Why do we choose Moll Flanders?

 

Some background information about Moll Flanders is it was banned as it discussed issues that it is taboo during that time : prostitution, oppression, against church and mischievous deeds.

Quotations from the novel:

"I'm not going to fear any man of flesh and blood, no matter what costume he wears" 

" I kept kissing frogs looking for a prince" 

" I always thought I had to be rich to own the stars"

"We experienced a delirious, timeless peace"

Literary theory regards Moll Flanders as the first English novel .The novel is about the realistic experiences of a woman in the underworld of 18th century London. She is anonymous, Moll Flanders being an assumed name which she adopts when she needs an alternative identity for her criminal life. Defoe's novel gives us a clear sense of daily life and the anxieties attendant on economic and social uncertainty and he displays a clear understanding of female specifics, in a criminal world. He writes accurate social history in a fictional form.

The point of view is in first person but I think the problems with the narrative lies in the fact that Defoe, a man, tries to write so familiarly about a woman's point of view. Defoe doesn't do well writing this from a woman's point of view. At times Moll talks about her tender feelings as a mother, yet she lets her children go easily without the reader hearing about them again. All too often the story is narrated as if she were an observer rather than a participant. Also, most of the tale is glossed over. Occasionally she stops and gives more, but usually the book is an overview of the social conditions of Moll's life.

"Realism" is expressed by a rejection of traditional plot, by particularity, emphasis on the personality of the character, a consciousness of duration of time and space and its expression in style. The rejection of traditional plot is in the novel expressed by the choice of biography as the method of presenting the story, because the aim is to attract the reader's attention with stories as authentic as possible

Defoe seems to have intended Moll to affect the reader in many ways:

• as an object lesson 
• as a satirist on herself and her world 
• as an experienced thief who tries to teach her readers to guard themselves against the tricks of pickpockets and shoplifters 
• as a young (partly) innocent girl, always in danger from the attentions of unscrupulous men 
• as a cynic about love and marriage 
• as a woman struggling against an indifferent society

The novel is also adapted to a film: