Moll Flanders the Eighteenth Century Is Often

Moll Flanders

The eighteenth century is often thought of a time of pure reason; after all, the eighteenth century saw the Enlightenment, a time when people believed fervently in rationality, objectivity and progress. However, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe also shows an era of chaos, depicted by a sort of wildness inside of people. Moll Flanders, the protagonist of Defoe's story, has been an orphan, a wife, mother, prostitute and a thief. Paula Backscheider (65) urges that Moll Flanders symbolizes the vicissitudes that were frequently experienced by many people in what was supposed to be an enlightened age. This is an obvious juxtaposition in Defoe's work. Defoe depicts a world that is not very compassionate, despite it being the Enlightenment period. Moll should have been better taken care of as an orphan, but she wasn't and this shows a complete lack of social responsibility on the government's side. There seems to be a contempt for the poor that goes against Enlightenment ideas, which is why Moll must struggle to survive, doing whatever it is that she must do -- including bending to the whims of men above her, prostituting herself, cheating, and stealing. Moll must use her body as a commodity, but the way the world around sees women's bodies, in general, especially destitute women, is that of a commodity; women's bodies are seen as sexual or they are seen as maternal, and for the women of lesser means, like Moll, questions arise concerning the purpose of her body and what it should be used for. It is not Enlightenment individualism that compels Moll in the novel, despite the fact that individual personalities seemed to define English prose during the eighteenth century (Dupre 81) (e.g., Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, etc.); it is, rather, vulnerability because of her sex and a Puritanical view of how women should behave.

Moll refers to herself repeatedly as a commodity and she essentially is because of how she uses her body to get money. However, it is the attitudes of the time, attitudes of contempt for the poor, and attitudes against women that force Moll to become a commodity. The Enlightenment period was about individualism, and Defoe does portray Moll as being quite self-reliant, however, enterprise does not have anything to do with personal satisfaction (Mowry 97). "On the contrary, throughout the novel, Defoe clearly represents 'enterprize' as an antidote to the vagaries and degradations of collective affiliation" (98). Moll's first sexual encounter with the eldest brother in the family in which she is a maid is a perfect example of her vulnerability. Rousseau and Porter (198) note that "vulnerability of female servants, many of whom were children, to sexual abuse in the work-place was…an established fact." They were vulnerable because of their situation as well as because of their sex. Moll Flanders was perfectly aware of this as she knows precisely what she is doing when she removes her maid from London before discharging her, as the unemployed female servant in London was commonly believed to be the chief contributor to the ranks of prostitution (Rousseau & Porter 198-199).

Moll continuously cheapens herself in the novel. At one point she recalls her fall from "Virtue" with regretful sarcasm, dismissing that "Trifle" virginity as a wasted asset that he had undervalued. "Nothing was ever so stupid on both Sides… In short, if he had known me, and how easy the Trifle he aim'd at was to be had, he would have troubled his Head no farther, but have given me four or five Guineas and have lain with me the next time he had come at me" (Defoe 25). Whenever Moll approaches the topic of her sexual history, she uses a "reductive skepticism not entirely truthful…explaining away desire in economic terms of necessity… By reducing desire to its materiality, Moll remains innocent, forgiven for what Defoe would surely attack in his tracts as conjugal and extra-conjugal lewdness" (Flynn 65).

In her first sexual encounter, Moll faces to big problems: how to manage in a world of snares and cheats and how to express herself along the way. Protection is simply not enough in this world. In her subsequent falls from virtue, Moll opens herself up to the experience she is trying to control (Flynn 65). A woman alone in the world, she rationalizes, "is just like a Bag of Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway, which is a Prey to the next Comer" (Defoe 128). To protect her wealth, she uses her sexuality, turning herself into a "snare," a "cheat," while giving into calculated desire (Flynn 65). Flynn (66) notes that Moll's discourse becomes doubled, turning on invoked loathing of actions that actually "fire" Moll's body and imagination. "His words I must confess fir'd my Blood; all my Spirits flew about my Heart, and put me into Disorder enough" (Defoe 22). While she fits the stereotype of the "green-sick maid," Moll corrects her passion, explaining that the money that comes to her confounds her altogether. Her color comes and goes when she sees a purse, "with the fire of hi Proposal together" (Defoe 29), to reflect Moll's deliberate union of the sensual and the material (Flynn 66).

Defoe has created a heroine who struggles with the issues of money and sex. There are some who would say that Moll's confusion about the two things occurs after that first sexual encounter, when she begins to use her body as a commodity; others will argue that Moll's confusion occurs much earlier in her life. As a young girl, the women in her neighborhood would give her money and clothes because she was so well behaved and beautiful and thus Moll comes to associate her beauty with capital. However, it is undoubtedly when Moll is seduced by the eldest brother for the family in which she is a maid, she realizes the worth of her body. "…tho' he took these Freedoms with me…he put almost a Handful of Gold in my Hand, and left me" (Defoe 25). It is at this moment that Moll transforms her sexuality as erotic appeal, to sexuality as a commodity for exchange. She realizes that she can depend on no person but herself and for this the reader is compelled to feel compassion for Moll. She looks at herself and contemplates what she can sell. She has beauty and she has her youth and these are the two characteristics she decides that she must capitalize upon. With every struggle that Moll goes through and her subsequent immoral actions, the reader is inclined to understand, if not completely excuse, what she is doing.

Moll is anonymous in London in that she has given herself a pseudonym and the underworld of London in which she dwells does not allow her to be weak -- ever. Defoe makes it clear in the novel that social position and money are what one needs for survival and, as Moll has neither, she must fight to secure some kind of stability in life. This fight usually involves selling her body, stealing and deceiving others for her own benefit. She is determined to find wealth and she must find her way in a man's world, which makes her plight all the more difficult. However, she is able to find her way in the world and by the end of her life she has found wealth and some form of security. In this sense, Moll is incredibly strong; she has persevered and made a life out of nothing.

It has been suggested that Defoe created male characters and put them in women's clothing and this makes sense as Moll is a character like none other of her time. Moll must oftentimes dress in men's clothing to carry out her criminal acts and so the reader begins to see her as being a bit manly. Undoubtedly, the men in her life have never been half as manly as she is; they have oftentimes let her down and she has taken the brunt of the ruin. Women at that time were controlled by men and their whims and men were able to destroy their wives' security if they themselves messed up. She dresses as a man and it can be suggested that Defoe did this to make a point about women. As it was the age of Enlightenment, perhaps he was taking a firm stand about the power of woman and how they are just as strong and capable of taking care of themselves as men, yet they are punished for acting the same as men. Society took away a woman's right to be educated and her right to have control over her own life and her own affairs. Moll can be viewed as Defoe's stance against the social injustice of their time.

There is a certain contradiction in Moll Flanders when it comes to the female body and the woman's sexual system. In looking for some kind of security, which women of that day were supposed to desire, she also seems attracted to instabilities that forces her to live as "artist -- sensational representations of an eroticized public imagination" (Flynn 64). Driven by a desire that she needs to rationalize, she is also driven by cultural inequalities that forces her to market those rationalized needs (64). Moll Flanders must use her body as a commodity to get through a complicated and compromised sexual system (64). Flynn (65) notes that the elaborate strategies of Moll is unsettling to readers because of her "unflinching recognition of the cost of things," of seeing herself and her "patrons" as they really are (65). Critics that are sensitive to feminist and Marxist implications of her material predicament read her subversive actions with sympathy and even exhilaration, but "the costs of such independence run high" (65). The cost, Flynn (65) notes, severely qualifies the triumph. The maternity of Moll is important to examine because Moll is not a good mother, "generating life in a casual, almost Rabelaisian fashion" (65) only to deny her children for their survival. Moll becomes a rather ambiguous figure.

Moll is a character who is isolated and ostracized for reasons that were beyond her own control. The fact that she feels forced to turn to prostitution and a criminal life, in general, is an inevitable result of a life that just keeps dealing her a bad hand. She has dreams of being wealth and of having some kind of social position, yet because of her upbringing (or lack thereof) Moll was not given the chance or the rights that others had.

Defoe has created an environment where people, not just Moll, are commodities. The desire to want more -- more money, more status -- than one has is what leads many individuals in the novel down a path of deviant and cruel behavior. Of course, if a woman could only find security in a man, she must naturally find herself a wealthy man to marry so that she can have security. If she can't find a rich man to marry, then she could always be a mistress to a rich man. Moll learns early on that she has the beauty to find men; they are always attracted to her, but the men that gravitate toward Moll are either dishonest, unavailable, or related to her. As Moll begins to lose her beautiful looks, she is forced to turn somewhere else for her security, which becomes theft.

Moll wishes to be a lady in life; it is a station that she does not have any birthright to. In order to find this sort of status, she must commit adultery, become a prostitute, neglect her children, and take part in incestuous behavior. Moll does finally find peace once she become redemptive and she confesses her sins. In this manner, Defoe's novel shows us two sides of eighteenth century thinking. There was the conservative and the liberal ideologies.

The story of Moll Flanders is one rife with themes of capitalism, contracts, and money. Everything in life has a sort of monetary value. There are aspects of Moll Flanders that can be seen in different ways. On one hand, the story of Moll Flanders is tragic; she has the fault of price and ambition in that she desires to be a lady and that is a title that she is not entitled to. To rise to this status, she commits many sins -- like adultery, prostitution, and child neglect -- in hopes that it will help her rise to her station. On the other hand, Moll Flanders could be read as a story about a woman whose crime is her own self-reliance and a certain lack of religious duty.

On the role of women in 18th century colonial America, Defoe depicts a place where women by go to redeem their sexual excess by contributing to colonial reproduction (Rosenthal 10). The transportation or deportation of "excess" women suggests some evidence for the persistence of this strategy.

For Defoe,…and many other eighteenth-century 'realist' writers,…sending disorderly women to the colonies benefits both the colonial and domestic projects. Early eighteenth-century fiction reveals a near obsession with excess and excessive women… The potential problem of too many women for everyone to get a husband not only shaped fictional plots, but influenced discussions of population at this time. Marriage rates indeed remained relatively low in the early eighteenth-century… With marriage portions rising and economic opportunities for women decreasing, some families found themselves with 'daughters in excess,' a situation that fed broader concerns about depopulation leading to national weakness (Rosenthal 11-12).

Rosenthal (12) goes on to suggest that if the thought of a generation of spinsters presented one kind of threat to reproduction, an increase in prostitution posed another. Reformers in the early part of the eighteenth century depicted London streets as teeming with disorderly women; these women just didn't take over the public spaces, but they contributed to depopulation through their alleged infertility (13). In the year 1758, Saunders Welch wrote an article entitled, "Proposal To Render Effectual a Plan To Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes From the Streets of This Metropolis," stating in the article that:

Prostitutes swarm in the streets of this metropolis to such a degree, and bawdy-houses are kept in such an open and public manger, to the great scandal of our civil polity, that a stranger would think that such practices, instead of being prohibited, had the sanction of the legislature, and that the whole town was one general stew (Welch 7).