The ambiguity of Moll Flanders

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Moll Flanders as an innocent girl who is thrown into a life of vice and crime against her will

3. Daniel Defoe´s attitude towards marriage

4. Moll and her marriages
4.1 Moll and the development of her personality up to her forth marriage
4.2 Moll and the intertwine with her two last marriages

5. Moll and her career as a criminal

6. Conclusion

7. Literature

1. Introduction

In this paper I would like to have a look at the heroine of Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders. The main question that I will try to answer is whether or not Moll was a deceiver of the audience or an unprotected victim of destiny. In order to answer this question we have to understand what Moll did and what she essentially was. Without minimising her fault, we, as a reader, are permanently seeking to detach our hate from the doer to the deed and try to retain our sympathy for the heroine. Why?

I found this fact very interesting and therefore would like to analyse this phenomenon while taking Moll under closer analysis. Somehow, Moll, who claims to be a vicious criminal, successes not only to capture reader’s attention throughout the whole book but also his sympathies.

In my opinion, there are two ways, which Moll takes to do so: the first is how Moll sees herself and the second is how the author’s audience sees her; namely how she manipulates the events in order to present herself in a different way then she is. In this way, the aim of this paper is to find out whether the heroine of Defoe`s novel was just a whore, a thief, a felon and an overly amoral person or, while being involved in all the crimes she had confessed to us, she still remained free from the brutalization of her deeds and awful experiences she has gone through.

To start with I would like to point out one interesting thing about the novel of Moll Flanders: when we read this book we catch ourselves with sympathies for Moll, which is sometimes at odds with our moral judgements. Throughout the novel it is assumed that the respectable reader abhors crime and despises thieves and is clear about what is right and what is wrong; what is good or what is bad. Yet the main character of the book is inviting us constantly to deal with new crimes, which we are supposed to hate, but we don’t. Finally, we don’t really know whether to justify what she has just done or despise it. This contradiction is going throughout the whole book or whole life of Moll Flanders and I would like to establish the reasons for how Moll achieves such an effect on the reader and how she distinguishes her essential self from her admittedly reprehensible and awful doings.

As it is hardly possibly to analyse Moll’s life and the events throughout the whole book, I would like to restrict my analysis to three main points. There are going to deal with Moll’s marriages, her liaisons and partly with her criminal deeds.

2. Moll Flanders as an innocent girl who is thrown into a life of vice and crime against her will

In order to start considering Moll as a criminal we have to go back to the very beginning of her misfortune life. Therefore, the first important episode in Moll’s story is her stay in the Colchester family and her seduction by the elder brother. Moll, who acts as a narrator, gives us a full account on the events. She doesn’t try to minimise the badness of hers or other people’s deeds. She is honest to the maximum and criticises not only others but also herself. For example, when we read her remarks about herself, she says: “First, I was apparently handsomer that any of them. Secondly, I was better shaped, and thirdly, I sung better, by which I mean I had a better voice; in all which you will I hope allow me to say, I do not speak my own conceit of myself, but the opinion of all that knew the family ” ¹. In one of the next paragraphs the very interesting thing occurs, namely: “But that which I was too vain of, was my ruin, or rather my vanity was the cause of it”². I found it amazing how Moll by stressing the folly that precedes the act of her seduction, and by blaming herself for this folly, manages to deflect the reader’s judgement from a question of her vanity and conceit.

From this passage on this becomes Moll’s strategy to gain reader’s sympathy. Already in the next pages we have another corroboration of her innocence and thoughtlessness. This time the elder brother appears and seduces Moll. He is handsome, rich, determine and persuasive. He is also very good gentlemen and says abundance of nice things to Moll, which pleases her utmost, as we already know how high her self esteem is; and finally he has money. Consequently, Moll ruins herself and presents it to us as if carried along by her circumstances. In this case she is just “a poor fool”, who didn’t understand the drift of the situation and she acts “as if there was no such thing as any kind of love but that which tended to matrimony”³.

While reading this part of her story we feel sorry for a poor girl who was deluded and debauched by the promises and entrapped by the wiles of her seducer - rather than doing mischief. We also understand that along with her passivity and her naiveté Moll tells us about her frailty and we really don’t feel like punishing her at all; as she is suffering enough already. She also admits at one point that she just had no power to say “no” at the moment of her seduction; and thus suggests that she was not induced through inclination or interest to give her consent. Yet we understand that what had happened is criminal and abhorrent, but... somehow we keep our sympathies for Moll.

After her seduction, Moll’s situation is changed to worse by the younger brother, who seeks to marry her. In my opinion, this time all Moll’s principles and values, as long as she claims to be innocent, are being tested and her true nature is proofed. Here, we are talking about someone who is not only involved into the illegitimate sexual relationship but also about the moral principals of each and everyone.

According to Moll, we are dealing in this situation with her moral principles, such as: “I said everything to dissuade him from his design that I could imagine, or “ I repented heartily my easiness with the eldest brother ” , or “ I could not think of being a whore to one brother and a wife to the other”⁴, but at the same time she seeks for moral arguments for strategic reasons, not for honest ones. Her point of view is how to deceive the reader and show the events, although fully amoral and criminal, in the penitent and naive way. We know this because right after giving us an discourse about her distress, she says: “for though I had no great scruples of conscience ” ⁵.

Basically, we could blame her for the hypocrisy towards the younger brother, but she is absolutely open and confidential towards us. In this way her perplexity is obvious, her anxieties are prudential and after all she is the one who has been deceived by the cruel and cunning elder brother. She has to take even more: marry someone unloved.

As to E. Zimmerman in “Defoe and the Novel”, he says the following about Moll’s behaviour:

“ This private betrothal does not excuse her sexual misbehaviour, but it does make her subsequent marriage to Robin a greater evil than sex with his elder brother...”.⁶.

In this way I would like to move on to the next part of my paper and have a little discourse about Defoe´s attitude towards marriage and how it reflected on the life of Moll Flanders.

3. Daniel Defoes attitude towards marriage

To begin with I would like to say that when Moll realised that she has been left by the elder brother she is full of reproaches towards him, which are partly very justified. For example, she says: “he had engaged himself to marry me, and that my consent was at the same time engaged to him; he had all along told me I was his wife, and I looked upon myself as effectual so as if the ceremony had passed”⁷. She also declares to him: “I was your wife intentionally, though not in the eyes of the world... it was as effectual a marriage as if we had been publicly wedded by the person of the parish ” ⁸. In this place I would like to bring the opinion of Defoe` towards marriage, which he has expressed few years before in the “Advice from the Scandal Club⁹ ”.

In his opinion, the first and most important thing is: marriage is nothing but a promise. He says:

“the ceremony is no addition to the contract, only anything exacted by the law, to prevent knaves doing what seems here to be attempted, and therefore the society insist upon it, when the promise was made, the man and woman were actually married”¹⁰.

In another place Defoe says:

“A publick marriage signifies no more before God than a private contract... only here’s the difference, the first gives a satisfaction to the world, and renders the party proper subjects of the law as to estates“¹¹.

Keeping in mind what I have just mentioned above, I found his opinion very revolutionary and extraordinary in the context of the seventeenth century. It is absolutely clear that nowadays anyone could bring up such an opinion. But on that time, I guess, it was quite unusually, as we know from the words of Moll Flanders herself and not only that only arrange marriage or money were worth getting married. This statement is shown openly throughout the whole book and repeats every time when Moll is about to get married again. We can find it in the situation with all her husbands, where either she herself is cheating or some of her husbands are cheating her. The bottom line is that marriage without money is useless and stupid.

In “Conjugal Lewdness”¹², Defoe describes marriage as “potentially the best or worst condition in life: it is either the “ Centre to which all the lesser Delights of life tend, as a point in the circle ” or a “ kind of hell in miniature ” ¹³.

Concerning love, he mentions:

“Love is that one essential and absolutely necessary part of the composition... without which the matrimonial state is, I think, can never be happy”¹⁴. His discourse about marriage for primarily sexual reasons is “sheltering our wickedness under the letter of the law and he “particularly condemns marriages that are made primarily for economic or sexual reasons”.¹⁵

Consequently the marriage to Robin is a double jeopardy. On one hand, Moll doesn’t appreciate her good luck by being loved by someone from the upper class and willing to get married to her legally. One the other hand, she betrays him from the very beginning while not mentioning her relationship with Robin’s brother (which is obvious) and also later on: “I committed adultery and incest with him every day in my desires”¹⁶. Thus, is she a criminal from the beginning and a tactical player or deceived innocence?

In my opinion, bearing in mind Defoe´s feelings about marriage, we can certainly assume that he despises Moll for being so wicked. As a reader, we are asked to follow Defoe and condemn her as well, on one hand. Then, ... here again we are facing the ambiguity of Moll’s personality, namely: instead of turning her our backs - we forgive her! We forgive her calculated attitude towards Robin, forget about her money excitement in the relationship with elder brother and the compensation that he gave her, and we are focusing our attention on the fact that she is about: “to go to church like a bear to the stake”¹⁷. We still remember what Defoe has said: “marriage is a promise” and she had already promised! No blame on her!

Right in this place I again would like to point out the main problematic of Moll’s character: is she an honest and innocent person or a calculated player, who is eager to do anything just to win the reader’s attention? Is she presenting us the circumstances the way she wants and manipulates us? and the main goal is achieved: we are about to defend her, not to condemn?

I would even go further in my presumption and say that even Defoe himself tries to justify her deeds and somehow protects her.

To sum up this part, I would say that the first stage in her decay is finished and she is more like someone who chooses to deny love for the sake of money and, she prefers practical rather than moral and emotional aspects of life. My conclusion is that non of us is agree with her consent to get married to Robin, as it is amoral, not even Defoe himself, yet Moll succeeds. What I mean is Moll’s goal. In first line she asks and overtly seeks from us a negative judgement of her criminal longings; nevertheless, her gesture of self-reproach may also involve an appeal to our fellow feelings. Whatever our response to this particular confession, it is part of a larger strategy that clearly tends to her advantage. The bottom line of this confession is that innocent desires are as effectually virtuous as innocent deeds and her virtue belies her true quilt and her quilt belies her true virtue.

4. Moll and her marriages

4.1. Moll and the development of her personality up to her forth marriage

As we know, form now on Moll decides to go for money rather than for love and as a result of it soon she is married to a gentleman-tradesman. This marriage is not only because of money but rather because of “his gentlemanly appearance; she has a pleasant time with him, but parts form him with little feeling except annoyance at his poor management of money ” ¹⁸.

The marriage itself is not really interesting for us, except the fact that after Moll has rejected love she is determined to find her pleasure in money. What I mean is how she deals with financial situation after her husband’s got arrested for debt. Her first thought is: “all is going to wreck ” , her first action: “ is better to conduct salvage operations beforehand than afterwards”¹⁹. Basically, what she does is pure cheating of creditors. I don’t know if her actions are so vicious, as any women is her situation, who’s been left like this, would prefer to secure some of valuable things rather than to pay for debts for her unlucky husband. But what I am pointing out in her deeds is the way of description of it and thus her sly intentions towards us and the tricks she uses.

Once again, Moll is not culpable for the circumstances, which provoked her misfortune. Her husband is. She says: ” he would have me go home, and in the night take away everything I had in the house of any value, and secure it”²⁰. Indirectly, she acknowledges the fact of robbery, but she shifts this dishonourable deed to her husband. And thus she doesn’t rob or cheat the creditors of her own inclination, but is left to do so by her husband; she is just a tool.

What I have already mentioned before in the scene about her seduction and what I am trying to show here is that Moll attempts to present the situation in a different light, namely: she is an innocent victim (already from the first pages), and she is always prompted to do bad things by somebody else. Before it was the elder brother, now it is her husband, afterwards it is going to be her husband-brother or somebody else. The presence of each of this persons, who influenced Moll’s bad luck, makes us probably less critical of her subsequent criminal (in the eyes of God and society) deeds than we would be if her status was altogether clear and she was left with the responsibility on her own.

When all this distress happened to her she found herself in a very odd situation: she was “WIDOW bewitched; I had a husband and no husband”²¹. She made an acquaintance with a very sober, good woman, “who was a WIDOW TOO, LIKE ME”²². Like who? Isn’t it a little bit hypocritical towards us now? What widow?

What I see in this statement is that she wants to show us the parallels between her own case, or what she is about to do, and this woman’s. As we know, she helped her friend-widow to get married and is searching for a husband for herself. In other words, her task is to smooth the facts and get rid off the responsibility. Her dearest friend, who she had helped to get married, is going to take this burden. And Moll? She remains to be a passive tool of others deliberate cunning! What is happening next implies that the forthcoming attempt to cheat her future husband may be in the wrong, but that the fault is not Moll’s but her friend’s. And as a consequence she escapes any responsibility.

After she had finally found a new husband because he had money and was good tempered, and probably would not abuse her when he would discover that he had been tricked, she acknowledges to us: “I often reflected on myself how doubly criminal it was to deceive such a man; but that necessity, which pressed me to a settlement suitable to my condition, was my authority for it”²³. How honest and innocent she sounds in her self-reproaches, like as if she, in fact, hasn’t done anything bad in order to get married to a well-off man!

However, her life with new husband is not so cheerful as she had expected, after she discovered that her husband was actually her half-brother. What really bothers me now is her personality. First of all, she says: “I was not much touched with the crime of it ” !!!, but “ it made my husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me ” !!, and how to regain her peace of mind “ without

causing the ruin of the whole family ” ²⁴ ! Secondly, Moll has got two children, who somehow don’t really interest her or don’t mean anything to her at least on that time. And thirdly, she starts to loathe her husband, although it is obviously not his fault that the things went this way. To me, she acts like an insane person, whose problem is only how to get rid off all this stress without loosing financial advantage. Her conscience is not present, her mother instincts are dead, her family bounds are useless. She has a horror of poverty and a public exposure.

In the opinion of G. A.Starr the author of “Spiritual Autobiography of Defoe” Moll is described like this:

“She undergoes gradual hardening from the point of her seduction, so that the process gives a continuity to her behaviour throughout the larger part of the book”²⁵.

He also points out that:

“Defoe is concerned to show us how her moral arteries harden, and it may now be objected, more plausibly than ever, that such a woman would no longer be capable of the tenderness and the moral scruples... But to say that is to have too rigid a conception of human character...”²⁶.

She is much more deliberate in her actions and cruel than we suggest. Thanks to her nice way of expressing herself, she smoothes the facts and we are not able to keep our judgements crucial on her. To sum up this part of my paper briefly, I could say that her deeds contradict her presentations of them. This makes us difficult to see Moll in true light.

4.1.2. Moll and the intertwine with her two last marriages

Her next liaison is at Bath. She is now neither married no widow²⁷. Her new lover is, as Moll asserts us, “he had no wife, that is to say, she was as no wife to him”²⁸. The way is open for her to go. She has already justified her action by giving us false information and now she is about to make the first move. Her position now is “knowing the world as I had done, and that such kind of things do not often last long, I took care to lay up as much money as I could for a wet day...”²⁹. And in order to achieve her goal, she said: “The inclination was not to be resisted... I was obliged to yield up all even before he asked it”³⁰...

I think that she is clever enough to understand the facts and probably tries to do her best toward this lover. She doesn’t cheat on him or misuse him. But in the background of her mind there is money and financial stability, which she is still searching for. Sex for pleasure is more shameful that sex for money. This is her excuse. She has to survive however difficult it was. She is aware of the criminality of her life but is not capable to change it. After staying with her lover for nearly six years, I doubt, that she had thought much about what was good and what’s bad. We were supposed to do that for her, though after her lover left her, we feel very sorry for her and are full of reproaches towards him, not her. She is in a miserable position whenever. This episode at Bath has some similarity to her relationship with her first lover by those quineas that her Bath lover poured into her lap.

Her next relationships are intertwined. She is obliged to get married to a bank clerk, while she marries Jemmy the highwayman. Perhaps it is better to treat them separately to the certain degree in order not to get confused who had playing who.

The banker’s clerk is like Moll having a wife and no wife. Surprisingly, Moll becomes involved more than once with men who have “a wife and no wife”, so that:

“The ambiguities of her own situation will be compounded by those of the people she moves among”³¹.

His wife is a whore by inclination and for “the sake of the vice”. Somehow this clerk fell in love with Moll immediately, which is quite odd, and too of them spend some time together discussing different ways of freeing him from his weird bond. At the same time, after becoming a nearly official fiancée of a banker, which Moll was very eager to do, she marries the highwayman (just by the way) by using her cunning and tricks.

The trouble here is that Moll is not only keeping the bank clerk in ignorant abeyance but that she is deliberately getting married to someone else by tricking him. It may sound strange, but apparently she is also in deep love with him, which doesn’t bother her later on to get married to the banker.

After having a child from Jemmy, she returns back to the banker. What about any picks of conscience? As a rule, when Moll commits crime she faces two problems: first is how to get rid off the actual problem, whatever it is. In this situation it is a child; and second is how to retain our sympathy “ in very course of describing her baseness and duplicity towards others ” ³².

Moll’s dilemma over the child aggravates when it is born: apparently her mother instincts are born at the same time with it and she says: “it touched my heart so forcibly to think of parting entirely with the child, and ... of having it murdered, or starved by neglect and ill-usage — that I could not think of it without horror ³³ ”. The truth of the matter is that she has already left nine children somewhere in this world! She goes on: “those women who consent to the disposing their children out of the way, as it is called, for decency sake, would consider that it is only a killing their children with safety”³⁴.

She is changing the subject so cunningly “all those women” that we are confused to the prospect that she will discover grounds for doing what she initially finds unthinkable, and for preserving a stance or virtuous indignation towards those who do the same thing under other circumstances.

Up to this moment I didn’t mind her lying towards us, as it was mainly for her protection. From now on, I believe, she is heartless. She didn’t care much about first marriage to Robin and their two children. After he died she wasn’t overwhelmed with grief either; she didn’t care much about her marriage to her brother, although it was not his fault and he was suffering to the extreme as even to commit suicide, which she even didn’t think of; she didn’t care about all her children from legal or illegal marriages because she was so hypocrite and self-orientated; and now she is so mendacious that even pretends to be a nearly penitent and suddenly feels sorry for all those pure creature left alone in this cruel world! From now on, I definitely have no sympathies for her anymore.

Moreover, as to her second problem how to trick the facts, she has something new. She is innocent again. Why? because she has nothing to do with the dispense of her child and marriage to the banker but her mother midwife! This midwife has such “bewitching eloquence, and so great a power of persuasion, that there was no concealing anything from her and thus this midwife .. she fell a-laughing at my scruples about marrying, and told me the other was no marriage, but a cheat on both sides; and that, as we were parted by mutual consent, the nature of the contract was destroyed, and the obligation was mutually discharged ” ³⁵. And here we go: Moll feels free to marry now because “the other was no marriage, but a cheat on both sides”. Believe it or not but this old lady is guilty of overcoming Moll’s wholesome convictions with pernicious doctrine and “bewitching eloquence”, when in fact she has merely reinforced with “reason” a decision that Moll had already arrived at through her own will.

In conclusion to this part I just want to say that, in my opinion, after having gone through all her marriages Moll has become so senseless, so that the process of her spiritual hardening has got accomplished. Now she is ready to become what so ever: a thief, a murder or a penitent? depends!

That is to say:

“Like regeneration, the term “hardness of heart” can represent a fully realised state, but it more commonly stands for an ongoing, cumulative development. It is not reached instantaneously, through a single misdeed, any more that is regeneration achieved through the bare experience of conversion: each requires time and persistence”³⁶.

5. Moll and her career as a criminal

“Her criminal career is at a stage frequently described by divines by the simile of a spring, easily dammed at first but quickly becoming a flood if allowed to proceed”³⁷.

In this part of my essay I will try to concentrate my attention not at Moll’s deeds as a criminal but to follow the process of her soul hardening. The purpose of this chapter is to ask the question whether it is possible to become a true penitent after having committed numerous crimes without any scruple or what are the real reasons for her penitence.

The death of Moll’s last husband plunges her into the straits, which she is too scared of. She is broke once again and is left perfectly friendless and helpless. She feels that her “ heart would sink within me at the inevitable approach of misery and want”³⁸. I think that although the respectable reader had already enough of her deeds and misdeeds, still she is aware of loosing his sympathy. She appeals to us in order to smooth what she is about to tell. We are nearly challenged to put ourselves in Moll’s position to justify her deeds. As usually, she portrays herself as a passive instrument, as a helpless animal. This time as a victim of “baits” and “snares” put cunningly and maliciously in her way by devil. As the moment of her theft approaches, the role of the devil becomes more clear.

After finishing her first crime, she finds herself in the atmosphere of perplexity; we are feeling sorry her and wish her that she would never get caught. First of all because she just has been manipulated by a will more powerful than her own and, secondly because her actions were without her own inclination, what we know from her own words.

E. Zimmerman in “Defoe and the Novel” defines it like this:

“As her life becomes more openly corrupt, Moll´s attempts to hide her evil lead to inner chaos. To continue to deny her increasingly apparent evil requires enormous effort. Her disguises multiply, and she loses her sense of her own coherence”³⁹.

“Newgate is the emblem of what Moll has become”⁴⁰.

Basically, we know already that what she does or about to do again and again is amoral, criminal, vicious and so on and so forth. Anyone who finds himself in this kind of situation doesn’t have a single chance for sympathy or even understanding. Moll, in fact, has lost all her control of her life and even steals what she does not need, like for example a horse.

Surprisingly, although there is no a single touch to exonerate her, the cumulative effect is to dispose us in her favour! What I mean here is the ambiguity of per personality and ambiguity of our perception. That is to say, she produces numerous defences of her act, but with a touch of hypocrisy. She shows us all the events the way they are, but there are too many circumstances which change the true nature of the crime.

“Temptations and impulses to mischief do not originate in Moll, but in her counsellors; and she herself is the first to label the counsellors “the evil” and the impulses “wicked”, so that she further dissociates herself from them, and aligns herself with the respectable reader by anticipating his severest judgement”⁴¹.

After all her sentimentality or compassion for victims or humanity towards little ships, which she robs, Moll has reached the point at which, as she puts it, she “cast off all remorse and repentance” and this is the leading point of my paper.

From my point of view, Moll is a proper criminal with little remorse and repentance ever. She is an educated hardened theft, who’s not only been experienced for many years but also goes for this business with her whole heart. Besides this, she doesn’t do it for necessity anymore but for the sake of it. And as little she reflects on the moral aspect of her profession, as little she cares about her “colloquies” who have been either hanged or transported. Somehow I have a feeling that at last she has found herself in an occupation which satisfies her.

Moreover, she is not a low class pickpocket, she is an elaborated criminal, whose morality has died long time ago and her spiritual decay is at full power.

“In other words, her career in crime is not so much a case of innocence giving way to quilt, as of existing quilt taking on new degrees and dimensions”⁴².

So then, as to her becoming a true penitent, it is not possible. When she is at last at Newgate and claims to become a different person and a true penitent, I can’t believe her anymore. She is more like a morally decoyed person and someone who has nothing to loose. She is sentenced to death. That’s why her search for the “satisfaction and comfort” of repentance becoming successful.

“she finally believes in her repentance when it can no longer serve an earthly purpose”⁴³.

Till the very end of her story her purpose is to be good to us. Her attitude towards the reader is more important for her than towards her deeds. There is always someone who committed crimes for her and the purpose of her story is to deplore her but not to despise. I guess, she succeeds at this point. The respectable reader, we are, believe her vows of innocence and basically all her statements of innocence have been proofed. She emphasises her bad life, past wickedness in order to separate the present from the past. And we do sympathise with her troublesome life and forgive everything.

6. Conclusion

In order to come to a conclusion I would like to point out that from the very beginning Moll has set an important point, namely: She insists that she is the reader’s instructor, not his parishioner or patient. Her instructions to us often serve to insulate her from painful episodes of the past. In dealing with this even, she suppresses her feelings of quilt, provides a justification for her confession, and reiterates her separation from her old deeds. She can derive from her past whatever stability she needs.

She presents herself to us from many different points of view. Sometimes she lies to us, sometimes she’s honest. Most of the time she’s clear about her reprehensible deeds, can analyse them by herself and therefore expects the reader’s judgement. Yet she doesn’t only want us to think of her as of a criminal. She is also brave, generous, affectionate, and gentle even in her acts of crime. Her virtues are as apparent as her faults. This is true!

Throughout the book she was so serious and elaborate to keep out sympathies that finally we believed her and have less to condemn her that to prise her. Her position is mostly ambiguous, as sometimes we don’t know how to understand her. Is she an injured part or injuring one. As I have already mentioned, she is contradicting herself and thus makes our position more difficult to create an opinion about her. She is both generous and selfish, both faithful and disloyal, her attitude towards all her husbands are honest and dishonest. She is both reprehensible and sympathetic.

Unfortunately she has one weak characteristics: She can resist anything except temptation and this turns out to be her ruin. In fact, she has a nature of a calculating adventures who finds that she can secure a fife of luxury by trading on her personal charms. At the same time she is just a woman of seventeenth century and, I believe, that sometimes she indeed feels unprotected and has no way out of many situations. I also believe that she is a victim of her greediness and desires, although she is aware of many of them.

7. Literature

1. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993
2. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Herausgegeben von Norbert Miller. München: Carl Hanser Verlag 1968
3. Moore, J.R.: Daniel Defoe: Citizen of the modern World. Chicago and London.- The University of Chicago Press 1975
4. Starr, G. A.: Defoe and Casuistry. Printed in the united states of America by Princeton university press.- Princeton: New Jersey 1971
5. Starr, G. A.: Defoe and spiritual autobiography. New York: Coridan Press 1971
6. Zimmerman, E.: Defoe and the Novel. Printed by University of California Press.- Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1975

[...]

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¹ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.12

² the same p.13

³ the same p.34

⁴ the same p.25

⁵ the same p.26

⁶ E. Zimmermann: Defoe and the Novel. University of Califonrnian Press 1975. p. 80

⁷ original text. Moll Flanders. p.32

⁸ the same p.33

⁹ taken from G.A. Starr: Defoe and Casuistry. Princeton, New Jersey 1971. p.118

¹⁰ G.A. Starr: Defoe and Casuistry. Princeton, New Jersey 1971. p.119

¹¹ Review, supplement, 1. (nov. , 1704) 19-20

¹² taken from E. Zimmerman: Defoe and the Novel. University of California Press.-Berkley.Los Angeles. London. 1975. p.80.

¹³ the same p. 81

¹⁴ the same p.81

¹⁵ the same p.81

¹⁶ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993.p.53

¹⁷ the same p.54

¹⁸ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.62

¹⁹ the same p. 63

²⁰ the same p. 58

²¹ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.64

²² the same p. 60

²³ the same p.78

²⁴ the same p.88

²⁵ G:A. Starr.- Defoe & Spiritual autobiography. Cordian press. New York 1971. p.143

²⁶ G:A. Starr.- Defoe & Spiritual autobiography. Cordian press. New York 1971. p.143

²⁷ apparently

²⁸ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.108

²⁹ the same p. 109

³⁰ the same p. 111

³¹ G. A. Starr.- Defoe & Casuistry. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press 1977. p127

³² G. A. Starr.- Defoe & Casuistry. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press 1977. p140

³³ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.168

³⁴ the same p.168

³⁵ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.171

³⁶ G:A. Starr.- Defoe & Spiritual autobiography. Cordian press: New York 1971. p.147

³⁷ G:A. Starr.- Defoe & Spiritual autobiography. Cordian press: New York 1971. p.151

³⁸ original text. Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham plc, Chatham, Kent. - Wordsworth Editions Limited 1993. p.185

³⁹ E. Zimmerman: Defoe and the Novel. University of California Press.-Berkley.Los Angeles. London. 1975. p.88

⁴⁰ same p. 88

⁴¹ G. A. Starr: Defoe & Casuistry. Princeton, New jersey: Princeton University Press 1977. p153

⁴² G:A. Starr: Defoe & Spiritual autobiography. Cordian press: New York 1971. p.149

⁴³ E. Zimmerman: Defoe and the Novel. University of California Press.-Berkley.Los Angeles. London. 1975. p.90