by Steven Moore
Compared stylistically to the pungent criminal novels of the 17th century on which Defoe modeled his, Moll Flanders is rather bland and prolix. (Most of those earlier fictions are taut novellas; Moll Flanders rambles on for 268 pages.) Of course, Moll doesn’t pretend to be a skilled writer, and in the preface her “editor” admits “the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered, particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words than she told it at first” (3), but that doesn’t relieve the occasional tedium. This may also be due to Defoe’s ambition to improve upon naive productions like Mary Frith and The Counterfeit Lady Revealed; as Richetti notes, “What distinguishes Moll Flanders from mere criminal biography of the period and what makes the book a novel in the full modern sense of the term is its tendency towards extended meditation on the nature of action rather than the mere description of the action itself” (Defoe’s Narratives, 105). But Moll’s meditations often amount to the-devil-made-me-do-it evasions (literally: see p. 151) and some uneasiness after certain crimes that she might be caught, or commonplaces such as “’tis evident to me that when once we are hardened in crime, no fear can affect it, no example give us any warning” (172). And of course the moral lessons she derives from her activities are clichéd and hypocritical.
For a novel lauded as a breakthrough in realism, it’s rather vague and sketchy, unlike the better criminal novels like The London Jilt: few characters are named, and there are no references to current events: Moll is in London during both the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, yet doesn’t say a word about either. (In A Journal of the Plague Year, which Defoe wrote around the same time, the narrator notes that most of the thieves who took advantage of the calamity were women.) Moll mentions some London street names, but doesn’t describe any settings in any detail; la, when she’s thrown into Newgate Prison, which screams out for color commentary, she claims “no colors can represent the place to the life” (215).132 The novel is not so much realistic as frank about certain topics not often treated in fiction before, such as abortion and syphilis. As Dorothy Van Ghent points out, there are plenty of references to things (especially stolen goods), but the novel is not “a world rich in physical, sensuous textures—in images for the eye or for the tactile sense or for the tongue or the ear or for the sense of temperature or the sense of pressure. It is extraordinarily barren of such images” (49–50). On the one hand, this is appropriate for a narrator as self-centered as Moll; as E. M. Forster writes, “She fills the book that bears her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park, so that we can see her from every aspect and are not bothered by rival growths” (88). The isolated Robinson Crusoe can be forgiven his self-absorption, but Moll’s is more damning. And I don’t know where Moll Flanders got its ribald reputation; Moll skips over the details of her sexual encounters and dwells only on the money she made from them: “as for the gold, I spent whole hours looking upon it. I told [counted] the guineas over and over a thousand times a day” (21–22). Defoe forces us to spend 268 pages inside the head of a self-pitying, self-centered, morally bankrupt woman who has no problem stealing from kids and rolling drunks to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a “gentlewoman,” and who then has the gall to presume her melodramatic jailhouse act of contrition cancels out the misery she inflicted on countless good, law-abiding people. Her financial success at the end of the novel leaves a bad taste in the mouth, “a severe satire” on the Christian idea of repentance. The entire novel feels like one of her scams.
Much more impressive is the novel Defoe published three months later, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), the story of an ordinary man trying to comprehend an extraordinary event. It may be the earliest example of what critics today call the “documentary novel,” in which the writer sticks much closer to facts than the author of a historical novel would. While Defoe gives a fairly accurate account of the bubonic plague that swept through London and environs in 1665 (when he was five), he filters it through the conflicted sensibility of a saddler identified at the end only as “H. F.,” probably after Henry Foe, an uncle who lived through the plague. Written some years after the event, the novel is as much about him as the plague, dramatizing a personal crisis by way of a public crisis.
H. F. begins by describing the arrival of the plague in the stunned but stoic manner of Raymond Burr in Godzilla, superbly capturing the uncertainty and dread felt by Londoners as the epidemic seeps into the suburbs and creeps eastward into the city. For a reader today, it evokes not only sci-fi movies but the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.133 The narrator tries to stick to facts and figures as he describes the devastating toll of the epidemic, but it becomes apparent that for him the calamity is a crisis of faith, both in his government and in his god. A good citizen not used to questioning authority, he unctuously praises the Lord Mayor, magistrates, and aldermen for their handling of the disaster, but timidly registers his doubts about the wisdom of certain policies, especially boarding up houses if only one person within was diagnosed as infected, which often caused all members of the house to succumb to the disease. He notes the king and court abandoned the city early on, which is understandable, but he can’t help but notice “really the court concerned themselves so little, and that little they did was of so small import, that I do not see it of much moment to mention any part of it here” (234). He bends over backward to excuse the government’s ineffective responses to the crisis, too respectful of authority to criticize them: of the house-shutting measure (which he obsesses over), he lets them off the hook in their own officialese: “but it was authorized by a law, it had the public good in view as the end chiefly aimed at, and all the private injuries that were done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the public benefit” (158). H. F. knows the authorities made mistakes and the king showed a lack of leadership, but he’s the type of citizen who considers it unpatriotic to say so—and thus the type of citizen who allows those authorities to remain in power.
He also lets his god off the hook. H. F. is one of those religious types who regard a natural disaster as an act of divine punishment—verified by his reading of the 91st Psalm—and though he occasionally wonders why a lot of good people and innocent children were punished as well, he quickly suppresses such thoughts. He peppers his text with Old Testament examples of YHWH’s taste for revenge, and defends his religious convictions in one lively scene when he confronts “a dreadful set of fellows” in a tavern who mock him with “hellish abominable raillery” for believing his god would inflict “such a desolating stroke” on his people (65–66). Yet throughout the novel H. F. waffles between supernatural and natural explanations for the plague; though unfamiliar with epidemiology and the true cause of the epidemic (fleas on diseased rats off ships from Holland), he keeps leaning toward realistic explanations, only to be yanked back by his religious belief in divine vengeance, tying himself in knots as he tries to reconcile empirical with theological causes. “I would be far from lessening the awe of the judgments of God, and the reverence of his providence which ought always to be on our minds on such occasions as these . . .” he begins one particularly tortuous passage, “But when I am speaking of the plague as a distemper arising from natural causes, we must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means . . .” (193–94). Behind the curve on scientific knowledge—H. F. wrongly claims “we had no microscopes at that time” (203)—he is torn between a medieval and a modern worldview. In the end he retreats to the medieval and actually praises his god for lifting the plague in late 1665, which is like thanking a burglar for eventually leaving after breaking into your home, killing some family members, and making off with most of your stuff. Similarly, H. F.’s fellow Londoners have learned nothing from the experience and revert to their old habits afterward, including “all manner of wickedness” (248).
The Journal can be read as a study of how a patriotic, godfearing citizen reacts when hi
s faith in both secular and divine authority is shaken. While trying to separate rumors from facts and remain objective, H. F. can’t help but register the subjective effect this calamity is having on him. After describing a frantic, “nearly naked” man who had “come out into the open street, run dancing and singing and making a thousand antic gestures, with five or six women and children running after him, crying and calling upon him for the Lord’s sake to come back,” H. F. adds, “This was a most grievous and afflicting thing to me, who saw it all from my own windows” (172, my italics). He almost gives in to despair, and at one point wonders “after I have mentioned these things, what can be added more?” (177), but he perseveres for 70 more pages (admittedly a little repetitious) and survives the plague with his uncritical beliefs intact. I doubt Defoe meant us to question the validity of those beliefs—he had his patriotic, superstitious side, and was more concerned with warning Londoners how to react to an imminent plague brewing in Marseilles since 1720—but this is another instance where we need to trust the tale rather than the author. And what a tale it is: the apocalyptic atmosphere, the horrific details, the historical accuracy, the anecdotes about how people reacted to the disaster—this is Defoe’s real breakthrough in realism, and it would be a long time before any other English novelist would dare describe life this close to the bone.
Like the protagonists of Defoe’s other novels, H. F. has a self-destructive streak: he remains in London even though he admits he should have left at the beginning of the plague, just as Moll Flanders tempts fate by remaining a crook after she’s made enough to retire; Crusoe confesses he is powerless to resist the urge “that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction” (12), and feels he “was born to be my own destroyer” (31). No Defoe character better exemplifies this self-destructive tendency than the protagonist of his last major novel, Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress (1724). He may have written this in response to the swelling tide of female novelists in the early 1720s (which will crash over us shortly): Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess was published the same year as Robinson Crusoe and initially was just as popular, and Defoe may have taken his title from her 1723 novel Idalia, or The Unfortunate Mistress.134 If so, I can’t imagine what female readers made of Defoe’s dark, histrionic tale, for Roxana triumphs over adversity, becomes rich beyond the dreams of avarice, is loved by several decent men, marries the most decent of them, and is made a countess; yet she regards all this as a tragedy.
Like “Moll Flanders,” “Roxana” is an alias adopted later in life by a French girl taken to England in 1683 by her father, who marries her at the age of 15 to a London brewer. A brainless incompetent who allows his business to fail, he walks out on his wife after eight years and five children, reducing her to penury. Forced by circumstances to abandon her children, Roxana and her devoted maid Amy are rescued from starvation by their landlord, a prosperous jeweler who helps the beautiful 23-year-old get back on her feet. Worldly Amy informs her fortunate mistress that the jeweler will expect sexual favors in return, and even though he’s not a vicious ogre but a handsome man who falls in love with her, and even though Roxana has come to love him as well, as soon as she has sex with him, she flips out—or so it seems, for all her subsequent actions are so neurotic that the reader has to agree with her later self-diagnosis that she is “as truly crazed and distracted . . . as most of the people in Bedlam” (234). For all practical purposes a single woman, as Amy and the jeweler point out—he’s married but separated—Roxana is so mindlessly wedded to “the laws both of God and our country” (43) that she suddenly considers herself a “whore.” There’s nothing in her previous background to account for such a violent reaction, no convent education or excessive religiosity; she describes her younger self as quick, smart, bold, satirical, confident, and happy. The first indication she has snapped is her treatment of Amy (who deserves an award for best supporting actress in this soap opera): one night, while the jeweler is waiting in bed for Roxana, she strips Amy, pushes her at him, and watches them have sex: “as I thought myself a whore, I cannot say but that it was something designed in my thoughts that my maid should be a whore too, and should not reproach me with it” (47). Invoking satanic imagery, Roxana now regards herself as “the Devil’s agent, to make others as miserable as myself” (48); that drama-queen claim, her morbid mortification, and her indifference to her children—she eventually produces and abandons almost as many as Moll—all suggest Roxana is not merely distressed by the compromises she needs to make to survive, but is driven mad by them.
The jeweler gives Roxana what she admits is “the most agreeable life” until he is murdered two years later, and leaves her enough money to live comfortably; instead, theatrically damning herself “the queen of whores,” she enters into a few other long-term relationships with equally decent men, but she’s so traumatized by her earlier brush with poverty that she rejects an excellent marriage proposal in order to keep control of her own money. At one point she makes a sensible feminist argument for the importance of financial independence for women, but Defoe positions this as the crazy talk of of a “she-merchant,” a “kind of Amazonian language” from someone who “would be a man-woman” (171). This is typical of the mixed messages Defoe sends throughout the novel: the luxurious life Roxana leads after she turns “whore” would look pretty attractive to most of his female readers—she is literally treated as a princess by a French prince, and has an affair with the king of England—as though Defoe were daring his readers to admit they too would turn whore in those circumstances. Roxana’s insistence that the foolish early marriage her father pushed her into is sacred because it is in accordance with “the laws both of God and our country,” while her mature relationships with decent, generous men are sinful adulteries, ridicules those laws even as Defoe seems to defend them. Roxana’s sense of propriety is exposed as provincial during her stay in France, where she learns that the prince’s wife urbanely dismisses his infidelities as “foibles,” while middle-class Roxana insists they represent “the meanest of human frailties” (107, 102). I doubt Defoe wanted his readers to drop British propriety for continental savoir-faire, though the text makes the latter (and Amy’s moral relativism) more attractive and sensible than Roxana’s lace-curtain views. The preface makes the usual argument that the novel is intended for “the instruction and improvement of the reader,” but it’s unclear what that lesson is, aside from the obvious one about Roxana’s excessive vanity and ostentation: this fame monster wants to become the king’s mistress and is given her exotic stage-name after performing an Oriental dance in a skimpy outfit at a ball. (Readers are also encouraged to speculate how many other aristocratic ladies earned their titles on their backs.) Roxana makes some pointed criticism about the way the rich squander their wealth “upon the most worthless creatures” (74), but this comes across more as self-loathing than anything else. (She selfishly hordes her wealth rather than circulates it, as Defoe recommends in his economic writings.) Roxana claims “I am a memorial to all that shall read my story, a standing monument of the madness and distraction which pride and infatuation from hell runs us into; how ill our passions guide us; and how dangerously we act when we follow the dictates of an ambitious mind” (161), but her case is so extreme, her actions so self-destructive, that we can’t take her or the moralizing preface seriously. The novel titillates and tantalizes more than it instructs and improves; whatever it is satirizing, “the book exists as an example of failed satire,” as Richetti writes (Defoe’s Narratives, 193n2).
Roxana is a puzzling novel in other ways, beginning with its time scheme. Certain dates indicate it is set mostly in the beginning of the 18th century, but the title page places it “in the time of Charles II,” who died in 1685 when Roxana was about 12. Some critics have argued that Defoe meant Roxana to exist on these two temporal planes simultaneously, time-traveling back and forth as in a sci-fi novel, but the chronological discrepancies are too similar to the careless ones in Moll Flanders to take this seriousl
y. Defoe isn’t a magic realist. There are other inconsistencies—Roxana says “she’s above fifty” on one page, but a few years later claims she’s “pretty near fifty” (187, 245)—which suggest Defoe simply wasn’t paying close attention. (During this period Defoe was simultaneously writing several books and a massive amount of journalism, plus running numerous business ventures, and it’s pretty clear his novels weren’t edited in the modern sense, just typeset.) There are numerous violations of point-of-view, many unnecessary repetitions, unbelievably convenient coincidences, obscure biblical and literary allusions that are inconsistent with Roxana’s education, and other signs that Roxana was composed carelessly. As to its genre, it lurches from faux-picaresque to chronique scandaleuse to detective novel, then abruptly reverts back to 17th-century spiritual autobiography at the end. The conclusion is especially disappointing: Defoe walks out on Roxana just as her first husband did, as though he was tired of his adventuress, couldn’t figure out how to continue the novel, or simply ran out of paper. At least he didn’t give it a happy ending, which some of the publishers who reprinted it in the 18th century did.
Nonetheless, Roxana is memorable for its fierce female characters. Scenery-chewing Roxana is often upstaged by the amazing, amoral Amy, a vibrant, resourceful woman whose earthy pragmatism challenges her mistress’s artificial ideology. Her devotion to Roxana is intense and borderline-neurotic: “I will starve for your sake, I will be a whore, or anything for your sake,” she raves; “why I would die for you, if I were put to it” (28), and later she murders for her mistress. Her willingness to sleep with their landlord raises eyebrows, as does Roxana’s frequent mention that they often sleep together. While not too much should be made of this—such arrangements were not uncommon then, and Amy has her share of heterosexual fun—it’s hard to ignore the psychosexual dynamics “of her violent affection for her mistress” (32). Everett Zimmerman suggests “Roxana’s putting Amy to bed with the landlord is her way of enjoying Amy,” and “Both participate by imagination in every aspect of the other’s sexuality” (167, 168). During those decades of sleeping together, Amy must have thrown a leg over her bedfellow at some point, and if she’s as lively and cunning in bed as out of it, Roxana would indeed be a fortunate mistress. And then there’s Susan, one of Roxana’s daughters from her first marriage and a personification of her guilt, who hunts her errant mother down during the last quarter of the novel “like a hound” (317), haunting her “like an evil spirit” (310). (Roxana irrationally fears that acknowledging Susan as her daughter would ruin her own reputation.) Amy wants to murder “the wild thing,” but it’s hard to say whether “the violence of her passion” (328) is sexual or professional. Roxana, Amy, and Susan are all obsessive, driven women who luridly light up these pages, easily overshadowing the nameless male characters in the novel.