Moll Flanders

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	1.5 (2)
Download:	147
Data:	28.11.2000
Numero di pagine:	2
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

Marriage as we can see from the story as a whole was a relatively loose contractual arrangement at this period. We can recognize it as a familiar period of commercial capitalism when the system of justice is struggling to become estabilished.
Moll as a woman of embullience with the determination to look only to her future: Moll is the new small-time capitalist in the making, she is the pilgrim processing to what, as sharp-witted child and clear-headed woman, she rightly takes to be the capitalist definition of a gentlewoman – the wife of a prosperous buisnessman or a self-made woman in her own right.
Defoe presents it as a society without a father; no traditional God, no traditional law. Moll, the new woman of capitalism, has a mother and is adept at finding surrogate mothers.
Moll is good even while a thief and prostitute and just a bad or just as good even while she is a wife and investor.
Moll steals and prostitutes her body for one reason and one reason alone: she is poor. ‘Give me not poverty, least I steal’…
Defoe is writing from a time in which Moll as wife and Moll as prostitute, Moll is in all plausibility a moderately good woman caught up from necessity in relatively ‘bad’ acts; had she been born into social circumstances it is just as likely that she might have been a bad woman caught up in ‘good’ acts.
What does it mean to be a ‘gentlewoman'? in Moll’s society, a gentlewoman is a member of the leisured gentry, or a prostitute: both ends of the social scale meet and are still, today, exemplified by the title ‘madam’.
Moll steals because she is poor and leads a moral life because she is prosperous; her social crimes against property have not yet been sufficientely internalized by men to have become so much a part of their unconscious thinking that they seem equivalent to religious sins.
In a society that valued a person’s life less than a teaspoon, the worth of the unborn foetus came into its own. A woman such as Moll’s mother could escape hanging if she pleaded pregnancy.
The society is clearly one that was sexually lax and that placed small value on human life.
Moll, then, is criminal and plebian heroine – they are much the same thing. By the end she has become a prosperous self-made woman. Moll is a heroine because she has the courage to be successful, to know what she wants and go to get it. In the context of the times, for any woman success must have meant to become bourgeois and prosperous. Capitalism in England had develped at this stage into a situation where there was an urban middle class and a growing urban plebeian class.
Moll is an incarnation of capitalist woman at that moment when the society’s ideologists are torn between an awareness that all is new and an effort to make all permanent and changeless.
Prostitution and theft in this new society are what you do if you cannot get successfully married in the one case, and have no capital in the other.
Prostitution and theft stand to marriage and investiment as their necessary other sides. The need for marriage and prostitution for immediate economic reasons are particulary hers as a woman.