'The fate of this poor woman': Men, women, and intersubjectivity in 'Moll Flanders' and 'Roxana' (Daniel Defoe)

This dissertation examines the interwoven relationships within Moll Flanders and Roxana via the fatal and providential elements in the lives of Defoe's heroines. It explores how Fate and Providence are gendered in fiction and how these forces are embodied through male and female characters that help construct the subjectivity of Defoe's heroines. Each heroine's success results from her ability to relate to others who play feminine and masculine roles. Ultimately, Moll succeeds because she accepts both forces, both sexes, and all the attendant roles, aspects, and functions of these seemingly oppositional groups as part of her life; by contrast, I argue, Roxana fails because she divides everything in her life into mutually exclusive components, not allowing for multiple possibilities.; Moll's success and Roxana's failure manifest soteriologically and psychologically. Moll achieves the means to salvation through her conversion story, and Roxana remains a reprobate who does not accept the past. Each heroine's spiritual state is tied directly to how she relates to others. They are situated within the intersubjective mythos that requires the modern subject to be an overinclusive individual who accepts paradoxical possibilities and acknowledges her interrelatedness with other subjects. Because Defoe makes his characters' success dependent upon accepting both Fate and Providence, I use intersubjective psychoanalysis to examine how Moll maintains tension between these reveals the interwoven, often tangled, relationships Defoe's heroines create with others within the fatal matrix of interconnected bonds in their lives along with the less flexible but mutual relationships offered by the Providence figures in their lives.; Although Defoe predates the relational school of psychoanalysis by nearly three centuries, the world he creates in Moll Flanders is an intersubjective realm where like subjects enable each other to survive, succeed, and gain salvation. This dissertation examines Defoe's mythos and the modern subject's need to accept paradoxical tensions in order to thrive in a world of interconnectivity and intersubjectivity.