Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Defoe, 1722)

After reading a classic, there are many routes to follow, mostly academic.  Is this a religious book?  A feminist book?  A guilty pleasure (by eighteenth century standards)?  A didactic tome of moral cautionary tales?  Was Defoe ahead of his time or behind it? 

Since we're not in a lit class, I'm just going to talk about the story, which is quite good, and the writing, which is high quality prose, even including the editorial asides.  Defoe presents it as a true story, cleaned up from Moll's original notes (which he hints are decidedly more colorful in language and content) for the purpose of highlighting right living by showing where she went wrong. However, Moll is no mere cardboard cutout - we are treated to a rich story of survival, misfortune, rationalization and repentence in a society where deadly poverty lurks after an unmarried, unmonied woman.

The rationalizations are probably the best part of the book.  When she marries a man for security, she proclaims she was never anything but a good wife to him, and when she prostitutes herself, she stresses her need for the money and sets herself above women who do it for fun.  When she turns to thievery, we see her modify her goals: first she'll quit after she gets ₤200, then after ₤400... Moll takes responsibility for her actions for the most part, but sometimes blames her circumstances, or her upbringing, or the English legal system. For a fairly straightforward realist, Defoe adds a lot in between the lines to reveal a full psychological portrait.

One of the most bizarre elements of the book is all the children she has, and how they all disappear.  If she marries up, the kids go to the husband's family after he inevitably dies. If she has a child out of wedlock, the father arranges for the child to be raised elsewhere. At one point, she pays to have a child raised by a family in the country.  She must have seven or eight children, but in the end she only reunites and reconciles with one of them (at which she claims great tenderness of heart). We're never sure whether she is really heartbroken by losing her children, or whether she is just glad to get them off her hands.

Ultimately, Moll Flanders is a very good read. It tracks the moral arc of a life misspent but redeemed, from youthful ignorance to mercenary marriage, from nervous larceny to bold thievery, from sorrow at being caught to geniune - if imperfect - repentence.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 unmarried, unmonied women