The expansion of the imagination causes the animal spirits to rush to the head where, overly agitated, they burst out of their normal channels and cut new paths across the brain and the nerves, with the result that the intellect is tormented and the individual goes mad. Willis, in laying stress upon the role of the animal spirits in causing virtually all psychological disturbances, saw that various mental conditions were connected, and that apparently dissimilar conditions, such as depression and mania, might well be different manifestations of the same mental disease. Given Willis’s pre-eminence, important new ideas of this sort would gradually have become disseminated in much the same way that the ideas and terms of Freud have become widely known in our own day, even to people who have never read him.

The course of Roxana’s psychological deterioration is gradual. The first sign of her disturbed state of mind is the admission that she suffers from ‘dark Intervals’ produced by her guilty conscience in living with her landlord as his wife, while knowing that to do so ‘was horribly unlawful, scandalous, and abominable’. The repression both of her dark thoughts and her conscience drives her into a ‘Stupidity’ (or lethargy, as it was sometimes called), that is, into a temporarily calm state of mind, of the sort often today induced by tranquillizers. Her tranquillity is interrupted by her terror during a stormy channel crossing and her ‘Stupidity’ now takes the form of ‘a silent, sullen kind of Grief’, one of the indications of the depression from which she is later to suffer severely. Bouts of remorse, however, alternate with periods of elation brought on by the contemplation of her own beauty and success. Like her contemporaries, Roxana believes that the ‘Madness and Distraction’ of mind that so often marks her behaviour during the height of her success are brought on by strong emotions (she mentions ‘Vanity’, ‘Pride’, and ‘an ambitious Mind’). During much of this time Roxana suffers from what physicians would then have called melancholy, a mental disorder characterized in her case by obsession and often accompanied by anxiety, guilt, delusions of grandeur, and insomnia – all of which Roxana suffers from.

After several years during which her behaviour grows more seriously obsessive and paranoid, to the degree that she becomes incapable of making moral decisions, Roxana’s mental health finally gives way entirely. The thought of becoming a princess, she tells us, ‘turn’d my Head; and I was as truly craz’d and distracted for about a Fortnight, as most of the People in Bedlam, tho’ perhaps, not quite so far gone’ (p. 278). What has happened is that the continued melancholy has now turned into a ‘frenzy’ (more or less what we would call mania), a more serious form of delirium marked by a fever (melancholy was sometimes defined as a delirium without fever) and a raging of the blood which in turn has inflamed the animal spirits, producing acute mental distraction. This is precisely the condition Roxana describes when she speaks of the ‘violent Fermentation in my Blood’ and explains that ‘the very Motion which the steddy Contemplation of my fancy’d Greatness had put my Spirits into, had thrown me into a kind of Fever, and I scarce knew what I did’ (p. 279).

The final stage of her psychological breakdown occurs when Roxana realizes that her daughter, Susan, has been murdered by Amy. Having been abandoned years before by Roxana, and now desperately trying to re-establish contact with her mother, Susan is the incarnation of all Roxana’s years of guilt and fear. The superstructure of Roxana’s criminal prosperity has been raised on the foundation of the desertion, and later the denial, of her children. With the death of Susan, Roxana is released from the fear of exposure but the knowledge of her crime and her responsibility at the same time drives her mad, and her imagination is haunted by hallucinations of her dead daughter, with her throat slit, her brains dashed out, hanged, or drowned.

Of course Defoe employs the vocabulary of his own age to describe the symptoms of Roxana’s mental disease. In modern terms Roxana’s bouts of melancholy and of frenzy would probably be diagnosed as depression and mania, the alternating disturbed states of mind of the manic-depressive psychosis from which she suffers. Her condition is prolonged and made worse by the absence of a genuine friend and confidant, which modern psychiatry recognizes as a primary therapeutic factor, to whom she could turn for advice, and through whom she could regain contact with the real world outside herself. As a result she suffers increasingly and intensely from ‘a secret Hell within’, the slow-growing but relentless spiritual cancer which eats away at her emotional and mental health. Defoe understood the way in which repressed emotions bury themselves deep within the human personality until they grow claws and begin to dig their way out, and he knew, too, of the way in which ambition and pride corrupt and destroy the soul. His depiction of these terrible processes at work in Roxana is among the finest things he ever wrote.

4

The dark ending of the novel, the story of her daughter Susan’s desperate attempt to force Roxana to acknowledge her and the fatal outcome of the girl’s pursuit of her mother, draws together the diverse strands of the book. Roxana’s exotic life – her wealth, foreign travel, splendid clothes and houses, lavish parties, and place at court – all rest upon the desertion of her five children and her willingness to become a whore. Moreover, she is from the beginning fully aware of her wickedness: ‘I was resolv’d to commit the Crime,’ she confesses, ‘knowing and owning it to be a Crime’ (p. 75). And at the height of her prosperity, while resolving to continue in her immoral way of living, she is forced to wonder, ‘Why am I a Whore now?’ (p. 244). The ending of the story draws the moral, and shows the link between Roxana’s crimes and the punishment which follows.

The symbol of Roxana’s immorality, and the link between her two lives, is the Turkish dress. Associated with the glamorous, dissolute, and aristocratic side of Roxana’s existence, the dress, which ‘wou’d not look modest’ in England (p. 291), and the ‘Turkish’ dance she performs while wearing it, cause her to be called ‘Roxana’, a name that suggests the courtesan, as Roxana knows when she refers to herself as ‘a meer Roxana’ (p.