Re-read reviews: Moll Flanders, by Daniel Dufoe
The full original title of this book pretty succinctly summarizes what you’re going to get:
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother), twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent.
Of course, while the author and Moll herself repeatedly claim this is a cautionary tale…it doesn’t actually feel that way, and one has good reason to doubt the penitence!
This 1722 novel builds on the picaresque tradition, in which a roguish, lower-class hero lives by his wits in a corrupt society and engages in a series of loosely-connected adventures. However, ‘Moll Flanders’ makes several interesting changes to this form. Most notably, of course, the witty rogue is a she who has to deal with specifically female 18th century challenges. Also, the picaro usually goes through zero character development and is never fully a criminal. Neither of these things are true of Moll, who feels more like an early female anti-hero. She is not exactly a good person, but you still can’t help but root for her.
Moll’s life starts out rough: She is born in Newgate prison to a woman who would have been hanged for stealing some cloth but is then transported to Virginia as an indentured servant. (Moll Flanders isn’t actually her real name, but since she never says what her real name is, that’s what I’ll call her). Defoe uses this as a chance to comment on how it would be both kind and sensible if there were a reliable system of caring for children without parents that would ensure they could honestly provide for themselves when they grew up! Moll does end up with a kind caretaker, but she develops a horror of being a servant – sure she will be beaten and treated as a drudge - and begs the nurse to let her stay and earn her living with her needle. Young Moll declares she wants to be a gentlewoman, by which she just means being independent, but this tickles her nurse and some of the fine ladies of the town. One family takes her on as a companion for their daughters, and in the process she learns by sitting in on their lessons to dance and sing and otherwise act as a "real" gentlewoman. Unfortunately for Moll, both of the sons of the house take notice of her. Having been told by many how pretty and charming she is, she is ready to believe the elder when he (without permission, mind you) starts kissing her and protesting that he loves her. She develops quite a crush on him and agrees to become his mistress on his promise that he will marry her when he comes into his inheritance. Later, the younger son honestly proposes marriage, and Moll is confounded about what to do. The family is becoming rather chilly to her as he continuously rhapsodizes about his love and might well kick her out on the street. She is furious when the elder brother makes clear the falseness of his promise by pointing out that his father could live for decades, so he won’t be coming into his inheritance for ages and advises her to marry his brother. Not knowing what else to do, she eventually agrees.
After that, Moll basically gives up on the concept of marrying for love – though she does have quite a lot of affection for some of her husbands. Instead, she recognizes marriage for the economic transaction that it is in her society, and several times lectures female readers on how to avoid losing out even when the market seems to be against them:
Nothing is more certain, than that the ladies always gain of the men, by keeping their ground, and letting their pretended lovers see…that they are not affraid [sic] of saying NO…she is always married too soon, who gets a bad husband.
If the men will blatantly fortune-hunt, so will Moll! It is fitting that the husband she has the best rapport with, and who she ends up with in the end, is as much a picaro seeking to live above the station where he was born as she is.
The thing about marrying her brother occurs because Moll’s mother had, unbeknownst to her, other children after she was transported. Moll is highly grossed out by the whole situation when she finds out, and eventually persuades her brother-husband to let her go back to England, telling him to give it out that she is dead so he can remarry. The Virginia commentary is rather interesting. It is clear that being transported as a felon/indentured servant isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As Moll’s mother points out:
Some of the best men in this country are burnt in the hand…there’s Major______, says she, he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba___r was a shoplifter…
However, one thing the story doesn’t address is the distinction between indentured servants and slaves. Moll ends up owning tobacco plantations worked by hundreds of “servants”…but how many can aspire to the freedom she enjoys? The coyness on this point may betray discomfort on Defoe’s part; some authors of the day openly admitted to and even celebrated the slave trade, but he seems to not want to open up that dark reality in his cheeky little novel about a poor girl who makes good.
Moll is never technically a sex worker as the subtitle might imply; it is more that she is at several points a “kept woman” rather than a wife. But the framing of the story suggests that Defoe might have quietly been trying to point out how little distinction there was. Agreeing to be a mistress might be an unwise move because it left a woman in a particularly vulnerable position…but, on the other hand, with everyone marrying for money and women needing to have husbands and often left in tough circumstances if they died or abandoned them – how different is it, really? But, of course, he can’t say that out loud!
The thieving comes in after Moll’s fifth husband dies, leaving her in debt and too old to go fortune-hunting again. She recounts a long list1 of her various methods of theft, which range from nabbing a bit of lace from a shop table while people are distracted by a passing aristocrat, to pickpocketing watches, to agreeing to look after someone’s luggage and then walking off with it (or, more reprehensibly, the goods someone is trying to save from a fire!). It is ironic, really, that she eventually gets nicked and sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation) over a bit of cloth that she never even carried out of the shop. But, again, that’s Defoe’s point – it is bizarre that highwaymen who’ve actually murdered people and poor widows who pocket a bit of silk get the exact same sentence!
One can certainly fault Moll – as she reproaches herself – for getting greedy. She keeps stealing long after she has laid up enough of a fund to support herself with a bit of additional needlework. But she has gotten a taste for the finer things. It should be noted that it was difficult for a single woman to support herself in any level of comfort because women’s jobs were really poorly paid compared to men’s manual labor (which wasn’t exactly a goldmine either). The thing modern readers would more likely find disturbing is her rather callous, or at least highly inconsistent, attitude toward her children. She gives birth to at least 12 over the course of the book. Five of them die – not an uncommon rate for the time – and the others are all handed off in one way or another to someone else to raise when her relationship with their fathers ends. The only time she shows real concern about doing this is over the son of her fellow picaro - who had to leave her, even though they both really liked each other, when it turned out that neither of them had any money. She also shows a great deal of positive emotion on being reunited with the son of the guy she really liked before finding out he was her brother! That suggests her feelings about the man influence her feelings about the kid…which is believable, I suppose.
1. Perhaps too long, really – the book starts to get a little tedious at this point. This bit might work better as episodes in a TV show or comic, if some non-theft plot could be mixed in as well.
Overall recommendation: This is an old-fashioned story which might not be to everyone’s taste. But it is very clever in places and makes some good social commentary on 18th century life (though, as mentioned, it neglects to address slavery). And I do appreciate that Defoe was able to give his con-woman protagonist a voice that feels reasonably authentic and that reveals the difficult choices that women of her time had to make, especially regarding their interactions with men.
