324 Defoe, Daniel
has in her life are nearly always the result of her lack
of experience—in other words, her innocence.
The daughter of a transported convict, Moll
enters a kind of orphanage at about three years
old. She is mocked when, as a girl, she innocently
expresses her wish not to become a servant but to
support herself as a “gentlewoman.” In England
during Moll’s century, a gentlewoman earned her
keep by marrying a gentleman, and there was
virtually no work available through which a single
woman could legally support herself. As a young
woman, Moll lives with a mayor and his family
and is innocent enough to believe the mayor’s
oldest son loves her and will marry her when he
inherits, so Moll becomes his lover. The affair ends
painfully, though, when the younger brother falls
in love with her, and the elder brother not only
insists that she marry the younger brother but also
breaks off the affair, says he will never marry her,
and manipulates people and events to make the
other marriage go smoothly. After her husband’s
death, Moll leaves his family behind, including her
two children, and uses these experiences with men
and money to lie and cheat her way through the
rest of her life.
Though Moll makes another mistake in her next
marriage by choosing a man who lives far beyond his
income and spends all her money, still she continues
to move around England using what she knows
of human nature to try to arrange profitable mar-
riages and sometimes profitable affairs as well. She
continues to make mistakes—her third husband is
comfortably well-off but turns out to be her half
brother—and she and her fourth husband (whom
she calls her Lancashire husband) each trick the
other into believing they are wealthy. However, Moll
sees her mistakes as little more than short-term set-
backs and is always willing to start over again and to
make use of her experience in her next scam.
After the death of her fifth husband and her
quick abandonment of her seventh child, Moll’s
readiness to take advantage of the innocence of oth-
ers moves into a whole new realm as she becomes
a skilled pickpocket and a clever thief. Twice Moll
steals jewelry from very young girls, and each time
she blames the theft on the parents, saying the expe-
rience will teach them to take better care of their
daughters. Moll gives precise details about a par-
ticular attempt at stealing a lady’s gold watch, and
again she calls the other woman a “fool” for being
too inexperienced at being robbed to catch Moll in
the act. Moll, though, learns from each experience,
thinks up new ways of stealing, and is always willing
to be more careful and to change her strategy, her
name, her locale, or her costume if experience tells
her she will be a better thief for it.
When Moll is finally caught, taken to Newgate
Prison, sentenced to hang, and then manages to
have her sentence reduced to a term of exile to the
American colonies, her experience shows her that
enough money, kind words, and good appearance
can lighten even that sentence. Almost immediately
after arriving in the New World, she and her Lan-
cashire husband (with whom she has been reunited
in Newgate) set up as plantation owners and begin
profiting from their new situation.
It is impossible to assign a consistent meaning to
Moll Flanders as a whole or in part. Daniel Defoe’s
preface says that Moll’s “autobiography” is a morality
tale and that the story demonstrates that every bad
deed is punished, every criminal pays for his or her
crime. Yet, Defoe clearly does not mean his words
to be taken seriously, for Moll is a sinner who is not
very good and yet has done very well. Moll and her
husband end up happy, healthy, living well into old
age in their beloved England. What is more, they
profit, not in spite of all of their crimes but because
of them. Thus, in the context of the novel, innocence
is always painful and expensive. Experience, on the
other hand, is always good when Moll is able and—
more important, willing—to use her experience to
take advantage of another’s innocence.
Carman CurtonDEFOE, DANIEL Robinson Crusoe
( The Life and Strange Surprising Adven-
tures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner.
Who lived eight and twenty years all alone
in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of
America near the Mouth of the great river
Oroonoque. Having been cast in shore by
Shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but