Moll Flanders, Quintessential Capitalist

Keeley Hawes as Moll Flanders

Alex Kingston as Moll Flanders

I’m teaching Moll Flanders for the first time in years (in my 18th and 19th century English Language Literature survey) and have been struck by how drawn we are to her. One would think it would be easy to condemn a woman who is, at different times, a thief, a prostitute, a bigamist (several times over), an adulteress, and a negligent mother. Nevertheless, many of my students have found themselves rooting for her.

I will report in upcoming days about specific student reactions, but my sense is that today’s tight job market is making students sympathetic to a character who does whatever is necessary to get by. Furthermore, she throws herself into her projects with such gusto that it’s hard not to get caught up in her energy.

Defoe was himself an energetic businessman and I’m asking my students to think of Moll as an early capitalist, both in her business dealings and in her personal relations. To set up the discussion, I first had them read quotations from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) about the impact of capitalism on existing social relations—which in 1722 involved a rigid class hierachy with a set of social values designed to discourage social mobility. The social situation had my students on Moll’s side from the get-go, her thieving be damned, because they, like she, believe in social mobility.

Whatever one thinks of Marx’s predictions of a proletarian revolution, he understands well the disruptive impact capitalism had on the established aristocratic order. Here are a couple of the quotations that I shared with the students:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.”

And my favorite:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Neither the middle class nor Moll Flanders had gotten the upper hand in 1722 but they were definitely making a play for said hand. Moll profanes all that is holy with enthusiasm. “Naked self-interest” is her middle name.

It all starts when she is born in Newgate Prison to a woman sentenced to transportation. Moll seems destined for a life as a scullery maid or other lower class servant but is determined to do everything she can do to escape such a fate. Slowly but surely, she manages to climb the social ladder, using her good looks and her vivacity to attract the wealthy sons of a family she is working for.

From then on, no social institution seems sacred.  She loses his virginity to the elder brother but, when she realizes that he won’t marry her, she accepts the proposal of his younger brother. The scandalized family cuts ties with her when her husband dies. (She hands over their two sons to the family in return for payment.) Practically everything she does is with an eye towards money. When she makes a bad marriage with a husband who runs off, she pretends that she isn’t married. She holds one marriage proposal in abeyance until she can figure out if a seemingly more profitable one will come through. It appears to, only she then learns that it was a scam—her husband is going for the fortune he believes her to have, just as she is going for his (non-existent) wealth. They part on relatively good terms and, after giving birth to their child, she goes back and accepts the other proposal.

My class is having fun figuring out how many children Moll ultimately gives birth to. I believe the number reaches double figures but it’s hard to tell because she only talks in detail about one. For him, we are given a full rundown of three different payment options she has for farming him out.. There is a gold plan, a silver plan, and a bronze plan. Since the bronze plan is little short of delivering the child over to his death, in an act of conscience she opts for the silver plan.

It’s interesting to figure out what action is immoral enough to deter Moll. After all, she figures out ways to rationalize stealing from a child and from a woman whose house is burning down. There is one act that causes her to pause, however. She feels that she can’t continue to live with one of her husbands, with whom she has had three children, when she discovers that he is her brother. So apparently the incest taboo is a red line she won’t cross. It’s also in her favor that she doesn’t murder anyone (although she contemplates it at one point).Other than that, everything appears to be fair game.

Although that being said, there are times when she lets her feelings override her head, to her monetary disadvantage. She regrets it later, however. The following passage is fairly typical of her reasoning process:

Had I acted as became me, and resisted  as virtue and honor required, this gentlemen had either desisted his attacks, finding no room to expect the accomplishment of his design, or had made fair and honorable proposals of marriage; in which case, whoever had blamed him, nobody could have blamed me. In short, if he had known me, and how easy the trifle he aimed at was to be had, he would have troubled his head nor farther, but have given me four or five guineas, and have lain with me the next time he had come at me. And if I had known his thoughts, and how hard he thought I would be to be gained, I might have made my own terms with him; and if I had not capitulated for an immediate marriage, I might for a maintenance till marriage, and might have had what I would; for he was already rich to excess, besides what he had in expectation; but I seemed wholly to have abandoned all such thoughts as these, and was taken up only with the pride of my beauty, and of being beloved by such a gentleman.

It’s fascinating to see how, like a good business woman, she is always tallying up her asserts. One of these assets is her face, which she acknowledges is worth more in her twenties than in her forties. Another asset is her virginity, which she offers to several successive husbands. In other words, she sees her body as a commodity.

My class was not as scandalized by this as I anticipated, perhaps because we have become accustomed to talking about such figures as athletes, actors, and others in exactly these terms. Capitalism really does profane all that is sacred. The next work I teach will be the greatest attack ever penned against people who objectify humans: Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”

But back to our capitalist. Like any businessperson, when Moll isn’t moving forward she is moving backwards. She’s either making a profit or spending her stock. Also, even when she amasses an income that should leave her comfortably well off, this just whets her appetite to acquire even more.

What is disturbing about Moll Flanders is how she is like us—or like what we might become if we were scrabbling hard to pull ourselves up in the world. The fact that Defoe has written a novel that gets us to sympathize with her helps explain why moralists were so suspicious of the novel in the 18th century. While Defoe claims to condemn her, we can’t help but cheer.

 

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