Kingston, Craig in “Moll Flanders”
I’m wondering whether it is a sign of our stressed economic times that my students are having very smart things to say about Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Maybe it’s the rising student debt load and the uncertain job market for college graduates that has them cheering for her as she pulls herself out of poverty and into the monied class.
Our sympathy is actually a bit unnerving given that Moll is not what you would call a model citizen. She is a woman who acquires and discards husbands on a regular basis, and she finds various ways to unload every one of her children (all twelve of them), including a couple who are also her siblings since she finds herself married to her brother. At one point she turns whore and then thief, and she even contemplates killing a little girl whom she has just robbed (but decides not to).
But these almost seem minor points. What wins my students over—I’ve just finished reading their journal entries on the book—is her energy, her ingenuity, and her resilience. She is born in Newgate Prison, her mother having “pleaded her belly” to avoid being hanged, and she seems destined for a similar life herself. But early on she determines to become a gentlewoman and, by the end of the book, she is a wealthy landowner. To be sure, she barely escapes being hanged herself on the way there.
We sympathize in part because the novel is told in the first person. If novels were looked at with suspicion in their early years, it’s in part because they took readers into the lives and the minds of the marginalized. Identification with whores and thieves was seen as undermining social morality.
But it’s not just the first person perspective that draws us to Moll. Defoe has tapped into the zeitgeist—into the energy of the rising middle class—and we American dreamers recognize her aspiring as our own. While we may like to imagine ourselves on Sunday evenings as the gentry in Downton Abbey, most of us are really descendants of Moll.
As we discussed Moll Flanders we decided that the novel was an 18th century version of The Wire, the award-winning HBO miniseries about inner city Baltimore. It also reminds me of Clockers, the fine novel about the drug trade by occasional Wire writer Richard Price. In all three works (and I guess we should throw Breaking Bad in there as well), members of the criminal class demonstrate a remarkable entrepreneurial spirit Malcolm X remarked in his autobiography that if the energy and brainpower he encountered in prison could ever be harnessed to socially productive uses, amazing things could be accomplished.
When times get bad, we often find ourselves drawn to fictional figures that flout the law in order to get ahead. My students’ response to Moll Flanders indicates that they regard the times as bad.
