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.
I am impressed that you got an accurate count; the time I tried it, I came up with a fuzzier total.
Any thoughts about why Moll displays attitudes towards her children that most of us would find utterly alien? Is Defoe telling us she is a terrible person, or is he demonstrating something, consciously or not, about changes in attitudes towards children over the centuries? Also, I wonder if we cannot draw a parallel between this question and the point that Destiny and Amber made in their presentation today about the links between poverty, desperation, and crime?
Good oberservation! I noticed the same thing, and was also quite apalled. I know it made it easier to survive, but c’mon, really!