Ian's Reviews > Moll Flanders

Style-wise, this classic novel isn’t the easiest book for the 21st century reader. In period fashion Defoe goes in for many long, long sentences, full of commas and semi-colons. Some of them stretch to an entire page. In terms of vocabulary though, it’s remarkable how little English has changed in 300 years.

The book is supposed to have been written by the central character, who goes by the name “Moll Flanders”, though we’re not told what her real name is. Moll looks back on her life as she approaches the age of 70, and the book ends with the words “written in 1683”. I’d always thought of Moll Flanders as a character in an 18th century world, but had she been a real person she would have lived through the English Civil War, Cromwell, and the Restoration. Although none of those events feature in the book, that is the world we should think of when we picture the setting.

One feature of the 17th century was the lack of bureaucracy. For example, Moll’s second husband is a gambler and wastrel who flees to France to escape his creditors. Moll then moves house, assumes a new name and marries again – as simple as that. A lack of bureaucracy has pros and cons though. If you ran out of money in 17th century England there was no government to send you a social security cheque. Throughout the novel, Moll’s actions are motivated by one fear.

“I had the terrible prospect of poverty and starving, which lay on me as a frightful spectre…”

She continually calculates how much money she has. Conventionally the story is one of moral decline and redemption. I think it’s possible to interpret the ending another way, but will avoid saying more for fear of spoilers. The book is also a commentary on the position of women in early modern England, and the lack of opportunities open to them. As an innocent teenager Moll is seduced by the flattery and false promises of a wealthy young man. At this stage she is sinned against rather than sinner, but as her life progresses she gradually becomes hard hearted and calculating, deliberately using her looks to manipulate men. When the man who becomes her fifth husband starts to court her, she comments how:

“I played with this lover as an angler does with a trout.”

Moll uses what she has to get men to transfer their wealth to her. On one occasion she is picked up by a wealthy gent:

“Would such gentlemen but consider the contemptible thoughts which the very women they are concerned with, in such cases as these, have of them…when he is, as it were, drunk in the ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his pockets searching for what she can find there…”

As Moll gets older she can no longer rely on her looks, and turns to a life of crime. By this point she has almost entirely lost her sense of right and wrong. To most modern readers, her life of borderline prostitution is not as shocking as it might have been in Defoe’s time, but other aspects of her behaviour are more so. She has several children by her various husbands but with one exception they disappear from the text almost as soon as they are mentioned. As far as I could tell Moll simply abandons them.

Worth a read if you are interested in the classics.