Teaching Defoe's Roxana
I am teaching Roxana in an eighteenth-century English novel course and am slightly perplexed. I love the text and think there is a lot of wonderful discussions it could spark, but I was unsure how students would respond. Overall, it seems to have gone over well. Even students who didn't "like" the heroine found it interesting. Some especially loved how "modern" the story felt and that Roxana was a fully-developed, "mixed" character. There, as with any Defoe novel, were a few complaints about the narrative's style.
There are a couple of useful posts online, but nothing compared to what you can find on Defoe's Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe or for that matter, the first assigned text of the quarter, Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
I used the Oxford World Classic edition and partitioned the reading mainly by where a paragraph ended at the bottom of a page (chapters are so useful when assigning reading).
1) Friday: 2-53
2) Monday: 55-159
3) Wednesday: 160-242
4) Friday: 243-335; Optional: read the Introduction (vii-xxvii) and Appendix (331-339).
When I teach it again this fall, I think I'd like a bit more time. One more day would have made a difference. I don't know how well that will work, since my Fall class will meet only once a week.
It's no secret that I'm a huge Broadview Press fan, so I'll be using their new edition next time. There's nothing wrong with the Oxford edition; in fact, it has a nice account in the introduction and appendix on the textual history, including the different endings and titles. I just find the historical focus on Broadview so appealing.
1) Friday: General Introduction: I brought up Defoe's writing style, especially his narrator's love of itemized lists. I tried to put it in the context of Defoe's other novels, using Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack (as well as a little Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton) as a means of talking about Defoe's protagonists. I describe them as individuals with a variety of social, economic, and national affiliations, that these texts are concerned largely with themes of circulation and accumulation, and that they should look for moments of parallelism and repetition.
2) Background on Defoe and the novel's publication history; a bit on Watt's "Rise of the Novel" (much of this was based on the Roxana post from "This Gaudy Gilded Stage"). I highlighted the heroine's fluidity of identity, using as a jumping off point Janet Sorensen's argument that Roxana is "a heroine who masters the exchange economy of late seventeenth-century England and does so, in part, by her ability to translate and subsume linguistic and cultural difference" (65).
3) We began by brainstorming the different labels that could be applied to Roxana: naturally, "whore" and "mistress" came up. "History Undressed" had posted a nice piece on courtesans that morning, so I included a bit of that history, as well. It was fun to go back to some of my qualifying work on the nineteenth-century demimonde. If I was to do it again, I might have brought up Defoe's comments on marital prostitution.
A lively debate started in the class over Roxana's ethics. As it often the case when I teach Moll Flanders, there were a couple of men who really didn't approve of her and a couple of women who justified her actions as the result of gender inequalities. I love having both kinds of students, because they are willing to speak up, are passionate, and have clearly read the book.
We also discussed the role of accumulation in the novel: was it positively or negatively portrayed? what different types of accumulation occur? how does Roxana's treatment of her wealth alter in the novel? etc, etc.
4) The last day had a brief reading quiz and group discussions. Before the group discussions, I discussed the role of money a little more by giving a brief lecture on some of the economic changes occurring at the time. As a class, we tried to connect our thoughts on the role of material wealth in the novel with the daughter's pursuit of a non-economic relationship with her mother.
Next Up: Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai.
Links:
http://thisgaudygildedstage.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/hottie-of-the-month-daniel-defoe/ ["Hottie of the Month: Daniel Defoe" from This Gaudy Gilded Stages]
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/v035/35.2conway.html [Conway, Alison. "Defoe's Protestant Whore." Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.2 (2002) 215-233 via Project Muse]
http://books.google.com/books?id=ocDHo47T1YUC&pg=PA2&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0#PPA65,M1 [Sorensen, Janet. "'I talk to Everybody in their own Way': Defoe's economies of identity." The New Economic Criticism. Eds. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen. New York: Routledge, 1999. 65-81 via Google Book Search]
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/LiteratureEnglish/BritishLiterature/18thC/?view=usa&ci=9780199536740# [Roxana @ Oxford University Press]
http://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=939&cat=0&page=1 [Roxana @ Broadview Press]
http://historyundressed.blogspot.com/2009/04/life-of-courtesan.html ["Life of a Courtesan" @ History Undressed]
Second image is from amazon.co.uk [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roxana-Fortunate-Mistress-Oxford-Classics/dp/0199536740]
http://www.broadviewpress.com/product.php?productid=16&cat=0&page=1 [Adventures of Eovaai @ Broadview Press]