37 pages • 1 hour read
Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress
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Pages 111-220Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 111-220 Summary
Roxana visits a Dutch merchant in Paris in the hope that he will help her transfer the sum of 12,000 pistoles to England. She poses as the Landlord’s widow and makes no mention of the fact that she has been the Prince’s mistress. The Dutchman tries to sell Roxana’s jewels; however, the purchaser attempts to defame Roxana, even trying to frame her for the murder of her supposed husband.
With the assistance of the Dutch merchant, Roxana negotiates matters so that she can get away with leaving the country and retaining her financial gains. The merchant, however, says she must go to Holland to ensure that her finances are safe. She sails to Holland with Amy and they get shipwrecked off the coast of England after a near-death experience. Amy feels remorseful about her wicked life; however, Roxana “had no Sense of Repentance, from the true Motive of Repentance” and feels like a criminal who is only “sorry that he is to be Hang’d for” his crime (129).
Roxana goes to Holland to collect her money and manage her business affairs. While she is there, Amy sends her news that her husband has died and that she may return to Paris, marry well, and set herself up as a Duchess. Roxana, however, has no inclination to make herself a wife, because she sees that although a wife has virtue and social standing, she is “look’d upon, as but an Upper-Servant,” whereas “a Mistress is Sovereign” (132).
The Dutch Merchant comes to Holland, and after a protracted courtship persuades Roxana to go to bed with him. She finally accepts but says that she will not grant him his other wish of making her his wife. She buys him off with a thousand pistoles and continues to refuse him, even when she becomes pregnant with his child.
Deciding that she is rich and still attractive enough, Roxana returns to London to try her fortunes there. She is burdened by her pregnancy and fantasizes about paying good money to terminate it. In London, Roxana settles her bills and gets an estate of over a thousand pounds a year where she brings a healthy baby boy into the world. The Dutchman keeps asking her to marry him, and she refuses. Amy disseminates the rumour that Roxana is the widow of a gentleman in France and has come to London to look over an estate left to her by relations. However, the truth about Roxana’s lack of virtue becomes apparent in the lavish and exotic entertainments hosted at her house. At a ball, Roxana is given the name that titles the book by “foolish Accident” (176) after she does a Turkish dance in the costume she obtained during her travels with the Prince.
A Lord makes Roxana his mistress and finds her a lodging “in a very handsome House […] where he had a convenient Way to come into the Garden, by a Door that open’d into the Park” (186). Roxana meanwhile wonders what became of the five children she had by her legitimate husband and sends Amy to make enquiries. Amy finds a daughter living in poverty and furnishes her with Roxana’s fortunes, though Roxana herself is not involved. She sends the son she conceived with the Dutchman to study with a master and then abroad to Italy.
Although Roxana eventually leaves the Lord and lives with Amy in Kensington, she feels socially isolated as men continually try to seduce her and women of standing ignore her. She charges Amy with finding her a living situation where she is unknown. Amy complies and finds lodging for the two of them with a family of Quakers. Their life with the Quaker family is a kind of retreat and Roxana is fully disguised in her Quaker dress. However, this modest lifestyle soon makes her feel “like a Fish out of Water” (214), and she fantasizes about making contact with the Dutchman, whom she earlier rejected. She sends Amy to France to look for him; however, on a trip to Epping Forest with the Quakers, Roxana spots the Dutchman on horseback. She begins to drive out each day with the hope of seeing him.
Pages 111-220 Analysis
The novel’s middle section sets Roxana up as a career mistress who manages her own household and finances. When Amy delivers the news that Roxana’s lawful husband has died and that she is free to remarry, Roxana vehemently refutes the possibility, seeing wifehood as little more than glorified servitude. While she acknowledges that wifehood is the honorable position and taking advantage of men the way she does is dishonorable, she is uncomfortable with the fact that “a Wife must give up all she has; have every Reserve she makes for herself, be thought hard of […] whereas a Mistress makes the Saying true, that what the Man has, is hers, and what she has, is her own” (132). Roxana is aware that by the laws of the time, she would have to hand over her accumulated wealth to a husband; instead, she prefers to occupy the masculine position of controlling her resources, whilst also gaining the mistress’s advantage of expensive gifts. Her stance is therefore less influenced by Christian morality than by pragmatism, ambition, and greed.
While this middle section shows Roxana gaining the worldly advantages of wealth, autonomy, and travel, she begins to see that her actions have had some negative consequences. Her child, conceived in illegitimacy, stands to be “ruin’d before it is born” (157) and thereby driven out of polite society. Meanwhile, her legitimate children, whom she abandoned to the care of a relative many years earlier, have had to scrape by in poverty. Roxana tries to make amends for her remiss parenting by paying others to fix the problem rather than becoming personally involved. For example, she acquires a Master for her illegitimate son and then sends him to Italy, and she asks for Amy’s help in aiding her remaining legitimate children. Roxana’s role is more paternal than maternal, as she is less a nurturer than a provider who uses her finances to make amends for previous neglect.
Roxana also suffers from social isolation because as she sets herself up in London, she becomes marginalized as “a common Whore” (208) who is procurable to men and ignored by women. Finding the situation intolerable, she and Amy go to live with Quakers, who are known for their modesty, and she disguises herself in the plainest, most shapeless clothes possible so that she looks “quite another-body” (210). However, this retreat from the social life she has become used to is tiresome, and as soon as the novelty wears off, she fantasizes about being “courted, flatter’d” (214), and the object of male admiration again. Although Roxana fashions herself as an independent woman who is not reliant on a man, her sense of self is also dependent on being valued by men and pursued by them. When she cannot contemplate an identity outside of the male gaze, she begins to fantasize about the Dutchman’s return.
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