Defoe's Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders

Abstract

Defoe's Alternative Conduct Manual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in Moll Flanders Srividhya Swaminathan Analyses of Defoe's narratives tend to dismiss his secondary characters because they lack well-developed personalities. The extensive cast of women in Moll Flanders, for instance, has been ignored largely because twentieth-century critics privilege interiority and psychology, and discount stock or "flat" characters.1 Ian Watt's TheRise ofNovelcanonized Defoe as the great novelist ofself-maximizing individualism, identifying in Moll a "criminal individualism" that "tends to minimise the importance of personal relationships."2 Though Watt's analysis of Moll Flanders has been hotly contested, critics focus on defining the nature of Moll's individualism, tacitly agreeing with Watt's contention that personal relationships are diminished in the novel.3 This neglect would not be a problem if 1 Ail exception to this discounting of"flat" characters is Deidre Shauna Lynch, TheEconomy of'diamela> (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998). In MollFUi?deis, the main female characters who have merited analysis are "Mother Midnight," the midwife who teaches Moll to steal, Moll's biological mother, and, to a lesser extent, Moll's nurse. For a comprehensive discussion of Mother Midnight and the role of midwives in English society, see Robert Erickson, MotherMidniglit: Biilh, Sex, mid Fate in ICigliteerilli-Cerituiy Fiction (New York: AMS Press, 1986). For an analysis ofMother Midnight, Moll's biological mother, and her nurse, see Lois A. Chaber, "The Matriarchal Mirron Women and Capital in MoUFlandeis," PMlA 97 (1982), 212-26. 1 would like to thank Kathryn Hume, Clement Hawes, Robert D. Hume, andJohn T. Harwood for criticism ofearlier versions of this essay. 2 Ian Watt, Tlie Rise oftheNmiel (1957; Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1965), p. 111. 3 Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe's Politics: Palliarne«I, Power, Kingship, arid "Robinson Crusoe" EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 2,January 2003 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION secondary characters merely provided local colour, but the actions of women in particular turn out to be critical to Moll's survival. Ignoring the "minor" female characters has led to odd imbalances in critical readings, notably with respect to feminist criticism. For example, Defoe's "narrative transvestism" has been read as seeking to misrepresent the "sexual other" and thus to co-opt the female VOiCe.4 Other feminist readings ?? Moll Flanders tend to focus on Defoe's obsession with commerce and economics and their influence on gender relations .5 While Moll's narrative amply rewards these lines of critical inquiry, such approaches ignore the relationships formed between women: the factor in the story that makes Moll's survival possible. In this essay I suggest that actions are usually more important than thought to Defoe. Furthermore, I believe that he supplies us with an extremely revealing context for novelistic actions among his nonfiction writings, specifically his conduct manuals. MollFlanders can be read as an alternative conduct manual, one that explores the options available to women in unstable, often desperate circumstances. As an alternative conduct manual, Moll's life teaches her reader more about survival than religion, possibly transcending Defoe's intent in the novel. Critics who read Moll's narrative as a series of relationships with men or as a solitary struggle for survival6 miss the multiple layers ofsocial criticism in the text. I will argue that Defoe uses the novel to depict a broader and less sanitized view ofsociety, thereby illustrating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Schonhom's challenge to Watt's thesis emphasizes the residual "monarchist" elements in Defoe's thought rather than a network ofsupposedly minor characters. Madeline Kahn, Narrative Tiansveslism: Rlieloiic and Gender in the Kigltteenth-Ceiitwy English Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): "I use the term 'narrative transvestism' to refer to this process whereby a male author gains access to a culturally defined female voice and sensibility but runs no risk of being trapped in the devalued female realm. Through narrative transvestism the male author plays out, in the metaphorical body of the text, the ambiguous possibilities of identity and gender" (p. 6). The first such feminist analysis wasJuliet McMaster, "The Equation of Love and Money in Moll Handels," Studies in UieNovel2 (1970), 131-44. See also Chaber; William E. Hummel, "'The Gift ofMy...

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