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CONTRIBUTORS:
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PROCEEDINGS TITLE:
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YEAR:
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2001
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PUB TYPE:
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Conference Paper in Proceedings
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PAGES:
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223 -
246
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SUBJECT(S):
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features and significance of the representation of female offenders in Defoe's fiction
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DISCIPLINE:
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Literature
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HTTP:
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-405-724
(Last edited on
2004/08/02 09:25:56 GMT-6)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
In trying to make out the significance of Defoe’s female offenders, one surely cannot overlook the linkage of crime and sin, very common in that period. But what is more difficult to account for is the way punishment is evaded by the culprit until it becomes a mere abstraction situated outside the story. Similarly, the “crimes” committed, are, by the very standards apparently adopted by the author, increasingly horrific, as they progress from incest and robbery to murder. Sometimes one cannot tell the crime from the punishment. Indeed, both the unnatural increase of money and the Amazonian stance are examples of monstrosity. Yet the place of trade — and of money, the object of trade — is, to say the least, ambiguous in Defoe.
The explanation for such “narrative licence” may lie in the relation Defoe’s fiction — as exemplified by Moll Flanders and Roxana — bears to the feminine. Indeed, both these works elicit a fascination with the feminine ranging from the choice of a female voice to the narrating of women’s unspeakable deeds, and, as it were, unavowedly wished-for lack of restraint. Women’s sexuality is so misrepresented and frowned upon in both fiction and non-fiction in Defoe that the permissiveness and criminality of his female rogues may quite definitely be taken as some kind of abstract wish-fulfilment. In a way, the storyteller may have no concern for the crime and punishment problematic. His own pleasure and his power over his reader naturally supersede the necessity of any punishment. This aspect of the dialogue of history and fiction might be described as the reality of illusion — in a literary genre whose main openly-declared objective is to create an illusion of reality. In both Moll Flanders and Roxana the marginal situation of female offenders enables Defoe to carry out a complex exploration of character and gender relations. Notwithstanding the misogyny underlying it, Defoe’s ambivalent attitude towards his female offenders creates a pleasurable proto-feminist illusion.
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