Scan barcode
A review by jrc2011
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
4.0
Written in an age when fiction often took the form of moralistic autobiographies, Moll Flanders pretends to be written by a woman who was left an orphan, sought to live off other people from an early age, seems to have avoided work most of her life, but then somehow got involved with actually doing work and achieved some success and was able to retire before the age of 70.
A profligate bigamist who believed - and probably quite rightly so - that the key to her comfort and care lay in marrying well, she married often and seems to have popped out babies all along the way (12 total, only like 4 or 5 seem to be living).
It seems like she spent a lot of time thinking of ways to get and keep other people's money - and in an age when one could live on 5 pounds per year -- gathering together 500-700 pounds (could you imagine putting together the equivalent amount of cash to live simply or comfortably for 100 years?)
One has to wonder at her motive and greed. She talks about her escapades as a thief as "adventures" -- and it makes me wonder how widespread such behavior was at the time.
By the time she ends up back in Virginia - where she invests in some land and her plantation makes amazing profits - she attributes this to her penitence and "God" rather than a really basic fact: England at the time had no such opportunities for women, or of men of certain classes and it was only in the colonies that people not born into wealth could attain it.
Even the one basic fact of "hunting" was not available to her Lancashire husband in England -- nobody was allowed to hunt on any land unless they owned it or had permission of the owner (people were hanged for poaching) despite the fact that England has a long tradition of allowing right-of-way across private property.
Moll Flanders is a picaresque - to be sure - but underlying this is a critique of women's position in society -- and poor people generally -- and the static, stifling socio-economic hierarchy in England.
A profligate bigamist who believed - and probably quite rightly so - that the key to her comfort and care lay in marrying well, she married often and seems to have popped out babies all along the way (12 total, only like 4 or 5 seem to be living).
It seems like she spent a lot of time thinking of ways to get and keep other people's money - and in an age when one could live on 5 pounds per year -- gathering together 500-700 pounds (could you imagine putting together the equivalent amount of cash to live simply or comfortably for 100 years?)
One has to wonder at her motive and greed. She talks about her escapades as a thief as "adventures" -- and it makes me wonder how widespread such behavior was at the time.
By the time she ends up back in Virginia - where she invests in some land and her plantation makes amazing profits - she attributes this to her penitence and "God" rather than a really basic fact: England at the time had no such opportunities for women, or of men of certain classes and it was only in the colonies that people not born into wealth could attain it.
Even the one basic fact of "hunting" was not available to her Lancashire husband in England -- nobody was allowed to hunt on any land unless they owned it or had permission of the owner (people were hanged for poaching) despite the fact that England has a long tradition of allowing right-of-way across private property.
Moll Flanders is a picaresque - to be sure - but underlying this is a critique of women's position in society -- and poor people generally -- and the static, stifling socio-economic hierarchy in England.