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Defoe's Roxana: the making and unmaking of a heroine.(Daniel Defoe's "Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana")

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From: The Modern Language Review
Date: 20070101
Author:Crane, Julie

This article begins by drawing together some differences between Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana, claiming a link between them in terms of an obsession with language and silence, recovery and ruin. The central argument is that in Roxana Defoe portrays a heroine who loses her voice as she gains in psychological complexity, and that this process is responsible for the strangeness and paradoxical difficulty of Defoe's last novel. The article seeks to explore the workings of this ruin of language as it takes place alongside the heroine's psychological and moral ruin.

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