"Moll flanders" by Amber Romanowski.

Essay by nataliemkoUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, April 2003

download word file, 3 pages 4.0

Downloaded 45 times

It is noteworthy to state the fact that Defoe wrote Molla flanders at a time when there was still little precedence for the novel as a genre . Therefore, he accordingly felt compelled to justify his book by presenting it a true story .

In this respect , Moll Flanders is an excellent story about one woman's evolution from a poor economic status to a, later, mid-class caste in life. Moll Flanders used her meticulous cunning in order to survive in the 18th century. She started out with a tabula rasa, or clean slate, when she is born, but, eventually, she resorts to an immoral life in order to survive. When she learns that her husbands die very quickly, but give her money for having sex with them, she turns to a life of whoredom. This choice, however, was only done as an instinct to survive.

In the 1800's, the legal system was not in a woman's favor.

Women would not inherit anything when their husbands died. Which is why Moll Flanders had to resort to a life of crime after she no longer looked good enough to make a living as a whore. This all, eventually, led to her imprisonment and trip to America to live happily with her husband.

Moll Flanders chose her life as a prostitute. She states on page 138: "Well, let her life have been the way it would then, it was certain that my life was very uneasy to me; for I liv'd, as I have said, but in the worst sort of whoredom, and as I cou'd expect no Good of it, so really no good issue came and all my seeming prosperity wore off and ended in misery and destruction;..." Whenever Moll would have kids she would sell them or give them...