Moll Flanders is one of those book that will either disgust, or waken an inner badass from the most innocent of readers that they’d be able to accept or even support the choices made by the main character and perhaps do some of these drastic actions themselves. I still don’t know what the fuck to make out of this book. Moll Flanders is one of the most fascinating characters of literature. It seems as though she has gone through everything under the sun — mostly bad: poverty, living an adulterous life, being a criminal, accidental victim of incest.
It seems as though the story of Moll Flanders can befit four or five lives and be a novel in each one. Thus, it is futile to summarise the events of the story lest we lose track of the review. The first half of the book deals with her various marriages with different men — some honourable, some slimy bastards and some in the grey — but she always ends up moving from one family to another. The second half of the book is her life as the criminal femme fatale “Moll Flanders”, as she accumulates wealth as a freelance criminal mastermind. Defoe leaves Moll Flanders to judge her life — and it is a deeply polarising one.
Moll Flanders, like many antiheroes, is a victim of her circumstance. She was already born an orphan, and survived through the care of a wealthy family who took a liking to her. From her formative years as a child she had to survive from her wits, and the failure of that being abject poverty. The choices she made were formed from the options limited to her as a woman of her time and place — she has no say to take care of her (first) children, she has to marry someone from a less privileged background, and oftentimes she marries out of desperation. She rolls from one misfortune to the next because of the choices she makes, but we need to acknowledge that these choices are limited.
As the current of history ebbs, scholars are still divided by how “feminist” Daniel Defoe was, but we know that he was a proponent for gender equality even in the 18th century. Moll Flanders is a social commentary of the decisions a woman must make in order to make a living, for the sake of survival. And it is not a pretty picture — a woman cannot make her first ideal choices given that she is under the societal pressure to be a wife, to obey the choices of her husband and her choices for a lucrative career is also limited. Her barriers to obtain the skills for sustenance are also high.
But Moll Flanders’s silence is also a gaping hole in the book which leaves many readers, like myself confused. How can she, as a mother neglect her offsprings and barely mention any word about them? She only has one genuine connection out of all the children that she bore — and this too, like her life, is morally ambiguous as she benefits from this relationship given the wealth of her estranged son. It is a silence that put her life first, and effectively killed her children from the story. Is this a choice that she is forced to make, or is Moll Flanders a naturally selfish person? Either way, there is no avoiding the accusation that Moll Flanders is one of the most horrible mothers in literature.
There is no taking away that Moll Flanders is an important text. Where it sits in history, it precedes the other classics repertoire, and though it would be rash for us to say that it has great influences over books written after, it has the luck (if you’d like to call it that) as a pioneer. If I had to judge the morality of Moll Flanders — whether she should be crucified for her life, or whether we should forgive her, we need to take in mind her history as well, that from a very young age she is forced early into adulthood and that she was constantly in survival mode. Who are we to judge who has not been through the same? By this logic, we should forgive the errant life of Moll Flanders, given that we are still having the same discussions of gender equality even to this day.
