Imagining the Colonial State in Roxana’s Turkish Costume

If the census, the map, and the museum shape the colonial state, as Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities, Roxana’s Turkish costume and her very name can be read as an extension of the “totalizing classificatory grid” that solidified “the state’s real or contemplated control” (184). Roxana’s act of clothing herself in artifacts ripped from another culture has precedent: Colonial outposts in the eighteenth century such as the British East India Company encouraged this type of appropriation as a means of advancing their commercial interests. Imperial expansion, in other words, is furthered in Roxana by just such a classificatory system as Anderson describes.

Anderson notes “the peculiarity of the new census” that “tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining,” identifying, classifying, and quantifying its subjects (169). Roxana, too, is seized by a desire to enumerate the possessions acquired from a “Malthese Man of War”: a robe of “fine Persian or Indian damask,” a “Girdle five or six inches wide, after the Turkish Mode, a “Turban, or Head Dress, and finally, a “Turkish Slave” bought for the express purpose of arraying her in the foreign finery (Defoe 174). While the slave receives far less mention than the clothing purchases, she is instrumental in helping her mistress replicate the effect of a Turkish princess on many occasions. Indeed, while Roxana ostensibly buys the costume for a masquerade ball, she seems more concerned with the repeated ritual of dressing in it and gazing upon herself in the privacy of her home. The image of the Turkish princess is reproducible, a sign of the “replicable plurals” Anderson identifies as crucial to the imaginings of the colonial state (184).

The unnamed slave is instrumental to dressing Roxana because she is the original wearer of the costume, a former high-born lady enslaved on a journey from Constantinople to Alexandria. Roxana strips the woman of all remnants of her former life by calling her “my little Turk,” calling to mind how “the Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like ‘race.’”(Anderson 167). While the lady is diminished figuratively as a “little Turk,” the dress she once wore is elevated to the “Habit of a Turkish Princess,” thus effacing rank and prioritizing the objects produced by Turkish culture.

When Roxana finally appears in public wearing the costume, she is immediately assigned a name that recalls the infinite reproducibility of colonial power. As she performs a solo dance that is immediately (and falsely) attributed to the courts of Constantinople, “one of the Gentlemen cry’d out Roxana! Roxana! By--, with an Oath, upon which foolish Accident I had the name of Roxana presently fix’d on me…” (176). The introduction to my Oxford edition clarifies that Roxana is a name used in drama of the seventeenth century “as a generic name for an oriental queen,” and had recently been used in scandalous memoirs and as the stage name of an actress whom a Restoration aristocrat admired (xvii). The name Roxana, then, is yet another example of the “logic of quantification” established in the earlier scene with the Turkish slave (Anderson 169). Adding one more layer of complexity, Roxana’s name—appropriated from an unknown “oriental queen”—is primarily what establishes her fame and desirability among the crowds of gentlemen who flock to see her dance. She is classified in terms of her exoticism and placed in a long tradition of others “Roxanas” who similarly have made themselves available for “surveillance and infinite replication” (Anderson 185).

I will admit, Roxana’s voluntary classification (and obviously, her status as a white woman) is troubling to me. While I have argued before that Roxana is complicit with Defoe’s capitalist project, her reluctance to be gazed upon—as opposed to gazing at herself in full costume, only accompanied by the Turkish slave—introduces some ambivalence. Is it possible to both apply the “totalizing classificatory grid” and place oneself in it, or is my reading too sympathetic to Roxana?