Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Roxana: The Psychology of Sex and the Body, or The Valuation of Sexualis in the Familiar

Mullier est homins confusion-
Chauntecleer (Chaucer)

The valuation of the sex trade cannot be defined outside the context of the body’s use as both an economic commodity and psychosocial agent imbedded in the theme of slavery; these two themes- one, engaging a viable, finite product and the other, the mental role of agitated memory, guilt, and conscience support this view. The aforesaid intersect (respectively) intricately time and time again in Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana. Defoe presents Roxana, the ambivalent heroine and Amy, her sagaciously adept maid. He engages his protagonist Roxana, quickly, into sexual escapades in exchange for survival. Her choice is a free one; however, her decision thrusts her into a life of sin and slavery. A closer analysis of Roxana’s sexuality reveals more than mere trade and turning beauty into coin. Defoe presents clearly an agent of sex bound by slavery serving both body and mind. Slavery here can be defined as that inordinate affection and attachment given to an object or person without the power to regain independence from that object or person. Roxana is a slave then to her own trade because she is attached to her money as well as to her own person. It is by incorporating this significant thread of slavery into the tapestry of the economically feasible sex trade that Roxana grants clues that expose her being. To ignore this position is to quite possibly ill-define Roxana, the person, and one could argue-to forego an important aspect of Defoe’s intended meaning of sexuality within his British novel.

Perhaps the one who mentions, “I’m sure my mistress is no fool” (Roxana, pg. 37) should reconsider her statement. Roxana is a multi-casted protagonist. She is at once the entrepreneur, a hidden, reluctant mother, and the mistress of a merchant and prince and king. Her ascendancy throughout her social attachments is paired alongside her treatment of sexuality as her commodity. In her approach to business and financing she procures a sense of liberty or freedom. This freedom also presents her as a fool, a prudent fool. Roxana is both a slave to her vice and a fool for her continuing path. She claims, “I was young, handsome, and with all the mortifications I had met with, was vain, and that not a little” (39). Here, she admires her beauty and the possibilities of such a discovery serving a purpose. The purpose is vile and even she acknowledges her condition as being “a whore, not a wife” (45). Roxana never describes herself to be smart, wise, or even sensible. Moreover, she relies heavily on what her finite beauty can provide for her. In becoming promiscuous she loses faith in marriage, in men taking control, and more overtly damages the part of the psyche known to direct one’s moral judgment-the conscience. Roxana mentions, “I was resolv’d to commit the Crime, knowing and owning it to be a crime” (41). She mentally recognizes the condition of her vice readily. At one point she describes her impaired psyche where “there was, and would be, hours of intervals, and of dark reflections which came involuntarily in, and thrust in sighs into the middle of my songs” (48). The verbal choices, consciously sexual, betray a calm disposition. Roxana is anything but calm, though living with her husband and playing “the game”, she is an unstable woman. Roxana’s faulty conscience is a direct result of her devilry or affinity to sin. Here sin can be defined as transgressing a standard and/or moral code in exchange for a lesser one. Her sin amounts to the sum of vice with her body added to her mind. The conscience, still, cries, “I was now become the Devil’s agent” (48), and yet earlier it was Amy who mentions, “has he not brought you out of the devil’s clutches” (37). The reader is left with a divided house. This division plays into Roxana’s divided mind, a mind unable to possibly separate and discern the act of sex and the thought of sex.

The psychology of sex alludes to the slavery of sex and proposes a connection between the body and the mind. “The Queen of Whores” (82), a self-ascribed title from a woman of the night lends a suggestive credibility to a faulted value system. Roxana is constantly calling herself these names, yet there exists no follow-through or lasting signs of repentance. She is at once comfortable to make such penitent remarks while her actions contradict her mental confessions. At one point she proudly mentions in thought to herself an itemization of all her sin and vice as a history. Roxana calls it a “history of this prosperous wickedness” (131). It is clear then that her action is sin and her verbal choices reassert she is a slave to her vice. She cannot shake its demands. Even when pressed to leave and quit the sex trade because she is “rich, and not only rich, but was very rich; in a word richer than I knew what to think of;” (110) she does not. Again, presented with an opportunity to depart forever a life of crime for which she began with no hope or money, Roxana makes the choice to forego freedom. She states, “I had now an opportunity to have quitted a Life of crime and debauchery”, but she does not and instead responds with “but my measure of wickedness was not yet full” (159). In short, Roxana ruled by a faulty mind and craving body for coin continues obstinate against rightful freedom. She is a slave to her passions. What's more, Roxana is a slave to her immoral drive toward coin and illogically combats moral reasoning for her present and future action(s). She reflectively asks, “What was I whore for now?” (201) She has no human answer and forswears that, though an agent of devilry herself, “the Devil himself cou’d not form one argument, or put one reason into my head now, that cou’d have serve for an answer, no, not so much as a pretended answer” (201). Roxana is admitting to her mental person that there is no answer to the question, “What was I whore for now?” Not only can she not answer the question with a rebuttal from her mind, but her reply seems to come again from that storage or default of vice, her body. She does not stop her sexual appetite. In fact, it would seem that she is all flesh and no conscience. What remains then is a dialogue between the split self, or a discourse of the mind and the body. Roxana makes her choice emphatically clear:

I cou’d not without blushing, as wicked as I was, answer, that I lov’d it for the sake of vice, and that I delighted in being a whore, as such…not being able to resist the flatteries of great persons; being call’d the finest woman in France; being caress’d by the Prince…by a great Monarch. These were my baits, these the chains by which the Devil held me bound (202).

In unpacking this statement recall the definition of slavery mentioned earlier. First, Roxana claims that “chains by which the Devil held” constrict her, suggesting impaired freedom. Second, she admits that she, “as wicked as I was”, enjoys vice and “delights in being a whore”. Again, these are her confessions from a frail and finite psyche. However, all of these points of interest rest on a greater fact-her vanity. Roxana is flattered by great persons paying great attention to her. Though she links her vices by stating “these baits” and “these chains” it is of considerable importance that her audience has served to continue her debased lifestyle. She began married to a faithless and foolish man of business then worked her way through a prince, a lord, a wealthy merchant, and a king. This shared article of trade attests to her body serving the role of a viable commodity in exchange for social mobility. However, after all is done what haunts her person remains an answer to her mind’s inquiry, “What was I whore for now?” Upon this inquiry rests a possible answer to freedom for Roxana, the quasi-libertine or pseudo-slave.

The matter of libertinism is at once ambiguous in Roxana as well as overtly dialectic; it exists on one end of Roxana’s sexual spectrum to be the ensnaring of her mind and freedom of the body, and vice versa. At one juncture Roxana mentions, “I had maintain’d the dignity of female liberty” as if to mention a freedom existing in the absence of boundaries. She is, in her liberty able to move like a man, but unable to exist in such a condition for very long. She wishes to float freely defying the gravity of the masculine, but cannot because there is no vacuum in the masculine world. Recollect, Roxana has come, “from a Lady of Pleasure, a Woman of Business, and of Great Business too” in order to exist and possibly dominate a masculine world. The most she is able to do is co-exist. Why? Apart from being a woman her mind is too frail. She is constantly sensing guilt and false honesty. The latter falls under the guise or rather disguise, if not a pretence, of a penitent. Roxana is none to be sure. She narrates, “there was a dart struck into the liver; there was a secret hell within”. Roxana is constantly battling and utilizing mental energy to keep the devilry at bay, but without success. The person of Roxana in the end concedes to the truth that having a woman behave like a man is to sin. To transgress in a masculine world is reflective of a “crime going before” (298), whereby the issue of scandal ensues.

The novel ends with a rather dismal projection on the psyche of Roxana though her outward body, that is, her material self proved wealthy and valuable. In the end, “the blast of heaven seem’d to follow…and I was brought so low again, that my repentance seem’d to be only the consequence of my misery, as my misery was of my crime” (330). It is this misery, this proven crime that places Roxana at once a slave to her mental anguish, languishing in the waves of guilt, sustained by aged body evidence, which ultimately suggests freedom to be obvious slavery.

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