Defoe’s “Almost Invisible Hand”: Narrative Logic as a Structuring Principle in Moll Flanders
Carl R. Lovitt, Clemson University
Volume 6, no. 1, October 1993
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ABSTRACT
Many of the critical disagreements about Moll Flanders have hinged on questions of external authority: the extent to which external control over the narrative can be reliably inferred from the text. Arguments about Defoe’s irony and about the novel’s aesthetic structure — both of which presuppose external agency — have dominated discussions of Moll Flanders. The persistent concern with these issues can be attributed in large part to a problem that confronts readers of any fictional first-person narrative. According to Ian Watt, when we are “entirely limited to what the main character tells us,” any attempt to “derive final values and meanings from a work of fiction” presents itself as a “difficult epistemological problem.” Readers who hesitate to endorse Moll’s own moral judgments will nevertheless “find it impossible to infer other more satisfactory standards of judgment from the narrative itself.” Wayne Booth concurs: “It would be a clever reader indeed who could be sure just how much of Moll’s behavior is consciously judged and repudiated by Defoe.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Daniel Defoe” include:
“A Life of Continu’d Variety”: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders
by KATE LOVEMAN (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Real Robinson Crusoe
by MICHAEL GAVIN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
“Zealous for Their Own Way of Worship”: Defoe, Monarchy, and Religious Toleration during the War of the Quadruple Alliance
by MORGAN STRAWN (ECF 25.2, Winter 2012-13)
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