Matriarchal Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders

Abstract

Ironic readings of Moll Flanders have illuminated the novel's psychological comedy at the expense of its social criticism and have elevated Defoe's art by lowering the moral status of its heroine. This essay defends and celebrates Moll as a character who co-opts the essentially criminal practices of a burgeoning capitalist patriarchy, thereby escaping the eternal feminine cycle of reproduction and entering the historical social cycle of production. Moll's anomie and anonymity reflect back on a disintegrating social order. Marriage, rendered newly insecure by the contradictions of waning patriarchal authority and of a market economy, proves a false haven for Moll; the novel's real quest is matriarchal—a search among three maternal figures for a viable economic model. Defoe eschews the myth of female purity, although Moll's finally successful but realistically compromised woman's estate is, by the standards of the myth, unacceptable to patriarchal critics.