An Analysis of Moll Flanders Essay -- Moll Flanders Essays

An Analysis of moll Flanders The story is about the graphic experiences of a woman in the underworld of 18th century London. She is anonymous, moll Flanders being a pseudonym which she adopts when she needs an alternative identity for her roughshod feel. She has no family, having been abandoned by her own mother - a transported felon, and her upbringing, education, loving position and material well - being atomic number 18 all forever precarious. She lives in a hostile, urban world, which allows for no weakness. Social position and wealth are the dominant factors for survival. She has neither and her life is a struggle to arrive at both. She is clever and persevering, always alert to opportunity and she survives and becomes rich, although after a life fraught with difficulty, much of it of her own making. Defoes novel gives us a assimilate sense of daily life and the anxieties attendant on economic and societal uncertainty and he displays a clear understan ding of female specifics, in a criminal world. Defoe himself was an outsider. A Londoner who often had to live by his wits, move by creditors and spending time in Newgate prison for debt. His own truth was at times rather dubious. He writes accurate social accounting in a fictional form. The social details in Moll Flanders are very accurate, even those set in Virginia and the novel is also politically and economically structured. The themes of the novel, in part, are transgression, repentance and redemption, which are to be expected, tending(p) Defoes Dissenting background. Molls fortunes do not prosper in the Babylon of London, save in Virginia, in the New world. Perhaps Defoe was suggesting, like hi... ...ly innocent, despite her adventures and her chosen lifestyle as a master criminal. Defoe shows us the two sides of her character in changeless opposition. On the one hand, she can be thrifty, cold and efficient and on the other, reckless, excited and bold. She is never dull. Again, Defoe derives no moral judgement, but leaves the reader to make his own. The novel is structured so that we see a series of parodies of tragic situations, which often become almost bizarre in their comic absurdity. Moll sometimes behaves insensitively, or even in a completely pachydermic way, but Defoes heroine is never contemptible, eagerly thrusting from one experience to the next. The novel has a deep intensity of experience. Molls emotions, too are mixed and unstable, but she always recognises and articulates them, even if she does not show complete understanding of them.