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Autre Publication Scientifique Année : 2019

Faces in Defoe's Roxana

Résumé

Roxana's chameleon-like narrator constantly re-invents herself and reveals a relish for and a mastery of disguise, in the literal sense. Yet at the very moment when she parades in her infamous Turkish dress before a masked audience, Roxana is perhaps the least disguised of all in the sense that unlike the others, she offers her naked face for everyone to see and admire: I had no mask, neither did I paint, and yet I had the day of all the ladies that appeared at the ball, I mean of those that appeared with faces on. As for those masked, nothing could be said of them, no doubt there might be many finer than I was… (Roxana 180 1) This is not the only time that she insists on the purely natural quality of her beauty; she previously referred to her face as "the mere work of nature" (R 72). But this passage encapsulates the double movement which characterizes so much of Roxana and of Roxana, built as it is upon a tension in which Roxana's face arguably plays a crucial role and which takes several forms: between exposure (the face wears no make-up) and concealment (the body is disguised), revelation and hiding behind a mask, naming and anonymity, the natural and the artificial, etc. In this she resembles Defoe's other fictional autobiographers, as Homer O. Brown explains: Defoe's narrators seem obsessed with concealing themselves, but the impulse leading them towards exposure appears equally strong. Complete concealment is impossible, perhaps not even desirable. On the one hand there is the insistence on building a faceless shelter around the self, but, on the other, a recurring compulsion to move out into the open 2. But the traditional dichotomy between face and facelessness, face and mask (another formulation of the one which opposes self and persona), is somehow subverted in the very passage I just quoted, which thanks to the phrase "with faces on" also suggests a form of interchangeability or at least of equivalence between "face" and "mask", two terms which at first sight have antithetical meanings. At Roxana's balls, one can almost indifferently put on a mask or a face, bringing onto highly unstable ground the whole question of identity and presenting a very modern view of the self as performative, as a series of roles or masks as 1 The references are to Oxford's World Classics edition, hereafter abbreviated as "R"; almost all extracts come from the digital version available on www.gutenberg.org, hence the differences in spelling, punctuation and capitalization. 2 "The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe," ELH 38 (1971): 562-90, 569.

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hal-02345219 , version 1 (04-11-2019)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02345219 , version 1

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Anne Rouhette. Faces in Defoe's Roxana. 2019. ⟨hal-02345219⟩
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