Roxana

There’s an accounting in this book that reflects a lot about Defoe’s background as a fact-gatherer. I’d illustrate it with charts and accounts. (I think he did this already in A Journal of the Plague Year). It’s not what we’d expect in a novel. It’s not apparently a page-turner strategy, yet it is… I’m turning the pages. I find it absurdly fascinating. At times the story seems to stand still and only tension is created. I can feel the wear-marks on the floor from all the pacing that the character must do in going over the same ground seemingly endlessly. It creates tension in the reader too. There’s a sense of ‘stop talking and just get on with it’. This is especially true in the conversations between Roxana (who hasn’t yet been named so) and her maid Amy around the issue of whether and when R. will end up sleeping with the gentleman (her former landlord) who has been so generous to her since her husband left her, she had to farm her kids out to relatives and fell into abject poverty. Whether she sleeps with him or not in some ways seems the least of her worries but I understand why she worries and why Amy worries along with her and why the talking takes so long. Roxana’s also acutely aware of what we’d call ‘the slippery slope’. She knows she’s on the edge of it. When things seem to be working out, she knows that her debts will be called in. There will be a day of reckoning. It’s religious of course and we might analyze it from that perspective or from a perspective in which we recognize Roxana’s compromised position as a woman in her time and place but what Defoe really recognizes and (more importantly) gets down on paper is Roxana’s intelligence and self-awareness. As readers we really get a sense of how she lives in her own body and in her own world. But in a book supremely about manipulation, is she also working on us? What does she want from us? I’m thinking about that…