Moll Flanders

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and analyzes the novel’s depiction of incest, references to death by suicide, and discrimination and slurs against Romani people.

“To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal spirit and life.”

The author justifies his inclusion of the less savory details of Moll’s life, claiming that he intends them to serve as a juxtaposition to Moll’s more penitent ways later on. The claim reveals an anxiety about the content and purpose of the novel: if it is not morally instructive, then it may be morally suspect.

“Now all this while my good old nurse, Mrs Mayoress, and all the rest of them did not understand me at all, for they meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I meant quite another; for, alas! all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service, whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and I know not what.”

Moll’s definition of what it means to be a gentlewoman is an emerging social position. Rather than signifying a wealthy and powerful woman of the upper classes, Moll’s idea of the gentlewoman indicates a self-sufficient wage-earner who has individual agency. Going into service, in contrast, would limit Moll’s self-determination and autonomy.

“I was now in a dreadful condition indeed, and now I repented heartily my easiness with the eldest brother; not from any reflection of my conscience, but from a view of the happiness I might have enjoyed, and had now made impossible; for though I had no great scruples of conscience, as I have said, to struggle with, yet I could not think of being a whore to one brother and a wife to the other.”

Moll admits that her moral compass is short-sighted: she engages in the affair with Robert without guilt or remorse until his brother, Robin, wants to marry her. Moll does not regret engaging in sexual relations with a man outside of the institution of marriage; she only regrets that it impedes her ability to make a better contract with the other brother. Still, her qualms only confound her for but a moment.