Anthony House
English 109-01
Prof. Betz
30 January 2001

The Social Forces that Hinder Moll Flanders

The woman whose life forms the central story of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is hardly a sympathetic character. Her moral degradation, though built on the promise of eventual repentance, is not accompanied by the nagging conscience that is so often necessary to elicit sympathy from the audience. Indeed, if anything, the title character seems to acknowledge and embrace the abhorrent life she willingly chooses. Still, the novel does as much to expose the injustices of seventeenth century England as the sinful tendencies of Flanders’ heart.

Domestic political discord and the gradual development of England’s colonial empire characterize the historical period that frames Moll Flanders’ life. The latter, no doubt, seems to be more central to Defoe’s critique of the society. The onset of European colonialism coincided (at least partially) with England’s domestic tendency toward the enclosure of common lands; the end result was the near-deification of the notion of property. Property's exalted position is manifest throughout Moll Flanders. Indeed, it is the reverence for ownership that both incites Flanders’ sin (by appealing to her desires to become and remain a ‘gentlewoman’) and brings her to the brink of death (by facilitating a legal system in which petty theft is a capital offense. The penal system itself is exposed as more a college of criminals than a portal to penitence. Even after Flanders' redemption, it is her personal wealth that enables her to escape her past, suggesting that she is not altogether free—in either mind or body—of those tendencies that first tempted her to a life of selfishness and deceit.

Viewed in such a light, Flanders’ epiphany loses its luster. Her profession of regret for her former deeds falls to the level of mere lip service, and she proves to be a generally static character. On the whole, Moll Flanders relates the story of an opportunistic woman who succeeds in an opportunistic society. Its professed moral purposes fall by the wayside as Defoe upholds the status quo, refusing to criticize those facets of the English value system at the root of the behaviors engaged in by Flanders and her peers.