Moll Flanders

I read Defoe's Moll Flanders over January break in preparation for "The Rise of the Novel," a seminar I will be taking Spring 2011.

Never poor vain Creature was so wrapt up with every part of the Story, as I was, not considering what was before me, and how near my Ruin was at the Door; indeed I think, I rather wish'd for that Ruin, than studyed to avoid it (Defoe 27).

I cannot but remind the Ladies here how much they place themselves below the common Station of a Wife, which if I may be allow'd not to be Partial is low enough already; I say they place themselves below their common Station, and prepare their own Mortifications, by their submitting so to be insulted by the Men before-hand, which I confess I see no Necessity of (Defoe 70).

Upon her arrival at Newgate:

On the contrary, like the Waters in the Caveties, and Hollows of Mountains, which putrifies and turns into Stone whatever they are suffer'd to drop upon; so the continual Conversing with such a Crew of Hell-Hounds as I saw, which had the same common Operation upon me, as upon other People, I degenerated into Stone, I turn'd first Stupid and Senseless, then Brutish and thoughtless, and at last raving Mad as any of them were; and in short, I became as naturally pleas'd and easie with the Place, as if indeed I had been Born there (Defoe 259).

Ian Watt wrote a fantastic essay on Moll Flanders in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding about, among other things, this novel as a prototype of the eighteenth-century novel and the reader's versus Defoe's intentions of irony.

Next up: Richardson's Pamela.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. New York: Random House, 2002.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1957.