Defoe’s Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders
Srividhya Swaminathan, Pennsylvania State University
Volume 15, no. 2, January 2003
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ABSTRACT
Analyses of Daniel Defoe’s narratives tend to dismiss his secondary characters because they lack well-developed personalities. The extensive cast of women in Moll Flanders, for instance, has been ignored largely because twentieth-century critics privilege interiority and psychology, and discount stock or “flat” characters. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel canonized Defoe as the great novelist of self-maximizing individualism, identifying in Moll a “criminal individualism” that “tends to minimise the importance of personal relationships.” Though Watt’s analysis of Moll Flanders has been hotly contested, critics focus on defining the nature of Moll’s individualism, tacitly agreeing with Watt’s contention that personal relationships are diminished in the novel. This neglect would not be a problem if secondary characters merely provided local colour, but the actions of women in particular turn out to be critical to Moll’s survival. Ignoring the “minor” female characters has led to odd imbalances in critical readings, notably with respect to feminist criticism. For example, Defoe’s “narrative transvestism” has been read as seeking to misrepresent the “sexual other” and thus to co-opt the female voice … While Moll’s narrative amply rewards these lines of critical inquiry, such approaches ignore the relationships formed between women: the factor in the story that makes Moll’s survival possible.
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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