ABSTRACT
This essay 1 uses a reading of a powerful trope in the representation of women as a kind of workshop on the discursive relation between gender and empire in early eighteenth-century literary culture. Despite my title, I will focus mainly on Amazons — in eighteenth-century literature variously and in Defoe's Roxana (1724) at some length. Recently, the image of the Amazon has attracted the attention of feminist theorists and cultural historians, as well as classicists, anthropologists, and literary critics; and Amazons have been seen variously as emblems of female autonomy, figures of myth, examples of misogyny, or thematizations of romantic heroism. 2 In literature, outside the classical, the focus has been on the drama and epic of the Renaissance; 3 the Amazon has not seemed an active figure in the literary culture of the eighteenth century. I want to try to argue here that the Amazon is — though covertly or indirectly — a significant image in the discourse of the representation of difference in this period; that this figure is most readily perceived and most usefully understood specifically in terms of contemporary representations of exchange, accumulation, and commodification; and finally that the Amazon is for this period an important form of mediation in the representation of imperialist ideology. In focusing on Defoe, I have chosen to view this trope through the eyes of one of the most prolific and eloquent apologists for mercantile expansion in early eighteenth-century literary culture. That is to say, I stand in the place of the imperialist, and I view the "other" from the perspective of the dominant ideology. This perspective inevitably places gender before race, because gender represents a category of difference constituted primarily within the geographical purview of the dominant culture, while race in this period remains mainly extrinsic, geographically foreign, a category of difference defined as an external object. For that reason, the argument here will come to the African through the figure of the Amazon, and it will use Defoe's image of the African in Captain Singleton (1720) as a final test case for the connection of the representation of difference with the ideology of empire.