Analysis Of Daniel Defoes Moll Flanders English Literature Essay

The narrative begins with the disclosure that “Moll Flanders” is not the heroine’s true name, but rather an alias given her by “some of my worst Comrades” in crime. Defoe thus reveals from the novel’s first lines that Moll, having been born in prison as the daughter of a convicted felon, will eventually continue in that tradition. We also glimpse in this opening paragraph the severity of the justice system of the time. Defoe’s century saw an increase in crime, and also in the number of crimes that were punishable by death. Moll’s mother receives her sentence-transportation to the American colonies-as a “Favour”; the expected punishment would have been execution.

Moll begins as an orphan, and her life will in fact be defined, from start to finish, as one of profound isolation. Moll’s early abandonment is but the first in a long line of such desertions, and the novel will continue divesting Moll of all her friends and relations at a rapid rate. The basic aloneness of human beings was a favorite theme for Defoe. Although Moll exists in the midst of a bustling and crowded urban world (rather than being stranded on an island like Robinson Crusoe), she forges almost no enduring loyalties or friendships. On the rare occasions when she does find fellowship, Defoe does not allow Moll’s interpersonal relations to become the focus of the novel.

Moll’s solitary and unpropitious start in life also initiates her remarkable self-sufficiency. That she divides herself from the band of gypsies at the age of three is an index of the power this heroine will have to steer and direct her own life. While Moll is often at the mercy of circumstances, her lack of affiliation also gives her a kind of freedom, and it forces her to rely on her own judgment and cunning to make her way in the world. Her story will be a quest for survival.

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The situation in which Moll eventually finds herself-in love with one brother but compelled to marry the other-is the stuff of tragedy. Defoe gives the plot a fairly comic treatment, however, utilizing the episode mainly to demonstrate Moll’s early naiveté and to show her perseverance and her quickness to learn from her experiences. Moll singles out the growth of her youthful vanity as marking a turning point in her life. Up to this point, Moll has had nothing to reproach herself with except a childish ignorance. “Thus far I have had a smooth Story to tell of myself, and in all this Part of my Life, I not only had the Reputation of living in a very good Family,…but I had the Character too of a very sober, modest, and virtuous young Woman, and such I had always been; neither had I yet any occasion to think of any thing else, or to know what a Temptation to Wickedness meant.” Yet the narrator backs off of the sermon on the evils of vanity, or at least she recasts those evils in material, not spiritual terms. The lesson she draws is one of expediency rather than of piety. When she warns her younger readers “to Guard themselves against the Mischiefs which attend an early Knowledge of their own Beauty,” the mischief to which she refers is not immoral sexual behavior but rather the credulousness that will allow a woman to be the dupe of a more sophisticated man. She admonishes herself for her lack of attention to practical matters-not for the fact that she yielded to temptation, but for the fact that she failed to secure her own interests as she might have.

The scene of Moll’s seduction is one of the book’s raciest episodes. As the heroine becomes more sexually experienced, the narrator ceases to present the sexual facts of her story with the same romance and titillation. Desire and emotion are in fact conspicuously minimized in this novel, which distills human existence to its economic and materialistic bottom line. The emotional responses of the character Moll contrast markedly here with the wizened perspective of the septuagenarian who narrates the story. As Moll grows into her adult self, this divided perspective closes somewhat: she matures into a pattern in which her first reactions to events, which may be emotional or impetuous initially, quickly resolve into stoic and pragmatic courses of action.

Yet the gap between the narrator and the protagonist remains important throughout, serving to reinforce the conditional morality that the book so often propounds. Life decisions in Defoe’s novel cannot be divorced from the circumstances under which they are made. The narrator’s most frequent strategy in commenting on her own life is to imagine herself into her former situation, rather than to impose the wisdom of her years on her earlier experience. Moll’s ability to perform this imaginative displacement is part of what enables her to tell her story with such tenderness of sympathy and understanding. The narrator is never coy with her reader, which is part of her appeal. She presents her own responses and motivations frankly and unabashedly, as when she confesses that she was too pleased with her first lover’s attentions to resist him. The fact that we get no real external perspective on Moll’s life, however, limits the capacity of the novel to pronounce any stern judgment or to come to an objective moral resolution.

Defoe depicts, through his heroine, the harsh realities of the marriage market. He himself was outspoken in his criticism of the practice of marrying without love, calling such alliances “legalized prostitution.” This candid and unsentimental presentation of the economic motives governing marriage casts Moll’s frankness about her own motivations in a new light. If we were inclined to see her avowed acquisitiveness as overly mercenary, we are now forced to acknowledge, at the very least, that she is a creature of her world.

Moll’s moral disgust at the revelation that she has been living with her brother as a husband is somewhat surprising, given the equanimity and lack of emotion with which she has met the other tragedies that have befallen her. This is one of the rare cases when a moral principle will outweigh every other consideration for Moll. Even in this case, however, her initial repulsion is quickly channeled into a more pragmatic vein as she calmly considers what action she ought to take. The news causes Moll’s brother/husband to suffer a breakdown, a fact which reinforces, by contrast, Moll’s personal resourcefulness and resiliency.

This episode serves as a link between the beginning of the novel and the end: it shows Moll rediscovering her mother and her own origins and also paves the way for her return to America and her final attainment of prosperity.

Moll’s relationship with this “Gentleman” is governed by a conflict: she seems reluctant to become his mistress, but also at some level desires that outcome. She confesses “that from the first hour I began to converse with him, I resolved to let him lye with me if he offered it; but it was because I wanted his help and assistance, and I knew no other way of securing him than that.” The underlying question for Moll is one of security, not of love or even desire. Moll has learned that being a wife is more secure than being a mistress, and she knows that there is no chance of marrying this man as long as his mad wife is still living. Yet his generosity and loyalty make him a likely candidate for an affair, and this assessment is confirmed when he promises to take care of her and her children. For the six years that they are together, Moll enjoys financial stability, if not social comfort. She is wise enough, however, to save money while she is enjoying such prosperity, “knowing well enough that such things as these do not always continue, that Men that keep mistresses often change them, grow weary of them or Jealous of them, or something or other happens to make them withdraw their Bounty.” Moll’s concerns-and her financial prudence-are not unfounded: after finding himself on the brink of death, her lover repents of his adultery and deserts Moll. Still, the relationship is a relative success, especially since marriage for Moll has been equally uncertain.

Interestingly, the moral valence of the situation is not in the fact of committing adultery, but rather in having the common sense to secure oneself against some change of circumstances; the woman who does not protect herself against that possibility is “justly” ruined. Moll admits to having some “secret Reproaches of my own Conscience for the Life I led,” but then elaborates them in financial terms: “even in the greatest height of the Satisfaction I ever took, yet I had the terrible prospect of Poverty and Starving which lay behind me.” Moll has learned to look for openings that might bring her financial gain, and she is not shy to capitalize on them when she finds them.

We see in Moll’s calculating treatment of the banker how much she has learned since her handling of the two brothers at the time of her first seduction. With respect to that affair, she sees retrospectively that “if I had known his Thoughts, and how hard he thought I would be to be gained, I might have made my own Terms with him.” By this time, however, Moll knows how to string a man along; “I play’d with this Lover as an Angler does with a Trout,” she brags. When the banker suggests that she marry him immediately, promising to seek the divorce afterwards, she is tempted only momentarily, and knows not to reveal her eagerness to her suitor. She plans her moves so as to keep her options open and refuses to rest her confidence in anybody but herself.

In Jemy, however, Moll meets her manipulative match. They cross each other in the same game, and although they banter about which of them is more “undone,” each is good-tempered enough not to harbor any real resentment. For all their anxiety about what to do next, both take a certain delight in their predicament, and Jemy’s attitude toward adversity is much like Moll’s: “I must try the world again; a Man ought to think like a Man: To be Discourag’d, is to yield to the Misfortune.” Jemy is in fact the only man Moll has any real and lasting affection for, probably because they have so much in common. “I really believe…that he was a Man that was as well qualified to make me happy, as to his Temper and Behaviour, as any Man ever was,” she reminisces. He is one of the few characters in the book who has a name (in fact he goes by several). While this is partly an expedient to his reappearance later in the story, it is also a signal of the fact that he makes a lasting impression on Moll’s affections-something few of the people she meets manage to do.

Although we have seen Moll growing in worldliness and sophistication over the course of the novel, Defoe emphasizes his heroine’s innocence in comparison to the women she meets when she returns to London. Assuming her first landlady to be a very scrupulous gentlewoman, she is embarrassed to appear as an unwed mother (although she is also reluctant to admit that she is married, because of her intention of remarrying). Only later does she realize that “the Mistress of the House was not so great a Stranger to such Cases as mine was.” The midwife whom the landlady summons turns out to be exactly “the right sort” for Moll’s situation. Little by little, Moll begins to get glimpses into a shadowy-but highly organized-world of corruption and degeneracy. She is surprised to discover what intricate networks of people and practices are in place to support immoral and criminal behavior. Moll’s Governess is midwife to “Ladies of Pleasure” on a regular basis, and she knows just whom to contact to have Moll’s baby taken off her hands. She evidently knows how to abort the baby as well, though she broaches the topic so indirectly that Moll only barely catches her meaning. She also appears to be acting as a procuress. Moll in fact declines to narrate in full detail “the Nature of the wicked Practice of this Woman, in whose Hands I was now fallen,” fearing that she may tempt others to similar vice. Defoe offers his readers a glimpse into this underworld as kind of realistic documentary-as “Testimony of the growing Vice of the Age.”

Moll carefully traces the process by which she is tempted into and then inextricably involved in a life of crime. She says of her critics, “Let ’em remember that a time of Distress is a time of dreadful Temptation, and all the Strength to resist is taken away; Poverty presses, the Soul is made Desperate by Distress, and what can be Done?” The more successful and celebrated she becomes as a criminal, the more reluctant Moll is to leave off the “trade,” despite her occasional pangs of conscience. She explains the strength of the inducements to crime but does not disguise her motives: “If…a prospect of Work had presented itself at first, when I began to feel the approach of my miserable Circumstances,…I had never fallen into this wicked Trade, or into such a wicked Gang as I was now embark’d with; but practise had hardened me, and I grew audacious to the last degree; and the more so, because I had carried it on so long, and had never been taken.” Stealing becomes a kind of compulsion for Moll, and she freely admits that she continued to steal even once she had plenty of money-as if for the challenge and excitement of it.

This segment of the book is peppered with pragmatic morals: Defoe tells us not only how Moll could have done her work better, but also how her victims might have avoided being robbed. And the crime detail as a whole is purported to serve the moral purpose of warning readers against becoming victims themselves, rather than against criminal behavior. Even this explanation does not seem to capture the true character of Defoe’s relish for these scenes, however. He presents Moll’s thievery as almost an art form; her narrative delights in the ingenuity with which each crime is conceived and the technical mastery with which it is accomplished. “I grew the greatest Artist of my time,” she writes, “and work’d myself out of every danger with…Dexterity.” The fact that Moll, from her retrospective vantage point, takes such joy in these relations calls into question the sincerity of her repentance.

Moll’s criminal phase is in many ways the period of her greatest independence and autonomy. Once she becomes a master thief, Moll’s solitude is turned from a liability to an advantage. It becomes the mark of freedom and self-sufficiency, just as her preference for working alone stems from the knowledge of her superior skill. Having found a “career,” at which she excels, Moll no longer has to seek desperately for a man to support her. The fact that crime is the occupation that presents itself (we can hardly imagine that needlework, Moll’s only real alternative, would have been as fulfilling or empowering) might be taken as an indication of Defoe’s insight into predicament of women in his day, and particularly of the dearth of acceptable outlets for their talent and ambition.

Moll presents it as a basic truth of human nature that “a Secret of the Moment should always have a Confident, a bosom Friend, to whom we may Communicate the Joy of it, or the Grief of it, be it which it will, or it will be a double weight upon the Spirits, and perhaps become even insupportable.” This reflection is particularly poignant in light of the fact that Moll has so often been lacking in such a friend or confidante, and thus has been forced to bear most of her life’s burdens alone. She does not draw out the connection very explicitly in her own case, but goes on to affirm that the lack of friends has been the source of much weakness in many of her acquaintances.

Moll’s outpouring of emotion upon seeing her son seems incongruous with the strikingly unsentimental way she has borne the loss of so many children, and especially with her particular disdain for the children of her incestuous relationship with her brother. Such sentiment, it would seem, is a luxury for Moll: only in moments of relative security and prosperity does she find leisure to indulge in such displays of emotion. Her new filial piety is also presumably meant to accord with her religious conversion, as testimony-however thin it may seem-to the fact that her outlook has really changed. The fact that she does not hesitate to tell a whole web of lies to protect herself and promote her own convenience casts some doubt on the image of Moll as a reformed woman, however, and her eagerness to retrieve her share of her mother’s legacy has a similar effect. Much critical debate has centered on the (questionable) sincerity of Moll’s reformation by the end of the novel. By her own account, her repentance is sincere enough. The fond manner in which she relates her past life, however, suggests otherwise, and the fact that the novel seems to offer piety as an option only after economic security and social stability have been obtained represents a more bleakly materialistic view of human spiritual possibilities. On the religious register as well as on others, the question of whether Moll actually develops as a character or merely responds to changing conditions remains a troubling one.