The Pleasures and Perils of Female Consumption in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana
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By highlighting Roxana’s paradoxical construction as both a consumer and a commodity in the broader framework of material culture in the eighteenth century, this paper considers how Roxana exercises agency as the female consumer in the new economic order through her manipulation of her status as both a subject and an object of exchange. By underscoring the interconnections between economic and gender discourses, I argue that Roxana becomes an active, even transgressive, agent in the marketplace, one who uses the delights of commodities and consumption to fashion and empower herself, while she also carefully exploits her status of an object of exchange for her own ends. Just as she fashions new selves through her use of commodities, her masquerades recapitulate the uncertainty and fluidity of the eighteenth-century British market and its discourses, making it possible for her to manufacture and circulate different selves for her own profit. While the early part of Roxana celebrates the heroine’s ability to forge new selves through consumption, its later sequences dramatize Defoe’s reservations about the unruly power of the female consumer and its threat on English domestic virtues through Susan, who would ultimately limit Roxana to a private, domestic role. As such, Roxana dramatizes radical new possibilities for female agency within the developing consumer culture, yet it also attempts to contain and regulate these transgressive female desires within the prescribed ideal of domesticity.
Abstract
By highlighting Roxana’s paradoxical construction as both a consumer and a commodity in the broader framework of material culture in the eighteenth century, this paper considers how Roxana exercises agency as the female consumer in the new economic order through her manipulation of her status as both a subject and an object of exchange. By underscoring the interconnections between economic and gender discourses, I argue that Roxana becomes an active, even transgressive, agent in the marketplace, one who uses the delights of commodities and consumption to fashion and empower herself, while she also carefully exploits her status of an object of exchange for her own ends. Just as she fashions new selves through her use of commodities, her masquerades recapitulate the uncertainty and fluidity of the eighteenth-century British market and its discourses, making it possible for her to manufacture and circulate different selves for her own profit. While the early part of Roxana celebrates the heroine’s ability to forge new selves through consumption, its later sequences dramatize Defoe’s reservations about the unruly power of the female consumer and its threat on English domestic virtues through Susan, who would ultimately limit Roxana to a private, domestic role. As such, Roxana dramatizes radical new possibilities for female agency within the developing consumer culture, yet it also attempts to contain and regulate these transgressive female desires within the prescribed ideal of domesticity.
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