Compared to their contemporaries,Defoe’sfemalecharacterspresent a rather ambitiousattitudetoward thepursuitoffinancialsuccess.Thecharacters’concerns for economic development and devotion to commercial activities convey the novelist’s exceptional awareness of the ethos of eighteenth-century England. The burgeoning growth of the modern market economy in the era stimulated dedication to business of different types, and reveals the fact that making money became a popular trend among the commoners as well as a main avenue to prosperity, regardless of one’s family background. In his fiction as well as prose work, Defoe repeatedly expresses his interest in this topic, and Bram Dijkstra regards it as a kind of education with which Defoe intends to cultivate his readers (Dijkstra 12-14). Defoe’s novels at some level are a response to his advocacy of the unceasing quest for wealth discussed in his journals and didactic writings. Through his works, Defoe apparently attempts to emphasize the idea with all the persuasion he could master.
In many ways, Roxana shows a more mature attitude toward the pursuit of money as a modern capitalist, and the novel demonstrates a more practical standpoint on the issue of the cultivation of a businesswoman than does Moll Flanders. As he tries to construct the image of the ideal “complete trades(wo)man,”Defoe, based on the historical contexts he lives in, delineates a life pattern from the socio-economic perspective of the novels. In an investigation of the influence of economics on the representation of social phenomenon, As James Thompson states,“Literature(and political economy) perform cultural work; novels are determined by social and economic change and, in turn, novels represent and effect, solidify, or modify social change. In other words, literature can serve as a space to imagine and to represent
socialconditionsnotyetin being”(7).There is no doubt that Defoe’s special concern with economics and sympathy for women in distress distinguish his works from other eighteenth-century novelists; meanwhile, he appears to be a forerunner who endeavors to introduce advanced conceptions on economy and gender issues to his reader.
In this chapter, I would like to continue the discussion of Defoe’s capitalistic mentality presented in Roxana. Different from Moll Flanders, Roxana is a conscious merchant who regards her business as the core of her life, and with systematic management of her wealth, she achieves a level of success that none of Defoe’s other characters could ever attain. In this novel, Defoe sets out to delineate the realm of high finance, and yet relinquishes his privilege of the middle station of life, which is another element making Roxana a work distinctive from Defoe’s other writings.
Novak states, “Roxana turns her back on her honest, middle-class background to step into the world of riches and high finance, a world … which Roxana never leaves until her mysterious end”(Economics and Defoe 128). In certain aspects, the novel further manifests Defoe’s position as a modern capitalist and presents his preference for a more aggressive attitude in the manipulation of business skills. Again, Max Weber’s sociology of religion and his observations of social realities will provide the study with a theoretical foundation in the analysis of Defoe’s capitalistic mind. The image of Roxana as a successful businesswoman, and her money-oriented inclinations express a more mature attitude toward business management that the novelist intends to introduce in his Complete English Tradesman, which was published one year later than Roxana. It seems that Defoe attempts to mold this female character into the image of an entrepreneur to compete with her male contemporaries. Unlike Robinson Crusoe or Colonel Jack, Roxana is destined to be an object in her society. Being an
adjunct to men is the means for survival, so Roxana uses her feminine beauty as capital to operate her business for the purpose of financial prosperity. It is controversial that although she is the victim of patriarchal power and social institutions, Roxana at the same time manipulates her pre-conditioned inferiority to achieve her aims. She is rather conscious of the biased opinions against women and attempts to maintain her female liberty as an independent individual. By her denial of matrimony and ambition for business, Roxana expresses a more progressive attitude toward the establishment of a female identity than her contemporaries. She states, “I wou’d be a Man-Woman; for as I was born free, I wou’d die so”(Roxana 171). Defoe appears to particularly stress the autonomy of women in Roxana, yet whether Defoe is a feminist remains to be polemic in this novel. What is certain is that like Moll, Roxana is a transgressive figure trying to establish her female subjectivity rather than fulfilling a subsidiary existence. Focusing on women’s positions in the eighteenth century in light of the construction of female subjectivity, this study will also probe the equivocal issue of Defoe’s feminist thinking presented in this “notorious”woman.
Most of Defoe’s characters are equipped with the aptitude for commerce.61 Their adventurous stories usually begin with the exile of the castaway and then end up in the character’s return to society as an accomplished businessman. At the age of fifty-nine, Defoe published his first novel Robinson Crusoe in 1719, which not only revealed his financial embarrassment but signifies Defoe’s engagement in another type of business. In his last novel, Roxana, Defoe presents a more complete perspective on the management of wealth in a businesswoman. The adduction of the historical character (though anachronistic) appears to construct a verisimilar world of business operation, making the narrative more convincing to his reader. Roxana’s
61 There is no doubt that Defoe’s characters are mostly self-accomplished tradespeople, and even H.F.
in the verisimilar historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year is a prominent saddler in London.
consultant in investment, Sir Robert Clayton (1629-1707), was the lord mayor (1679-80), Director of the Bank of England (1702-1707), and Whig politician in history. In the novel, he is the crucial man leading Roxana into the world of large-scale business transaction. With advanced concepts on business management, Sir Robert educates Roxana in the “self-generating potential of money” (Kibbie 1029), introducing Roxana to multiple her money by mortgage. In addition, the implication of Roxana’sbeing thekeptmistressofCharlesⅡ is an indication of the woman character’s involvement with the high-level whoring trade of the time. Roxana isa“calculating adventuress”(Moore249), trading her feminine beauty to make more money not solely for survival but for personal achievement. Different from Moll Flanders, Roxana is more than a “woman in business” but in effect a
“businesswoman.” Dijkstra suggests that the novel represents Defoe’s “most
systematic exposition of his economic thought in the context of a narrative”(xv).
In Roxana, Defoe displays a more complete perspective on the business engagements of women from different social ranks. Yet as a woman rising from distress, Roxana at first confronts similar predicaments—poverty and necessity—that Moll has to face, and the whoring trade appears to be a more efficient possibility for survival to a penniless woman in Defoe’s society. However, through prostitution, Roxana attains the “prodigious Height”(Roxana 167) of her life and expands her
“business”in foreign countries. Regarding herself as a “She-Merchant”(Roxana 131), Roxana attempts to define herself as a businesswoman engaging in overseas commerce. To Defoe, tradesman and merchant share certain similarities in business operations, and the only differences consist in the locale and the scale of the business transactions. At the beginning of The Complete English Tradesman, Defoe classifies people who practice commercial activities into different degrees, and merchants are
regarded as of a higher level among the traders. He indicates, “[I]n England the word merchant is understood of none but such as carry on foreign correspondences, importing the goods and growth of other countries, and exporting the growth and manufacture of England to other countries; or, to use a vulgar expression, such as trade beyond sea”(CET 18). The “honourable distinction”(CET 18) of the merchants makes them distinctive in the hierarchy of businessman, yet the interrelationship between the tradesman and merchant is in fact close. In the preface of The Complete
English Tradesman, Defoe acknowledges that certain businessmen, whom he calls
“amphibious tradesmen”(CET 14), such as the traders and shopkeepers in seaport towns, may inevitably get involved in some parts of foreign business, building or fitting ships, for instance, and it makes the interaction between the two classes of businessmen considerable and reciprocal. As the inland tradesmen prosper in England, the merchants accelerate the growth of the economy of the state in a very different way by their “corresponding with all parts of the world”(CET 19).
According to Defoe, the main difference between the tradesman and merchant mainly hinges on the domain of business operation, as the one concerns domestic trade and the other relates to international business. Although Defoe emphasizes the contribution of the tradesman to the state, the exploits of the merchant in the development of overseas business should not be underestimated. Eighteenth-century England dedicated herself to the expansion of overseas trades. In this century, the merchant marine trebled, and imports and exports increased rapidly (Porter 189). In the latter half of the seventeenth century, especially after 1670, the development of English shipping and the rise of seamanship gradually helped the country extend her territory of overseas business and achieve its peak in the eighteenth century. The development of the Thames School, a school for mapmakers, and the first Navigation
Act62 issued in 1651 accounted for the demand of sailing. Samuel L. Macey indicates,
“Thissymbolized amovementthatwasto break thesupremacy oftheNetherlands both at sea and in America. It was also to be reflected in a subsequent change of supremacy from Dutch to English in the atlas trade” (19). The emergence and growing interest in voyage literature in the eighteenth century reveals this phenomenon.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and The Farther Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719), for instance, exemplify the ethos of his contemporaries to engage
themselves in overseas activities. In the title page of Farther Adventures, it is noted that the book includes “A MAP of the WORLD, on which is Delineated the Voyages of ROBINSON CRUSOE,”which is an important feature that accords with the reader’s desire to explore the world. In the second volume, Crusoe as an old man over sixty still proceeds on a voyage again in 1693, which is forty-two years after his first adventure in 1651.Crusoe’sambition neverdwindlesashisageincreases; instead, he continuously expands his colonies, and in addition to revisiting his island, he even reaches South America, Madagascar, the Gulf of Persia, Siam, and the Cochin-China, Formosa in Volume Ⅲ. The publication of the series of Robinson Crusoe in 1719 reflects the fact that voyage literature indeed catered to the taste of certain readers as well as the demand of the market. In the last few paragraphs of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe the writer and Crusoe the narrator promised the reader that a new trip would take place, a foreshadowing of the subsequent stories of his adventures. Crusoe says,“[M]y nephew coming home with good Success from a Voyage to Spain, my Inclination to go Abroad, and his Importunity prevailed and engag’d me to go in his Ship, as a private Trader to the East Indies: this was in the Year 1694”(RC 236),
62 Under this Act, all goods imported into England should be shipped in English vessels. See Macey, Money and the Novel 19.
which is an adequate introduction to Farther Adventures. The stories of Crusoe aroused the reader’s curiosity about exotic places and the adventure provided the contemporary reader with a depiction of an unknown world, which is beyond most people’s recognition. J. Paul Hunter indicates, “How systematic, or even how conscious, readers were in their quest for information may be impossible to sort out….
[T]he ordinary and everyday character of novels meant not only that recognizable reality lent probability but also that it provided practical facts”(Before Novels 91).
The experiences and knowledge of sailing, the methods necessary to survive in the wild, encounters with foreign ships at sea, the practical wisdom needed to face natives and cannibals on unexplored islands, and various observations on different races and cultures in effect offered Defoe’s contemporaries space of imagination, while the verisimilar information convinced the reader of the reliability of the novel. Due to the development of navigation and mapmaking, the eighteenth-century Briton viewed the world with a more broadened perspective, and voyage literature was the means for the ordinary reader to have access to remote countries.
Like their male counterparts, Defoe’s female characters are ambitious economically sharp women, and endeavor to achieve economic independence.
Compared with Moll, Roxana, transforming herself into a successful “She-Merchant”
(Roxana 131), expresses a more aggressive as well as progressive attitude toward the quest. As Mona Scheuermann states, “Roxana’s business sense is admirable, not unfeminine…. The salient fact is that she is such a capable human being”(“Income of One’s Own”239). With the only exception of the affair with her landlord, what Roxana is concerned about in relationships with men is not limited to survival.
Relationships in her life are part of her desire to make herself even richer. The realm of her business interests transgresses geographic and social boundaries, and she
devotedly engages herself in the manipulation of the facets of her business. She commences her profession as a mistress after the “Elopement”(Roxana 13) of her irresponsible brewer husband. With her feminine beauty as commodity/capital, Roxana travels to France (with the landlord), Italy (with the Prince of —), and Holland. Her liaisons with the German prince and the Dutch merchant contribute to the contact with foreign exchanges, though through harlotry—the affair with the prince introduces Roxana into a world of “Vanity and Great Things”(Roxana 64), while the relationship with the Dutch merchant leads her into a higher plane of economic acquisition. Scheuermann deems Roxana as full sister to Moll Flanders in financial manipulation,63 yet in the proficiency of business operation and money accumulation, Moll seems to be less competent, while Roxana behaves as a knowing businesswoman, willing to try different methods, such as mortgages and bank savings, to multiply her wealth. Roxana regards worldly success as her main concern.
In Roxana, Defoe presents a systematic theory on economy with the introduction of the operation of credit and investment, and the novel is didactic in certain aspects, although it seems to be deficient in moral consideration. The way that Roxana transforms herself into a merchant is parallel to the process of cultivation of a tradesman in The Complete English Tradesman, which Defoe terms as a “collection of useful instructions for a young tradesman”(CET 11) and with which he hopes to protect the ambitious individual from any possibility of miscarriage. In The Complete
English Tradesman, Defoe uses aphorisms to stress the importance of frugality,
honesty, and diligence, and his privilege of tradesman over gentry in the acquisition and accumulation of wealth is obviously revealed. There is no doubt that TheComplete English Tradesman serves as an indication of Defoe’
s appreciation for the63 See “An Income of One’s Own”239, and also Her Bread to Earn 58-59.
self-accomplished tradesman, and the novelist has expressed fond feelings for similar values in Roxana. In Defoe and Economics, Dijkstra indicates that in the novel, Defoe intends to show the contrast between the old and new economic orders, emphasizing the capability in business of the newly rising parvenu. He states, “The crucial difference between the destructive, reactionary, and at best, static, world-view of the aristocracy, and the dynamic, progressive, and expansionist ambitions of the bourgeoisie, forms the subject of the most sustained and extensive didactic passage in Roxana’s narrative …”(15). The business world of Roxana is one of competition and management of wealth. As a middle-class woman, she opts to lead a risky life after abandoning her disgraceful occupation, instead of resorting to the stable condition that marriage might guarantee.
The metaphors of pond and spring are used to distinguish the inevitable recession of the conservative aristocracy and the prospect of success for the ambitious middle class. The duality helps to express Roxana’s as well as Defoe’s preference for the development of the new economic order. In a discussion about the disposition of Roxana’s money, Roxana and Sir Robert Clayton, whom is regarded by Roxana as “a Man thorowly vers’d in Arts of improving Money”(Roxana 169), reach the consensus that circumstances as a merchant are predominant in the obtainment and accumulation of fortune. Sir Robert tells Roxana, “Thatan EstateisaPond;butthataTradewasa Spring; that if the first is once mortgag’d, it seldom gets clear, but embarrass’d the Person for ever; but the Merchant had his Estate continually flowing…”(
Roxana 170).
The images of the inexhaustible spring and the stagnant pond illustrate the notion that engagement in business creates more opportunities to increase wealth, while an inherited estate simply declines or is incapable of growth as time passes. The statement clearly expresses the novelist’s awareness of the contrast between different
economic institutions, and Roxana apparently decides to march toward a venturesome yet promising path—to be a merchant. On the other hand, Defoe in The Complete
English Tradesman once again proposes the same idea and further emphasizes the
potentiality of the tradesman and the merchant over the landed gentry in the acquirement of money. He claims:[A]n estate’
s a pond, but a trade’ s a spring: the first, if it keeps full, and the
water wholesome, by the ordinary supplies and drains from the neighboring grounds, it is well, and it is all that is expected; but the other is an inexhausted current, which not only fills the pond, and keeps it full, but is continually running over, and fills all the lower ponds and places about it.(CET 265)
The connotation of the pond as an unceasing source of money for the tradesman is rather impressive. In Roxana, Defoe praises the accomplishment of the merchant over the outmoded aristocracy; in The Complete English Tradesman, he further elaborates the notion and regards it to be a more practicable means to accord with the ethos.
Dijkstra proposes, “For Defoe the delineation of Roxana’s experiences from dependency to independent wealth was a means toward the demonstration of the truth of his theory of the pond and the spring”(16). Overthrowing the conventional conception to regard the nobility and gentry as guaranteed circumstances, Defoe advocates the new trend in economic change, and Roxana thus becomes the embodiment of his proposition. As he models an image of the ambitious and unceasing middle class to substitute for the old-line aristocracy, family blood and legacy are no longer the necessary elements for the acquisition of better social status.
Through Sir Robert, Defoe expresses his admiration of businessmen for their discretion and the caliber of their genius to transgress the existing class order. Sir
Robert suggests:
[A] true-bred Merchant is the best Gentleman in the Nation; that in Knowledge, in Manners, in Judgment of things, the Merchant out-did many of the Nobility; that having once master’d the World, and being above the
[A] true-bred Merchant is the best Gentleman in the Nation; that in Knowledge, in Manners, in Judgment of things, the Merchant out-did many of the Nobility; that having once master’d the World, and being above the