A Sermon by the "Queen of Whores"

Abstract

Daniel Roxana seems to resist interpretation, though it has been scrutinized for its likeness to a trade manual, a spiritual autobiography, and a 'woman's novel. Leopold Damrosch, for instance, remarks with some exasperation on his attempt to define Roxands inner logic: We cannot know exactly what Defoe thought he was doing in this enigmatic novel, but we do know that it was his last. As one critic puts it, 'Defoe stopped when he reached the end. '2 One prominent debate concerns the novel's religious allusions, as when Roxana reflects: So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in Wickedness, until we grow invulnerable by Conscience. 3 At issue is the influence that Puritanism exerted on the text. Polarized opinions on this subject emerge in two seminal studies of Defoe. In the monograph Economics and the FYction of Daniel Defoe (1962), Maximillian Novak presents Defoe as guided by the religious precepts of Puritanism; Novak, thus, is not loath to pronounce Roxana guilty of two economic sins: avarice and luxury.4 Contrary to Novak, Ian Watt claims in The Rise of the Novel (1957) that Defoe substitutes the literary schema of formal realism for Puritanism's providential order, making his writings ethically neutral. 5 Roxands unsatisfactory plot denouement, Watt says, shows that Defoe prefers and certainly achieves the inconsequential and the incomplete.6 Recent studies tend to view Roxana as informed by Puritanism, particularly in its sober tone, even while they suggest that the novel is a departure from strict religious discourse toward aesthetic expression. As Malinda Snow comments in Arguments to the Self in Roxand' (1994), Defoe's