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Wikipedia Entries for Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress

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When the Jeweller/Landlord dies unexpectedly, Roxana skillfully secures some of his jewels for herself, since they are presumed to be stolen. She sees the jewels as a way to secure her future financial security and freedom. Ironically, however, the jewels almost end up landing Roxana in prison: when she is trying to get out of France, the jewels are recognized and she is accused of criminal activity. While the jewels were supposed to make it easier for Roxana to move freely to wherever she wants to go, they end up almost barring her from being able to leave France, as the Jew wants to detain her there while the case is being investigated. Indeed, Roxana has to secretly flee from France like a criminal, rather than the socially secure, self-assured woman she aspired to be. In further irony, the jewels were intended to make Roxana independent, but because of their stolen status, they end up reinforcing her dependence on a man. Because of her risk of being imprisoned, Roxana has to rely on help from the Dutch Merchant, and is in fact still dependent on masculine aid.
When Roxana dances for an elite gathering of London aristocrats in her Turkish costume, it seems like she is at the height of her powers. She knows that she is beautiful and alluring, and she is also in control of the narrative she is shaping about herself: she is reinventing herself yet again, and ends up even being renamed after this performance. However, the irony is later revealed: Roxana thinks she is reinventing herself and concealing her past, but in this moment, she is actually setting the stage for potentially being revealed. Later, Roxana will learn that her daughter Susan was actually one of her household servants at the time, and was transfixed by the performance. It helped to fuel Susan's conviction that the Lady Roxana was her long-lost mother, which will become Susan's obsessive pursuit. There will also be a very tense moment when Susan provides a vivid description of the outfit worn by the Lady Roxana, and the Quaker notices how similar the outfit sounds to something she has seen Roxana wearing (the outfits, of course, are one and the same). Ironically, the moment when Roxana felt most empowered and in control of her destiny was actually laying the seeds for her ruin.
When Roxana moves in with the Quaker, she becomes interested in potentially dressing like her new friend and landlady. The Quakers were known for dressing in an extremely simple and austere style, making them quickly recognizable. The Quaker thinks that Roxana is simply exploring a new style, and maybe even thinking about converting. However, in an instance of dramatic irony, readers know that Roxana is interested in a Quaker costume because it will help her to hide her previous identity. As a courtesan, Roxana was known for glamorous and striking attire, so if anyone were to catch sight of her dressed as a Quaker, they would be unlikely to recognize her. Rather than reflecting simplicity and spirituality, Roxana's Quaker dress ironically reflects her duplicity and lies.
While Roxana is hiding in the countryside, she receives a letter from the Quaker, who innocently informs her that Susan seems to have vanished. The Quaker believes that Susan must have given up searching for her mother, and possibly even left London. This letter is a dark example of dramatic irony because the reader knows that Susan's disappearance is much more likely explained by murder, whereas the Quaker has no idea. The dramatic irony is important because it shows the gulf between Roxana and Amy, and someone like the Quaker. The Quaker is operating under fundamentally different assumptions about human nature: to her, murder is simply inconceivable, and it seems plausible that Susan might have given up and decided to stop bothering Roxana. From Roxana's more cynical and realistic perspective, she knows that Susan would never have voluntarily given up, and that Amy would readily resort to violence if she needed to. The dramatic irony highlights how Roxana and Amy's lifestyle has pushed them outside of typical patterns of moral behavior.
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Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress by Daniel Defoe.

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^ Jump up to: a b "6 Contemporary Feminist Artists Active Today by Ruth Millington" . Rise Art . 10 March 2020 . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Roxana Halls Paintings at Reuben Colley Fine Art | Feminine Moments" . Feminine Moments . 6 May 2019 . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World, Home" . Artfully Dressed . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ Jump up to: a b McNay, Anna. "Roxana Halls: 'I often equate painting with performance' " . Studio International . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Roxana Halls" . National Galleries Scotland . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Roxana Halls" . New Art Projects . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Roxana Halls" . OtherPeoplesPixels Blog . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Roxana Halls. Appetite" . Wall Street International . 19 August 2014 . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

^ "Roxana Halls" . National Galleries of Scotland . Retrieved 16 August 2021 .

^ "ROXANA HALLS - Laughing While Leaving" . roxanahalls.com . Retrieved 11 February 2021 .

Roxana Halls (born 1974, UK) is a figurative painter known for her images of wayward women who refuse to conform to society’s expectations. [1] [2] She has been widely praised for her draughtsmanship, wry humour, and disturbing narratives. She lives with her wife in London.

Halls was born in Plaistow, London . [3]

Growing up, she aspired to be an actress and her long-standing interest in drama and performance is evident in the baroque sensibility of many of her works. Halls has said that she often equates painting with performance [4] and that her models collude with her in creating theatrical scenarios for which the viewer is invited to tease out narratives.

Describing herself as mainly self-taught, Halls took a foundation course in art at Plymouth College of Art and Design but found that she was very self-reliant. When she moved to London, she ‘just painted, worked hard, went to the National Gallery constantly and did it that way.’ She moved near a former theatre in south London where she established her first studio. [4]

Halls’s practice has relied on painting from life, memory, and photographs. Referencing everything from high art and philosophy to the zeitgeist (including, at different times, Charcot’s ‘The Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière,’ Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine , the war time paintings of Dame Laura Knight, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the songs of Nick Cave, Peaches and Robert Wyatt, Sylvia Plath, avantgarde cinema, and the fashion for glamorising the past), Halls’s paintings examine gender, class, identity and sexuality. [1] [5] [6]
[7] A voracious researcher, Halls has claimed she is magpie-like, attracted by beautiful things but also by the discarded and careworn. She collects costumes - often foraged from charity or thrift shops - from different countries and periods, aware that the stories of their owners may remain forever unknowable.

Her paintings focus on the materiality of people’s lived environments, seducing the viewer with exquisite still lifes or her emphasis on fabrics and hair. Often domestic in scale and subject, they rebut the notion that grandiose history paintings are a better barometer of contemporary life. They ask: how is women’s behaviour policed by society and how do women internalise those expectations and limitations through self-surveillance?

Whilst her ‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Suspended Women’ series (2012) may recall the surrealism of artists like Dorothea Tanning or Meret Oppenheim, Halls does not consider her work surreal. However, performance, theatricality, illusion, and magic are recurring themes. Her exhibition ‘Roxana Halls’ Tingle-Tangle,’ produced for the National Theatre, London in 2009 borrowed the language of cabaret performance, Halls re-imaging herself as the impresario of a troupe. For her painting Terina The Paper Tearer and Inferna The Human Torch , she performed Inferna, a character she created after being inspired by a costume she found in a charity shop in Brixton. Whilst she used external performers for other works in the series, self-portraits have always been an important aspect of her oeuvre though Halls has stated that she rarely paints herself as herself. Halls allows paintings to evolve in the making rather than beginning with preparatory drawings. This mirrors her interest in depicting women in evolving states, in liminal states, held sometimes in suspension.

Halls has also explored consumption and abstinence, as in her 'Appetite' series (2013–14), [8] where women transgress by not behaving as they are expected to: Halls shows one gorging on popcorn, eating with her mouth open (referencing, perhaps, the eighteenth century celebrity portraitist Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun and her innovation of showing her teeth in her self-portraits – something that was considered uncouth or deemed the sign of a maniac; Halls paints the teeth last in her paintings). Inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio’s versions of Judith and Holofernes , another woman (Halls again) takes over the traditionally male role in Carvery , 2013 where platters of working-class food teeter on the edge of this feast for one, much like the plate in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus . She wields her implements, carving out her own place in the world.

One of Halls’s most renowned series - 'Laughing While' (2012 onwards) – depicts women engaged in more transgressive acts that interrogate encultured norms around femininity. These women are always active subjects — often breaking propriety just by eating messily ( Laughing While Eating Yoghurt , 2017) or laughing out loud. Halls cites Cixous’s retelling of the Chinese general Sun Tse ‘who decapitates a group of women he is trying to train as soldiers, so disconcerted, so disgusted is he by their persistent laughter and refusal to take his orders seriously. This resonates with me deeply. Acts of political resistance come in many forms and when I paint images of women laughing, eating, reclining, reading or simply looking, I am always cognisant of the fact that the most seemingly innocuous actions can be subversive.’ In many of the images, the women’s ‘bad’ behaviour becomes less innocuous and tips towards making them a danger to others and possibly to themselves. They jilt, commit arson, vandalise, loot, maraud.

In 2020 Halls was invited to paint Portrait of Katie Tomkins, Mortuary & Post Mortem Services Manager by her colleague Natalie Miles-Kemp on behalf of West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust for what became a major lockdown art project in the UK during the global Covid pandemic: Portraits for NHS Heroes . [9] conceived by Tom Croft.

Halls was also commissioned to make portraits for Katherine Parkinson’s play Sitting (filmed by BBC Arts & Avalon Productions for BBC Four as part of the Lights Up festival, April 2021). She and Parkinson were recorded in conversation at her London studio for BBC Radio 4's Only Artists .

Inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as St. Catherine , Halls’s exhibition 'Crime Spree' (2021) examines the taboo subject of women and criminality.

Halls’s work is in myriad private and public collections, both in the U.K. and overseas. Besides solo exhibitions at Beaux Arts, Bath; Hay Hill, London; and at Reuben Colley Fine Art, Birmingham, her work has been shown in numerous group shows in the UK and US, including the BP Portrait Award at The National Portrait Gallery, London, The R.A. Summer Exhibition, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Discerning Eye, The Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Competition. In 2004, Halls won the Villiers David Prize which enabled her to visit Berlin for the first time and make her 'Cabaret' series. In 2010, she won the Founder’s Purchase Prize at the ING Discerning Eye show and thus entered their collection. Her 2019 portrait of Scottish musician Horse McDonald was acquired for the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The portrait’s pose derived from an amalgam of all the live moments, mannerisms and movements, Halls witnessed in her studio while Horse performed her best-loved song “Careful,” for her live and a cappella ; the pose was the one Halls felt best encapsulated her sitter.

In 2020 Halls became a founder-member of InFems Art Collective. and created her first NFT "Pulse Points" in 2022 as part of 'Nightclubbing' - InFems's collaboration with Carolina Herrera .

In 2022 Halls featured on Episode 1 of BBC's Extraordinary Portraits hosted by Tinie Tempah where she was commissioned to paint twin sisters who survived a crocodile attack in Mexico.
Also in 2022, Halls' portrait of Katie Tomkins - Mortuary & Post Mortem Services Manager at West Hertfordshire NHS Trust was acquired for the permanent collection of the Science Museum, London, UK as part of their COVID-19 Collecting Project.

https://afterellen.com/files/AFTERELLEN-SUPORT-VIDEO-v5-UpdatedApril82020_1.mp4
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Women have a complicated relationship with the act of laughing. Many of us laugh when we’re uncomfortable. We also laugh to ease tension. We laugh at jokes that aren’t funny to save the joker’s feelings. Women put themselves under surveillance because of the societal punishments for stepping out of line. There is rarely a better example of female self-policing than the way we scrutinise our own joy, our laughter.
We are our own voyeur, as Margaret Atwood wrote in The Robber Bride :
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
The way we police the volume and politeness of our laughter indicates the way our true, most liberated desires are so suppressed. Women must feel mildly. We must be accomodating to our surroundings and the people within it. Our feelings must cause absolutely no disruption to gendered ideas about our collective benignity.
Women laughing in Roxana Halls’ artworks are delightfully malignant to patriarchal ideas of womanhood. Many of her Laughing While artworks make me nostalgic for the freedom of feeling only experienced in girlhood. I remember laughing in what looked like uncontrollable fits of madness and parents or teachers demanding I stop. I couldn’t. I wasn’t trying to be cheeky but there was “no reason” for the red-face, tear-rolling, mouth-gaping sort of laughter I couldn’t contain. I was resisting control. What’s more scary than an uncontrollable girl?
Seeing women laugh uncontrollably in Roxana’s art inspires me. I feel a deep sense of joy and a huge rush of adrenaline. Why is viewing women laughing so impactful? When I asked Roxana about the significance of women laughing in her Laughing While… artworks, she pointed me to a quote in Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay , ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’:
“ The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a supression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives…As women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge…..The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings…..Of course, women so empowered are dangerous.”
Roxana’s subjects indulge in the erotic. “ My work using laughter explores ways of depicting women’s internalised rules of conduct, posing questions about the ways in which within contemporary culture women are appraised, influenced & policed and how ‘self-surveillance’ circumscribes the repertoire of legitimate actions available to them,” she explains. “Many of the subjects of my paintings offer a riposte to self-consciousness, they often teeter on the verge of indulging in ‘catastrophic’ behaviour, or at times topple over. They may be inappropriate and immune to self-censure. When women are laughing the most seemingly innocuous actions can be subversive, just as acts of transgression may be foregrounded by the prosaic.”
Any woman or girl who feels things in “excess,” who refuses to contain her thoughts or feelings, who dabbles in uncontained desire — managing to express her nature despite militant patriarchal socialisation — is viewed as mad. It’s catastrophic for a woman to rip off the figurative corset. We distrust our erotic power because our energy is suffocated by socially constructed strings.
The women in Roxana Halls’ art are often committing crimes. In fact, Roxana’s art is being exhibited at Reuben Colley Fine Art in Birmingham, UK, until October 2nd, in a show entitled “CRIME SPREE.” The women challenge their socialization. Femininity, including passivity and submission, is naturalised among women. Women and girls are not naturally feminine. However, any behaviour that challenges the naturalisation of such femininity is viewed as a fault in the individual girl or woman, rather than proof patriarchy’s ideals don’t adequately represent the reality of females.
Women laughing is significant. It’s powerful. It can even be revolutionary. While taking in Roxana Hall’s art and insight, I am reminded of the only Shakespeare quote that’s been stuck in my head since secondary school: “The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.” We rob from surveillance when we resist self-policing.
The women laughing in Roxana Halls’ art are painted with the physical response to unbridled laughter in mind. “Laughter is disruptive, it erupts unbidden and is often described as ‘inappropriate’,” Roxana asserts, “But is life-force and cannot be policed or suppressed. I’ve always thought of my work as having a palpable eroticism, not only because of the connotations of unbridled laughter, but also in the manner in which they are painted; the act of laughter engages most of the body in its production and consequently my figures have a muscular dimension but in synthesis there is a deliberate sensuousness in the light falling on fabric and hair, and this is frequently suggested in my figures’ surroundings, dark woods, vivid pyrotechnics,
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