In contrast to Humphry Clinker, in which appearances appear not to be so important (even if, as we have shown, there are some important questions opened by them), Defoe’s Roxana (The Fortunate Mistress) could be said to depend strongly on a series of questions of appearances.
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On a first impression, on a first reading, Humphry Clinker is not a novel about appearances. For one, its plot doesn’t seem to revolve around appearances. None of the narrators, as main characters (though not all the ‘main’ characters are narrators, and even to call some of them ‘narrators’ could be problematic, but we will get back to this) could be said, for example, to be concealing something (or putting on an appearance), worried about appearances, or their life and/or future to depend much on appearances (that is, especially if we compare them to other main characters/narrators such as Evelina, Moll Flanders or Roxana, in their respective novels). However…
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Tom Jones —as most eighteenth-century novels— appears as a novel of education —in the double sense of being about the education of the protagonist, for the education of the reader— and about the function and the importance of appearances in the world.
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[...] despite that I will start by focusing on the occurrence of certain words, such as ‘appearance’, ‘apparition’, ‘apparent’, ‘appear’, what I will call questions of appearance at issue, signaled or indexed by them, are not limited to their occurrence.
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Slavoj Zizek has always been fascinated by questions of appearance. Here, I am going to present and comment on some of those questions, considered by Zizek, to try to find something like Zizek’s theory of appearances, assuming he has at least one.
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