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| Moll Flanders |
| 作者Author / Daniel Defoe 丹尼爾．狄福 |
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Moll Flanders (1722)
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Provider:
Cecilia Liu / 劉雪珍
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Moll
Flanders is the chronicle of a full life-span, told by a
woman in her seventieth year with wonder and acceptance. In one sense, she is the
product of a Puritan society turned to worldly zeal. Moll is supreme
tradeswoman, always ready to draw up an account, to enter each
experience in her ledger as profit or loss, bustling with incredible
force in the market place of marriage, and finally turning to those
bolder and franker forms of competitive enterprise, whoredom and theft. To an extent, she is the embodiment of thrift, good management, and industry. But she is also the
perverse and savagely acquisitive outlaw, the once-dedicated servant of
the Lord turned to the false worship of wealth, power, success.
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Her drive in part the
inevitable quest for security, the island of property that will one
above the waters of an individualistic, cruelly commercial society. Born in Newgate,
left with no resources but her needle, she constantly seeks enough
wealth or a wealthy enough husband to free herself from the threat of
poverty and the temptations of crime. But she finds herself fascinated
by the quest itself, by the management of marriages, the danger of
thievery. When she has more money than she needs, she is still
disguising herself for new crimes, disdaining the humble trade of the
seamstress. When she finally settles into respectability, it is with a
gentleman, not a merchant; her husband is a rather pretentious,
somewhat sentimental highwayman, who is not much good as a farmer but
is considerable sportsman. Moll is so simple middle-class mercantile
figure.
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| There is another
dimension of Moll Flanders. Her
constant moral resolutions, her efforts to reform, her doubts and
remorse cannot be discounted as hypocrisy or even unrealistic
self-deception. Moll
is a daughter of Puritan thought, and her piety has all the troublesome
ambiguities of the faith. Her religion and morality are essentially
emotional. She has scruples against incest, but they take the form of
nausea, physical revulsion. She intends virtuous behavior and is
astonished to discover her hardness of heart.
Moll's life is a
career of self-discovery, of "herself surprised," surprised
by herself and with herself. |
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| Key
Points
Moll Flanders: a picaresque novel
Devices to gain unity: Newgate to Newgate: rebirth; Old world ←→New
world
Places:
Colchester /to be a gentlewoman
Later, again
London
Lancashire
Bath
Moll as wife, mother
recognition:
different stages: Mother/Jemy /Son
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Motifs
Money
and Marriage as business in the 18th Century
Gentleman
→ whoring and thievery
Middle-class
mentality
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