Moll Flanders 321Hugh’s dilemma now is that his newly awakened
belief in his own right to happiness conflicts with his
sense of honesty, so he looks to religion for help.
With the money in his pocket, he listens to a sermon
in a well-appointed church attended by the rich,
and he realizes that his experience of Christianity
has almost nothing to do with Christ’s original mis-
sion of ministering to the poor, the outcast, and the
meek. It is not, therefore, surprising that Hugh ends
up in jail, although it is ironic that jail is where he
finds his final hope in suicide. There is a strong inti-
mation in the story that Hugh has been sacrificed to
redeem his society from the sins it has committed
against his class, and the hope for a changed future
is realized when, after serving her sentence for her
role as Hugh’s accomplice, Deborah is taken in by
the nearby Quaker community.
Significantly, while Hugh and Deborah attempt
to achieve their hopes, the men who visit the mill
consciously reject their ability to provide hope to
their oppressed workers. It appears that they have
at least some sympathy for the downtrodden work-
ers when they conduct a philosophical discussion
about who is responsible for lifting the mill hands
up, acknowledging their theoretical obligation to
those less fortunate than they. Although Dr. May in
particular believes that by praising Hugh’s talent he
is showing Hugh the hope for a different and much
better life, his almost willful misunderstanding of
the difficulty of Hugh’s circumstances only serves to
confuse Hugh. When Dr. May tells Hugh that he
has the talent to be a great sculptor but then refuses
to help him become so, citing a lack of money, he has
opened a window of hope yet cruelly closed it again.
The reader’s hope for change is also dashed by
the disconnect between Dr. May’s apparent sympa-
thy for Hugh’s plight and his reaction to the news
of Hugh’s sentence of 19 years in prison for grand
larceny. It seems that Dr. May is incapable of any
sort of compassion, even given the circumstances
under which the theft occurred: “Scoundrel! Serves
him right! After all our kindness that night! Picking
Mitchell’s pocket at the very time!” While Dr. May’s
refusal of hope seems almost crafted, the attitude of
Kirby (the son of the mill owner) is much less con-
scious. He would prefer that the men and women
of Hugh’s class be machines. That way, they could
feel no pain and would be unable to understand
the important things in life they are missing. This
attitude is especially telling because it absolves him
of any further responsibility.
Although Life in the Iron Mills is fiction, the
hopelessness felt by Hugh and Deborah is reflective
of the experience of so many of the workers who
made their way to the iron mills, the cotton mills,
and the other factories of early industrial America.
So, too, is the continuing sense of optimism implied
by Deborah’s joining the Quaker community.
Helen Lynne SchicketanzDEFOE, DANIEL Moll Flanders
(1722)
Published in 1722, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
is one of the earliest novels written in English. Its
structure makes it difficult to read, understand,
or analyze with any confidence. It has no chapter
breaks, and each of Moll’s stories leads to the next
almost without transition. Often, Moll weaves back
and forth between stories, returning to one when she
seems to be in the middle of another.
Moll Flanders tells her story in the first person,
in a carefree and conversational tone, but the hard-
to-follow narrative is confounded by the number
of important characters. In the course of her life,
Moll has five husbands, three lovers, and at least 11
children. In possibly the most infamous incident of
the novel, she is horrified to discover that her third
husband is also her half brother.
The fact that Moll can experience the loss of
a husband or lover and abandon or put out to fos-
ter care each of her children in barely a sentence
or two makes it easy for a reader to confuse the
characters with each other or to forget a character’s
involvement in an episode altogether. Despite these
problems, Moll Flanders is an entertaining story,
primarily because of Moll’s indefatigable energy, wit,
and resourcefulness. The novel’s structure reconciles
the seemingly insolvable problem presented by a
very simple question: Is it wrong to steal if you are
starving, or even just afraid of starving? The moral
of Moll’s story, when taken as a whole, would seem
to be: No.
Carman Curton