"I wou'd be a Man-Woman": Roxana's Amazonian Threat to the Ideology of Marriage

Maurer explores the ideology of marriage in Daniel Defoe's final novel, Roxana. Attempts of character Roxana to style herself a man-woman, to enjoy Amazonian independence from male economic and sexual control, necessarily situate her outside the bounds of prescribed femininity, into a category of otherness that, under patriarchy, leads both to her destruction and to that of the daughter who bears her name.