b. 1660, year of the restoration of Charles II, after Cromwell’s death in 1658.
Defoe the son of a butcher, sent to a Dissenting academy but decides not to be a minister and goes into business.
Marries in 1684, wife has dowry of £3700, eight children. [Interest rates about 4 percent, therefore £148 per annum]
Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ bastard son, invades but is defeated at Sedgemoor and executed (1685). Defoe fights in the Monmouth rebellion, pardoned.
1692, goes bankrupt for £17,000 - $3 million or more? Goes back into business. By 1700, also employed as a writer, and as a spy for the Whigs (who supported Holland and opposed France).
1703, stands in the pillory for satirizing Tory extremism against the Dissenters.
1704 becomes an agent for Harley, the moderate Tory prime minister - disillusioned with the Dissenters?
1715, Whigs back in power, Defoe becomes an agent for them while pretending to be still a Tory.
1719, publishes Robinson Crusoe, followed by his other major works of fiction. 566 works attributed to him.
Continues to be active in business - “Thirteen times I have been rich and poor.” Dies in hiding from creditors, 1731.
Crucial features of Defoe’s life evident in Moll Flanders:
1. Dissenting morality: the Providence narrative, treatment of the inner life.
2. Business mentality
3. Uncertain fortunes and status (as opposed to the stability of traditional society).
4. Egotism, secrecy, unstable identity.
Problem in reading Defoe is not in recognizing these features, but in deciding the interplay between them.
Moll’s Birth and Upbringing
Deep fissure in 18th cent society between explanation by nature (the old feudal/agrarian society) and nurture (the new society of opportunity, where people make themselves).
In Tom Jones the blood runs true from one generation to the next - Tom doesn’t pretend to be a gentleman, or make himself a gentleman - he is a gentleman. Plot consists of bringing blood and external circumstances into alignment.
Defoe constantly goes back and forth between incompatible explanations:
Is Moll a born thief, destined to be like her mother?
Or is she a typical product of society - “Give me not poverty, lest I steal” (142).
Moll is obsessed with the radical vulnerability of the infant - “that we are born into the world helpless and incapable” (128).
Locke’s doctrine of the tabula rasa - no innate ideas, we build up a sense of the world, and of ourselves, by using our senses. But Defoe emphasises the negative aspect of this, the world’s power over us - what the gypsies would have done to Moll (p. 2).
Moll’s childish desire to be a gentlewoman is foolish, yet the Mayoress says “she has a lady’s hand” (5) - fairytale explanation by breeding. Moll is set to work on ladies’ clothes, is given such clothes, and passes for a lady eventually. Is this to be explained as nature expressing itself, or as Moll’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities in her environment?
Defoe consistently shows Moll herself to be uncertain about causes and motives - she registers the impact of rival social views, but doesn’t rise to any comprehensive or theoretical vision - nor does Defoe himself offer one (unlike Fielding).
Might be said that the morality of the introduction is that vision - but it is manifestly inadequate as a day-to-day explanation of what’s going on.
From the beginning of Moll’s erotic experience, we are left wondering whether love is natural and spontaneous, or whether it is a response to external stimuli - above all, economic ones.
Elder brother is a rake (p. 10) who “baits his hook” - so we have no way of judging his claim to Betty that he is “in love with her” (12). What is certain is that he woos her on two levels simultaneously, the sexual and the financial.
Story of Danae - prophesied that her son will kill her father, he shuts her up in a tower - Zeus comes to her as a shower of gold, she gives birth to Perseus.
Elder brother’s gold is a form of penetration - first 5 guineas, then a handful - when he gives her a hundred she puts it into her bosom herself, then yields to him.
Moll’s passion is fetishistic - “I was more confounded with the money than I was before with the love, and began to be so elevated that I scarce knew the ground I stood on” (13). The money sweeps her off her feet; it precedes sex and is more exciting - to some extent it is a substitute for it.
All of Moll’s subsequent sexual relations will have a monetary dimension:
a. Prestige culture and romantic love both try to separate sex from the marketplace - taboo against exchanging money for sex - Fielding’s critique of property marriage as “legalized prostitution.”
b. Moll doesn’t even try to make such a distinction - takes it for granted that you must make a financial assessment before going to bed with anyone.
c. Sex is therefore a transaction, or rather an investment - after each relationship she adds up whether she has more money or less.
d. In parallel with changes in society as a whole, credit becomes more important to the transaction - each side tries to impose on the other, and figure out how much the partner has got - Moll thinks it legitimate to cheat here.
Clothes are also a form of credit, inflating the value of the person who wears them.
e. This is systematized in the idea of the “marriage market” (pp. 11, 46), or rather markets - the male buys beauty in prostitution, but expects the wife to pay him when he marries. Moll wants to be paid, but also wants the security of respectable marriage - as usual, her values are mixed and inconsistent.
The women who describe this system have a neo-feminist critique of it - question of whether Moll Flanders is “feminist” will be discussed later.
The relentless economism of the novel is obvious - every human relation has an economic dimension, or is described in economic language, or can be quantified (Mother Midnight’s bills, p. 121). No shame, or expectation tht it could be any different.
The individual as entrepreneur:
a. Affectionate or “human” relations are secondary to financial dealings, and are determined by them:
p. 129 - Mother Midnight on caring as a trade - the implicit contrast is with the insecurity of being “on the parish,” as Moll was as an infant. MM says that being able to pay is the best way of ensuring good treatment - even Moll finds this too “hardened” a view of the social system.
But Moll hardly distinguishes having “friends” from having a mutually advantageous financial relationship.
b. Personal identity and psychological condition are both determined by financial status - when Moll has a financial setback, she is likely to have a nervous breakdown, with depression, vapours, “fancies and imaginations”, etc. (141). But this kind of experience is only referred to rather than described - perhaps because it lies outside of economic rationality and the Mandevillian profit/loss calculus.
c. Important to understand how capital determines consciousness in the period before social security - each individual bears their own risk, and depends on having capital to protect them against old age, sickness, etc. These risks might be shared by family and friends; but Moll, as an orphan, cannot rely on family or personal relations as safety net.
Your “security” is a very literal sum, made insecure by the risk of thieves, bad investments, or failure of banks, etc. You also have to be constantly calculating how to “place” it for the least risk and best return. Sometimes you have to spend it on show - fine clothes and consumer goods - to make it seem as if you don’t need it (cf. the Lancashire husband, 108 - spent all his money to get Moll’s £15,000 - which she didn’t have).
This mobile capital contrasts with landed society, where security comes from being settled on a family estate, or residing on a property whose owner recognizes an obligation to you (like Allworthy’s numerous dependents). Servants would be given a cottage and a little money when too old to work, or a place in the local almshouse.
Capital is fluid (it moves constantly from one kind of asset to another) and variable (its current value is always going up and down). Moll’s identity has similar qualities; by implication, if her capital was reduced to zero, her identity too would disappear. The stable ground of identity in the old organic community has been pulled out from under her - and from everyone else who is now in the same situation.
Ian Watt argues that both Moll as a person and crime as a social phenomenon are “characteristic products of modern individualism.” In traditional societies, the collectivity is viewed as a kind of larger family, within which the modern idea of crime has no place (because there is no place within the family in which you could privately benefit from crime - think of the battle betwen Moll Seagrim and the rest of the village over her new dress).
In modern society, the polis (the community) becomes the police. Anonymity and private acquisitiveness make property crimes possible (and Moll’s crimes are all against property).
By the early 18th century, Watt notes, there existed “one of the characteristic institutions of modern urban civilisation: a well-defined criminal class, and a complex system for handling it.”
At the same time, there arises the philosophical problem of crime:
1. Is the criminal someone who is morally defective as an individual? or
2. Is the criminal merely a member of a particular class that is essentially a product of the social system - that tells everyone to strive for success, but does not provide success “easily or equally.”
Some of the time, Moll claims that the “dreadful necessity of [her] circumstances” (143) is the cause of her becoming a criminal. Still, this is not a developed sociological argument, such as we might make today: she doesn’t ask herself why a certain percentage of the population is destitute, she just wants to make sure that she isn’t one of them.
At other times, she thinks of her crimes as caused by her devil:
p. 148: she has enough work to live on, but the devil sends her out into the street.
the silver tankard “calls out to her,” as it were - the goods of the new consumer society demand to be owned, they are seducers - Moll doesn’t use violence and she is not a burglar: she takes that which is already on display.
p. 145: the vanity of the mother is blamed for the child’s wearing the necklace - but Moll herself is caught up in the demands of consumer society: she is not stealing to survive, but to have fine clothes and ornaments.
What has happened to the idea of “necessity” when society’s wealth has gone beyond mere subsistence, and when Moll needs to dress well in order to mingle with respectable people in order to steal enough to dress well?
Moll recognizes the dynamic on page 151: the “busy devil” is the spirit of the new consumer society, where wants are no longer held in place by the ceiling of a fixed class status (again, cf. Molly Seagrim in Tom Jones). In this world, people steal luxuries, not food.
Eighteenth-century society recognized the open-ended potential of property crimes, and responded with harsher punishments and the spectacle of the gallows. Moll sees it as madness, or the devil’s work, that she can’t stop stealing even when she risks death. What we might ask is why there should be this passion for things that go so far beyond survival?
In concentration camps, people would trade their food rations for cigarettes - there can be passions stronger than the passion for survival; Moll is in the grip of such a passion, but she is also an allegory of the arrival of that passion in our society - this is part of the novel’s fascination.
The passion is, ultimately, for identity and being - the naked infant that she is at the start, without other grounds of identity, can only become a person at all through acts of consumption - all other human relations are, for Moll at least, subordinate to this.
Moll is thus typical and abnormal at the same time - thus reconciling the two ways of looking at crime with which we began.
We can begin the question of Moll’s femaleness in the context of her crimes - which are conventionally female both in their means (i.e. deceit rather than violence) and in their objects (clothing and domestic goods). They are thus continuous (as Moll herself recognizes) with her earlier exploitation of her sexuality for the purpose of profit.
Mother Midnight (p. 147) sponsors young women as prostitutes, older ones as thieves - one career blends into the other, and with her drunken nobleman Moll will practise both (p. 168-170).
All of this, however, might have been perceived by any outside observer, whether male or female. Is Moll Flanders a feminine or feminist novel in any deeper sense, as a sympathetic and convincing representation of female experiences and values?
Ian Watt argues that it is not: “Defoe’s identification with Moll Flanders was so complete that, desite a few feminine traits, he created a personality that was in essence his own.” (115)
I’m not sure how we could prove this. Wht we can examine is how Defoe imagines a Mandevillian self-interest within the social roles and possibilities open to a woman at that time. There is here a kind of universalism, whereby women’s motives are presented as effectively no different from men’s, but in fulfilling their desires they must take social conventions into account.
Moll is Mandevillian in her belief that only appearances matter, that the main thing is not to get caught, and in her ability to rationalize everything that she wants to do. The underlying assumption is that women and men are equal (if equal in selfishness), and that there is no natural or essential femininity, but only direct strategies for men and indirect ones for women.
Watt says that “Moll accepts none of the disabilities of her sex, and . . . Virginia Woolf’s admiration for her was largely due to admiration of a heroine who so fully realised one of the ideals of feminism: freedom from any involuntary involvement in the feminine role.”
If you believe that, you also believe that these “disabilities” can be escaped, given a certain amount of ambition and cunning. You might go on to say that Moll can be admired for refusing to be a victim, no matter how badly she is treated; but by the same token, systemic discrimination against women need not be taken seriously, because if you follow Moll’s example you can find a way around it.
It is logical, then, that Moll rarely feels much solidarity with other women, unless they have a common interest and share profits (as with Mother Midnight). At the end, she enjoys having a “trophy husband” whom she dresses up as a “very fine gentleman” (257) and who seems to spend more time hunting (251) than in managing the estate.
Twenty years ago, Moll might have been condemned by feminists for false consciousness and lack of solidarity - today she may be more admired for her successful self-assertion - or perhaps condemned, but on different grounds: that she is lacking both in conscience and empathy. In either case, she is the first major heroine (or anti-heroine) in the English novel - and a highly distinctive one, as we shall see when we turn first to Clarissa, and then to Emma.