Defoe's Realism versus Astell's Philosophy

The writings of Mary Astell present a unique but, until recently, largely forgotten intellectual female voice of late-seventeenth-century England –a voice significant to the European Enlightenment not only for its female perspective but for connecting seventeenth-century French rhetorical theory with the emerging philosophical and rhetorical developments of eighteenth-century Britain.

When Astell first began to publish in the 1690s, the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empirical science were coming into vogue, and the intellectual center of Western Europe was in the process of shifting from France to London.  Ramus, Descartes, the Port Royalists, and Lamy were being read in their native tongue, translated to English, and appropriated by the British educated elite. The ideas of Whig philosopher and empiricist John Locke were gaining prestige in England. One of Mary Astell’s ideas is that marriage can be for money –as it was usual at the time– or for love –what is one of the newest sentimental features of the eighteenth century– which is supported by Tanya Evans in her article “Women, marriage and the family”.

In regard to her literary ties, the fact that Mary Astell was a source of inspiration for the ‘Group of the (16)90s’ is not an exception. The fact that she is a forerunner when she defines ‘marriage’ makes her being connected to authors who portrayed women such as Samuel Richardson or Daniel Defoe. Some scholars have considered Astell to be an anti-marriage author and a forerunner philosopher, but, maybe, they missed the idea that she was trying to support, education. Above all, Mary Astell is trying to defend education, and that is why she is against marriage, considering it a result of bad decisions done by uneducated women. In other words, due to the lack of education women marry and they let themselves to be slaves of their husbands. And it is precisely in this very complex axiom where Defoe and Astell share a female role.

Defoe’s Roxanna has no feelings and her coldness takes her to be practical and cautious. Roxanna does not consider marriage as a love agreement –as Tanya Evan supports as one of the ‘new’ reasons to get married at this time, in her article “Women, marriage and the family”– but as a power relation. Roxanna creates a verbal battle –a kind of game– which paves the path to Richardson’s Clarissa.

Although, Defoe is still influenced by the Puritan ideas that Mary Astell does not support. His Roxana’s sin has been to appreciate money and not the effort and hard work which have gone into amassing it: Roxanna’s death as a penitent affirms the Puritan ethic which she has spent her life transgressing. She is not the role-model for the woman of her time –the one that Tanya Evans affirms as the new woman of the time that is Mary Astell herself– because she is adventurous and pleasure-loving. It is not long before the novel provides a ‘complete’ female role-model in the work of Samuel Richardson.