Language and Lying in Roxana: the Last of Defoe's Fiction

Okey Goode

doi:10.13189/lls.2013.010103

Abstract

Defoe, as religious dissenter and writer of fictions, sought to ally moral pronouncement with mimetic representation of material conditions.His character-narrators typically detail wicked behavior they are driven to for survival as a prelude to repentance. In his final novel, Roxana, however, Defoe confronts his narrator's exploitation of gap between referential language of experience and internally persuasive (Bakhtin) conventional discourse of repentance. Once Roxana dethrones the sovereignty of an original Text (Foucault), she manipulates language of repentance to authorize her self-serving sexual license. Defoe cannot resolve narrative by her repentance. The implications of split between speech and act may lead Defoe to recognize similar disjunction between allure of his character's adventures and his goal of moral instruction. Unable to ally truth of human experience with truth of dissenting repentance while ensuring that the Fable is always made for Moral (Defoe), he abandons fiction.

Highlights

Lagados carrying their conversation about in sacks, exchanging ideas literally by unpacking their word-hoard, a satire that plainly defines the gap between the recalcitrant thing itself and the infinitely portable, malleable words for it
The discussion proceeds by textual analysis of Roxana, informed by genre theory, narratology and reception theory, and the philosophical and religious environment of and in the novel as represented in nonliterary texts by Defoe and others Such analysis expands our conceptions of Defoe, narrative, eighteenth-century culture, and our own stance as readers
It seems novels that “the conversion scene . . . [is] a traditional generic a narrative inconsistency when she reverses her stance and paradigm that has been partially emptied of content and put tells her servant, Amy, “[I]f I yield, ‘tis vain to mince the to new use as a saving convention, which allows Defoe to Matter, I am a Whore” [p. 40], but her extreme distance himself from the impulse that has driven his self-condemnation lays the groundwork for an alternative narrative . . . and substitute a less disturbing logic of the wish rationale for submission: whores are not women struggling fulfillment.”

Summary

Introduction

Lagados carrying their conversation about in sacks, exchanging ideas literally by unpacking their word-hoard, a satire that plainly defines the gap between the recalcitrant thing itself and the infinitely portable, malleable words for it. Whereas Swift’s satire explores the concrete and logical limits of language, Defoe’s fiction, with its “Foundation . Laid in the Truth of Fact,” as he says in the preface to Roxana [2], seeks to embody in words the spirit that uses them—the Word made flesh. Defoe is steeped in the notion of human fallibility and deceit. He notes in The Wickedness of a Disregard to Oaths (1723) [3, p.110] the “Impossibility to us of knowing the secrets of one anothers Hearts” and laments that “Words . Verbal unreliability proves problematic in Defoe’s final novel, Roxana, which appeared a year later, because his heroine’s continual lying and disguise exploits the dissociation between res et verba that haunts Defoe He notes in The Wickedness of a Disregard to Oaths (1723) [3, p.110] the “Impossibility to us of knowing the secrets of one anothers Hearts” and laments that “Words . . . do not necessarily convey the true sentiment of man’s Mind.” Verbal unreliability proves problematic in Defoe’s final novel, Roxana, which appeared a year later, because his heroine’s continual lying and disguise exploits the dissociation between res et verba that haunts Defoe

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion