Fantomina and other works

So Ive read some of the other blogs and many seem to think of Fantomina as a powerful female figure who meets a bad end.  Although I have to agree that she gets the best of Beauplaiser (sorry about the spelling) most of the time my question throughout the whole story was why would she want to?  The man treats her miserably in ALL of her personas and yet she is still desperate to have him.  She thinks that shes so smart because she trick him into only cheating on her with her but never seems to question why she would want a man so treacherous.  Then in “The Tea Table”Brilliante tells a story in which Clemina (who is lovely and honourable, and who most people think favourably of) falls in love with Beraldus who is decietful and cruel and treats her miserably.  She finds out about his betrayel of her, and discovers how cruelly he has manipulated her affections, watches as he publically denounces any affection for her and claims to love someone else yet she is still so affected by her feelings for him that she tries to kill Lamira.  WHY? Her remaining love for him is never questioned.  After the story is told Amiana comments that women must be more careful over whom they choose to trust but never doubts that Clemina would still want to be with someone who treated her so badly.  The fact that this is true in both stories baffled me, especially considering it was written by a woman who (judging by some other social commentary on acceptable women’s conduct) seems to have no problem placing women in roles and characters that do not fit in with the traditional view of women.  What I couldn’t understand is if Clemina and particularly Fantomina are supposed to be strong, powerful female figures, then why is it that they are powerless to end (or even question) thier love for men who treat them miserably? 

I think that what Defoe meant to convey about Moll through her children differs depending on which of her children hes referring to. I don’t think that we’re ever supposed to dislike her or think negatively about her as a result. I think that all of her children meantioned up to (but not including) her son with the man at bath are mentioned either for the sake of reality (obviously a healthy married woman in this time period would be having children) or because they are needed later in the story, as is the case with Moll’s son in Virginia.  Once we get to her next two children (her son by the man at bath and her son by her Lancanshire husband) she is very upset to leave them behind. I think that this reflects the presentation made last week in class because as a woman Moll really didn’t have any other choice. She could either leave her children where they would be well cared for and she would also have better prospects of finding someone to support her or she could keep them with her and both her and her children would likely and up starving and homeless.

Another thing that I noticed is that a lot of the time that Moll or others are complaining about how poor they are they still have maids attending them. Like when Moll and her Lancanshire husband find out that neither of them have any money and when Moll goes to stay with her “governess” to give birth.  It made me wonder what the lives of some of these maids would have been like. Not the maids of the very wealthy like Moll was when she was first taken in ,w ho may have recieved better wages, treatment, or accomadations as a result,  but those of people like Moll who had very little money and seldom had a permanent residence.

Moll Flanders

So I finally finished reading Moll Flanders and I really liked it at the beginning. However once she became a thief the story got really repetitive and boring! I liked it again towards the end though (after she got caught and things started to pick up again) so I geuss it wasn’t all bad.  The one thing that really bothered me about the novel was the way in which Molls children are treated.  I couldn’t believe that out of 12 children (yes I counted 12!) that none of them end up living with her for very long.  And she seems to change  her feelings about this throughout the novel.  The only mention of her children by her first husband is that they were “happily” taken out of her hands by her mother in law after her husbands death.  With her brother-husband she seems happy to leave her children as they remind her of her incest but then when she sees her son when she returns to Virginia she acts as if she has been missing him and wondering about him the whole time  (even though she makes no other mention of him up until that point).  She does get upset about leavnig behind the child that she had with the “man at bath” but once it is done she gets over it quite quickly and never mentions it again.  Then when she has her child by her Lancansire (sorry about spelling) husband she feels horrible about leaving it behind and makes long speeches about it even though she has already had 9 other children that she either abandoned or that died.  Then she goes right back to her old ways when she dismisses the removal of her last husbands child from the story with just one sentence.  Overall I just couldn’t believe that Moll and the story treated her children with such indifference, especially after the way that she was treated as a child.

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