Revisiting Disrupted Matrimony in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana in Light of New Historicism

This study aims to explore how Moll and Roxana, the heroines constructed by Daniel Defoe in his novels Moll Flanders and Roxana, problematize the conventions of the ۱۸th century notions of matrimony viewed from a New Historicist perspective. For the New Historicists literary texts are conceived not as mere reflectors of, but rather as active contributors to the historical process they illuminate. New Historicists don't believe that we have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history. Any given event is a product of its culture, but it also affects the culture in return. In other words, all events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge. In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana the two heroines play with the very delicate balance between women and men and exploit this connection in different ways. This picture seems to contradict the one produced by Defoe in his Conjugal Lewdness, later called A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. In Moll Flanders, and Roxana confrontation with marriage, money, love, and sex seem to problamize Defoe’s own voice as a member of the ruling patriarchy.

Keywords:

Defoe , matrimony , New Historicism , Marriage , Money , love.