So they pass it off as a morality tale, as the intro explains at superfluous length, then spend a grand total of maybe 30 out of 300 pages making small mention of why she shouldn’t have done the things she did. But the whole story is about her thievery and sexual transgressions. Ok, so she tells us ‘this is how theives steal, so don’t make yourself an easy target, fasten your watch tight’ and ‘I shouldn’t have slept with him, but I really thought I loved him’ or ‘ but it was the only way to get his money’, but that’s all mixed in with how much fun it was and how much money she made. I counted 12 children by the way, and 15 lovers by her account, though I only counted 7.
This is the crime literature from last week in greater length – exhausting length, and her supposed repentance is a poorly executed device for making it almost socially acceptable in the time period. but because the whole point is to entertain the audience with her ‘wicked adventures’, these must be described with excitement, and the repentance wrapped up quickly.
The most annoying thing was – well it’s hard to say. First there was the attrocious treatment of marriage, but that generally goes with the time – marriage was like unethical business arrangements. Then there were the dozens of petty theft stories that led the plot nowhere, all sounded alike, and went on for ages. Then while she is so very peninent for her years of thievery, Moll makes full use of that which she gained thereby – alright so she needed money, but once she was settled in Maryland she didn’t need to send for 200L worth of fancy clothes and stuff bought with money she stole – did anyone else notice she lies constantly? She really needs to read revalations. And finally, or agian, when she tells her story, the focus is entirely on her transgressions! She even takes time to tell us how exciting a story would be made by her husband’s life, which was apparently worse than hers. But she raves on about her wicked life for 300+ pages, and then we are meant to understand from the final 10, that her honest years are the more important, that those are more important to her . . .. ya she bugs me.
Miriam Jones said,
September 25, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Do you think Defoe meant for us to read her as a hypocrite? Or was he caught up between the conflicting goals of entertaining, and moralizing?
notinclass said,
September 26, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I don’t think Defoe particularly cared whether she was a hypocrite or not. I think he needed to sell books in order to eat and knew that the book needed to be both exciting and socially acceptable by some mechanism or other.
I read an historical fiction novel by Harry Turtledove entitled Ruled Britania, in which Shakespeare is portrayed as partly writing things the way he wants them understood, and partly – well, a literary mercenary. A more extreme fictional account of a newspaper publisher is given in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. The publisher often orders his writers support political issues that he disagrees with because he knows those stories will sell better than his personal views.
So to sell well to the rich (and socially proper) Defoe would have to have made Moll appear a true penitent – or at least she had to believe she was. But I think he overlooked a few details that are important in the Christian tradition, causing her character to be annoying to me.