Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments “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 May, 2005 Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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 ii Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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 iii Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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. iv Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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. 1 Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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 2 Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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 3 Click Here & Upgrade Expanded Features PDF Unlimited Pages CompleteDocuments 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