Moll Flanders

Moll’s luck finally runs out—or perhaps providence intervenes—and she is sent to prison. The conditions in Newgate are abysmal, and she describes slowly becoming sluggish and senseless. Just as with the circumstances in the earlier parts of her story, so too do the circumstances in prison influence who Moll is. She becomes like the other prisoners, and she accustoms herself to her situation, in her chameleon-like way. In addition, while Moll herself does not directly question this, it seems that the punishment is far harsher than the crime warrants: she is to be hanged for petty thievery. There is no justice served at Newgate, only brutality. This incident also takes her story full circle: “I became as naturally pleased and easy with the place, as if indeed I had been born there” (262). Moll elides the truth that she was, indeed, born in Newgate. This is her other great talent: willful forgetting and conscious dissembling.

Moll’s time in Newgate introduces a new nuance to the theme of The Interplay of Circumstance, Opportunity, and Morality. To this point, circumstances have usually pushed Moll into immoral behavior. In Newgate, Moll begins to “repent,” pursuing more conventionally moral behavior. Yet the dire circumstances she faces raise the question of whether her remorse is genuine or whether she is merely fearful of her own death. She defends her inability to repent truly by noting that she had been living an iniquitous life for 40 years; the habit of remorse had left her long ago. Self-preservation has been her only motivation for so long that she can no longer recognize true atonement. Read another way, however, her justifications are earned: without her skills as a thief and her sex work, Moll would likely not have survived. Still, she claims that this kind of false repentance leads to “the completest misery on earth” (263). She falls into despair.

After her initial wave of misfortune and despair, however, Moll meets with remarkable good fortune. She is welcomed by the other prisoners, and she is sent a compassionate minister who helps her with her case. The minister believes that she is now a true penitent—the experience of seeing her Lancashire husband come into Newgate shocks her into more sincere remorse than she had originally felt—so he pleads her case and she escapes hanging. Because she still possesses a small fortune, she is treated like a wealthy gentlewoman rather than a prisoner. During her voyage to Virginia, the captain helps her arrange to buy her and her husband’s freedom when they arrive. They build a successful plantation using her resources, and she discovers that she has inherited money and a plantation from her mother. She reunites with her son, who treats her with affection and respect, despite her having disappeared years earlier. The fortunes of Moll’s story inevitably outweigh the misfortunes.

The fact that Moll both evades serious consequences for her crimes and ends the story free and wealthy epitomizes the irresolvable tension at the heart of the theme of The Role of Providence Versus Luck. On one hand, the vacillation of Moll’s fortunes at the end of the novel could be interpreted as the influence of providence in her life. At the culmination of her criminal life, providence steps in to send her to Newgate, where she faces her mortality. That experience leads her to repent her sins and begin to act not only in her own self-interest but to help others, particularly her Lancashire husband. Thus, she is reunited with her husband and can go to Virginia to make amends with her son. Her success and happiness in America is, in this view, a reflection of providence interceding to bring her to repentance and rewarding her when she takes a more virtuous path.

However, even with Moll’s insistence on her genuine repentance, there are signs that she is acting cynically. For one thing, her behavior does not meaningfully change. She continues to lie and conceal information from almost everyone around her. She tells her son that her time in prison was made worse by being associated with the name Moll Flanders: “but that, as he knew well, was none of my name” (279). Thus, she says, she was “dealt with as an old offender, though this was the first thing they had ever known of me” (279). She cannot bring herself to be honest with her son, and she works tirelessly to gloss over the nature of her crimes and the length of time she spent committing them. If her repentance is not sincere, then what happens to Moll is not the result of providence, but of luck—first the bad luck of being caught, then the good luck of meeting the kindly minister, which Moll uses to her advantage. In this reading, Moll is an opportunist, not a penitent.

The problem of how to interpret Moll, her behavior, and the meaning of her story is complicated further by the dissonance between Moll’s actions and her words. Throughout this section, Moll tries to provide a moral for her readers. She is concerned that the salacious descriptions of her life will be more intriguing for readers than her ultimate repentance. She is keen to suggest that her misfortunes will be instructive to alert readers: “It must be the work of every sober reader to make just reflections on [her conversion], as their own circumstances may direct” (270). Again, it is difficult to take Moll at her word: she denies being Moll Flanders; she never suffers any punishment for her crimes; she revels in her talent for crime and, finally, her penchant for repentance. She even elides the fact that she has numerous children that she has left behind or given up. She tells her son in Virginia, about his inheritance, “I had no child but him in the world” (312). Nevertheless, Moll’s resilience, her roguish spirit, and her ingenuity conspire to make her a likable—if highly untrustworthy—character. Certainly, none of the men in the novel (mostly unnamed) can keep up with her ingenious exploits. Whether Moll Flanders represents a story of sin and repentance, a celebration of capitalistic ingenuity, or a cautionary tale about the moral threat colonialist capitalism poses remains an open question.