"A Hole in My Heart": Narrative Failure in Defoe's Roxana

林松燕(Song-Yen Lin)

possessive individual ； economic representation ； narrative failure ； trauma

小說與戲劇

18卷1期（2007 / 12 / 01）

173 - 190

英文

One of the difficulties in reading Roxana comes from the contrast of tones and plots in to irreconcilable parts: one the account of Roxana's successful financial management through sexual liaisons and the other the account of her daughter's relentless pursuit demanding maternal connection and transparency of her past. This study argues that such a discrepancy derives from the fact that Roxana loses her narrative command in her financial and fictional narratives. Roxana is less concerned with financial issues than with how to maintain her fictionality. Roxana's murder of her daughter has a traumatic impact on the representation of her financial and narrative self-fashioning. The murder makes a hole in her heart. ”This hole” signals a state that precedes a linguistic registration in her narrative. The fact that the narrative collapses in the end demonstrates the inadequacy of the very terms of language to the phenomenon it seeks to describe. Instead of the cornmonplace reception of Roxana as an epitome of the possessive individual ”what e have is a destitute and impoverished” subject in both financial and narrative sense of the term.

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