Irony Moll Flanders Essay, Research Paper

I love but hate, I laugh without a smile, I am ridiculous and respected, hypocrite and honest, a nonsense with reason , a convict and a gentleman. Isn’t that the world we live in ? He is using a subtle form of humour by saying things that he does not mean. This situation is odd or amusing because it involves a contrast. Irony kills, laughs, denounces, argues but is hidden behind words to look not so politically incorrect. Daniel Defoe was one of those who wanted to denounce society’s incongruities. He used his character, Moll Flanders, as an archetype of 18th century England society depicting the cruelty and the immorality of the time. In this autobiography (the novel is written in the first person) Moll’s life seems to be fill of contrasts and ironic situations, but is that not interpretation? This essay will discuss the irony in the novel Moll Flanders taking examples from the book to prove whether or not it should be considered as a ironic novel. Let’s have a look at the interpretations that one may have.

As a preliminary, it must be noted that Moll has a basically bipartie structure, the first part containing Moll’s sexual adventures, the second her life as a thief, her imprisonment, and her transportation to America. The difference here, however, is that Defoe has effected an organic rather than a merely schematic relationship between the two halves. The episode of the two brothers, an episode which is crucial to our understanding of the novel’s irony. Moll is seduced by the elder brother of the family in which she is a maid, then is persuaded by him to marry Robin, the younger brother, who loves her and proposed to her. She is a bewildered, passive object in the centre of the family dispute: her position is no sooner established as the elder’s brother mistress, than he suggests that she should accept Robin’s offer of marriage, thus becoming his sister where formerly she was his whore later affirming: ” I shall always be your sincere friend, without any inclination to nearer intimacy, when you become my sister” . He presses her hard, and the traumatic effect the affair has on Moll is symbolized in her near-fatal illness. Not surprisingly, after her marriage she succumbs to incestuous fantasies:” I was never in bed with my husband but I wished myself in the arms of his brother; … I committed adultery and incest with him every day in my desires, which, without doubt, was as effectually criminal in the nature of the guilt as if I had actually done it” . Robin dies after five years, and there is an interval consisting of two main episodes, in one of which Moll marries a gentleman-tradesman who, faced with financial ruin, leaves her “a widow bewitched; I had an husband and no husband” ; and in the second of which Moll helps a young lady avenge herself on a captain who regarded her as too easy a conquest.

The notion of revenge on the male, and the fact that it is Moll who is taking the initiative, and not members of the opposite sex, are indicative of a radical change of character. It is indeed ironic, then, that by making the initiative Moll should soon land herself in a situation which strongly resembles her earlier one with the two brothers: she now courts and marries her own brother.

She discovers the truth only when she is on her husband’s plantation in Virginia and his mother narrates her life story. As she listen to it, Moll gradually gathers ” that this was certainly no more or less than my own mother, and I had now had two children, and was big with another by my own brother”|, following this with declaration which echoes the one quoted above from page 68 “I lived therefore in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest wife; and though I was not much touched with the crime of it, yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me.” At first she conceals the situation from her husband, merely telling him that the union is not a lawful one. This alone has a strong effect on him: ” he turned pale as death, and stood mute as a thunderstruck, and once or twice I thought he would have fainted” . He recovers, but when Moll decides to at last that the full truth must be told the reaction is more severe: “I saw him turn pale and look wild” and nearly faint away, says Moll; then he became pensive and melancholy, “a little distempered in his head”, eventually falling “into a long lingering consumption.

Every detail here matches one in the first episode. Just as Moll’s brother begins to “turned pale as death” and nearly fainted, so does Moll when the elder brother begins to suggest that she might marry Robin (turning pale as death she nearly sinks down out of her chair). And just as Moll’s brother becomes ill when he hears of his incest so, we recall, does Moll when the elder brother, on another visit, tries to persuade her to accept Robin’s proposal. Anticipating her brother’s illness almost exactly, Moll becomes melancholy, it is feared that she will “go into a consumption; and which vexed me most, they gave it as their opinion that my mind was oppressed” .

This parallel is an ironic one, and of course it is ironic that Moll should carefully court her own brother, thus unwittingly depriving herself of the secure marriage she was seeking. There is, however, more to it than this. For the most important thing to emerge is the contrast with what happened the first time. It is not really Moll who suffers at all, she does not become ill; her brother does. She has treated her brother as the elder brother treated her, so that in causing his illness by revealing their incestuous relationship she has had her revenge. A man must suffer as she suffered; and the only man who can suffer is her own brother.

Defoe’s use of irony in this parallel has to do with power. The author wants to criticize the condition of women that are under man power. Manipulator, liar but gentleman, as the elder brother is, men had always manipulated women for their own benefit. By returning the situation, Moll’s husband is the one who suffers, Defoe highlights the painfulness of being oppressed in a man situation. This ironic situation gives a revenge to women for centuries of manipulation. Therefore, irony is used by the author to criticize or to bring out a topic which was a bit taboo, at least for a man. Women’s condition was certainly not the main subject of man’s conversation during the 18th century. Irony is a safe way of criticizing because it does not involve the author directly.

It is important to describe Moll’s character or how Defoe has developed her to understand whether or not irony could emerge from the novel. Moll’s middle-class preoccupation with “being a gentlewoman” is further developed as we are told of her receiving an education beyond her station in life. Moll continues to persist in her superiority: “I learned to dance and speak French as well as any of them, and to sing much better… ” But Moll never appears to us as someone who can speak French or even sing and dance, for Defoe has no concept of this kind of character, and Moll’s overwhelming materialism and pragmatism quickly suppress such qualities. But her desire to be considered a “gentle woman” and her insistence on her superiority are very much in keeping with her general character. The word “gentlewoman” keeps reappearing in Moll’s vocabulary and begins to take on special connotations. It accumulates meaning and becomes a sign for us of some of Moll’s important attitudes and specific limitations. The concept of being a “gentlewoman” is no longer limited to earning one’s own keep without being a servant. Economic independence becomes more and more tied in with the appearance of gentility, and the appearance of being a “gentlewoman” become a sign of individual superiority. It has, therefore, nothing to do with irony which consist of comparing a gentlewoman with a whore. Living without working is not what Moll wants, she likes superiority, but the point is not well established yet. It is in this context that Moll begins to make her assessment of other people and to judge the success or limitations of her own life. There is no question that part of her fascination with the man who seduces her has to do with his station in life and his manners he was “gay gentleman that knew the town, as well as the country…” Except for this, and the fact that “tho’ he had levity enough to do an ill-natured thing, yet had too much judgment of things to pay too dear for his pleasures…” , we never discover anything more about him. Indeed, the quality of appearing and behaving like a “gentleman” is the only one we ever discover about all Moll’s men, so persistent is she in her own attitude toward others and so desirous is she to affirm her own superiority.

The problem of secondary figures in the novel has been developed to clarify the nature of Moll’s character, both the way in which it is developed and the way in which it is not. Moll’s character is developed largely in terms of her self-awareness and not through her awareness of others; even her minimal relationship with other people serve only to reinforce her intrinsic qualities. From Defoe’s preface we know that the emphasis was to be on the adventures in which she was engaged. At this point in the novel there is an apparent separation between the older and the younger Moll. The older woman can look back upon her behaviour years before and understand it from a mature and worldly-wise position. Moll can say of her younger self: “I saw him most unbounded stock of vanity and pride, but a very little stock of virtue… Thus, I gave up myself to ruin without the least concern, and am a fair momento to all young women whose vanity prevails over their virtue.” We may be somewhat dubious about Moll’s moralizing here, but unquestionably there is a difference between the character of the young girl, driven by vanity into precarious relationship, and the woman who censures this youthful behaviour. Moll is not behaving with financial prudence in her first affair with the two brothers. She has not yet learned the way of her world and the older Moll condemns her younger self for this. The girl is too taken up with her own beauty and its immediate, not long-range reward: “I…was taken up with the pride of my beauty… as for the gold, I spent the whole hours in looking upon it…”

The point here is that Moll sees the gold only as a gift for her beauty, almost as a symbol of her physical excellence. She does not see that her beauty is being used, and she is not using her beauty. Some might think that there is something ironic in the fact that Moll s beauty is living in a rough and cruel world. Defoe gives no clue and make her fit in every situation. She is cute as a beggar and wonderful as a whore. She fits everywhere. Her beauty has though nothing ironic or at least Defoe does not seem to make it so.

When Moll says: “Thus my pride, not my principle, my money, not my virtue, kept me honest” , she makes a moral and rather pathetic statement that seems accurate and totally in keeping with her character. She is not rationalizing her behaviour; she is not drawing an extend moral lesson which the situation cannot support; she is making a statement about her motivations from a moral but realistic point of view. The Moll who writes her memoirs presents her own wisdom and attitudes as a character and forces us to understand them as they developed in the younger Moll: “(I) sold my self… to a tradesman that was rake, gentleman, shop-keeper, and beggar all together.” But the younger Moll was still capable of mistakes which the present Moll looks upon with some contempt: “But I was hurried on (by fancy to a gentleman) to ruin my self in the grossest manner that ever woman did… At such moments as these, we have the two Molls, with enough similar characteristics to suggest their different ages. But these occasions will appear less frequently in the book, for now we have Moll basically as she will be the rest of her life and with much the same awareness as the woman writing the book. We have really been watching, so far in the novel, the development of two character patterns, and gradually they have begun closely to approximate each other. This is a crucial point, since a number of critics have sought to explain the novel’s ambiguities and contradictions as the result of Defoe’s consciously playing off the older Moll against the younger, of his having the older woman unaware of the motivations in the earlier self and the implication of her activities and thus filling the book with bogus rationalizing and moralizing. The only problem with this theory is that from this point of view in the novel both characters mouth such statements and both seem to understand Moll’s experiences in much the same way. For example, even though the younger Moll forgets that she is still legally married and committing adultery, her moral reactions to her long affair with the married man is such the same as when she is older. Certainly both Molls have a propensity for moralizing throughout the book. At the same time, both Molls are aware of that necessitates the younger woman’s immoral life:” I wanted to be plac’d in a settled state of living, and I happen’d to meet with a sober good husband. I should have been as true a wife to him as virtue it self could have form’d. If I had been otherwise, the vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination…”

It is not a case, then, of the older Moll being ignorant or hypocritical about her former situations and motivations, nor of the younger one being unaware of the life she was living and its moral problems. At this point in the novel, in spite of the older Moll’s occasional expressions of hindsight, both women respond in much the same way, and there is no evidence in the text that Defoe consciously or consistently uses the distance between his two Molls for ironic purposes. Nor does it seem plausible that Defoe ironically intended the older Moll to create her former self in her present image, filled with the same delusions and moral hypocrisy. Again, there is no evidence within the text to support this, no way in which we can see this double level of irony. Such a complexity in narrative technique, where the created world reflects the distortions of the narrator’s own psyche, would be unique for Defoe in the entire body of his prose narratives, and unique in fiction in the very beginning of that period. So long as there is no indication that the author intends an ironic interpretation of any level of this work, so long as there is no clear “handle” for such an interpretation , there is no point in making one.

Now, we have two contradictory ideas. In the first part of this work there is a parallel which was ironic in order to bring out Defoe’s desire to criticize his society. After, by describing deeply Moll’s character we arrive at the conclusion that there is no irony in the book. In is this book irony depends on the reader’s point of view. There is indeed some ironic situations in Moll Flanders.

It is difficult to believe that all those rapid transfers of her affections were not contemplated ironically by Defoe; but although there is a rather more conscious irony than many of my friends are apparently prepared to admit. There is no consistently ironic attitude present in Moll Flanders, and what may appear to be highly ironic to the twentieth-century reader may not have seemed so to Defoe. For the most part Defoe simply followed Moll around; and having a perfectly clear idea of her character he was chiefly concerned to show her acting and feeling in every situation as he believed she would.

The idea that there is irony in Moll Flanders is a subjective one. It can be argued, using example in the book, that it is full of irony; another doing the same thing but denying the idea would lead another reader to the same conclusion: both seem to be right. One can just admit that there is irony in Defoe’s novel but the degree of interpretation will differ from one reader to another. Defoe used a narrative technique and developed a deep character that in some ways created a new kind of fiction. Defoe wanted to denounce the society he was living in and was certainly the first author who defended the rights of women, but irony stays at the level of interpretation. Discussing the irony in Moll Flanders is just considering the interpretation of everyone.