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When Roxana strips her maid and forces the girl into bed with Roxana's own lover, she can reflect after the fact that she did this because she was unwilling to let her maid be morally superior to her. "...As I thought myself a Whore," she explains, "I cannot say that it was something design'd in my Thoughts, that my Maid should be a Whore too, and should not reproach me for it." That's the kind of introspection that makes Roxana such an interesting narrative voice and something that distinguishes her from her sister anti-heroine, Moll Flanders.

Roxana's self-knowledge, however, is inconsistent. At other times in her narration, she simply recounts her actions without having anything to say about their moral character. She is glib when she describes forcing her son to marry a woman of her own choosing, then punishing him for his reluctance by withholding promised investment capital. This is interesting in a different way: Does she not comment because Defoe is purposefully depicting the blind spots in her character, or is this just another of the many inconsistencies in the novel? (Her age and number of children are muddled, which is not the sort of thing I'd expect an author to get wrong on purpose.) Or am I encountering values so unfamiliar to my own moral experience and observation that what is unworthy of mention in Defoe's community seems a sort of crime in mine? I don't know, and I enjoy not knowing. That is one of the reasons I like to read old novels. The morality of most contemporary novels is so blatant as to become tiresome.

Roxana's "bad" behavior is blatant, but her moral arguments are subtle. She represents herself as wicked even when she is describing acts of kindness or extraordinary fair play and generosity. By hastening to assure the reader that she agrees with the conventional opinion of her dissolute life, she (and the author) cleverly forestall the reader's condemnation, although perhaps not to the extent that prevented publishers from feeling they needed to add alternate endings to subsequent editions of the book. In these alternate endings, Roxana is punished for her wrongdoing, penitent, reformed, and usually dead. Defoe gave her a sad and abrupt end, too, but the relish with which her sins are recounted and the complexity of her moral character make me wonder how wicked she was meant to be. Wicked enough, I suppose, to make for good reading--still.


For my reference:
Roxana's taxonomy of fools begins with the passage: "If you have any regard to your future happiness, any view of living comfortably with a husband, any hope of preserving your fortunes or restoring them after any disaster, never, ladies, marry a fool."

Roxana's false "new turn" on the subject of marriage, in which whe explains why she will sleep with, but not marry, her lover begins with: "I told him I had perhaps differing notions of matrimony from what the received custom had given us of it..."