Morality vs Immorality in the Miserable Life of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

Abstract

Defoe’s novel, Moll Flanders, the story of a thief, a criminal, a whore, a mistress, a lady, a lover, a beggar, and a plantation owner who lives the life of a repentant at 70, reveals Moll’s both high and low morals. In the present paper I try to reveal the fact that Moll Flanders, the protagonist, and the first person narrator of the novel, speaks in the voice of Defoe who had lived a life of both vice and virtue with all its extremes. Moll Flanders represents the age Defoe lived, along with its harsh and corrupt judicial system, the poverty, the low level of life in the English society, and the injustice of the patriarchy, where love and marriage were commodities in the market called life. In the society where Moll lived, women got married either for money or for title but never for love. Thus, Moll, having neither money nor title, and urging to become a lady, passed through different stages in her life living in vice but later repenting and living in virtue.