Essay analyzes women characters' dynamics in Defoe’s Roxana, suggesting a challenge to gendered power notions.
This essay uses contemporary feminist theories and methods to analyze the complex dynamics among women characters in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724). It analyzes the unique perspectives and agency of women servants in Defoe’s novel, decentering the title heroine to show the choreography of women in a mobile urban landscape. Defoe mobilizes this choreography through descriptions of London space. Perhaps counterintuitively for Defoe studies and novel studies, this essay suggests that these representations challenge capitalist individualist notions of gendered power.
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Elizabeth Porter (2026) studied this question.
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