations and the guidance of the Fate figures
82 Nussbaum 32. Nussbaum provides a detailed postcolonial reading of Roxana with particular emphasis on the Turkish dress as an emblem of the sexualized other on the periphery of the empire; see Nussbaum 30-41. For a reading of the Turkish dress within the context of women and imperialism, see Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). In her chapter on Defoe, Brown analyzes the dress as a symbol of the violently sexualized woman, the Amazon, and as a signifier of the spoils of imperialism; see Brown 135-57.
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who helped her dispose of her children and turn to whoring. To deny her maternal self
and favor the sexual one, Roxana displaces sexuality onto the Turk in order to survive in
“bourgeois domesticity” (Nussbaum 18). According to eighteenth-century limitations
placed upon mothers, she must deny her maternal role in order to be the other who can
exercise sexual and political power. She does so by taking the name of a politically
scheming courtesan, thus masking her identity as a mother with that of the other woman
whose mystifying power lies on the fringe of the British Empire. This masking of
motherhood with “the Other woman’s alleged sexual ambiguity and libidinal freedom
liberate[s] Roxana from her confinement to certain gendered regimes” (Nussbaum 35).
Temporarily, she is freed from her earlier notion of a maternal self, but her desire to
provide for her children and her daughter’s memory of her public performance force her
to be both the maternal Susan and the sexualized Roxana.83 The temporary freedom from
gender constraints afforded by this act of clothing and naming herself ultimately
precipitates the split in self that will lead to her daughter’s death, and the figurative death
of Roxana. Just as Roxana cannot maintain the tension between assertion and recognition
in her relationship with Amy, she cannot maintain the tension between mother and whore
in her sense of self; one role must be eliminated in order for the other to exist.
The breakdown of tension throughout Roxana’s narrative reveals why she cannot
be both a Fate figure and a penitent as is Moll. Although Roxana’s tendency to split is
manifest earlier in her story, the Turkish dress episode fosters the fatal split between the
maternal and sexual. Without the Turkish servant, Roxana would not be able to publicly
83 In this instance, I am referring to Roxana by her birth name, Susan, and not to her daughter of the same name.
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embody the sexualized other so brazenly as she does; this incorporation of the exotic
other into her story is the key to the paradox of sexualized other and maternal mother,
and it is written masterfully as a fatal birth process.
Just as Defoe employs the exotic, sexualized other as the key Fate figure in
Roxana’s public life, he utilizes the Quaker as a Fate figure who assists Roxana in her
private life. The Quaker’s asymmetrical relationship to Roxana allows Roxana to
incorporate her into the patterns of experience she has already formulated with other
subordinate women; therefore, it is no surprise that she readily trusts this woman and
eventually comes to call her a friend and an agent. The Quaker at first appears as a stark
contrast to the Turk because her domestic nature balances the exotic nature of the earlier
Fate figure; however, both women function as subordinate figures who grant Roxana
qualities conventionally ascribed to men. Both women also help Roxana become
“Masculine in her politick Capacity” by serving as masculine role models (R 148): the
Turk is a symbol for the politically scheming prostitute, and the Quaker is a symbol of
women who performed male roles preaching and through missionary work. Both exotic
others like the Turk and women who dared speak or act as the Quakers did were
ostracized groups perceived as different than the ideal English mother figure. In her
desire to be autonomous, Roxana first tries to gain agency through sexuality, but she
grows “sick of the Vice” of whoring (R 200). She turns from the agency through
sexuality model to one of agency through more virtuous actions, although this model is
not feminine according to seventeenth-century gender constructions.
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Quaker women in Defoe’s day was perceived as masculine for adopting roles as
preachers and missionaries within the church and for disseminating their voices through
writings such as conversion narratives, persecution narratives, spiritual autobiographies,
and other works aimed at their persecutors, potential converts, and many others beyond
an intimate circle of friends, or Friends, as the case may be.84 To further emphasize her
emblematic nature, Defoe does not provide her a name, much as he does not provide the
Turk a name. Both women are objects used by Roxana to alter her identity. Defoe
employs a Quaker woman because his contemporaries would recognize her as a symbol
for a potential Providence figure and, simultaneously, a symbol for a woman whose
manners are too mannish. Because of her earlier patterns of experiences with other
women, Roxana subordinates the Quaker, ignores any potential Providential
relationships, and as with other women before, gets what she wants from and through this
other woman.
The Quaker acts as a Fate figure in several ways: most often, she is an agent who
executes Roxana’s will, yet she also determines what Roxana should do by making
decisions for her and guiding her actions. Primarily, the Quaker allows Roxana to deny
her daughter Susan by helping Roxana disguise herself and by telling half-truths about
Roxana. These repeated themes of disguise and deceit at first keep Roxana from
confronting what she fears about herself; however, they also compound her sense of guilt,
and, ultimately, they lead her to her fate. The Quaker initially helps Roxana remain safe
84 For a detailed discussion of the role and voice of Quaker women as feminists, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women¶s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 136-37. She provides a number of examples to help dispel the belief that seventeenth-century women writers were limited to writing within intimate circles of friends, as in coterie literature; see Ezell 34.
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from her own past, but she unintentionally helps Roxana confront her infanticidal self.
Much like Amy, the Quaker serves as a complement to Roxana.
Despite their asymmetrical relationship, the two women share at least one pattern
of experience; like Roxana, the Quaker has suffered from a bad marriage. Roxana
immediately sees her as a sister in distress who “was as glad of me, as I was of her” (R
212). Roxana explains her later generosity to the Quaker by saying that charity is not the
primary reason for her giving so much to the Quaker:
there was another Spring from whence all flow’d, and ‘tis on that Account
I speak of it: Was it possible I cou’d think of a poor desolate Woman with
four Children, and her Husband gone from her, and perhaps good for little
if he had stay¶d; I say, was I, that had tasted so deep of the Sorrows of
such a kind of Widowhood, able to look on her, and think of her
Circumstances, and not be touch’d in an uncommon Manner?85
Some may read Roxana’s generosity as a means of bribing the Quaker to perform her
will, but at this stage in her life, Roxana has been so dependent upon Amy that trusting
and even befriending a subordinate woman is in keeping with her character. Roxana does
wish to employ the Quaker as an agent, but she also genuinely sympathizes with her and
readily addresses her as a friend much as she does Amy. Because of the kindness both
women show one another and the asymmetrical class structure between them, the
relationship further develops into one in which the Quaker assists Roxana.
85 R 252. Defoe lists the items Roxana gives the Quaker in his customary fashion on pages 251, 252, and 254.
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There are many reasons Roxana willingly trusts the Quaker. The most immediate
reason is the Quaker allows Roxana to disguise herself in the time between her career as a
wealthy courtesan and her marriage to the Dutch merchant. At this moment, Roxana
wishes to go into temporary retirement, and, following Amy’s advice, she does so in a
“remote Part of the Town,” where she will be “perfectly unknown” (R 210). Roxana
follows Amy’s scheme and delights in the fact that she will board with Quakers, people
with whom no one would associate a courtesan. The Quaker epitomizes the very
opposite of Roxana’s public identity and particularly impresses her as “a most courteous,
obliging, mannerly Person; perfectly well-bred, and perfectly well-humour’d” (R 210).
In addition to being an ideal friend, the Quaker provides Roxana with an ideal disguise
and eventually tells so many half-truths on behalf of Roxana that she functions as an
agent of deceit. Ultimately, the Quaker becomes Roxana’s assistant, and this role can be
further divided into multiple roles, particularly agent, spy, and governess. Although it is
in this last role that she functions most like a Fate figure, the Quaker does allow for
Roxana’s guilt to compound through disguise and deceit, thus making Roxana’s
confrontation with her fate all the more climactic.
The Quaker offers secrecy and good company, and she allows Roxana to augment
her evasion from society with a disguise. When Roxana dons the Quaker garb, Amy
exclaims that it not only conceals her identity but it also makes her look ten years
younger, which allows Roxana to enjoy two of her favorite vices: deceit and vanity (R
211). Roxana purchases her first Quaker costume from the Quaker and eventually learns
the peculiar Quaker dialect (R 213). Here, the Quaker clearly functions as Clotho by
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clothing Roxana and birthing her into a new role in life. Roxana, no longer a prisoner of
her reputation thanks to this disguise, can roam freely in London.
Although Roxana clothes herself as a penitent Christian, the garb does not match
her interior motives as well as the Turkish garb matched her desires to be politically
masculine. The Turkish garb was accepted in public, and it was an indication of how
Roxana wanted others to perceive her and how she perceived herself. Because of its
solely external function as a disguise, the Quaker dress cannot eradicate Roxana’s earlier
marker, the exotic dress from which Roxana herself cannot part. On the surface, Roxana
is obviously trying to use a fragile disguise to hide what she has become; those familiar
with the Quakers’ views of the internal and external would realize that Roxana fails to
embrace the Quaker belief that external signifiers such as words or clothes are not to be
valued as much as the internal signified: most particularly, the Inner Light (Ezell 139).
Although her discourse is not so much of the tongue as it is the cloth, Roxana is no better
than other Christians who could speak eloquently but who did so with no internal
motivation; Margaret Fell divides Quakers from others through conventional
differentiation: noting that unity and agreement constitute “the Difference between Us,
and Them that have the form of Words, but not the Power thereof” (qtd. in Ezell 143).
Roxana’s disguise is merely an external farce; as Laura Brown notes, she tries to resolve
her problems through changes of clothes but cannot (147). Backscheider further
comments, “Not even the most severe and modest dress [...] can hide her [...]. She
becomes trapped in her own form and, whenever she looks at herself, sees Susan’s
Roxana, which now matches the inner woman” (Ambition 199). Roxana cannot mask her
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internal self, let alone her subjectivity as it is constructed by others like Susan, who have
seen her play the part of the courtesan. Her past is revealed with each reference to the
Turkish garb and with Roxana’s continuing ambition to gain recognition through flattery.
No Quaker, and surely no penitent, Roxana continues to operate as she always has by
relying upon women to counsel, and more often, serve her; the Quaker, like Amy, is only
too willing to oblige.
As an agent for Roxana, the Quaker performs a variety of fatal roles. Roxana
calls her both a friend and a governess and does her best to “have a Confidence” in the
Quaker by buying clothes, linen, plate, and sundry items for her (R 213). At first, this
may be just for selfish reasons; to gain a friend, for, as Moll always complains, what a
woman most needs is a friend; or to find a reliable agent, for Roxana realizes that she
needs someone honest and well-bred in her life in order to maintain her new secret
identity, for Amy, Susan, and herself surely are not honest. These qualities of the Quaker
serve Roxana well, for she does many things for Roxana without questioning Roxana’s
intentions.
In addition to being courteous, obliging, and mannerly, the Quaker is discreet; she
willingly performs a number of tasks without asking Roxana why. When Roxana
discovers the Dutch merchant in England, the Quaker actively helps Roxana track him
down. She is perceptive enough to note “Thou hast seen him with more than common
Eyes” but does not pursue how exactly Roxana knows him (R 218). She tells Roxana,
after they have several talks about the Dutch merchant, “I have found out thy Dutch
Friend, […] and can tell THEE how to find him too” (R 220); her ability to decipher
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Roxana’s relationship with him and his whereabouts makes Roxana whether she has dealt
with “the Evil One” to gather such information, to which the Quaker replies, “I have no
Familiar” (R 220). Although she denies evil agency, the hint at the fatal role of the witch
serves marks the Quaker as a Fate figure, but it’s her ability to serve and govern Roxana
that is must important. While Roxana and the Quaker are on the same ship with Susan,
the Quaker is able to thwart Susan’s questions by telling her what she believes to be the
truth about Roxana: essentially, that Roxana is a Dutch lady who lives abroad and wishes
to visit her family (R 281). The Quaker thwarts Susan’s repeated attempts to reach
Roxana by going so far as to argue in class terms against the impertinent daughter’s
claims that Roxana is her mother: “She insisted upon the slender Evidence [Susan] had of
the Fact itself, and the Rudeness of claiming so near a Relation of one so much above
her” (R 306). She even meets with Amy after Roxana has dismissed Amy as her servant,
and delivers the news of Amy’s ending her relationship with Susan without realizing the
implications of this termination.
The Quaker’s willingness to assist Roxana without prying into her past leads
Roxana to dub the Quaker her “faithful Agent” and “faithful Spy” (R 308, 309). The
Quaker willingly accompanies Roxana, thwarts visitors’ attempts to reach her, and
unknowingly lies through half-truths to Susan. All of these activities make her both
cunning and honest, as Roxana notes, for the Quaker only does what it is in her nature,
being courteous, obliging, and honest; nevertheless, her actions maintain Roxana’s
disguise and deceit. Immediately following Roxana’s receipt of a letter regarding Amy’s
disposal of Susan, Roxana perceives the Quaker as a naive yet helpful agent:
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The innocent well-meaning Creature, my Quaker, who was all Kindness
and Goodness, in herself, and particularly to me, saw nothing in this, but
she thought Amy had found some Way to perswade her to be quiet and
easie, and to give over teizing and following me, and rejoic’d in it, for my
sake; as she thought nothing of any Evil herself, so she suspected none in
any-body else, and was exceeding glad of having such good News to write
to me: But my Thoughts of it run otherwise. (R 323)
Roxana suspects Amy has murdered Susan, but the Quaker merely thinks Amy somehow
persuaded Susan to stop molesting Roxana; this passage reveals the Quaker as a willing
yet ignorant agent. In this sense, the Quaker is an even more useful agent than Amy, for
Amy knows everything Roxana has done and could easily harm Roxana by revealing her
past self; the Quaker never fully knows what Roxana has done yet is always willing to
help her.
Despite her usefulness, the Quaker can never live up to Amy’s role as an agent.
After Roxana angrily dismisses Amy for murdering Susan, she bemoans the fact “that
now I had neither Assistant or Confident to speak to, or receive the least Information
from, my friend the QUAKER excepted” (R 316). Perhaps a willing yet ignorant agent
has her limitations, or Roxana fears Amy will somehow harm her by turning against her.
Regardless, even up until the last ten pages of the story, Roxana says she does not tell the
Quaker the whole story (R 326). Moll never tells Jemy everything, nor does Roxana tell
the Dutch merchant everything, so their secretive ways are completely in character for
both heroines. Surprisingly, the Quaker continues to serve Roxana despite this lack of
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full disclosure. She may do so simply because she is obliging, happy to receive gifts
from Roxana, or excited to be involved in some intrigue that is difficult, if not
impossible, to define. Whatever the reasons, she remains bound to Roxana until the end
of the narrative.
The most telling passages about the Quaker as an agent occur after Roxana’s
dismissal of Amy. The Quaker can never fully take Amy’s place as an agent, yet she
does at least symbolically do so by inhabiting Amy’s quarters: “I open’d all my Affairs to
my dear trusty Friend, the QUAKER, and plac’d her, in Matters of Trust, in the room of
Amy” (R 326). Granted, Roxana qualifies the phrase “all my affairs” in the next
paragraph as not including such facts as herself being Susan’s mother. Roxana then
trusts the Quaker with providing for her children: “I resolv’d to leave the Management of
what I had reserv’d for that Work, with my faithful QUAKER” (R 327). Roxana
comments upon the Quaker as an agent: “I need not say how punctually my new Agent
acted: but which was more, she brought the Old-Man and his Wife, and my other
Daughter, several times to her House, by which I had an Opportunity … to see my other
Girl” (R 328-9). Pleased with the Quaker, Roxana trusts her with the final maintenance
of her dependents: “I committed the finishing it all, to my faithful friend the QUAKER,
to whom I communicated as much of the old Story, as was needful to empower her to
perform what Amy had promis’d [to the children]; and to make her talk so much to the
Purpose, as one employ’d more remotely than Amy had been, needed to do” (R 328). All
of this trust is founded on her previous experience with Amy; like Moll, Roxana trusts
her female agents to do her will.
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Although she functions as an agent for Roxana, the Quaker also actively controls
her. When the Dutch merchant finally tracks her down, Roxana tells the Quaker “you
must Govern me now,” recalling the similar language Moll uses with Mother Midnight (R
223). The word choice is telling, yet the episode is fairly insignificant: Roxana simply
takes the Quaker’s word that a cordial will give her the strength to confront the man she
once argued with about marriage and that a certain preserve will cut the smell of alcohol
on her breath. As a governess, the Quaker is a Fate figure if only due to denotation:
governing someone is controlling that person. However, the Quaker does not govern
Roxana in any more significant way than in this moment, for Roxana never fully
discloses the truth to her.
The passage in which Roxana asks for the Quaker’s governance is the only one in
which Roxana fully acquiesces to the Quaker. By the last third of the story, Roxana is so
tormented by the fear that Susan will reveal who she is that she does not trust herself to
another’s care as easily as she had when she gave in to the three comforters. Roxana has
no fear of becoming destitute again; her fear concerns the fragile web of lies she has
woven between herself and others throughout her life. By the time the Quaker becomes
part of this intersubjective web, Roxana is far too fearful to allow her to become as
influential a Fate figure as Amy has become. Thus, the Quaker never reaches the same
height as Amy, and she does not govern Roxana to the same extent as the other two
comforters do in the opening episode of the narrative.
It could be argued that the Quaker actively manipulates Roxana in some of the
key scenes involving Susan. Roxana dismisses any half truths or other forms of deceit
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spoken by the Quaker as owing to the woman’s ignorance of the full story. Yet this is the
same woman who was perceptive enough to notice how Roxana looked upon the Dutch
merchant “with more than common Eyes” (R 218). Though this conjecture may be
interesting, to argue that the Quaker knows more than Roxana admits she does is
erroneous if only because the narrative does not incorporate the Quaker’s point of view.86
Such conjecture also denies the significance of the Quaker’s ignorance of Roxana’s true
history.
The Quaker serves Roxana without threatening her sense of self because, unlike
Amy, she does not have a master narrative from which to draw (Conway 230). Unlike
Amy and Susan, she does not know of Roxana’s past, nor does she care to know the
entire truth. Conway’s reading of the Quaker reveals why she does not pursue Roxana’s
story to the point that it would harm the narrator: “Like Susan, the Quaker is drawn to
Roxana’s courtesan past, fixating on the costume that threatens to expose Roxana’s true
identity. But her curiosity allows itself to indulge the fantasy without needing to destroy
the secrecy upon which the courtesan’s survival depends” (Conway 230). The Quaker
does not desire to know every demand as Susan demands to know, nor does she know
everything as does Amy; as such, she is a suitable agent, but she is not as controlling a
Fate figure.
In short, the Quaker allows Roxana to perpetrate her disguise and deceit long
enough to bring about the inevitable conclusion of her fate: the literal infanticide of Susan
86 The only points of view presented are Roxana’s and the writer’s, who claims to be acquainted with Roxana’s father and first husband; see R 1-2. For a reading of the significance of the veracity and consistency of the perspectives in Roxana, see O’Brien 605-06.
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via Amy, and her acknowledgement that she is an infanticidal mother. Although the
Quaker assists Roxana’s charade, it is Amy, not the Quaker, who forces Roxana to
confront her infanticidal nature by acting on her behalf. Ultimately, Roxana’s
subjectivity is more fatal in the terminal sense than Moll’s, but both women are Fate
figures in every sense of the word.
Both Moll and Roxana become Fate figures through their interactions with other
women who govern, guide, and, ultimately, determine who they become by birthing them
into various careers and roles, allotting their portions in life, and severing their ties with
the past. The language of Fate is interwoven throughout their stories, enmeshing Moll
and Roxana within a fatal, intersubjective mythos that emphasizes the paradoxical need
for others in one’s quest for independence. Both women learn that only with the aid of
external others can a person succeed in the modern world. These others help the modern
individual shape her patterns of experiences into meaningful patterns; Moll manages
these patterns dexterously, but Roxana becomes entangled in her web of disguise and
deceit.
Although Fate is the chief governing force in both narratives, it is not the only
deterministic system. Interestingly, Defoe develops Providence and repentance further in
Roxana, but both concepts have their place in Moll Flanders as well. In fact, the chief
agents of Moll and Roxana help each narrator understand the place of Fate and
Providence in their lives. Moll actually becomes subject to Providence while telling her
story, thus revealing her secrets, to an agent of Providence while in Newgate; Roxana’s
awareness of the place of Providence comes from her anxiety over trying to maintain her
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secret. By telling her story, Moll maintains the tension between Fate and Providence in
her life, thus becoming a penitent Fate figure; Roxana, however, cannot maintain such
tension because she has split every possible tension in her life from the moment she
makes Amy submit to her. Even though each narrator responds to Providence differently,
its presence cannot be ignored in Defoe’s fiction: “The world of his characters is open
and spacious, but God’s presence is everywhere” (Novak, Daniel 49). Although Novak’s
observation concerns Defoe’s ability to write about scientific ideas within a Christian
context, it is noteworthy in any analysis of Defoe’s fiction that focuses upon non-
Christian elements. Providence cannot be escaped in either narrative; however, it is not
employed as a convention to the same extent as is Fate. The intersubjective web of Fate
connects Defoe’s characters within their “open and spacious” worlds.
In these open spaces, which I read as the space between individuals, Moll and
Roxana create meaning from their circumstances with the help of Fate figures. Moll and
Roxana pattern their experiences and interactions with others into meaningful structures
of experience that determine how they will interact with others, particularly Mother
Midnight and Amy, throughout their lives. Nearly all of the women in their stories help
them survive within a system in which they constantly influence one another and operate
as Fate figures who possess the powers to create, apportion, and destroy. These Fate
figures serve a multitude of key roles, but it is Mother Midnight and Amy who serve the
most significant roles as Fate figures. Mother Midnight enables Moll to adopt new roles,
confront Newgate, and become a penitent. Amy also enables Roxana to adopt new roles,
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but she assists Roxana in her efforts to obliterate her past, thus eliminating any hope for
Roxana’s penitence or escaping misery.
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CHAPTER III
MUTUAL RECOGNITION WITHIN THE FATAL MATRIX AND BETWEEN THE
SEXES: MOLL, MOTHER MIDNIGHT, AND JEMY
From the fatal connections Moll shares with women emerge patterns that repeat
and develop in her interactions with the two characters who enable her to become a
subject capable of mutually recognizing others, a Fate figure, and a penitent woman.
This chapter concerns how Jemy and Mother Midnight help Moll to build upon earlier
patterns of experience and accept paradoxical tensions through the mutual recognition of
like subjects. They help her to gain recognition and support from others, and to fulfill her
fate: to confront Newgate and emerge as a penitent Fate figure. To fulfill her fate, Moll
develops survival strategies through bonds she shares with the only man she actively
loves and with the Fate figure who aids her when she is abandoned, imprisoned, and
headed to the New World.
Jemy and Mother Midnight are vitally important to Moll’s relational development
to others. Through him, she learns of love that mutually binds people so much so that
they seem supernaturally connected yet allows them to remain independent subjects
capable of asserting and following their own wishes. Their parting allows Moll to
recognize men as alike yet different, preventing her from making the split Roxana does
between the sexes. These interactions with Jemy make Moll overinclusive, capable of
possessing both masculine and feminine traits and avoiding the either/or trap which
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bifurcates and eventually destroys Roxana’s sense of self. Being pregnant with Jemy’s
child brings her to Mother Midnight, who counsels and guides her. Moll treats her much
as she does Jemy, as someone with her own desires, some of which Moll chooses not to
pursue herself. Had Moll encountered Mother Midnight while with child by any of the
other men in her life, she may have concluded as Roxana does that men treat women
objectively for their own purposes and women are objects to please others. It is crucial
that Jemy appears before she meets one of the greatest Fate figures in her life in order to
help prevent this self-defeating split. Both Jemy and Mother Midnight are vital to Moll’s
becoming a penitent Fate figure, and they enable her to survive in a hostile world. In her
relationships with these two characters, the intersubjective strands that connect Moll to
everyone in her story are most obvious and significant. In order to understand how Moll
survives in her world and becomes a penitent Fate figure, it is necessary to briefly explain
the nature of these bonds between individuals.
Jemy and Mother Midnight act as like subjects to Moll; she can find recognition
through them rather than mere identification. They play “an active part in the struggle of
the individual to creatively discover and accept reality” (Benjamin, Bonds 45).
Discovering reality requires the subject to accept others as more than objects of her
fantasy; there is much to this realization, and one of the key elements is moving beyond
the intrapsychic concept of identification to that of the intersubjective concept of
recognition. When we identify with the other, we internalize the other as in inner
representation, “taking the other as the ideal of who we wish to become” (Benjamin, Like
7). Benjamin argues that identification can “further or impede our recognition of others”
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by enabling us to perceive others as like subjects or by limiting us to perceiving others as
objects (Benjamin, Shadow xiii). Identification may be a step towards recognition, but it
is easy for many to remain trapped in a fantasy world in which the self interacts with
objects only. Recognition, on the other hand, is not a mere idealization of the other as an
object about which we fantasize but the realization that the other is a like subject, a
“separate but equivalent center of subjectivity” (Benjamin, Like 7). Why we need others
to be subjects in order to operate as independent subjects ourselves may be understood in
terms of maintaining the tension between self and other.
In this intersubjective web of relationships, there exists a paradoxical tension
between subjects who must simultaneously assert their independence and recognize the
independence of others. Hegel acknowledges this paradox of recognition, which
Benjamin phrases as the subject’s realization that her independence is dependent upon
another’s recognition of her as a subject.87 Hegel argues that this paradox produces a
tension between subjects that inevitably breaks down and, in doing so, leads to the
domination of one subject and the submission of the other; however, Benjamin maintains
that this tension must be preserved in order for subjects to continue recognizing
themselves as independent beings.88 If the tension breaks down and one subject views
the other as an object, that subject is no longer operating within the space that exists
between the self and others but solely within her own intrapsychic fantasy. Intrapsychic
constructions of self and other only allow for relationships of regulation rather than ones
of mutuality. Regulation, the controlling of the other as an internalized object, does not
87 Benjamin, Bonds 33; Benjamin, Like 37. 88 Benjamin, Bonds 31-32; Benjamin, Like 38.
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permit the subject to recognize others as other subjects who, in turn, can mutually
recognize that subject (Benjamin, Bonds 45). The subject who only regulates others
becomes trapped within a false sense of omnipotence in which she limits her interactions
with others because she perceives them only as objects to control.
If limiting her understanding of others to being objects she can control is not
problematic enough, then one must also consider how that subject will no longer be able
to gain recognition from others who function as mere objects. Only others who function
as subjects can give the subject the recognition she desires. Objects may give the subject
a degree of recognition because they react to that subject’s influence upon them, but only
other subjects can react in ways that mirror the subject’s own emotional output and in
ways that the subject may not anticipate, thus allowing both for recognition and
differentiation from an other who is different yet similar to the self and who shares
emotional states with that self.89 Mutual recognition allows both subjects to acknowledge
one another as subjects in an empathic space of “true collaboration and mutual trust”
which does not simply degenerate into a sadomasochist drama of one subject dominating
the object who submits (Aron 150-51). Simply put, mutual recognition fulfills the
subject’s “need to recognize the other as a separate person who is like [her] yet distinct”
(Benjamin, Bonds 23). Through mutual recognition, the subject differentiates herself
from others by asserting herself in order to create a coherent sense of her self (she is not
me), but this differentiation must come from another whom the subject recognizes as an
89 Benjamin, Bonds 26. Benjamin provides a detailed discussion of recognition in the context of intersubjective theory contrasted with Margaret Mahler’s separation-individuation theory. Her examples of subject and subject relations versus subject and object relations provides further clarification about why the other must be an independent subject; see Bonds 25-31.
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independent subject (she, like me, is independent, but she is not me) (Benjamin, Like 38).
Just as she is learning how to differentiate herself as distinct from others, she is also
learning how she is like other subjects (Benjamin, Bonds 12). The intersubjective space
is an open space of constantly shifting relationships situated within a paradoxical tension
between assertion and recognition, self and other, separateness but equivalence, yet it is a
space that does not simply reduce itself to a symmetrical relationship of commonality
between subjects.
Relationships perceived through the intersubjective approach are mutual and
reciprocal, requiring a balance of assertion and recognition between self and other;
however, these relationships are not symmetrical beyond the sense that all subjects must
assert their desires and recognize the desires of others. If the relationship between each
subject were truly symmetrical, the individual selves would merge due to lack of
differentiation between one another. Differentiation must be maintained between self and
other; each subject must be seen as independent or else “the meaning of mutuality would
degenerate into merger or fusion” (Aron xi). Many relationships are mutual but
asymmetrical: analyst and patient; teacher and student; and mother and child (Samuels
175). It is between the latter two that mutual recognition most often begins, and it may
evolve or fail depending upon how the mother (or caregiver) reacts to the child’s needs to
assert his independence and receive recognition.
Benjamin goes into great detail about how the mother may encourage the child to
assert himself while maintaining boundaries that allow the child to understand that the
mother is not merely an object to control or destroy. By employing D. W. Winnicott’s
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understanding of the process of the child destroying the internal object in order to
determine the external object has survived, Benjamin explains how the fantasy of
destroying the object is enacted internally so the subject can differentiate himself from
others (Benjamin, Like 39, 90). Effectively, the child destroys the mother as an internal
object in his intrapsychic fantasy, but because she survives in the external world, he
realizes that she exists outside of his self as another subject. Once the internal object is
destroyed, the child realizes that the external object is something beyond what he
imagined; he can reason that mother is another subject like himself, fully capable of
surviving the fantasy of destruction (Benjamin, Like 39).
This process of destruction occurs during the rapprochement stage of
development. In Margaret Mahler’s three stages of infant development, rapprochement is
a phase of conflict in which the subject, a fourteen-month-old infant, must begin to
reconcile his grandiose aspirations and euphoria (of discovering new worlds while still
being close to mother) with the perceived reality of his limitations and dependency
(Benjamin, Bonds 33-34). In order for the subject to situate himself with an
intersubjective world, he must not view herself as wholly dominant or wholly
submissive; either extreme may occur during the crucial stage of rapprochement. If the
caregiver yields to the infant’s every desire, then the child will view himself as
omnipotent and treat others only as objects; if the caregiver shelters the child and makes
her believe she can never do anything without the direction of another, she will view
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herself as submissive and capable of serving others as an object.90 The caregiver must
not withdraw from the child’s assertions of himself or else risk the child internalizing the
caregiver as an object to be dominated; likewise, the caregiver must not retaliate against
these assertions or else risk the child internalizing himself as an object who must submit
to the caregiver’s desires (Benjamin, Like 40). Such a breakdown of tension makes the
subject who asserts himself an omnipotent one who dominates others and reduces the
subject who seeks recognition to a submissive object. When the tension between the
assertion of the self and the recognition of the other breaks down, when one subject
begins to imagine herself or the other as omnipotent, then the dynamics of domination
begin (Benjamin, Bonds 49). If the subject can maintain the tension between assertion
and recognition by continuing to perceive others as subjects to whom she need neither
submit nor dominate, her relationships with others will not degenerate into
complementary ones that indicate a split between self and other and the attendant
splitting between masculine and feminine. To avoid splitting, individuals must mutually
recognize one another as both active and passive, simultaneously asserting themselves
and desiring recognition from others.
Mutual recognition is not an issue during infancy alone, for every individual
needs others to recognize her as an independent subject. Benjamin traces these needs
through a child’s development, noting “At each phase of development, the core conflict
between assertion and recognition is recast in terms of the new level at which the child
90 I employ contrasting gendered terms because Western society, particularly from the early modern period onwards, has established a sadomasochist model for the sexes. The child who becomes dominant or submissive may be either sex, but due to the generally accepted gender hierarchy of masculinity as active and femininity as passive, more often than not, the dominant child will be male and the submissive child female; see Benjamin, Bonds 78.
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experiences his own agency and the distinctness of the other” (Benjamin, Bonds 31).
These levels do not magically end after one’s formative years; the subject needs to
maintain this tension in order not to degenerate into domination of or submission to
others.91 To be intersubjective, the subject must remain an open system in which the
paradoxical tension between sameness and difference, the tension between self and other
“remains an organizing issue throughout life” (Benjamin, Like 94). So long as the subject
continues to perceive herself and others as subjects, she will be able to maintain a healthy
sense of self.
Moll builds relationships with others in order to maintain this healthy sense of
self. Most often, these others are women, for with only one exception, men fail her.
There are many reasons why all but one of the male characters fail Moll. Primarily, they
fail her because they treat her as a mere object, and as Backscheider explains, Defoe
portrays the men as vain and weak individuals in order to emphasize the importance of
women in Moll’s life (Making 77). Moll’s unsuccessful relations with men coupled with
capitalist ideologies that disempower women contribute to the personal conflicts she
endures over such issues as survival and virtue (Moglen 41). Whether weak or
disempowering, the men are clearly not the focus of Moll Flanders for two reasons: most
obviously because “female characters outnumber male characters almost two to one in
the narrative” (Swaminathan 194), and more significantly because “Moll’s narrative
proposes an alternative method of surviving in the absence of a stable male figure. Her
91 Psychoanalysis generally focuses upon these years because the subject’s patterns of experience are established early in life and are reinforced throughout her life as she undergoes one episode after another. Later mother figures and father figures function in the subject’s life much as earlier figures did because the subject reacts to them according to the structures of experience she has already established.
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life illustrates the importance of female networks as a way of overcoming the inequities
of marriage and widowhood” (Swaminathan 193). Jemy is the one exception not because
he is not vain or weak at times, but because he recognizes Moll as a woman with her own
desires. He does abandon her after their marriage, but before doing so, he foreshadows
his significance as a Providence figure at Newgate and mutually recognizes Moll as a like
subject.
The other men in Moll’s life, however, follow the patterns established by the
Colchester brothers. Robin loves her as a witty, beautiful object to possess, and the elder
brother acts much as the nonvirtuous man in Moll’s observation:
When a woman is thus left desolate and void of Council, she is just like a
Bag of Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway, which is prey to the next
Comer; if a Man of Virtue and upright Principles happens to find it, he
will have it cried, [...] but how many times shall such a thing fall into
Hands that will make no scruple of seizing it for their own, to once that it
shall come into good Hands [...]. (MF 128)
Without a friend or advisor, a woman is an object to be seized and misused. Both
brothers, indeed every man but Jemy, treat Moll only as an object, and as such, they
function as others who are not like subjects, but as a particular type of man: “the other
who puts Moll most at risk […][:] the predatory male” (Sim 153). These predators
exploit women as they would any commodity, but as an object, Moll is not only
commoditized but also sexualized. Moll’s comment on the objectification of women
contains a sexual undercurrent considering the vulgar early modern metaphors of a
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woman’s genitalia or a woman herself as a bag or purse. Reduced to the state of an
object, a woman cannot control her own destiny (Benjamin, Bonds 88). This reduction is
largely due to the privileging of one gender over the other in the split construction of
gender hierarchy.
Although the dynamics of gender differentiation and sexual oppression in the
early modern period differ from twentieth-century dynamics, much of what Benjamin and
other relational theorists have explained about the polarization of the sexes holds as true
for Moll as it does today’s women.92 Being reduced to an object deprives a person of
agency, and when coupled with the objectification in relation to female genitalia, as in
Moll’s “Bag of Money,” the loss of agency, the ability to control one’s destiny, becomes
most obvious.
It has now become a commonplace that the phallus signifies desire and the vagina
signifies the object of desire; furthermore, the gender hierarchy privileges the masculine
complement as the active doer and the feminine as the passive done-to. This split is an
unnecessary fiction perpetuated through language and social conventions. Even Freud,
who continues to be criticized for his rigid split model of gender and the sexes, notes men
and women have both masculine and feminine attributes:
In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found in the
psychological or biological sense. Every character on the contrary
displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the
92 Although the exact nature of sexual polarization has changed over the centuries, women have been continuously subjugated by men from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. For a detailed account of how sexual polarization in Western civilization has changed from a one-sex model to a two-sex model, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990).
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opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity
whether or not these last character traits tally with his biological ones.
(qtd. in Price 323)
Freud nevertheless maintains throughout his writing the tendency to label all things active
masculine active and all things feminine passive (Price 323). The phallus continues to
remain the signifier for desire, “and in a culture in which the representation of the body is
organized and dominated by the phallus, woman’s body necessarily becomes the object
of the phallus” (Benjamin Bonds 124). Benjamin reveals that due to the lack of a “female
image or symbol to counterbalance the monopoly of the phallus in representing desire,”
women are denied sexual agency (Bonds 88). The split model of complementarity denies
women agency.
One may wonder why a signifier may not be “derived from the image of woman’s
organs” much as the phallus has come to represent desire, but that would not eliminate
woman as the object of man’s desire (Benjamin, Bonds 124). The objectification of
woman as the other which man desires creates a number of problems within
psychoanalysis. This language of male desire for female objects epitomizes the
heterosexual element and the objectification of women in psychoanalytic theory.
Benjamin notes the privileging of heterosexual desire as a problem in psychoanalytic
theory when she paraphrases J. Butler’s contention that the question remains whether
“psychoanalysis leaves room for homosexuality at all” (Benjamin, Like 67). Benjamin
does address homoerotic love in the context of a boy’s (or even a girl’s) identificatory
love for the father as an ideal (Benjamin, Like 60), but more needs to be done to explore
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homosexuality without reducing it to a pathological condition, much as there has been
much effort to prove that being a woman is not pathological.93 Intersubjectivity, because
it is not limited to the symbolic structures in our intrapsychic world, may provide the
model in which such exploration is possible.94 Benjamin argues that by turning to the
intersubjective realm, we can create representations for individuals based upon their
subjectivity rather than their objectivity (Benjamin Bonds 125). Such representation
would enable us to move beyond a system that, like much theory, as Dimen observes,
reduces desire to metonymy, be it the penis, clitoris, or vagina (Sexuality 60). To
understand the splitting of passive and active and to try to heal this complementary
relationship, we must continue to consider the phallus as a signifier of desire, but we
must also note how the polarization of the sexes occurs in terms of the child’s
relationship to her caregivers.
The split between active subject and passive object begins in infancy. Initially,
the child perceives the mother as a love object that contains and nurtures and that also
threatens to engulf the child back into an “oceanic oneness of being” (Benjamin, Like 81).
To differentiate himself from the mother, the boy identifies with the father, who
represents the exciting, outside other subject capable of acting upon his own desires
(Benjamin, Like 57, 81). This identificatory love for the father as an ideal is not
93 In the “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: Femininity,” Freud claims, “The suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed upon them socially favors the development of powerful masochistic impulses […] binding erotically the destructive trends, which have been directed inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is feminine”; qtd. in Benjamin, Shadow 35. Benjamin deconstructs binary oppositions that split the sexes and attribute them contrary natures throughout her work; see especially the dynamics of sadomasochism in the context of the sexes in “Master and Slave” in The Bonds of Love 51-84. See also the construction of gender in “Sameness and Difference: An Overinclusive View of Gender Constitution” in Like Subjects, Love Objects 49-79. 94 Dimen has taken steps to incorporate homosexuality into psychoanalytic gender discourse, particularly in “On ‘Our Nature’ or Sex and the Single Narrative”; see Sexuality 85-119.
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necessarily a love of the phallus so much as a desire to be like an active subject, and it is
experienced by both sexes. The girl who does not separate herself from her mother in
this manner may do so later, or she may repeat the process, had she successfully
identified with the father, through an identificatory love for an active mother figure,
usually an older woman in a position of authority (Benjamin, Like 60). Identificatory
love may help the boy to develop a sense of himself as an active subject, but if the girl
identifies with a passive mother, the active/passive split will simply perpetuate from one
generation to the next. Until mothers and fathers are perceived as both active and
passive, identifying with an active father and a passive mother will continue to split the
genders into a hierarchy that privileges the masculine over the feminine and leaves little
opportunity for the girl to develop the ability to desire in any way but vicariously through
the phallus of the male object (father, lover, child) by whom she is possessed (Dimen,
Sexuality 7). A hierarchy will emerge from any split because any dualistic system will
break down into a monism in which one set of terms is subordinated to the other (Dimen,
Sexuality 7). Phallic monism denies feminine desire and sets up the woman as the
passive, non-signified other that lacks agency. If the active/passive tension is maintained
rather than split and neither subject tries to wholly dominate the other or submit to the
other, then such identifications with both caregivers as active and passive can develop
into relations of mutual recognition (Dimen, Sexuality 59-60).
Maintaining such tension is not easy, but in Moll Flanders, one male character
allows for Moll to make multiple identifications with masculine and feminine markers,
particularly the attributes of actively needing and passively wanting. Jemy helps Moll
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become overinclusive, a preoedipal condition in which children “believe they can have or
be everything” (Benjamin, Like 53). Children at this stage believe they can
simultaneously be boys and girls and do not privilege one sex over the other as they later
learn to do during the oedipal stage when the mutual exclusivity of the sexes is realized
(Benjamin, Like 103). Benjamin calls for us to adopt the overinclusive model of
accepting “both/and” rather than “either/or” because it allows for plural identifications
that explode the gender hierarchy.95 Obviously, Moll does not imagine herself possessing
both genitalia, but she does possess both active and passive capacities, thus both
masculine and feminine characteristics. Through this model, one may maintain the
tension between any supposed opposites. It is a crucial step towards healing the split
between the sexes, and it allows Moll to become a character who is bound both to
Providence and to Fate.
Because the sexes were so directly polarized in Moll’s day, it is easy to
understand why she at first seeks men for protection and women for friendship and
assistance. Initially, women provide the interconnectedness she desires so that she need
not be alone, and men provide object relations she seeks. Most often, each male
character functions as the ideal love that she believes she lacks. Ideal love is a distortion
of love based on identification, not recognition, and degenerates into the woman’s
95 Benjamin, Like 9. Muriel Dimen also advocates both/and phraseology in order to deconstruct and heal the rift created between the sexes by the polarization that results from casting one sex into the mold of either active or passive; see Sexuality 55. Like Benjamin, she wishes to maintain tension not only between masculinity and femininity, but also between schools of thought that appear opposed to one another, as with psychoanalysis and feminism. To do so, she proposes adding a third term to emphasize and ameliorate the contradictions between such schools of thought. In the chapter “The Engagement of Psychoanalysis and Feminism,” she introduces the third term of social theory to maintain the tension between psychoanalysis and feminism; see Sexuality 41-62.
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“submission to a powerful other who seemingly embodies the agency and desire one
lacks in oneself” (Benjamin, Bonds 100). Adult ideal love is a means for the daughter to
“attain, at long-last, a father-daughter identification in which their own desire and
subjectivity can finally be recognized and realized” (Benjamin, Bonds 116). This kind of
love may be found in Moll Flanders as well as nearly any novel that focuses upon
feminine desire, for it establishes a theory of “how women’s missing desire so often takes
the form of adoring the man who possesses it” (Benjamin, Bonds 86). The entrance of
Jemy changes these object relations, for he enables Moll to recognize him as a like
subject, not some lost ideal, and he recognizes her as a like subject capable of acting for
herself. He is crucial to Moll’s development as a Fate figure, for he enables her to
exercise her agency in ways others have not before. In order to understand how Moll
becomes a Fate figure who can exercise her own agency with the aid of others but not
vicariously through them, it is necessary to focus upon the intersubjective relationships
she shares with women, and with Jemy, for the relationships she has with other men are
based upon subject-to-object relations rather than subject-to-subject relations. Aside
from Jemy, none of the men in her life recognize her as a desiring subject capable of
making decisions on her own.
Jemy and the women in Moll’s life do not treat her as a mere object to be
appropriated or regulated in a given way. Even the seemingly minor characters in Moll’s
story help her become who she is by participating in her life and shaping her story. Jemy
and Mother Midnight further this enterprise because they are so much more like Moll
than these others, but they also differentiate themselves from Moll. They are the
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characters whom Moll can recognize as like subjects, and most importantly, they
recognize Moll as an independent subject. This mutual recognition allows both Moll and
Mother Midnight to function as Fate figures and all three characters to achieve penitence
through empathy and shared stories.
MOLL’S FATAL ATTRACTION: “WELL QUALIFIED TO MAKE ME HAPPY”
Both Mother Midnight and Jemy mutually recognize Moll; their intersubjective
bonds with her become crucial to her confronting her fate and becoming a penitent. To
facilitate these ends, Moll must learn the importance of others, and the lesson of greatest
import is that of mutual recognition, the subject’s “need to recognize the other as a
separate person who is like [her] yet distinct” (Benjamin, Bonds 23). Jemy is the only
man to fulfill these needs. He is truly a like subject, not only the outside “other as inner
representation, [...] the ideal of who [she] might wish to become,” but also, and more
importantly, “the outside other as a separate and equivalent center of subjectivity”
(Benjamin, Like 7). He is not just someone with whom Moll identifies but a man who
recognizes her as a person with desires that are similar to his but hers nonetheless. When
he perceives obstacles in the way of obtaining these desires, he leaves Moll, but not after
establishing a mutual relationship in which the they recognize one another and assert
themselves.
It may seem ironic that the strongest, most trustworthy relationship Moll has with
a man is based upon lies, but theirs is a mutual relationship based upon an equality
initially founded upon deceit: they both agree that they have both been cheated “upon the
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foot of a double Fraud” (MF 148). They also admire one other’s skills, and they respect
one another’s desires. They are alike in their ability to deceive, their desire for fortune,
their blaming of Jemy’s accomplice, and their willingness to help one another, and they
differ only in the sense that they do not agree about how to maintain a fortune in the
future. This difference in vision reveals Moll’s active desires that make her a desiring
subject. Moll demonstrates that she sees herself as an active partner in their relationship
when she continues to control her fortune rather than surrender it to Jemy. Most
importantly, by not agreeing to his plan to retire in Ireland, she establishes herself as
similar yet desiring something more than what he proposes. She is not a passive object
who submits wholly to his will. She is active, and often in a fatal sense, as when she
delivers him from the hue and cry at Brickhill. Her fatal powers are even more obvious
in the extrasensory communication they share when Jemy swears that he hears her voice
from miles away. His admiration of her qualities, particularly this last supernatural
quality, shows that she shares a fatal bond with him. As a Fate figure, she acts as a
midwife when she figuratively delivers him from imprisonment and as a witch when she
overcomes natural boundaries such as physical distance to communicate with him.
Furthermore, his recognition of her fatal influence is reciprocated by her when she later
recognizes his providential role. Before either character can realize how indebted he or
she is to the other, they must together develop a relationship based upon a simultaneous
acceptance of likeness and difference.
What attracts Moll to Jemy is his apparent difference to her: he appears to be a
gentleman with fortune enough to provide for her. Her desire to marry him remains
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consistent with her childhood dreams of becoming a gentlewoman. He appears to be the
gentleman capable of supporting her: “he Courted me, made me Presents, and run in Debt
like a mad Man for the Expences of his Equipage, and of his Courtship; [...] he was Tall,
well Shap’d, and had an extraordinary Address” (MF 143). By all appearances, Jemy is a
wealthy gentleman, and it is appearance that initially attracts Moll to him. His
appearance includes his conversation and behavior, which leads Moll to conclude he is
“truly a gallant Spirit,” and to admit “’Tis something of a Relief even to be undone by a
Man of Honour” (MF 150). In her naivety, Moll believes every word he says about not
wanting to ruin her. She is further attracted to him because he claims to be a gentleman,
even though he claims to have lost all his wealth. All her life, she has sought someone
who could assist her in her desire to become a working gentlewoman; Jemy appears to be
perfect for this role, and he is physically attractive to her, as well. Jemy’s appearance of
being a gentleman and his willingness to support Moll during the seven months they are
together endears him to her, as she makes clear in her summary of all the reasons she
loves him:
the passionate Expressions of his Letter, the kind Gentlemanly Treatment I
had from him in all the Affair, with the Concern he show’d for me in it,
his manner of Parting with that large Share which he gave me of his little
Stock left; all these had joyn’d to make such Impressions on me, that I
really lov’d him most tenderly, and could not bear the Thoughts of parting
with him. (MF 155)
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Such language is not to be found in Roxana, as Backscheider makes clear in her contrast
between Moll’s love for Jemy and Roxana’s eventual marriage to the Dutch merchant:
“When she agrees to marry the Dutchman, she finds him no more personally attractive;
none of Moll’s affection, concern, and generosity toward Jemmy appears” (Ambition
207). Moll’s love for Jemy is based upon his deceit, which leads Moll to believe “he
was a Man that was as well qualified to make [her] happy,” based upon his “Temper and
Behaviour,” but without a fortune, she finds their future “dismal and dreadful” (MF 148).
Even with little hope for a future together, she admires Jemy as no other, for they have
much more in common than the capability to deceive.
Ironically, what Moll first perceives as difference is similarity: like Moll, Jemy
has schemed to land a good fortune via marriage. Due to the encouragement of Jemy’s
accomplice—his so-called sister—and his genteel facade, Moll concludes, “in all
appearance this Brother was a Match worth my lissening to” (MF 142). She believes all
the lies Jemy’s accomplice tells her and is further persuaded by his natural ease with his
equipage and fine surroundings, so that “the glittering show of a great Estate” helps
convince her to marry him (MF 144). His deception is matched only by hers, for the two
fortune hunters are two of a kind, although neither of them realizes this truth until several
weeks after they are married.
The “double Fraud” which unites Moll and Jemy is maintained through a three-
part deception involving Moll, Jemy, and his accomplice. Moll initiates the deception by
letting others believe she is a woman of fortune. Although she initially blames Jemy’s
accomplice for the deception, her narrative voice reveals her own stake in this sham: “If
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this Woman had known my real Circumstances, she would never have laid so many
Snares [...] to catch a poor desolate Creature” (MF 130). Had Moll made the truth
obvious, Jemy’s accomplice would not have pursued her, but Moll also may have lost
potential suitors. Although Moll acts the part of the victim entrapped by this woman’s
lies, she has also deceived, if only by omission (Starr, Explanatory 370). Moll never
corrects the accomplice about the rumors concerning her wealth, not even when her
exaggeration of Moll’s estate rises from five hundred pounds to five thousand and to the
ridiculous amount of fifteen thousand (MF 143). All Moll must do to conceal the truth
about her fortune is keep her mouth shut. In contrast, Jemy’s deception is far more
obvious, but it requires the assistance of a female accomplice to win over Moll. After all,
in marriage matters, the networking of women is necessary to land a good fortune, as the
women of Redriff demonstrate. Swaminathan further notes, “the fact that the Lancashire
husband requires a woman to find him a wealthy widow reinforces the existence and
effectiveness of this network [of women]” (202). This network calls to mind the
metaphor of the fatal matrix; even in her encounters with men, Moll is not isolated from
the influence of Fate figures. Although this accomplice is a Fate figure only in the sense
that she serves as a model of manipulation, she does control Jemy and Moll, and so she
assumes the blame for their willingness to believe the other is a fortune.
Jemy’s accomplice serves a vital role: a scapegoat, the other onto whom both
Jemy and Moll can project their deceit without blaming themselves. Moll initiates the
blaming episode by calling both Jemy and his accomplice into her chamber after
considering Jemy’s concerns about her estate. She places the blame solely on the
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accomplice because she “had represented me in Colours which were not my due” (MF
145). After Moll establishes how she never told anyone she had a fortune and the
accomplice believed she had one based upon hearsay, she asks Jemy, “who has abus’d
both you and me so much, as to make you believe I had a Fortune, and prompt you to
court me to this Marriage?” (MF 147). Jemy directs all of his anger towards his
accomplice; cursing and verbally attacking her for misguiding him and for taking a
hundred pounds for helping in the affair (MF 147). The scene is a precursor of the scene
in which Roxana casts all of her guilt onto Amy, although the split does not persist as it
does in Roxana’s relationship with Amy.
Their willingness to blame the accomplice for their machinations and their
gullibility is a form of projective identification, which operates much as dissociation,
when “we attempt to eliminate something that belongs to us by projecting it into some
other being or thing” (Dimen, Sexuality 49). This projection may be seen as a result of
splitting, in which the self casts the repudiated aspects of itself onto the other, thus
creating the dichotomy of “‘part of self’ and ‘repudiated not-part-of-self’” (Benjamin,
Shadow 89). In this episode, the split unites Jemy and Moll while dividing them from the
woman they perceive as the sole agent of deception. This projection of what they wish to
repudiate does not degenerate into a pathological sadomasochist relationship as does the
scene between Roxana, Amy, and the landlord for two reasons: the sister is never
mentioned once Moll and Jemy reconcile themselves to one another, and they both
inadvertently admit their responsibility for the deceit.
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Moll and Jemy never openly acknowledge guilt for duping one another, but they
both express regret through their actions by trying to assist one another. Jemy first
expresses a hypothetical form of care for Moll; had they married and lived off of her
fortune, he reasons, “I had resolv’d to have dedicated every Groat of it to you; I would
not have wrong’d you of a Shilling, and the rest I would have made up in my Affection to
you, and Tenderness of you as long as I liv’d” (MF 148). Such fine words win over Moll
and convince her to accept Jemy as an honest gentleman.96 Here, her sense of his genteel
status is not only an indication of his autonomy, as it was when she was an orphan girl of
Colchester, but of a person who dresses well, speaks well, maintains himself well, and is,
by all appearances, a gentleman. Moved by his words but wanting further proof of his
claim that he would not harm her, Moll tests him by offering him a bank bill with twenty
pounds and eleven guineas, even though, she says, “if it was taken from me I was left
destitute, and he knew what the Condition of a Woman among strangers must be, if she
had no Money in her Pocket” (MF 148). His refusal to take this money, and indeed, his
offer to give her fifty guineas of his own, demonstrates to Moll that he means well by her.
The reader may be more skeptical, but the two do offer at least some of their money to
one another as a token of support and affection; at the very least, this exchange signifies
the “honor among thieves” code they share.
Their mutual offering of money reveals to what extent the two wish to impress
one another with tokens of affection, and it serves at least two other purposes. The
96 Starr reads Moll’s willingness to accept Jemy as a gentleman as an indication of her vanity, which he interprets as her downfall; see Spiritual 127-28. His explanation of her vanity remains soundly insightful; it applies as much to her willingness to believe Jemy is an honest man as it does in her desire to be flattered by the elder Colchester brother.
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episode anticipates Roxana’s mixing of money with the Dutch merchant, although she
refuses to mix the two because she does not wish to taint his goodness with her
wickedness (R 259). Here, the money is not mixed, and Moll and Jemy are equals. Both
individuals put what money they have before them at the disposal of the other. Secondly,
and most importantly, Moll reveals that they are two of a kind in a subtle fashion, for just
as she admits she has money of which Jemy is unaware, she intimates that Jemy must
have some fortune secreted from her when she notes “there was nothing to be expected
from him, however good Humoured, and however honest he seem’d to be” (MF 149).
Her statement may be read flatly: Jemy has no money despite his appearance; however,
such a reading misses the context of Moll’s omission of her money aside from the bank
bill. However, Moll’s qualifier about Jemy seeming to be honest and “good Humoured”
may indicate that she wonders whether he is hiding money from her just as she is from
him. The two may be more of a kind than they at first appear.
Moll and Jemy reach reconciliation through their willingness to assist one
another. Although Moll notes that they are reconciled after placing all of the blame upon
Jemy’s accomplice for the “double Fraud,” she relates how Jemy continues to say he
feels guilty for placing her in her current position: “he was as Penitent, for having put all
those Cheats upon me as if it had been a Felony, and that he was going to Execution,
[and] he offered again every Shilling of the Money he had about him” (MF 151). Moll’s
likening of Jemy’s penitence to that of a criminal should alert the reader to its false
nature. Jemy’s later exploits as a highwayman and Moll’s stirrings of repentance prove
that such stirrings of conscience may lead to repentance, but it takes something more to
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be truly penitent. The penitent must confess his or her sins in entirety and resolve not to
commit them again; clearly, neither Moll nor Jemy are prepared to do either at this stage
of their lives. Their penitence will come later, after Moll confronts her past and
acknowledges how she has wronged others. At this point of the narrative, with neither
Moll nor Jemy’s fortune secure, it is unlikely either one would willingly stop thieving,
deceiving, or do whatever is necessary to secure a fortune; thus, neither one of them are
prepared for true repentance, which would force them to quit their picaresque ways and
join the mainstream.97 Although they are reconciled to one another, Defoe makes it clear
that neither is ready to make full confessions, yet.
Although penitence becomes the key theme of the final pages of the book, what
makes Jemy so significant to Moll at first is finally summed up in his chief likeness to
her, which also turns out to be his chief difference to her. Just as their first apparent
difference of Moll being without a fortune and Jemy being a gentleman with a fortune is
actually a likeness, so their schemes for the future first appear to be the same but prove to
be otherwise. She tells him of all the wonders of the New World, her estate through her
mother, and how they could live well if they were to work on their own plantation, but he
counters that a man can live very well on very little if he were to go to Ireland (MF 157-
58). Moll believes they can be happy together, but only on her terms. Jemy proves
himself a stereotypical gentleman: he is indolent and wishes not to try to raise an estate in
97 The penitent’s willingness to never sin again is one condition for true repentance, as may be found in a number of Christian texts. In his chapter on repentance, Defoe’s contemporary, William Law, provides in- depth description of what a penitent must do; see William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life; The Spirit of Love, ed. Paul G. Stanwood, The Classics of Western Spirituality (1728; New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 328-40, 343.
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America but to live well in Ireland off of what little money he and Moll have. Although
they both have visions of the future, neither of them is willing to give in; Moll does not
wish to go to Ireland, and Jemy does not wish to work in America.
Jemy’s reluctance to try Moll’s scheme is born not out of his fear to go to the
New World but of his fear to submit to the will of a woman. He tells her when they first
part, “I must try the World again; a Man ought to think like a Man” (MF 150). Jemy
simply wishes to actively fulfill his desires rather than submit to Moll’s direction.
Following her scheme would, in traditional terms, effeminize him by making him appear
subordinate to her. By thinking “like a Man,” Jemy disappoints Moll but makes her
realize that despite his love for her, he is a creature with a will of his own. As such, he is
worth more to her because he, like her, is a desiring subject and not a mere object to be
used and forgotten, as were her first three husbands.
Once Moll realizes that Jemy will not fully submit to her by going to America just
as she will not fully submit to her by going to Ireland, she recognizes that they are both
subjects with desires of their own.98 Moll’s allowing Jemy to assert himself and Jemy’s
allowing Moll to assert herself are key to their mutual recognition of one another, for
recognition must “allow for the assertion of each self” (Benjamin, Bonds 24). They exist
within a shared reality of similarity and difference; such a shared reality between subjects
98 Moll provides an interesting contrast to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Alison. Although both Moll and Alison have five husbands, the two differ in their treatment of men, particularly the men with whom they end their tales. Moll recognizes Jemy as a man with similar desires and lets him choose how to fulfill them. Alison forces her fifth husband, Jankin, to submit to her will: “He yaf me al the brydel in myn hond, / to han the governance of hous and lond, / and of his tongue and of his hond also”; see Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. V.A. Kolve and Glending Olson. (New York: Norton, 1989) lines 813-15. The knight from Alison’s tale also yields sovereignty to his wife: “My lady and my love, and wyf so dere, / I put me in youre wyse governance”; see Chaucer 1230-31.
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enables the subject to overcome any sense of being omnipotent she may have because she
has controlled others as a mere objects or any sense of being subject to an omnipotent
other she may have because she has been controlled by others as an object (Benjamin,
Like 88). They are active partners with a relationship based on equivalence, separateness,
and symmetry. The symmetry does not imply that they have equal social standing or
equal authority over one another, but it indicates that they are both active subjects with
desires of their own (Benjamin, Shadow 39). Only from another subject can Moll gain
the recognition that she is also a subject with desires. By differentiating his desires from
hers and simultaneously allowing Moll to recognize how similar they are, Jemy allows
her to recognize him as something more than an object. Thus, they share a mutual
relationship that will later save Moll when she is entrapped within lethargy.
The extent of Moll’s intersubjective bonds is questioned by Butte in his recent
analysis of intersubjectivity in narrative. Butte’s phenomenological approach to
intersubjectivity relies upon the tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his focus is
upon “deep intersubjectivity,” or the character’s “consciousness of consciousness” in
fiction, which, he argues, first emerges in Jane Austen’s novels (Butte vii). Butte argues
that “Jemy’s subjectivity as [Moll] represents it” is limited because “never, in his or
Moll’s or Defoe’s text, does Jemy reflect on Moll as a subjectivity and much less on her
consciousness of him” (43). Although Butte argues there are no exchanges in which Moll
articulates her perception of Jemy’s thoughts about her as anything but on object, he
concedes the narrative itself establishes the beginnings of intersubjectivity in fiction with
“the representation of experience in one primary subjectivity perceiving other subjects”
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(40). Butte is correct to explain Moll’s relationship to Jemy in subjective rather than
objective terms, but his reading fails to give Defoe the credit he deserves for creating an
intersubjective system of relational bonds between Moll and others. Although Defoe
does not employ an omniscient narrator that allows for “the representation of others’
experience of others” (Butte 40), he portrays relationships between like subjects
convincingly enough to convey the sense that these characters are bound
intersubjectively. In her initial encounters with Jemy and Mother Midnight and her
conversion scene in Newgate, Moll reveals how these characters have shaped her and
how she has influenced them; this mutual exchange between the three characters should
not be dismissed only because Moll never directly says, to borrow from Butte’s title, “I
Know that You Know that I Know.” Jemy and Moll share a connection that goes beyond
the limitation of objectivity. Jemy helps Moll realize that others have desires of their
own, thus enabling her to perceive the world as an intersubjective reality in which people
recognize rather than regulate one another. However, this realization does not eliminate
all conflict.
Moll’s and Jemy’s dissimilar schemes reveal how each character continues to
assert his own or her own desires even as they continue to maintain their affections for
one another. At this point, it is most obvious that they are like subjects who are also
different. What they have in common is vital, though, for maintaining a relationship in
which neither subject simply dominates or objectifies the other. By asserting her desire,
her want for something, Moll does not allow herself to be perceived as a passive object
that simply needs something or someone else. She defies the traditional gender hierarchy
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that maintains men are desiring subjects that want and women are desired objects that
need to be wanted (Dimen, “Deconstructing” 44, 50). In this split model, Dimen argues,
women are reduced not only to the state of intrapsychic objects but also to the state of
“inanimate things” meant to be desired or possessed (“Deconstructing” 51). By actively
wanting to go to America and actively choosing not to go to Ireland with Jemy, Moll
proves she not only needs Jemy but also wants to control their future. By both needing
and wanting, she acts overinclusively.
Just as the overinclusive child believes she can simultaneously possess the
characteristics, even the genitalia, of a girl and a boy (Benjamin, Like 103), Moll
embraces a system of both/and rather than either/or by believing she can both actively
need and passively want. Moll makes plural identifications that appear paradoxical. By
marrying to survive, Moll acts as a conventional early modern woman, and by actively
making plans and defying Jemy, she acts as a man of her day; as such, she may be viewed
as a character who is both an object of Jemy’s affection and a subject with her own
desires, a woman who wants to be both feminine as society dictates and masculine in her
capacity to make her own decisions. Rather than simply accept Jemy as different because
he is a man, she adopts the masculine role of one who plans and acts rather than the
feminine role of one who waits and reacts. Jemy’s refusal to accept her scheme to go to
America may be due to his indolence or his fear to submit to the will of a woman. Later,
he nearly submits to being hanged rather than submit to Moll’s will. The overinclusive
Moll is simply too much for Jemy to handle at the moment.
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The joy Moll takes in her connection with Jemy due to their likenesses is
simultaneously maintained with the joy she takes in their differences. Jemy,
unfortunately, does not adapt so well to a woman who is willing to plan a future in the
New World and who makes him submit to her desire to support him for a few months on
her terms, as when she relates, “I told him it was the last time I was like to enjoy his
Company, and I desir’d he would let me be the Master in that thing only” (MF 157). Her
emphatic stipulation may convince him to live off her money for some time, but coupled
with her plans for America, it becomes a point that challenges his mastery of their
relationship. Moll wants to be with him and to direct her own affairs; however, Jemy is
not ready for a woman with such power. Despite his discomfort over who is in charge,
Moll delights in their relationship, for they really are two of a kind: they share the same
desires to marry into a fortune and live as gentility, they both deceive others through
outward appearance, they both blame others for their deceptions, they both assist one
another and show signs of guilt and penitence, and they are both capable of scheming for
the future. Their similarities make them two of a kind, but their differences make them
unique subjects.
As like subjects, Moll and Jemy acknowledge that they both have desires of their
own, which, at this point of the narrative, conflict. Through actively asserting
themselves, both characters reveal they are in the process of embodying aspects of
controlling forces. Moll may act as a Fate figure in many ways, but she has yet to fulfill
her fate, and so her faculties of creation, apportioning, and termination are limited. Jemy
is even more immature in his development as a Providence figure. He cannot yet be an
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agent of Providence until he and Moll are both ready to repent. Nonetheless, even at this
early stage, they undergo two episodes that prefigure Moll’s becoming a penitent Fate
figure.
Moll’s rescue of Jemy at Brickhill may be read as a simple adventure in which
Moll aids Jemy without his knowing it, but it concerns supernatural agency. By design,
be it fatal, providential, or merely authorial, Moll sees Jemy shortly after being married to
her next husband, the bank clerk. She is able to vouch for his character and so stop his
pursuers who know he is a highwayman. In so doing, Moll delivers Jemy from danger by
saying she knows “he was a Gentleman of a very good Estate, and an undoubted
Character in Lancashire” (MF 186). Her word alone is enough to stop the hue and cry.
Moll’s voice is becoming more influential as she learns how she can manipulate others
simply by vouching for a person’s character rather than going into great detail about
concrete circumstances; such power is especially important when her tongue saves her
life in several instances in her career as a thief.99 As a Fate figure, Moll delivers Jemy
from danger and manipulates others through her verbal influence. Likewise, she may be
read as an agent of Providence who saves Jemy so he may truly repent when he meets
Moll later in Newgate. A truly cynical reader may not see either force at work in this
episode, but Defoe was immersed in the Puritan tradition, which saw Providence, the
devil, or some other agency behind every happening. Every episode must be read with
the knowledge that Defoe is a creator of myths that operate systematically and
99 For an engaging reading of the importance of character in obtaining funds, establishing credibility, and reinforcing reputation, see O’Brien 612-20. O’Brien’s reading of the mutability of property and character in the early eighteenth century as compared to earlier fixed models of property, class, and character reveals the abstract, intangible basis of both property and reputation; see O’Brien 627.
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purposefully (Novak, Realism 11). Defoe consistently employs Fate throughout Moll
Flanders, and as the narrative progresses, it becomes obvious that Providence has its
place, too.100
At no other point in the narrative is supernatural agency more obvious than during
the crisis period when Jemy first leaves Moll. At this point, Moll suffers a period of loss
that mimics other crises in her life. As in the Colchester episode when she is abandoned
by the elder brother, and in the three moments of loss when Mother Midnight comforts
her, Moll suffers a temporary illness, gains assistance, and is transformed. Jemy’s
departure prompts a “vehement Fit of crying” in which Moll cries out “James, O Jemy!
[...] come back, come back” and continues to sob for several hours until he answers her
call (MF 153). His return due to their “extrasensory communication” is a sign that he and
Moll are meant to be together (Backscheider, His Life 522). He comforts her, and at this
point, she manages to propose her scheme to go to America and to tell him that he must
allow her to pay for their lodging until the money she has with her is gone. Only after he
comes back to her does she exert her influence in such a conventionally masculine
manner. Oddly, no woman assists her in this episode; clearly, Defoe wishes the reader to
notice how Jemy has a calming effect upon her and allows her to exert her will, even if it
is only to a small extent.
Moll’s cry for Jemy, which he hears from nearly fifteen miles away, perplexes
them both. Upon his relation of hearing her cry, Moll grows “amaz’d and surpiz’d, and
100 As I noted in Chapter One, Fortune certainly has its place, as well, in a picaresque reading of the narratives. Chance does play a part, although it is subordinated to Fortune, Fate, and Providence. For a reading of chance in Defoe’s writing, and in particular, the gambling episode in Moll Flanders, see Hentzi 191-92.
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indeed frighted” because Jemy so firmly attests that he heard her clearly (MF 154).
Novak comments on this episode by noting Moll “is no Crusoe to perceive God’s design
behind the ‘chequer work’ of her life, but the reader feels spiritual forces at work [...] in
the scene in which she seems to hear the voice of her beloved Jemy after they have
separated” (Daniel 601). Novak’s observation that Moll does not perceive supernatural
agency although the reader should is noteworthy, as is his slippage of who hears whom.
Camden comments upon this error and reinforces the significance of Jemy responding to
Moll’s call:
Novak’s own anxiety about the spiritual and gendered implications of this
scene enforce his own misreading. It is not Moll who hears Jemy’s cry,
but quite the reverse. It is she who is calling out in need, recognition, and
love. It is their one pure moment of intersubjective recognition and must
not be denied or ignored. Here is the moment we have been waiting for,
where Moll can recognize and respond to mature, non-exploitative love.
(“Re: thanks”)
Not only does Moll respond to Jemy’s love, but she cries out so forcefully that he hears
and responds to her need. Within the context of the many fatal and providential signs in
the narrative, Defoe’s use of supernatural agency should not be ignored. Starr notes early
critics who read the episode as providential, for they argue it is proof that Providence is
trying to unite the two long before the reunion in Newgate, in which Jemy’s appearance
drives Moll to repentance (Starr, Explanatory 370). This line of thought contrasts one
seventeenth-century belief that those who could hear voices from far off were under the
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influence of diabolic spirits (Starr, Explanatory 370-71). Add to this Moll’s being a Fate
figure, and clearly the episode may be read in any number of ways.101 Most importantly,
the supernatural enables Moll and Jemy to respond to one another mutually. Whether one
reads Moll’s cry as her fatal influence over Jemy, an intercession of Providence, or both,
one cannot deny how supernatural agency enables the two to reunite, if only fleetingly, to
establish the mutual bonds that will later spur Moll to repent. To avoid splitting the
supernatural agency into a dichotomy of either one possibility or the other, I suggest that
it be read overinclusively, as both fatal and providential. Moll will eventually come to
embody both forces, so this key episode is a means of preparing the reader for the
balance between Fate and Providence Moll maintains once she enters Newgate.
By employing both Fate and Providence in the Jemy and Moll passages, Defoe
begins to unite the masculine and feminine controlling elements of the narrative. The
two forces do not cancel one another out or divide into a simple split between the pagan
and the Christian but are manifested in Moll once she realizes she needs both men and
women to recognize her in order to survive in the early modern period. This realization
does not come easily; her reliance upon Jemy is important, but once he is gone, she falls
back into earlier objective patterns of relying upon men. It is not until she no longer
needs support, when she has reached her nadir at Newgate, that she realizes how crucial
Jemy and Mother Midnight are to her survival and her penitence.
101 Backscheider notes that Defoe’s works, particularly The Political History of the Devil, often frustrate readers because they can be at once serious and comical, providential and diabolical. She explains that his mixing of tone grants him the ability “to give his subject comprehensive treatment. He mixes the Bible, Paradise Lost, and folktales, as the people and books of his time jumbled religion and magic”; see Backscheider, His Life 521.
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Although Jemy is the one man Moll believes is qualified to be her husband, he is
not yet able to serve as a providential figure until Moll is ready to confront her past. He
is a fortune hunter and a highwayman, and he is bent solely on finding a fortune;
likewise, Moll is also concerned about finding a fortune, but she wants to do so by being
married in order to support herself as a working gentleman. There is more art to Defoe’s
reasoning why Moll cannot keep a husband to support her for long: she must
acknowledge that to survive, she needs to rely upon both men and women, and she needs
to acknowledge her entire history before becoming a penitent figure.
The marriage with Jemy fails because Moll must learn that she cannot rely on
men alone for survival; she must strike a balance between relying upon women and
relying upon men. Swaminathan concludes, “Moll looks to men for potential security,
but in fact she survives because of women” (206). This observation is true, but Jemy
proves as necessary to Moll in Newgate as any woman in her life. Parting with Jemy
leaves Moll vulnerable, like the proverbial dropped bag, but also because Jemy
recognizes her as no other man does. Once Jemy is gone, Moll cannot go straight to
another man, for they have failed her before; furthermore, she must deal with her
pregnancy with the assistance of a woman who can help prepare her for the marriage
market, as did the linen-draper’s sister, the captain’s fiancée, and Jemy’s accomplice.
Before she can marry well, Moll must understand how both men and women are
crucial to survival, and she must acknowledge her past. She must confront her past with
the assistance of a Fate figure before Jemy can operate as a Providence figure; otherwise,
she will not be ready for the conversion process in which the Providence figure operates.
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Just as the penitent must confess all of her past sins, Moll must come to understand who
she is by confronting her past. Unifying her narrative and acknowledging her
responsibility for the multiple roles she has played, not thieving, whoring, or deceiving,
allows her to become the self-determined gentlewoman in the New World.102 The Fate
figure who enables her to do this is Mother Midnight. Mother Midnight also enables
Moll to survive during two difficult episodes in which she perceives herself as a poor
commodity on the marriage market. Her service during this time finally establishes how
important women are to Moll.
MOTHER MIDNIGHT’S COUNSEL: “EVERY WORD […] A CORDIAL FOR ME”
The Fate figures who help Moll derive meaning from her patterns of experience
include a woman who is so like Moll that she in many ways mirrors the protagonist. Like
Jemy, Mother Midnight is a person whom Moll can mutually recognize; and like Jemy,
she helps transform Moll before the key repentance scene in Newgate. She is vitally
important to Moll, even to the extent of overshadowing Jemy, as Erickson argues, “Moll
Flanders [...] may seem to be a rather flat, overcrowded narrative until one begins to
gather some sense of the power inherent in the Governess figure and her influence on
Moll” (5). She furthers Moll’s quest to become a Fate figure by modeling various fatal
roles that Moll adopts as her own. Through this process, Moll learns of and acts in a
number of fatal roles that each allow her to exercise the three fatal functions of creation,
102 Kietzman makes this argument in terms of Moll unifying her narrative through repentance. She cannot gain independence or self-determination through material or sinful means in a text that is built upon repentance as a means for finding subjectivity; see Chapter Five and Kietzman 692.
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apportionment, and destruction. Playing each of these roles allows Moll multiple
possibilities for asserting herself, and these assertions manifest in her various desires to
be a gentlewoman, mother, and thief.
To fulfill her desires and fulfill her fate, Moll needs assistance from others,
including mother figures, figurative midwives, and people with supernatural agency—
even a man who at first fails as a husband but emerges as a Providence figure. Starr
argues that Moll’s quest is for a mother figure, and that this quest is fulfilled after she
restores the “lost familial paradise” through her reunion with Humphry (Starr,
Introduction xi-xii); however, the mother figure is but one fatal role Moll adopts in her
quest to be a woman in control of her own destiny. Through intersubjective bonds with
Fate figures, Moll adopts a number of fatal roles including those of the mother, midwife,
witch, and governess, and she undergoes a repetitious pattern of illness, assistance, and
transformation. The final transformation leaves Moll an independent woman capable of
controlling her own destiny and a paradoxical being who unites the providential with the
pagan as a true penitent and a Fate figure. The most important of these bonds is the one
she forms with the character who plays a part in her story more than any of her husbands,
with the exception of Jemy, and who Moll loves as a friend and mother, her Governess at
the Sign of the Cradle, her Mother Midnight.
The parallels between Moll’s life and Mother Midnight’s make them even more
two of a kind than Moll and Jemy. Moll’s beloved Governess possesses “all the eminent
degrees of a Gentlewoman, a Whore, and a Bawd; a Midwife, and a Midwife-keeper, [...]
a Pawn-broker, a Child-taker, a Receiver of Thieves, and of Thieves purchase, [...] her
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self a Thief, a Breeder up of Thieves, and yet at last a Penitent” (MF 5). One wonders if
a picaresque narrative of her tales would rival or exceed Moll’s after such a description.
Mother Midnight serves as a model for Moll and provides essential services for her: “the
governess is always what Moll needs: a midwife when Moll is with child, a fence when
Moll steals, a penitent when Moll repents” (Zimmerman 102). She further serves as a
model of a Fate figure who is in control of her own destiny, and to some degree, the
destinies of others. The similarities between the two women allow them to mutually
recognize one another, and the asymmetrical bonds between them allow them to
differentiate themselves so they do not merge into a single, co-dependent entity. Their
fatal bonds bring Moll back to Mother Midnight, who leads her to Newgate, and once
there, through Mother Midnight’s repentance coupled with Jemy’s reappearance, to
penitence. Before Moll becomes a penitent, though, she develops as a Fate figure
capable of controlling her own destiny under the tutelage of Mother Midnight so she may
confront Newgate and learn what the “ill fate” that has been guiding her throughout her
narrative has in store for her (MF 90, 262). Moll only indirectly mentions the force that
compels her to her past, first to her mother for her story, to Mother Midnight for
direction, and to Newgate in order to confront her origin and decide her future.
Mother Midnight fulfills a number of roles associated with the Fates: she births
Moll into whoring and thieving, cares for Moll as she would for her own child, controls
Moll in a fashion akin to a supernatural witch, aids Moll in thieving (which ultimately
lands Moll in Newgate, where she can confront the place of her birth and undergo her
conversion), comforts her as a friend and confidant, and leaves Moll a penitent Fate
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figure capable of controlling her own destiny. She is more than a simple plot device or a
mirror of Moll’s present state; she is the most significant Fate figure who guides,
counsels, and controls Moll through the most difficult years of her life as a woman who
can no longer manipulate the marriage market, as a thief, and as a prisoner in Newgate.
At first, nearly all of the power to control Moll’s destiny is Mother Midnight’s: her
dexterous hands help Moll deliver and dispose of burdens such as her child by Jemy and
various items she has stolen, and the same hands deliver Jemy and Moll from Newgate.
Over the course of the years these two women interact, though, the asymmetrical balance
between them shifts as Moll becomes a Fate figure.
Because Mother Midnight is a Fate figure, she can guide Moll, but she is also a
person with whom Moll can identify, and, more importantly, a person whom she can
recognize as a like subject. She appears in Moll’s story at three crucial moments when
Moll experiences a pattern of illness, assistance, and transformation: when Moll first
comes to her, pregnant and friendless; when Moll begins her career as a thief; and when
Moll becomes a penitent. During these three episodes, Moll’s need for others is most
evident. She desires a bond with another person who will allow her to assert her will
upon her, whom she can recognize as an independent subject herself, and who will
reciprocate these needs as an equal. Moll’s desire for a bond with another independent
subject is based upon “the need for recognition” which “propels people into social
relations since individuals are dependent on others to satisfy this need. [Such]
recognition [...] cannot be gained unless it is reciprocated, and thus it is constitutive of
respectful relations between equals” (Meyers 122). Moll and Mother Midnight satisfy
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one another’s need for recognition by treating each other as independent subjects without
wholly dominating or submitting to the other. In this sense, they are equals, but their
relationship is always asymmetrical: one woman delivers, mothers, or otherwise guides
the other throughout the last half of the novel. The balance shifts from Mother Midnight
as the guiding Fate figure to Moll as the penitent Fate figure during the last years of
Moll’s quest to confront her past.
The three passages in which Moll and Mother Midnight interact have been
analyzed by Lerenbaum in the context of Moll’s femininity; however, these passages also
concern intersubjective elements. When Moll comes to Mother Midnight with Jemy’s
child, when she first begins thieving, and when she is imprisoned in Newgate, she relies
upon her bonds with others in order to survive, and, in the end, become a penitent Fate
figure. The intersubjective components of Moll’s life are most clear in these three
passages in which Moll is transformed by Mother Midnight. Moll’s embarkation upon
her careers as a wife, thief, and penitent are marked by stages in which she becomes a
sexual object on the marriage market, a menopausal woman who views her marriage
market days as over, and a penitent who reinvents herself by exercising her agency in
order to save and direct the lives of others. Lerenbaum also notes a fourth episode, when
Moll first meets Mother Midnight, but she does not pursue this passage in as great of
detail because it does not mark a moment when Moll is embarking upon a new career.
Moll experiences a psychosomatic illness during these four moments in the text, and she
is assisted and transformed by Fate figures at each stage. The first episode concerns the
Colchester women, and Mother Midnight helps Moll in the final three episodes.
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The first of these key moments with Mother Midnight is marked by a period of
illness and anxiety. Mother Midnight comforts Moll during this illness and provides a
maternal model of a Fate figure who can birth, allot, and terminate the lives of others. It
is upon this model that Moll has been patterning her life in the first half of her narrative,
but now she has a companion who provides the model at the times when Moll most needs
it: when she is alone and pregnant, when her marketable assets of bearing children and
being sexually alluring are gone, and when she is reduced to a senseless creature in
Newgate. Through mutual recognition, Mother Midnight and Moll influence one another
and help each other become Fate figures who control the lives of others and accept
responsibility for their own lives.
While pregnant with Jemy’s child, Moll finds herself at odds with the world
around her. The people with whom she lodges hint that she must leave or else be hustled
out by the parish officers, and it seems that she has no friends.103 Moll’s fears of being
with a child but no husband, and, more immediately, of being thrown out of her lodgings
and the parish itself manifest as an illness: “In the course of this Affair I fell very ill, and
my Melancholy really encreas’d my Distemper; my illness prov’d at length to be only an
Ague” (MF 161). Moll wonders whether the ague will make her miscarry; thus, her
physical illness becomes a psychological concern of conflicting desires in which she at
once hopes that a miscarriage will free her of her burden and detests herself for desiring
103An illegitimate child born in the parish was the responsibility of that parish regardless of the parents’ settlement; see Dorothy M. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925; London: Peregrine, 1966) 214. Parish officers were supposed to see to the care of such infants and others that would otherwise die of exposure and neglect, but too often they exacerbated the problem. Officers often hustled pregnant women out of the parish to avoid having to care for the infant, “or security was demanded that the child should not become a burden upon the parish”; see George 214.
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the death of her child by Jemy. Mother Midnight counsels Moll during this period of
internal conflict, providing the assistance she desperately needs.
Mother Midnight’s assistance is fatal in two senses: in the nature of the assistance
and in the role she plays in delivering it. The nature of her assistance is both physical and
verbal comfort. She comforts Moll by providing her a place in which to reside and
alleviates her fears about being hustled out of the parish by assuring Moll that she does
not care about the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. Her words have an
immediate effect on Moll: “Every word [...] was a Cordial to me, and put a new Life and
a new Spirit into my very Heart; my Blood began to circulate immediately, and I was
quite another Body” (MF 162). Such a healing influence may be read in any number of
ways. Given the fatal roles of midwife, mother and witch are consistently maintained
throughout their relationship, it is within the context of these roles this passage should be
read. As a mother, Mother Midnight gives Moll life, for her circulating of blood may be
read as a quickening; as a midwife, she delivers Moll’s child and Moll herself from the
burden of her child; and as a witch, her words are cordials, pleasant potions that soothe
Moll. These roles continue throughout their initial encounter.
Most obviously, Mother Midnight acts as a midwife in the literal and figurative
sense of the word. Moll introduces Mother Midnight as “an experienc’d Woman in her
Business, I mean as a Midwife, but she had another Calling too” (MF 161). Moll’s
allusion to Mother Midnight’s profession as a bawd and her practice of disposing
unwanted children reveals a conventional Mother Midnight type in early modern
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literature.104 As a midwife, she literally delivers children, but she also delivers women
from unwanted children, the fear of being hustled out of the parish, or whatever anxieties
attended their condition as pregnant women. She delivers Moll of her child, provides for
the child in a manner Moll finds suitable, and discreetly delivers Moll from her
circumstances. After her initial encounter with Mother Midnight, Moll can marry again.
The process, though, requires a great amount of healing, and the transformation Moll
undergoes involves much healing through Mother Midnight’s verbal counsel and physical
comfort.
Mother Midnight’s counseling is so artful that Moll questions whether it may be
diabolical in nature. She extracts one secret from Moll, that of the history of her marriage
to Jemy, with “such a bewitching Eloquence, and so great a power of Persuasion, that
there was no concealing any thing from her” (MF 172). Mother Midnight’s uncanny
power to gain access to Moll’s story is highly conventional for Defoe’s day; the midwife
often was connected to witchcraft in the early modern period.105 Witches were supposed
to have malevolent powers to harm others, and they were often perceived as the
complement to midwives. The “cunning woman” or “wise woman” had complementary
powers of good and evil: she could bring new life into the world as a midwife or inflict
harm on others, most often by killing a newborn, as a witch (Erickson 18). Mother
Midnight’s very name suggests the black arts, but it is her linguistic power that Moll, at
first, finds supernatural.
104 Backscheider, Making 75; Erickson 17-18. 105 Thomas Rogers Forbes, The Midwife and the Witch (New Haven: Yale UP, 1966).
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After entrusting Mother Midnight with part of her history, Moll openly calls her
witch, invoking the name of the fatal figure who operates at night and has powers to see
and harm others, and mother, invoking the name of the fatal figure who has the power to
birth, apportion, and terminate the child’s life. Mother Midnight counsels Moll to let her
child by Jemy to set out to nurse, for, “Are you sure, you was Nurs’d up by your own
Mother?” (MF 174). Moll fears that Mother Midnight has some power to see into her
past, and wonders whether “this Creature cannot be a witch” who may “have any
Conversation with a Spirit that can inform her what was done with me before I was able
to know it myself” (MF 175). Such power, she says, “touch’d me to the Quick,” yet it is
only one example of Mother Midnight’s ability to perceive Moll’s life so clearly (MF
175). She clearly assesses Moll’s present condition when she says “yet you look fat, and
fair Child,” and foreshadows what nearly becomes of Moll’s future when she asks “what
would it be to me if you were to be Hang’d?” (MF 174). Mother Midnight sees Moll’s
past, present, and potential future in this passage in which Moll calls her midwife,
mother, and witch.
Although the midwife has the most obvious role in a child’s beginnings of life,
the witch and mother possess even greater degrees of control, for the witch possesses
uncanny powers to see clearly into past, present, and future, and the mother has the
ability to control a child’s past, present, and future. Here, the roles of the Fate figure are
clearly delineated for Moll to rely upon and adopt as her own. She has, at long last,
found a Fate figure who can comfort, assist, advise, and deliver her into better
circumstances; she has found a mother.
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Others have noted Mother Midnight is a mother figure for Moll, and Rietz
specifies when this bond is formed by noting “In this central passage [when they discuss
the lying-in bills and what do with the child] Moll finds the mother she has been seeking”
(4). I would further add that she finds the particular kind of mother for whom she has
been seeking, for Moll wants a powerful female figure in her life who will counsel her to
make choices that will not conflict with her desires. When Mother Midnight offers her
services to help Moll “off with [her] Burthen sooner,” Moll’s abhorrence to the
suggestion makes Mother Midnight manipulate her words “so cleverly, that I cou’d not
say she really intended it, or whether she only mentioned the practise as a horrible thing,
[...] she couch’d her words so well” (MF 168-69). She says exactly what Moll wishes to
hear, and if ever she goes against Moll, she is quick to change her advice. This
counseling with consideration for Moll’s desires helps establish a relationship that will
come into play when Moll is once again ill and friendless.106 She does not act like Moll’s
own mother, who counsels her to remain in an incestuous marriage rather than to try her
fortune in a “natural” relationship. Although Moll wants someone like Mother Midnight
to rely upon, she does not blindly submit to her direction or adopt the roles she models
without modification. Moll does differentiate herself from the fatal role of the witch by
openly denouncing infanticide, but she readily adopts the fatal roles of mother, midwife,
and woman of the night.107
106 Mother Midnight’s counsel also helps Moll to decide to remarry and to send her child by Jemy out to nurse; see MF 172-72, 175. 107 There are two moments in which Moll exercises witch-like supernatural agency: when Jemy hears her cry from fifteen miles away, and when the baronet claims that she bewitched him; see MF 153, 235. Moll may be read as exercising diabolical agency here, and other passages make Moll appear diabolical, as when she steals the necklace from the child. Here, she has the chance to play the infanticidal midwife-witch, but
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Moll’s refusal to dispose of her son by Jemy by leaving him with just any parish
nurse is based upon the harsh reality and high mortality rate that faced children left to
parish nurses in Defoe’s England. Moll equates such abandonment to infanticide:
BUT it touch’d my Heart so forcibly to think of Parting entirely with the
Child, and for ought I knew, of having it murther’d or starv’d by Neglect
and Ill-usage, (which was much the same) that I could not think of it,
without Horror: I wish all those Women who consent to the disposing of
their Children in the same way, as it is call¶d for Decency sake, would
consider that ‘tis only a contriv’d Method for Murther; that is to say, a
killing their Children with safety (MF 173).
A number of historians and literary critics including Dorothy M. George, Dorothy
Marshall, and G. A. Starr cite the March 8, 1716 House of Commons Journals to
substantiate Moll’s claim about the parish nurses: “A great many poor infants and
exposed bastard children are inhumanly suffered to die by the barbarity of nurses, who
are a sort of people void of commiseration or religion, hir’d by the churchwardens to take
off a burthen from the parish at the cheapest and easiest rates they can, and these know
the manner of doing it effectually.”108 Moll’s fears of such treatment for her child by
she resists this urge that she blames on the Devil; see MF 194. Even though she is “hardened” to sin, she does not submit wholly to all evil inclinations, be they directly from the Devil, some other external force, or her own agency; see Starr, Spiritual 153-56. 108qtd. in George 215. The high mortality rate continued throughout the eighteenth century with some improvement made by the end of the century, but parish nurses were continually blamed for the deaths of children; see George 17, 213-61. Lawrence Stone cites J. Hanway’s 1766 An earnest Appeal for Mercy to the Children of the Poor, in which Hanway writes “There is no wonder in this [high mortality rate], when it is considered that these children were put in the hands of indigent, filthy, and decrepit women. . . . The allowance to these women being scanty, they are tempted to take the bread and milk intended for the poor infants. The child cries for food, and the nurse beats it because it cries. Thus with blows, starving and
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Jemy reveal the horrific treatment of children in her day, and her desire to save her child
from such treatment reveals she will follow Mother Midnight’s direction only to a certain
extent. Here, her quality of being a like subject, one who is similar to others yet distinct,
is especially clear, for she does not blindly accept everything Mother Midnight suggests
but asserts her own desires. Although she does not adopt the terminating Atropos-
function of the midwife-witch, Moll does gain empowerment by functioning in other fatal
capacities. Coupled with the tears she sheds for her actions, the adoption of these roles
indicates a change in Moll.
Moll’s tears over parting with her child by Jemy foreshadow of the tears of
repentance that signify her transformation to a penitent Fate figure. After ensuring the
safety of the child’s future, Moll hands her son to a nurse, “with a heavy Heart and many
a tear” (MF 177). Although some readers may judge Moll as an unnatural mother ready
to drop her children whenever a new opportunity arises, her tears signify something
more. Moll sheds these tears for this child because he is one of the last children she may
have and he is her only child by Jemy, for whom she cares far more than her earlier
husbands (Lerenbaum 110-11). Furthermore, Moll’s tears are a foreshadowing of her
tears of repentance during her final transformation, for Defoe establishes the pattern of
illness, assistance, and transformation in her life long before Moll is ready to become a
penitent. With this pattern well-established, Moll is prepared to become a penitent Fate
figure.
putrid air, with the addition of lice, itch, filthiness, he soon receives his quietus”; qtd. in Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (New York: Harper, 1979) 475.
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At first, Moll may not seem to be significantly transformed in this first episode
with Mother Midnight because the transformation is the simple but significant
introduction of Mother Midnight into Moll’s life. Over the course of this episode and the
remainder of the novel, Mother Midnight fulfills a number of roles associated with the
Fates and encourages Moll to adopt these roles herself. In this first episode, Mother
Midnight counsels and governs Moll as a midwife, witch, and mother, and more roles are
to come. It is with these roles Moll identifies, yet she maintains her independence by
differentiating herself from the person who models these roles for her. Even as she
becomes more of a Fate figure herself, Moll asserts her will and differentiates herself
from Mother Midnight by not submitting to overt infanticide. Furthermore, although she
submits to Mother Midnight’s direction, Moll does not grant her complete control over
her, for Moll leaves her not knowing whether Moll is off to London or Lancashire (MF
178). By maintaining a distinct sense of her independence while identifying with Mother
Midnight, Moll becomes an independent yet intersubjective being whose paradoxical
nature allows her to transform into a penitent Fate figure. This transformation occurs
only after she learns from Mother Midnight’s direction and confronts her maker. The
next phase in Moll’s process towards becoming a Fate figure is the embarking upon a
new career that lands her in Newgate, thus bringing her to her birthplace.
“AS IMPUDENT A THIEF, AND AS DEXTEROUS AS […] MOLL CUT-PURSE”:
THE MIDWIFE-THIEF
The pattern that Moll experiences in Colchester and during her first encounter
with Mother Midnight repeats as she enters her career as a thief. Again, the two women
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share an asymmetrical relationship in which Moll is dependent upon Mother Midnight for
governance, comfort, and assistance, and, this time, money for stolen goods.
Immediately before she becomes a thief, she loses her fifth husband, suffers from fits of
hysteria and depression for two years, and finds herself in an abject state. The illness-
assistance-transformation pattern is intensified at this stage, for as Lerenbaum notes,
“women who have earlier responded to their female role with depression or
pyschosomatic illness will respond to the onset of their cilmacterium in a similar but
more intense form” (114). Compared to the earlier episodes in which this pattern
manifests, Moll’s illness lasts longer, her dependence upon Mother Midnight is made
stronger, and her transformation into a thief is a shock even to herself.
Moll is reduced to a state far more miserable than any state that she has suffered
before.109 After her fifth husband dies, Moll suffers for two years: “I sat and cried and
tormented my self Night and Day; wringing my Hands; and sometimes raving like a
distracted Woman; and indeed I have often wonder’d it had not affected my Reason, for I
had the Vapours to such a degree, that my Understanding was sometimes quite lost in
Fancies and Imaginations” (MF 190). Moll has more than enough reasons to fear for her
future, and that fear propels her into the pattern she has endured twice before and will
experience once more before her final transformation.
Moll’s illness originates because she has lost four qualities that she has relied
upon all of her life. She has lost her husband, her sexual attractiveness, her capacity to
109 After losing the elder brother’s interest, she suffers a fever for five weeks, and when left with a child but no husband after Jemy leaves, she suffers an ague that threatens her to miscarry; see MF 42, 161.
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bear children, and with “every Sixpence [...] paid but for a Loaf of Bread,” her fortune
(MF 190). As Lerenbaum notes, “The loss of any one of these would be a major blow;
the loss of all of them together represents the loss of every source of security and
gratification she is entitled to expect” (112). Unable to be a wife or mistress, Moll sees
no alternative but to starve; her deduction is not mere hyperbole.110 Utterly desolate,
Moll says she continues “weeping [..] over my dismal Circumstances, and as it were only
bleeding to Death, without the least hope or prospect of help from God or Man; and now
I had cried so long, and often, that Tears were [...] exhausted” (MF 190). Moll’s likens
her tears to blood, and, in doing so, she is not merely exaggerating the nature of her pain.
The tears and blood to which Moll refers are a foreshadowing of her repentance scene,
for they represent the cleansing and rebirth associated with the fluids of the sacraments of
baptism and communion and the water and blood that poured from Christ’s side.
However, these tears cannot yet be the fluids of cleansing and rebirth. Without the
assistance of a minister or the honest suffering of a contrite heart, Moll’s tears signify
little more than a woman bemoaning her circumstances; however, they will surface once
more as part of the pattern that ultimately transforms her. Tears often signify rebirth, but
here they do not signify a providential rebirth; their significance is fatal: Moll’s delivery
by Mother Midnight into a new profession.
110 Alice Clark analyzes in detail the change capitalism wrought on women’s role in labor and production in the early modern period in England. By Moll’s day, women had been pushed out of most economic roles and limited to the roles of wife, mistress, prostitute, maid, or drudge. Industrialism and capitalism exacerbated this tendency and forced women out of many professions in which they had nearly been the sole practicioners; see Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1968) 294-303. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy’s chapter “Spinsters and Widows” in Women¶s Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel adds to Clark’s scholarship by noting the few economic avenues available to women in the early eighteenth-century; see Brophy 198-232.
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Moll’s new career replaces her previous roles as a wife and mother with a new
role that is both fatal and something more. At first, the profession is traumatic for Moll,
but it soon becomes exciting for her. Moll cries at great length after she steals her first
bundle of linen, but her heart becomes hardened, and she soon describes her thefts as
“adventures” (MF 196). Moll’s joy in her new career is not incongruent with her
character, for her prowess as a thief not only grants her a new life and vocation, but it
compensates for her lost roles as mother and wife (Lerenbaum 115). Stealing the first
bundle, which turns out to contain children’s clothing, has a number of fatal
ramifications. By stealing this linen, Moll attempts to steal back her ability to clothe an
infant—to be a mother who can clothe the child within her very womb by “knitting” what
Sharp calls “coats” full of “wrinkles” and “seams” for the fetus (Sharp 77), and to verify
her maternal instincts by being able to lay claim to providing the benefit of linen.111
Thieving becomes a means of regaining the power she once had as a mother, the power to
create and clothe a child, and it is also a form of midwifery.
The role of the thief may be seen as a means of replacing the maternal element in
Moll’s life, and it is unquestionably fatal. The midwife-thief delivers the child as any
111 A woman who wished to commit infanticide and not be punished by the law had an out other than abandoning the child. If she provided linen for her children, she was not likely to be accused of infanticide, as Bowers notes, “in Augustan England, ‘making provision’ for one’s children was a precise and legally operative term. It denoted an expectant mother’s preparation of childbed linen before delivery, an action assumed to indicate maternal affection and often successfully cited in defense of mothers accused of infanticide”; see Bowers 114. Hoffer and Hull note “There is no way of knowing how popular or effective this line of defense was before 1700, but after that date, benefit-of-linen, in the absence of violence upon the [infant’s] corpse, almost guaranteed an evemtual acquittal in newborn bastard death trials”; see Peter C. Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558-1803 (New York: New York UP, 1981) 69. Bowers draws her evidence directly from various Old Bailey Proceedings from 1720 through 1721 and further emphasizes that women who could produce bed linen as evidence of maternal affection were less likely to be seen as prostitutes, for no whore would provide for her bastards; see Bowers 114.
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bundle and disposes of it as she pleases; just as Moll sells the linen, Mother Midnight
sells children to parish nurses. Thieves and midwives have more in common than the
delivery of goods, “because both trades, at least as they were practiced in the eighteenth
century, were life-and-death occupations, and were considered ‘Arts’” (Erickson 63).
Both arts require deftness, as Moll describes Mother Midnight’s midwifery as having
“the greatest Art and Dexterity” and her own thieving “as dextrous” (MF 171, 201). The
powers to create and destroy accompany each art, just as they are linked to maternity.
The change from mother to thief is not that great a jump within the fatal matrix, and it
may be understood in other terms. Lerenbaum explains this new career in terms of
Moll’s reaction to menopause being representative of many women’s experience:
“women respond to their climacteric experience with a sense of relief and release that
often takes the form of a drastic and even incongruous change in their life, interests, and
behavior” (Lerenbaum 114). To extend the analogy to men, Moll’s decision to steal is
certainly drastic, much like the twentieth-century stereotype of the man who, upon
reaching middle age, buys a red sports car and leaves his wife for a younger woman.
Furthermore, Lerenbaum notes, “Her thieving career provides her with a truly absorbing
activity and a reliable protector, […] Moll’s change of life commences with a shattering
confluence of difficulties deeply rooted in the female condition, to which she, in common
with many other women, responds first with paralyzing depression, followed by relief,
release, and the start of a new life” (115).
Her start of a new life may be read as masculine, too. Moglen argues that through
thieving, Moll “is restored to a masculine form of subjectivity that allows her to be
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exploitative rather than exploited” (41). She is not just a bag left on the highway to be
picked up (MF 128), but the one who picks up the bag. Playing the thief allows her to
play the active role of the one who takes the object of his desire. Again, Moll reveals her
overinclusive capacity because the role of the midwife-thief is both masculine and
feminine according to the traditional gender split. Although one may split hairs over
whether Moll is more of a woman or a man as a thief, what is most significant about her
thieving is its propulsion of her ever closer to Newgate.
Moll’s decision to steal is not so odd because she has few other options, and it
figures perfectly into her fate. Her decision to turn thief is not only a reaction to
menopause but also the manifestation of her subconscious desire to confront her place of
birth. This drastic change of life brings her closer to the fulfillment of this desire, but
before she can confront that which created her, she must learn what it is to be a Fate
figure through the aid of Mother Midnight, who fences the goods that Moll steals, directs
her to the best teachers of the trade, and operates as a reliable protector for Moll. In the
thieving episode, Mother Midnight becomes even more important to Moll than before.
Once Moll is compelled to steal, Mother Midnight appears to assist her in her new
career. Moll is directed to steal by a force that she cannot pinpoint, for when she says she
is “prompted by I know not what Spirit,” she blames poverty, the Devil, necessity, and
chance (MF 191). Oddly enough, she does not blame her “ill fate,” which she blames at
two other key moments (MF 90, 262). Moll’s inability to see Fate at work does not
diminish the impact it has on her, for after several adventures in stealing, she returns to
the Fate figure who has counseled and aided her before. Moll may be prompted to steal
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by forces other than fate, but Mother Midnight nurtures Moll during her career as a thief,
for “What the Devil instigates the midwife fosters and brings into maturity” (Erickson
57). Mother Midnight essentially births Moll into thieving and delivers her to her fate.
This direction is based upon action and word. Mother Midnight provides physical
means for Moll to dispose of her goods as she once disposed of her son, and she
convinces Moll that doing so is necessary given her circumstances. As mistress of her
tongue, Mother Midnight encourages Moll to draw ever-closer to Newgate by advancing
in her career as a thief. She receives Moll “in her usual obliging manner” and tells Moll
exactly what she wants to hear about supporting her son by Jemy (MF 197-98). Mother
Midnight, who once convinced Moll to send her son off to nurse, has lost nothing of her
verbal powers. Moll relates Mother Midnight’s story and notes how she escaped
transportation because she was a “Woman of a rare tongue,” and she succeeded as a
midwife-procuress because of her “good Tongue” (MF 213). This tongue of Mother
Midnight’s crafts a number of clever half truths, as when she convinces a justice of the
peace that no man had entered her house, although Moll had entered her disguised as a
man (MF 218). Mother Midnight is able to manipulate words to suit any situation. Moll
has always been crafty enough with her tongue, as the episodes preceeding her marriages
to her brother and Jemy show, but Mother Midnight truly is mistress of her tongue. Her
acting as a governess through her counsel helps Moll become a manipulative Fate figure.
Moll relinquishes control to Mother Midnight when she lets her into a secret; in
doing so, she seals her fate to become a thief. She asks Mother Mother whether she can
keep “a Secret of the greatest Consequence in the World” (MF 200). Moll is ever-
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reluctant to share secrets, for she recognizes the power such knowledge possesses, but
she does entrust Mother Midnight with the knowledge of her having become a thief by
circumstance. Mother Midnight, much like Moll’s mother when she extracts Moll’s true
name from her (MF 95), acts as a midwife delivering knowledge as though it were an
infant struggling to escape the womb. This secret-sharing was common to midwives of
Moll’s day, for they often were asked to be discrete about the circumstances surrounding
births, particularly those of bastard children or of infants that were to be strangled or
otherwise murdered at birth (Erickson 53). Sharing the secret seals Moll’s fate because
she will listen to Mother Midnight’s direction, and there is little question what a midwife-
bawd turned pawnbroker will recommend to a neophyte thief. The death of her husband
and impending poverty certainly can be blamed, but neither Moll nor Mother Midnight
are ready to accept responsibility for their actions. Mother Midnight counsels her to
continue stealing because “there’s no going back now,” which becomes a mantra to Moll
throughout her career as a thief (MF 200).
Moll takes Mother Midnight’s advice not only because she assisted her before in
her time of need but also because Moll has always relied upon women for direction.
Usually, she seeks such direction in regards to marriage, as with the linen-draper’s sister,
Jemy’s accomplice, and others, but she also relies upon networks of women for
professional advice, particularly her Colchester Nurse and Mother Midnight, both of
whom are mother figures to her (Swaminathan 195-96). Mother Midnight is unique,
however, because her role is far more active in Moll’s life. The Colchester Nurse makes
it clear to Moll that she must go into service because she cannot be a gentlewoman and
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she cannot run a little school as the nurse has; Mother Midnight, though, is willing to
work against the patriarchal system that excludes women from prosperous avenues by
counseling Moll and others like her to abandon their children, remarry as often as they
please, and fence stolen goods through her. If ever any woman has qualms with her
advice, as Moll does regarding abortion, she simply manipulates her words “so cleverly,
that [it cannot be said whether] she really intended it, or whether she only mentioned the
practise as a horrible thing” (MF 168-69). Such a mistress of her tongue is the perfect
governess for a new thief, but Mother Midnight is not just one to give advice.
In addition to verbal counsel, Mother Midnight arranges Moll’s life for her. She
provides tutors in the art of theft, fences the goods Moll steals, and protects her from the
authorities. Nearly every page of this episode contains some instance of Mother
Midnight assisting or counseling Moll, but the most significant passages reveal that she is
operating as a Fate figure and shaping Moll into a Fate figure. Early in her career, Moll
thinks of leaving off her trade because she has no immediate necessity, “but my Fate was
otherwise determin’d” (MF 203). Moll immediately notes that this determintation is
made by some “busy Devil” whose identity she makes clear when Mother Midnight
counsels her to continue stealing even though three of her comrades have been hanged: “I
had a new Tempter, who prompted me every Day, I mean my Governess” (MF 203, 209).
Here, Mother Midnight is readily identified as a deterministic figure; more specifically,
she is the Fate figure as apportioner, for she allots Moll’s fortunes. She controls Moll, in
what some may view as a paradoxical role, as a nurturing tempter who provides Moll
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shelter, money, disguises, aliases, and tutors, all of which make Moll a hardened thief
whose fate is inevitable.
Just as Moll has adopted other fatal roles with relish, she adopts the role of the
thief; however, she continually voices her discomfort with this role. Under the guidance
of Mother Midnight and the tutors she provides, Moll becomes “as impudent a Thief, and
as dexterous as [...] Moll Cut-Purse.”112 Before long, Moll becomes “the greatest Artist
of [her] time” (MF 214). Moll does describe a number of her adventures in detail, but
she notes, “I COULD fill up this whole Discourse with the variety of such Adventures
which daily Invention directed to, and which I manag’d with the utmost Dexterity, and
always with Success” (241). She steals watches, bundles of linen, plate, and, at an
awkward moment, a horse, but she is never truly at ease with her identity as a thief. Moll
lives a double-life that wears on her, for she can never reveal her true name or be her true
self as a thief. Moll finds her many aliases and disguises “contrary to nature” and
“ominous,” and when questioned who she is by a magistrate, she reveals her secret
loathing of these inauthentic selves by making public the alias all the rogues in Newgate
have given her: Mary Flanders (MF 215, 254, 247). Despite becoming the greatest thief
of her day, Moll is never truly comfortable in the role. The role is merely a means to an
end, and an exciting means at that.
Mother Midnight is the force that governs Moll to become a master thief. She is
so persuasive that she convinces Moll to go against her very nature in two key episodes.
112 MF 201. Moll Cut-Purse was the “alias of Mary Frith (1584?-1659), who ‘gained great notoriety as a bully, pickpurse, fortune-teller, receiver, and forger’”; see Starr, Explanatory 379.
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She has Moll dress as a man, which Moll finds “so contrary to Nature” that she is glad
when the disguise can no longer be used due to her near capture.113 Although Moll has
expressed both want and need and has actively asserted herself and passively recognized
others’ desires, she does not wish to blur the boundaries between male and female
through clothing; her overinclusivity has its limits. The second episode in which Mother
Midnight convinces Moll to go against her inclinations occurs when she encouarges Moll
to prostitute herself by reasoning, “I have kept your Counsel in worse things than these,
sure you may trust me in this” (MF 229). Moll does trust in her, and although she does
not always accept Mother Midnight’s direction, she allows herself to be transformed into
a whore as well as a thief. Because of this type of counsel, Moll calls her a “Tempter”
(MF 209). She is a “dexterous Manager in the nicest Cases,” providing a model for Moll,
who grows to be the most dexterous thief of her day (MF 211). Moll follows this model
well, even becoming, if only figuratively, a “Midwife and Procuress” herself after
becoming as accomplished in her “Art and Dexterity: as “this wicked Creature” (MF
213). Beyond couseling, comforting, and controlling Moll, Mother Midnight helps her
become a Fate figure by making her one of the greatest midwives of her time; Moll just
happens to deliver watches rather than babies.114
Moll becomes a thief in much the same way a person was appenticed to become a
midwife. Mother Midnight makes the suggestion to Moll: “I cou’d help you to a School-
113 MF 215. Moll’s discomfort with masculine attire is consistent with her compliance to early modern constructions of femininity; she has no desire to violate gender roles as a transvestite. On the dangers and rewards of violating social and gender roles via clothing, see Eva Marie Stadler, “Defining the Female Body within Social Space: The Function of Clothes in Some Early Eighteenth-Century Novels,” Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Roger Bauer and Douwe Fokkema (Munich: Iudicium Verlag Munchen, 1990) 468-69. 114 On the value of watches and infants in the novel, see Erickson 60-61.
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Mistress, that shall make you as dexterous as her self” (MF 201). Moll connects theft
with midwifery through the use of the word dexterity; she often employs this term in her
first enounter with Mother Midnight as a midwife, and she uses it freely to define herself
and Mother Midnight in their partnership of thief and fence. The crude early modern
analogy of the midwife as a pick-purse also connects the two roles, for a purse was
connotative of a woman’s genitals. The most significant connection between the two
roles is clarified when Moll recalls “I attended [the School-Mistress] some time in the
Practise, just as a Deputy attends a Midwife without any Pay” (MF 201). Moll is capable
of stealing from the figurative matrix of life: the purse, the fruits of which no one can
survive without, as Moll has lamented again and again when she states that only money
recommends a woman and that poverty is the “sure Bane of Virtue” (MF 188). At this
point, she has adopted the role of the fatal midwife-thief.
As a midwife-thief, Moll regains her agency through an exciting career in which
she literally steals goods that will provide sustenance, figuratively steals time by
delivering women of their watches, and figuratively steals the creative power of their
wombs by taking the contents of the purses. Like a parish nurse who gains her income by
taking in infants, Moll sustains herself by stealing watches. The deliveries are not always
pleasant for the figurative mother, however. The midwife possesses the power to harm
the infant or the mother during delivery. Moll has no desire to harm the infant, the stolen
item, but in one key moment, she nearly harms the figurative mother. As she steals a
necklace from a young girl whom she has mislead, Moll describes a sinister temptation to
become a fatal figure in the most literal sense: “the Devil put me upon killing the Child in
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the dark Alley” (MF 194). Here, the infant-item and mother-victim of theft analogy is
confused. The life of the little girl-cum-mother is in the midwife’s hands, and the fatal
power is almost too much to bear. Moll posesses the capacity to kill, but just as she was
not willing to anadon her son to just any parish nurse, she is not willing to kill this child.
Moll is never literally infanticidal, but her temptation to do so reveals that she becomes a
fatal midwife in the darkest sense of the word; she has the capacity to act as Atropos, the
severer of all ties, especially the ties that support another’s life.
Moll would not have been birthed into this fatal role and guided so deftly through
the world of crime without Mother Midnight. Ironically, Mother Midnight also counsels
Moll to stop. She does so after she and Moll have reached success in their thief-fence
partnership: “the old Gentlewoman began to talk of leaving off while we were well, [...]
but I knew not what Fate guided me, [...] and so in an ill Hour we gave over the Thoughts
of [leaving off] for the present, and in a Word, I grew more hardn’d and audacious than
ever.”115 How Moll employs fate is crucial, for here she indicates it is her own personal
destiny, not Mother Midnight, that is directing her actions. At this point of her career,
Moll is far removed from necessity, but Mother Midnight’s advice goes against Moll’s
fate, her unconscious desire to reclaim her past and acknowledge from what she was born
by confronting Newgate and to be reborn as a penitent. Moll and Mother Midnight both
decide that Moll should continue to steal, but Moll’s fate leads her to the next stage of her
life: confronting Newgate and becoming a penitent Fate figure.
115 MF 262. Hardening to one’s vices, which is related to spiritual hardening, is a crucial stage in conversion narratives; see Starr, Spiritual 141-42, 156-57.
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The journey to this confrontation has been complicated, and it has not been a
linear path in which the lone individual strikes out on her own against the world.
Although society is antagonistic towards Moll,116 the people with whom she forms
relationships are vital to her understanding how she is dependent upon others in order to
assert her independence (Benjamin, Bonds 33; Like 37). She needs others such as Mother
Midnight in order to be an independent woman. This is but one paradox which Moll
manages to maintain in her life, for, as Kietzman notes, when Moll reaches Newgate and
contemplates her shared history with Mother Midnight and Jemy, “she begins to
constitute herself as a subject in relation to others’ lives instead of in opposition to them”
(698). Even before Newgate, the seeds of this relatedness have been planted in Moll
during her first encounters with Jemy and Mother Midnight. This relational
understanding contrasts greatly with Robinson Crusoe’s construction of the self in which
he achieves “a mastery of external objects rather than a richer organization of the psyche”
(Damrosch 196). Moll, though, does not stop at “a richer organization of the psyche,”
which is but an intrapsychic regulation of others as objects, for she develops a relational
understanding between like subjects. Even before Newgate, Moll has been weaving the
ties that bind her to others, but her ubiquitous lament of friendlessness indicates that she
has yet to understand how truly interconnected she is with others, that she is never alone.
That understanding is nascent up until her repentance scene, but the roots of
understanding that the self is interconnected to others and no one is ever alone are to be
116 Erickson reads Moll’s birth into thievery as her means of striking back the world that has forced her into dire straits time and time again: “The world has [...] become for Moll a huge unpredictable labyrinthine antagonist, dominated by powerful commercial and legal forces, which has always defeated her and which she must now outwit and overcome”; see Erickson 56.
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found in the tensions she maintains between masculinity and femininity, and between
passivity and activity in the initial episodes with Jemy and Mother Midnight.
The initial episodes with Jemy and Mother Midnight, coupled with Mother
Midnight’s guidance during Moll’s career as a thief, enable Moll to become a character
capable of maintaining paradoxical tensions in her life. This capability is necessary to
prevent the breakdown into domination and submission in her relations with others, and it
is vital to reconcile the roles of Fate and Providence within her life. Although the Fate
figures who have come before Mother Midnight help prefigure her role in Moll’s life, it is
Mother Midnight and the one man who recognizes Moll as a woman with her own desires
who give her the mutual recognition she requires from others who are like her yet
distinct. By accepting both men and women as assistants and guides in her life, she does
not simply split their roles into the traditional dichotomy; she realizes that creating bonds
with men and women alike is necessary to survive, and these bonds need not be split into
simple binary oppositions such as ones in which men are active providers and woman are
passive confidantes. As she asserts her desires when with Jemy and recognizes his
desires, and as she models multiple roles and performs multiple functions of Fate figures
under Mother Midnight’s direction, Moll becomes a woman capable of maintaining the
tension between assertion and recognition, activity and passivity, and, eventually, self
and other. When she confronts Newgate and interacts with these two characters again,
she will maintain a bond between the pagan and the providential by becoming a penitent
Fate figure.
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Moll’s survival, although important, is not the key development of these episodes.
Of utmost importance is the relationships she develops based upon mutual recognition,
for these relationships will enable her to repent while at Newgate, and so fulfill her fate.
Swaminathan derives a similar conclusion: “Admiration for Moll’s resourceful survival
techniques is not intended to overshadow the rewards that come from true repentance at
the end of the novel” (191). The conversion scene is dependent upon her relationships
with Jemy and Mother Midnight because her empathy for Jemy, her guilt over past
actions, and her desire to follow Mother Midnight’s example as a penitent all contribute
to how she becomes a penitent Fate figure.
The ability to maintain relationships based upon mutual recognition via the
paradox of one’s independence being dependent upon others grants Moll the capability of
organizing her life in relation to others and understanding her responsibility to others.
Moll, in her repentance scene, takes possession of her narrative because she perceives
that is an intricate web woven between individuals, and she is responsible for her actions
within this web. This realization occurs in Newgate, and it differs greatly from Roxana’s
descent into misery, which is based upon her failure to maintain relationships based upon
mutual recognition. Roxana, unlike Moll, adopts fatal roles but splits her bonds with
others so her fatal ties degenerate into complementary relationships of domination and
submission.
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CHAPTER IV
“THE MISERIES OF FATE”: ROXANA AS MISTRESS OF MEN AND MISTRESS
OVER AMY
Many critics have noted Roxana’s failure, with some claiming she fails as a
mother; some, as a penitent; and some, as an independent, autonomous individual.117
This last failure allows for her other failures; it is the result of a relationship in which she
and Amy play complementary roles to one another, a relationship that creates a pattern of
splitting that continues throughout her narrative. Roxana becomes a tyrannical child and
Amy becomes a permissive mother due to the splitting and projection that occur in the
early scenes of the narrative when Roxana abandons her children via Amy and when she
forces Amy to bed with the landlord. In these episodes, she makes Amy an object upon
whom she projects her desires to whore herself, to submit to necessity, and to abandon
her children. In doing so, she disowns her own experiences and attributes these unwanted
parts of her history, of her self, to Amy. By splitting the aspects of her self that she
despises from her self and projecting them onto Amy, Roxana breaks down the tension
117 Recent gender criticism reveals that Roxana fails as a mother because she is torn between sexuality and maternity in a split created by society; see Bowers 100; Alison Conway, “Defoe’s Protestant Whore,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.2 (2002): 229; and Nussbaum 40. On Roxana’s failure to follow Providence, see Starr, Spiritual 163-83, and Marilyn Westfall, “A Sermon by the 'Queen of Whores,'” Studies in English Literature 41.3 (2001): 483-97. On Roxana’s failure to achieve economic independence because of her reliance upon men, see D. Christopher Gabbard, “The Dutch Wives’ Good Husbandry: Defoe’s Roxana and Financial Literacy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.2 (2004): 238, 245.
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between her self and Amy, thus eliminating her ability to maintain mutual bonds with
others.
The peculiar mother-daughter bond formed between Roxana and Amy is due to
Amy’s figurative relationship to Roxana rather than anything more literal. Although
Amy’s age is never given in the text, it may be assumed that she is close to Roxana’s age,
be she slightly older or younger, because she bears children in the same years Roxana
does and because Roxana often compliments her beauty. Roxana notes how Amy can
appear “like a Gentlewoman” (31, 165), and “look like a Lady, for she was a very
handsome well-shap’d Woman” (194). Likewise, their intimate conversations and their
desires to be with one another may indicate they are like sisters who are close in age, but
their relationship is clearly a figurative mother-daughter dyad when the abandonment and
bedding scenes are considered. Amy’s doting upon Roxana is due not to her being a
nurturing matron who cares for her charge, but to her being a figurative mother who
fulfills her child’s needs.
With Amy as the protective mother who does everything for her, Roxana can
project her repudiated role of mother onto Amy, and so disown her maternal self.
Splitting one part of herself and projecting it onto another leads to further splitting in her
life. Roxana begins to deny aspects of her self in the three comforters episode by
denying the voice of necessity within herself and her role as an infanticidal mother. In
the bedding scene, she also denies her desire to whore herself and begins the prostitution
pattern in which she passively submits to men. This pattern leads to further splitting in
which Roxana becomes even more passive as she allows Amy and men to serve her will
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while acting as an object to them. The splitting in these patterns ultimately leads to her
failure to accept a providential figure who offers a relationship based upon mutuality and
overinclusiveness. By refusing to accept a providential figure when he first appears in
her life, Roxana fails to recognize herself as part of two systems, that of Providence and
Fate, because she limits herself to fatal relationships by making either/or split decisions
unlike Moll, who becomes an overinclusive penitent Fate figure who embodies both fatal
and providential elements. Furthermore, her failure to heed the providential call to
marriage proves to Defoe’s Puritanical audience that Roxana is a damned reprobate.
Roxana’s tendency to split everything into oppositions rather than to accept
paradoxical relationships situates her within a realm of mutually exclusive,
sadomasochistic relations. These relationships must be read within the context of
intersubjective theory to understand how she fails to maintain mutual relationships with
like subjects. Her failure is due to the splitting that develops in the three comforters
episode, the bedding scene, the prostitution pattern, and her refusal to accept the Dutch
merchant’s first marriage proposal.
“FAITHFUL TO ME, AS THE SKIN TO MY BACK”: ROXANA AND AMY AS ONE
The three comforters episode initiates the process in which Roxana and Amy
merge as a sadomasochistic pair. As the widowed aunt, the family’s dependent, and Amy
conspire to rid Roxana of her children, Roxana projects two roles which she despises
about herself, those of the voice of necessity and the infanticidal mother, onto these other
women. Roxana reveals her willingness to allow Amy and others to act on her behalf,
thus establishing the passive/active split that degenerates into the dynamic of passive
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child and active mother between herself and Amy. Within this episode, the three women
assist Roxana in a number of fatal capacities by advising and counseling her “like Job’s
three Comforters” (R 17), disposing of her children, and transforming her into a woman
free of children and the necessities associateed with them. Amy in particular acts as the
voice of necessity, convincing Roxana to abandon her children. She also plays two
crucial fatal roles: a midwife who assists Roxana’s figurative delivery of her children and
an infanticidal mother who disposes of children. As the figurative midwife, Amy assists
Roxana in her time of need, and by playing the roles of the voice of necessity and the
infanticidal mother, Amy takes on the repudiated aspects Roxana wishes to disown about
herself. The latter action allows Roxana to project the role of the whore onto Amy in the
next and most formative episode in the novel: the bedding scene. Thus, the three
comforters scene is necessary for the transformation of Roxana and Amy into a single
sadomasochistic entity.
In need of assistance, Roxana turns to others to help her with her circumstances.
Abandoned by her husband, she sells nearly all she has, and within a short amount of
time, is brought to a state in which she is “extremely perplex’d, melancholy, and
discourag’d to the last Degree” because she does not want to leave her house for fear she
may miss her husband should he return and because she knows she cannot afford the rent
(R 13). She grows more ill month after month, until Amy brings help in the form of
herself and two other “Comforters”— her husband’s aunt and a woman dependent upon
her husband’s family—who find Roxana “crying ready to burst [her]self” and “swell’d
with crying”(R 17). Upon seeing these three women, Roxana falls “into another violent
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Fit of Crying” and cannot speak (R 18). The swelling, crying, and inability to speak
indicate Roxana is in the process of a figurative labor. Her tears function much like the
breaking of the water that signals the delivery of a baby because they indicate she is
ready to deliver her burden. The three comforters act as midwives who deliver her from
her circumstances, the pain that is causing the tears, and her burden: her children.
The figurative delivery is directed by Amy, who counsels Roxana to submit to the
necessity of her circumstances. She and the other comforters advise Roxana to abandon
her children in order to avoid starving them and herself. Roxana relates this decision in
the language of necessity: “I began to be reconcil’d to parting with [my children], any
how, and any where, that I might be freed from the dreadful Necessity of seeing them
perish, and perishing with them myself” (19). Necessity conflicts with her affection for
her children, so rather than abandon them herself, she allows her three comforters to
dispose of them: “So I agreed to go away out of the House, and leave the Management of
the whole Matter to my Maid Amy; and to them, and accordingly I did so; and the same
Afternoon they carried them all away to one of their Aunts” (19). Amy’s counsel for
necessity wears Roxana down, and necessity demands she abandon her children or starve.
By submitting to necessity, Roxana becomes an infanticidal mother, and Amy
shares in this act via her counsel and the actual disposal of the children at the home of
one of Roxana’s in-laws. This is a figurative infanticide, for, as Bowers notes, “the
elimination of children [...] however achieved” is infanticide, whether the child is actually
murdered or merely disposed of by some other means (98). Roxana is not directly to
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blame, however, because Amy disposes of the children herself, thus allowing Roxana to
identify her as the infanticidal figure and to begin projecting her own desires onto Amy.
Projecting her desire to submit to necessity and abandon her children allows
Roxana to divorce herself from the role of the infanticidal mother. Denying this aspect of
motherhood also allows her to split motherhood entirely from her self. Roxana chooses
to be an independent woman unencumbered by children. Throughout the narrative, she
emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining the tension between the roles of an independent
woman and of a mother; ultimately, she breaks down this tension by denying any
maternal roles and by making Amy her surrogate. This breakdown begins with her
willingness to lie and, more importantly, to have others lie for her. Although Roxana
comments that the lie delivered by the poor woman to her relations contains no truth, she
notes one exception: “that at the parting with my poor Children, I fainted, and was like
one Mad when I came to myself and found they were gone” (R 22). Like Moll, she fears
for her children:
I was at first sadly afflicted at the Thoughts of parting with my Children,
and especially at that terrible thing, their being taken into the Parish-
keeping; [...] of Parish-Children being Starv’d at Nurse; of their being
ruin’d, let grow crooked, lame, and the like, for want of being taken care
of; and this sunk my very Heart within me.118
118 R 19. Roxana also expresses satisfaction over not having her son by the prince nursed by such women; see R 80. Moll has similar fears of parish nurses; see MF 173 and my comments in Chapter Three on Moll’s refusal to dispose of her child by Jemy to just anyone.
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After the children are delivered, she notes that she is relieved, “for I was terribly frighted
at the Apprehensions of my Children being brought to Misery and Distress, as those must
be who have no Friends, but are left to Parish Benevolence” (R 25). Essentially, she fears
her children will become like the orphaned Moll, friendless and nurtured only by
whomever the parish appoints as a nurse.
Roxana’s fears and her later provisions for her children via Amy prove that she is
concerned for their welfare; Defoe has taken pains to illustrate how like the nurturing
mother Roxana wishes to be. Her desire to provide for her children reveals her desire to
fit within the maternal ideals that defined the mother as “tender, noble, self-sacrificial,
and ever-nurturant,” ideals prevalent by the end of the eighteenth century and “codified at
least a generation earlier” by writers such as Defoe (Bowers 15). However, Roxana also
has other drives, and her desire to survive trumps any maternal drives:
But the Misery of my own Circumstances hardened my Heart against my
own Flesh and Blood; and when I consider’d they must inevitably be
Starv’d, and I too, if I continued to keep them about me, I began to be
reconcil’d to parting with them all, any how, and any where, that I might
be freed from the dreadful Necessity of seeing them perish, and perishing
with them myself [...]. (R 19)
Necessity at first conflicts with her affection for her children, and Roxana allows herself
to be counseled to do whatever is necessary in order to improve her circumstances.
Being counseled by others allows her to blame others for her actions, and it allows her to
act through others, vicariously exerting her will via agents who do as she wishes.
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As an infanticidal figure, Amy plays two important roles to Roxana, both of
which are fatal in nature. She acts as the midwife who delivers babies and disposes of
them either by selling them after delivery or killing them during delivery. She also acts
as the infanticidal mother who abandons or murders her children. Both roles are
associated with Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread of life (Erickson 18). As a
figurative midwife, she delivers Roxana of her burden and disposes of the children much
as Mother Midnight does for Moll when Moll needs “the right sort” of Midwife who has
“another Calling too” (MF 161). Because she delivers the children, Amy may be read as
such a midwife, but she is also the infanticidal mother who disposes of the children and,
later, the nurturing mother who provides for them. Amy acts as Atropos, severing the
children’s connection with their mother and leaving them to their fate with Roxana’s in-
laws. As an Atropos figure, Amy becomes a surrogate mother of sorts, an infanticidal
surrogate who delivers and disposes of the children, thus eliminating Roxana’s maternal
function.119 By eliminating Roxana’s maternal connection to her children, Amy absorbs
the role of the infanticidal mother.
By becoming a surrogate infanticidal mother, Amy initiates the complementary
relationship to Roxana. As mother and child, the pair also creates a split between active
and passive partners. Amy becomes more active in times of crisis, during which she
“asserts herself as the prudent manager of affairs, while Roxana tends to devolve into
passiveness” (Castle 86). Amy and Roxana split their actions in a manner akin to the
119 Terry Castle claims that Roxana eliminates her own maternal function through this disposal of her children by her first husband, through the joy she takes in losing her child by the Prince, and through the disposal of her son by the Dutch Merchant in her essay, “‘Amy, Who Knew My Disease’: A Psychosexual Pattern in Defoe’s Roxana.” ELH 46 (1979): 89-90.
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protective mother who acts only for her child and the controlling child who expects
others to do her will. Amy is not only a surrogate mother for Roxana but also a figurative
mother to her. Her nurturing guidance and willingness to act for Roxana reveal that she
is a self-abnegating mother figure to Roxana; just as she provides for Roxana’s children,
she provides for Roxana, and in so doing, makes Roxana, “paradoxically, one of her own
children” (Castle 91). Roxana becomes more child-like as she becomes increasingly
dependent upon Amy’s ability to provide for her. They share a relationship in which
Roxana the mistress is not only an authoritative mistress to her maid and an eroticized
mistress to her lovers, but also a demanding mistress of a child, a distressed young Miss.
The relationship of Amy as providing mother and Roxana as needy, omnipotent child
develops further in the bedding scene as the two women become complements to one
another.
Roxana further projects other aspects of her self which she despises onto Amy,
making her a receptacle of all Roxana wishes to disown and deny. In the three
comforters episode, she begins to relate to Amy through projective identification, which
operates much as dissociation, when she “attempt[s] to eliminate something that belongs
to [her] by projecting it into some other being or thing” (Dimen, Sexuality 49). Roxana
projects the part of herself she despises onto the space occupied by the other, Amy, in a
general sense of splitting, in which she “now fills the position of the other [...] not with an
outside, differentiated being but with the self’s disowned, unconscious experience, which
appears as a threatening Other” (Benjamin, Like 18). This splitting of good-self/bad-
other is possible because Amy makes herself the voice of necessity and allows Roxana to
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be the voice of virtue. Rather than accept the voice of necessity or the role of the
infanticidal mother as parts of her self, Roxana projects them onto Amy. First, Amy
absorbs Roxana’s infanticidal desire, then, in the bedding scene, she absorbs Roxana’s
desire to submit to a man out of necessity.
In the bedding scene, the relationship of Amy as providing mother and Roxana as
needy, omnipotent child develops. Here, the two women become complements to one
another in a relationship that degenerates into one of master and slave. Such a
relationship is based not upon mutuality but shared agency, an interdependency in which
neither subject recognizes the other as a distinct individual. Castle reads this
interdependency as a mother-daughter bond in which “Amy and Roxana share a
paradoxical relation of sameness and otherness” (84). The two confuse their selves with
the other when Roxana splits her maternal nature from her self and projects in onto Amy.
Paradoxically, the two become one interdependent self. Nussbaum notes, “the
interdependence between Amy and Roxana begins when Amy pretends to be the mother
of Roxana’s children in attempting to parcel them out, and soon after, [it develops] when
she indicates she would whore for Roxana” (38). This interdependency should be read
in light of the fatal bonds between mothers and daughters and the failure of mutual
recognition as it degenerates into a relationship based upon complementary roles. They
need one another in order to survive in a society that creates circumstances in which
women must abandon their children and prostitute themselves in order to maintain
themselves as they are accustomed. As the maid, Amy wishes to continue to serve the
mistress she has always known, but by acting for her, Amy becomes trapped within an
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interdependent, indeed codependent, relationship in which neither woman can survive
without the other.
“MY WOMAN, AMY”: MISTRESS AND SLAVE
In the bedding scene, Defoe interweaves the dynamics of domination into the
familiar pattern of illness, assistance, and transformation found throughout Moll Flanders
and Roxana. This pattern permits Roxana to adopt more fatal roles, but her inability to
mutually recognize others traps her within a system of complementarity. Roxana entraps
herself within a world of hierarchical opposition between those who dominate and those
who submit because of the bedding episode, which, Peter New notes, “establishes a
permanent signifier for her divided state of mind” (324). The division is clear in the
terms Roxana employs for herself as “the Wife of [the landlord’s] Affection” and Amy as
“the Wife of his Aversion” (R 47). This splitting divides all of her relationships with
others, confining Roxana to either/or choices that limit her relationships and lead to her
own destruction.
Delivered of her children, Roxana is still a victim of circumstance. Unable to
gain employment and abandoned by her husband and his family, she is thrust into a
situation in which “the Necessity of [her] present Circumstances” forces her to prostitute
herself for fear of starvation (R 40). These circumstances are more than she can bear; as
in the comforters episode, her body becomes the site for the interior battle between
yielding to necessity and maintaining her virtue. Roxana remembers her copious tears
and reasons that “the Misery I had been in, was great, such as wou’d make the Heart
tremble at the Apprehensions of its Return” (R 39). Roxana’s trembling heart and fear of
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being reduced to tears are the only signs of illness in this episode. However, this fearful
trembling is as strong as any fever or ague Moll suffers, and it is enough to convince her
to listen to Amy’s counsel and to submit to the landlord’s propositions.
Amy simply wishes to continue serving her mistress as she always has; however,
her counsel for necessity allows Roxana to project the voice of necessity onto her and so
create a split between herself (virtue) and Amy (necessity). This split intensifies when
the landlord begins to proposition Roxana. When Roxana asks Amy what she should do
about the landlord’s advances, Amy replies: “Your Choice is fair and plain; [...] be rich,
live pleasantly, and in Plenty; or refuse him, and want a Dinner, go in Rags, live in
Tears” (R 40). Amy sees the situation in simple terms in which necessity trumps virtue
and conscience. Hentzi comments upon Amy “as the practical survivor, who speaks for
the unanswerable demands of necessity and acts on them in her mistress’s behalf” (180).
Amy’s arguments help Roxana reason that while she is at the whim of necessity, she may
starve. Amy adds, “I don’t think you wou’d [lie with him] for any thing else; it would
not be Lawful for any thing else, but for Bread, Madam; why nobody can starve, there’s
no bearing that” (R 28). Amy’s assumption of the voice of necessity makes her the
perfect complement to Roxana’s desire to uphold what society dictates as moral and
virtuous; it also allows Roxana to project her own inclinations to prostitute herself onto
Amy, thus blaming her maid for her own actions.
Once Roxana projects what she despises about her self onto Amy, Amy no longer
functions as an external subject but as an internalized object that gives morally devious
advice to her mistress. By allowing Amy to assume the voice of necessity, Roxana
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degrades Amy as the source of wickedness. She reinforces this degradation by calling
Amy a number of detested appellations including jade, slut, and the Devil’s “Privy-
Counsellor” (R 37). She acknowledges that she wants Amy to perform these despised
roles when she notes “had I consulted Conscience and Virtue, I shou’d have repelled this
Amy, however faithful and honest to me in other things, as a Viper, and Engine of the
Devil” (R 38). As much as she despises Amy’s counsel for necessity, she does not repel
Amy because she wants to be provided for and she sees no other means to gain such
provision. She also allows Amy to argue for necessity because she is inclined to ignore
conscience and virtue whenever she is faced with a choice between poverty and plenty.
However, because she does not want to hear Amy’s arguments for necessity, much less
give in to her own fears of returning to her former miserable state, she projects the part of
herself she despises onto Amy, splitting her good self from her bad by projecting the bad
self onto the other. Amy becomes the complement that serves as the receptacle for all
Roxana despises about her self.
As Roxana’s complement, Amy makes arguments for necessity that may seem
straightforward enough, but she delivers them with great dexterity. She appears as the
artful midwife-bawd who counsels women to whore themselves for sustenance. After
noting that the landlord will inevitably ask Roxana to lie with him, and after arguing with
Roxana about his noble intentions, Amy seems to dismiss all of her arguments with a
simple: “this is but Talk, Madam” (R 29). Discussing the subject, though, plants a seed
of doubt in Roxana’s mind. She begins to wonder what her obligations to such a man
may be, and she eventually realizes that she must yield to him or suffer the circumstances
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of necessity. She is under the control of Amy and the landlord, both of whom advise her
to yield to his propositions out of necessity.
Amy’s arguments for necessity allow Roxana to blame circumstance and Amy’s
direction for her submission to the landlord. She tells Amy, “there’s more Friendship
than Honesty in [your kindness],” to which Amy replies, “I think Honesty is out of the
Question, when Starving is the Case” (R 28). Such reasoning for necessity violates the
tenets of virtue and honesty, and it is a clever manipulation on Amy’s part. Despite her
scorn for Amy’s arguments for necessity and her increasingly sadistic treatment of Amy,
Roxana blames herself as well as her maid for her decision to prostitute herself: “the Jade
prompted the Crime, which I had but too much Inclination to commit” (R 40). Roxana
then continues to note how necessity rather than vice stirs her to prostitute herself to the
landlord: “I had nothing of the Vice [to whore myself] in my Constitution; […] but the
terrible Pressure of my former Misery, [...] the surprizing kindness with which he
deliver’d me, and withal, the Expectations of what he might still do for me, were
powerful things” (R 34). These reasons and Amy’s assistance, all of which she justifies
as necessity, prime Roxana to whore herself in order to get what she wants, be it out of
her fear of starvation or her sense of obligation to a man for his kindness and promise of
future support.
The landlord appeals to Roxana’s need to appear virtuous and offers a means of
improving her circumstances. In so doing, he provides Roxana the means to escape her
declining circumstances through whoring herself in a relationship he calls virtuous. He
propositions Roxana much as Amy foresees, first by arguing that Roxana is a widow and
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he a man with no wife, and then by arguing how his orchestrations are honorable (R 30,
33). He manipulates Roxana to accept his proposals by telling her his intentions are
honest and virtuous: “he hop’d I would not deny him all the Favours he should ask,
because he resolv’d to ask nothing of me but what was fit for a Woman of Virtue and
Modesty [...] to yield” (R 33). Such examples of virtuous discourse can be cited ad
nauseam, especially in the passages in which he and Roxana parlay before she yields to
him as his so-called wife (R 29-36). However, as Amy so appropriately noted before, this
is all but talk (R 29). The landlord’s talk distorts the language of virtue to suit his need
for vice, and Amy sees through the deception.
Because Amy realizes his intentions are masked by his so-called virtuous words,
she functions as the midwife-witch, a counselor to whom Roxana listens. When she
understands the landlord’s actions are motivated by the desire to bed with Roxana, she
argues “he’ll ask you a Favour by and by” and says “you shall see what he will do after
Dinner” (R 27). This prognostication may seem as obvious an observation to the modern
reader as it is to Amy, but Roxana is a woman of gentility who adheres to the tenets of
virtue: Amy’s observation appears common, vulgar, and ludicrous to her.120 Nonetheless,
Amy possesses a fatal power to divine the future, for she reads the situation more clearly
than Roxana does. Just as the midwife can predict what will happen during childbirth
due to experience and intuition, Amy knows what will happen to Roxana. The only
120 Roxana’s ignorance of the landlord’s intent reveals she is in need of the education Mary Astell proposes when she argues women should be taught to beware the truth behind men’s sentiment: “if a woman were duly principled and taught to know the world, especially the true sentiments that men have of her, and the traps they lay for her under so many gilded compliments, and such a seemingly great respect, that disgrace would be prevented which is brought upon too many families”; see Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage (1730; New York: Source Book Press, 1970) 82.
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evidence confirming Amy’s ability to foresee this passage lacks is Roxana’s actual
calling Amy a witch as Moll does Mother Midnight.121 Roxana later mimics this power
of Amy’s twice in the narrative, although she does so in a more fantastic manner in
dreams when she sees the landlord’s death in a portentous nightmare and when she has
visions of Susan’s murder.122 Roxana intensifies this fatal power of foresight,
demonstrating how she builds upon every fatal foundation Amy establishes in a
domineering contest of one-upmanship. However, before she dominates her maid, she
submits to her counsel and plays the role of the mistress. This new role introduces a
pattern that Roxana employs with every lover in her life: the prostitution pattern.
Amy’s counsel to submit to necessity and the landlord’s propositions convince
Roxana to whore herself as a passive mistress to men via a prostitution pattern. This
pattern varies slightly with each new lover, but it is fairly consistent: she argues that she
needs a friend to help her recover from her suffering, which usually manifests as both
anxiety and physical illness; she allows Amy to assist her through this illness through
counsel or direct action; she accepts a man’s help through his flattery, which eventually
overcomes her modest protestations; she accepts payment from him; and, finally, she
yields to him and allows herself to be confined to him only. Through this pattern,
Roxana becomes a passive object men use for their own needs as she uses them to receive
121 MF 172, 175. Terry Castle reads Amy as Roxana’s familiar, for she is an active agent tied to her mistress through an “almost physical” bond; see Castle 86, 84. 122 R 53, 325. Veronica Kelly’s postmodern reading of Roxana dismisses these supernatural episodes as “affectively powerful” but having “no impact at all on her ‘history,’ which remains a tale of successful business and investment”; see Kelly, “The Paranormal Roxana,” Postmodernism across the Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity That Wasn't Born Yesterday, ed. Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1993) 140.
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recognition. Like Amy, these men serve her, but their relationship to her is split in a
different manner. Each lover plays the role of the father who represents the exciting,
outside world and who represents an ideal object with whom the girl wishes to identify
during rapprochement (Benjamin, Like 129). Roxana may try to identify with these men,
but she does not recognize them as like subjects. In failing to do so, she limits herself to
a life of passivity.
Roxana’s transformation into an ambitious whore begins with the remedy she
receives from a man who calls himself a friend: the landlord. Amy’s arguments for
necessity win Roxana over to prostituting herself and accepting the kind words of the
landlord, which act as “a Cordial to my very Soul” (R 30). The landlord’s words function
as does Mother Midnight’s rationalization for Moll to abandon her baby. In each case,
their words enable the narrator to abandon any moral objections she may have. Roxana
relates the comfort he brings to her: “I was so overcome with the Comfort of it, that I sat
down and cry’d for Joy a good-while, as I had formerly cry’d for Sorrow” (R 31). When
he later tells her that he loves her, Roxana says “it turn’d the very Heart within me” (R
37). This transformation is but one step in the process towards fulfilling the prostitution
pattern, and it marks the end of Roxana’s fears of necessity in this stage of her life. Her
tears of sorrow shed and her heart no longer quivering, Roxana is soothed by the cordial
of whoring herself for food. Though it is administered by the landlord, it would not be
available if not for the assistance of Amy.
The landlord’s kind words and actions endear him to her as a friend, and this
endearment begins the pattern of whoring that develops into a successful but devastating
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enterprise for Roxana. At first, Roxana tells Amy that the landlord is “such a Friend as I
have long wanted” (R 31), indicating that she outwardly acknowledges he is a man of
honor who is helping a woman in distress and that she inwardly believes that he will
provide for her if she will be his whore. Although it may be conjecture to surmise what
Roxana believes, Amy expresses the latter possibility when she intimates that he is a
worldly man acting in his own interest: “he is such a Friend as the World, sure, has not
abundance of to show” (R 31). Amy uncannily sees through the discourse of virtue to the
man’s true intentions, and in so doing, she acts as a midwife and plays the role of the
pragmatic cynic who believes others act out of necessity rather than virtue. Because her
maid fixates upon necessity, Roxana can remain convinced the landlord is honorable and
allow her servant to assume the negative role.
Roxana tries to maintain herself as a virtuous woman before she adopts the role of
a whore. When she reflects on her actions, she reasons that she should have ignored
Amy’s “Privy-[Counsel]” in favor of the dictates of virtue and conscience (R 37). She
further argues that she should have felt no obligation to yield to the landlord, but “in
Recompence for that Deliverance; I shou’d have look’d upon all the Good this Man had
done for me, to have been the particular Work of Goodness of Heaven” (R 38). To her
credit, she does try to maintain a virtuous relationship with the landlord, but she favors
yielding to necessity and the counsel of a Fate figure to seeing any signs of deliverance
that Providence provides. The reflective, narrating Roxana may interject what she should
have done in terms of Providence by referring to the landlord’s help as “Deliverance,”
but the Roxana of the moment ignores anything providential in favor of fatal terms. At
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this moment, it is clear that Roxana could choose between the pagan and the providential
or even embrace both concepts, but she favors the former because of her earlier success
with the Fate figures. Although she gains some control over her circumstances by acting
as a Fate figure, she limits herself solely to fatal roles and does not accept providential
roles. She seals her fate by yielding to the landlord as his mistress.
The landlord’s propositions and Roxana’s fears that he may desert her if she does
not yield to him outweigh what little resistance she possesses. Her protestations to his
kindness are many, but his flattery overwhelms her: “I was young, [...] vain, and that not
a little, and [...] it was a pleasant thing, to be courted, caress’d, embrac’d, and high
Professions of Affection made to me by a Man so agreeable, and so able to do me good”
(R 39). His ability to help her wins her over, but so does his flattery, as when he tells her
that “he valued me infinitely above all the Women in the World” (R 33). Such adulation
moves her, but she is careful to protest that he not ask her to do anything not “fit for a
Woman of Virtue and Modesty,” or “a Woman of Honesty and Good Manners” (R 34).
Coupled with her fear of returning to her former circumstances, his flattery persuades her
to “[accept] his Assistance” and believe “he was sincere in his Design of serving [her]”
(R 34). Although he is the one who acts, Roxana phrases his actions in such a way as to
make it appear as though he acts for her. She does not blame his intentions for their
actions, although Amy notes a number of times that he is actively seducing Roxana even
as he uses virtuous-sounding words to impress her. He says what is necessary to
convince her that he is acting nobly. To settle any qualms she may have, he backs his
flattery with payments.
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The landlord’s payment is similar to the one the elder brother gives Moll, and it
provides Roxana justification for submitting to him out of obligation. After their initial
dinner, Roxanan explains, and “after kissing me twenty times, or thereabouts, [he] put a
Guinea in my hand; which, he said, was for my present Supply, [...] also he gave Amy
Half a Crown” (R 31). Roxana assumes this payment is out of kindness even though it is
accompanied by kisses. Later payments such as the rent-free arrangement are
accompanied by more kisses and embraces that Roxana discreetly dubs as “kind of
familiar” (34). The greatest payment occurs after their “Wedding Supper,” when she
says that he presents her with a contract “wherein he engag’d himself to me; to cohabit
constantly with me; to provide for me in all Respects as a Wife; [...] and an Obligation in
the Penalty of 7000 l. never to abandon me; and [...] a bond of 500 l. to be paid to me [...]
after his Death” (R 42). Because of these reassurances, she submits to him, and in doing
so, accepts his proposal that she let out rooms, including one for himself, from which he
may come and go as she please, while she must wait for him, ostensibly, to keep order in
the house (R 33). Won over by his flattery and money, Roxana acquiesces and so their
relationship becomes one not of a “Man and Wife,” as he would suppose, but “a Whore
and a Rogue,” as Roxana calls it (R 43). The inversion of the gendered terms is no
accident; her disdain for her actions is clear. Roxana associates “Man” with “Whore” to
emphasize how a whore is active like a man; she continues to perceive her role as the
active partner when, in fact, she is the passive complement to the lover.
Roxana’s acquiescence to the landlord is not merely the result of her desire to
escape necessity or to repay his kindness. The flattery, money, and gifts he lavishes upon
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her incline her to accept him as her ideal love. His meaningfulness to her is most clear
when she expresses his death as an irreparable loss to her: “I think I almost cry’d myself
to Death for him; for I abandon’d myself to all the Excesses of Grief; and indeed, I lov’d
him to a Degree inexpressible” (R 54). The landlord and the men who follow him fulfill
a vital need for Roxana, a need for an adult ideal love, a love in which “woman loses
herself in the identification with the powerful other who embodies [her] missing desire
and agency” (Benjamin, Bonds 116). This ideal love is “a second chance, an opportunity
to attain, at long-last, a father-daughter identification in which their own desire and
subjectivity can finally be recognized and realized” (Benjamin, Bonds 116). The
thwarted opportunity to identify with the father via identificatory love—a preoedipal love
for the father as an exciting, outside other—often “inspire[s] adult women’s fantasies
about loving men who represent their ideal” (Benjamin, Like 129). Through the landlord
and the men who follow, Roxana attempts to regain a sense of freedom and otherness,
and, ultimately, recognition as a desiring subject. Unfortunately, ideal love is based on
submission to an “other who is what she cannot be,” in whom she hopes to find “an ideal
image of [herself].”123 She tries to find her own capacity to desire through the desire of
the men she encounters. Like Moll’s purse dropped in the middle of the road, Roxana is
merely an object to these men through whom she vicariously gains recognition.
123 Benjamin, Bonds 86, 107. For an in-depth analysis of the role the missing father plays in a girl’s development and the propensity of women to adore and submit to men in order to fulfill this role, see “Women’s Desire” in The Bonds of Love, particularly 107-23. Benjamin argues that until society allows both mothers and fathers to function as figures of separation and attachment rather than the male as the ideal of separation and the female as the ideal of attachment, children will not be able to identify with parents without gender confusion; see Bonds 112.
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Roxana repeats this prostitution pattern with four other men: the prince, the Dutch
merchant, the king, and a lord. Each episode varies slightly, and only the Dutch
merchant remains with her. The Dutch merchant offers her a chance to break the
prostitution pattern, but she ignores his offer in favor of the liberty she finds in being a
mistress; their relationship deserves further analysis in contrast to the relationships
Roxana forms with other men and Amy. In each of the other relationships, Roxana
becomes increasingly passive. The prince overcomes her protestations and does not
allow her to make requests, choosing to anticipate her needs, as she notes, “his Bounty
always anticipated my Expectations” (R 75). Castle notes they share “a kind of
telepathy” in which he provides what she wants, and “she finds the generalized passivity
of the mistress-role satisfying on a more profound level. Her ‘Lethargy’ after all,
modulates into a ‘Fullness of Humane Delight’” (87). Yet this delight comes at a cost,
for Roxana reflects, the conscience, “once doz’d, sleeps fast, not to be awken’d while the
Tide of Pleasure continues to flow, or till something dark and dreadful brings us to
ourselves again” (R 69). That something dark and dreadful manifests much later when
her daughter forces her to confront the aspects of her self she has denied. Before Roxana
confronts her past, though, she grows increasingly passive. The prince is free to go
whenever he pleases while she is imprisoned within her apartment; he even jokingly
refers to her as his “Prisoner.”124 Likewise, she finds herself confined as mistress of the
124 R 68. The imprisonment is especially disturbing given the sexual imagery of Roxana’s apartment as a metaphor for her body, to which the prince has free access: “my House was the most convenient that could possibly be found in Paris, [...] having a Way into Three Streets, and not overlook’d by any Neighbours, so that he could pass and repass, without Observation; for one of the Back-ways open’d into a narrow, dark Alley”; see R 66. For a thorough reading of this passage and the accessibility Roxana gives to her lovers, see Conway 226.
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king, this time for for three years and a month (R 181). Castle calls her desire to be
passive “a perverse pleasure in self-limitation” (88). The lord does not confine her to
such a great extent, and they end their affair in mutual disgust. Unfortunately, Roxana
has been a passive complement to men for so long throughout her life that she cannot
maintain a mutual relationship beyond the enmity she shares with her final lover.
SADOMASOCHISTIC MAID AND MISTRESS, MOTHER AND CHILD: “WHY I
WOULD DIE FOR YOU, IF I WERE PUT TO IT”
Submission to men is but one aspect of Roxana’s resignation to complementary
relationships that are objective rather than intersubjective. By confining herself to such
relationships, Roxana breaks down the tension between self and other, and she does so
with the assistance of Amy. Both women create the sadomasochistic bond that unites
them and prevents Roxana from interacting with others intersubjectively. Within their
complementary relationship, they split the need for a self to both assert herself and be
recognized by another into a relationship in which the dominant complement asserts
herself and the other receives recognition through her. As she gives advice to Roxana,
Amy asserts her self, but she does so vicariously. Everything she does, she does for
Roxana. She experiences her need to assert herself through Roxana and willingly
submits to her in order to receive the recognition she desires. Amy inextricably binds
herself to Roxana by offering to suffer for her: “If I will starve for your sake, I will be a
Whore, or any thing, for your sake; why I would die for you, if I were put to it” (R 28).
She has already suffered near-starvation and aided Roxana in the disposal of her children,
and now she reveals that she will whore herself or die for Roxana if need be. Her voice
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remains that of necessity, but the necessity is her own survival. Without Roxana, she is
nothing because she is fused to her mistress in a relationship in which both subjects
function as a singular entity.
Amy understands Roxana as a vital part of herself, a mistress through whom she
can act and through whom she can receive recognition. Her relationship to Roxana is
masochistic, for “masochism reflects the inability to express one’s own desire and
agency. In submission, even the fulfillment of desire is made to appear as the expression
of the other’s will” (Benjamin, Bonds 79). Amy has split her needs for mutual
recognition and assertion so that she can gain recognition through submission and
Roxana can assert herself through domination. This relationship is a split perversion of
the mutual recognition individuals seek to maintain. Amy views Roxana as an
omnipotent other powerful enough to bestow recognition and as an other through whom
she can vicariously exert her self (Benjamin, Bonds 56). Aron explains that
sadomasochism arises whenever “mutuality and intimacy are lacking […]. If two people
do not acknowledge each other as separate autonomous subjects, then in one way or
another they are dominating and submitting to each other” (150). People who do not treat
one another as like subjects confine themselves to sadomasochistic relations. As a
sadomasochistic pair, Amy and Roxana do what Freud and Hegel argue is inevitable by
breaking down the tension between self and other, thus establishing a master and slave
relationship (Benjamin, Bonds 31-32).
Once the tension of self and other is broken down, the complementary halves
assume roles that degenerate into the struggle for omnipotence. This struggle may repeat
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throughout life, and it first manifests during rapprochement. While testing the limits
between self and other during this crucial phase, the child (usually a fourteen-month-old
infant) may recognize others as external subjects with desires of their own or become
trapped within the mental state of undifferentiation, known as omnipotence (Benjamin
Shadow 86). Many relationships break down into sadomasochistic ones because the
subject’s testing of limits between itself and others can easily deteriorate into a struggle
in which the self or the other gains all control. The child who suffers under a parent who
“jiggles, pokes, looms, and shouts ‘look at me,’” a parent who constantly asserts her own
mastery over the child, becomes a masochist incapable of asserting her own will
(Benjamin, Bonds 28). Such a child will perceive the (m)other, and subsequent others, as
omnipotent, and believe she is an object to serve the will of others (Benjamin, Bonds 38-
39; Like 39-40). The child whose parent is overly permissive becomes a tyrant who
retreats into “an illusory oneness where he has no agency of his own,” and must
constantly assert his will over others in order to be satisfied, thus becoming a sadist
(Benjamin, Bonds 35). Such a child whose (m)other withdraws from him during the
destructive fantasy will perceive himself as omnipotent and believe others are mere
objects to serve his will.125 Like these children, both the sadist and the masochist hold
onto a sense of omnipotence, whether it is “projected onto the other or assumed by the
self” (Benjamin, Bonds 36). Simply put, “Omnipotence […] means the complete
125 Benjamin continually builds upon her theory of omnipotence in the context of Mahler’s and Winnicott’s concepts to illustrate how the splitting that so often occurs during this crucial stage is a contributing factor to the split between male and female, a split which more often than not is between the poles of sadist and masochist; see Benjamin, Bonds 38-39; Like 39-40. Here, I use gendered terms for the child who believes himself omnipotent and the child who believes the outside (m)other omnipotent in order to indicate how the split is most often perceived.
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assimilation of the other into the self” (Benjamin, Like 191). There is no mutual
recognition in such a relationship.
Amy acts as the parent who retreats, one who always recognizes and seeks union
with the other, and Roxana acts as the tyrannical child who always exerts her aggression
upon the other. It is impossible to trace Amy’s masochism or Roxana’s sadism to
infancy, but it is important to note the theoretical origins of such behaviors if only to
offer possible explanations for their relationship. The only hint of Roxana’s childhood,
let alone infancy, occurs in the early part of her narrative, where she glosses over her
education and mentions her mother’s and father’s deaths (R 9). Castle parenthetically
notes that the death of her mother may indicate why Roxana allows Amy to take the
maternal role (90), but there is too little evidence to make much more conjecture beyond
such an aside.
Amy becomes the protective, all-providing mother who does everything for her
child, thus acting as a complement to the needy, demanding Roxana. By taking on
Roxana’s maternal roles and by continuing to counsel Roxana on how to improve her
circumstances, she effectively communicates to Roxana that she will do anything for her
mistress. Roxana assumes the role of the omnipotent child first by allowing Amy to do
everything for her, then by expecting the men in her life to provide for her, too. As Amy
grows more active, Roxana becomes more passive, further shaping the split between
Amy the all-providing mother and Roxana the ever-needy child.
At times, Roxana does perform roles associated with the mother, but she usually
relies upon Amy to do her will. In a complementary relationship, “one self asserts power,
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[and] the other recognizes that power through submission. The two moments are
represented as opposite and distinct tendencies, so that they are available to the subject
only as alternatives: each can play only one side at a time, projecting the opposite side
onto the other” (Benjamin, Like 185-86). Rarely, the complementary partners may
reverse these roles, but never do they simultaneously assert and recognize one another.
The sadist dominates through assertion in its most “pure” form, and the masochist
complements her through submitting, which is recognition in its most “pure” form
(Benjamin, Bonds 62). The necessary tension between assertion and recognition is
maintained in a dynamic between the dominant mistress and the submissive slave; due to
the complementary nature of the two halves in the relationship, the two selves can never
mutually recognize one another as independent subjects (Benjamin, Bonds 62). The
mistress needs her servant in order to assert her will as much as the servant needs her in
order to be recognized. Essentially, the two women fulfill one another’s desires.
Sadomasochism is fueled by the sadist’s desire to dominate and the masochist’s
desire to submit. The masochist is as necessary to the sadist as the sadist is to the
masochist, for the two act as one. As Roxana’s complement, Amy is an object upon
which Roxana can project what she wishes to disown about herself and as an object upon
which Roxana can assert her self (Benjamin, Like 18). Functioning as such an object, she
loses all sense of difference from her mistress (Benjamin, Bonds 59). Amy is only too
willing to accept this role as the other because Roxana can fulfill her fantasy of an “ideal,
omnipotent other” through whom she can receive recognition so long as they remain
connected (Benjamin, Bonds 60). Interestingly, Amy is the one who initiates the process
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of their becoming such a pair by voicing necessity and offering to suffer, whore herself,
even die, for her mistress.
By offering to suffer in Roxana’s stead, Amy allows for Roxana to project her
own inclinations to whore onto her. When Amy’s excess is first mentioned, Amy tells
Roxana,“he should lye with me for it with all my Heart” (R 28). To emphasize the
seriousness of her offer, Amy alludes to Genesis: “if you won’t consent [to lie with him],
tell him you’ll do as Rachael did to Jacob, when she could have no Children, [she] put
her Maid to Bed to him.”126 Granted, Amy is offering not to bear children but to whore
herself, but her convictions are strong. Roxana is quick to recognize Amy’s desire to act,
indeed live, for her is abnormal. Although flattered by her servant’s devotion, she
comments, “Why that’s an Excess of Affection [...] I never met with before” (R 28).
Amy’s excess frightens Roxana not only because Amy is willing to suffer on her
mistress’s behalf but because her willingness to do so robs Roxana of another person to
whom she may relate as a like subject. By leading Roxana to accept the role of the
dominating master who can only assert her self, Amy strips Roxana of her relation to
another independent subject. The bonds between them are no longer ones that allow for a
mutual maintenance of the tension between assertion and recognition but ones that form a
rarely reversible relation through which Roxana’s assertion of her subjectivity flows
outward and Amy receives her recognition through this assertion. Amy’s self-abnegating
126 R 39. The passage from Genesis 30.1-5 reads, “And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in unto her. And Bilhah conceived, and bare Jacob a son.”
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love for her mistress makes her willing to humiliate or harm herself for Roxana in order
to receive recognition from her.
Through her “Excess of Affection,” Amy reveals the latent homosexuality of their
union. Time and time again, Amy shows Roxana that she is truly happy only when her
mistress is, as when Roxana relates how she and Amy stay awake girlishly chatting about
the landlord:
Amy and I went to Bed that night (for Amy lay with me) pretty early, but
lay chatting almost all Night about it, and the Girl was so transported, that
she got up two or three times [...], and danc’d about [...]; in short, the Girl
was half-distracted with the joy of it; a Testimony still of her violent
Affection for her Mistress. (R 32)
Roxana mentions their bedding together numerous times throughout the text;127 however,
their sleeping together indicates an intimate relationship, not necessarily an erotic one. It
may indicate a typical mistress-servant sleeping arrangement, for masters and servants
were more convivial than we imagine.128 Their intimate relationship must not be
misread. Helene Moglen hints at the erotic bonds between them when she notes their
being “frequent bedfellows,” but she fortunately does not adopt the ill-founded
revisionism found in the lesbian scenes in the WBGH production of Moll Flanders.129
Such revisionism caused a stir in Austen studies a decade ago with Sedgwick’s “Jane
Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” but Defoe studies need not be tainted by unfounded
127 R 32, 186, 208, 214. 128 Richard Cook, personal communication, 26 July 2004. 129 Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001) 48.
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speculation.130 There are erotically-charged moments between women in Roxana’s story,
but as with so much else in Roxana’s story, they are not fulfilled. The erotic language in
the seventeenth and eighteenth-century plays of Catharine Trotter and Mary Pix or the
letters of Queen Anne serve as stark contrasts to the complementary, though not
necessarily lesbian, affection shared between Roxana and Amy.131 Moglen’s reading, in
fact, indicates a sadomasochistic union: “Frequent bedfellows themselves, their
sexualities intertwine so that each acts as the instrument of the other’s desire while
enacting her own desire through the other” (48). The bedding scene has greater
significance than indicating an overtly erotic union between mistress and maid; their
union is a merger of two selves in which one complements the other.
This merger is possible because Amy willingly takes on the roles Roxana wishes
to deny about her self. Twice, Amy tells Roxana she will lie with the landlord (R 28, 39),
so Roxana tests Amy’s willingness by joking with her and him: “I told him, I wou’d put
Amy to Bed to him; Amy said, with all her Heart, she had never been a Bride in all her
life” (R 44). At this moment, Amy believes that Roxana and the landlord are as good as
husband and wife, so she sees no harm in making such a jest. Roxana, however, has
suffered the trauma of whoring herself and wishes to make her maid likewise suffer.
130 E.K. Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 818-37. Sedgwick offers a strong response to what she calls “repressive” Austen studies, but in her zeal to parallel Austen’s Dashwood sisters to the girls in an 1881 medical text titled “Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls,” she makes a homosocial bond between sisters a narrative of masturbation and anal retention; see Sedgwick 827-32. Sedgwick’s work created quite a stir within and without the academy— see especially her summary of criticism on 818-19—but it suffers from reading nineteenth-century discourse of masturbation into a text that offers too little support for such a reading. 131 For examples of erotically charged language between women, see Kendall, “Finding the Good Parts: Sexuality in Women’s Tragedies in the Time of Queen Anne,” Curtain Calls: British and American Women in the Theater, 1660-1820, ed. Mary Ann Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1991) 165-76.
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Forced to bow to necessity and abandon virtue, Roxana believes herself a fallen woman.
To ease her pain from this fall, she projects her whoredom onto Amy. She breaks the
tension between speech and action, fantasy and reality, by forcing Amy to bed with the
landlord.
Although the offers Amy makes and the hint Roxana drops all seem to be “but
talk,” the actual bedding of Amy is a tragic scene in which Roxana’s assertion becomes
full-blown aggression in her desire to dominate the other who represents all that she
despises about her self. After Amy says that she would have had a child with the
landlord had she lain with him, Roxana exerts her mastery over her maid by forcing her
to lay with him. She describes her domination and humiliation of Amy in great detail:
At night, when we came to go to-Bed, Amy came into the Chamber to
undress me, and her Master slipt into Bed first; then I began, and told him
all that Amy had said about my not being with-Child, and of her being
with-Child twice in that time: Ay, Mrs. Amy, says he, I believe so too,
Come hither, and we’ll try; but Amy wou’d not go; Nay, you Whore, says
I, you said, if I wou’d put you to-Bed, you wou’d with all your Heart: and
with that, I sat her down, pull’d off her Stockings and Shooes, and all her
Cloaths, Piece by Piece, and led her to the Bed to him: Here, says I, try
what you can do with your Maid Amy: She pull’d back a little, would not
let me pull off her Cloaths at first, [...] and at last, when she see I was in
earnest, she let me do what I wou’d; so I fairly stript her, and then I threw
open the Bed, and thrust her in. (R 46)
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This scene captures one of Roxana’s few direct actions in violent, domineering terms of
stripping, throwing, and thrusting. Once Amy is in bed with the landlord, Roxana relates,
“he held her fast, and the wench being naked in the Bed with him, ‘twas too late to look
back, so she lay still, and let him do what he wou’d with her” (R 46-47). Here, the
passive Amy allows Roxana to dominate her, playing the whore for her mistress so her
mistress can project the role of prostitute onto her.
Roxana’s prostituting herself makes her despise herself, so she projects the role of
whore onto Amy much as she projects the voice of necessity and the role of infanticidal
mother onto her. She does so because she believes herself wicked, and she wishes to cast
this wickedness from her self onto Amy. After Roxana submits to the landlord, she
reflects, “I sinn’d, knowing it to be a Sin, but having no Power to resist; when this had
thus made a Hole in my Heart, and I was come to such a height, as to transgress against
the Light of my own Conscience, I was then fit for any Wickedness” (R 44). Although
Amy argues that lying with the landlord is no sin because necessity trumps conscience
and any rules of virtue, Roxana knows that she is reduced to being a whore. To regain
her power to assert herself and somehow fill the void within her, the “Hole in [her]
Heart” created be her defiance of her conscience, she projects the struggle onto Amy’s
body. Here, the harmful nature of projective identification is made obvious, for Roxana
“inserts [part of her] self […] into the object in order to harm, possess, or control it”
(Laplanche and Pontalis 356). Amy becomes that part of the self that Roxana wishes to
control and deny as she projects this part of her self onto Amy.
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Projecting the role of the whore onto Amy allows Roxana to regain control over
her maid. When Amy plays the part of the bawd by saying “I must put you to-Bed to
Night together,” she upsets her mistress (R 36). Roxana wishes neither to prostitute
herself nor to submit to the voice of necessity. She has what Hentzi calls “a barely
conscious need to reestablish her mastery and sense of social superiority over Amy”
(188). She does so by forcing Amy to commit the same sin she has. She strips Amy,
thrusts her into bed with the landlord, and watches them consummate their union. This
act establishes Roxana as a Fate figure who allots Amy’s portion in life to serve her
mistress and never rise above her in any station, particularly that of morality. Roxana
explains, “as I thought myself a Whore, I cannot say but that it was something design’d in
my Thoughts, that my Maid should be a Whore too, and should not reproach me with it”
(47). She successfully exerts her mastery over her maid/mother in order to restore her
sense of omnipotence. Had she not done so, she would have been subject to Amy’s
control, for in a sadomasochistic relationship, she is caught within a “dialectic of control:
If [she] completely control[s] the other, then the other ceases to exist, and if the other
completely controls [her], then [she] cease[s] to exist” (Benjamin, Bonds 53). By
refusing to recognize Amy as an independent subject, Roxana determines that she must
dominate her servant or else cease to be. Rather than reach a state of no agency, she
maintains her capability to assert herself by stripping Amy of her ability to assert herself.
Roxana’s forcing Amy to whore herself is fatal in two senses, and it creates two
indissoluble bonds between the two women. Roxana apportions Amy’s lot, thus
functioning as a fatal mother and blurring the distinction between herself and Amy, who
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functions as Roxana’s surrogate to her children when she first disposes of them and later
provides for them. Amy is more than a surrogate through whom Roxana can control her
children from a distance. Their mother-daughter bond, Nussbaum argues, is a
homoerotic union between them in which the boundaries between the two women are
blurred by Amy’s desire “to bear a child for Roxana’s landlord lover” (38). After Roxana
makes this wish possible, the resultant daughter is raised by Amy and Roxana, thus
“anticipat[ing] their mutual relation to another child, Roxana’s daughter Susan”
(Nussbaum 38). Uniting themselves through birth is both maternal and sexual, and the
scene is reminiscent of a midwife-bawd forcing a young woman to prostitute herself for
the first time. This domination of the other determines the dynamics of domination
within the fatal relationships between Roxana and Amy.
Although Roxana performs two fatal roles in the bedding scene, her role may be
simultaneously read as that of a child. Roxana forces Amy to act “in the posture of the
female parent, while she herself assumes the role of a child [...]. Standing off to one side,
Roxana is a mute observer of the sexual act. She recapitulates, it might seem, the child’s
primary exposure to sexuality” (Castle 81-82). Whether Roxana is replaying such a
scene or not, she does force Amy to play the role of a surrogate whore much as she once
willingly played the role of a surrogate mother. With this act, Roxana’s mastery over
Amy is complete. Amy is now the surrogate whore and the voice of necessity upon
which Roxana can project her own inclinations to prostitute herself. The young miss, the
child-like mistress Roxana, is now in control of the providing mother.
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The immediate effects of this transformation are devastating. The landlord splits
his desires for a whore by considering Roxana “his Wife as if [they] had been Marry’d
from [their] Youth” and Amy the object of repudiation that “he hate[s] [...] heartily” for
reminding him of his adultery (R 47). He splits the two women into opposite poles:
Roxana, “the Wife of his Affection, the other, the Wife of his Aversion” (R 47). Much as
Roxana has cast all she despises about herself onto the other, so does the landlord. Amy
is not blind to the transformation, as Roxana notes, “less vicious than I, [Amy] was
grievously out of Sorts the next Morning, and cry’d, and took-on most vehemently; that
she was ruin’d and undone, and there was no pacifying her; she was a Whore, a Slut, and
she was undone! undone! and cry’d almost all day” (R 47). Her tears signify her
suffering and her birth into submission to her controlling mistress. Amy has no need to
resort to prostitution; she had once offered to do so for Roxana in order to keep them
from starving, but Roxana removes that necessity by surrendering herself to the landlord
out of obligation to his “Kindness” (R 34). The needlessness, indeed, the viciousness of
the rape destroys Amy’s ability to act on her own. From this moment on, all of her
actions for her self are performed for her mistress, through whom she vicariously receives
recognition.
As Amy’s assertive complement, Roxana reasons she is wicked for making Amy
submit to her will. Her wickedness may be read in the context of Providence, but it is
also characteristic of the Fates, who have a connection to evil or destructive forces
extending back to the Theogony. Oftentimes, the control exercised by Fate figures in
Defoe’s novels is associated with the Devil, as is the case with Roxana during and after
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Amy’s rape. Roxana makes this association with evil most evident when she comments,
“I was now become the Devil’s Agent, to make others as wicked as myself” (R 48). Like
the Erinyes, the ancient Greek deities associated with the Moirai, the Devil is a creature
of the underworld who torments those who have committed grievous crimes; it is only
this aspect, however, that the two the two types of deities share, for the Erinyes do not
tempt people to commit crimes as the Devil does in Defoe’s narratives.132 Roxana’s
embracing of this aspect of the Fates makes her like Atropos, who is associated with
death and the underworld. Indeed, she acts less and less as the life-bearing Clotho or the
apportioning Lachesis as the narrative develops.
Roxana’s adoption of the role as a destructive power, be it fatal or satanic, further
contributes to her breaking down of the tension between self and other. This destructive
power may be read as a manifestation of Freud’s death instinct. Freud characterizes the
death instinct as the opposing force of Eros, or “Nature’s power to create, to multiply
life,” and this instinct may manifest in fiction or fantasy as destructive figures such as the
Devil or Mephistopheles (qtd. in Benjamin, Like 189-90). Freud describes the Devil as a
metaphor for the death drive, the opposite force of life and nature, and a force that wishes
to destroy; Benjamin argues that, given these characteristics, the death instinct may be
equated with aggression, especially aggression in its purest form: domination (Benjamin,
Like 189). The death instinct propels the self to seek a complete lack of tension through
an “endlessly frustrating replay of destructiveness” (Benjamin, Like 189). This
132 The Erinyes are chthonic deities that originated long before the Archaic age of Greece. In addition to avenging those who were murdered, they are the “vindicators of curses, and indeed of law in general in an age before the gods or the polis have assumed a responsibility for a consistent code dealing with murder”; see Greene 104.
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destructive behavior is a defense against succumbing to death itself. The subject breaks
down the tension between self and other by dominating the other through destructive
behavior in order to make her a mere object that serves to recognize the will of the self
(Benjamin, Like 189). Once Roxana breaks down this necessary tension, she limits
herself to be the mistress (the one who dominates) and Amy to be the maid (the one who
submits); no longer does Amy direct or guide her mistress, for she is the other to be
dominated.
Despite Amy’s performance as a Fate figure in the three comforters episode, her
relegation to a mere complement of Roxana impedes her ability to serve as a model for
Roxana to follow. Amy loses her status as a Fate figure, and although she performs some
fatal roles throughout the text, she does not possess the agency of a Fate figure like Moll
or Mother Midnight. Even when she murders Susan, her action is an attempt to gain
recognition from her complementary half, her mistress. Amy does not remain a woman
capable of asserting her own desires, for she is only the masochistic complement to her
mistress.
As a complement to Roxana, Amy serves as an object onto which Roxana can
project her worst desires; however, she is very much a part of Roxana, thus Roxana never
truly disowns her desires to yield to necessity, dispose of her children, or whore herself.
New describes Amy as Roxana’s double, an alter ego that allows her “both to own and
disown, at the time of the action and at the time of writing, her own desires. [...] The
Roxana who writes can [...] at once express, extenuate, and disown the desires of her
historical self, because they are partly projected into another, parallel self” (323-24).
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New’s observation of a partial projection reveals Roxana never fully divorces herself
from those repudiated aspects of her self, particularly the desire to submit to necessity, to
dispose of her children, and to whore herself. These aspects define Amy, and Amy is a
complement from which Roxana cannot sever herself after joining with her in the bonds
of domination and submission.
The bonds between mistress and maid ultimately lead to Roxana’s destruction. At
the end of her narrative, Roxana thinks of murdering Amy to prevent her from harming
Susan, the daughter who plagues Roxana and Amy in the final part of the narrative, but,
she reasons, “to have fall’n upon Amy, had been to have murther’d myself” (302).
Killing her complement is impossible because it would destroy her self. Ironically,
Roxana destroys herself figuratively by binding herself to Amy in the bedding scene, for
the merger of herself with her maid can only last for so long until the tension between
self and other is annihilated—the sadomasochistic relationship always terminates in
abandonment or death (Benjamin, Bonds 65-66). Once the tension between the self and
other is broken, one complement or the other must completely destroy the other in order
to believe she herself is in control. In the end, Roxana tries to abandon Amy, but her
maid is so much a part of her that she executes what she believes to be her mistress’s will
by murdering Susan, the daughter she once disposed of for Roxana and who returns to
haunt Roxana in the end. This action destroys Roxana and Amy, for the two suffer being
“utterly undone” as Roxana predicts (R 297), and they finish the narrative in shared guilt
and misery.
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The sadomasochistic relationship established in the bedding scene prepares the
reader for Roxana’s legacy of guilt and misery. The cause of this failure is found early in
her narrative; for once she reduces herself to a world of complementary relationships,
Roxana can treat others only as parts of her self and operate only as a part of others.
Other selves are not external others independent of her will but complements who fulfill
particular roles for her. Why Roxana does not acknowledge her daughter Susan, wed the
Dutch merchant earlier in the narrative, or otherwise recognize others is rooted in the
early scenes of the narrative when she projects what she despises about her self—her
desire to submit to necessity, abandon her children, and whore herself—onto Amy. The
dualism of good self/bad other, of Roxana as the voice of virtue and Amy as that of
necessity, breaks down into a monism of the sadomasochistic pair incapable of
recognizing others.133 This breakdown is the failure of Roxana, and it explains why she
continues to treat others as objects and to relate to others as an object.
THE [UN]FORTUNATE MISTRESS ROXANA “LEFT TO THE MISERIES OF
FATE”
Roxana’s failure to relate to relate to Amy or men as like subjects leaves her
stranded at the end of her narrative. To show just how isolated she has made herself by
splitting her self from others, Defoe has Roxana deny a mutual bond with a Providence
figure, a man who represents the socially accepted Christian order and who offers Roxana
the opportunity to control her fortune and his in their marriage. Roxana repeats the
prostitution pattern with this man, the Dutch merchant, and she refuses to marry him
133 Dimen argues that all dualistic systems break down into monistic ones; see Sexuality 7.
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despite his argument that Providence has led her to him. She would rather be a free agent
capable of taking any lover she pleases than be a wife who must submit to one man. She
cannot imagine herself having control in a marriage, so she splits the roles of mistress and
wife much as she has split the roles of mistress and mother; she reasons that she cannot
possess the attributes of both roles. Roxana’s sense of self is all or nothing: she can
either be a mistress in control of her own finances and decisions or a wife subject to the
whims of her husband. However, Roxana’s reality is not of an autonomous individual
free to do as she pleases but of a passive kept woman confined to her quarters so she may
be accessible to her lover whenever he pleases to visit. This mistaken perception also
affects how she reads the Dutch merchant’s place in her life. She does not believe his
claims that theirs will be a relationship based on mutuality, and she does not perceive him
as a Providence figure until she has proven herself a reprobate. In the end, she marries
him only after continuing to prostitute herself, and by then, she has so split her past self
from the present, she cannot reconcile seemingly contradictory roles such as wife and
whore, or mother and sexual being. Ultimately, she is destroyed by the splitting in her
life, and that is no more apparent than in her relationship with the Dutch merchant, the
Providence figure who, as Jemy is to Moll, offers Roxana the ability to be both a penitent
and a Fate figure, a wife and a woman in control of her fortune and her destiny.
The Dutch merchant appears at three crucial moments in her life. First, he helps
her sell the landlord’s jewels after she reports them amongst the items stolen from him
when he was robbed and murdered. He then comforts her after she suffers a storm at sea,
and it is at this time that she repays him for his kindness by offering “the greatest Favour
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a Woman could grant” (R 145), whoring herself to him. After consummating their affair,
he offers to marry her because he is a widower, but she refuses. Her refusal reveals how
deep has become the split she has made between various roles such as wife and whore,
and it reveals how she refuses to assume multiple roles at once. She does marry him after
her whoring years are over, but she fails to accept his offer for a mutual relationship,
choosing instead to seek new lovers to satisfy her vanity and pride, “the Dictates of an
Ambitious Mind,” (R 161). These dictates keep her entangled in the prostitution pattern.
The prostitution pattern begins much as it has before, but it contains new elements
that indicate the Dutch merchant is unlike any of her other lovers. Roxana begins the
pattern in desperate need of a friend to handle her finances (R 111), and she fears the
danger of being tortured and imprisoned for being an accomplice in the landlord’s murder
(R 117-19). Amy assists Roxana by bringing the Dutch merchant to her, and she accepts
his help as she has accepted men’s help before. As the landlord’s words were a cordial to
her ills, the Dutch merchant’s financial acumen and protection from the Jewish jeweler
are a remedy to her problem of not being able to dispose of the landlord’s wealth.
Because he assists her, she feels indebted to him much as she felt indebted the landlord
and the prince.
The assistance from the initial danger sets up what the reader anticipates will be
another episode in which Roxana is provided for by a man until he dies or becomes a
penitent. However, the Dutch merchant is not like the earlier men. He does flatter her,
but he does so by calling her pious (R 137). The landlord uses the language of virtue to
seduce Roxana, but the Dutch merchant does it out of sincerity. To prove he thinks her a
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good woman, once he is widowed, he cautiously broaches a marriage proposal to her.
Again, she protests the man making love to her, but now she protests his marrying her
and tells him she will grant any other favor he asks since she is in his debt (R 135). Since
she will not yield to being his wife, she pays her debt to him through three days of
adulterous bliss, initiated by her making him drunk and feigning her own drunkenness (R
142). The payment and yielding to the Dutch merchant take place on her terms. Once
she has bedded with him, she feels no obligation to him, but she desires his protection as
a lover. This desire frustrates the Dutch merchant and provides the reader with one of the
greatest diatribes against marriage, in which the split between the maternal and the
sexualized other is revealed at its most obvious.
Because she chooses to follow the prostitution pattern and ignore the Dutch
merchant’s first offer to marry, Roxana confines herself to one version of her self: the
supposedly independent prostitute split from any maternal or marital roles. Snow reads
this split as Roxana’s denial of a part of her self: “A result of Roxana’s deciding against
the conventionally accepted choice [to marry] is, ironically, a loss—or at least burial—of
part of herself, which she reserves and does not reveal. This reserve […] results in an
estrangement from herself, an inward and spiritual estrangement” (531). The split
prohibits her from adopting multiple roles simultaneously, and this failure makes it
impossible to own her story because she does not accept her multiple selves. Roxana
divides the wife and whore into mutually exclusive roles because she wants to deny the
servitude of the wife and gain the financial independence of the whore (O’Brien 623-24).
Noting her misfortune with her first husband, she explains:
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a Wife is treated with Indifference, a Mistress with a strong Passion; a
Wife is look’d upon as but an Upper-Servant, a Mistress is Sovereign; a
Wife must give up all she has, have every Reserve she makes for herself,
be thought hard of, and be upbraided with her very Pin-Money; whereas a
Mistress makes the Saying true, that what the Man has, is hers, and what
she has, is her own; the Wife bears a thousand Insults, and is forc’d to [...]
bear it, [...] a Mistress insulted, helps herself immediately, and takes
another. (R 132).
This antithetical list reveals her view of the mistress as a woman who is treated with
passion, who manages her own finances, and who bears no insult. Add to this her point
about autonomy, “if I shou’d be a Wife, all I had then, was given up to the Husband, and
I was thenceforth to be under his Authority only” (R 144), and it is clear that she fears
being subject to a tyrant, or, as with her first husband, a fool. Lastly, she calls a wife a
slave and draws a comparison to servants whose ears wore bored to indicate that they had
chosen to forever serve their masters (Exod. 21.5-6). Contrariwise, a kept woman,
“receive[s] from them that keep” (R 144), so she maintains her finances and her
autonomy. Roxana argues that being a kept woman affords women the same rights as
men, for such “a Woman was a free agent [...] [and] might enjoy the Liberty to as much
purpose as Men do” (R 147). Her continual usage of servile imagery reinforces her view
that wives are subject to tyrants, and so they give up the liberty she so desperately tries to
find while moving from one lover to the next.
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Although her experience as a wife proves wives can be ruined by foolish
husbands, Roxana is no feminist with a model for female subjectivity and independence.
Despite her arguments for independence through prostitution, her passivity towards men
and her failure to maintain mutual bonds with men or women reveal she is a failure. She
is dependent upon Amy to act for her, and her financial success is due to help from men
(Gabbard 245). Furthermore, Defoe emphasizes her rhetoric of liberation is deluded and
tragically wrong through her editorial reflections on her past and the final outcome of
guilt and misery in her narrative. Defoe’s view of Roxana’s choice to prostitute herself
as contrary to the best course of action for a woman’s success:
despite his eloquent acknowledgement of the inequalities of marriage,
Defoe is finally of the opinion that a woman can be assured of both having
the demands of necessity satisfied and retaining her virtue only by being
the wife to a good, reasonably wealthy husband—preferably someone ‘in
the figure of a Merchant’ if we are to accept the advice of Sir Robert
Clayton as representing Defoe’s own opinion.134
Clayton makes this observation when Roxana accepts his help with her investments (R
169-70). However, Roxana continues to follow the prostitution pattern despite such
cautionary advice.
Simply by choosing the role of the mistress over the traditional role of the
virtuous wife, Roxana proves herself a moral outcast, a reprobate who chooses to sin
because it is in her nature, not because she is forced to do so from necessity alone. She
134 Hentzi 187. Bram Dijkstra argues Clayton represents Defoe’s opinion in Defoe and Economics: The Fortunes of Roxana in the History of Interpretation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) 171-73.
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acknowledges her decision to remain a whore is disastrous when she says “if ever
Woman in her Senses rejected a Man of Merit, on so trivial and frivolous a Pretence, I
was the Woman; but surely it was the most preposterous thing that Woman did” (R 157),
but in so doing, she “defends the [moral] conventions [of her day] in a voice that reveals
the loneliness of one outside the pale” (Snow 531). Dependent upon others, cast out of
society, damned from the beginning, Roxana as a narrator acknowledges the failures of
her life and condemns her past even as she revels in telling it.
The reflective Roxana, the narrator who judges her past actions, dwells not on the
split between the servile wife and independent mistress but upon the legitimate wife and
the illicit mistress. In this darker contrast, she fixates upon the rift between the public
acknowledgement of the wife’s “social and legal privileges” versus the whore’s
confinement from society (O’Brien 625). She characterizes the whore as isolated and
miserable:
The Whore skulks about in Lodgings; is visited in the dark; disown’d upon
all Occasions, before God and Man; is maintain’d indeed, for a time; but is
certainly condemn’d to be abandon’d at last, and left to the Miseries of
Fate, and her own just Disaster: If She has any Children, her Endeavour is
to get rid of them, and not maintain them; and if she lives, she is certain to
see them all hate her, and be asham’d of her; while the Vice rages, and the
Man is in the Devil’s Hand, she has him; and while she has him, she
makes a Prey of him; but if he happens to fall Sick; if any Disaster befals
him, the Cause of all lies upon her; he is sure to lay all his Misfortunes at
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her Door; and if once he comes to Repentance, or makes but one Step
towards a Reformation, he begins with her; leaves her; uses her as she
deserves; hates her; abhors her; and sees her no more […]. (R 132-33)
Every item in this list is based on hard-earned experience. The lord fulfills the last part of
the pattern, Roxana perceives her children as hating her, and the prince abandons her
twice due to repentance.135 The most telling part of her discourse, though, concerns her
being shut away and left alone. At the end of her narrative, Roxana is truly alone, for she
has only herself and those whom she has used as objects all her life. Roxana degenerates
into a mere cipher because she has no one to recognize her as an individual who controls
her own destiny. All she has are her secrets. The wife, however, fares better, for she
may appear in public without censure, be acknowledged by her husband and children,
and be entitled to his inheritance should he die (R 132). The wife has public rights no
whore has, and she certainly does not have to concern herself with scheming jewelers or
threats of the rack (R 118).
Roxana’s choice of whoredom reveals that she cannot imagine herself having the
qualities of both a wife and a mistress; for her, one is wholly submissive in marriage or
wholly dominant in adultery. Again, the language of sadomasochism is evident in her
splitting of these roles, much as it is in her splitting of the maternal role from the sexual
role in the three comforters episode. Unfortunately, as a mistress, Roxana becomes more
passive and dependent, thus revealing her belief that being a mistress makes one
135 Moll draws a similar conclusion about adultery and repentance: “I cannot but observe also, and leave it for the Direction of my Sex in such Cases of Pleasure, that when ever sincere Repentance succeeds such a Crime as this [affair], there never fails to attend a hatred of the Object; and the more Affection might seem to be before, the Hatred will be the more in Proportion”; see MF 123.
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independent is unfounded. She is no “She Merchant” in charge of her own business
affairs as she claims (R 131), but she does possess what many in her day what determine
to be masculine characteristics.
Roxana’s splitting of whore and wife is in accordance with the gender hierarchy
emerging in the early modern period. In this hierarchy, opposites such as “‘whore’ and
‘mother’ [are rendered] mutually exclusive” (Conway 229), and “The impossibility of
reconciling maternity with sexual freedom is painfully clear.”136 The role of the
prostitute was seen as masculine, thus her statement that she wishes to be “Masculine in
her politick Capacity” further establishes the split she has made between her self as a kept
woman and her self as a mother (R 148). When she tells Sir Robert Clayton she wishes
to be a “Man-Woman” for the sake of liberty, and he calls her language “Amazonian” (R
171), Roxana willingly denies femininity in order to appear masculine. If she were to
accept both masculine and feminine roles, she would be overinculsive, but she embraces
the concept of independence while adhering to passivity. She never becomes masculine
in the sense of the male as active and the female as passive.137 Despite her “mannish”
talk, Roxana is a passive prostitute, for she relies upon men’s “Bounty” to sustain her.
Nevertheless, her talk would be construed by Defoe’s audience much as Clayton
interprets it.
136 Nussbaum 40. Bowers also makes this point clear in her argument about Roxana’s split of maternity and sexuality, in which infanticide is the only way in which one may remain autonomous; see Bowers 100, 123. 137 The early modern novel responded and contributed to the developing sex-gender system of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, helping to reinforce the split that defined men as active, reasonable, and externally-motivated beings and women as passive, emotional, and internally-motivated; see Moglen 1- 15.
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To Defoe’s audience, prostitutes were not only Amazonian but masculine.
Nussbaum explains that due to her sexual activity in an age in which femininity was
defined as passivity, the prostitute was perceived as a passionate being more masculine
than feminine (100). Moglen further explains how maternity was considered normal for
women, but sexuality became “displaced onto the prostitute, [woman’s] abnormal
counterpart, who was often represented as ambiguously gendered, even mannish, with an
enlarged and ejaculating clitoris” (3). Roxana embraces this role of a “Man-Woman” by
denying her maternal role via the abandonment of her children and by refusing the Dutch
merchant’s first marriage proposal (Castle 90). In so doing, she chooses liberty over all
else, be it virtue, as with the landlord; modesty, as with the Dutch merchant (R 157); or
her children, as with the three comforters and the concluding pages of her narrative.
Rather than try to accept both aspects of her self, Roxana first splits virtue from
necessity, projects her whoring onto Amy, assumes the role of the whore herself, and
denies her maternal role throughout the remainder of her life. As the prostitute, she tries
to be the active, independent woman free of any marital bonds. Instead, she becomes a
passive creature.
The desire to be a kept woman who is free from the bondage of marriage confines
her to the role of the sexualized, non-maternal prostitute. Her desire to maintain her
identity as a kept woman splits her not only from the role of a wife but the favor of
Providence, for, as the Dutch merchant argues, marriage is “decreed by Heaven [...] [as]
the fix’d State of Life, which God had appointed for Man’s Felicity and for establishing a
legal Posterity” (R 151). Roxana has suffered under the bonds created for “Man’s
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Felicity” once before; hardened by her first marriage, she is determined not to submit to
any man, even if he is a Providence figure.
The Dutch merchant functions as a Providence figure in a number of episodes.
His rescue of her from the Jewish jeweler’s machinations may be read as a special
providence, a specific intervention by God in the normal course of human affairs. The
danger she fears from being tortured on the rack due to the jeweler’s accusations and the
fear of immediate death may make her cry out “Lord have Mercy upon me” and resolve
to make changes in her life (R 126), but she does not interpret the Dutch merchant’s help
as providential intervention. Once the danger is removed, her “wicked Taste of Life
return[s]” (R 128). She may call him her deliverer and benefactor for saving her from the
Jewish jeweler’s accusations and safely seeing her out of Paris with her fortune intact (R
115, 121, 135), but she attributes his help to those of “second Causes,” human
intervention, rather than the first cause, or divine intervention (R 121; Mullan 346). Her
failure to read his deliverance of her as providential repeats after the storm at sea , a
favorite convention of narratives involving special providences (Hunter, Reluctant 56,
62). Both episodes should be read by Roxana as special providences much as Moll reads
Jemy’s arrival at Newgate as a special providence. However, Roxana does not see the
providential signs, so she fails to acknowledge his rescue of her from danger or the storm
at sea, let alone later signs such as his wife’s death or his desire for a mutual relationship,
as providential. Even when the Dutch merchant employs the language of both Fate and
Providence, she continues to adhere to her decision to be a kept woman, thus ignoring the
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fatal and providential intervention of an overinclusive character who offers her
protection.
The Dutch merchant dismisses the storm at sea as a frequent, natural occurrence
so Roxana may not fear another such voyage; however, his talk of shelter from the storm
carries providential intimations. He tells Roxana that there are many harbors on either
coast between England and Holland, so the ship may find shelter on either shore (R 136).
The allegory is fairly simple: the ship, the sinner, need only find shelter by returning to
the safety of the harbor, God. Roxana uses this ship-at-sea metaphor later in her narrative
when she compares her marriage to the Dutch merchant as a merchant ship reaching the
safety of London after venturing upon the stormy seas.138 The Dutch merchant, marriage,
and London all signify safety from the storms that trouble Roxana’s life; however, she
does not read the storm at sea as a sign that she should seek the shelter of a safe harbor in
the Dutch merchant. Only after further storms will she come to him, and even then, she
has internalized the storms to such a degree that there is no escape from them as they
manifest in the form of her daughter Susan.
As though the allegory of the storm were not enough to prove the place of
Providence in this fatal narrative, Defoe includes further instances of providential
influence in Roxana’s life at the moment when she first chooses whoredom over marriage
to the Dutch merchant. Roxana sheds tears of joy at the sight of the Dutch merchant after
her trial at sea (R 135). These tears have the potential to be the forerunners or penitence
138 R 243. Defoe also employs the metaphor of marriage as a harbor fashioned by Providence when he has Moll describe her marriage to the banker: “Now I seem’d landed in a safe Harbour, after the Stormy Voyage of Life past was at an end; and I began to be thankful for my Deliverance”; see MF 188.
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like the “a secret surprizing Joy” Moll experiences in her conversion (MF 289). Because
Roxana has no intention to change her life of prostitution, though, these tears do not
signify a rebirth. Likewise, when the Dutch merchant says “Providence had (as it were
for that Purpose [of our marriage]) taken his Wife from him” (R 141), Roxana fails to
read this death as anything but coincidence. She refuses to accept his marriage proposal
even though he tells her their union is possible because of providential intervention. It is
also odd that she fails to see his likeness to her in the passage in which he relates the
death of his wife, for he also notes the death of a child “which indeed, had troubled him
much” (R 141). She should be able to recognize a person with a troubling child as
someone like herself, but she has split her self from others. No matter how many
providential signs attend his marriage proposal, no matter how many arguments for
marriage he makes, and no matter how much like Roxana he is for being glad of the
disposal of a pestering child, she will not have him as anything but a lover.
The Dutch merchant’s arguments about the role of Providence in their union and
the benefits of marriage do not persuade Roxana from following her fatal path. To
reinforce Roxana’s inability to become an overinclusive penitent Fate figure like Moll,
Defoe employs the Dutch merchant as a foil to Roxana. This character’s use of both fatal
and providential terminology contrasts with Roxana’s split between the two. In a passage
employing metaphors associated with both governing forces, the Dutch merchant
explains how marital bonds could connect him with Roxana: “You shall be the Pilot [of
our Ship] [...] you can take the Helm out of my Hand when you please, and bid me go
spin” (R 151). Both the Fates and Providence are considered the steersmen of
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individuals’ destinies, and “spin,” though here signifying who spins the wheel that
controls the direction of the ship, has many a fatal connotation.139 Roxana fears he will
abuse his power and command their ship of marriage with no input from her; this fear,
though rationalized by her first marriage, dooms her, as he foretells: “the Cruelty of
refusing him [...] would be an Introduction to my Ruin; and that I wou’d seriously repent
of it” (R 160). The fatal convention of the midwife-witch who sees the child’s future
should come to mind, and Roxana’s further relation confirms this inclination: “he
foretold some fatal things, which, he said, he was well assur’d I shou’d fall into” (R 160).
His ability to be both providential and fatal should indicate to Roxana that he is a man
who can be both one thing and another, someone who honestly can offer “mutual Love”
that both gives and receives (R 149).
The Dutch merchant is the sole individual who offers Roxana the opportunity to
become overinclusive. To emphasize how the Dutch merchant offers much more than
any system of split complements, Defoe has him argue for marriage in terms of
mutuality. He tells Roxana “where there was a mutual Love, there cou’d be no Bondage”
(R 149), and he reinforces his talk of mutuality when they finally do marry years after
their argument over marriage. He offers her what she claims she wants—financial
independence and the ability to possess not only what she has, but what the man has as
well: “I intend not to trouble myself with any Care of Trouble of managing what either
you have for me, or what I have to add to it; but you shall e’en take it all upon yourself,
as the Wives do in Holland” (R 244). Gabbard explains the Dutch merchant’s point by
139 On Providence as the steersman, see Thomas 79. On the Fates as such, see Chapter One, particularly the passages on Prometheus Bound and The Eumenides.
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noting how the English believed Dutch women possessed financial acumen: “the
historical reality of Dutchwomen’s economic and social status does not concern us so
much as the fact that these women were reputed to possess commercial wisdom” (242).
Defoe employs the notion of the Dutch wife as an example of a woman who aids her
husband by managing the finances and who aids herself and the economy, should he die,
by being able to manage her affairs and not become a burden on society (Gabbard 242-
43). Effectively, he offers the promise of financial independence, indeed control, but
Roxana fails to take his offer by mixing her money with his and letting him have control.
When given the ability to handle all of the finances, Roxana knows not what to do
because she has never managed her own affairs, having relied upon Amy to handle most
matters and men such as Sir Robert Clayton to handle her finances. She is no Alison of
Bath, who gains sovereignty over her husband Jankin’s estate, words, and actions.140 The
Dutch merchant offers her financial control within marriage, but Roxana has so split
marriage and mistress-hood that she cannot imagine a quality she associates with the one
to be a quality of the other. She is, as Gabbard argues, more of a French prostitute, the
stereotypical kept woman dependent upon her lover, and no Dutch wife, reputed to have
both social and financial control (244). She may even be the Turkish courtesan
Nussbaum describes as a political schemer (31-31), but this figure is not fully appropriate
given Roxana’s lack of political ambition. In the end, she is no Dutch wife who appears
in public and keeps control of the purse, nor is she a scheming courtesan who possesses
140 The wife of Bath and her fifth husband come to an agreement in which “He yaf me al the brydel in myn hond, / to han the governance of hous and lond, / and of his tongue and of his hond also”; see Chaucer 813- 15.
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liberty and full control of her wealth. She is a woman torn between roles, the maternal,
married woman and the sexualized, Amazonian other. Rather than possessing both
qualities of wife and whore, she becomes neither one nor the other. Due to her splitting
of the roles into opposites, when she cannot be wholly one or the other, she believes she
is nothing.
The splitting that destroys Roxana’s chance to marry and become overinclusive
begins with Roxana’s disposal of her children and continues with her ever-more-passive
role in life. She cannot perceive her relations with others in any other terms than those of
domination and submission because of her shared existence with Amy. She and Amy are
so much one and the same that they split the functions of one person between the two.
Roxana passively expects Amy to act for her, and even when Amy is not doing
something for Roxana, she takes on the active role, as may be seen in the storm scene,
when Amy cries aloud and repents for all to hear and Roxana keeps quiet. Roxana
relates, “It is true, the Difference was between us, that I said all these things within
myself, and sigh’d, and mourn’d inwardly; but Amy, as her Temper was more violent,
spoke aloud, and cry’d, and call’d aloud like one in agony” (R 126). Once again, Amy
“act[s] out what Roxana only thinks of doing” by giving voice to the pangs of conscience
that inwardly trouble both her and Roxana (New 323). Even at the threshold of death,
Roxana is passive and reliant upon Amy to express her fears and to act for her.
Ultimately, everyone acts for Roxana, from her woman who assists her every
need to the men who provide for her without her intimating what she needs. Roxana is
the child who believes herself in control of everyone around her, and these people are
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mere objects to her, not like subjects with whom she can maintain mutual relations. It is
no wonder she mocks the Dutch merchant’s concept of marriage as “Oneness of Interest,
Mutual Affection, and the like” (R 151). She is trapped within a perverse “Oneness of
Interest” with Amy, and she believes that within such a relationship, one is in control
while the other submits. She has no concept of mutuality, thus she fails to recognize like
subjects who can offer the opportunity to recognize her assertions as no objects can. By
allowing Amy to act for her, and by allowing men to provide for her, Roxana reduces all
others to mere objects that exist merely to please her. She denies herself the ability to
maintain bonds with like subjects.
Mutual recognition is essential to allowing a subject to envision herself as more
than just active or just passive, just a man or just a woman, just a whore or just a wife.
Maintaining bonds with like subjects allows the individual to dissolve the duality of
complementary relationships through maintaining the tension between assertion and
recognition, and self and other. Through such maintenance, the subject can accept
paradoxical possibilities that allow for relationships in which the self may be both one
thing and another even though such versions of the self appear to be contradictory
(Dimen, Sexuality 59-60). If Roxana were to maintain such tensions, she could accept
being both wife and independent woman, both mother and sexual being. However, once
she limits her self to the dynamics of domination, she forbids herself from accepting
multiple possible selves. As New explains, “Her selves can never be integrated. She is
condemned to search for an identity in the story of herselves and to be unable ever to find
it, because she both wants to be and does not want to be legion” (329). Roxana will not
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accept her history of a being a mother or that of a courtesan, or that of any other of her
experiences as a kept woman because these identities seem mutually exclusive; however,
even when she is in a state of marital bliss with her Dutch merchant, she cannot divorce
herself from her past because she delights in obtaining titles and appearing in her Turkish
garb. Due to the split that began with the disposal of her children and was consummated
with the rape of Amy, Roxana is forever torn between different versions of her self that
she cannot integrate.
When Roxana confronts her self through her reunion with Susan, she reaches a
stage similar to Moll’s confronting her birthplace at Newgate. Both women suffer a
similar trauma, but they react differently based upon their ability to accept and maintain
paradoxical possibilities in their lives. Moll fulfills her fate by reclaiming her past,
acknowledging from what she was born by confronting Newgate, and being reborn as a
penitent. Roxana’s fulfills her fate by disowning her past, denying her daughter, and
ultimately destroying her daughter and her self through Amy’s machinations for her.
This distinct contrast is based upon the dynamics of mutual recognition of like subjects
versus domination of and submission to other objects. Moll succeeds due to her ability to
maintain mutual bonds with others, be they male or female, and her willingness to take
ownership of her history by telling her story in full and accepting her responsibility for
affecting others’ lives. Roxana does not succeed due to her failure to maintain such
bonds, even when they are freely offered to her, and her inability to take ownership of her
own story as mother/lover/wife/mistress. Moll becomes a penitent Fate figure, a paradox
in itself, in control of her own fate, and Roxana becomes a victim of her own fate.
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CHAPTER V
THE REWARDS OF MUTUAL RECOGNITION: MOLL CONFRONTS HER FATE
AND OWNS HER SELF
The contrast between Moll and Roxana becomes most clear at the end of their
narratives. The splitting that characterizes Roxana’s life reaches its inevitable conclusion
when she can no longer deny the reality of her past and must destroy the daughter who
embodies those aspects she wishes to deny about herself. Moll’s fate is not tragic,
however, because she has not split her self from others, and although she has denied
various aspects of her self before, she also has proven herself willing to accept
paradoxical roles and willing to mutually recognize both fatal and providential subjects as
like herself. Her recognition of others and her ability to accept multiple roles and aspects
of herself lead her to accept all of her past actions and selves as her own; this act of
ownership, which Defoe conveys through Moll’s spiritual conversion, is all that is
necessary for Moll to become an overinclusive figure who embodies aspects of both the
feminine Fate and the masculine Providence. Through this embodiment, she accepts
many aspects and roles, even ones that seem contradictory, as her own, making possible
what the child who wishes to overinclusively possess both the penis and the vagina can
only imagine (Benjamin, Like 53). As a Fate figure, she continues to create, apportion,
and destroy bonds with others; as a Providence figure, she becomes a penitent who
submits to God and owns her story.
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Moll’s success is based on her willingness to take ownership of her past
experiences and, because individuals are constructed by their interactions with other
subjects (Biurski and Haglund 15; Jackson 11), her self. Moll keeps some aspects of her
life secret from others, as when she does not tell Jemy of all of her fortune in America,
but she owns her past through her repentance narrative. Her willingness to share her self
through her story by telling of her birth to her mother, of her desires to be a gentlewoman
to Jemy, of her desperate situation to Mother Midnight, and of her crimes to the minister
in Newgate reveals her acceptance of her ties to others. She knows that she is related to
others and is willing, when necessary, to share her self with them.
The bonds Moll shares with others are based upon mutual recognition, and mutual
recognition requires her to accept paradoxical tensions. Because Moll recognizes and is
recognized by like subjects such as Jemy and Mother Midnight, she operates with the
capacities “to affirm, validate, acknowledge, know, accept, understand, empathize, take
in, tolerate, appreciate, see, identify with, find familiar, … love” (Benjamin, Bonds 15-
16). In this space of empathy and love, Benjamin further describes mutual recognition as
“includ[ing] a number of experiences […]: emotional attunement, mutual influence,
affective mutuality, sharing states of mind” (Bonds 16). All of these states may be found
in the final two episodes of Moll’s life, particularly in the interactions between herself,
Jemy, and Mother Midnight during the repentance scene in Newgate. She maintains the
necessary tensions between herself and others by accepting the paradox of mutual
recognition: that one is dependent upon others to be independent (Benjamin, Bonds 33).
Accepting such a paradox allows her to accept the paradoxes of overinclusive
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relationships, for in such relationships, the subject can be both one thing and another.
Based upon the preoedipal child’s desire to be both male and female, overinclusiveness
affords the subject the ability to transcend gender splitting by possessing both masculine
and feminine characteristics. Moll accomplishes this overinclusive leap by incorporating
fatal and providential characteristics as part of her subjectivity.
The process in which Moll becomes an overinclusive figure is steeped in both her
intersubjective relatedness to others and her spiritual conversion. It is made possible by
the bonds she maintains with others and her confrontation with the place of her origin.
At Newgate, Moll undergoes the final Lerenbaumian pattern of illness, assistance, and
transformation. In her illness, she is reduced to the state of an object, but she is
awakened from her lethargy by a reminder of her bonds to other subjects when Jemy is
brought to prison. Awakened by Jemy, she begins to repent of her past actions, and is
assisted further by Mother Midnight, who encourages Moll to complete her repentance by
telling all to a minister as she has done. Both Jemy and Mother Midnight enable her to
take ownership of her past. Furthermore, by accepting her fatal governess and her
providential husband, she maintains bonds between the pagan and the providential.
Ultimately, she embodies both of these forces by becoming a penitent Fate figure. Moll’s
transformation into a penitent is made complete when she reveals her past actions and her
true name to the minister, although she keeps her name secret from the reader, thus
allowing herself some control over the external marker of her identity. Her penitence is
characteristic of repentance narratives, as evidenced by scriptural parallels and a wealth
of English literature and theology. This traditional conversion makes her both sorrowful
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and joyful; maintaining this tension allows her to maintain other tensions in her life and
to accept all of her past incarnations of her self, whether as a woman of Fate or of
Providence. She ends her story as a penitent who continues to play fatal roles; she serves
as a governing mother and midwife until the very last pages of her story.
“CONCEAL’D AND DISCOVER’D BOTH TOGETHER”: PARADOXES OF
SECRETS AND REVELATIONS
For the entire narrative, Moll has consciously struggled to survive and
subconsciously quested to learn more about her self. She tries to find recognition via
marriage and money, but it is from her relationships with Jemy and women that she
learns the most about herself. These Fate and Providence figures guide her to become a
subject in her own right who is simultaneously self-reliant yet dependent upon others.
Moll recognizes herself as an independent subject through her first encounter with Jemy
and through Mother Midnight’s help during her career as a thief, and she is capable of
recognizing others as subjects themselves. Both Jemy and Mother Midnight recognize
Moll as a like subject, and Mother Midnight further performs fatal roles that prepare Moll
to confront the final two Fate figures in her story: Mother Newgate and Moll herself.
After receiving Mother Midnight’s aid, Moll is ready to confront the force that
has compelled her throughout her story and has lead her inexorably to the most peculiar
of Fate figures. This force is the unnamable “ill Fate” that first surfaces when Moll
claims her life is ruined after realizing her mother-in-law is actually her mother (MF 90).
This same “ill Fate” guides her when she first steals and when she fails to take Mother
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Midnight’s advice to quit thieving once she need not do so out of necessity (MF 191,
262). This driving force is actually Moll’s desire to confront a particular Fate figure that
has been called Mother Newgate and Moll’s “inevitable destiny” (Erickson 65;
Backscheider, Making 26). The desire to confront Mother Newgate compels her to leave
America and urges her to continue stealing so she may return to her birthplace.
Ultimately, it fulfills Moll’s quest to control her destiny and become a Fate figure.
Newgate is a Fate figure in a compelling sense. It is the only Fate figure that is
stronger than Mother Midnight, and as an “inescapable womb of fate,” it is associated
with Moll’s birth, her birth mother, and her Mother Midnight (Erickson 65). It is a Fate
figure in the most obvious sense because it births Moll and influences her long before she
returns to it, both as the Fate figure she wishes to confront and as the force she fears
when she sets off to visit two thieving comrades who are imprisoned.141 As a mother
figure, Newgate appears as the infanticidal mother who will destroy her own young;
however, this obvious quality of the prison belittles its horrific nature. What frightens
Moll so is “the consummate paradox of Newgate, a teeming mob held together in one
place; [...] a dread microcosm of Moll’s old antagonist, the World; ‘an Emblem of Hell
itself’” (Erickson 65). It is a fearful place where she suffers in solitude while surrounded
by a mob of criminals who must remind her of the purse-snatching men that treat women
as objects to be taken (MF 128). It is also a paradoxical combination of fatal and
providential conventions: it is a matrix that creates and destroys, and it is an emblem of
the Christian emblem of ultimate destruction. It furthermore symbolizes the paradox of
141 Moll succinctly relates this fear: “but the place gave me so much Horror, [...] that I could not bear it”; see MF 204.
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the intersubjective self: a person who is at once a unique individual but constructed of so
many others. However, as an entity, Newgate is not the healthy subject who asserts her
own independence while recognizing the subjectivity of others; it is merely an object that
sadistically destroys other objects literally through execution and figuratively through
fear and dehumanization. Newgate at first appears to be the last place where a subject
could assert herself and recognize others, yet that is exactly what Moll does while she is
there.
Imprisonment reduces Moll to an abject state at first, but with the aid of Jemy and
Mother Midnight, she emerges from Newgate a new woman in at least two key ways. At
first, her interactions with the other “Newgate birds” have an institutionalizing effect
upon her: “I degenerated into Stone; I turn’d first Stupid and Senseless, then Brutish and
thoughtless, and at last stark raving Mad as any of them were; [...] I became as naturally
pleas’d and easie with the Place, as if indeed I had been born there” (MF 278). The
shock of being in Newgate wears off as Moll falls into an illness which fits the familiar
pattern of illness-assistance-transformation, thus signifying the beginning of her final
transformation: “a certain strange Lethargy of Soul possess’d me, I had no Trouble, no
Apprehensions, no Sorrow about me, [...] my Senses, my Reason, nay, my Conscience
were all a-sleep; [...] and now I was ingulph’d in the misery of Punishment” (MF 279).
This illness leaves Moll in a stupor of non-agency; she does not suffer the pangs of
conscience, so the repentance process cannot begin, and she remains trapped within a
lethargy from which little can wake her. At this point, Moll appears to have resigned
herself to be hanged; and if she were alone in the world, that very well may be her fate.
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But Moll is not an isolated human being; as an intersubjective creature, she can draw
upon others to awaken her from her lethargy. Once reminded of her bonds to others, she
may take responsibility for her past actions. Others help revive her conscience, stir her
repentance, and encourage her tears of repentance that signify her rebirth. This help
cannot come from within Newgate, as is evidenced by the Ordinary, who does not
encourage Moll to gain her senses but desires her confession in order that it may be sold
as a criminal biography or used against her in court. Help must come from those for
whom Moll cares.
Moll’s humanity is restored by her own concern for another human being with
whom she feels a strong bond. When she sees Jemy brought to Newgate, she begins to
reflect upon her “horrid detestable Life” and awaken from her stupor:
I WAS overwhelm’d with grief for him; my own Case gave me no
disturbance compar’d to this, and I loaded my self with Reproaches on his
Account; I bewail’d his Misfortunes, and the ruin he was now come to, at
such a Rate, that I relish’d nothing now, as I did before, and the first
Reflections I made upon the horrid detestable Life I had liv’d, began to
return upon me, and as these things return’d my abhorrance of the Place I
was in, and the way of living in it return’d also; in a word, I was perfectly
chang’d and become another Body. (MF 281)
So strong is her bond to Jemy that it makes her realize how she is responsible for her past
actions that have affected others and it makes her act to save him, and, consequently,
herself. Rietz argues this change is brought about by Jemy as the “reappearance of
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masculine authority” (5), but it is Moll’s relation to him as a like subject, as a picaro
much like her self, not as a dominant partner who possesses authority over her, that
moves her to repent. So strong is her transformation into “another Body” that Lerenbaum
goes so far as to argue that the language in this episode is more substantial than Moll’s
language of penitence in the scene with the minister, and she emphasizes “Moll’s penitent
love for Jemy is the foundation of her recovery” (116). Jemy is significant, for he
inspires Moll to reflect upon her past actions. These reflections awaken her from her
“Lethargy of Soul,” drawing her ever closer to becoming a true penitent and a Fate
figure.
Moll’s awakening is based upon her past relationship of mutuality with Jemy.
Her reaction to seeing him in Newgate reminds her of her ties to others and how she is
intersubjectively bound to him in particular. As in any intersubjective relationship, the
bonds between self and other maintain “a continual exchange of influence” throughout
the interactions between like subjects (Benjamin, Bonds 49). Seeing a like subject with
whom she shares a past reminds Moll of her ties to others and awakens her from her
lethargy. This man from the past has a profound effect upon her present. In Newgate,
“past and present, self and other” converge, enabling Moll to see how what she has done
in the past with and to others is as much a part of her as her present situation (Kietzman
697). Jemy reminds her of her picaresque past (Kietzman 697), and he becomes a
providential figure by awakening her desire to repent through taking ownership of her
past. His presence stirs “conscious Guilt” in Moll’s mind, prompting her, she says, “to
think, and to think is one real Advance from Hell to Heaven; […] he that is restor’d to his
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Power of thinking, is restor’d to himself” (MF 281). This restoration is possible only
through her recognition of a like subject and her acceptance of her impact upon him.
Once Moll begins thinking, she does not focus inwardly on her self alone but
upon the others whom she has influenced and who have influenced her. Seeing Jemy
makes Moll wonder amidst her tears “How many poor People have I made Miserable?
How many poor wretches have I sent to the Devil[?]” (MF 280). Acknowledging her
sorrow and guilt for past actions is one of the key steps in becoming a true penitent.
Moll’s “penitent love for Jemy” allows her to accept her guilt for past actions and to
inspire Mother Midnight to do likewise (Lerenbaum 116). Seeing him prompts her to
reflect upon her past, shed tears of repentance, and resolve to redirect her life. Moll
accepts her agency in shaping the life of another and employs this agency to save Mother
Midnight and Jemy.
Moll’s transformation in Newgate is relational and fatal. Homer O. Brown
incorrectly presents Moll as wavering between selfishness and repentance at this moment,
as though her thinking about her self is removed from her consideration of others (578).
Moll’s restoration is due to her thoughts about herself in relation to others, rather than to
a selfishness removed from others. After noting how thinking restores herself, Moll says
her thoughts direct her to another person from her past, and she summons Mother
Midnight to enable her to repent so that she may experience “real signs of Repentance”
by uniting her past and present and her self as it has been constructed by her self and
others (MF 287). Mother Midnight’s entry into the beginning of Moll’s conversion scene
reinforces how necessary others are to her taking ownership of her past and finding
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repentance. Moll’s drive to change is initiated by Jemy and aided by Mother Midnight’s
dexterous hands; after all, Moll cannot deliver herself without complications.
The figurative birth process begins after Moll is roused from her illness by the
sight of Jemy and begins to reflect upon her past actions. The appearance of Jemy and
Mother Midnight in Newgate repeats an earlier pattern in which Jemy enables Moll to
shift from relating to others objectively to treating others as like subjects, and Mother
Midnight furthers the transformation Jemy begins. Their reappearance in her story also
allows Moll to accept two truths rooted in her relationships to others: these others from
her past are as much a part of her story as she is theirs, and because they are
intersubjectively connected, she is as responsible for many of their actions just as much
as they are hers. When, upon seeing Jemy, Moll considers how she has made others
miserable, she acknowledges how she has affected others, particularly Jemy. Although
she does not reveal Jemy’s thoughts on her subjectivity or his awareness of how she
relates to him, and so does not engage in what Butte calls “deep intersubjectivity,” the
character’s “consciousness of consciousness” (43, vii), Moll consciously acknowledges
the impact she has had on him. Jemy is not a mere object to her, he is another individual
who has shared experiences, emotions, and desires like hers. As such, he is not only an
instrument of repentance but also an other whose appearance makes her realize how her
actions have impacted others.
Moll’s realization that she is responsible for others because she is connected to
them is more significant than, for instance, Moll considering a past sin as something she
needs to confess. Just as Jemy once helped her realize that men have desires like hers,
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and so they can be like subjects, the sight of him helps her realize how intertwined her
story is with others. To reciprocate his assistance in waking her from her stupor, she
saves him again at Newgate as she once did at Brickhill. Moll and Jemy help one another
as like subjects, for in the intersubjective realm, “two subjects may exchange, may
alternate in expressing and receiving, cocreating a mutuality that allows for and presumes
separateness” (Benjamin, Shadow 29). Although the two subjects are bound to one
another, they may interact without dissolving or merging into one individual. Moll also
reciprocates Mother Midnight’s assistance in this manner. She inspires Mother Midnight
to take responsibility for her own actions, which leads Mother Midnight to repentance,
and, in turn, Mother Midnight enables Moll to take ownership of her past by unifying her
life into a conversion narrative. Interestingly, Mother Midnight becomes a penitent
before Moll because Moll’s initial acknowledgement of how she is related to others
impacts her.
Moll is not alone in her acceptance of past actions affecting the lives of others.
Mother Midnight repeats Moll’s discourse of accepting blame for shaping the lives of
others, as she tells Moll, “she had been the Destruction of all her Friends, [...] she had
brought such a one, and such a one, and such one to the Gallows” (MF 283). After both
women accept responsibility for affecting others’ lives, Moll absolves Mother Midnight
by claiming “I only have ruin’d myself” (MF 284), thus acknowledging their bonds while
taking ownership and responsibility for her actions. Moll not only acknowledges her
agency by noting how she has affected others but also acknowledges it by noting how she
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is responsible for her present condition. This self-assertion encourages Mother Midnight
to do the same, and the good governess goes straight to a minister to repent.
The intersubjective bonds between Moll and Mother Midnight enable both of
them to escape this episode free from fear of Newgate. Mother Midnight is not free of
Newgate so long as Moll lives in fear of execution because Moll could inform the
authorities of her criminal activities. Both Moll and Mother Midnight have feared what
prisoners may reveal about them to the authorities, and they have rejoiced at the deaths of
their comrades who had the power to tell the authorities anything (MF 208, 214, 220,
222). However, Moll does not speak against Mother Midnight, and as Swaminathan
suggests, Mother Midnight’s visits to Moll in Newgate “reveal a real concern for Moll’s
well-being that no other character in the novel demonstrates” (199). This concern of
Mother Midnight’s is rewarded amply by Moll. She saves Mother Midnight by
encouraging her to seek a minister, much as she once saved her mother “from the
Gallows by being in her Belly” (MF 95); Mother Midnight then returns the favor by
sending a minister to Moll. Theirs is a reciprocal relationship in which one helps the
other in a like manner.
The culmination of this relationship based upon mutuality comes when Mother
Midnight sends Moll the minister, who allows Moll to recapitulate and take ownership of
her story while in the place that gave birth to her. The minister encourages Moll to repent
by making her develop her reflections upon her past guilt into a confession; she does tell
all, and although she tearfully claims that she is not “Mistress of Words enough to
express” how she sincerely repents (MF 288), she does emerge from this episode a
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woman who has confessed herself convincingly enough that the minister obtains her a
reprieve and, eventually, secures transportation to America for Jemy and her. Moll saves
herself from hanging, but, more importantly, she interprets and organizes her experience
when she tells her story to the minister (Sim 155). As Miller observes, the minister
enables Moll to find “the key to her true self” (17), and Moll says his “honest friendly
way of treating me unlock’d all the Sluces of my Passions: He broke into my very Soul
by it; and I unravell’d all the Wickedness of my Life to him” (MF 288). The minister’s
kindness and honest, his way of affecting her, enables her to reveal of her story. Without
seeing Jemy and speaking with Mother Midnight, Moll would not have told her story to
the minister and taken ownership of her experience. Because she is bound by affective
ties to others, she is able her to construct, maintain, and, when necessary, keep secret her
true self. Ironically, her true self is kept secret from the reader, but taking ownership of
her past allows Moll to restore herself.
The power of Moll’s true name and the manner in which she preserves its secrecy
even while telling her story to the reader makes Moll a mythic character who can at once
reveal herself and maintain the secrecy of her self. Moll never reveals her true name, her
“grand Secret” (MF 159) to the reader, and she keeps it from many of the people in her
life, including Jemy and Mother Midnight when she first meets them. Homer O. Brown
comments upon this paradoxical element of Moll’s story in the context of Robinson’s and
Roxana’s narratives: “Secrecy seems to be an absolute precondition of self-revelation
[…] these narrators seem to be under a double compulsion to expose and to conceal
themselves” (563). Moll maintains the paradox of revealing herself through her story of
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her interactions with others while concealing herself by keeping her true name a secret;
thus, she can take ownership of her experiences with others by giving an “Abridgement
of this whole History; […] of [her] Conduct for 50 Years in Miniature” without revealing
her name (MF 288). Moll is both a specific person who relates her picaresque
experiences as a woman struggling to survive in a world of necessity through great detail
and much reflection from her penitent point of view and a universal, mythic heroine
whose name remains a secret.
The power of Moll’s true name leads the reader to wonder who she is even after
she has given her entire history up to this point in Newgate. Moll moves with “fluidity”
from one role to another (Hentzi 184), from being the generic maid Mrs. Betty to Mrs.
Flanders, and from Mary Flanders to the eponymous name by which we know her, until
she reaches the point in Newgate in which she assumes the role of the penitent and unites
her true name with her penitent self. Miller comments upon the power of Moll’s name by
noting, “Although her name is neither her mother’s, nor her father’s, nor her husband’s, it
is no longer the generic Mrs. Betty. She has named herself, and by living her nom de
plume as a woman and sui generis, she becomes an eponymous heroine” (20).
Furthermore, this name gives her a sense of coherence and strengthens her belief “that
she is possessed of a ‘real’ self […] that she is always driven to hide, […] like ‘the grand
secret’ that is her name” (Miller 40). Whether the essential self is a fictional construct or
not, it gives Moll a sense of being grounded. Paradoxically, it also makes the eponymous
heroine anonymous, though, and the anonymity of her true self carries universal, indeed
mythic, power for those who recognize themselves in Moll.
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Moll’s true name is connected to her power to save others. Erickson asks whether
her true name, which is “well known in the Records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the
Old Baily” (MF 7), is that of her mother’s maiden or married name, Moll’s last married
name assumed when she married the bank clerk, or any of a number of possibilities, and
he concludes, most convincingly:
Moll’s name—whatever it is—would seem to be the sign of her true
identity, the person who she really is in her own eyes. The real Moll
Flanders is the one with the name that can never be revealed, the innocent
child, imprisoned in her womb-house, who ironically saved her mother
from hanging and freed her for a new life […]. Moll’s true name works
for her as a talisman tied to the precious illusion of her original self, the
innocent, life-bringing child. (Erickson 49-50)
Erickson presents Moll as a mythic heroine whose power to save others resides in her
secret; as the anonymous fetus, she saves her mother from hanging, and when taken back
to her birthplace, Mother Newgate, she regains that power to save an other, Jemy, from
hanging, by taking ownership of her true name and the many others she has assumed. By
keeping her name secret, she also “distinguishes her essential self from her admittedly
reprehensible doings” (Starr, Casuistry 113). Once she admits to her past crimes, Moll
can become a penitent and embrace this “real” or “essential” self. The paradox of
becoming pure by recalling and taking responsibility for one’s past sins is yet one more
apparent contradiction in Moll’s repentance narrative. Along with her concealing her self
through revealing her self, such a paradox may perplex readers, but Moll accepts
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paradoxical tensions in her life. Readers must be satisfied with never knowing the name
Moll keeps secret from them even as they read of her taking ownership of her story.
As Moll owns her story, she organizes it by following the conventions of the
repentance sequence within spiritual autobiography. In his definitive reading of Defoe’s
fiction within the tradition of spiritual autobiography, Starr argues that Moll’s references
to Fate and the Devil as the agents who make her do commit certain actions “both serve
primarily to objectify compulsions within her, for which she herself is responsible”
(Spiritual 154). She does take responsibility for her past actions when telling her story to
the minister and to the reader, and she shifts from a picara to a penitent. Moll must
become a penitent in order to see her true self, for, as Kietzman argues, Moll cannot gain
independence or self-determination through material or sinful means in a text that is built
upon repentance as a means for finding subjectivity (692). Kietzman’s reading from the
shift in Moll’s picaresque “serial subjectivity” to the ordered narrative of the penitent
contributes to Starr’s reading within the context of spiritual autobiography. Through
recapitulating her story, Moll reorganizes her self and “learns to constitute her
subjectivity by including and ordering its multiple aspects in a continuous history”
(Kietzman 697). This continuous history must be organized according to the
conventions of repentance rather than material terms, so Moll must reorganize her past
via new terms: “In the course of her previous life, Moll had serialized herself in fictions
aimed to secure material ends; it is only when she proves herself able to contain and read
those serializations in a continuous history that she is considered a true convert and
eventually pardoned” (Kietzman 699). She organizes her experiences by discerning what
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has been called “‘God’s Plot,’ […] a stratagem or manipulative program that has much in
common with plot as literary critics understand it” (Damrosch 5). Paradoxically, Moll
takes responsibility for her experiences even as she perceives them as part of a master
plot.
Despite the preponderance of scholarship situating Moll Flanders within the
spiritual autobiography tradition, some scholars voice suspect Moll’s conversion. Novak
notes Moll “regards everything [in her life] as shrouded in a certain mystery and wonder”
but contends “She is no Crusoe to perceive God’s design behind the ‘chequer work’ of
her life” (Master 601). Novak does not question the sincerity of Moll’s conversion as do
some critics such as Peter New, who argues Moll’s conversion may not be wholly
genuine since she is still proud of her wealth however it is gained at the end of story
(New 317), but he does strip from Moll the understanding Starr and Kietzman attribute to
her. Instead, Novak argues, “the reader feels spiritual forces at work when [Moll] is in
prison toward the end of her narrative and in the scene in which she seems to hear the
voice of her beloved Jemy after they have separated” (Master 601). Even Moll’s
fictional editor notes Moll is, in her later years, “not so extraordinary a Penitent, as she
was at first” (MF 5). Whether Moll perceives Providence or not, there is no question that
Defoe intends the reader to see Providence at work in Moll’s story just as much as he
intends for the reader to note the fatal nature of her narrative. The conventions associated
with repentance are mixed with the fatal elements throughout the narrative in the
concluding pages of the narrative, creating yet another paradox that troubles readers:
Moll as a penitent Fate figure.
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“SHAME AND TEARS” AND “A SECRET SURPRISING JOY”: PARADOXES IN
PENITENCE
The assistance and transformation pattern takes on a new dimension with the
introduction of Moll’s tears of repentance. Moll has cried before, but never before have
her tears reflected a genuine desire to accept responsibility for her past actions and to
avoid sinning again. The sincerity of Moll’s repentance and the importance of her
transformation into a penitent become clear when the episode is read in the context of
early modern Christian literature. Contextualizing these tears is necessary, for twenty-
first century readers may dwell upon whether Moll’s penitence is sincere much as
Defoe’s fictitious editor of her text does when he notes her final days in which she “was
not so extraordinary a Penitent, as she was at first.”142 It is easy to see her narrative in
split terms: either she is a penitent who reveals all or she is a liar who has not truly
repented. However, such splitting is unnecessary. Moll does keep secrets after her
penitence, as when she does not tell Humphry the watch she has given him was stolen or
when she does not tell her brother-husband she has returned to Virginia, but such
omissions coexist with a narrative in which she is grateful for “the Hand of Providence”
and has a “Sense upon me of Providence doing good to me” throughout the end of her
story (MF 336-37). Defoe’s contemporary audience would have read her transformation
in the context of the conventions of spiritual biography, especially the conversion of the
repentant sinner; his audience would not have questioned the sincerity of her penitence
(Backscheider, Making 27).
142 MF 5. Paula R. Backscheider notes Moll’s repentance is dubious in The Making of a Criminal Mind, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990) 58.
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Defoe’s contemporary audience had a rich heritage of tears of repentance
extending from scripture to early modern spiritual autobiography. The literary tradition
of tears of repentance issues from Luke 7.44-47:
And [Jesus] turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this
woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet:
but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of
her head. / Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came
in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. / My head with oil thou didst not anoint:
but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. / Wherefore I say
unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much [...].
The woman’s tears are worth far more than any expensive oils poured upon a weary
traveler’s dusty head because they are signs of love and not mere external signs of
respect. The importance of such tears is prevalent in much early modern British
literature. In a text addressed to Cromwell and “the Christian Reader,” John Eliot,
Richard Mather, and Thomas Mayhew emphasize the importance of tears in their 1653
publication, Tears of Repentance: or, A further narrative of the progress of the Gospel
amongst the Indians in New England. A catalogue of brief first-person confessions to
Christianity by numerous Native Americans, this seventeenth-century text reveals the
importance of tears of repentance in Defoe’s day through its title alone. More well-
known British literature adds to this tradition. Sources from William Langland to
William Law draw from the tears of repentance in Luke and help reveal the conventional
nature of Moll’s transformation via tears.
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Spiritual texts in Defoe’s day and earlier often emphasize the importance of tears
of repentance in one’s path to salvation. The Vision of Piers Plowman ends with a
passage on tears as the signifier for repentance: “Thus [Good Manners] gooth and
gadereth, and gloseth there he shryveth— / Til Contrition hadde clene forgyeten to crye
and to wepe, / And wake for hise wikked werkes as he was wont to doone. / For confort
of his confessour, contricion he lafte, / That is the soverayneste salve for all kynne
synnes.”143 To emphasize the importance of tears, Donne writes of John 11.35, “Jesus
wept,” that “there is not a shorter verse in the Bible, nor a larger Text” (158). Donne
draws from the Old and New Testaments, Apocrypha, and church fathers of East and
West to emphasize the importance of holy tears as a sign of rebirth and repentance. He
advises all Christians “to weep these tears truly” in imitation of Christ (Donne 177), who
wept for Lazarus, the sins of Jerusalem, and the sins of all humanity (158). In “The
Pilgrimage,” George Herbert emphasizes the greatness of tears when he finds at the base
of the hill of his salvation, “A lake of brackish waters” (line 23). Milton’s Lycidas is
surrounded by saints and angels in heaven, who “wipe the tears for ever from his
eyes.”144 These tears of a penitent’s sorrow and joy are not to be mistaken for the tears
shed in mourning for loved ones, as in lines 12-14 of Lycidas, for such tears are selfishly
shed for what one has lost rather than ones shed for the joy and sorrow one gains with
143 William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text Based on Trinity College MS B.15.17 ed. A.V.C.Scmidt. (1550; London: Everyman, 1995) passus 20, lines 369-73. Galen Johnson’s translation of these lines emphasizes the significance of tears and sorrow: “Eventually Contrition had completely forgotten to shed tears for his evil acts and to stay awake during praying, as once his practice had been. Such was the comfort brought to him by his confessor that he simply gave up feeling sorrow—sorrow, which is the supreme cure for every kind of sin.” 144 John Milton, Milton¶s Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, ed. C. A. Patrides (1638; Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1983) 181. This line emphasizes the importance of tears in salvation and echoes Revelation 7.17: “and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
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true repentance. Numerous other passages on tears of repentance may be found in
English literature, but some of the most dramatic presentations occur in the work of
Defoe’s immediate predecessor and fellow protonovelist, John Bunyan.
Tears of repentance are shed in many of Bunyan’s works, texts well-known to
Defoe’s contemporary audience. In The Pilgrim¶s Progress, Christian cries continually
for his burden and later tells Pliable that he seeks the Kingdom of God, where “There
shall be no more crying, nor sorrow; for he that is owner of the place will wipe all tears
from their eyes.”145 In his foreword to Part II of The Pilgrim¶s Progress, Bunyan
commands his book to “Tell them also how Master Fearing went / On pilgrimage […] /
In solitariness with fears and cries, / And how at last, he won the joyful prize” (PP: II
229). In both cases, the juxtaposition of sorrow and joy is evident; this pairing of
opposites is conventional of the repentance sequence of spiritual autobiography. In The
Holy War, Wet-Eyes, son of Repentance, petitions to Emmanuel on behalf of Mansoul,
and the town of Mansoul cries before the sight of Emmanuel (HW 129). In addition to
these passages from fictions popular in Defoe’s day, Bunyan’s autobiography sheds the
most light on how a sinner comes to repentance after believing himself damned for
committing the worst of crimes.146 Most of the passages concern his reading of Hebrews
12.16-17, in which Esau cannot find “repentance, though he [seeks] it carefully with
145 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim¶s Progress ed. Roger Sharrock (1678; London: Penguin, 1987) 52,56. For ease of reference, I abbreviate Bunyan’s works in the following manner: The Life and Death of Mr.Badman: BM, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: GA, The Holy War Made by Shaddai upon Diabolus: HW, and The Pilgrim¶s Progress: PP. 146 Bunyan perceives his sin as a sin not against the law but as an intimate crime against Christ. He dwells upon this selling of Christ in numerous passages, ultimately linking it with murder and Esau’s selling of his birthright; see GA 218. For a detailed discussion of Bunyan’s selling of Christ and his submission to the authority of the Esau passages from Hebrews, see Vera Camden, “‘That of Esau’: Hebrews xii.16, 17 in Grace Abounding,” John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing, ed. N. H. Keeble, Religions and Discourse Vol. 12 (Lang: Oxford, 2002) 143-44.
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tears” (GA 141). Because Bunyan believes he has committed the one unforgivable sin,
he fixates upon this passage concerning one who could not gain repentance despite his
copious tears. Bunyan’s obsessive, repetitious narrative emphasizes the conversion stage
of spiritual autobiography and reveals the central importance of repentance in
Puritanism.147 Moll may not obsessively repeat one instance of her life as does Bunyan,
but she does dwell upon how she has sinned against others, and her tears are as copious
as those of any of these literary antecedents.
Much of what Moll undergoes as she seeks repentance may be found in William
Law’s detailed guide for the penitent. She must be truly ashamed of each individual sin,
remorseful for every sin she has committed, mindful that God has made her repentance
possible, and sorrowful to the point that she sheds tears born not of hysteria but of a
“broken and contrite heart” that simultaneously grieves over sins committed and rejoices
over the process of repentance.148 Moll follows nearly all of Law’s prescription for true
repentance. She covers as many specific sins as possible when she describes “the Picture
of my Conduct for 50 Years in Miniature” (MF 288); she looks back on her “past Life
with abhorrence” (MF 289); she credits God’s role in her repentance when she says, “I
had deeper Impressions [...] of the Mercy of God in sparing my Life; and a greater
147 Camden, “That of Esau” 135. Camden explains the repetition of Grace Abounding as Bunyan’s way of coming to terms with scripture. As a Puritan who believes that the Word of God alone should suffice, Bunyan fixates upon this passage of Hebrews as he believes it relates to his personal life; see Camden 134. In doing so, everything, including scripture, “becomes concentric, circling around the central image of Esau which articulates Bunyan’s experience of himself”; see Camden 138. Bunyan’s reading becomes subjective, and it is not until he can transcend this meaning of Esau by contextualizing Hebrews 12 within other scripture that he can break the repetition and see that he is not damned; see Camden 151. Unlike earlier, dismissive readings of Grace Abounding, Camden’s analysis of the breakdown of this repetition reveals the dynamics of repetition. 148 The following conditions are discussed in great detail in William Law’s chapter on repentance; see Law 343. Law’s “broken and contrite heart” is based upon Psalms 51.17: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”
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Detestation of my past Sins, from a Sense of the goodness which I had tasted in this Case,
than I had in all my Sorrow before” (MF 290-91); and she sheds tears born of the
paradoxical state of a penitent: “I was cover’d in Shame and Tears for things past, and yet
had at the same time a secret surprizing Joy at the Prospect of becoming a true Penitent”
(MF 289). Moll fits the model of Law’s penitent, a model that was common to Anglicans
and Puritans alike in Defoe’s day.
There is only one qualification that Law makes about repentance to which Moll
does not fully comply. Law argues that true repentance can be found only when there is
“no more hope from a total despair of human help” (490). During the repentance
episode, Moll notes her friendlessness three times, yet Moll is never truly friendless.
Jemy and Mother Midnight continue to influence her life: her guilt over harming Jemy
has led to her sorrow for her sins, and the minister to whom she confesses these sins is
sent by Mother Midnight (MF 281-83). Moll is always an intersubjective individual who
relies heavily on others despite her ironic claims that she has no friends.
Like Moll, Defoe’s other characters experience some of the sorrows and joys of
repentance. Roxana notes a number of signs of true repentance, which include
considering her “Wickedness with Abhorrence” in regards to “the Corruption of Nature,
the Sin of [her] Life, as an Offence against God; as a thing odious to the Holiness of his
Being; as abusing his Mercy, and despising his Goodness” (R 129). However, she
continues to note that her own repentance does not allow her to see her sins “in their
proper Shape” or to view and have hope in her redeemer (R 129). Defoe’s other penitents
cry such tears of sorrow and joy, as in Colonel Jack: “his Face was ever smiling [...] and
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yet his Eyes had Tears standing in them, [...] for he had a delightful Sorrow” CJ 164-65),
and in Due Preparations for the Plague As well for Soul as Body: “no tears like those that
are raised by any humble sense of infinite, undeserved, forgiving grace; and no joy [...]
like the joy that is founded in sorrow, founded in repentance” (166). Undergoing this
paradoxical state shared by so many other penitents and would-be penitents transforms
Moll into a woman who accepts responsibility for her own actions and who sees herself
as more than a mere object subject to the whim of circumstance.
As Moll accepts responsibility, she bathes herself in the tears that will usher her
into her new life as a penitent Fate figure. These tears of repentance are not the hysterical
sobs that accompany her thoughts of horror and terror when she arrives in Newgate, for
those tears were of an insincere repentance, as Moll reasons, “it was repenting after the
Power of farther Sinning was taken away: I seem’d not to Mourn that I had committed
such Crimes, and for the Fact, as it was an offence against God and my Neighbor; but I
mourn’d that I was to be punish’d for it.”149 Moll also experiences a foretaste of
repentance when she feels sorry for manipulating the bank clerk: “I TURN’D from him,
for it fill’d my Eyes with Tears [...]: If ever I had a Grain of true Repentance for a vitious
and abominable Life for 24 Years past, it was then” (MF 182). Of course, Moll’s fate,
her unconscious desire to confront Newgate, does not allow her to experience true
repentance at these moments, but these intimations serve as precursors of what will come.
Likewise, tears accompany her reflections upon her thefts, but she “cast off all Remorse
149 MF 274. Roxana experiences a similar type of repentance when she relates that after the storm abides, she has “only such a Repentance as a Criminal has at the place of Execution, who is sorry, not that he has committed the Crime, as it is a Crime, but sorry that he is to be Hang¶d for it”; see R 129. Starr notes similar episodes in Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack; see Starr, explanatory 389.
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and Repentance” in order to continue to ply her trade (MF 207). The tears here may be
genuine, but they are not the tears that signify a rebirth through repentance. Unlike her
earlier tears, her tears of repentance reveal her shame and remorse for every sin she has
committed, her belief that God has made her repentance possible, and her joy in
redemption.
When Moll experiences her true repentance, she enters a paradoxical state
peculiar to repentance accounts, and she maintains other paradoxical tensions in her life.
In Newgate, she expresses the paradoxical state of a penitent: “”I was cover’d with
Shame and Tears for things past, and yet at the same time a secret surprizing Joy at the
Prospect of being a true Penitent” (MF 289). Another paradox associated with this
moment is the simultaneous sexuality and spirituality of the confession. Miller observes,
“Moll’s account of spiritual penetration […] is coded by sexual metaphor” in her reading
of Moll’s spiritual ecstasy (17), which Moll passionately conveys, “He reviv’d my Heart
[…] and so swift did my Thoughts circulate, and so high did the impression they made
upon me run, that I thought I cou’d freely have gone that Minute to Execution” (MF 289).
The sexual language combined with the psychological and spiritual language conveys the
impact this moment makes on her physical, mental, and spiritual self. The penitent
maintains a paradoxical tension by being both sorrowful and joyful and by experiencing
the sexual and the spiritual simultaneously; thus, the penitent is an overinclusive figure,
one who can accept seemingly contradictory realities simultaneously (Benjamin, Like
53), and one who can transcend the state of being “either/or” for a state that allows
multiple possibilities within a state of being “both/and” (Dimen, Sexuality 4).
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Even as Moll becomes a true penitent, elevated by her experience of simultaneous
shame and surprising joy, she becomes a Fate figure in the truest sense. All her life, she
has performed the roles of a Fate figure, but in this rebirth, she employs both Christian
and pagan conventions by describing her figurative birth via tears of repentance. She is
reborn through the minister, but it is her own conscious decision to repent that allows her
to experience the paradoxical shame and joy of this renewal; in effect, Moll delivers
herself into her new role that embodies both Christian and pagan elements. Some may
argue that the Christian repentance subjugates any traces of pagan elements in Moll’s
identity, for in the repentance scene, the fatal midwife is replaced by the minister, and the
maternal Fates are replaced by the paternal God. The amniotic fluid of the womb here
becomes the tears of penitence, which are the sign of a sinner’s rebirth. However, the
penitent’s ability to maintain the tension between joy and sorrow indicates that the
penitent Moll can maintain other tensions, including those between the pagan and the
providential.
The overinclusive mix of pagan and providential conventions in this episode of
Moll’s life indicates the powerful nature of her transformation. Erickson argues that this
scene transforms Moll’s nature from an equivocal into a unified one. Moll has always
been at once one entity or quality and its exact opposite: an orphan and a little
gentlewoman, a wife and a whore to the Colchester brothers, a widow with no fortune
believed by her brother/husband to be a woman of fortune, a “happy but unhappy”
mistress (MF 120), a “Widow bewitch’d, [who] had a Husband, and no Husband” (MF
64), a mother who “would see the Child, and […] not see the Child” (MF 175), and a
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thief capable of committing “a Robbery and no Robbery” (MF 254). Newgate brings
Moll to a state in which she is nothing more than her surroundings, a near cipher who
then takes on one unequivocal role: that of the penitent (Erickson 66). Certainly, she
does unify her identity, but as a penitent, Moll’s unequivocal nature still allows for
multiple possibilities. Moll unifies her narrative not because she plays only one role in
her life but because she owns multiple aspects and roles, thus unifying them into one
multi-faceted character. She is both a sorrowful penitent who rejoices in her salvation
and a Fate figure in control of her own destiny. As a Fate figure, she deceives others and
manipulates them for her own gain, and she operates in the key fatal roles as a mother,
midwife, and governess.
Whether viewed as a Providence figure or a Fate figure, Moll becomes an agent
capable of controlling her life and that of others; however, Moll need not be labeled as
either one or the other type of figure. After her rebirth, Moll unites the providential and
the pagan. She unifies the two controlling forces in her personhood: she is at once the
sorrowful penitent and the manipulative Fate figure. The repentance scene, with its
Christian conventions of tears, repentance, grief, and sorrow, is intermingled with the
pagan conventions of midwifery, controlling one’s destiny, and manipulating the lives of
others. This manipulation is not limited to the negative connotation that some lend the
term, for it serves as a means of rescuing others.
After her rebirth through repentance, Moll takes control over her life and the lives
of others. She redirects Jemy’s decision by confronting him and convincing him to
submit to transportation rather than hanging. Convincing an indolent gentleman is no
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easy task, but Moll relates, “I treated him with such a Sincerity and Affection as
overcame him; that he would take my Advice, and would strive to submit to his Fate, in
hope of having the comfort of my Assistance, and of so faithful a Counsellor, and such a
Companion in his Misery” (MF 304). As a Fate figure, Moll controls Jemy through
assistance, counseling, and companionship. He submits his will to hers in a moment that
defies gender polarity and empowers Moll with the ability to make decisions concerning
his very life.150 Moll no longer must fear being thrown in a madhouse for disobeying a
man’s commands; she has been reborn within the matrix of Mother Newgate, delivered
by the ministrations of Mother Midnight and her agents, and “become another Body”
who is capable of bearing, delivering, and guiding others (MF 281).
A PENITENT FATE FIGURE “PERFECTLY CHANG’D AND BECOME ANOTHER
BODY”
Moll becomes the Fate figure for whom she has quested and regains her true self
through rebirth. Erickson argues that Moll’s unfulfilled destiny and her actual identity
merge in the concluding pages of her story, for “her new self is a regenerated version of
the innocent child (associated with her ‘True Name’) who brings fresh life to a new
world” (67). Because he joins Moll’s destiny to confront Newgate with her desire to
150 Moll’s offer of a choice to Jemy provides an interesting comparison to a choice in The Canterbury Tales, in which the wife of the knight in Alison of Bath’s tale yields sovereignty to his wife: “My lady and my love, and wyf so dere, / I put me in youre wyse governance”; see Chaucer 1230-31. Both Jemy and this knight have a choice between submitting either to their wives or to death. Moll herself provides an interesting contrast to the Wife of Bath. Although both Moll and Alison have five husbands, the two differ in their treatment of men, particularly the men with whom they end their tales. Moll recognizes Jemy as a man with similar desires to hers and lets him choose how to fulfill them. Alison forces her fifth husband, Jankin, to submit to her will: “He yaf me al the brydel in myn hond, / to han the governance of hous and lond, / and of his tongue and of his hond also”; see Chaucer 813-15.
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become her true self, Erickson reads Moll’s destiny and identity differently than Starr,
who reads Moll as having “a stronger sense of her unfulfilled destiny than of her actual
identity” (Starr, Introduction xviii). Erickson reads Moll as a woman who recognizes her
true self as the pure, innocent self that saved her mother from being hanged; her quest for
Newgate is also a quest to restore this sense of self (49). Starr reads her story as a quest
narrative in which Moll’s quest is for “a lost familial paradise”; she is less aware of her
actual identity than her desire to find a family (Introduction xii). Both quests are part of
Moll’s story; her desire to become a “natural” mother and be her true self finally coincide
at the end of her quest.
After her rebirth in Newgate, Moll becomes the Fate figure she has sought all her
life. She takes ownership of her past but parts with such markers of her days of thieving
as the watch she had stolen. Giving this watch to Humphry signifies her transition from
the midwife-thief to the mother figure she had sought in her youth. Newgate allows her
to become more than the innocent child Erickson reads as her essential self (49); it
transforms her into a Fate figure capable of fulfilling a number of figurative roles as a
midwife who delivers herself and others from Newgate, a mother who soothes her
children, and a midwife-governess who controls others. The regenerative language in the
concluding pages of her story reveals how she has fulfilled her destiny and begun anew:
she and Jemy “begin the World upon a new foundation” (MF 303); they “live as new
People in a new World” (MF 304); and Moll concludes, “In the Sixty first Year of my
Age, I launch’d out into a new World” (MF 312). In this “New World,” Sim argues,
Moll is her real self, “the energetic, possessive individualist busily stockpiling goods in
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the Americas” (157). Certainly she is the individualist to a degree, just as much as she is
the woman Starr and Erickson see, but she is also a woman who continues to maintain,
even renew, her bonds to others. She continues to maintain fatal roles by delivering
herself and Jemy from Newgate and mothering those around her. Her quest for a mother
figure has transfigured into a quest to be a mother figure, and that quest is fulfilled after
her regeneration in Newgate.
After her rebirth, Moll acts as a mother to others. She has been an infanticidal
mother in the figurative sense all of her life and has been called unnatural, but now she
comforts her children.151 As Moll leaves England, Mother Midnight “cryes after [her]
like a Child” (MF 309). After Moll delivers Jemy from Newgate, he is reduced to a
childish state while being transported to America, as Moll notes: “he was as much at a
loss as a Child what to do with himself, or with what he had, but by Directions” (MF
311). As a Fate figure, Moll mothers her mother figure and her husband. Here, the
asymmetrical balance between mother-daughter and male-female roles is reversed,
allowing Moll to birth, control, and potentially harm her figurative children. The ever-
resourceful Moll is calm even though she is cutting her ties with her governess and
entrusting herself with the indolent Jemy; here, she proves herself capable of nurturing
and guiding others.
Moll furthermore fulfills her fate by restoring herself to the state of a “natural”
mother by reacquainting herself with her son, Humphry. Like her own mother, Moll has
151 Her brother-husband, Humphry, first accuses Moll of being unnatural to their children, and Moll rationalizes that she is not unnatural because she does not abandon her child by Jemy to a nurse who may kill him through abuse or neglect; see MF 91, 176.
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been a whore and a thief reborn through Newgate, Virginia, and repentance. She can
start life anew knowing that she was delivered of Newgate by her Mother Midnight’s
help, and she is aware that she also saved herself by adopting the role of a penitent. As a
penitent survivor of Newgate who has owned her experiences that would make her seem
“unnatural” or nonmaternal, she can now act as a natural mother to Humphry.
Restoring her natural motherhood has two consequences for Moll. The first
seems to be in accordance with her mercenary self: she can gain access to the inheritance
her mother had set aside for her (MF 323). The second consequence is her reunion with
her son, who restores this inheritance to her and further reinforces her power as a mother
figure: “[Humphry] comes directly up to me, kisses me, took me in his Arms, and
embrac’d me with so much Passion, that he could not speak, but I could feel his breast
heave and throb like a Child that Cries, but Sobs, and cannot cry it out” (MF 333). This
reunion “reintegrates Moll’s maternity” through her connection to the person of a once-
abandoned child (Miller 18). Starr reads this episode as an unrealistic, mythic moment in
which Moll fulfills her quest for a stable familial unit.152 It certainly is mythic, and she
has gained a stable family life at long last, but it is mythic foremost because this
restoration of motherhood reinforces Moll’s role as a Fate figure. As a mother, Moll
proves herself far more powerful than any self-abnegating, passive model of maternity.
152 Starr, introduction xi. Lerenbaum argues that the scene is not as unrealistic as Starr and others contend, for Moll is merely responding to her son, now a gallant young man, as most contemporary women would. She is not concerned about him solely because he allows her access to wealth; she is pleased to see that her son has grown into a handsome gentleman. Lerenbaum also does not read Moll’s acceptance of Humphry as contradictory to her earlier decisions to leave her children, who are merely unpleasant burdens, because “Moll’s attitudes towards her children are readily comprehensible in terms of her sex, her age, and her culture: she is indifferent to them when both she and they are young, she is concerned about their welfare but uninterested in rearing them herself, and she responds to them when they are thriving or when they are the children of men whom she cares for. [...] her attitudes and actions fall well within the range of normal, feminine behaviour”; see Lerenbaum 111.
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By modeling herself after the Fates, she establishes herself as a woman who can birth a
child, allot his portion, and sever herself from that child in a number of literal and
figurative ways. Moll is one of the most powerful mothers in literature, for she at once
represents the mother who bears, nurtures, and guides others, much as she distances
herself and severs her ties with others.
At the end of her narrative, Moll favors the nurturing mother role over the
infanticidal role. Her favoring of one role over the other is most obvious in the key
episode of exchange with her son. Once she is reconciled with her son, she judges him “a
Man of Sense [...] [who] needed no Direction from me[,]” for he prudently decides not to
tell his ailing father about Moll’s return (MF 334). She rewards this discretion by giving
him a present of one of the gold watches she had stolen in her days as a thief (MF 337).
Moll gives her son the key to understanding her past as a midwife-thief by giving him the
object she once so deftly delivered from a pregnant woman. At one time, Moll preferred
possessing a watch to possessing a child, for it was far less of a burden and far more
valuable a commodity.153 Now, she freely gives that emblem of theft and value to the
child she once abandoned. Moll restores her natural motherhood by exchanging the past
relationship with an object for the present relationship with her child.
As a Fate figure, Moll assists the rebirth of Jemy and herself, delivers herself and
Jemy into a new world, and continues to control the lives of others. Her ability to control
others is perpetuated by Mother Midnight’s parting gift to Moll: three serving women
sent to America along with Moll’s cargo. They are “lusty Wenches, [...] suitable enough
153 On the value of watches and infants in the novel, see Erickson 60-61.
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to the Place, and to the Work we had for them to do; one of which happen’d to come
double, having been got with Child by one of the Seamen in the Ship” (MF 340). Moll is
in charge of these three women who call to mind the Fates, and with the baby of one girl
on its way, Moll continues her role as a midwife in the New World, even as she continues
to be a mother.
A penitent Fate figure, a joyful, sorrowful woman whose spirituality is expressed
in sexual terms and whose motherhood includes nurturing and infanticidal roles, Moll
embodies the paradoxical tensions that exist within an individual. Because she can
maintain tensions, Moll need not subordinate Fate to Providence or woman to man. Just
as she can be both joyful and sorrowful, she can be both a Fate figure and a penitent.
There is more to her than being either a subordinate child of Providence, mother, and
wife, or a controlling sister of Fate, mother, and mistress; Moll’s true self is her story, and
she has played many roles as well as being a subject to Providence and the eighteenth-
century model of motherhood. As a heroine, she remains multi-faceted, as any number of
clues in the text attest. Moll shows that any woman who comes to terms with
intersubjective agency can possess such a seemingly paradoxical title as penitent Fate
figure. Moll is a Fate figure and a subject in her own right.
The patterns of survival Moll develops through the aid of women and the mutual
recognition she builds with Jemy and Mother Midnight have brought her far. She has
pursued her quests to be a gentlewoman and to find a mother figure; learned of the
marriage market; confronted her birth mother; been a whore, fortune-hunter, and thief;
confronted her origin in Newgate; and in this final stage, employed all of the advice,
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guidance, and assistance given her over the years to repent and renew herself within the
matrix that originally bore her. At the end of her story, she becomes a penitent who owns
all of her experience and a Fate figure who governs herself and others.
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CHAPTER VI
TEARS OF MISERY: ROXANA CONFRONTS HER FATE AND HER SELF
With Moll Flanders and Roxana, Defoe creates two vastly different stories within
the context of Fate and Providence. Moll achieves mutual recognition with other subjects
while Roxana disintegrates into relationships of domination and submission. Moll
succeeds because she takes ownership of her past by telling her secrets and owning all of
her experiences; Roxana fails because she splits her self and her story, thus disowning her
own experiences. Moll sees Jemy while in Newgate and is moved to repent by taking
ownership of her picaresque past; Roxana sees her past self in Susan but disowns this self
by refusing to take ownership of her self as a whore and an infanticidal mother. Moll
accepts contradictory roles in her life as integral to her self; Roxana refuses to do so.
Moll maintains tension between apparent opposites by owning her socially accepted roles
as wife and mother and the socially abhorrent roles of thief and whore. Doing so allows
her to maintain other tensions in her life, particularly the tensions between male and
female, self and other, Providence and Fate. Roxana, however, tries to privilege one role
over the other. She can only be a whore or a wife in the end of her story; to disown the
former role, she destroys her daughter through Amy’s actions, thus destroying one aspect
of her maternal role, the nurturing mother, while becoming the infanticidal mother she
tries to deny. Defoe makes the contrasts between the two women obvious through their
individual fates. Moll’s fate is manifest in her unconscious desires to reclaim her past, to
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acknowledge from what she was born by confronting Newgate, and to be reborn as a
penitent. Roxana’s fate is to disown her past by denying her daughter, consequently
destroying her daughter and her self through Amy’s machinations. Their fates are also
bound to their willingness to own their experiences and their many selves; Moll shares
her secrets and owns her past experience with others; Roxana does neither.
These sharp contrasts between two women who suffer many similar
circumstances reveal a positive and negative side to Defoe’s myth of intersubjectivity.
Even at their most autonomous, both women are subject to the influence of others.
Should they deny others, they would be destroyed. They need mutual recognition from
others to fully assert themselves and be recognized as like subjects, or else they will be
caught in the trap of complementarity, which splits everyone’s roles into either doer or
done-to, either dominant one or submissive one. Roxana falls into this trap by splitting
the various aspects of her self, accepting those aspects she wishes to embrace, and
projecting those aspects she wishes to deny onto others.
Roxana wishes to contain the knowledge of her years as a courtesan and her
infanticidal decisions by hiding her self from her own daughter and confining her self
from society. Because she invests so much power in her secrets, she will do almost
anything to keep them to herself. In the end, she is destroyed by her secrets after missing
every opportunity to repent as Moll does by confessing her sins, thus making her story
known, and acknowledging her fatal influence on others. She does not intertwine Fate
and Providence as does Moll but limits herself to fatal roles. Her inability to relate to
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others as like subjects leaves her unable to maintain paradoxical tensions in her life: in no
way can she become a penitent Fate figure.
This chapter concerns how Roxana, unlike Moll, fails to own her past, her secrets,
and her very origins. Moll does so successfully through the aid of Mother Midnight and
Jemy and her willingness to take ownership of her story. Roxana fails to do so because
she has dominated others or submitted to them and her failure to “own up” to her past
experiences and past roles. Moll’s revelation of her connectivity to others saves her from
hanging, and more significantly, from living her last days without taking ownership of
her past or becoming a penitent, whereas Roxana’s confrontations with Susan and Amy’s
machinations in the last section of the narrative limit her to a world of misery and guilt.
Roxana’s fate is due to both psychological and spiritual failure. Psychologically,
she fails to be an intersubjective woman because she splits her self from others, splits
vital aspects of her self from her self, and fails to be overinclusive. She tries to keep her
past a secret, but the cost is her daughter’s murder, which, in turn, is the most immediate
cause of Roxana’s misery and guilt. Spiritually, she fails because she does not act upon
the guidance of Providence even though she admits she is aware of its influence on her
life. Although ashamed of her past, she does not own it through a repentance narrative as
Moll does. She frequently misinterprets providential signs in her life, and she sheds tears
throughout her life, but they are not the tears of a penitent who grieves for her sins and
weeps joyfully for her salvation. Both failures result in a life of misery, the only possible
consequence for a woman who refuses to acknowledge others as subjects who are
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important to the shaping of her subjectivity and who fails to follow the conventions of
penitence.
“I’LL KEEP THEM ASUNDER, IF IT BE POSSIBLE”: THE CONSEQUENCES OF
SPLITTING IN ROXANA
Roxana’s status as a reprobate is due to her psychological shortcomings. She will
never truly repent as Moll does because she has split her past self from her present self.
Moll shares her secrets and owns her past experience; Roxana does neither, making
herself a woman torn between two selves: past and present. Ultimately, this splitting
destroys her when her protective complement, Amy, acts on what she assumes to be
Roxana’s desire to murder Susan. Murdering Susan destroys the physical marker of
Roxana’s days of infanticide and whoring, but this act also destroys Roxana, who endures
guilt and misery throughout her final days. Reduced to a grief-stricken reprobate,
Roxana suffers because of her inabilities to be overinclusive and to be intersubjective by
relating to others as subjects. She may be able to play the deterministic Fate figure, but
unlike Moll, she cannot see how others are also Fate figures with as much influence over
her as she has over them. She does not view others as like subjects, thus she acts as the
omnipotent child who believes only one subject can be in control and others must submit
to her will as would any objects (Benjamin, Like 43).
Roxana’s dominating will does not allow her to realize that she needs to be
dependent upon others in order to be independent. She wants to imagine herself, and
herself only, as in control of her destiny. But the split is not only between her self and
others, it manifests in her understanding of the various roles she plays. She believes she
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cannot be both the infanticidal mother and the nurturing mother; in fact, she refuses to
play either role directly, for she performs both roles by proxy through Amy. She also
cannot be both the courtesan who entertained the king and a good wife to the Dutch
merchant; the split between good woman and bad woman is too clear-cut to her. As the
good wife in her later years, she fears any of her past coming to light, and she tries to
distance herself from the past by having her agents separate her from what she considers
her wicked deeds. In the end, she is truly alone, a woman who cannot relate to others as
subjects because her own subjectivity is split. She is a masterpiece of failure, a
cautionary tale for those who would deny their mutual bonds to others in favor of
complementary, objective relationships.
The continual interweaving of such pairs as past/present and self/other reveals
Roxana is situated in an intersubjective mythos, but she refuses to be a part of it. She is
an objective woman immersed in the realm of titles, wealth, and others who submit to
her, but with the constant emphasis on guilt, repentance, and conscience in her narrative,
her story unquestionably remains Defoe’s greatest narrative of psychological depth and
his best depiction of the spiritual trauma of the reprobate. Roxana’s reflection throughout
her retelling of her story and the various psychological defense mechanisms she employs
to distance herself from her wicked deeds reveal a protagonist who is defined by
psychological self-searching. Moglen goes so far as to state, “In his protagonist’s
struggle to understand the irrational desires by which she is driven, in her inability to
divorce herself from her past, Defoe does manage to create the impression of psychic
depth for the first time in his novels” (46). Moll and Robinson suffer psychological and
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spiritual trauma, but the degree of pain manifest in Roxana is far greater. Roxana is not
the only of Defoe’s narratives with “psychic depth,” but it is the greatest.
The intensity of Roxana’s inner struggles with guilt and misery reveals that the
narrative is as much about the psychological experience of the early modern individual as
it is about the external realities of Defoe’s day. Moglen reads the novel as a form
indebted two mutually defining traditions: realism and fantasy.154 She reads both
defining features in Defoe’s narratives, and she observes the predominance of the latter
over the former in Roxana: “the material success [Roxana] is given in the realistic fiction
is undermined when the reappearance of her children motivates an intense fantastic
narrative” (Moglen 20). This fantastic narrative should be read as both psychological and
spiritual, and no small amount of criticism is devoted to either, and in some cases, both
readings.155 Fantastic elements take over realism in Roxana: “the fantastic narrative
continually interrupts the picaresque and, after the protagonist’s marriage, subverts it
completely by focusing on Roxana’s feelings of guilt and shame” (Moglen 46). As in
Moll Flanders, there is a shift from the episodic picaresque adventures from which the
154 Moglen 1-2. As in Watt’s and McKeon’s earlier studies of the novel, Moglen’s work reveals how realism helps define the novel, but she also reveals the fantastic component of its construction. She further differentiates her reading by asserting that “the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” shifting the emphasis of the novel’s birth from capitalism and the rise of the middle class to the construction of gender; see Moglen 1. The most influential readings of capitalism and the middle class as the primary origins of the novel remain Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 1987). 155 Although any number of works may be noted here, the strongest, most-noted psychological readings include Castle’s “‘Amy, Who Knew My Disease’: A Psychosexual Pattern in Defoe’s Roxana” and Hentzi’s “Holes in the Heart: Moll Flanders, Roxana, and 'Agreeable Crime'.” On spiritual interpretations, Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim, Sim’s Negotiations with Paradox, and Starr’s Spirituality are amongst the best readings. Sim offers an inclusive reading by applying Marxist and psychoanalytic methodologies to a number of Bunyan’s and Defoe’s narratives in the context of spiritual autobiography and Calvinism.
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protagonist learns little but how to survive to a moral and psychological narrative in
which her self and salvation are on the line.156
Roxana fails psychologically and spiritually for two different but related reasons:
her bonds to others are objectively based upon complementary relations rather than
intersubjectively based on mutual relations, and her repentance is not attended by a
complete submission to God. In both cases, Roxana fails to recognize her self, whether
in psychological or soteriological terms, as dependent upon others. To be intersubjective,
one must recognize one’s independence is dependent upon recognition of and by other
independent subjects (Benjamin, Bonds 33); to be penitent, one must be wholly
dependent upon God (Law 490-91). Roxana often admits her dependence upon her
agents, as when she is lost “in the utmost Horror and Confusion” after she dismisses Amy
or anytime she is without an agent to do her bidding (R 318); however, she does not wish
to admit that they have desires much as she does. Roxana, like anyone trapped within the
mental state of omnipotence, is unable to understand how “the other person does not want
what [she] want[s], do what [she] say[s]”; instead, she assumes the other wants want she
wants, but she also deposits her “repudiated aspects [of her self] in the other, using it to
represent what is despised or intolerable [...] and so necessarily casts the other in the role
of opposite” (Benjamin, Shadow 86). Although she assumes others must want what she
wants, she also makes them her opposites, thus establishing a paradoxical relationship
which denies others will or agency but holds them accountable for what she, the
156 Kietzman reads a similar shift from the picaresque in Moll Flanders; however, her emphasis is on a shift to “serial subjectivity,” a convention of criminal biography that allows the criminal to possess multiple selves; see Kietzman 697.
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omnipotent child, does or wants done. As an omnipotent child who wants everything to
work her way, Roxana is trapped within a state of denial, a state of being unable to own
reality (Benjamin, Like 179), particularly the reality that others are like her because they
are also desiring subjects yet different because their desires vary from hers. Her fantasy
is an inversion of this model; others are different from her because they are separate
objects and like her only because she believes they want exactly what she wants.
Analyzing Roxana’s relationships to others reveals a picture of the autonomous,
self-created individual. She maintains paradoxes in her life, particularly the notion that
others desire what she desires even though they are only objects to be used by her.
However, she does not maintain paradoxes that help sustain mutual relationships. If she
were situated in a text based strictly on material values, she would be a success.
However, her guilt, shame, and misery reveal that she knows she is not living in a world
where one must do whatever is necessary to survive. She realizes that she is accountable
for her mistreatment of others, but she refuses to do as Moll does and accept others as
like subjects who can help her. Her reduction of Amy to a mere complement upon whom
she can project what she despises about her self and her refusal to marry the Dutch
merchant, who offers her a relationship based upon mutual affection, leave her incapable
of the realization that Moll makes upon seeing Jemy in Newgate. Amy’s place by her
side and the Dutch merchant’s reappearance in Roxana’s life trigger no realization that
she must be held accountable for how she has harmed others. All her life, she has refused
to maintain mutual bonds with others. She has always dominated or submitted to the
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other, and in less drastic terms, asserted herself or recognized the other, but she has never
been capable of doing both at once.
Roxana’s inability to be overinclusive, particularly her inabilities to be capable of
both assertion and recognition at once and to accept seemingly contradictory roles such
as mother and mistress simultaneously, damns her. Psychologically, she is trapped with a
state of omnipotence in which all relationships are complementary. Spiritually, she is
caught within a state of reprobation. In both cases, she refuses to own her past, and most
particularly, her past as it relates to others. Homer O. Brown observes, “The book ends
in the uncertainty of the unspeakable. It is either the most resolved of all the dialectical
struggles between self and other in Defoe’s fiction or the most unresolvable” (582). Sim
attacks this reading in what will hopefully be a growing trend: “Such criticism
underestimates the work’s value quite drastically. Rather than Brown’s ‘either/or’
reading of the text I would substitute a reformulated inclusive one: Roxana is both the
most resolved of all the dialectical struggles in Defoe’s fiction and the most irresolvable”
(159). Roxana cannot be resolved because the protagonist cannot come to terms with her
self; she is caught in a state of misery, and there she will remain; however, her story is
resolved because the outcome could be no different given her actions. The only
resolution to her murder by proxy of Susan is her consequent suffering.
The text can be both unresolved and resolved because it follows two patterns to
their inevitable conclusions: psychologically, the person trapped in a state of
omnipotence will end up destroying everything around her, and, in the end, herself,
because she will have nothing left to support her. Roxana is left with nothing in the end
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because “omnipotence […] means the complete assimilation of the other into the self”
and this complete loss of tension between self and other is a metaphorical death of the
self (Benjamin, Like 191). Roxana’s story, then, is a story of two figurative deaths: that
of the self and that of the soul. Psychologically, she is condemned to a world of
omnipotence at the cost of mutual bonds with others. Spiritually, she must be damned
because she is a reprobate par excellence.
Roxana’s status as a reprobate who lives in a providential world but refuses to
accept it mirrors her status as a woman who lives within a world of intersubjectivite
possibility but clings to the myth of autonomy. Sim observes that as a reprobate, she is
damned from the start (15), but she suffers as one of the elect due to three characteristics:
“anxiety, [a] sense of sin and [a] sense of repentance” (160). Moglen comments upon the
paradox Roxana finds herself trapped within as a result of her splitting of her past self
from her present:
Roxana cannot overcome a vexed relation to a past in which she has
traded her body and abdicated her maternal responsibilities. Her pain is
reflected in recurrent feelings of guilt about her ‘life of wickedness’ and in
her contradictory sense of herself both as a ‘sorrowful penitent,’ haunted
by memory, and as one who, unable to repent, is possessed by a ‘sullen,
silent kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears,
and which was, therefore, much the worse to bear’ [(R 129)]. Because her
moral urges are not animated by religious faith, they assume a
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psychological reference that embroils them in an obsessive, repetitive, and
self-destructive dynamic. (47)
As a reprobate, Roxana is unique. She has the capacity to feel guilt and remorse, but she
fails to own her past. Gabbard explains that Puritans often addressed this ownership in
terms of accounting and taking stock, and Roxana, “because she cannot take stock of
herself or accomplish a serious personal reckoning, […] cannot bring this spiritual
autobiography to a meaningful close” (248). She does end her story, but it’s not the
conventional close of a penitent’s autobiography; it’s the apparently unresolved account
of a reprobate’s life, one that has not been organized to the conventions of spiritual
autobiography. Her failure to own her past and take stock of it dooms her to an
inescapable cycle of guilt and misery. No matter how much she suffers as one of the
elect does, she cannot be a penitent without owning her past. Likewise, she is part of an
intersubjective mythos, but she cannot be intersubjective without accepting her ties to
others from her past and present.
Roxana is a reprobate damned from the beginning, and in psychological terms,
she cannot maintain the paradoxical tensions necessary for mutual recognition. No more
can Roxana maintain the paradoxical tensions in Calvinist beliefs of the elect and the
reprobate than she can maintain such tensions between her self and others. Because she
splits the self and other so early in her narrative, during the bedding scene, and refuses to
bridge this split, she cannot accept any other intersubjective paradoxes in her life. Defoe
brilliantly portrays the psychology of the reprobate as the person who cannot own her life
because she cannot overcome the paradoxes of intersubjectivity or the paradox of
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reprobation: “the individual at once predestined to damnation, yet responsible for her
own sins” (Sim 143).
Roxana must be read as a psychological and spiritual failure. Although Defoe
stirs the reader’s sympathy by having Roxana submit to necessity, he holds his heroine
accountable for her actions because, unlike Moll, she does not stop once necessity no
longer motivates her actions. Her repentance and guilt is born from her conscience, but
because she refuses to acknowledge her bonds to others as subjects as does Moll and
because she does not submit to Providence by owning her past and acknowledging that
God has made her repentance possible, she fails to be intersubjective or penitent. Why
she does neither is due to her splitting of self and other, her persistence in shrouding her
past in secrecy, and her refusal to own her past.
“LET’S HEAR THE STORY OF ROXANA; IT WILL DIVERT MY LADY, I’M SURE”:
SPLITTING, DIVERSION, AND DESTRUCTION
Splitting manifests in a number of ways in Roxana’s narrative, particularly
between her self and others and in her role in the narrative present as a good wife as
opposed to her past roles as an infanticidal mother and a mistress. Although Roxana says
“,¶ll keep them asunder, if it be possible” in regards to her mingling her money with the
Dutch merchant’s wealth (R 259), this desire to divide applies to all aspects of her life.
She wishes to divorce herself from past roles she has played and deny the importance of
others in her life. By denying her connection to those who remind her of her past,
Roxana maintains complementary relationships based upon splitting, in which “the
subject […] fills the position of the other […] not with an outside, differentiated being
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but with the self’s disowned, unconscious experience, which appears as a threatening
Other” (Benjamin, Like 18). The other is the daughter who threatens to expose Roxana’s
secret and who embodies Roxana’s disowned past. Roxana, because she wishes to
divorce herself from her past identities, cannot move quite so easily as Moll, who always
knows who she is by maintaining her name in secrecy so that she may move from one
identity to another without losing a sense of her self (Erickson 49-50). The past haunts
Roxana, reminding her of who she does not want wish to be. Because she splits her self
into past and present, good and bad, she denies herself the ability to be a unified whole
defined by all of the roles she has played and all of the people who have been a part of
her life. She desperately wishes to keep her past self secret so she may not be associated
with the infanticidal mother and the courtesan christened Roxana.
Although Roxana is surrounded by a number of markers from her past, only one
threatens her. The Turkish dress, emblem of her days as Roxana, mistress to the king,
can easily be stowed in a trunk. There, it remains harmless unless someone from her past
should see her wear it. Amy is tied inextricably to Roxana’s past, but because she
submits to Roxana’s will, she never threatens her mistress. She can act as a bridge to the
past, maintaining Roxana’s children by proxy and otherwise serving her mistress (R 188-
89, 266). Even the Dutch merchant is safe, for he remembers Roxana the whore but
never reproaches her for it. The dangerous element from her past is Susan, who is
unwilling to submit to Roxana’s desire to keep her past a secret. She threatens Roxana
by searching England and Holland in the tradition of “Knight-Errantry” (R 308),
haunting her “like an Evil Spirit” (R 310), and pursuing her “like a Hound” (R 317).
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Such dedication on Susan’s part is reminiscent of Aeschylus’s depiction of the Erinyes
pursuing Orestes; the Greek avengers of the murdered compare well to Susan, who as the
abandoned daughter, has suffered figurative infanticide and wants her due: ownership by
and of her mother. The threat of Susan revealing Roxana’s past is so great to Roxana
because she has divorced herself from her past and does not want to assume the
contrasting roles of wife/mistress and nurturing mother/infanticidal mother.
Defoe brings Roxana’s past and present together with Susan, a physical
embodiment of two acts Roxana wishes to keep concealed. The split is challenged just
when Roxana thinks she has escaped her past: “She appears as the self she would like to
be […] at the same time she is confronted by her daughter who bears Roxana’s true
name” (H. Brown 581). Susan reminds Roxana of her infanticidal self and her licentious
self; ironically, she combines these two selves, mother and whore, that would normally
be split in the early modern culture, for she recognizes Roxana by the Turkish garb (R
206), which “paradoxically becomes the marker of [Roxana’s] maternal identity”
(Nussbaum 32). Herein lies the problem: Roxana cannot accept being both a mother and
a mistress.
Roxana refuses to own both roles because she roots her self in a world of either/or
relationships. Conway notes that Roxana does not share Susan’s fantasy of reconciliation
because she lives within “a world that renders the terms ‘whore’ and ‘mother’ mutually
exclusive” (229). Accepting such roles as mutually exclusive is easy for two reasons.
Benjamin notes “opposites are to some extent unavoidable because of the inherent
psychic tendency to split” (Shadow 24). Such splitting offers comfort, for the subject can
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easily define who she is by claiming “I am this, not that,” but such splitting creates a
dualism in which one term, in this case, “mother” or “whore,” is privileged over the other
(Dimen, Sexuality 113, 7). In dualistic systems, hierarchies are inevitable; dualism
becomes monism, and monism dictates that one set of terms is superior to the other
(Dimen, Sexuality 7). The subject who limits herself to such a system of relationships
will always be forced to view her choices, experiences, relationships, and very self as
either good or bad.
Roxana and Moll both live in a world that forces them to choose between material
success and raising their offspring, and they both choose the former, whether driven by
necessity, ambition, or the desire to be marketable. Moll eventually reconciles the split,
but Roxana never does. The split is obvious to many different readers. Nussbaum notes,
“The impossibility of reconciling maternity with sexual freedom is painfully clear in
Roxana” (40). Bowers adds maternity is a “threat to economic and psychic autonomy” in
Moll Flanders, Roxana, and other early modern narratives (100). To maintain her
autonomy, Roxana must divorce herself from motherhood, and she must maintain the
split between the past and the present. Because being a mistress is part of her past, she
denies this aspect of her life, too. Once the role of the mistress is denied, she is free to
accept the role of the mother as Moll does at the end of her story, but there is a catch.
She discovers she must disown her self as a mistress and a mother because her daughter
Susan embodies both roles she would deny.
The chief reason Roxana must keep her past split from her present is her inability
to accept two realities at once; she cannot be overinclusive. Her inability to accept
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both/and relationships extends back to the bedding episode, in which she assumes the role
of the dominant mistress, the omnipotent child, and Amy assumes the role of the
submissive but protective mother who acts only for her child. Moglen reads “Roxana’s
psychic fragmentation and ultimate breakdown” in her relationship to Amy, for here the
splitting begins, and in her relationship to Susan, for here the split cannot be maintained
(48). The splitting is not just an issue of society forcing women to choose between the
role of mother or autonomous woman; it is directly tied to Roxana’s desire to make
others submit to her will. Her will is to be a good wife to the Dutch merchant and to live
with the material spoils of her career as a mistress without having to live with the
negative consequences of her past actions: figurative infanticide and her reputation as “a
meer Roxana” (R 182).
Keeping her past a secret becomes Roxana’s greatest desire, and Susan becomes
her greatest challenge to this desire in the final episodes of the story. At times, it appears
as if Roxana wants to reestablish her bonds with her children from her brewer husband.
She expresses this desire in conventional terms of affection: “I was too tender a Mother
[…] to let this poor Girl go about the World drudging” (R 197), and she reacts with much
“Affection” when she sees her daughter Susan and her other daughter (R 277, 329).
However, her affections are constrained by her desire to keep the past a secret. She does
not want her children to reproach her with her past (R 205), much as she once did not
want Amy to reproach her for being a whore (R 47). She does not want her children to
know “what a Mother [they] had, and what a Life she liv’d” for she does not want them
to “hate [their] Mother” (R 204). Roxana simply wishes to forget the past, a desire that
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interferes with her repentance and originates from her belief that she must be in control of
others at all times. Lying and denial lead to harming herself, as Rich observes, “In lying
to others, we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person,
and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or
present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives” (188). Not
only does Roxana lose faith in her life, she loses her very sense of self. Essentially,
motherhood is death to her, because “the reappearance of her daughter signals the death
of Roxana’s dreams, and Susan’s identification of Roxana seals the daughter’s doom”
(Bowers 122). Susan first destroys Roxana’s dreams of keeping her past a secret; her
death later destroys any chance Roxana has of taking ownership of the daughter named
for her, her infanticides, and her life as a courtesan.
Susan threatens Roxana’s control because she embodies Roxana’s past and she
truly is her mother’s daughter. She is one of the daughters abandoned at the beginning of
the story, and she is one of Roxana’s maids from her days at Pall Mall. She has seen
Roxana in the Turkish garb which fixed the name Roxana upon her mother, so once she
realizes that the lady she once served as a maid is her own mother, she connects the
infanticidal mother with the licentious courtesan. This knowledge makes Susan the
physical embodiment of the two aspects of her past Roxana most wishes to deny.
Furthermore, Susan carries one of the most powerful markers of selfhood, as Roxana
comments in an aside, “for she was my own Name” (R 205). Susan truly is her mother’s
daughter, for she tries to force her will on others in her search for her mother just as
Roxana forces her will on others to gain what she desires. Backscheider notes that Susan
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can read others much as Roxana reads Susan’s ability to see through her disguise: “She
knows Roxana is her mother, […]. Not even the most severe and modest dress she
[Roxana] can adopt, the Quaker’s, can hide her from Susan’s reading” (Ambition 199).
Both women have fatal, uncanny powers of perception, and both women keep their
readings secret during the episode when they meet on the ship for the first time. Like her
mother, Susan is also vain, for once she is provided for, she appears “dressed […] very
handsomely indeed” (R 198). Selfish, perceptive, and vain, she is Roxana; rather, she is
Susan—Roxana’s own name. The only difference between mother and daughter is
Roxana allows others to act for her and Susan acts on her own. She actively seeks to
discover her mother; this desire ultimately leads to her destruction, and the ruin of
Roxana, as well.
Susan’s active pursuit of her mother threatens the secrets Roxana so wishes to
keep to herself. Should the secrets about her infanticidal and licentious selves be
revealed, Roxana would have to reconcile these past selves in some manner, and she has
split the maternal and sexual aspects of her life so well that she believes reconciliation is
impossible. The fear of the consequences of discovery terrifies her: “the Notion of being
discover’d, carried with it so many frightful Ideas, and hurry’d my Thoughts so much,
that I was scarce myself” (R 273). Roxana lives so much for the moment that her past,
especially the maternal and sexual roles she wishes to deny, threatens her sense of self.
This self is one based upon a lie of omission. Should the omitted parts of her life, “the
only valuable Secret in the World” (R 276), be openly acknowledged by Susan, Roxana
would be subject to her own daughter’s will. Possessing the secret would grant Susan
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power over her mother, as Roxana says, “I must for-ever 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 of it fill¶d me with Horror” (280). Roxana fears
Susan will dominate her as would an omnipotent child whose need for mutual recognition
has never developed beyond her desire to dominate the (m)other (Benjamin, Bonds 54).
Her horror is the fear of Susan dominating her and forcing her “to share everything” and
“participate in all [her] deeds” (Benjamin, Bonds 34). Being undone, ruined, filled with
horror—the discourse of destruction—persists throughout the remainder of Roxana’s
story. The reunion of mother and daughter, the moment when Roxana is most likely to
be “expos’d” captures the essence of the destructive, affectionate, horrific, sensual, even
erotic bonds that tie this mother to her daughter.
The profound connection between these two women is conveyed via the language
of heights and depths, of emotion and physicality. They reunite when Roxana boards a
ship bound for Holland, the very vessel she believes will take her away from England and
her persistent daughter, on which she meets Susan face-to face, for Susan is the friend of
the captain’s wife (R 275-76). This episode is charged both with Roxana’s fear of losing
her self and Susan’s plaintive pleas for a mother, in which she cries, “what have I done
that you won’t own me[?]” to Amy (R 267), whom, at the time, she believes to be her
mother. Susan’s cries for her mother and her multitudinous tears, as when “she cry’d
ready to kill herself, and hung about Amy again, like a Child” (R 268), are echoed, if not
intensified by Roxana’s language in the reunion scene. Conway writes, “As in the
description Amy provides of Susan’s desire, the language of the sublime here speaks to
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the intensity of the mother-child passion and its ability to obliterate distinctions,
separateness, and even the integrity of the self” (229). Whether Roxana’s language of the
sublime trumps Susan’s is arguable, but there is no question that the distinctions between
mother and daughter are blurred as they are depicted in the paradoxical language of
horror and desire.
Roxana’s reunion with Susan is the most intense depiction of the bonds between
self/other, past/present in the narrative. Lerenbaum’s claim that the language in the
episode in which Moll sees Jemy enter Newgate is even more substantial than Moll’s
language of penitence applies to Roxana’s story as well (116), for the reunion has a
profound effect on Roxana and contains far more affective language than any of her
reflections on repentance. The repentance episodes, for all their resonance, do not
possess the intensity of this passage:
there was a secret Horror in my Mind, and I was ready to sink when I
came close to her, […] yet it was a secret inconceivable Pleasure to me
when I kiss’d her, to know that I kiss’d my own Child’ my own Flesh and
Bloods, born of my Body; and who I had never kiss’d since I took the fatal
Farewel of them all, with a Million of Tears, and a Heart almost dead with
Grief, when Amy and the Good Woman took them all away, […] No Pen
can describe, no Words can express […] the strange Impression which this
thing made upon my Spirits; I felt something shoot thro’ my Blood; my
Heart flutter’d; my Head flash’d, and was dizzy, and all within me, as I
thought, turn’d about, and much ado I had, not to abandon myself to an
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Excess of Passion at the first Sight of her, much more when my Lips
touch’d her Face; I thought I must have taken her in my Arms, and kiss’d
her again a thousand times, whether I wou’d or no. (R 277)
Roxana mentions secrets, horror, pleasure, flesh, body, and states of mind, all strong
words that convey as much as her descriptions of her physiological stirrings in her head,
heart, and blood.
The reunion of mother and daughter is the most passionate, traumatic event in
Roxana’s text. The “orgasmic intensity of feeling” in this passage reveals a bond that
transcends language and operates both physically and emotionally (Bowers 116).
Nussbaum notes “Female erotic bonds fairly sizzle in Roxana’s extreme response” to
Susan “and hint at an uncontrollable desire that cannot be articulated” (39). This desire,
be it the desire for mutual recognition, for sameness within difference, or even “a
breaking of the incest taboo” is repressed because Roxana refuses to own her daughter
(Nussbaum 39). Roxana denies her “unconventional desire and illegitimate maternity”
(fatal, non-nurturing maternity) and so buries a part of her self by restraining herself from
kissing her daughter a thousand times as she once shed a million tears over her
(Nussbaum 39). This “fatal Farewel” is another figurative infanticide, for it is told in the
language of tears and loss associated with childbirth and its consequences. Here, the
splits between past/present, self/other, mother/mistress, mother/daughter are blurred, and
Roxana has her last chance to own her daughter, her past, and her self. However, she
maintains the split and seeks to destroy the bonds which could unite her many selves and
allow her to experience the horrific pleasure or pleasurable horror of the mother-daughter
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bond. Roxana’s split between her self and others runs so deep that she is unable to
recognize her daughter and so own her past.
Motherhood is a dangerous relationship that threatens to expose Roxana, and she
cannot communicate this fear to Susan or to others because she has no means to express it
to them. Her tie to Susan becomes a power struggle over her identity, one of many
possible struggles Rich comments upon in regards to motherhood: “For motherhood is
the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most
elemental assumptions about love and power” (260). The power struggle between
mother and daughter is a continuation of the struggles for domination Roxana has
encountered all her life. She can only relate to others as objects to serve her will, so
when one, her own daughter, willfully asserts her right to know her mother, she cannot
accept the assertion. Susan’s definition of motherhood is limited by convention; she
“believes that maternity exists as an inalienable fact rather than as a fiction created by
habit and time” (Conway 229), and this belief is of a nurturing mother who wants to be
with her child as much as the child wants to be with her. She does not realize how,
“unlike Susan, Roxana views the relationship from the position of the mother who has
learned to harden herself against her children in order to survive, and who now knows
that her secret self is the only chance at independence she might have” (Conway 229).
Granted, Roxana will never achieve independence because she believes she must not be
bound to others and her secret will keep her self intact. Her belief in a nonrelational
autonomy prevents her from ever maintaining any kind of relationship with others
besides that of submission and domination.
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Roxana chooses not to abandon herself to kissing her daughter a thousand times,
thus denying the power of a bond that could empower her to share with another the
mutual connection she has failed to make time and time again. Just as she refuses to
accept the Dutch merchant’s offer of “Mutual Affection” because of the split established
by the bedding scene (R 151), she refuses Susan’s orchestrations to make possible her
ownership of her daughter and her past. Roxana’s failure to share her secret forces her to
suffer a peculiar torment: listening to her own daughter recount to the ladies in the ship’s
cabin what she knows of her former mistress, Roxana. Conveniently, Susan knows
Roxana only in her Turkish garb, so the plainly-attired Roxana need not fear immediate
recognition, but she must endure hearing Susan’s story or else risk appearing uneasy in
front of the daughter who has pursued her relentlessly. As Susan recounts the story,
Roxana reacts inwardly, “in a kind of silent Rage; for the Force I was under of restraining
my Passion, was such, as I never felt the like of: I had no Vent; nobody to open myself
to” (R 284). Moglen comments on this passage: “Objectified by Susan, Roxana
experiences the full horror of self-knowledge as the rejecting sexualized mother. It is this
that makes Roxana hate her daughter and wish for her destruction” (50). Roxana realizes
that Susan knows of both Roxana’s abandonment of her children and her days as a
courtesan; such knowledge makes her dangerous to Roxana as the good wife with an only
slightly sullied past. However, Roxana also delights in Susan’s story of her past: “Thou’
I dreaded the Sequel of the Story, yet when she talk’d how handsome and how fine a
Lady this Roxana was, I cou’d not help being pleas’d and tickl’d with it” (R 287).
Although she is flattered by Susan’s praise, she cannot integrate this fractured part of
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herself “with the self she has to project at other stages of her history” (New 320). She
may delight in her past, but she refuses to own it.
Denying her daughter during the most opportune moment reveals how desperately
Roxana clings to her world of division and domination. At one point, she slips into the
world of intersubjectivity, of having “consciousness of [another’s] consciousness” (Butte
vii), by imagining what Susan must know: “I was quite discourag’d, not at-all doubting
but that the Jade had a right Scent of things, and that she knew and remember’d my Face,
but had artfully conceal’d her Knowledge of me, till she might perhaps, do it more to my
Disadvantage” (R 281). Because she does not truly know her daughter’s thought, though,
she says, “I was oblig’d to sit and hear her tell all the Story of Roxana, that is to say, of
myself, and not know at the same time, whether she was in earnest or in jest; whether she
knew me or no; or, in short, whether I was to be expos’d or not expos’d” (R 285).
Trapped within the ambiguities of the chiasm between herself and Susan, Roxana cannot
know whether her daughter knows she is the woman in Susan’s story or not. She must
listen to her daughter tell of her voyeuristic experience of seeing her mother act as an
exotic mistress.
Roxana’s fear of exposure contrasts with the pleasure she takes in watching her
protective mother-figure, Amy, bed with the landlord; once Roxana is in danger of being
seen by her daughter as Amy was once seen by her, she desires to further conceal herself.
She does not want to be the object of the child who, “Standing off to one side, […] is a
mute observer of the sexual act” and who “recapitulates […] the child’s primary exposure
to sexuality” (Castle 81-82). Susan has seen Roxana as a sexual object by having seen
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her dance in the Turkish garb at Pall Mall; Roxana does not want Susan to connect her
mother’s present self with that exotic object. To avoid such objectification, Roxana acts
in the only way she knows how: through her agents.
Roxana’s only refuge from Susan’s quest for her is found in Amy and the Quaker.
She says Amy, who “for so many Years had not only been a Servant, but an Agent; and
not only an Agent, but a Friend,” is “all the Relief I had” (R 317, 281). Amy always
comforts and assists Roxana, soothing her as would a mother. She is not always present,
though, so Roxana also turns to her “sure and certain Comforter,” the Quaker (R 324).
Amy knows all about Roxana, and she has served as the object upon whom Roxana
deposited her infanticide and whoring, but the Quaker also serves Roxana well because
the two are fellow widows and Roxana has lavished so many gifts upon her that the
Quaker must feel indebted to her. The Quaker is no threat to Roxana, even though, “Like
Susan, the Quaker is drawn to Roxana’s courtesan past, fixating on the costume that
threatens to expose Roxana’s true identity. But her curiosity allows itself to indulge the
fantasy without needing to destroy the secrecy upon which the courtesan’s survival
depends” (Conway 230). The two agents shelter Roxana, taking the brunt of Amy’s
questioning until mother and daughter meet in the ship bound for Holland, which,
ironically, Roxana had hoped would deliver her from her daughter and her past.
“THE INJURY DONE THE POOR GIRL, BY US BOTH”: THE MURDEROUS
ROXANA AND AMY
The death of Susan originates as has every momentous occasion in Roxana’s life:
through passivity. Roxana convinces her husband to move them back to Holland and
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leave her past behind, but she also fantasizes about her deliverance from her daughter.
Roxana so wishes to avoid her daughter that she wishes Susan “dropp’d into the Grave by
any fair Way, […] had she died by any ordinary Distemper, I shou’d have shed but very
few Tears for her: But I was not arriv’d to such a Pitch of obstinate Wickedness, as to
commit Murther, especially such, as to murther my own Child” (R 302). Roxana’s
thoughts become Amy’s actions, however, as they have before.157 Once again, Amy
“act[s] out what Roxana only thinks of doing” by giving voice to the pangs of conscience
that inwardly trouble both her and Roxana (New 323). Amy suggests murder several
times, and when she swears by God to actually do so, Roxana tells her “you ought to be
hang’d for what you have done already; for having resolv’d on it, is doing it, as to the
Guilt of the Fact; you are a Murtherer already, as much as if you had done it already” (R
273). Thinking of murder is one thing, but saying one will kill is another; Roxana,
however, shares her guilt with Amy for murdering Susan because she desired it and Amy
acted on that desire. Amy is Roxana’s agent, and as her protective mother, she always
does what she believes is best for Roxana. She has disposed of Susan twice before, when
Susan was but a child and when she was Roxana’s maid (R 19, 197), so she assumes she
must be rid of her a third and final time, which Roxana judges as “a more fatal and
wicked Design” (R 311). All Amy wishes to do is play the fatal roles of the midwife who
delivers the woman of her burden and the mother who apportions her child’s lot by
making the world a safer place for her. Roxana notes, “for however wicked she was, still
157 Amy “speaks for the unanswerable demands of necessity and acts on them in her mistress’s behalf (and eventually even without her consent)”; see Hentzi 180. Castle also notes, “Amy asserts herself as the prudent manager of affairs, while Roxana tends to devolve into passiveness”; see Castle 86.
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she was true to me; and this Rage of hers [against Susan] was all upon my Account, and
for fear any Mischief shou’d befall me” (R 313). There is no question of Amy’s
devotion, indeed, her attachment to Roxana. Because her will is bound to Roxana’s, and
she acts on behalf of this will, Amy determines Susan must die.
Amy’s motherly devotion to Roxana binds the two into a sadomasochistic pair
with a singular desire to be rid of Susan. However, the theory of how to remove the
importunate daughter varies from mistress to maid. Roxana voices her concerns as she
once did before yielding to Amy’s suggestion to abandon her children and to yield to the
landlord, but she does so more forcefully than when she played the voice of virtue to
Amy’s voice of necessity: “when Amy spoke of throwing her into the River, and
drowning her, I was so provok’d at her, that all my Rage turn’d against Amy, and I fell
thorowly out with her” (R 312-13). So strong is Roxana’s fear of murdering Susan that
she dismisses Amy after three decades of service:
I cou’d not bear the Mention of Murthering the poor Girl, and it put me so
beside myself, that I rise up in a Rage, and bade her out of my Sight, […] I
had before told her, That she was a Murtherer, […] that she cou’d not but
know that I cou’d not bear the Thought of it, much less the Mention of it
[…]. (R 313)
Although Roxana has fantasized about Susan dying “by any ordinary Distemper” (R
302), the thought of her being responsible for the murder drives her to a mad pitch. In
her defense of Susan and in her reunion with Susan, Roxana’s language reaches a
passionate level unmatched by her earlier protests against abandoning her children. The
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fear of murdering her daughter outweighs her own desire to keep her secret: “I wou’d not
murther my Child, tho’ I was otherwise to be ruin’d by it” (R 313). Abandoning her
children is difficult enough, but directly murdering one of them threatens to destroy her.
Figurative and literal infanticide greatly disturb Roxana. Figurative infanticide
has a horrific impact on Roxana when she first abandons her children, making her a
“natural mother” in the sense that her maternity is defined by early modern conventions
of the mother who suffers when forced to part with her children in order to survive.158
Roxana is horrified to think of parting with her children, let alone having one directly
murdered by one of her agents, much as Moll is horrified by the thought of parting with
her son by Jemy in order to once again make herself a marriageable commodity: “I wish
all those Women who consent to the disposing of their Children in the same way, as it is
call¶d for Decency sake, would consider that ‘tis only a contriv’d Method for Murther;
that is to say, a killing their Children with safety (MF 173). Moll’s attack on selling
infants to parish nurses and Roxana’s comment that letting her children be taken to the
parish “sunk my very Heart within me” reveal both mothers fear for their children’s
welfare (R 19). In fact, their sentiment over their children is part of the codification of
maternity that limits mothers to self-abnegating, nurturing objects (Bowers 15). What
Roxana faces in the final pages of her narrative is a far more literal infanticide, and she
does differentiate between the passive death of her child by accident and her active
murder. Should Amy or one of her agents murder Susan, she would not only blame
158 Motherhood was being limited in Defoe’s day to a narrow set of parameters. On “natural” motherhood as defined in Defoe’s day, see Bowers 1-33, especially 19. On maternity as the universal marker of womanhood, see Nussbaum 23. On Moll as a loving mother, see Lerenbaum 106-07.
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herself for the murder but “conclude [she] was ten times wickeder” for having influenced
Amy to dispose of Susan (R 313).
The dismissal of Amy and the subsequent disappearance of Susan drive Roxana to
the apex of guilt and misery. Ever fearful of her past coming to light, she comments on
missing her best agent and friend and grows concerned, as she relates, “that Amy knew all
the Secret History of my Life […] ill-using me was enough in her Power, and might be
my utter Undoing” (R 317). Such concerns, however, are eclipsed by Susan’s
disappearance. The Quaker reports that Susan has stopped asking her for information
about Roxana, so Roxana fears the worst, even going so far as to ask those who know
Susan whether they had seen the girl recently, for she fears she may have been murdered
(R 325). Roxana rationalizes that Amy’s absence confirms the murder even though she
has dismissed Amy from her, and she becomes so furious that she “cou’d have kill’d her
with my own Hands” (R 313), an odd statement from a woman who has always passively
manipulated others to do her will for her. This statement reveals the extent of Roxana’s
loss of self, for, as she notes, “to have fall’n upon Amy, had been to have murther’d
myself” (R 302). The thought of killing Amy is suicide to Roxana, and Susan’s murder is
as harmful to Roxana’s self because Roxana considers herself responsible for anything
committed by Amy. Susan’s disappearance is most likely due to murder, for her
character has stopped at nothing to find her mother; whether she actually dies or not is
not the issue so much as it is that Roxana believes she has been murdered.
Susan’s death is more than a convenient removal of an obstacle in Roxana’s life;
it is her destruction. Hentzi observes, Roxana’s “desire to be rid of her daughter is
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ultimately the expression of a need to destroy all traces of a past identity, and such an act
is dangerously close to being a destruction of oneself” (95). Nussbaum likewise reads the
fantasy of “the murder of her child is a fantasy of self-destruction, since both mother and
daughter are named Susan” (37). Castle adds, “Roxana is engaged in a kind of self-
destruction when she fantasizes the murder of her child. Part of the self cannot be
repressed without great damage to the whole” (93). With Susan’s disappearance, this
fantasy becomes reality. Susan is a vital part of Roxana, but her connection to both the
figurative infanticide and the years at Pall Mall make her dangerous to Roxana’s desire to
keep those parts of herself secret. Roxana wants to live off the spoils of her past and to
delight in stories of her days as a courtesan, but she wants to deny the negative
consequences. This denial, though, is of two aspects of her past: roles she has played and
others who are a part of her past, both of which are crucial to the construction of her self.
To deny them is to deny unity; Roxana is the epitome of a split subject, and this splitting
is manifest in her failure to take ownership of her past which contains secrets she wishes
to conceal and keep split from the life she wishes to live. Because she will not own
Susan, and therefore her past, Roxana cannot be a penitent. She wishes to divorce herself
from the past, not to atone for it.
“[M]Y REPENTANCE SEEM’D TO BE ONLY THE CONSEQUENCE OF MY
MISERY”: SPIRITUAL FAILINGS AND A LEGACY OF GUILT
Roxana does not experience the simultaneous joy over salvation and sorrow over
her sins as does Moll, but she does live in a state in which she says her reflections “might
be said to have gnaw’d a Hole in my Heart” at various points throughout her life (R 264).
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These guilt-ridden reflections consume her in the final pages of her narrative, as she
relates: “now they made a Hole quite thro’ it [my heart]; now they eat into all my
pleasant things; made bitter every Sweet, and mix’d my Sighs with every Smile” (R 264).
This is no repentant state in which she experiences both sorrow over her sins and joy over
her conversion, but one in which her joy from material success and maintaining her secret
are tainted by the bitter fruits of the past. In effect, Roxana’s happiness is overcome by
her guilt and misery, so that one state dominates the other. She cannot have both the
present and the past because of the split she perceives between her present self and her
wicked past; as such, she will never be anything more than a reprobate confined to a
lifetime of guilt and misery.
Roxana is a peculiar reprobate, for although she suffers as the elect do during
conversion, she remains immersed in her wickedness. Much as she continues to split
relationships in her life even though others try to interact with her as like subjects, she
plays the reprobate to the end. Starr notes that Roxana violates the conventions of
spiritual autobiography in two ways: she does not end up a convert, and she does not
improve throughout the story (Spiritual 182). Sim adds to Starr’s reading of Roxana the
reprobate by noting how she suffers anxiety as do the elect, and she has “a sense of sin”
and “a sense of repentance” as they do (160), but she is a reprobate who does not submit
to the idea that God has made her repentance possible.
Roxana’s fears of providential retribution are akin to the self-doubts and fears of
the Puritan who doubts his or her election. Perhaps the most intense portrayal of such
anxieties and fears appears in Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, in which he fixates upon
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a passage from Hebrews that appears to defy the tradition of tears of repentance as a
precursor to repentance and the consequent salvation:
Even as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birth-right; for ye
knew how that afterwards, when he would have inherited the blessing, he
was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it
carefully with tears (Heb. 12).
Now was the Word of the gospel forced from my soul, so that no
promise or encouragement was to be found in the Bible for me. (GA 51)
Like Bunyan, Roxana suffers fear of retribution, but unlike him, she does not eventually
find solace through scripture. They both fear physical suffering, as when Bunyan writes
upon contemplating Hebrews:
Then was I struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times
I could for whole days feel my very body as well as my mind to shake and
totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God […]. I felt also
such a clogging and heat at my stomach by reason of this terror, that I was,
especially at some times, as if my breast-bone would have split in sunder.
(GA 42)
Like Roxana, whose liver is struck, her vitals melted, and her heart torn with a “Hole
quite thro’ it” (R 264), Bunyan relates his spiritual suffering in physical terms. Bunyan
and Moll, however, find the cure for their ills by owning their past sins and mourning for
them. Contrariwise, Roxana is never “brought to herself again” by recounting her
experience and taking ownership of them (Starr, Spiritual 174). Unlike Moll, she does
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not own her experience through conversion, for even if she interprets and organizes it
according to conversion conventions (Sim 155), she does not complete her repentance.
Roxana mourns for her past sins, but she wants to keep them secret.
Although Roxana continually refers to repentance throughout her story, she never
completes her conversion. Primarily, she fails to do so for much the same reason she
fails to become an individual who can maintain mutual relations with other subjects: her
desire to keep secret the parts of her self tied to the past and to others. In addition to this
denial of a vital part of her self, she fails to meet Law’s conditions of conversion: being
ashamed and remorseful for each individual sin, mindful that God has made her
repentance possible through special providences or Providence in general, and sorrowful
to the point that she sheds tears born of a “broken and contrite heart” that simultaneously
grieves over sins committed and rejoices over the process of repentance (Law 490-91).
Although Roxana suffers as one of the elect, her shame, mindfulness of Providence, and
tears all fall short of Law’s prescriptions for the penitent, prescriptions Defoe exploits in
order to reveal how Roxana is a spiritual failure as well as a psychological one.
The past is a painful burden which Roxana wishes to deny, thus she cannot ease
herself of its weight by admitting it is a part of her. She feels shame for abandoning her
children and prostituting herself, but she wishes to keep her past in the past, as when she
splits her present happiness in her marriage to the Dutch merchant from her past grief:
“But if I look’d upon my present Situation with Satisfaction, as I certainly did, so in
Proportion I on all Occasions look’d back on former things with Detestation, and with the
utmost Affliction” (R 264). Upon further reflection, she situates this detestation of her
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past in a causal relationship: “Sin and Shame follow one-another so constantly at the
Heels, that they are not like Attendants only, but like Cause and Consequence,
necessarily connected one with another” (R 298). Although she sees this relationship
clearly enough, rather than take ownership of her sins like the penitent Moll, she resorts
to the childish tactic of “what-I-can’t-see-can’t-hurt-me,” denying the past and making
any resolution of the past with the present impossible.
Roxana’s denial also manifests as a peculiar myopia. Although she sees some
signs of Providence at work in her life, she mistakes the signs and is unaware of how
God’s agency operates in her repentance. Occasionally, she acknowledges the power of
Providence, as when she observes, “What a glorious Testimony it is to the Justice of
Providence and to the Concern Providence has in guiding all the Affairs of Men […] that
the most secret Crimes are, by the most unforeseen Accidents, brought to light, and
discover’d” (R 297). Although Roxana credits Providence with bringing news about
Susan dangerously close to the Dutch merchant’s attention, Roxana thwarts the action so
her connection to Susan will remain undisclosed to her husband. Roxana not only
thwarts potential discoveries, but she misinterprets Providence as saving her from
Susan’s near discovery of her while they are on the ship bound to Holland. She
foreshadows what she reads as a special providence before boarding the ship, noting, “I
languish’d near two Years; […] if Providence had not reliev’d me, I shou’d have died in
little time” (R 265). She later reveals the relief as Amy’s absence on the Holland-bound
ship: “Amy was not with us, and that was my Deliverance indeed” (R 280). Had Susan
seen Amy, the woman who provides for her, and Roxana, her former mistress, together,
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she would undoubtedly have connected Roxana with Pall Mall and her mother. By
crediting Providence with this fortunate incident, Roxana assumes her desire not to own
her daughter is also the will of God; this may or not be so, but given how important
owning her past is to Moll and owning the past and feeling remorse is for every penitent,
it is highly unlikely that an author immersed within the Puritan tradition would make
denial a part of the conversion experience. Roxana may be aware of Providence, but she
misreads it. She fails to marry a Providence figure when he first comes into her life, and
she assumes that Providence wants her to deny her daughter and her past.159
Although Roxana misinterprets Providence, she suffers the pangs of conscience
brought on by an awareness of the presence of God in her life. She is plagued by horrors
and doubts: “to all appearance, I was one of the happiest Women upon Earth; all this
while, I say, I had such a constant Terror upon my Mind, as gave me every now and then
very terrible Shocks, and which made me expect something very frightful upon every
Accident of Life” (R 260). Her fear for her life is a fear of providential retribution: “In a
word, it never Lightn’d or Thunder’d, but I expected the next Flash wou’d penetrate my
Vitals, and melt the Sword (Soul) in this Scabbord of Flesh; it never blew a Storm of
Wind, but I expected the Fall of some Stack of Chimneys, or some Part of the House
wou’d bury me in its Ruins” (R 260). Starr notes allusions to Daniel and to Proverbs 7.23
in these passages (Spiritual 180), reinforcing the idea that Roxana acts as one of the elect
even though she remains a reprobate. Quoting scripture reveals she has some
understanding of soteriology, and acknowledging her fearfulness of God is part of
159 Backscheider claims that Roxana ignores Providence and misses her opportunity for conversion by refusing to marry the Dutch merchant early in her narrative; see Ambition 207.
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recognizing the role the divine will plays in repentance, but no amount of playing the
penitent can outweigh her failure to own her past.
Unlike Moll, Roxana is not moved to repent by others; she so wishes to distance
herself from her past that she denies the roles others play in her life. Before relating the
story of Susan, Roxana reflects on her past, observing, “no Woman ever liv’d a Life like
me, of six and twenty Years of Wickedness, without the least Signals of Remorse;
without any Signs of Repentance” (R 188). By the end of her story, Roxana’s repentance
is caused by her misery, which is caused by her crime (R 330); however, Roxana does not
connect the crime to her mistreatment of other subjects so much as she connects it to her
agency in the death of Susan, who is an object who dared get in the way of Roxana’s
happiness. Defoe situates this passage on repentance immediately before introducing
Susan in order to reinforce the idea that Roxana, like Moll, should be stirred to feel
remorse for her shameful treatment of others, not to feel remorse for the misery brought
about because of this mistreatment. Roxana’s causal chain does not link her repentance
to others; it connects her repentance to her misery.
Failure to connect her repentance to something greater than her misery leaves
Roxana isolated from her past and from others. She neither understands that she must
own both her past and her bonds to others in order to be truly ashamed and remorseful for
her sins nor does she understand that she must recognize the agents of Providence in her
life as part of God’s plan for her conversion. As a reprobate, she fails to see these agents
or other signs of Providence, whether Providence manifests as the storm at sea, the Dutch
merchant’s marriage proposal, or Susan’s dramatic reappearance in her life. Roxana has
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no moment like Moll’s recognition of Jemy in Newgate and subsequent admittance of her
importance to his life and his to hers. An object to the end, Roxana does not cry as she
once did when she sought deliverance from her circumstances. In the end, she sheds no
tears of repentance, and she barely sheds any tears, thus signifying her inability to
undergo rebirth.
The tears of rebirth so prevalent in Moll’s entire narrative and the first part of
Roxana’s all but disappear in the end of Roxana’s story, and tears of repentance never
appear. Roxana cries once in the end upon reading the Quaker’s letter about Amy’s
disposal of Susan much as she suffers when Susan tells her about her past at Pall Mall: “I
had nobody to speak a Word to, to give Vent to my Passion; nor did I speak a word for a
good-while, […] I threw myself on the Bed, and cry’d out, Lord be merciful to me, she
has murther¶d my Child; and with that, a Flood of Tears burst out, and I cry’d vehemently
for above an Hour” (R 323). All of the signs of rebirth are present: the illness, the
inability to speak, even the breaking of the water, but Roxana’s agents are not near her to
assist. Cut apart from the others, she is unable to deliver herself from her misery, and
although she acknowledges her part in Amy’s action, this is not a recognition of her
influence upon a like subject, but a mere acknowledgment of her part in a crime
perpetrated by her active complement. Her cry to God is meaningless because she has
not acted as a penitent should according to the conventions of conversion. Her failure to
own her past by being shameful and remorseful for every sin, to recognize the role of
Providence in her life, and to cry tears born not of hysteria but of sorrow for her sin and
joy for her salvation leave her a reprobate doomed to misery.
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Roxana’s story is one of the greatest explorations of the guilt and misery caused
by one person’s failure to own her past or to relate to others as anything but objects. Bell
claims, “it is her sense of guilt which organizes the narrative” (173), and “the whole tale
becomes much more of a psychological exploration of misery than any other
contemporary tale” (185). The final pages of Roxana’s story are devoted to the misery
she endures for denying ownership of her past. The “Hole in [her] Heart” (R 264), the
“Dart struck into the Liver” (R 260), and the “secret Hell within” are all due to one act
perpetrated by Amy (R 260). Roxana does acknowledge her part in this act, for she and
Amy are one, by saying the murder of Susan is “the Injury done the poor Girl, by us
both” (R 330). Moglen writes in regards to this passage, “As Roxana acknowledges
Amy’s crime to have been her own, the distance between them disappears and their fates
are merged” (51). Their fates, their very selves, merge during the bedding scene and
remain bound when Roxana owns Amy’s crime as her own during the storm at sea (R
126), so they end as inextricably bound to one another. Even unto the end, Roxana and
Amy are an indivisible pair, as Homer O. Brown observes, “That Amy is enacting
Roxana’s secret will is proved by Roxana’s overwhelming sense of guilt” (582). The two
are both to blame: Amy in deed, Roxana in willing her complement to act.
Roxana does not take her guilt lightly; she suffers tremendously for trying to
avoid her past. She expresses her guilt in a passage that evokes the passion of the kiss
she gives her daughter while in disguise. She at first fantasizes about killing Amy for
harming her daughter, but her thoughts turn to Susan, upon whom she fixates:
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As for the poor Girl herself, she was ever before my Eyes; I saw her by-
Night, and by-Day; she haunted my imagination, if she did not haunt the
House; my Fancy show’d her me in a hundred Shapes and Postures;
sleeping or waking, she was with me: Sometimes I thought I saw her with
her Throat cut; sometimes with her Head cut, and her Brains knock’d-out;
other-times hang’d up upon a Beam; another time drown’d in the Great
Pond at Camberwell: And all these Appearances were terrifying to the last
Degree […]. (R 325)
The explicit images of her daughter in various death scenes captures the visceral reality
of death much as Bunyan depicts it in an inset story in The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman, linking the two stories about reprobates by associating spiritual torment with
physical torment. In Badman, Wiseman gives horrifically graphic details of John Cox’s
suicide: “[he] quickly took his Raisor, and therewith cut a great hole in his side, out of
which he pulled, and cut off some of his guts, and threw them, with the blood, up and
down the Chamber. […] he took the same Raisor and therewith cut his own throat” (BM
158-59). Indeed, “Bunyan displays the maimed body in this story to emphasize the
severity of physical pain, to make his audience imagine the pain that affects the sinner
who denies the grace of God and desires to take his own life.”160 Defoe also complicates
the relationship between external physical and internal spiritual (psychological) suffering.
160 Peter Marbais, “The Tormented Body in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing, ed. N.H. Keeble, Religions and Discourse Vol. 12 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003) 237. Bunyan complicates the spirit/body split in Badman, offering conventional inset stories that illustrate a direct correlation between spirit/body parallel and the main narrative that asserts “Physical suffering is simply a precursor, not a direct reflection of eternal suffering”; see Marbais 243.
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Granted, Susan’s body, not Roxana’s, suffers various deaths in Roxana’s visions, but
Roxana suffers mentally due to these images. Just as Roxana cannot escape these visions
night or day, she can neither escape nor differentiate fantasy from reality: Susan haunts
her dreams and her house.
Defoe indicts Roxana with her own words and actions, convincing the reader that
there is no question that Roxana shares in the blame for her daughter’s murder, but there
is more to blame than one woman who succumbs to the realm of sadomasochistic,
complementary relations. The society which sets into motion the circumstances that
expose Roxana to necessity has a share in the blame as well. Had Roxana, rather Susan
given her name is not Roxana until much later in her life, another avenue than marriage,
whoredom, or drudgery to support herself and her children after her brewer-husband’s
abandonment of her, she may never have become Roxana. Were she a man, she could
have gained employment or have abandoned her children as lightly as her husband does.
Social critique is part of Defoe’s agenda in Roxana, although reading the text solely as
social critique denies its greatest triumph: depicting the consequent failure, psychological
and spiritual, of the individual who denies the importance of others in her life.
One cannot help but sympathize with Roxana’s plight at the beginning of her
story, and such sympathy may lead one to place the blame on Roxana’s failure not on her
shoulders, or on Amy’s for being the voice of necessity, but upon a society that denies
women agency but holds them accountable for their actions. Such a reading is logical
and sound, and it may lead to Moglen’s conclusion that “The ultimate tragedy of Roxana
suggests the intransigence of gender ideology: how it is internalized by women no less
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than men, and how it produces, in those who resist it, guilt and shame that are
destructively turned back upon the self” (21). Undoubtedly, Defoe exposes this tragedy
in this work that sympathizes with women who must make moral decisions due to
necessity, but his audience, and arguable Defoe himself, would see the tragedy in
Roxana’s failure to repent. Twentieth-century readers immersed in the feminist rather
than the Calvinist tradition would agree with Bowers that Defoe “places the blame for
maternal failure squarely on the heroine, denying credence to the arguments for her
constraint and passivity that have punctuated the narrative all along” (123). Yet when
one considers the Calvinist notion that the individual is responsible for her sins even
though her salvation or damnation is predetermined, one realizes that Defoe’s work must
not be read solely with a logical critical lens but one beveled with belief. Although
twentieth-century readers like Bowers may find troubling the paradox of holding a
passive creature like Roxana to blame when other forces have determined the events in
her life, Puritan readers rooted in the Calvinist tradition would see the paradox of
reprobation at work.
Roxana is a social critique, but it is primarily a work of paradox rooted in the
Calvinist tradition. As Sim notes, the paradox of the reprobate is to be responsible for her
sins even though she is predestined to be damned (143), and this paradox governs
Roxana. She makes decisions in her life, ignoring Providence whenever it manifests,
because she is a reprobate. Like Bunyan’s epitome of the reprobate, Badman, she is
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damned from the beginning.161 This lot in life does not mean that society has no
responsibility to enable people such as Roxana to avoid falling into circumstances that
drive them to immoral acts (Sim 162), but it does reveal that one is responsible for one’s
actions and one’s character is predetermined. Because Moll is dynamic and accepts
paradoxes within her life, she can become as odd a creature as a penitent Fate figure;
because Roxana splits everything in her life, she cannot accept such a paradox as being
responsible for her own actions even though she is predetermined to damnation, so she
can be either a Fate figure or a penitent. The latter is ruled out due to her character, and
the former manifests less and less throughout her story. Society is to blame for driving
her to whoredom, but Roxan is to blame for dominating Amy, projecting her repudiated
aspects onto others, and failing to relate to others every bit as much as she is to blame for
her sins. Situate her within the intersubjective web that connects individuals, the
interconnected matrix of Fate, or the rigid Chain of Being between God and humankind,
and she fails to make the necessary connection to others necessary to her subjectivity and
her salvation. Analyze her as operating within all three systems at once, and her failure
within each system becomes obvious.
At the end, Roxana is isolated in a present haunted by the past. She is alone in her
misery even with Amy, for Amy is nothing more than her complement. The two suffer a
fate due to splitting past from present and self from other:
Here, after some few Years of flourishing, and outwardly happy
Circumstances, I fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities, and Amy also;
161 Badman ignores two key providential signs, including “Once, when he broke his legg as he came home drunk from the Ale-house; and another time when he fell sick, and thought he should die”; see BM 131.
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the very Reverse of our former Good Days; the Blast of Heaven seem’d to
follow the Injury done the poor Girl, by us both; and I was brought so low
again, that my Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of my
Misery, as my Misery was of my Crime. (R 330)
In the end, Roxana fulfills what she foresaw when the Dutch merchant nearly discovered
her true connection to Susan: “we are all utterly undone” (R 297). Susan is dead, and
Roxana and Amy are trapped in a state of misery.
The failure at the end of the novel is appropriate, indeed the only possible ending
for a character such as Roxana. Throughout her life, she has consistently maintained a
split between her self and others, and this split, as it manifests into a split between past
wrongs and present prosperity, prevents her from making the connections to others Moll
does or gaining repentance. Her aversion to owning Susan destroys her, for she can
never be unified without accepting the parts of the past she once projected onto Amy or
tried to escape by donning Quaker garb. The secret she maintains has a far darker fatal
connotation than the secret Moll maintains because Roxana wishes to deny crucial
aspects of her self whereas Moll simply wishes to keep her name, which is on public
record, safe from the voyeuristic reader. Moll keeps her name secret from the reader but
owns everything in her life; conversely, Roxana reveals her name but refuses to own her
past experiences. Roxana refuses to accept the importance of other subjects in her life,
damning herself to objective relationships based upon complementary states; Moll
accepts the importance of others, maintains mutual bonds based upon the paradox of
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intersubjectivity—that to be independent, we are dependent on others—and becomes an
overinclusive character capable of being many seemingly contradictory selves at once.
These observations about the interrelatedness of the narrators to others and their
need for mutual recognition hold true for everyone. We cannot be separated from others
nor treat them only as objects, for like subjects are integral to us in innumerable ways.
Moll and Roxana teach us that we must seek mutual recognition from like subjects rather
than limit ourselves to objective relationships in which we use others and they use us as
little more than objects. Moll establishes a positive example, although her relationships
with men other than Jemy and her manipulation of others as objects reveals that she does
not always relate to others as like subjects. Roxana’s narrative reveals the destruction
splitting causes as it turns all relationships into sadomasochistic ones and limits her to a
world of objective relationships. Her adherence to complementarity forces her into split
reality of what she will own and what she will disown, a world of independence at the
cost of misery and guilt.
The world of misery and guilt is what any person who denies vital aspects of her
past is condemned to face. Moglen makes an astute but flawed observation based upon
the complementary relationship of Amy and Roxana: “as Amy establishes herself as the
benefactress of the children, she and the past elude Roxana’s mastery, and the horror of
her evil maternity overwhelms her life. It is at this point that Defoe loses the power to
shape and bring his narrative to closure” (Moglen 49). The first claim in this observation
is accurate, but the second claim is only partially correct because it falls into the negative
realm of the either/or split suggested by Homer O. Brown in which the narrative “is either
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the most resolved of all the dialectical struggles between self and other in Defoe’s fiction
or the most unresolvable” (582). Sim’s inclusive reading should be kept in mind:
“Roxana is both the most resolved of all the dialectical struggles in Defoe’s fiction and
the most irresolvable” (Sim 159). Given the Calvinist context, the reprobate ends as the
reprobate should; given the social critique, though, the reader wonders why Roxana and
Amy alone should suffer for their decisions given the circumstances they are thrust into
when Roxana’s first husband abandons her. Because Roxana refuses to repent for her
actions after this abandonment, she must suffer the fate of the reprobate. In the end,
Roxana may not be overinclusive, but her text is: it is both resolved and unresolved, both
fatal and providential. It is resolved because she suffers her due within the context of
Puritanical, Calvinist determinism, and unresolved because she suffers because she tries
to maintain the good mother/bad whore advocated by early modern society. It is a rich
text that has much to offer readers who are willing to maintain multiple analytical
perspectives.
Moll Flanders offers a character who can be many things at once, an early
modern woman who relies upon networks of women to survive in a patriarchal world and
who maintains mutual bonds with men and women in order to fulfill her fate to become a
penitent Fate figure. Roxana starts in much the same vein as the earlier narrative, but the
fatal bonds become distorted, and the narrative becomes a cautionary tale about the
destructiveness of sadomasochistic, complementary relationships. We have only begun
to explore the rich worlds of these two women created by a secretive man in his later
years. To explore further, we must not be afraid to read these characters as proto-
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feminists and women who “collude with a sexual politics [sic] that has little to offer her”
(Bowers 109), as Fate figures and Providence figures, as intrapsychic creatures and
intersubjective beings. We must explore the tension maintained by Moll and lost by
Roxana, acting as overinclusive readers who accept multiple roles, aspects, and states of
self that appear contradictory simultaneously. We must read and live with simultaneity
and multiplicity, accept plural identifications, and embrace paradox in order not to fall
into the trap of submission and domination. Reading Moll and Roxana as women who
operate within systems of Fate and Providence is but one minor step in applying an
overinclusive reading to two texts that continue to yield fascinating avenues of
exploration in multiple possibilities.
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