Subjectivity in Narrative Space: The Lack of Female Agency in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana Christopher Maye With its revealing character dialogues and strategic plot endings, reading eighteenth-century texts without connecting it to notions of character subjectivity and agency is difficult. While these ideas seem in opposition, is it possible to appear as an agent but actually be a victim in a much larger framework? Principally, an individual can be in control of his or her actions but still be victimized and controlled by social constructs allowing some individual freedom but only in accordance with societal expectations. Allison Case extends this concept in discussing the difference between the male and female voices in narratives; women must assume a heightened form of submissiveness and impotency, and overall, their voices and narratives are either directly or indirectly shaped by men and male expectations of femininity.1 This observation of the discrepancy between these gendered narrative voices prompts us not only to understand how eighteenth-century English society functioned and what it deemed as acceptable but also to surmise that its delegation of patriarchal power existed in seemingly private textual spaces. With this perspective, it is necessary to view eighteenth-century English women as existing within a confined space where notions of agency are dictated by a hegemonic patriarchal society. Daniel Defoe’s Roxana The Fortunate Mistress alludes to these observations through the novel’s heroine. While current scholarship primarily views Roxana’s supposed self-prescribed prostitution as a form of empowerment, Roxana’s femaleness and Defoe’s depiction of his protagonist survey diverse but convergent aspects of confinement. The selling of her body connotes a material existence and her seducing men for status and financial security limits her to the male gaze. From a broader perspective, Roxana’s actions stem from the very social ideas that characterize the historical ideologies of that time: the commodification of the female body, male domination, and the inability to escape social expectations. In having her continuously determine her next move, Defoe gives Roxana the appearance of an agent, yet I argue she is more accurately a paradigm of Defoe’s overarching didacticism and a victim of male dominated social forces. While Defoe focalizes Roxana’s identity as a seductress, there are various moments in the text that indicate a connection between Roxana’s
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