¹ Terence Martin, “The Unity of Moll Flanders” Modern Language Quarterly, 22 (1961), 115–24; rpt. in Moll Flanders: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, ed. Edward Kelly (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 365 (hereafter cited as Moll Flanders:An Authoritative Text); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 145. Fernand Braudel also explains eighteenthcentury London's “labyrinth of lanes and alleys” as a consequence of class oppression—a “clandestine proliferation” of hovels circumventing building prohibitions enacted between 1580 and 1625 to contain the distasteful poor (Capitalism and Material Life: 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan [New York: Harper, 1973], p. 430).

² Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Boston: Houghton, 1959), p. 112; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

³ The classic review of this debate is Ian Watt's “The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1967), 109–27; for an updated summary of the combatants' lineup, see John J. Richetti, Defoe's Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), pp. 94–95.

⁴ My understanding of the doctrine of the “typical hero” comes primarily from Georg Lukâcs' Studies in European Realism (no trans. [New York: Grosset, 1964], pp. 6–11, 71, et passim), but discussions of “typicality” in the following, which evince a range of disagreement among Russian scholars as to whether it leans more toward the representative or toward the ideal, strengthen the parallel with the neoclassical debate on the subject: S. Petrov, “Realism—The Generally Human,” in Preserve and Create: Essays in Marxist Literary Criticism, ed. Gaylord C. LeRoy and Ursula Beitz (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), pp. 23–29; Alexander Symshits, “Realism and Modernism”; Boris Suchkov, “Realism and Its Historical Development”; and Anatoly Dremov, “The Ideal and the Hero in Art,” in Problems of Modern Aesthetics, trans. Kate Cook (Moscow: n.p., n.d.), pp. 261–98, 3–19, 42–54, respectively.

⁵ “Flanders,” the byword for contraband Flemish lace, is modeled on real aliases of the cloth-stealing “trade,” such as “Calico Sarah” and “Susan Holland” (Gerald Hawson, Times Literary Supplement, No. 3438, 18 Jan. 1968, pp. 63–64; rpt. in Moll Flanders: An Authoritative Text, p. 318).

⁶ This shocked recognition of one's “typicality” recurs in Defoe: see, e.g., Jack's reaction to the discourse of his colonial “Master” to another “young rogue, born a Thief, and bred up a Pick-pocket like myself …” (Colonel Jack [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970], p. 121).

⁷ Karl Marx, Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Rayazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 21. See Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom—A Treatise on the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed (London, 1727; rpt. Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), pp. 256–57, for Defoe's explicit analysis of the evolving displacement of the aristocracy by the middle class.

⁸ See Alick West, The Mountain in the Sunlight: Studies in Conflict and Unity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958) pp. 185–98, and Arnold Kettle, “In Defence of Moll Flanders,” in Of Books and Mankind, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 55–67. Disappointingly, even Williams, in Country and City, derogates Moll's efforts at survival (p. 62). (My particular disagreements with these critics come up at a later point in the text.)

⁹ “Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, 1st Ser. (1925; rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1953), p. 95. Several good feminist surveys of Defoe's progressive views on women have appeared in the last five years: Paula R. Backscheider, ”Defoe's Women: Snares and Prey,“ in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, v, ed. Ronald S. Rosbottom (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 103–19; Kathryn Rogers, ”The Feminism of Daniel Defoe,“ in Woman in the 18th Century and Other Essays, ed. Paul Fritz and Richard Morton (Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1976), pp. 3–24; Shirlene Mason, Daniel Defoe and the Status of Women (St. Albans: Eden Press, 1978). Although Rogers' conclusions are sympathetic toward Moll, Backscheider's are distinctly double-edged (see, e.g., pp. 108, 110, 114, 116). Mason, assessing Moll literally in the light of Defoe's nonfictional proscriptions, emerges with some harsh and categorical judgments (see, e.g., pp. 21, 49–51, 77–78).

¹⁰ The following have influenced my reading of Moll Flanders: Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper, 1976); Juliet Mitchell, Women, the Longest Revolution (New Left Review, Nov.-Dec. 1966; rpt. Boston: New England Free Press, 1967); Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight against It, 3rd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 1977). Some feminists, precisely because they do not acknowledge such contradictions, have unfairly dismissed Marxist theories about women in the eighteenth century: Jean E. Hunter, “The 18th-Century Englishwoman: According to the Gentleman's Magazine,” in Fritz and Morton, pp. 73–88, and Marlene Le Gates, “The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976), 21–39, have challenged views of the “trivialization” and “idealization” of eighteenth-century women, respectively. Both would dismiss the purported socioeconomic causes by oversimplifying and then disputing a single ideological effect, thus misrepresenting Marxist dialectics, which analyze the simultaneous regressions and advances in the condition of eighteenth-century women.

¹¹ One of the quarrels Marxist feminists have with classic Marxism is its failure to investigate the historical effects on patriarchal relations of changes in modes of production (see Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, “Feminism and Materialism,” and Roison McDonough, “Patriarchy and Relations of Production,” in Kuhn and Wolpe, pp. 8, 11–41, respectively).

¹² See, e.g., Ian Watt's discussion of the various social fables, valid and invalid, read into Crusoe in “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,” Essays in Criticism (April 1951), pp. 95–119; rpt. and rev. in Robinson Crusoe: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 311–32. hereafter cited as “Robinson.” See also Ian Watt. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957), p. 108, hereafter cited as Rise, and Stephen Hymer, “Robinson Crusoe and the Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” Monthly Review, Sept. 1951, pp. 111–36. According to Forster (Aspects of the Novel [1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1954], p. 63) Moll “fills the book that bears her name, or rather stands alone in it, like a tree in a park….”

¹³ Robert Alter, “A Bourgeois Picaroon,” in Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964); rpt. in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Moll Flanders, ed. Robert C. Elliott (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 71. Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (rpt. Menston, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1969), p. 32. See also Defoe's derogatory references to “stock-jobbing” and speculation in Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (1724–26; rpt. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1971), pp. Ill, 178, 306–07; hereafter cited as Tour; Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second German Edition,” Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1867; rpt. New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 13–14.

¹⁴ See, in Lukâcs' European Realism, discussions of Balzac (pp. 34–35, 43, 53–54) and of Tolstoy (p. 145).

¹⁵ Leopold Damrosch, Jr., “Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator,” Modern Philology, 71 (1973), 153–59; Maximillian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962), p. 15; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Economics. Particularly note Defoe's preface to Colonel Jack (p. 1), and see Samuel Holt Monk's analogous critical observation (Introd., Colonel Jack, p. xvii) that lack, contrary to what we know of his character and experience, quotes Scripture readily—“But when he does so, we hear the voice of Daniel Defoe, not of his creature the Colonel.”

¹⁶ See Mason's clarification of this matter—a common fallacy about Moll (p. 98).

¹⁷ For this perspective on eighteenth-century crime see Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay and Peter Linebaugh (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 20–21.

¹⁸ Quoted in Harold Toliver, Animate Illusions: Explorations of Narrative Structure (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1974), pp. 235–36.

¹⁹ E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Hay and Linebaugh, p. 272. Cf. the metaphysical and psychological approaches to anonymity and pseudonymity in Defoe in Leo Braudy, “Daniel Defoe and the Anxieties of Autobiography,” Genre, 6 (1973), 76–97, and Homer O. Brown, “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe,” ELH, 38 ( 1961 ), 562–90.

²⁰ Note that although A Tour was composed from 1722 to 1725, Defoe used material gained primarily on earlier travels (Pat Rogers, Introd., Tour, p. 17).

²¹ Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Rhetorical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 249–50.

²² James K. Somerville, “The Salem (Mass.) Woman in the Home, 1660–1770,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 1 (1974), 11.

²³ See Jackie West, “Women, Sex, and Class,” in Kuhn and Wolpe, pp. 220–35; Marx and Marxists have generally not conceded analogies between women and other oppressed classes (McDonough, pp. 29–30).

²⁴ Although Defoe, visiting Lime, declared with satisfaction, “Here's no Bury Fair, where the women are scandalously said to carry themselves to market …” (Tour, p. 214), he apparently saw the ill consequences of such self-marketing in too many other places. Moll has “sold” herself to the gentleman-tradesman (p. 54). See Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 55. Kathryn Rogers notwithstanding (Fritz and Morton, pp. 10–11), Roxana's first marriage is an instance of these contradictions (Roxana, p. 7).

²⁵ Maximillian E. Novak remains convincing in relating Defoe's sympathetic view of divorce to natural law philosophy (Defoe and the Nature of Man [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963], pp. 96–106), despite Mason's argument to the contrary (pp. 73–77). It is perhaps pertinent here to mention my profound indebtedness to Novak despite my quarrels with some of his specific readings and despite his stance in the ironist camp. Both works of his cited in this paper, not to mention his personal inspiration as my professor, are, to a great extent, responsible for the general orientation of this essay.

²⁶ I For a defense of Moll's motherhood, see Miriam Lerenbaum, “Moll Flanders: Woman on Her Own Account,'” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 106–11.

²⁷ Whether women's domestic work is “productive labor” is a point of debate among Marxists. For a negative verdict from a feminist position, see Paul Smith, “Domestic Labour and Marx's Theory of Value,” in Kuhn and Wolpe, pp. 198–219.

²⁸ Ellen Glasgow, “Feminism,” Social Feminism, 31 July 1913; rpt. in Women: Their Changing Roles, ed. Elizabeth Janeway (New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. 13.

²⁹ Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 511; quoted in McDonough, who points out (p. 30) that Marx does not acknowledge the implications of this fact for women and the family unit.

³⁰ It is tempting to offer as food for thought Marx's use of “weaving” as the archetype of universal, abstract human labor. (See Capital, Pt. i, Ch. xxvi, esp. p. 67.)

³¹ Susan Sontag, “The Third World of Women,” Partisan Review, 40 (1973), 181.

³² See Jackie West's discussion of the proletarianization of white-collar labor in Kuhn and Wolpe, pp. 241–47. Indeed, the following suggests just how “forward-looking” the governess' enterprise is: “If Holiday Inns sanitized and made respectable the once tacky motel, and McDonald's gave the nation hamburgers without heartburn, why couldn't the same techniques of standardization and mass marketing be applied to day-care centers for children?” (“Making Millions by Baby-Sitting,” Time, 3 July 1978).

³³ Braudel quotes a similar eighteenth-century passage, which he finds “amusing” precisely because, like Moll's effusion, it eulogizes “barter and services paid for in kind as a progressivist innovation of young America” (Capitalism and Material Life, p. 335).

³⁴ See Robert Donovan's lament in The Shaping Vision: Imagination in the Novel from Defoe to Dickens (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966), p. 29.

³⁵ Kathleen McCoy, “The Femininity of Moll Flanders,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vu, ed. Roseanne Runte (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 413–22. Additional readings of Moll Flanders based on these assumptions about gender identity are legion—ranging from the would-be sympathetic arguments of Marsha Bordner, “Defoe's Androgynous Vision: In Moll Flanders and Roxana,” Gypsy Scholar, 2 (Fall 1974), 76–93, to the reduction ad absurdum dismissals (Moll is a man in drag) of Frederick R. Karl, “Moll's Many-Colored Coat: Veil and Disguise in the Fiction of Defoe,” Studies in the Novel, 5 (1973), 94, and John J. Richetti, “The Portrayal of Women in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature,” in What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977), p. 88. For a different approach to Moll's “femininity,” on experiential and historical grounds, see Lerenbaum, in Diamond and Edwards, pp. 101–17.

³⁶ See Zaretsky, pp. 10, 52, 64, 114–15, et passim, and “Socialism and Feminism in: Socialist Politics and the Family,” Socialist Revolution, No. 13 (Jan. 1973), p. 92. See also Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 43–53—on “the privatization of the home”—and Rowbotham, p. 20.

³⁷ See Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 184–87.

³⁸ I am embroidering, here, on a definition of the novel offered by Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 3–4. Obviously, this is a working generalization with many exceptions.

³⁹ Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 18.