The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (class Notes)

The criminal world in Moll Flanders is a constant masquerade where characters never
entirely reveal their true identities to each other, and anonymity is essential to the
effectiveness of their criminal activities. She plays the roles of a woman and a
criminal, which, according to John Rietz (1991: 183), “were perceived as mutually
exclusive” for women were expected to be nurturing, passive, beautiful, and witty,
whereas criminals were associated with traditional masculine traits. She never takes
her mask off to reveal her true identity (she never gives us her true name in order to
protect her family's reputation and herself from the authorities. Ha1 Gladfelder (2001:
128) points out, “Moll misleads by omission, glosses over her own most criminal
actions, shifts guilt onto her victims or confederates, and guards her money, her
origins, and her name as dangerous mysteries”

Born in the New Gate prison (Her mother, readers learn, was convicted of stealing “three
Pieces of fine Holland, of a certain Draper in Cheapside” (10).), brought up by the gypsies
and then left to the cure of a nurse, and then - when this latter dies— she is taken in the
house of a wealthy family in her neighbourhood.

The love triangle with the two brothers problem, she ends up marrying the younger
brother, which led her to a pretty comfortable life. Things only start to go bad when she
becomes a widow. They have two kids before he dies. Without a husband, Moll comes
dangerously close to losing everything.

She moves to London where marries a linen-draper. However, her new husband’s
bankruptcy forces the two to part their ways. Interestingly enough, he’s a man caught
between two social classes. As Moll says, "at last I found this amphibious creature, this
land-water thing called a gentleman-tradesman" (230). In other words, he's not quite a
member of the aristocracy, but he's more than just a merchant. He doesn't know which
class he should belong to and keeps blending the two categories. He wants to be more like
a gentleman but can't really be one from a tradesman's position.

After this, she marries again, to a wealthy captain and they move to Virginia where he
becomes a plantation owner. However, soon enough she finds out that he's actually her
half-brother and decides to leave, even though they've had kids together. “I refused to bed
with him, and carrying on the breach upon all occasions to extremity, he told me once he
thought I was mad, and if I did not alter my conduct, he would put me under cure; that is
to say, into a madhouse. (350)”
— The gentleman of Bath, they have a relationship, a child, but they never get married (he’s
stuck in a marriage with an absent woman). Part of the attraction she has to him comes from
the way he treats her as so virtuous and noble.

“He was a complete gentleman, that must be confessed, and his company was very
agreeable to me, as mine, if I might believe him, was to him. He made no professions to be
but of an extraordinary respect, and he had such an opinion of my virtue, that, as he often
professed, he believed if he should offer anything else, I should reject him with contempt.
(410)”

Returned to England, she meets and apparently falls in love with a Lancashire gentleman.
However, this latter turns out to be broke and when he finds out that Moll is broke, too,
they decide to separate. He's no gentleman at all – he's a fraud who happens to have some
good looks that help him out no matter his class or financial position. Of course,
ultimately, that's why Moll likes him best; he's a lot like her. They approach the world in
the same way and are both committed to making money by less-than-honest means. In this
sense, Lancashire reflects back to Moll exactly what she has been doing to the men in her
life. He gives her a taste of her own medicine. So even if he tricks her into marrying him,
only to find out that the marriage is a fraud, she will always cherish him : ”a fortune
would not have been ill bestowed on him, for he was a lovely person indeed, of generous
principles, good sense, and of abundance of good-humour" (575).

Being pregnant, she relies on her midwife friend’s help for a while. Then she takes up with
a banker she used to know (formerly married to a “whore”, needs to divorce), the two
marry and are happy for about five years before he dies, too. “[…] he was a quiet,
sensible, sober man; virtuous, modest, sincere, and in his business diligent and just. His
business was in a narrow compass, and his income sufficient to a plentiful way of living in
the ordinary way. (732)”

Prompted to return to her midwife friend in London, at this point, theft is one of the very
few ways she can hang on to what she has left.

After many years of stealing, Moll is caught and is sent to Newgate prison, where she
assumes she'll be executed for her crimes.

While in Newgate, she runs into her Lancashire husband, who has become a highwayman.
 They both end up getting exiled to America and escape Newgate (and execution).

In the New World, Moll becomes even richer by inheriting her mother’s fortune and
makes up with her American son (who, you'll remember, was a product of incest).

When enough time has passed, she and her husband move back to England, where they
feel bad about their previous crimes, but live lives of great comfort.

Besides MONEY, MAYBE MOLL’s TRUE LOVE: "I loved nothing in the world better than
fine clothes" (420)

This attention to cloth and clothing is remarkable. Defoe’s use of cloth as a motif in Moll
Flanders as an unconscious expression of the anxiety surrounding the uncertain role of
human beings in the growing capitalist system of the day, which in its rapacity saw people
—particularly women—not only as producers and consumers of goods, but also as
consumables, goods in themselves.

In other words, clothing and costuming can refashion people’s identities and social positions
thus highlighting the equation clothing as currency, clothing as capital. In this perspective,
Moll’s constant and mundane attention to her money and property go together with her
constant concern for fine clothes.

Cloth is also fundamental to Moll’s character. At one point, she says, “…I loved nothing
better in the World than fine Clothes” (91). Indeed, her pseudonym itself implies not only
prostitution in the word “Moll,” but also lace in the name “Flanders,” according to the
Oxford English Dictionary. So, one way to decode her name is “clothes whore.” Moreover,
a “Flanders baby,” states the Oxford English Dictionary, was a “small doll manufactured in
the Low Countries to display fashionable dress, or for use in a puppet show” in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These dolls were sometimes made of simple wooden
pegs and adorned with clothing.

“thorough Aversion to going to service … to be a Servant” (11). She fears being beaten and
forced into hard labor. Her nurse tells her that it will take more than her “Fingers Ends” to
make her a gentlewoman, for such a lady requires clothes: “…and who must buy the little
Gentlewoman clothes, says she, and smil’d all the while at me” (13). Before long, Moll
begins to acquire these trappings—“Head-Dresses, and Linnen, and Gloves, and Ribbons”--
through her own labor, “so that now I was a Gentlewoman indeed, as I understood that
Word” (15). She works with “Linnen” and “Lace” (15).

In her article “Defining the Female Body Within Social Space: The Function of Clothes In
Some Early Eighteenth Century Novels” Eva Maria Stadler explains that Moll’s acquisitions
of clothing have a deep social meaning, for it is a “clear example of the eighteenth century
notion of wealth, in which clothing and linen represented a significant person’s patrimony,
especially a servant or wage-earner” (469). Moll is given clothing as gifts by her best
customers, the mayor’s wife and daughters.
Stadler writes, “When Moll turns to thievery almost all of her bundles contain articles of
clothing and pieces of linen, lace, silk or velvet” (469).
An early example occurs when Moll’s second husband, who is fittingly a draper, flees from
England to escape his creditors and leaves her “20 pieces of fine Holland” in pawn that she
is able to sell for more than 100 pounds (53). Examining the contents of the bundle she
steals on her first outing as a thief, Moll finds among its contents linen, lace, and silk as well
as silver and money (152).

Later, a fleeing thief drops a bundle at her feet. Inside are silk and velvet (154). Eventually,
Moll is able to convert these cloth items into currency with the help of the governess,
“Mother Midnight” (128), who helped her secretly deliver a child and has since become a
pawn broker (156). In another theft, Moll takes “Bonelace, worth six or seven pound” (164),
and later steals “fine Holland and other things as came to about seven Pound” (207). A “Suit
of black silk Cloaths” plus 150 pounds are part of Moll’s legal settlement with the mercer,
who had accused her of stealing (198).

Stadler writes, “Cloth and clothing not only constitute visible, ‘countable’ signs of wealth,
but the garments themselves, in a strictly stratified society, act as costumes that identify
condition and status.” She continues that Moll’s “costumes and careers point to the roles
women were allowed to play in society; her disguises also point to the dangers and
advantages of transgressing class and gender roles” (469).

Cloth is the substance that allows Moll to disguise herself, cross class and gender lines, and
commit her crimes. It is Moll’s deftness with cloth that allows her to become a “little
Gentlewoman” as a child (15). Before her first outing as a thief, Moll says, “I dress’d me,
for I still had pretty good Cloaths” (151). It is the beginning of a pattern of disguise that
runs until Moll’s capture. On another excursion, Moll again dresses like a lady, for “on these
Adventures we always went very well Dress’d, and I had very good Cloaths on” (167).
Her disguises, however, evolve to suit her needs, and she moves up or down the social scale.
She says at one point she dresses in a “Mean habit” like a servant to loiter at a pub door: “…
for as I had several shapes to appear in I was now in an ordinary Stuff-Gown, a blue Apron,
and a Straw-Hat” (187). She puts on the “Disguise of a Widow’s Dress” (190), and then the
“coursest and most despicable Rags” of a “Beggar Woman” (199). Although Moll seems to
love playing the widow, the beggar woman is a stretch for her: “I naturally abhorr’d Dirt
and Rags” (199).

Likewise, it is a challenge for her to pose as a man, a disguise suggested by the governess.
The challenge, however, is not in assuming the masculine persona of “Gabriel Spencer” but
in moving with ease in a man’s clothing (169). She calls it a “Dress so contrary to
Nature” (169). The advantage of the disguise is that it is quickly thrown off, which helps
Moll return to a woman’s form and escape from a mob pursuing her for an accomplice’s
theft of four pieces of silk (170).

After two close calls, Moll is finally arrested for trying to steal “two Pieces of flower’d
Silks” (214). Symbolically, the “two Wenches” (214) who capture Moll tear her clothes,
revealing her criminality and ending her masquerade.