Winter is Coming (Again): Or, a Capitalist Horror Story for Halloween

Joshua Clover’s “Autumn of the System” charts the narrative of late capitalism through the “organizing trope of Autumnal literature," a clash between time and space that has a parallel relationship with the narrative of financialization (43). And yet “the conversion of the temporal to the spatial” is not a singular experience, limited to literature written about the twilight of the global economy collapse in 2007-2008. Clover gestures toward another “imperial cycle” in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which the poet “arrived not elsewhere but elsewhen, having made his way across a temporal ocean” (44). The implication is that the transmutation of time and space is a repetitive motion, occurring each time the discourse of capitalism reaches a point of rupture.

In this post, I aim to trace this trope back even further to an eighteenth-century Autumn epitomized by Roxana. Rather than using the term “Autumn” to identify the beginnings of an economic collapse, I hope to analyze how capitalism is both tentatively engaged with and feared as a potentially destructive force in the book. While Clover reads Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day as a “dizzying kaleidoscope refracting the now distant beginnings of the twentieth century—that is, the rise of industrial capital and U.S. world power,” I find that Roxana provides a snippet of a capitalist horror novel, depicting an era of material expansion swelling to monstrous extremes.

After being abandoned by her money-squandering husband, Roxana first seeks only to pawn goods for money: “I began to make away one Thing after another, until those few Things of Value which I had, began to lessen apace…” (Defoe 14). Roxana’s use of the C-M-C form (exchanging necessary commodities to acquire more necessary commodities) transitions rapidly to the “most basic of Marxian formulations," or “money which seeks to become more money” (Clover 36). As a successful businesswoman reaping investments, Roxana wholeheartedly embraces the capitalist lifestyle and becomes “as expert in [business], as any She-Merchant of them all (Defoe 170).

The temptation to read this moment as triumphant is complicated by Roxana’s journey by sea to claim a 1,200 crown-credit. The contrived nature of this scene is difficult to neglect: Roxana fears she will be accused of accumulating her wealth by illegal means, and thus entrusts her jewels and money to a Dutchman and flees France for Holland, carrying only the credit the Dutchman has given her. Reading the Autumn trope into this scene, we might interpret Roxana’s crossing to France over a “temporal ocean” as she confronts “the identical action of financialization itself, restlessly passing off time as space” (Clover 44). The limit of credit looms large in this scene, as Roxana worries that “if the Bills should be refus’d, I was cheated…” (122). Even more tellingly, a massive storm that occurs along the way results in a confrontation of space and time. Narrative movement slows to a stop as Roxana views an alternate future for herself, in which she will “spend a great deal of what I had thus wickedly got, in Acts of Charity, and doing Good” (Defoe 126). In a parallel to Yeat’s Byzantium, Roxana arrives “not elsewhere but elsewhen,” surveying a land that seems entirely to be made out of clouds.

My interpretation diverges from Clover’s in that Roxana’s credit cannot be read as “the making present of future labor…” since Roxana is, after all, the rightful owner of 1,200 crowns (44). There is a more sinister angle that I would like to take up in regards to this, and it hinges on the fact that Roxana, as a woman, represents “a natural economy of reproduction that is the antithesis of the perverse generation of capital…” (Kibbie 1025). Roxana will always be forced to labor under uncertainty that her rightfully earned money will be confiscated, as it nearly is after an unfounded accusation in France. This, perhaps, may explain the book’s uneasiness towards capitalism, as Roxana is portrayed as an all-consuming monster entirely manipulated by the system (it has been made much of that she cannot read her own accounts and relies entirely on male advisors to manage her investments). Roxana is punished throughout the novel for representing the mother figure and the greedy capitalist, used as a puppet to generate capital for her male counterparts, and finally condemned to an early grave while her husband and step-son (presumably) inherit her wealth. It would seem that her extended line of credit has run out.

Kibbie, Ann Louise. “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana.” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 5, (Oct. 1995): 1023-1034.