Cannibals, Pirates and Slaves – Oh my!

I approached Moll Flanders with a rather regret that we weren’t exploring Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe instead. A story of pirates, cannibals and survival seemed much more interesting to me than a bildungsroman about a woman oppressed within America. However, the social critique taking place in Moll Flanders did give me satisfaction as a student of the world, regardless of my limited entertainment.  

Defoe’s depiction of society is rather bleak and criticized its seemingly misplaced values. This human portrait of a woman is also an excellent sketch of the living conditions and the social stratification in England in the 18th century: “the Age is so wicked and the Sex so Debauch’d”. It shows the immense chasm between a small class of wealthy people and the rest (Swift: a thousand to one). The latter were struggling for sheer survival and praying “Give me not Poverty, lest I steal” … to be hanged: “If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring, and then there’s an End of poor Jenny.”

Defoe paints the poor’s religion as fatalism. Moll Flanders is all the time reproaching herself her Course of life, “a horrid Complication of Wickedness, Whoredom, Adultery, Incest, Lying, Theft”, but in the face of death at the gallows, “I had now neither Remorse or Repentance … no Thought of Heaven or Hell … I neither had a Heart to ask God’s Mercy.” The bleak outlook on society mirrors Defoe’s criticism of humanities limitations and sin.

I am glad to have read Moll Flanders for its educational promise; however, I would have rather entertained my boyish fantasies through Robinson Crusoe, which I will read -someday- outside my academic pursuits.