Abstract
As the long eighteenth century brought forth a new wave of secular ethics, Daniel Defoe expressed serious concern about a particular figure who was losing status among the intellectual elite: the Devil. In his Political History of the Devil, Defoe insists that waning belief in the Devil was a slippery slope toward atheism. How Defoe chose to represent the Devil in his novels could potentially have serious cultural ramifications, helping to shape the modern concept of the Tempter as well as social discourses about the origin of evil. And yet, in Roxana, the ontological status of the Devil remains uncertain: is he there, or not there? This question is not one we would ask of earlier portrayals, such as Milton's Satan, but one we must ask of Defoe's Devil, who never physically appears in person, but seems to operate as an unseen, internal force, tempting Roxana from within her own mind. No more than an eerie absent‐presence, Defoe's Devil is far more strange and subtle than earlier representations. In this essay, I examine the generic concerns surrounding the Devil's complicated ontological status in the novel—how Defoe depicted the form of the Devil in a genre dedicated to empirical realism. Most scholars have cast the Devil as a mere metaphor for Roxana's evil impulses, thus denying satanic presence altogether. But given Defoe's professed anxiety about the Devil's erasure from modern culture, I argue that Roxana may be tempted by a very real and literal Devil, one that is more metaphysical than metaphorical, and that marks a distinct shift in literary representation from the age of Milton to that of Defoe.
