Our first assignment for the 'Novel Worlds' unit at Sydney University is due on Thursday. It's a close reading exercise (a form of literary criticism to which I respond badly - foolish and unreasonable as my reaction no doubt is). I have 750 words to produce on a passage from page 278 of the World's Classics edition of Daniel Defoe's final novel, known as Roxana or The Fortunate Mistress although its original title was The Fortunate Mistress : Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess of Wintelsheim, in Germany, Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charless II.
The passage is perhaps the most important scene in the novel. We're on a moored ship at the moment Roxana meets her abandoned daughter, Susan (named after her mother). Susan suspects that the woman she knows as the Lady Roxana may be her natural mother. It's a moment of crises for Roxana. During the passage her identity collapses entirely.
I read that collapsed identity into the text. I surmise that it's there, see that it fits with the structure of the narrative. But at my usual level of reading I'm guessing (intelligently but guessing all the same). At that level of analysis, however, my exercise flounders. I would have struggled to find 750 words of any type, let alone meaningful analysis.
In an act of desperation I thought, start with the "I". that's how the passage begins. So I counted them up. There are thirty-one. I circled them with a lime-green highlighter and lo and behold a picture emerged that began to reveal the evidence in the text I needed to support my superficial reading Defoe has Roxana refer to herself with the subjective pronoun "I" thirty one times in two and a half paragraphs. When she says (to her 'Relator') "I was to conceal myself" in the middle of the third paragraph she stops using the subjective pronoun and switches to the objective pronoun "me". Defoe has the character of Susan, Roxana's daughter, make the opposite journey grammatically. For the first two and a half paragraphs Roxana only uses the objective pronoun (her) for her daughter. But at the point at which Roxana describes herself with the objective pronoun she starts to use that subjective pronoun, she, to refer to her daughter.
From subjective to objective pronoun and vice versa. The collapse of subjectivity and identity of the mother coincides with the emergence of the long-abandoned daughter as subject. Who would have thought I'd end up here, analysis of grammar; nothing more than a structuralist.
Don't get me started on Defoe and the personal adjective!!
