Analysis of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 13, 2025

Daniel Defoe claims in his preface to the novel fully titled The Fortunate Mistress; or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d the Countess de Wintselshiem, in Germany. Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II, that it represents an autobiography. He claims that the account differs from “most of the modern performances” of its kind in that its “foundation . . . is laid in truth of fact; and so the work is not a story, but a history.”

In the traditional 18th-century approach, Defoe seeks to validate the novel form, which had not yet achieved full acceptance as a valid approach to writing, by claiming for it a logistical truth, rather than the applicable human truth, which became sufficient to readers in later centuries. A call to identify with the protagonist and to empathize with her conflict signals the defining of fiction’s purpose, shared with all literature, which is to study the human condition.

Defoe also tactfully uses rhetoric to avoid censure for any material readers might find salacious, by employing an argument to be echoed almost two centuries later by Oscar Wilde: “If the reader makes wrong use of the figures, the wickedness is his own.”

The beautiful Roxana is born to Huguenot refugees in England with ambitions that rise beyond what her husband can afford. A London brewer, he soon loses all his money, prompting Roxana to depart in search of a better life, abandoning not only her husband but their five children as well. She moves from England to Holland and on to France, supported by lovers whom she chooses to term “protectors.”

She encounters various adventures along the way, early on having a premonition of the death of her jeweler lover, who has set her up in a high-class home. When robbers kill him, Roxana is the one who makes out like a bandit, procuring the jewels, cash, and other valuables he left behind. Although inconsolable, she finds her wits to wonder how “his relations, or his wife’s friends,” might behave and sends a message to her loyal maid, Amy, who proved “so dextrous, and did her work so nimbly, that she gutted the house.” Roxana proves herself equal to most situations in which she finds herself caught up, gaining her nickname because she danced like Alexander the Great’s widow.

When Roxana’s children learn of her identity, however, her fortunes begin to turn. She has married a wealthy Dutch merchant, but in a narrative turn representative of several such throughout the novel, Roxana explains to the reader the guilt she felt, thus arousing reader sympathy: “I know than ever Belshazzar did at the handwriting on the wall, and the occasion was every way as just. Unhappy wretch, said I to myself, shall my ill-got wealth, the product of prosperous lust, and of a vile and vicious life of whoredom and adultery, be intermingled with the honest well-gotten estate of this innocent gentleman?”

Having charged Amy to find her children when she, now a countess, and her husband move back to London, Amy mistakenly reveals the identity of the countess who has been contributing toward the children’s well-being and eventually employed them as her own servants. Amy’s solution is to murder one especially troublesome daughter, but Roxana becomes angry with her maid for the first time in her life, then excuses her with the knowledge that only her “excess of affection and fidelity” caused her to suggest such a thing.

Eventually Roxana concluded the original 1724 version with the summary statement that after “flourishing” for some years in “happy circumstances,” she and Amy suffered a reversal of fortune thanks to the efforts of her unrelentingly curious daughter and “was brought low again.” A continuation of Roxana’s life was published in 1745 containing a lengthy explanation as to who had authored it. While historians cannot claim absolutely that Defoe wrote the addendum, its style bears close resemblance to his own.

In a plot that runs on too long and, as critics later observed, becomes fragmented, tedious, and anticlimactic, Amy disappears for a time, Roxana believes her daughter murdered, finds the daughter is not dead after all, Amy returns, and Roxana’s husband learns of her identity thanks to the efforts of her own children, labeling her “an abandoned wretch,” with “a fair countenance, joined to a false unrelenting heart.” He dies shortly thereafter, leaving her only a small income. Remorseful and poor, Roxana must live the remainder of her life paying for her sins.

Claiming to write a true history, supporting the illusion of reality with varied and accurate external facts, Defoe sacrifices characterization in his early novel. As critic Lionel Stevenson notes, Defoe “is a chronicler of phenomena, not an interpreter of them,” and none of his works can be considered major novels. Roxana’s importance lies in its place on the continuum of the novel’s development. Drawing from works that likely included those by Aphra Behn and Mary Delarivière Manley, Defoe helped advance an approach that separated itself from the hyperbole of romance fiction, presented in a simple and straightforward style that allowed focus on the quotidian, or events of everyday life.

Thus, readers could better identify with the characters in his more realistic presentations, although they proved so objective in his striving for resemblance to “truth” that they could not represent the complex aspects of life that the novel would eventually supply.

Bibliography
Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Zimmerman, Everett A. Defoe and the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.