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.

One Lady’s Fanny: A Discourse of Intercourse

Foucault’s declaration that, “power is not held, it is exercised” can be utilized as a link into the regulation of sex as an act and the discussion of the incitement of sex as seen in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Moreover, this “incitement to discourse” by Foucault and his analysis present parallel streams in Memoirs that may suggest illumination of a codified language, censorship, regulation of sex as taboo, the power dynamic and more. Cleland’s novel can be analyzed through the philosophical lens of Foucault and further establish an interpretation of the role of sex, power, dialogue and a discourse of the meaning of sexuality. Furthermore, the public sphere that exists in Cleland’s Memoirs presents a dichotomy on the view of morality through the acceptance and condemnation of sexuality.

John Cleland presents a young woman and pits her in a world of sex where the body is recognized not as the carrier of future progeny, but the free cell of exploration and harbinger of pleasure. In a scene with Phoebe, Fanny Hill is chastised for attempting to cover up her body in what seemingly is an act of modesty on her part. Phoebe, in Foucaultian terms, cries “No! you must not, my sweet girl, think to hide all these treasures from me, my sight must be feasted as well as my touch” (Memoirs 12). The act of cover up is closely linked to Foucault’s idea of repression of sex and the body. In The History of Sexuality, “Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul…” (20). What Phoebe observes with her eyes is repressed by Fanny and recorded by Cleland. Cleland, in writing Memoirs deprecates his work as “a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot”. The author is clearly doing something here by mentioning it pains him to defend a work, even to his Soul. However, he is also driven to express his work. Under such compulsion, Cleland presents a work with Foucauldian implications on repression and the novel as sexual discourse. Through creative venues Cleland describes much of the body, the acts of the body, the differences of sexual orientation, and it is suggested that he does this using codified expressions. His rhetoric is censored even though he blatantly describes sexual encounter.

In order to contain and corral the subject of sex Cleland applies creative rhetoric that is codified “in order to gain mastery over it in reality” (History 17). Cleland does not exhibit the vulgar without the ambiguities of rhetorical “cover up”; his descriptions are poetic justifications to a rather taboo topic during the 18th c. Although Cleland was writing during the 18th c. Foucault recalls that “the seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age of repression” (17). Examples of Cleland’s poetic justifications and need for expression is carried out throughout the descriptions of sex and the body under the motive of discovery. Fanny recalls Phoebe’s sexual touch as “her fingers play’d, and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament” (11). Why did Cleland not simply mention something along the lines of “Phoebe put her fingers inside of my cunt and made me hot”? There is something occurring here with language. Sex is subjected to language as Foucault mentions, but moreover creative language is pulling double-duty in the arena of cover-up and repression. Cleland will not express the sex act or its discourse outside of a creative rhetoric. He describes male genitalia as having “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets”; “that conduit-pipe”; “tender globular reservoirs” (83). Again, he utilizes Fanny as his agent of creative expression. She notices Mrs. Brown’s vagina and describes it as “the whole greasy lanskip lay fairly open to my view: a wide open-mouthed gap, overshadowed with a grizzly bush, seemed held out like a beggar’s wallet for its provision” (24). This description is poetic in its use of the female body’s genitalia and the metaphor of the wallet. Cleland is clearly utilizing a technique, which recognizes sex as taboo and covers it up, or represses it with a codification of language to describe it. By mentioning sex in this vein, he incites his readership, members of the public sphere. It is important to note that Foucault’s thoughts on the “incitement of sex” and the variant discourses of sex move beyond Cleland’s poetic discourse of sex. Though Foucault notices, “there was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex,” Cleland’s Memoirs included, he progresses from this increase in “illicit” discourses and examines the climb “concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself” (18). The subject of power then is subject to examination in conjunction with the subjugation of sex. This subjugation is what links Cleland’s Memoirs to a further analysis of the power dynamic.

Foucault affirms that “power is not held, it is exercised.” According to this affirmation power is not merely contained, but by noticing its exchanges one can then analyze its implications. Foucault describes power through sex, “An institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). What followed from this proliferation was the repressive mechanism of discretion. Discretion working alongside taboo became censorship. Foucault continues with, “rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties of the Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse” (34). Cleland’s protagonist exists within this “incitement to discourse” and her account speaks volumes to the reader beginning with the subject of power. Fanny Hill is without power at the beginning of the novel. When Fanny runs away with her Adonis, Charles, power transfers from Mrs. Brown. This reiterates the power dynamic that power cannot be contained, but exercised. The placement of sex throughout the novel continues to be exercised even though ownership has been transferred. Moreover, in exercising sex you transfer power, and as such both sex and power can be described as being more than “held” regardless of its morbid attempts at sexual agitation. In fact, because of this exercise of sex and power many, according to Foucault, “since the eighteenth century […] has not ceased to provoke a kind of generalized discursive erethism” (32). Cleland knows and uses his discourse to play into the morose descriptions of such sexual agitations described by the various partners of sex his protagonist encounters. For instance, when Mr. Barville applies the whip to Fanny’s body in order to produce sensation a number of allusions to Foucault are possible. These exist as power being transferred, discursive erethism utilized, and sex is not only produced, but exercised and experienced. Fanny Hill experiences her body, her sex, and even her minimal shifts from the power exchange; i.e. Mrs. Brown thru Charles thru Mrs. Cole and back to Charles. It can be analyzed then that Fanny’s experiences, according to Foucault, do “not multiply apart from or against power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise” (32). Power is indeed a dynamic displayed time and time again throughout Cleland’s Memoirs.

The meaning of morality and sex exists in the agency of the public sphere. Foucault mentions the need for “A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses” (25). Sex existing as secret only exists to break free and proliferate to the outskirts of containment. Sex must therefore be addressed in a discursive method that does not bring about its incitement. Foucault suggests confession. Taking Foucault’s thoughts on the “incitement of sex” beside Cleland’s Memoirs suggests a need for regulation in order to justify its placement to morality. Moral thinking during the 18th c. was still disposed to keeping sex as a subject of secrecy and as Foucault mentions “confession”. However, because authors like Cleland took to describing the sex act this too required a “policing” effort. No more so than its author disclaiming his disdain for the work. Again, he expresses his disposition by mentioning his soul. He claims that he had written, “a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried, and forgot”. Well, the problem is that it was not buried and forgot! In fact, it became arguably “the most famous erotic novel in English”. Why? The author wrote about sex, thereby inciting its discourse; the public that shunned the book incited its discourse; the public that condemned the discourse of sex betrayed their affinity to talk about it, describe it, condemn it, and ultimately shun it; the moral sphere repressed it, but needed to confess it. This dialectic is what I believed Cleland utilized in writing his Memoirs. Cleland, by expressing in writing, a secret topic, exposed it for what it was, an agency for public discourse (sex, that is, not his novel).

The novel is simply a medium or for lack of a better term, a tool, to incite. The subject of sex in being repressed allowed for escape via a readership that Cleland was sure to know existed. The society of Mrs. Brown, Fanny Hill, Charles, Phoebe, and others, though fictional, exist as a possible by product of a repressed society. What society? A society existing in the novel that possibly mirrored its audience (readership). Does that mean that someone had to write about it? Not necessarily, but then another genre would have arisen accounting for sex much like the modern executive does at the water-cooler. Perhaps then sex must be discoursed, though it is being discussed. Foucault, I believe states it best:

What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret. (35)

This need of the public sphere to exploit and incessantly chat about sex proves their willingness to produce a typology for the “sex talk,” or better-stated “incitement of [sexual] discourse”.

Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure utilizes his sexual puppet Fanny Hill to express his incitement to an 18th c. public sphere, and by so doing justifies his codified rhetoric as analyzed alongside Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. The result suggests that morality is both existent and condemned in the agency of the public realm.