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2021/12/25
Chapter Three:Roxana’s Anxiety over Public Identity:Criminal Identity, the Violence of Abjection and Child-Murder in Roxana
Roxana is keenly aware of the unbidden accusation of her criminal identity and thus has a “strong Inclination to “absolve” herself “upon the easiest Penance” in the role of a defendant (104). As aptly put by Ruth Mazo Karras in Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (1996), “men prostitution sometimes substituted for marriage as a sexual outlet” (48). Roxana claims herself a “protestant whore” and she holds a firm attitude that she “has a mind to gratify herself” by means of “entertain[ing] a Man, as a Man does a Mistress,” by engrossing sexual indulgence in the role of man-woman (188).Roxana confesses that” I could not without blushing” that she “loved “to stick to whoring trade” for the sake of vice “literally sexual satisfaction and thus she is” delighted in being a whore” (244). In chapter three, I anchor on J. Kristeva, Freud, Elizabeth Groze and Jacques Lacan’s informative psychoanalytic theory to unmask and scrutinize the manifestation of uncanny boundary-overlapping between sexual desire, abjection and jouissance by psychologizing the title lady of Roxana. The tumultuous boundary-blurring between abjection and jouissance signals the ambiguous infusion between horror, pleasure and pain, complicates the tricky and enigmatic overlapping between abjection, sexual desire and jouissance. Roxana has been lived in Plenty and good Fashions (46). Roxana’s conceited self is overt in her self-narrative
Being French Born, I danced, as some say, natural, loved it extremely, and sung well also, that, as you will hear, it was after wards some Advantage to me: with all these things, I wanted neither Wit, Beauty, nor Money. In this Manner, I set out into the World, having all the Advantages that any Young Woman could desire…and form a happy Living to myself. (39)
Her superego is manifested in her manifesto as the “finest women in France” (244). In Leo Abse’s The Bi-Sexuality of Daniel Defoe: A Psychoanalytic Survey of the Man And His Works (2006), it noted that “Freud has noted that men are frequently attracted to such women of narcissistic tendencies that men are disposed to “see in these women a successful narcissistic integrity which they themselves have not be able to achieve…Roxana can lure them, for she achieve a rare seductive narcissistic autonomy…She becomes charming and desirable, a femme fatale (258). It might appropriate her role of a fascinated victim.
Roxana’sbourgeois experience furnishes a perfect framework for mediation of how a whore’s criminal identity begets phobia of shame and violence of abjection. When it comes to traumatic past experience, it is pertinent to put Freud’s psychological into contemplation. Abjection is an “otherness “to the self and “a terror to superego, challenge or crush its superego (Kristeva 4). Roxana desires sexual transgression and excessive sexual satisfaction but it also terrified her and haunted by self-contempt by perceiving herself a prostitute.
Roxana’s fervent desire of title of gentlewomen also unveils her inner desire to shrink from her traumatic past experience. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), as ssubtly observed by Freud, people revisits traumatic past experience with “irresistible” repetition of “instinctual compulsion” (282-83). Indeed, the forgotten trauma is supposedly the repressed. Roxana confesses that “the Reflections “ upon her past life were “ so much the more afflicting” that she declares “I looked back upon, the more black and horrid they appeared, effectually drinking up all the Comfort and Satisfaction…all those wicked things have been known too, which I now began to be very ashamed of “ (287-94, 306). Repression of troubled past memories is out of instinctual compulsion to ward off pain and wounded feeling.[137] Roxana assert that “according to my own way of arguing, it might die out of memory, and I might never meet with it again to my disadvantage” (163). It is necessary to approach the issue with Sigmund Freud’s psychosocial understanding.[138] Roxana re-lives the memories of repressed traumatic history repeatedly and compulsively in a state of hallucination or not or as a contemporary experience. Fred asserts that “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, he acts it out, without… knowing that he is repeating it” (28).[139] This conception was further developed in Freud’s essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “which contradicts the principle of quest for pleasure (1920). For instance, the dreams occur in “traumatic neuroses “rather than “healthy past” (282-83). Freud theorized that individuals are disposed to upset at the lost object and attempt to master the sensation of loss by re-enacting the scenes (285-308).[140]Freud generalizes a more convincing argument in stating the compulsion to repeat is more “primitive” than the pleasure principle (286). Freud points out a penetrating argument that compulsion of repeating former wounded experience is coupled with a motive to “master” the original trauma and turn its victimized passive role into active position, a desire to reverse the trauma case (285-94).[141] Roxana is the wounded subject placed in a passive position “but by repeating it, unpleasurable for the ego,she” took on an active part” (285). Roxana’s desire of becoming a man-woman witnesses her drastic anger to triumph over her former victimized role of weak passive creature into an autonomy powerful oppressor.[142] Roxana claims woman was” born free” and her motivation of becoming a “ Man-Woman” is to enact her self-proclaimed rights of a “free Agent” (187). Roxana’s anti-convention resolution signals her desire of anti-discrimination.
Roxana’s identity ranged from the “finest women in France, ” common whore,” and “Baronet’s Lady in England” and a “ Countess in Holland” to “ the most cursed Piece of Hypocrite” to a “she Devil” in her own terms ( 244-85; 337-48). Aside from this, she taunts her former of Roxana as “a Public Mistress or a Stage-Player” (350). Her mind is fragmented into two oppositional poles. Roxana hovers between her real and false identity and thus her false self-fashioned identity proves too fragile to hold onto. She admits that her “whole Conversation for twenty five Years had been black as Hell, a Complication of Crime” (348).
In the light of the theory in Kristeva’s essay “On the Melancholy Imaginary”, abjection is a “bad ego” which is destructive to destroy the self (Kristeva 6). Roxana titles Amy as the “Skin” of her “back” in claiming “Poor Amy! What art thou, that I am not?” (59, 164). Roxana perceives Amy as her “Right-Hand” who scapegoats all Roxana’s hideous and gruesome desires and “violence of her passion” (366-77).[143] As In this approach, I take a step further in proposing Amy as Roxana’s s primitive bad ego. Roxana claims’ Amy’s augment in documenting “ I will be the death of her for-all, and then I should be sober again…I will put you out of your pain and her too” and Roxana suggests that she “ began to see that [Amy] was in earnest” (319). Roxana insists “Amy effected all afterwards, without [her] knowledge” (350). In this respect, Amy is Roxana’s shadow or projection. In “On the Melancholy Imaginary,” Kristeva presupposes” the mechanism of identification in the interrelationship between depression, wounded ego, and the interplay between the self and the other in the narcissistic context (14). Roxana confessed that she “looked back former things with Detestation and with the utmost Affliction, and…those reflections began to prey upon [her] own Comforts, and lessen the Sweets of [her] other Enjoyment: They might be said to have gnawed a Hole in my[her] Heart before; but now they made a Hole quite thro’ it; now they eat into all [her] pleasant things…not all the things we call Pleasure can give [her]any relish… [she] grew sad, heavy, pensive, and melancholy; slept little, and eat little…my husband…did everything that lay in his power, to comfort and restore me; strove to reason me out of it; then tried all possible ways to deliver me, but it was all to no purpose” (310).[144] Roxana claims “I had neither Life or Soul left in me” (367). Following this line of thought, Roxana is enslaved by neurosis in acknowledgment of her maudlin, gloomy tendency. In Kristeva’s theory, abjection is placed in the imaginary border, in-between the other and the self. Abjection is an ambiguity-driven unstable mobile territory, which situated in the “ambiguous opposition I/ other” and “ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out the territory” which incites intense formidable violence to the self (Kristeva 7-10). Hence, I hypothesize that when the boundary between the self and the other is attacked by the impetus of abjection, the self is subject to identity crisis.
I identity that whore identity and beggar identity are the other dwelt in Roxana in the name of alter ego, which wounds and scatters her primitive ego. Whore identity absolutely gives rise to her victimhood. Abjection is the “precondition of the narcissism” (Kristeva 13). Roxana desires “nobler Objects,” such as title and “attracted by a Person of Honour and a Person of a very great Estate” (242). She desperately infatuated with aristocratic privilege, namely, the glamour of loyalty to soothe her hidden sense of inferiority and temper the violent attack of abjection.[145] Roxana claims “the Honor of having the scandalous Use of my prostituted Body, common “to Prince’s “inferiors,” which wryly recognizes herself as a common whore (110). Prince commonly crystalizes Roxana’s ideal of noble objects. Roxana is ‘dazzled” by the “notion of of being a Princess honour’d with Titles, be call’d Her HIGHTNESS” (278). Roxana claims “I had a strange Elevation upon my mind all the Great things of a Life with the Prince” (278). Whore identity is Roxana’s injured ego. Hence, Roxana claims that she resolves to put herself “into some Figure of Life,” namely, “putting a new Face” in which “might not be scandalous “to her “own Family” (249-50).[146] Roxana’s bad ego, namely, her whore identity potentially inflames narcissistic crisis.[147] Abjection is “a kind of narcissistic crisis, namely, narcissistic perturbation“(Kristeva 14). By burying her dreadful abjection, Roxana cloaks her clandestine whore identity and past temporary but traumatic identity of a beggar. Roxana’s begging experience is her first and utmost traumatic experience. Roxana remarks that “Amy who knew my disease” (239). Roxana once honestly confessed that “ I had indeed two assistances to deliver me from this snare, and these were, first, Amy, who knew my disease but was able to do nothing to this remedy; the second, the merchant, who really brought the remedy, but knew nothing of this distemper” (257).I propose that the remedy she refers to is “honest affection” in Roxana’s term (308).[148] The Dutch merchant is the only character who displays parental and feminine sympathy to the unborn-child. He proposed to Roxana persistently with attempt to “prevent the Scandal which would otherwise have fallen upon the Child, who was itself, innocent” (309). It is an established fact that the bastard is doomed to “suffer for the Sin of its Father and Mother” (308).
Roxana confesses that the “Apprehension” of the “Return” of “dreadful “terrors of “poverty” makes her “Heart Tremble” (73). The tragic truth creeps in that Roxana is frightened with the Prospect of Beggary from the outset and then she is chained by the fear of exposure of her whore identity. By extricating herself from humiliation of poverty, she falls into snare of another problematic disturbing whore identity. The repressed which she casts off under the surface keeps coming back and haunts her recurrently and uncannily. Hence, anxiety sets the tone of the text. Roxanna submits her principle of self-reliance and marries for the sake of title as a means to pacify the unremitting attack of abjection. The uncanny emergence of abjection is “inescapable, “weighty and “sudden” in the shape of “a vortex of summons and repulsions,” which is essentially an abominable “threating otherness” (Kristeva 2, 17). Roxana aims to shakes off her former victimhood by securing economic independence but her whore identity are tied up to the label of sexual immorality and inordinate sexuality. It is a truth universally acknowledged that whoring trade is a criminalized career and a criminalized identity in consideration of social normality. A whore is definitely labeled as bawd, unscrupulous individual in sight of social expectation. Roxana is doomed to bear social taboo. Susan is recognized by Roxana as a “ a sharp Jade,“ “ passionate Wench” and “young slut” to “ passionate creature “ and she indeed name her” the Girl “ and “ my own daughter” at times ( 313-16, 328 ). Susan is indisputably an “impertinent girl “who visits Amy and Roxana with attempt to legitimize herself as Roxana’s blood daughter (343).[149]
A whore is doomed to bear “shame” and be” visited in the dark; disowned upon all Occasions; before God and Man ” and “ is maintained indeed, for a time, but it certainly condemned to be abandoned at last” (R 171-86, 204). Roxana asserts “[she] was happier than I could be in being Prisoner of State to a Nobleman” than be an autonomous widow and would rather “suffered [herself] to be mastered, or prevailed with, to yield in the station of a mistress in the interest of capital (207-26).Roxana asserts “ if he thought fit, I would be wholly within doors…he said he would by no means have me confined that it would injure my health…I made the house be, as it were, shut up”(69).Roxana reveals [she] could not have been perfectly easie at living in England, unless [she] had kept constantly within-doors, lest some time or other, the dissolute Life I had lived here, should have come to be known” (293). Roxana states that “I was not afraid I should be found a-bed with anybody else, for, I in a word, I conversed with nobody at all “so as to keep her “privacy” intact (227-28). Self-isolation appears to be her strategy to keep her infamous affairs in the closet. Roxana can never unleash her true emotion or true self because she is doomed to be a woman of secret. Roxana confesses that “I reserved the grand Secret, and never broke my Resolution, which was not to let him know my true name” (159). Roxana is a woman of secret. She once confesses that “I have no Comforter, so I had no Counselor” in contending “I have no vent; no body to open myself to” (310-31).Roxana claims, “secrets should never be opened, without evident Utility” (375).[150]
Roxana’s begging experience is her first and utmost traumatic experience. Roxana remarks that “Amy who knew my disease” (239).[151] Roxana once honestly confessed that “I had indeed two assistances to deliver me from this snare, and these were, first, Amy, who knew my disease but was able to do nothing to this remedy; the second, the merchant, who really brought the remedy, but knew nothing of this distemper” (257) I propose that the remedy she refers to is true affection. Roxana confesses that the “Apprehension” of the “Return” of “dreadful “terrors of “poverty” makes her “Heart Tremble” (73).At any rate, Roxana lives in the skin of the other. False identity is unquestionably artificial and untenable and Roxana attests the very fact that identity is potentially convertible and arbitrary. Nevertheless, the application of mask secures but slippery false identity.
Roxana keeps her true identity clandestine but she is consistently besieged by two oppositional poles. Whore identity is Roxana’s wounded ego and gentlewoman is her ideal ego. Roxana is besieged by identity displacement between whore identity and gentlewoman identity, namely, between real wounded self and infatuated ideal identity. The former denotes her private identity and the later signals her social self-fashioned identity. She lives in a life of self-deception. The gap between Roxana’s true identity and her false identity is striking and consequently the entrenched ambiguity begets violent inescapable inner turmoil and agitation. Roxana’s identity formation is trapped by the infusion and contradiction of two oppositional poles. In this respect, I identify narcissist wound coupled with double psycho might beget self-disembodying. Roxana’s public self and private self, namely, true self are totally binary. She is a disoriented entity. She is an expert of disguises either in eloquence or in manner. Her ambivalent tones and statements are compelling evidence of her rampant lies. The ironic fact is Roxana confessed that she is “very far from knowing” herself (177). She is a missing center.Roxana is an accomplished liar but still she makes ambiguities lines from time to time. A whore is a stigmatized subject.[152]The whore identity is a socially and culturally criminalized identity, which “beyond the scope of the tolerable” (Kristeva 1). Thus Roxana is attacked by sudden and massive force of abjection and was torn by narcissistic crisis. Roxana is troubled by disgraceful label of being a lustful immoral whore and besieged by self-hatred. In this respect, Roxana embraces her enchanted identity as a revered gentlewoman partly as a means to ward off recurrent attack of dreadful abjection. Significantly, abjection and desire both revolves in the fundamental lack. Autonomy and virginity are Roxana’s lost objects and her lack and she contrives to retrieve them by embracing a self-fashioned false identity.[153]
Significantly, all abjection is “in fact in recognition of want” on which “desire is founded” (Kristeva 5). Gentlewoman is socially desirable. Roxana is gravitated by the aristocratic glamour and superiority of the upper-class. The identity of Gentlewoman is Roxana’s lifetime ardent infatuation. Roxana claims her “fancied Greatness” thrown her into a kind of Fever” and attribute to the “Effect of a violent Fermentation” in her “Blood” (79). Desire signifies fundamental lack. Hegel posits “desire as a lack and absence, “namely, “a fundamental lack, a hole in being” (Groze 64). Depression “like mourning, hides an aggressivity against the lost object” (Kristeva, MI 7). Roxana’s lost-chastity is absolutely her fundamental lack. Roxana repeatedly asserts “with a Fool! Once fall, and ever undone” (133). So to speak, once poor and falls into whoring, her wounded-virtue is stained and irreversible. After whoring for the first time, she lost self-respect. Roxana claims her “virtue was lost before” and it makes no difference to sin on” (100). Roxana is keenly aware that her virtue Roxana indeed senses that she was “not being able to retrieve what had been in Time Past” (348). Roxana determined to add her” Estate at the farther Expense” of her lost-chastity (212). Roxana is keenly aware that once she yields into whoring, ‘tis vain to mince the Matter” that she identified herself as “a Whore…neither better nor worse” and it “was too late to look back, so she lay still” and keeps herself in the same sexual trade until the very last (74, 81). Roxana harbors a thought that once “ruined” forever” undone “that she is “a whore, a Slut” for good (81).
Roxana is tempted to embrace the false ideal identity of being a gentlewoman. Gentlewoman is conventionally equals to women of honor and tied up to female chastity and social superiority. Roxana is absolutely a woman of dishonor. As noted, desire is “in principle insatiable” (Groze 67). Roxana’s instable desire at power and social standing is not a particular case but mirrors the social disease of contemporary society. It is a verified fact that Roxana is commonly accused as a promiscuous woman, who was a merciless hardhearted suspect of child-murder. Moments of horrifying self-recognition occurs abruptly. For instance, Roxana articulates” What was I a Whore now?” (201). As subtly pointed by Kristeva, abject is “a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered“ (PH 8). The “time” of abjection is “double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation burst forth” (Kristeva 8-9). I propose that Roxana’s thought of child-murder validate the hideous violence of abjection. Susan is Roxana’s flesh and blood but Susan’s occurrence serves a reminiscence of Roxana’s traumatic forgotten begging experience, which strikes her like thunder. Roxana’s self-recognition of being a lustful whore annihilates her and drives her to the edge of insanity. Roxana is propelled into the margin of the abject and the imaginary border then fragmented and identity disturbance ensued. The imaginary border features for its susceptibility. Roxana’s identity crisis is ignited because her subjectivity falls into the state of volatile uncertainty. Roxana confesses that the continual talk of “the Name of Roxana” throws her into” a kind of silent Rage:
what my face might do toward betraying me, I know not, because I could not see myself , but my Heart beat as if it would have jumped out of my Month…I should have burst…for the force I was under of restraining my Passion…I was obliged to sit and hear her tell the Story of Roxana…whether I was to be exposed, or not exposed. (331)
Roxana perceives Susan as the impetus to the exposure of her abjection.[154] Roxana is convinced that once her whore identity exposed, her earned dignity, vanity and reputation would be wounded severely.Her abjection sparks off a train of crimes that she fall sin to a nest of vices to keep her shameful demeanor in the closet. Roxana encounters neurotic fear in the presence of Susan in her self-narrative:
If I ever had need of courage…it was now …it was the only valuable Secret in the World to me… if the girl knew me, I was undone; and to discover any Surprise or Disorder, had been to make her know me…I was once going to feign a swooning, and faint-away, and so falling on the Ground, or Floor…then pretend I could not bear the Smell of the Ship …trembled…I was in the utmost Extremity…for I was to conceal my disorder from everybody….expect everybody would not discern it.(322-24)
Roxana senses that Susan might trigger the exposure of her double psycho, which serves as a formidable menace and disruption to Roxana’s identity formation. Roxana’s dreadful fear of exposure is tied up to the awareness of possible exposure of shame. Roxana senses her reputation as a benevolent Countess is in danger and once her identity of a whore discovered, she is doomed to swallow lifelong mortification:
there was a secret horror upon my mind, and I was ready to sink when I came close to her…yet it was a secret inconceivable Pleasure to me … to know that I kissed my own child, my own Flesh and Blood…No pen can describe, no words can express…the strange impression which this thing made upon my spirits; I felt something shoot through my blood; my heart fluttered, my head flashed, and was dizzy, and all within me. (323)
Roxana’s defensive mechanism triggers hysterical symptoms such as dizziness, tightening of breath and repulsion when she senses her second-skin, namely, her mask might be peeled off. Sigmund Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), he denotes that neurotic fear occurs by foretelling approaching disaster or” ascribing a dreadful meaning to all uncertainty” (III.). Roxana’s reaction is a fusion of neurotic fear and resistance in executing instinctual and compulsive defense mechanism.[155]In the times of identity crisis, Roxana’s sanity and rationality both crippled and gradually nullified by the momentum of abjection and she is obsessed with the monstrous thought of child-murder by executing defense mechanism. In Roxana’s case, abjection invites the devil in the minds of human beings. In this respect, when the violence of abjection rises to the peak, it potentially narcotizes human’s rationality to a destructive level. I recognize that the detrimental nature of abjection can potentially ignite human being’s bestiality and monstrosity.[156]Roxana lives in the skin of the other. Roxana’s whore identity is her absolute “threatening otherness” (Kristeva 17). Roxana is arrested and besieged by disgraceful label of being a lustful immoral whore. Abjection is essentially something unspeakable and menacing (Kristeva 9).
In the final episodes of Roxana, Susan’s whereabouts is a thorny and tricky issue in the master-servant relationship between Amy and Roxana. In the master-servant relationship, Roxana’s will and order are authoritative. Susan’s death remains suspenseful and unverified. But Roxana’s confirmed belief of Susan’s death evokes suspicion of her crime and becomes an irrefutable proof of her gruesome inner thinking or heinous design. Roxana affirms Susan’s death rather disappearance because she is supposedly the one who direct the horrible event of child-murder straightforwardly.[157] Roxana states “I set Amy to-work, and gave Amy her due” though she does not clarify the order (317). The Quaker perceives “ Amy had found some ways to persuade [Susan] to be quite and easie…as though she thought nothing of any evil herself” but “[Roxana’s] thought of it run otherwise (372). Roxana confides her sense of guilty once in stating ”Lord be merciful to me, [Amy] had murdered my child “and she “kicked her out of Doors “ in accusing “Amy had done it…Amy came no more to me, but confirmed her Guilt by her Absence” (372-74).[158] Indeed, Amy was “ the only body [Roxana] could trust” but Roxana contrives to iron out her wrongdoings by making Amy her lifetime servant scapegoat all the crime and public shame, who had serve her for “ almost thirty Year,” in accusing Amy the perpetrator of child-murder (230). The narrative goes:
[Amy] began to think it would be necessary to murder her; That Expression
filled me with Horror; all my Blood Ran chill in my Veins, and a Fit of
Trembling seized me, that I could not speak a good while; at last, What is the
Devil in you, Amy, Said I? Nay, nay, says she, let it be the devil or not the devil;
if I thought she knew one tittle of your history I would dispatch her if she were
my own daughter a thousand times. And I, says I in a rage, as well as I love you,
would be the first that should put the halter about your neck and see you hanged,
with more satisfaction than ever I saw you in my life. Nay, says I, you would not
live to be hanged, I believe I should cut your throat with my own hand; I am
almost ready to do it, said I, as ’tis, for your but naming the thing. With that I
called her cursed devil, and bade her get out of the room…tho she was a devilish
Jade in having such a thought, yet it was all of it the effect of her Excess of
Affection and Fidelity to me. (316)
I figure out two possibilities of the puzzle. Amy either assumes Roxana’s will mistakenly as Roxana argued or executes Roxana’s order directly as Roxana ordained. The former can lead to Amy’s overall crime. The latter suggests Roxana’s sinister design in making Amy scapegoat the crime alone so as to dissociate herself from the crime and save her own honor. Amy is bound to scapegoat wrongdoing on behalf of Roxana and obliged to guard the Roxana’s secrecy so as to preserve the name or Honor of her master.[159] At any rate, Amy is the accomplice of Roxana’s crime and Amy is unquestionably the executor or perpetrator of Roxana’s wrongdoings. As a faithful servant and Roxana’s trusted aide, Amy is willing to commit everything for Roxana’s account and “do” the crime to Roxana’s “disadvantage” (328). Roxana remarks “if I would trusted her, as I had always done, she would answer for it, that she would do nothing but what should be for my Interests , and what she would hope I should be very pleased with” (258). Owing to the unusual affinity of their master-servant relationship, I identity that Amy follow’s Roxana’s direct order. Without doubt, Amy is Roxana’s servant and also her lifelong companion and confidant who gains access to her detailed wicked life experience and Roxana’s inner thinking and motive. For instance, Roxana gets close to Quaker with motive to assume her identity.Though Roxana does not mention her “design” to Amy, Amy reads Roxana’s mind “perfectly right” (254). Roxana is keenly conscious of her crime. When Roxana mentions about her children, she is afflicted with “some Uneasiness” because she “directed” the affair the child-murder (245).
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