Moll Flanders as a picaresque novel

Moll Flanders is basically a picaresque novel. The

picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of
prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts,
in realistic, and often, humorous detail,
the adventures of a roguish hero of low social
class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society and is
in a constant journey from one social milieu to
another in an effort to survive. A picaresque novel is
typically narrated in the first person, and the narrator
achieves a moral perspective by interspersing his
narrative with moral reflections. It is episodic in
structure and each episode is independent in its own
way. Moll Flanders has all these characteristics with
the big difference that it has a "picara" for its main
protagonist rather than a "picaro".
To put it simply, a "picara" is a female rogue. She
cannot completely fit into the mould of the picaro
for she is a woman. A picara is defined not in terms
of what she is but with reference to the traditional
picaro. She is thus defined by what she is not. She
has her own identity but still functions in a man’s
world and therefore most of her attributes cater to
the demands of men. The picara in her quest to
climb the social ladder must rely on men to achieve
her goals. This is how a picara is different from a
picaro in a picaresque novel. Defoe's creation of
Moll is a way to celebrate a change in the traditional
perspective of women. She is a rebel against the set
norms of the society.
The entire novel can be divided into three parts. The
first phase of Moll’s life describes her childhood and
her first love affair. The second part traces her
attempts to find domestic and economic security
through marriage; and the third recounts her career
as a thief.
The first phase of her life depicts her victimization
in a man’s world. Born at Newgate and abandoned
by her convicted mother, she became conscious
quite early in life of her low origin and state of
abandonment. This made her wish to become a
"gentlewoman" who, in her unique childlike
perception, was any independent woman that lived
by her own earning. This wish to become a
"gentlewoman" was so intense that she refused to
serve as a servant. From the very beginning she had
an urge to be in a better position in life. However a
woman who had “beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense,
manners, modesty, and all to an extreme” but no
money, was nobody in the society. Her first
encounter with the two brothers acquainted her with
this harsh truth of her life. The elder brother who
made love to her several times and made false
propositions of marriage made it clear to her that a
woman of a poor low class is not acceptable in the
marriage market. To protect his own reputation he
insisted on her marrying the younger brother, thus
reducing her to a whore to the two brothers at once.
She gets married to the younger brother to secure
social and economic position. However she never
loved him and “committed adultery and incest with
him everyday”. Therefore her husband’s death did
not affect her much and she started her art of men
hunting to live a better life. She states "I have been
tricked once by that cheat called Love, but the game
was over”. She resolved to get well married or not at
all.
Moll like her male counterparts took the sole control
of her life. She never bowed down before the male
power; rather she used men to increase her value in
the society. Like the Wife of Bath in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, her primary aim was to achieve
security through the only way available - marriage.
She wanted to share the power that is withheld by
the patriarchal society. She indulges in a number of
marriages which gradually change her role from that
of a victim to a predator.
To make herself wanted in the marriage market,
Moll relies on her physical attractiveness as much as
on her intellect. To raise her market value she makes
herself desirable to several men at once, so that each
one would vie for her as a prize win. And the most
effective way of making herself desirable, she knew,
was to add suggestion of wealth to her physical
charms.
According to Ann Daghistary a picara takes the
active role in initiating most of her encounters with
men. Moll meets a lot of gentlemen in order to find
herself an economically affluent husband. Her most
significant encounter and marriage occurred with a
gentleman who later turned out to be her own
brother. She married him unknowingly and later had
two children by him. The moral allegory probably
intended in this instance is that any one so desperate
in marrying from an ulterior motive is likely to miss
out on the real identity of the individual concerned
and land up in incestuous relationship.
Moll indulges in a series of marriage even after this,
and each time ends up being a whore. She becomes a
mistress to a married man but it soon comes to an
end. She herself too gets deceived in this game by
her highwayman husband. Jemy is probably her
favourite among all the husbands because he is her
perfect counterpart in pretending to be what he is
not. Both of them got married to each other in the
hope of economic benefits. Realizing that both of
them had been cheated, they decided to part. Later
Moll gets married to a banker.
Moll Flanders is certainly, as E.M Forster states “a
novel of character”. However Defoe provides only
bare facts without any psychological illumination of
the character. Moll’s attitude towards her personal
relationship is not reflected clearly. She is
affectionate but not sentimental. We get somewhat
different picture when we come to consider her
character not as a wife but as a mother. On the one
hand, she can behave with complete sentimental
abandon, as when she kisses the ground her long-
separated son Humphrey has been standing on; one
the other hand, although she shows some fondness
for two or three of her children, she is by normal
standards somewhat callous in her treatment of most
of them. Therefore in most of the occasions she has
projected herself as a heartless mother.
The last phase of her life finds her as a criminal
through criminal adventures. Starting from bigamy,
and prostitution she now has become a thief. After
the death of her fifth husband, poverty once again
takes over her life. Being a woman of forty eight she
can no longer rely on her physical charms. Therefore
she takes recourse to theft. Initially she detested
herself for choosing such a trade but she says
"poverty hardened my heart, and my own necessities
made me regardless of anything”. She turns into a
seasoned criminal. One day she impetuously steals a
bundle that a careless maid has set down. “It is
impossible to express the horror of my soul”, Moll
says, but immediately she searches for another
opportunity for theft. The high incidence of crime in
our civilization is itself due to the wide diffusion of
an individualist ideology in a society where success
is not easily or equally attainable to all its members.
Moll Flanders is a characteristic product of modern
individualism in assuming that she owes it to herself
to achieve the highest economic and social rewards,
and in using every available method to carry out her
resolve. Her crimes are rooted in the dynamics of
economic individualism. That also to a great extent
sets Moll Flanders apart from the protagonists of the
picaresque novel.
Moll's gradual degeneration is accompanied by the
reader’s constant awareness of what must be Moll’s
inevitable destiny. Newgate prison seems to loom
larger and larger. Each of Moll’s crimes and her
increasingly narrow escapes ensure her capture.
Moll knows that she was born in Newgate and when
she is put there she describes it as “the place that had
so long expected me, and which with so much Art
and Success I had so long avoided”
However Newgate acts as a turning point in her life.
Money has alienated her both from god and
humanity. Spiritual consciousness tends to remain a
secondary consequence of economic calculation in
Moll’s world. During her stay in New gate she
repents for living such a tainted life. she says "I
repented heartily of all my life past, but that
repentance yielded me no satisfaction, no peace, no,
not in the least, because, as I said to myself, it was
repenting after the power of further sinning was
taken away”. Moll luckily meets Jemy, her
highwayman husband at Newgate who had once
believed that she brought him a fortune. When they
are reunited in Newgate and transported to Virginia,
it is her money that gets them to Virginia in comfort,
makes them prosperous and is augmented by the
fortune from her incestuous marriage. Defoe intends
to show the futility, even destructiveness of
imprisonment. For instance, several characters insist
that Newgate makes more criminals than "all the
clubs and societies of villains in the nation”. Moll
was born in Newgate and she is redeemed there, thus
born again upon her release to the colonies.
Finally our heroine acquires economic self
sufficiency. She is the prototype for a rebel who
breaks and reshapes traditional norms. In case of a
picaro the sense of morality doesn’t bother us much.
Rather we marvel at their devious ways of living
life. But when it comes to a woman we tend to box
her up within certain conventions and stereotypes.
Therefore the question of morality assumes a
significant position. The ways of sustenance that
Moll chose was rational and pragmatic. Growing up
as a motherless child she had no one to guide her. It
was her nurse in the initial days who taught her
certain fundamental skills. and later her governess
whom she addressed as her “mother” guided her in
living her life as a deviant-
"my governess acted a true mother to me, she pitied
me, she cried with me, and for me”.
Before Moll Flanders, a deviant woman in a
picaresque novel or in a novel in general, would be
quite common, e.g. Molly Seagram in Tom Jones.
What is most remarkable about Moll Flanders and
what makes it a unique example of picaresque novel
is Defoe's choice of a deviant woman as his heroine
or picara. And the choice, while it reveals much
about the hypocrisy and the double standards of the
patriarchal genteel society as well as the murky
London underworld, also impels the author to put
cautionary moral lectures in the picara's mouth.
Moll repeatedly confesses that she is a deviant and
also requests the readers not to follow her path of
existence. Defoe has introduced this moral voice in
order to pacify his readers' moral perception. But it
may also be an indirect way of defending his
character in a male dominated society which will not
accept Moll gladly. Defoe by creating Moll not only
breaks the conventional stereotypical view of
women but also gives a wide ranging view of the
kinds of subjugation that woman has to undergo in
order to survive in a male dominated society. She
too like her picaro counterpart strives towards
economic affluence but her means to achieve it is
what creates the difference. She has to cash in on her
physical charms more than her wits to survive and
eventually rise higher up in society. Her moral voice,
her sense of repentance is attributed to placate the
readers' sense of acceptable morality. The dichotomy
between her action and her moral expletives
generates ironic cross currents in the narrative that
point back to the moral and societal contradiction in
the contemporary society.