While Daniel Defoe’s most loved book is still Robinson Crusoe (1719) due to its appeal to young readers, Moll Flanders is considered by critics his most artful. Although it features the same hyperbole used in Robinson Crusoe, with Moll taking almost two dozen lovers and five husbands and birthing multiple children, it boasts an admirable narrative unity produced by the strong characterization of its protagonist.
Defoe relates Moll’s adventures in a series of episodes lacking smooth transition, and at times covers years in a single sentence, but readers overlook such distractions, enjoying the realism Defoe’s knowledge of the criminal class gives his novel. They also find his familiar theme of survival by a poverty-stricken heroic figure inspiring, despite the facts of Moll’s crude existence.
That existence is made clear in the complete title, which continues, Who was born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Three-score 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, Written from her own Memorandums.
Moll’s entrance into the world proves a blessing for her mother, who had been convicted of theft and sentenced to execution. However, her pregnancy gains her a delay of execution, and following Moll’s birth in Newgate, she is ordered to Virginia in the United States. Her deportation leaves Moll to be raised by various caretakers, including the mayoress of Colchester.
While with one gentlewoman she gains an education, she is also educated in sex when the son of the house seduces her. This begins a long series of sexual adventures for Moll, who eventually marries and has children. When she sails with her family to Virginia to find her mother, she makes the horrifying discovery that she has married her brother, who she leaves in the States with his offspring. He protests her plans, and Moll does not dispute his reasoning.
She wrote of his reaction as “horror” when he understands that she plans to leave her children. She tells her audience, “as to the charge of unnatural, I could easily answer it to myself, while I knew that the whole relationship was unnatural in the highest degree.”
Upon her return to England, she continues her adventures, marrying multiple men, and eventually ending up homeless and penniless. She turns to crime to survive, honing her skills as a thief. Even operating outside the law, she is a sympathetic character, explaining why she does not want to give up her illegitimate child in order to marry: “I wish all those women who consent to the disposing their children out of the way, as it is called for decency sake, would consider that ’tis only a contrived method for murder, that is, killing their children with safety.”
Moll is eventually caught and exported to Virginia, following her mother’s example. All is not lost, however, as on the ship she encounters an ex-husband, deported as a highwayman, and the two reunite. Moll finds a new life in the States as a landowner when she inherits her mother’s estate. At last materially blessed, she becomes successful and eventually returns to England with her husband, enjoying a happy middle life into old age.
At age 70, she reflects on her past, one that would be judged wicked by any reader. Defoe avoided accusations of immorality in his subject matter by claiming, “The best use is made of even the worst story” and by stating that Moll repented of her earlier life. He explained that “to give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear.”
Defoe focuses reader attention firmly on his protagonist, not depending on an adventure plot to carry the novel, although many of Moll’s adventures are reported. He cleverly circumvented criticism regarding the unrealistic nature of Moll’s refined manner and speech, considering her low social status, by claiming in a preface that the “editor” worked with an earlier version, written in a “language more like one still in Newgate.” Supposedly the editor chose “modester words than she told it at first” in a tone “grown penitent and humble.”
A wildly popular work, Moll Flanders remains readily available in print and has been transformed to multiple media versions.
Bibliography
West, Richard. Daniel Defoe: The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1998.
Zhang, John C. “Defoe’s Moll Flanders.” The Explicator 47, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 13–15.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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