So how does one begin to explain this burst of fictional energy beginning with Robinson Crusoe and continuing through to Roxana? This is not only a fair question, it is one of the most intriguing in the history of the British novel. If we define the novel in the way we are used to thinking about fiction—as a prose narrative of substantial length that makes a pretense of representing life in a form human beings might well have been imagined to have lived it-Defoe surely stakes a forceful claim as the first English novelist. But the question of Defoe’s primacy is less interesting than the question of his originality. What did he think he was doing in those remarkable narratives from 1719 to 1724? And how did he go about doing it?

Daniel Defoe was a man of wide and varied experience. He knew the world from the bottom up, from the dank holding cells of Newgate Prison¹ to the backroom offices of Britain’s most prestigious ministers of state. He began his adult life as a wholesaler of haberdashery, but soon enough emerged as major speculator in projects ranging from recovering buried treasure to cornering the civet-cat market in London for the production of perfume. Over the course of his life he owned trading vessels, imported wine, sold herring, mined for tin, manufactured bricks and tile, ran taverns, and even owned a few shares of a slave-trading venture. Defoe’s first financial empire, extensive but flimsy, collapsed in 1692, and he spent some uncomfortable days appearing before bankruptcy commissioners and on the lam from creditors in undisclosed locations in England. In 1703, he took up residence for five months in Newgate Prison on a trumped-up charge of sedition. Beginning in 1704, he went into surreptitious service as an undercover agent in Scotland and at the same time launched a new career as a publishing entrepreneur. He ran, wrote, and edited a newspaper, The Review of the State of the British Nation, for nine years, and, in addition, penned hundreds of essays, poems, conduct manuals, and treatises on topics ranging from weather conditions in the British Isles to the history of ghosts.

Defoe not only had vast life experience to draw upon when he began writing novels near the age of sixty, but he had another great talent that he had cultivated all his life. He learned early in his education at the respected Morton’s Academy for Dissenters that writing is a form of impersonation. A successful writer convinces an audience by assuming an appropriate writing voice, a voice that has a vested stake in a cause or proposition. As a prose stylist Defoe was so superb a ventriloquist that one of his efforts, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), written ironically in the frenzied voice of a zealous bigot inimical to Defoe’s actual beliefs on religious tolerance, got him thrown into prison as a fanatic.

Defoe’s later experiments with fiction came during a brief dry spell in his journalistic ventures when he began working on longer projects. He and his new consortium of publishers concocted a plan whereby Defoe would combine his extensive knowledge of English life with his talent for narrative mimicry. The premise was simple. The literary marketplace hungered for legitimate personal memoirs of travels, maritime adventures, social and religious experiences, accidents, storms, and plagues. Defoe would capitalize on a growing niche in the literary marketplace by publishing counterfeit, true-to-life memoirs for as much profit as he could glean from them.

He designed his work with enough paraphernalia to appeal to a wide variety of readers, putting out innumerable editions, abridgments, woodcut illustrations, and even sequels. He first experimented on a series of fake dispatches from a Turkish spy in Paris and on a memoir of a Jacobite Highlander supporting the French wars to restore the Stuart kings in England. But his truly innovative venture was a concocted travel, shipwreck, and survival story roughly modeled on the documented account of a sailor, Alexander Selkirk, marooned on an island off the coast of South America. Defoe substantiated his fictional invention by including a portfolio of phony documents: maps, bills, contracts, charts, and journal records. The result—The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe—was a phenomenal publishing success, not only in England but in translation on the European continent. Defoe had written what we would now call a “blockbuster.”

Though travel memoirs held pride of place for early-eighteenth-century readers, other memoir forms—criminal, confessional, and military—were not far behind. Defoe’s narratives following Crusoe mimicked all of these and others with their inclusion of soldiers of fortune, merchant adventurers, street criminals, plague victims, and scandalmongers. Defoe sustained his run of invented narrative histories until he ran out of new fictional ideas or grew weary of promising sequels. Or he may simply have turned to other projects he had temporarily shelved—a conduct book on marriage; a gazetteer or tour of the entire island of Great Britain; a treatise on servants; a history of a London mob boss, Jonathan Wild; and an attempt to capitalize on capital itself in a massive nonfictional account of trade and traders in England, The Complete English Tradesmen (1725). Even though Defoe never returned to prose fiction in what remained of his publishing life, those few years from 1719 to 1724 enriched the world of the English novel in ways that are hard to imagine and that have proved hard to repeat.

Moll’s particular adventures had their antecedents in the lives of other infamous woman criminals with full narrative records of their adventures, such as Francis Kirkman’s The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled. Being a full Account of the Birth, Life, Most Remarkable Actions, and Untimely Death of Mary Carleton, Known by the Name of the German Princess (London, 1673). As Moll herself puts it, “My course of life for forty years had been a horrid compilation of wickedness, whoredom, adultery, incest, lying, theft; and, in a word, everything but murder and treason” (p. 254). The narrative line of the book tracks the introduction of a young woman into a life of crime, the honing and schooling of the criminal, the capture and transportation of the criminal to America, and the first steps in confessional reformation.

Defoe identifies his primary genre in the “Author’s Preface” to Moll when he calls her story a “private history” (p. 3). By that he means a memoir, and Defoe is quick to distinguish his work from what he calls “novels and romances” (p. 3) but what Defoe means by novels and romances is not what we mean today. For early-eighteenth-century readers, novels were the unlikeliest of adventures, usually set in past times or remote and idealized places. They were marked by improbability and a suspension of the normal laws of nature and behavior. Private histories, on the other hand, were more like today’s novels. They provide readers access to aspects of a lived life that are usually hidden or unrecorded. What Defoe promises is a kind of voyeuristic biography or prose scandal, and he understands the likely “relish” (p. 4) of his readers for Moll’s “account of all her vicious practices” and “all the progressions of crime which she ran through in three-score years” (p. 3). The mimetic impetus of Moll Flanders is set from the editor’s words in the beginning when we learn that the original manuscript is “written in language more like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble” (p. 3).

The editor then throws a sop to his readership by claiming that a beneficial morality can worm its way out of even the “worst story” (p. 4). For those readers who demand moral uplift, the book is not only a criminal confession but a spiritual confession. Defoe says Moll Flanders is a book “from every part of which something may be learned” (p. 5). For that process to take full effect, the reader has to believe in the authenticity of Moll’s spiritual life, and that turns out to be something of a stretch for any but the committed Christian apologist who will follow the editor in applying to all the “levity and looseness” (p. 5) in the book “virtuous and religious uses” (p. 5).

As for the essence of the confessional genre, Moll explains its impulse when she tells the story late in the narrative of a thief who could not rest easily until he had unburdened himself by confessing in his sleep all the crimes he had committed the previous evening. Moll points out the general alliance of the confessional and the criminal when she notices the number of thieves in her world “obliged to disclose the greatest secrets either of their own or other people’s affairs” (p. 294). Her observation helps explain not only the shape of the particular story she tells, but the impetus of all fiction, at least as it developed from the early eighteenth century to modern times. Novelists, as much as criminals, feel the need to reveal secrets, especially when those secrets involve “other people’s affairs.”

Confession allows Moll to recapitulate her story, an epitome of which we see when she “unlocked all the sluices of my passions” (p. 262) to the minister in Newgate Prison. The hope is that her criminal resumé can also be the first step in her repentance: “In a word, I gave him an abridgment of this whole history; I gave him the picture of my conduct for fifty years in miniature” (p. 262). The idea of criminal autobiography is to lay everything out in deliberate sequence; the idea of confession is to get all bad things to the rear as quickly as possible. Moll does both in her narrative, though her criminality—in terms of the narrative space allowed it—seems to overwhelm her confession. The editor at the beginning refers to Moll’s penitent humility as a state in which she “pretends to be” (p. 3). Eighteenth-century usage allows the word pretend a certain neutrality, a mere showing forth or revealing. But for Moll, “pretend” takes on the very obvious quality of “temporary.”

When Defoe fictionalizes the life of Moll Flanders and all her pretenses, he not only borrows from popular criminal biographies but also from the tradition of Continental picaresque, or rogue, literature, which became popular throughout Europe with the publication of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) in Spain. Picarós and picarás are orphans, vagabonds, desperadoes, and reprobates trying to manipulate the conventions of a world largely determined by established family and class connections. As Moll puts it, “I understood too well, by the want of it, what the value of a settled life was” (p. 117). Picaresque fiction is the story of outsiders trying to get in, and the fortunes of the protagonist often depend on adaptable, protean, and duplicitous behavior as picaresque characters become who they need to be to survive.

The story of Moll as picará begins when she equivocates in regard to her stay with the gypsies near Colchester. She realizes upon discovery by parish officers that she has a better chance of protection if she claims the gypsies left her rather than that she left them. It pays to tell the best story available and either suppress or not worry too much over the truth. Even at the end of the adventure, when Moll supposedly repents, she arranges the facts of her life so she can thrive in a condition bettered by the fruits of those very things for which she was supposed to repent. As a picaresque heroine, neither poverty nor despair is so unredeemable “that an unwearied industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest creature to appear again in the world, and give him a new cast for his life” (p. 6).

Cast is one of Moll’s favorite words, and it usually means a cast of the die on the gaming table. But it can also mean a cast of the fishing line from the rod. The trick Moll would like to turn in the book is to convert the haphazard luck of the dice into the picaresque skill of angling, as she seems to do when she says of her prospective banker husband, “I played with this lover as an angler does with a trout” (p. 127). Relying on skill rather than on luck is the means by which Moll changes her fortunes, though it is revealing that toward the end of her life as a criminal she recognizes that the overexposure of her skill as a thief reintroduces the greater hazard that she will be captured as a felon. In the unstable world of picaresque fiction, her skill does not ultimately gain her security, nor does her luck insure it.

Very closely connected to the picaresque mode in fiction is Defoe’s particular brand of narrative irony, which counts on something that Moll learns early in her life: Words can shape reality. Because Moll’s first love affair with the elder brother of the Colchester family is conducted in secrecy, the second brother feels he might initiate the same course of action as if he were the first to think of it. She responds to the elder Colchester brother’s suggestion that she take up with the younger brother: “If I have been persuaded to believe that I am really your wife, shall I now give the lie to all those arguments, and call myself your whore” (p. 38). In the worlds Moll negotiates, it becomes clear that there are two terms for almost everything, one of them perfectly legal and bourgeois, and the other disreputable and even criminal. Even the title of the novel picks up the duality of content: Moll seeks fortunes in one world and discovers misfortunes in another.

To catch the rhythm of Defoe’s linguistic doublets—whether wife or whore, gentlewoman or madam, husband or lover—is to understand something of the nature of behavior represented in picaresque fiction. Moll’s dilemma at the younger son’s marriage proposal, for example, hints at the crossover of propriety and criminality that defines the novel. The sequence of ratios that Moll will have to factor all her life are put in place with Moll’s “being a whore to one brother and a wife to the other” (p. 31), especially since brother number one “had never spoken a word of having me for a wife after he had conquered me for a mistress” (p. 31). When Moll later succumbs to her male friend at Bath after many months of abstinence she “exchanged the place of friend for that unmusical, harsh-sounding title of whore” (p. 106).

Moll’s doublets here and elsewhere produce some of Defoe’s tightest and wittiest writing in the genre of rogue literature. When Moll finds herself standing in the middle of a London street not having the slightest idea what to do with a horse whose reins have just been deposited in her hands, she can only conclude, “So this was a robbery and no robbery, for little was lost by it, and nothing was got by it” (p. 232). Similarly, when she rejects counterfeiting as too dangerous a vocation, she does so by a linguistic turn, speaking of those working the “die” press for counterfeiting as victims almost before the fact: “for what care they to die, that cannot tell how to live?” (p. 233). A savvy Moll neatly explains to the reader, “Yet you may see how necessary it is for all women who expect anything in the world, to preserve the character of their virtue, even when perhaps they may have sacrificed the thing itself” (p. 126). How different than the immature Moll who had to learn the opposite lesson the hard way when associating with scurrilous types earned her “the scandal of a whore without the joy” (p. 60).

Though the picaresque is the most fictional of the genres of Moll Flanders, offering Defoe his greatest episodic and stylistic range, there is yet another important genre that Defoe incorporates, a genre in which he did considerable work before and during the composition of his novels: conduct books. The early-eighteenth-century reading audience loved to be told how to behave, and Defoe loved to tell them. Writing conduct books trained Defoe in the construction of social scenes, usually set out in dialogue and often centering on familial, monetary, or legal disputes that were highly charged for his contemporary readers. His two volumes of The Family Instructor (1715, 1718) were great successes, and he was planning other conduct books, including a work on marriage for which he claimed to have spent thirty years collecting material, Conjugal Lewdness (1727). Moll’s concern with personal relations, especially those relations conducted within the contours of courtship and marriage, precede her career as a criminal. The many scenes in the narrative that present the dilemma of women on the marriage market or the arrangement of one’s personal finances or the disposition of one’s children provide typical conduct-book advice, some of it almost aphoristic: “She is always married too soon who gets a bad husband, and she is never married too late who gets a good one” (p. 70).

The advice quotient in the novel extends to its criminal representations. In almost every instance of thievery, Moll takes the time to issue a warning or remonstrance to those who might be victimized by her schemes and ventures. The rich material in the book detailing Moll’s criminal adventures teaches readers as much about how to avoid crime as how to commit it. Defoe could (and did) make the argument that the adventures he recorded not only offered examples of a sinful and scandalous life but, by implication, performed a public service in alerting readers to criminal strategies and techniques. After Moll’s long itinerary of theft through much of the English countryside, she tells us:

That Moll is born in Newgate Prison and returns there after a life of crime is the most obvious manifestation of the circular plot of the novel, but nested within is another circuit that takes Moll, unknowingly, to her natural family in the Tideland region of America and returns her there at novel’s end, before she comes back to England to write up her memoirs. This second plot line of Moll Flanders is more a double loop than a circle, and Defoe works with that pattern again when he divides the action in the narrative by two cycles in a woman’s life, child-bearing years and barren ones. In the first loop, Moll gives of herself; in the second she takes from others. The crossover or connecting point for Moll is marked precisely as menopausal: “It began to be time for me to leave bearing children, for I was now eight-and-forty” (p. 171). At that very point, the plot line shifts from marriage to crime, and Moll even notices that she first steals from someone who might be in the same transitory state as herself: “It may be some poor widow like me, that had packed up these goods to go and sell them for a little bread for herself and a poor child” (p. 175).

Defoe’s two plot lines—one that traces the larger patterns of a life from origins to ends and the other the incremental actions taken under duress—combine a sense of inevitability with a sense of circumstance. And that combination says a great deal about Defoe’s contribution to the development of realistic fiction in the early eighteenth century. While events for Defoe seem drawn by a certain design—he even calls it a providential design—the particular decisions and choices made along the way by individual characters conform to immediate impulses and needs, to contingencies that are naturally felt and exhibited by human beings under the pressure of the moment.

Defoe complicates the nature of his own memoir by never actually naming the heroine of the story. Rather, the editor tells readers that Moll “thinks fit to conceal her true name, after which there is no occasion to say any more about that” (p. 3). The text in fact says a good deal more, even on the first page of the memoir when Defoe tantalizes the reader: “My true name is so well known in the records or registers at Newgate” (p. 11). The issue of Moll’s name and who knows it becomes burdensome when she takes up with the man who turns out to be her brother. To never bear a name one can call one’s own is to lack an almost primal or anthropological sense of legitimacy, a subject Defoe dwells upon with fascination at several moments in the novel. On the other hand, to run into your own name when you least expect it is to encounter much more than can be easily accommodated in a respectable life. Moll, like Oedipus, the character from ancient Greek drama who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, discovers that some names are attached to too much knowledge.

Moll proceeds in her life by adopting a series of names that accord with the position she occupies in society. She is at once herself and a version of herself, and even forgets the names she has gone under in the past. Her names are, in a sense, generic. She takes the name “Betty,” a tag name for household servants and the name “Flanders,” a rubric name for fine lace.² James Joyce’s famous Molly Bloom seems to identify Defoe’s Moll more by what she steals than by who she is. She says of Leopold Bloom’s attempt to get her to read that she never really liked books “with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it.”³

There are really two Moll Flanders in Defoe’s story. One is the would-be gentlewoman, the girl of some vanity and much good heart, the natural and energetic lover, the clever friend and ally, and the concerned mother. The other Moll is the wholesale reprobate, made worse by her own self-castigation. Her unreal names—the ones she adapts—become her other self, her criminal self. “Moll” indicates the soubriquet given women thieves—it stays with us today in the notion of the gun moll—and Moll is also traditional slang for a common prostitute. In the course of her adventures Moll can lay claim to both theft and prostitution. She assumes the proper name “Flanders” as the wife of a gentleman-thief linen merchant, though her mother, coincidentally, was in Newgate in the first place for “borrowing three pieces of fine holland of a certain draper in Cheapside” (p. 12).

Moll is connected to her mother by name and, later, by vocation, but that connection is nullified by separation. For Moll, the loss of a name is less important than the loss of a bond between birth mothers and children.

Moll points out, perhaps thinking of her own infancy, that the neglect of children is “to murder them,” and to deprive children of “that needful affection placed by nature in them, is to neglect them in the highest degree” (p. 157). Even if necessity forces Moll during the course of her life to sever the natural bond that exists with her own children, there is a certain sense that she feels herself murdered at her own birth. For purposes of her memoir, her real name dies at the moment of neglect. She even considers murdering a child left unguarded by a mother as a memento of vulnerability. Such a notion seems the very opposite of Moll’s empathetic nature, though it may be an offshoot of that nature in reverse. After all, Moll has a patron and friend in Mother Midnight, whose major role in the novel seems as a broker of illegitimate or inconvenient children. Moll both renews (in having a new mother adopt her) and reverses (Mother Midnight is an expert in abortion and, perhaps, even in infanticide) the maternal process in her criminal bonding. It is one of Defoe’s finer ironies that Moll is reborn as one nurtured in crime by a new “mother” (p. 157) just at the time she says she herself is incapable of bearing any more children. It is as if she finds a substitute mother at the very moment she need not connect her name to children of her own.

While Moll is nothing if not protean from decade to decade, Defoe is careful to construct at least a core of her true nature. Many of the decisions Moll learns to make in life are motivated by necessity and circumstance, but her emotions are heartfelt, even when the actions of her heart are severely strained. Moll is almost always drawn toward the warmth of another’s being before she is drawn to money or security. In a wonderful paragraph late in the book, a transported Moll decides to live in Maryland rather than in New England because she seeks the warmth of the land as the reflection of her very being. She knows little of geography, but she does sense what she calls her natural “aversion” to cold: “For that as I naturally loved warm weather, so now I grew into years, I had a stronger inclination to shun a cold climate” (pp. 294-295).

Moll’s sins, such as they are, seem natural sins—what today we would call her healthy sexuality. She may be vain, and she is surely what Virginia Woolf in a famous Common Reader essay calls “robust,” but she is also genuine. Defoe begins the sexual adventure of the book when the elder brother in the Colchester family moves in on Moll for casual pleasures. Moll goes through the motions of early resistance, but even Defoe’s language seems to have it both ways: “I struggled to get away, and yet did it but faintly neither” (p. 23). By the time readers get to the end of Moll’s sentence we see she did try hard; but the syntax initially hints she tried but faintly. A little of both is true. Moll is naturally given to desire; she never makes any pretense otherwise.

Earlier in the novel, we hear Moll say that her first experience with a lover had much less to do with her elevation in class status—as everyone seems to think—than with the overflow of emotions she feels for the first time. When the elder brother rather cavalierly suggests she shift her focus to the more marriageable younger brother, Moll is appalled: “And will you transfer me to your brother? Can you transfer my affection?” (p. 38). No matter what identity she adopts or what shape she takes, her natural affection defines her. As she says about the demise of her affair with the elder brother, “The bare loss of him as a gallant was not so much my affliction as the loss of his person, whom indeed I loved to distraction” (p. 40).

What Moll cannot grasp early in her life is that her true feelings have very little to do with either her status in the world or her ability to negotiate that status. She asks her first lover, “Will you allow no affection, no love on my side, where there has been so much on your side?” (p. 38). The narrative answers that he will not. In the marriage market that controls so much of the rest of the book, natural affection is something stifled. That realization becomes a part of Moll’s learning curve, even when she meets her soul mate in Jemmy, the con-man thief, after the double cheat in which they each think the other is far richer than either is: “It was very unhappy that so much love and so much good nature as I discovered in him should be thus precipitated into misery” (p. 134).

Moll gets a letter from Madam Midnight, her London patron, that one of her criminal accomplices is hanged. Anyone’s death—especially the death of an acquaintance—should sadden Moll, and she is not so hardened that she fails to understand that the appropriate reaction is solemnity. But Moll’s palpable relief that another’s death limits the witness pool against her allows Defoe’s prose to make its psychological point: “At last she sent me the joyful news that he was hanged, which was the best news to me that I had heard a great while” (p. 201). Joyful for her, perhaps, but hardly for the young man swinging at the end of rope.

What Defoe understands here is that the more extreme the pressure on individuals, the more extreme their reactions. The middling sort of person lives in a narrow register of emotions. The adventurer, the risk taker, the rogue, or thief suffers extreme highs and severe lows: “So true is it, that the greatest spirits, when overwhelmed by their afflictions, are subject to the greatest dejections” (p. 285). Defoe’s works are filled with similarly trenchant psychological observations about human behavior. His characters never stop explaining their actions—often they do a very good job—but in the very midst of knowing what they ought to do they cannot help doing something else. Circumstances and what Defoe calls exigencies radically alter what characters think and how they decide things. Moll notes with a kind of painful awareness that the grave illness of her Bath lover has made him repent of the crime of adultery, almost as if the sin caused the disease. But his fresh repentance produces a mean-spiritedness directed undeservedly at Moll: “Whenever sincere repentance succeeds such a crime as this, there never fails to attend a hatred of the object; and the more the affection might seem to be before, the hatred will be more in proportion” (p. 112).

Little is stable in the world Defoe represents. His characters negotiate not only their circumstances but the mental states that accompany them, reacting to events and then to the change affected by their reactions. When a desperate and destitute Moll first steals on the streets of London, she insists that she is driven toward crime by necessity. But as she becomes more accomplished in the art and craft of thievery, the energy of the activity overwhelms its necessity: “As poverty brought me in, so avarice kept me in, till there was no going back” (p.186). Only after she becomes an accomplished criminal does she act on criminal impulse alone, and then not because she feels herself naturally wicked; rather, she feels proud that she is so good at it. Skill differentiates her, and pride in her schemes and devises sustains her. Moll steals because of the emotional and aesthetic rush the deed offers her: “I grew the greatest artist of my time” (p. 196).

No scene in the novel better illustrates the substitution of impulse for necessity than the one in which Moll finds herself stealing a horse in the middle of a London street simply because the opportunity presents itself. She does not want or need the horse, and merely possessing it puts her in danger. But she takes it anyway. The urge is simply upon her. Moll’s addiction to thievery is at once devilish and magical:

Moll’s compulsion is close to the kind of addiction one might expect from a gambler, and she forecasts what will happen to her as a thief when she wins seventy-three guineas at a gaming house in London then vows not to return and submit herself to what she calls “the itch to play.” For Moll, human impulses are stronger than human restraints, and “inclination prevails at last over the most solemn resolutions; and that vice breaks in at the breaches of decency” (p. 115). Her metaphor here is a particularly focused one because “breaches” refers not only to fissures but also puns on breeches, or trousers. Impulses trump resolutions because they enter in at the most vulnerable of places.

Part of the fascination in a Defoe novel is the way he alternates the sequence of responses to the pressures that constitute human life. Robinson Crusoe, for example, understands how fear generates insecurity when he first sees the print of a human foot—presumably a cannibal’s foot—on his beach, but Crusoe has a much more clouded sense of how his skittish behavior for years after makes him almost feral. Moll is similarly acute and obtuse about her actions. When she steals a bundle from a trusting soul on a London street, she is empathic and dismissive almost in the same breath. She reflects on the booty: “It really touched me to the very soul when I looked into this treasure, to think of the poor disconsolate gentlewoman who had lost so much” (p. 189). Yet “the reflection wore off, and I quickly forgot the circumstances that attended it” (p. 190). The empathy Moll feels is no less real for the fact that she feels it only for a few minutes.

At the beginning of the story Moll is able to escape the gypsies because she remains, in part, natural: “I had not had my skin discoloured, as they do to all children they carry about with them” (p. 12). Her complexion, her natural good looks, and her resistance to makeup provide Moll a comfort zone in the midst of all the subterfuge around her, much of which she initiates. Moll remains extremely proud of her natural good looks, and even in her early forties she never “stooped” (p. 116) to painting or applying heavy makeup. On the other hand, Moll’s repertoire of personalities become her stock in trade: “for I had several shapes to appear in” (p. 217).

The narrative gives us a bit of a preview of Moll’s later career as a disguise artist when in order to discover the condition of her lover, the Bath gentleman then living in Bloomsbury, she “had the curiosity to disguise myself like a servant-maid, in a round cap and straw hat” (p. 110). She also mimicked the “gossip” of the household staff to acquire the information she needed, somewhat in the way Defoe as author mimics the voices of the characters he creates.

Defoe alternates throughout between the natural Moll and the disguised Moll, and that alternation marks Moll’s ambiguous status through life. She would rather be genteel than criminal. Part of Moll’s discomfort with a life of crime plays on her sense of bodily unease, a feeling of not being her natural self. After Moll wins her settlement for false arrest at the hands of an overzealous mercer, partly by affecting a status of dress and merit beyond even the style to which she was accustomed, she feels driven to circulate in rags around London in the meanest possible condition as a kind of psychological penance that would in a way bring her back to her Newgate or her gypsy origins. Her chosen disguise counters her almost instinctive punctiliousness about cleanliness and appearance: “I naturally abhorred dirt and rags; I had been bred up tight and cleanly, and could be no other, whatever condition I was in, so that this was the most uneasy disguise to me that ever I put on” (p. 231). The point is that Moll was in no way compelled to disguise herself in rags. She did it in spite of herself and perhaps to spite herself

At the beginning of her life as a ward of Colchester’s parish, Moll is brought up by a woman who runs a small school. Like the other students she is prepared for household service, which she says even at the age of eight she “had a thorough aversion to” (p. 14). She would prefer to be “a gentlewoman” (p. 15), a term that for Moll means only earning money for work rather than serving for keep. She has no idea of the class status of the term “gentlewoman” at this point in her life: “They meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I meant quite another” (p. 16). The very young Moll thinks she can sew her way into gentility, and when her guardian asks her if she truly thinks she can become a gentlewoman “by your fingers’ ends” (p. 15), Moll responds that she can. The irony is that Defoe forecasts the light fingers of a pickpocket rather than the nimble ones of a seamstress.

Moll seeks gentility and financial independence—that is what her early notion of a gentlewoman is—but her dilemma is that financial independence is neither easily nor legitimately come by for those who are cut off from resources. Moll would like to be free of service and able to support herself, but her means to do so will inevitably skirt the law. Moreover, when Moll names a particular woman in the town who earns by mending lace, her guardian points out that the woman is one of ill repute “and they call her madam” (p. 17). The soubriquet “madam” ironically partakes of both gentlewoman and whoremistress. We can think back on this exchange when, in fact, Moll later becomes a gentlewoman. One of the counterweights of the narrative for Defoe is the realization that for one born like Moll in and to Newgate, gentility is as much a mark of fraud as a mark of rank.

When Moll first takes up with the mayor of Colchester’s family early in the action, the mayor’s wife is charmed by her misunderstanding of gentlewoman and “put her hand in her pocket, gave me a shilling, and bid me mind my work, and learn to work well, and I might be a gentlewoman for aught she knew” (p. 16). The gesture seems innocent, but it begins the almost reflexive association of money with opportunity that defines Moll’s life. The mayor’s family repeats this gesture on several occasions when Moll is a child, even paying her coins for her dress and her appearance. The money theme comes to fruition in the Colchester household. One of the sisters of the family marks the condition of an unconnected young woman in society: “If a young woman has beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all to an extreme, yet if she has not money she’s nobody, she had as good want them all; nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands” (p. 22). The passage is rich for a number of reasons. Not only does it introduce the notion of the marital negotiation as part of a tactical “game,” but it reduces the loser to nobody, an entity robbed of material substance, a being without body or value.

As her love affair with the elder brother of the Colchester family heats up, Moll’s rush of libido is at once satisfied and terminated by the exchange of money. The brother offers Moll five guineas (a vast sum for a servant) for his first sexual foray, which stops well before what Moll calls the final favor. He comes back a half hour later, proceeds a bit further, and offers her even more, a handful of gold. As Moll notes from the perspective of her later memoirs, only her naivete prevented her at this stage in her life from understanding that if she played the game cleverly she might have extracted a proposal or, at least, a maintenance contract, from the elder brother. Instead, she admits she would have capitulated fully for far less than money than she had already accumulated. But there is a secondary love affair brewing in all this: “As for the gold, I spent whole hours in looking upon it” (p. 27). It is almost as if Moll learns that desire is fungible; she can turn it into cash. That notion characterizes almost every sexual relationship Moll engages in from this point on, a notion literally enacted when Moll and her Bath lover pool their gold coins in the lap of her dress and stare at the jumbled heap for the mere thrill it.

Even though Moll would rather not associate material wealth with bodily integrity, she comes to understand soon enough that her stock or her material wealth is comparable to her very physical constitution. She complains that “spending upon the main stock was but a certain kind of bleeding to death” (p. 97). The metaphoric confusion of wealth as lifeblood leads Moll to consider a friendless and destitute woman as a kind of material discard, worthy only insofar as someone else can capitalize her: “When a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer” (p. 117).

One key phrase in Moll’s bleak assessment—“void of counsel”—emphasizes another crucial and repeated theme in the novel: friendship and tactical alliances. Moll begins as something of a negative entry in life’s account book, “left a poor desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper” (p. 12). After her first remove to London and environs, she realizes she has “not one friend or relation in the world” (p. 61). She repeatedly articulates the need for bonding relations with other women and with men: “If a woman has no friend to communicate her affairs to, and to advise and assist her, ’tis ten to one but she is undone” (p. 116). The problem recurs for Moll after her fifth husband dies in London: “I had no acquaintance, which was one of my worst misfortunes, and the consequence of that was, I had no adviser, and, above all, I had nobody to whom I could in confidence commit the secret of my circumstances” (p. 116).⁴

Though the theme of friendship comes up at regular intervals in Moll’s life, it registers, as does so much else in Defoe’s fiction, as slightly paradoxical. Late in the action, Moll says that “a secret of moment should always have a confidant, a bosom friend to whom we may communicate the joy of it, or the grief of it, be it which it will, or it will be a double weight upon the spirits” (p. 293). To be fair to the action of the novel, even when Moll does find a confidant, she reveals only those portions of her secrets that will guarantee her security. On the one hand, loneliness and secrecy are psychologically wearing for her; on the other, Moll is better off when no one knows what she is up to.

Moll’s model for dealing with people—even those she likes—is encapsulated in the little phrase squeezed in to her general explanation of her life to her Lancashire husband while both are in Newgate Prison: “I told him so much of my story as I thought convenient” (p. 270). Her notion of “as I thought convenient” is a cold calculus, indeed, but it determines her presentation in the world. She embellishes or withholds by turns, and always for the particular convenience of her situation and its circumstances. Nonetheless, Moll repeatedly enters into what can be called a series of bonding alliances with a cadre of female characters. The lot of woman in society is one of those things that may not count for much in a man’s world but counts for considerably more in a woman’s. From Moll’s kindly first tutor in Colchester to the Redriff widow in London to the underworld Mother Midnight later in the adventure, Moll depends not only on the kindness of strangers, but on the kindness of women strangers. Ultimately, she contributes her own fair share to the female alliance motif.

The most extended and satisfying instance of female bonding in the novel centers on the scheme concocted by Moll and another young lady friend in Redriff to scam a self-satisfied ship captain into marriage and contrive a public shaming for his boorish behavior: “I told her, that if she would take my advice, I would tell her how she should obtain her wishes in both those things; and that I would engage I would bring the man to her door again” (p. 64). Here, as in most instances when women conspire in the narrative, things have a much better chance of going according to plan. And Moll’s activities in Redriff are but the prelude for the sustained activities of her patron, Mother Midnight, in protecting Moll in the London underworld and arranging, insofar as she can, for the best disposition of Moll’s affairs, even after her capture and transportation to America.

Perhaps the most shocking repetition in Moll Flanders is the incest theme. As is usually the case with the narrative patterns set up in the action, Defoe hints at incest before it appears and returns in different and subtle ways to it even after it submerges. Long before Moll mistakenly marries her brother and lives in a Virginia menage with her new husband and the mother they share, she imagines what it might mean for her in the Colchester household to marry the younger brother after sleeping with the elder. She thinks the elder brother has already committed to her and considers the proposal of the younger as a kind of tacit incest: “I gave him a look full of horror at those words” (p. 37). Sleeping with the elder brother is the expression of her sexuality, but her imagining sleeping with that same elder brother when she is married to the younger becomes “adultery and incest with him every day in my desires” (p. 55).

Her horror is equaled in its intensity only by her later references to the actual incest she commits and then abjures with her brother: “I could almost as willingly have embraced a dog” (p. 89). Moll’s first reaction to incest is not that she has committed a crime against legal standards but against natural law. She is “not much touched with the crime of it, yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my husband even nauseous to me” (pp. 81-82). Moll would like nothing better than to forget the incest interlude in Virginia, but the narrative will not let her. She finds herself reminded of it by the contorted excuses her Bath lover gives for not immediately jumping into bed with her—a negative impulse on his part that Moll finds hard to fathom. When the two stay one night at an inn in Gloucester and share a room, the Bath gentleman, thinking he is gallant, says to Moll that the two beds in the room will do: “ ‘Well,’ says my friend, very readily, ‘these beds will do; and as for the rest, we are too near akin to lie together, though we may lodge near one another’ ” (p. 104). Moll must have found his little protestation alarming. She is in a friendship “too near” a kinship just after she has been in a relationship too sexual to define as brotherly.

Defoe plays one more variation of the incest theme in the narrative, one that requires some metaphoric thinking. Moll has for all her life been searching for a relation in which she can see something of herself reflected in another. Her husband/brother “was a man of infinite good nature” (p. 77), and they began their marriage with Moll considering herself “the happiest creature alive” (p. 78). The setup here is oddly repeated when Moll returns to Virginia much later with her fourth husband, Jemmy. In many ways, Jemmy is a male version of Moll, “a man that was as well qualified to make me happy, as to his temper and behaviour, as any man ever was” (p. 134). She first meets him when both are engaged in what Moll calls a “double fraud” (p. 134), and still Moll cannot help revering him: “He was a lovely person indeed, of generous principles, good sense, and of abundance of good humour” (p. 137). The same could be said for Moll, and, indeed, the same is said in one version or another from one end of the narrative to the other.

With Jemmy, Moll displaces the incest motif into a different kind of kinship. She essentially eliminates the middleman. There can be no incest with Jemmy because she almost is Jemmy. The marriage of Moll to her virtual counterpart is sealed, after a fashion, when her brother/husband, old, blind, and wretched like Oedipus, dies and frees her for a new and unstained life as a gentlewoman and penitent.