The Truth about Moll Flanders

What is the truth about Moll Flanders? Was Defoe writing a crowd-pleaser, full of titillating details and salacious incidents, providing excitement for his readers? Is it simply that Defoe was writing for “a petty-bourgeois audience, prizing respectability yet craving adventure” (as G A Starr writes in the introduction to the World’s Classics edition)? If that were the case, Hogarth’s image on the front cover, The Orgy, from The Rake’s Progress (shown above), would be entirely appropriate.

But the truth is somewhat different. My impression, after reading the book, was that it had plenty of crime, but very little in the way of orgies - in fact none at all. The novel never descended into fantasy, but remained throughout a credible and indeed sympathetic study of a woman without connections making her way in the world as best she could. Moll is never a prostitute in the accepted sense of the word, selling her body for money. But as she progresses through life, she becomes more hard-headed about dealing with other people, justifying to us, the readers, her actions in a comprehensible way, even if we would not act in the way that she does. But at no point do we decide this character is beyond redemption. We remain on her side throughout the novel. That is quite an achievement, when you list some of her crimes.

This is not a fantasy novel; anyone expecting a libertarian, anarchist paradise will be sorely disappointed.

Here are some attempts to capture what is significant about this fascinating novel:

Moll Flanders has a different version of the truth, or a different selection of facts, with pretty much everyone she encounters, including her husbands. The only person she tells everything to is the priest in Newgate, and even there, she covers her tracks by not confessing to the ordinary (whose job it is to implicate others involved in criminal activity) but a priest found for her by her “governess”

Moll’s views on penitence vary with how much money she has. At the very end of the book, when she has plenty of material wealth, she can afford to be penitent, and is penitent. At other places in the book she shows no remorse whatever. In Newgate she states explicitly she is not unhappy out of any sense of sin for what she has done.

It is a tribute to the novel’s achievement that we are rooting for Moll throughout the book. In the end, although caught in flagrante with the stolen goods on her and the act of committing a crime, we still hope she can escape in some way, almost in any way.

There is a constant theme throughout the book of how much money she has. I know of no other novel that has such a precise statement of income and assets pretty much at every point in her career. And yet, in the chronology of Defoe’s life, it states he was declared bankrupt in 1692. Perhaps, like Balzac, his keen sense of money was cause by his being so overwhelmed by it.  

Why does Moll always reject what for most of us is the only choice – an honest job? Why does she seek out the criminal life, even when it involves more energy and application than a standard job?

Moll is economical with the truth throughout, even to herself. At the end she provides for her son and tells him he is the only child she has, which is flagrantly untrue. This is just one example of how Moll adjusts reality to suit herself, and adjusts her statements likewise. She is constantly transforming her name, her appearance, even, for a while, masquerading as a man.

Moll not hardened by her experiences. She does not appear to be callous. We are in her confidence throughout the book. We admire her cleverness and how prepared she is. She justifies her stealing as the inevitable result of her financial situation, as if to say, anyone in her situation would do the same thing.

G A Starr does not consider any of this. Instead, he claims that Moll is influenced by a mixture of “ roles of psychological, economic, social, and religious motivation” and it is for the reader to choose which has the greatest relative weight.  That sounds to me like passing the buck. Just as academics revel in ambiguity, as if to discover ambiguity  is in itself to establish the high literary calibre of the work studies, so Starr  satisfies himself by stating it is possible to assess Moll in a number of ways. That is hardly startling.

Her thieving is often justified along the lines of “why did they leave such a tempting object in full view of passers-by – they deserve all they get!”. Interestingly, Moll’s self-justification  seems to crowd out any other moral considerations by the reader – these moral misgivings only creep in some days after reading her account

You could even describe Moll Flanders as a living example of Macpherson’s Possessive Individualism – the only thing that matters to Moll is herself and her self-protection. Husbands, children, friends are all abandoned wherever necessary to maintain her economic independence.

Starr claims that Moll is not a hedonist, since she is more interested in acquiring than enjoying. That is true, but the question is, why? Why accumulate riches if you don’t make use of them? It suggests to me almost a class warfare point of view: I will show you, says Moll, how you can survive without the advantages of birth or learning. The point is the accumulation of wealth, not its enjoyment (and of course the accumulation is much more interesting to read about than the enjoyment of wealth).