Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
10th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture: Fashion as Material Culture., Gümüşhane, Türkiye, 15 - 16 Eylül 2023, ss.20-21
Fashion as a Woman’s Balancing Act of Survival in Defoe’s Roxana
Defoe’s Roxana (1724) is an eighteenth century novel on the life of a woman who tries to survive on her own after the males in her life fail her in various ways. As in many other eighteenth century novels, the clothes Roxana wears carry a significance beyond their use value corresponding to different stages in her life that take her from riches to rags and back to riches. However, Roxana soon realizes that material wealth would not make up for a woman’s lack of agency without publicly sanctioned protection of a man. Roxana’s mourning dress, her “Deshabile,” her “Suit of Lace,” her “Livery Lac’d with Silver,” her Quaker Suit, and most significant of all her “Habit of a Turkish Princess,” also called “Mahometan dress,” which comes with a “little” Turkish slave on the side complete with a Turban, make or break the images she envisions for her public personae. Different types of clothes in the novel carry the overtones of class, status, religion and morality, which could be transferred even to the servants or the slaves to a certain extent when they wear them. What is “fashionable” goes well beyond the clothes described in the novel, and includes different historical modes of behaviour and thought that allude to the corruption of aristocratic life during the reigns of Charles II and George I. This paper will explore the delicate balancing act Roxana has to perform in order to reconcile her inner life and public image in the eighteenth century codes of comportment for women.