The New World and indentured servitude have less of a presence in Moll Flanders than in Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack. Moll comes to the Chesapeake twice, first as the wife of a well-off planter, a man who turns out to be her brother, and again at the end of the novel, this time transported as an indentured servant. Though relatively brief, these two episodes neatly structure the novel: each is eight years long and each comes at the end of a thirty-five-year period of Moll's life. Both punctuate her life at crucial moments, defining, in a highly distilled and associative way, her psychological and moral condition.

Perhaps because they are meant to pass summary judgment on Moll, the American episodes confirm with unusual clarity the assumptions about indentured servitude which Defoe made use of in all his fiction. Here, as in his other novels, servitude opens the way to mastery, freedom, and a fuller integration into society at large. This view of indentured servitude is in such contrast to the way actual indentured servants experienced the institution – they saw it as a form of slavery and intense social isolation – that after examining the role of servitude in Moll Flanders, I turn to an exploration of the institution itself and then speculate about why Defoe so misrepresented it.