CorruptionDefoe's capitalist views and his moral purpose in Roxana Essay

CorruptionDefoes capitalist views and his moral purpose in Roxana - Essay ExampleRobinson Crusoe extended the form of the picaresque and turned an adventure baloney into a critique of colonialism. Moll Flanders did the same with the class of gentlewomen. Roxana similarly has come to be accepted as a critique of early capitalism -- a time in English history when the industrial revolution was yet not a tactile reality but a creepy marionette whose tugs on morality, civility and social infrastructure were being secretly felt. Defoe takes a old humanness morality tale about a womans coming to terms with her own profession as a whore and turns it into a contemporary tale about capitalisms philosophy of self-aggrandizement and saleability of the self.In retrospect Defoe will see prophetic in his constitution of the plot about Roxanas willing acceptance of her profession and how she readily agrees to capitalise it when she knows her moral degradation is irreversible. In medieval morali ty plays, Roxanas right-hand(a) self would have been saved by a benign god who in a climactic moment would retrieve her from misery. But in Defoes world emergent capitalism prevails over frivolling morality and what would have been a fallen life before becomes a life of opportunities for Roxana.No wonder Roxana is called Defoes darkest novel and that explains the displace of critical and scholarly attention that it has received. The term dark is not a secular word and hence burdens the novel with a given morality and wisdom. By such(prenominal) means it is easy to provide an ordinary, feminist framework for Roxana and turn it into a conventional male authors depiction of a bold woman, too much in control of her sexuality and hence too obviously susceptible to moral decrepitude and eventual fall. But at some other level Roxana is a scoff tale about capitalism, corruption and individual enterprise. As the novel proceeds, we see Roxana triumphant, outwitting the males in her life a nd by using them to achieve her own purposes. Later, she is seen to be felled once again and reverts to her previous status of misery and helplessness. At one level if this is her punishment for living against the moral standards of the society and the fantasy of a protestant moralist, at another level it is a critique of the