The Double Time-Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The Double Time-Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence DAVID BLEWETT Defoe's Roxana1 is a rare example of a novel set in two periods of time at once. Neither the title-page allusion to "the Time of King Charles II" nor the internal dating by which we can determine that Roxana is telling her story in 1724, the year of publication, tells the whole truth. The fact that Roxana exists simultaneously in two worlds fifty years apart in time is, as Paul Alkon points out, hard for modern readers to accept.2 Used to a stricter formal realism in fiction, we are apt either to accuse Defoe of a careless anachronism, or else to see the allusions to the earlier reign as "protective ambiguity,"3 a covering for his satirical thrusts at the reign and court of George I. But Roxana is complex rather than simple, or sim­ ply confused, and the novel possesses a double time-scheme for the ex­ cellent reason that Defoe wants us to see the moral parallel between the luxurious time of Charles II and the equally dissolute reign of George I. Roxana lives in two worlds at once because morally, in Defoe's eyes, they were the same. The case for an exclusively Georgian setting for the novel has been made by Rodney M. Baine, who provides a useful chronology of Roxana's life, allowing us to see clearly that by her own testimony Roxana is born in 1673, is therefore twelve years old at the death of Charles II in 1685, is about forty when she returns to England shortly before the accession of George I, and is fifty at the end of the novel when she is married to the Dutch merchant in the early 1720s. Moreover, as Professor Baine points out, by the publishing conventions of the time, the title page may well 19 20 / BLEWETT not have been composed, or even seen before publication, by Defoe.4 Be­ fore the introduction of the dust jacket, title pages, often rather sensa­ tional in tone, served as the publishers' advertisement for the book. What I want to do in this paper is to establish the evidence for the Resto­ ration setting of the novel, which is as extensive and as deliberate as the references to the early eighteenth century. Defoe may not—though he equally well may—have seen his own title page when the book was in press, but the publishers (if they were responsible for it) were certainly correct in thinking that the novel possesses a Restoration setting. I have on another occasion5 suggested that Roxana alludes to the reign of Charles II when she invites the reader to confuse her with Nell Gwyn by calling herself a "Protestant Whore," and by her friendship with Nell Gwyris financial adviser, Sir Robert Clayton, who was prominent in the reigns of Charles II and James II and who died in 1707, well before the time Roxana claims to have consulted him as her financial adviser after her return to London in 1714. Moreover, Nell Gwyn was given a house (the site of the present No. 79) in the Pall Mall close to St. James's Palace by Charles II. Similarly, Roxana tells us that she had "particular Reasons" for leaving her own house and moving into "handsome large Apartments in the Pall-Mall, in a House, out of which was a private Door into the King's Garden" (p. 204). It is in those apartments that she gives her splen­ did parties attended by the highest ranks of society, including the D____ of M____th, an unmistakable allusion to the Duke of Monmouth, Charles' illegitimate son by Lucy Walter, created Duke of Monmouth in 1663 and executed in 1685. And near the end of the novel when her daughter Susan insinuates that the Lady Roxana had been called to court to be the King's mistress, Roxana sarcastically replies, "To Court . . . why she was at Court wa'n't she? the Pallmall is not far from Whitehall" (p. 334). Such a remark refers to a time before 1697 when Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire. Susan's suggestion, of course, is that Roxana...