Rewriting the Body: Transgression and Renewal in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana

In Defoe’s Lady Roxana the ideals of classical harmony, public decorum and mental discipline, fostered by the rising Enlightenment, are subverted by a revolutionary drive. Behind the theoretical substance of Defoe’s new genre, we can discover the emergence of a new kind of heroine whose behaviours and actions are quite far from the traditional mentality. Defoe’s construction of gender has its basis in rationality, realism and a more utilitarian approach to the phenomenal world of the proto-industrial, capitalist society of his time. Defoe’s complex elaboration of Lady Roxana’s character anticipates features of the female protagonists of the forthcoming centuries, as well as testifies to the attention he devotes to the body in ways previously unrecognized. Defoe was too much committed to the cause of feminism not to confront any cynical denials of a self-determined female corporeality. Thus, he portrays Lady Roxana’s body as a powerful source of pleasure and sway.