322 Defoe, Daniel
cOmmOdiFicatiOn/cOmmercializatiOn
in Moll Flanders
Moll Flanders is so clearly a novel of commerce
and commodification that it may be hard to see any
other motives for its characters. Moll sees everything
as a commercial transaction. Whether or not the
reader is appalled by this, Daniel Defoe means it
to be clear that Moll is no more and no less than a
product of her environment. Moll herself was born
merely to benefit her mother. Though Moll did not
produce money, her mother’s pregnancy spared her
from hanging in prison. In England during the 17th
and 18th centuries, a woman sentenced to death
could “plead her belly,” and her sentence would be
delayed long enough for the child to be born.
Early in her adult life, Moll continues to see
other lessons in the commodification of all personal
relationships. Having no home of her own, she lives
with the mayor’s family and is part of a conversation
between the mayor’s son and daughter in which the
daughter declares that marriage is nothing more than
a marketplace and that a woman without money has
no value. Moll learns this lesson and applies it during
her many marriages and affairs throughout her life-
time. Soon after the marriage marketplace conversa-
tion, Moll begins an affair with the mayor’s elder son
and is very willing to accept the money he offers her
to keep the affair secret. He promises to marry her
later, but she confesses to the reader that she was not
concerned about marriage but, rather, was persuaded
by her pride in being found attractive and by the
gold coins he had given her.
Moll later marries the family’s younger son and
is widowed about five years after. When she goes
back out into the world, Moll declares that she will
marry a wealthy man or none at all. The reader may
be shocked at the bald greed of this statement, yet
Defoe constructs a world for Moll in which seem-
ingly every person is motivated by profit—even
during the most personal of family relationships.
Again and again, Moll encounters men who are
more interested in the wealth of their future wives
than in their appearances or personalities. Moll mar-
ries her second husband for love but soon realizes
he is as interested in spending her money as he is
in spending time with her. He leaves her without
much ado when he flees to France to escape being
jailed for debt. Her third husband also marries her
because he believes Moll has a fortune. When he is
disappointed in that expectation, he convinces her
to travel to Virginia to manage his plantations there
more profitably. It is in Virginia that Moll learns
her husband is also her brother, and while she tries
to persuade her husband/brother to let her leave
the marriage and return to England, he objects to
her plan with the argument that it would harm his
“prosperity.”
Moll eventually does leave Virginia and her
brother/husband but again finds when she is in the
marriage market that every man she would find
suitable is only looking for a woman who will bring
a substantial amount of money to the marriage.
Moll chooses to “deceive the deceiver” and again
allows her friends and neighbors to believe she is
quite wealthy when she is courted and married
by her “Lancashire husband,” a man she also calls
Jemmy and whom she believes to have a very large
estate. Shortly after their marriage (Moll’s fourth),
they discover that each has tricked the other into a
nearly destitute union, and so they part, though on
good terms, a few days later. The pair are reunited
years after and end up living together in America,
very comfortably, because of the inheritance left
Moll by her mother—who was also the mother of
her brother/husband. Here, Jemmy, who turns out
to have been a rake and a highwayman, becomes
genuinely repentant, primarily because of the wealth
he and Moll now enjoy.
Whether Defoe approves or laments Moll’s
overriding characteristic—that she reduces every
human relationship to a financial transaction—is
difficult to say. Yet he clearly wanted his audience to
understand that Moll Flanders was a perfect reflec-
tion of her—and by extension Defoe’s—England. A
greedy, selfish, uncaring woman who will only con-
tinue any family relationship or personal friendship
as long as it produces some benefit—usually, but not
always, financial—is the only possible product of the
society whose values she reflects.
Carman CurtonetHics in Moll Flanders
It is not until the middle of Moll Flanders that Moll’s
ethics, her personal code of moral behavior, become