Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, June 27, 2004
 | Moll Flanders
Written by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, this book lacks its predecessor's suspense and wonder (for the modern reader, at least). Indeed, Moll Flanders is about a woman who had an affair before marriage in the hopes of catching a husband, was passed to his brother instead to wife, survived him to accidentally marry her own brother a few years later, escaped that unhappy union, gave herself over to being a mistress, married yet again and survived her husband, then became a thief and pickpocket (in a day when thieves were hanged), spent time in the hellish Newgate Prison, and then found her fortune in the colonies. |
You'd think a life like that could only hold reader interest. However, the style of the book manages to keep the modern reader a good distance away from the characters. Indeed, the characters are not characters at all in terms of reader expectations. They are but motionless figures in Moll's long, overly explained, colorless narrative. There is not one line of dialogue in the entire book.
Historically, the book is of interest because it marks the beginning of the novel. In Defoe's time (early seventeen hundreds), most "fiction" was actually in verse. Chaucer's bawdy Canterbury tales from several centuries before adorned many a book shelf of the learned, and the comparatively more recent Faerie Queen, with its higher and loftier purposes served as a sort of national epic. Smirkers could enjoy Hudibras, a lesser-known epic poem, whose illustrations survive today.
Prose tales tended to be moral stories. John Bunyon's earlier Pilgrim's Progress and The Holy War, were long allegories written to encourage reflection and thought. They figure as an apex of religious writing, but they are not quite the same thing as the English novel.
Otherwise, long narratives came from travelers, the wealthy, the powerful, and those who wished to inculcate ideas into simpler minds by means of telling their own true stories and moralizing upon them. Such stories were true accounts, replete with geographical details, commentary upon current political situations, and even lists of those in social prominence.
So the first novels imitated non-fiction. Swift's Gulliver's Travels purports to be the journal of Lemuel Gulliver, who shipwrecked in strange waters and discovered strange lands. Defoe's earlier work, Robinson Crusoe, was the fictionalized account of Andrew Selkirk, with much of Selkirk's spiritual journey removed from the narrative and replaced with sequences of danger and derring-do. Samuel Richardson's Pamela came to readers in the form of letters and diaries. The more entertaining Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding started out as a semi-satirical true story about Pamela's brother.
Today, we read fiction as "live action" sequences. But then, fictional narrative was entirely retrospective. Dialogue, in the form that we read it, makes almost no appearance in the early novels. The careful insertion of a point-of-view character who does not know the end of the story any more than the reader does had not yet been developed. And the writers, perhaps to escape censorship, supplied their fiction with several layers of moralizing upon the good and evil encountered. Even Moll remains thoroughly repentant throughout the telling of her story. But her moralizing adds an insincere ring that becomes so detailed and tedious that it slows an already slow narrative.
I am told that PBS has broadcast a version of Moll Flanders much more appealing to readers. I can see that in screenplay, where dialogue must be supplied and where characters must become real, the story would engage the modern reader. But with so much left to the interpretation of the dramatist who renders it into script, you really have a story based on Moll Flanders, however well done, that is still not the book itself.
Nobody in my reading club found the book interesting as a novel. Indeed, only one person got all the way through it. But the concepts that emerge from the book, later to come to full flower under such great novelists like Charles Dickens, were worth discussing. We discussed the impact of the novel as a banned book, for Moll Flanders was censored in its day. But nobody could recall ever having heard of any modern controversies surrounding it. There is certainly no lurid detail in it and no foul language. Moll's sins are heavily distanced from the reader in her account. We supposed that the stupefying quality of the narrative was its own punishment for anybody who should try to plow through it in search of lascivious content.
