With such an indicative adjective as ¡§fortunate¡¨ in its title, Daniel Defoe¡¦s Roxana interests readers in how fortunate the heroine is and in what sense she is called fortunate. Finishing reading the story of Roxana, readers are also concerned about why the fortunate mistress ends up in calamity. Therefore, this thesis sets out to explore how Roxana fortunately becomes powerful and to explain why she ironically ends up a tragedy. In terms of the financial prosperity she achieves, it is apparent that Roxana can never make it without the fortunate blessing of her remarkable beauty. Being a beautiful woman, she attracts one powerful man after another, and this attraction is the source of her large fortune. In other words, this thesis focuses on the influence and power of personal beauty, and more importantly, on how Roxana uses her beauty to manipulate those powerful men to benefit herself greatly. Her power comes from the exertion of the power of her beauty. Although Roxana is fortunately beautiful, her fortune, however, is decided by her character too. Roxana¡¦s tragedy results from an ambitious mind, that cannot, however, reconcile itself to her chosen style of life. As a result, although she is living a seemingly comfortable life, her unbalanced and disturbed state of mind leads to nothing but a tragic ending. In sum, this thesis, adopting textual analysis, aims at tracing Roxana¡¦s power and tragedy in association with the most formative element of the story, her beauty. Recent research has shown that being beautiful translates into being privileged and favored in many respects, and Roxana¡¦s story bears out these findings in the eighteenth century. In addition, although Roxana¡¦s final tragic ending renders her a failed social climber, she is, however, truly a fortunate mistress, who, riding on the Wheel of Fortune, can always fortunately rise whenever she is unfortunately reduced. In other words, Roxana¡¦s beauty, power and tragedy are all her fortune and how they interrelate is the principal concern of this thesis.

Abstract Roxana is Defoe¡¦s last novel and his only one that ends in tragedy. In the eighteenth century when the idea of realism prevailed, the novel was a reflection of social reality. Unlike a romance in which love and imaginary adventures are depicted, a novel depicts ordinary people and their ordinary life. Based on this idea of realism, Defoe¡¦s Roxana touches its readers. This novel is mainly about how the heroine Roxana, a deserted woman, struggles to make money and how her mental state changes. Yet reading through the story, what readers learn is not only Roxana¡¦s tragedy in fighting through her life, but also, beyond that, the relationship between a woman and the society she lives in. Under the control of patriarchy, a woman, whether reliant on a man or independent, is doomed to be a loser. In order to give as full as possible a perspective about the process of Roxana¡¦s making money, I put many issues in the thesis, including gender, capital, marriage, morality and psychology. This thesis falls into six parts. The introduction gives a general idea of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century and of Defoe¡¦s life. The first chapter deals with Roxana¡¦s marriage, exploring the reasons for her refusal of marriage and the possible results she may have to face if she remains unmarried. In the second chapter, I will discuss Roxana¡¦s business of prostitution, focusing on how she succeeds in making money by her body and beauty. In Chapter Three, I attempt to analyze the two Roxanas¡Xthe public Roxana and the private Roxana¡Xto see how she takes advantage of disguise in presenting a public self but still possesses a guilty feeling when she is alone. Here, I would like to apply Bakhtin¡¦s two terms ¡§centrifugal¡¨ and ¡§centripetal¡¨ to Roxana¡¦s public self and private self respectively. In the last chapter, I intend to use Freud¡¦s psycho-analysis to explain the three characters¡XRoxana, Amy and Susan¡Xand conclude with the unbalanced mental state that brings about Roxana¡¦s psychological chaos.

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This thesis argues that all subjects are constructed through discourse or ideology and are incapable of acting or thinking outside the limits of that discursive or ideological construction. Based on Louis Althusser¡¦s theory, ¡§individuals are always-already subjects,¡¨ living in ¡§the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.¡¨ This Marxist notion serves as the point of departure for the thesis, which defines a subject¡¦s imaginary relation to the world. For Defoe and Swift, their ideological subjection to ¡§the system of the ideas and representations¡¨ is presented in their narratives, which relate the respective subject¡¦s imagination to the world in the eighteenth century. The first chapter begins with Ian Watt¡¦s critique of the eighteenth century individualism, which demands domestic alienation. It argues that if Gulliver¡¦s misanthropy loses its moral dimension, his domestic alienation is questionable. As Gulliver¡¦s counterpart, Crusoe bases his autonomy upon nonreciprocal human relationships, and his self-claimed omnipotence, under constant threats, is false and illusory. The second chapter modifies Helene Moglen¡¦s dualistic interpretation of Crusoe¡¦s consciousness and analyzes his internal contradictions from the perspective of Hegelian dialectics. The course of establishing the colonial hierarchy in Robinson Crusoe further exposes the dialectical reality of colonial tension and contradiction, which also lends itself to interpreting the triangular relationships among the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver, and the Yahoos in Gulliver¡¦s Travels. In the third chapter, the focus of concern shifts to the representation of sexual other. Though Roxana and Moll are constructed to emulate Crusoe and embody the female versions of economic autonomy, these two female-based narratives, Roxana and Moll Flanders, bring to light the paradoxes of eighteenth-century male subjectivity that discriminates men from women in terms of domesticity and individualism. While Roxana is further commodified to be enlisted in the service of imperialist ideology to mask the reality of colonial aggression and imperialist expansion, the same sleight of substitution also underlies Swift¡¦s systematic attacks on women in his Irish Tracts and misogynist poems. Lastly, the fourth chapter aims to bring these two categories of difference together. Through Swift¡¦s and Defoe¡¦s imagination, the racial other and their sexual counterpart enter into a metaphorical alliance. Thus Defoe¡¦s Amazon and Swift¡¦s Yahoo trope not only synthesize what are considered two discrete and separate categories of discrimination, but also demonstrate that their creations of race and gender derive from the same source of reference.

Orientador: Suzi Frankl Sperber / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T21:56:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Viegas_ShellidaFernandadaCollina_D.pdf: 120671766 bytes, checksum: 6769e677622ca23add669406b7687de0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Como é possível o mesmo autor, na mesma época, escrever dois romances com a mesma temática e dar-lhes tratamento tão distinto? Essa é a pergunta que intriga os leitores de Defoe ao ler duas das suas principais obras literárias, Moll Flanders (1722) e Roxana (1724), e é também a pergunta que norteou esta pesquisa. Para responder a isso, estudamos a história da leitura, o surgimento e a popularização do romance, a história dos direitos autorais e a influência do público leitor na produção de romances. Isso porque ambas as obras de Defoe tiveram várias edições ao longo do séc. XVIII que se diferenciavam das primeiras tiragens. Visando estabelecer algumas hipóteses para explicar os motivos que levaram os editores a alterar os finais das obras, foram analisadas, nesses romances, as figuras da prostituta, amante, esposa e mãe e a condição da mulher na Inglaterra pré-Revolução Industrial, sem perder de vista a questão da edição e da recepção / Abstract: To what extent is it possible that an author over the same decade had written two novels about the same central theme, but from and with different perspectives? The readers of Daniel Defoe are right to raise this issue after reading Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). This research sets about answering such questions. To this end, I used Defoe's novels to take a close look at the history of reading, the creation and popularity of the novel, copyright implications and the influence of the reader in the production of novels. After all, both novels underwent a series of different editions throughout the eighteenth century. To formulate a working hypothesis to outline the reasons that allowed such changes in editions, I analyzed the figures of the prostitute, lover, wife and mother and the condition of women in pre-Industrial Revolution England in both novels / Doutorado / Literatura Geral e Comparada / Doutor em Teoria e História Literária