THE READING RHEUM: MOLL FLANDERS (1722)

I've devoted four posts to Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE, which I consider to be the starting-point for Western popular fiction. Until recently I had not read Defoe's second-best-known novel, MOLL FLANDERS, though I'd seen a couple of cinematic adaptations. In one 2014 essay,
however, I conjured with Defoe's Moll as an example of an early female character who was not a "damsel in distress." I said back then:

According to the summaries I have read, CRUSOE, unlike OTRANTO, has no significant female characters at all, so it neither proves nor disproves Colangelo's assertion. None of Defoe's other works fit my criteria for popular culture, though it is worth noting that Defoe was not hostile to the idea of empowered female characters, given that his second best-known novel is 1722's MOLL FLANDERS. The titular character probably is not a femme formidable, though Wikipedia notes that she "begins a career of artful thievery, which, by employing her wits, beauty, charm, and femininity, as well as hard-heartedness and wickedness, brings her the financial security she has always sought."

Now that I have read MOLL, my conjecture-- probably based  as much on film-adaptations of the Defoe novel as on the Wiki summary-- is borne out. Moll starts out life on the down side, being born to a prostitute-mother in Newgate Prison. Moll-- whose titular name is made-up, though supposedly Defoe based her on a real woman with the same first name-- is separated from her mother at an early age. However, at age eleven she's apprenticed as a maid to a well-to-do family. This circumstance eventually leads her to her first romance, when she hooks up with one of the young men of the family. However, he seduces her with promises of marriage, but has no intention of making her anything but his mistress. This character-- who goes unnamed, like most of Defoe's characters here-- becomes one of several men whom Moll beds and/or weds in her quest for security, though none of these liaisons really "take." The early mortality of men during 18th-century England spares Moll from the fate of being a black widow murderess, though Defoe gets rid of male characters so quickly one might suspect him of murderous tendencies being exorcised through fiction.

In truth, Defoe seems to have a proto-feminist concept of Moll. On occasion men come to Moll's "rescue" with greater monetary resources, but it's almost as often that she makes her own money in clever ways, particularly in the latter half of the novel, when she becomes a professional thief. The only real time a male "rescue" really counts comes near the conclusion, when she's faced with hanging, and an unnamed minister manages to get her sentence changed, so that she's transported to America. But none of the "rescues" are so structured as to make Moll seem a "damsel in distress." I suppose she wouldn't be "feminist" these days because she generally uses sexuality and trickery to get ahead in life, rather than either political action or even the forceful endeavors of a femme formidable, like some of the female knights and rulers I've discussed elsewhere.

Both of Defoe's most famous characters, Robinson and Moll, incarnate the spirit of the entrepreneur as it was being re-defined in post-Renaissance Europe, and I would say that Defoe gives both of them as much agency as was possible for their respective genders in that time-period. Moll does suffer a certain amount of mistreatment by males, but she's usually able to escape being controlled-- so that if one deems her the First Lady of Popular Fiction, she definitely escapes the status of being "a damsel in distress."