Crime has been something that has plagued us as a species since we started walking the Earth. Although it didn’t create a face for itself until the Eighteenth-Century when there became a split in economic identity, as well as a separation in gender. In Daniel Defoe’s “The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders,” the central female character, is driven by a lust to rise above what she has been born into, but through a series of unfortunate events and gender norm, she is forced to step out of social norms to achieve the life that she believes that she deserves. Defoe’s main protagonist shows what the struggle for a women who fights to step out of the economic boundaries and gender stereotype of Eighteenth-Century England.
Daniel Defoe’s “The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders” is the perfect example of someone who was born in the worst possible situation for a women in Eighteen-Century England. Being born to a mother who she will never meet, because her “mother was convicted of felony for a certain petty theft scarce worth naming, viz” (Defoe 4), after she is released from prison, she leaves for America. Born into a world where the power of your family determines your future, Moll Flanders never met her mother or father, she was an orphan, “victims of negligent parents or parents whose health or lack of skills kept them from earning sufficient income to care for a family” (Reed). Children during the Eighteenth-Century who were born without parents or a guardian of any sort, were often forced into child labor. Defoe’s Moll Flanders was lucky enough to not be forced into child labor, “I was too young to do any work, being not above three years old, passion moved the magistrates of the town to order some c...
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... life until she is swept up into another school where she learns more skills. In this school, she meets the man who will take her virginity. “The lady in the house where I was had two sons, young gentlemen of very promising parts and extraordinary behavior” (Defoe 9). Being trained in various skills around the house, and the new skills she has acquired during the stay at the new school has made her very desirable to both of these brothers. The eldest made his move on her and eventually taking her virginity. After he seduces her, he abandons her, she is compelled to marry his brother; he soon dies after a few short years. She is left on the streets again, she must find a way to survive. She lacks skills to work in a factory and make a decent wage to survive on, she must marry again. But who would want a woman who has already been made into a widow at such a young age?
This account of Mary Brown provides historians with insight into the social and legal practices of the 18th century. This case identifies the social unrest and anxiety regarding the popularity of theft, and in this case shoplifting. This case reiterates this units themes, including, the gendering of crime. London society believed shoplifter most often to be women. The Old Bailey records, reaffirm the notion of gendered crime, and that women were more often than men accused and convicted of shoplifting. However,
Judith R. Walkowitz is a Professor Emeritus at John Hopkins University, specializing in modern British history and women’s history. In her book City of Dreadful Delight, she explores nineteenth century England’s development of sexual politics and danger by examining the hype of Jack the Ripper and other tales of sensational nature. By investigating social and cultural history she reveals the complexity of sexuality, and its influence on the public sphere and vice versa. Victorian London had upheld traditional notions of class and gender, that is until they were challenged by forces of different institutions.
To force me to give my fortune, I was imprisoned-yes: in a private madhouse…” (Maria 131-32). These lines from Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) unfinished novella Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman substantiates the private operation of the madhouse where the protagonist Maria is confined. The importance of private ownership is that this places the madhouse outside the discourse of law. It is illegitimate yet it is legitimized as it is a symbol of male-dominated state oppression. Parallel to this Bastille becomes the direct symbol of the same repression which is used by Wollstonecraft to depict the predicament of dissenting revolutionary women in the late Eighteenth- century England. The language which she is using is evidently from the French Revolution as we know the symbolic importance of the dreaded tower of Bastille where political ‘criminals’ were imprisoned. So, Wollstonecraft’s objective is to politicize the genre of novel as the other Jacobin women writers- novel, for them, is a vehicle of political propaganda.
Women of the seventeenth century had many reasons to accept the challenge of traversing to the New World. Life in England was not always easy, in fact, sometimes worse than in Virginia. Working conditions were appalling, with little pay and long hours. Many found work as servants to the upper class or turned to prostitution. The type of women who gladly boarded the ships were mostly young, single women of low class roots. Sometimes they were young widows who had been left impoverished or women who had no male in their lives for support and protection.1.
The thought of her brothers still being in her former home environment in Maine hurt her. She tried to think of a way to get at least one of her brothers, the sickly one, to come and be with her. She knew that her extended family was financially able to take in another child, and if she showed responsibility, there would be no problem (Wilson, 40). She found a vacant store, furnished it, and turned it into a school for children (Thinkquest, 5). At the age of seventeen, her grandmother sent her a correspondence, and requested her to come back to Boston with her brother (Thinkquest, 6).
Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth” mainly describes the need of a woman to be married to a wealthy man and how she attempts to find the most appropriate suitor. “The House of Mirth” also observes the tedious physical and mental decline of a young woman who, because of her own weakness and indecisiveness, falls from social distinction into poverty and griminess. The story presents a cruel measure of reality and ends quite sadly. Instead of marrying and living happily, Lily weakens slowly and commits suicide, possibly unintentionally, as a way of evading a lower-class humanity in which her upper-class needs cannot survive. Lily's life is the exact opposite of dignity or beauty; she had many chances to live the kind of life she dreamed of, but lost it all.
In the case of Hubert Page in the novella she decided to become a man after he husband has returned. He has made her life difficult after she had their second child, selling their house and leaving her. Once h...
In City of Dreadful Delight, Judith Walkowitz effortlessly weaves tales of sexual danger and more significantly, stories of the overt tension between the classes, during the months when Jack the Ripper, the serial murderer who brutally killed five women, all of them prostitutes, terrorized the city. The book tells the story of western male chauvinism that was prevalent in Victorian London not from the point of view not of the gazer, but rather of the object. Walkowitz argues that the press coverage of the murders served to construct a discourse of heterosexuality in which women were seen as passive victims and sexuality was associated with male violence. Much of City of Dreadful Delight explores the cultural construction and reconstruction of class and sexuality that preceded the Ripper murders. Walkowitz successfully investigates the discourses that took place after the fact and prior social frameworks that made the Ripper-inspired male violence and female passivity model possible and popular.
Whether it is the instability of social class or the destructiveness of an ageless love, the dramatic characters throughout this novel represent the Victorian era well. However, when no one triumphs in the end, this somewhat challenges those romantic elements of Victorian literature.
The advancements made in Victorian England socially, politically and technologically resulted in the questioning of how to grow and keep up with the times while still maintaining the core traditions that the Victorians idealised. One of the main debates in Victorian England was the discussion around the proper place and characteristics of women. Writers during the time period incorporated their personal opinions and outlooks on where women should be placed in society. Two writers and their pieces which will be further examined in this piece are Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities, and Charles Dickens Hard Times.
Everyone has to enter into a new and unknown environment at some point in his or her life, but how would one expect a young, naïve girl, who has always lived a plain life with a poor family, to enter into a new, elegant, and cultured society? This is the situation that Jane Austen depicts for readers in Northanger Abbey and manages to present with appropriate satire and amusing humor. The young lady that Austen writes about is Catherine Morland; though she is well into her youth and almost a young adult, she is still immature and ignorant. Jane Austen successfully portrays and develops Catherine Morland toward maturity, heroism, and self-knowledge through having her leave her family for the first time, adapt to the sophisticated society of Bath, learn what life is really like outside the fictional novels she reads, and forge relationships with new people. “It,[Northanger Abbey], is the herald of Jane Austen's development of the theme of the heroine's transition from girlhood to womanhood” (Cummins).
As a young girl from the country Emma is placed into a convent in the city. Here Emma develops and receives nourishment for her already sentimental soul. She looks upon "copper crosses," the "sick lamb" and the "mystic ...altar" with the vigor of a scholar on a quest for knowledge. She listens intently "to the sonorous lamentation of romantic melancholy" which "awakened unexpected joys within her." Emma, being isolated from the outside world, is left alone to develop her capricious dreams that she reads about in novels, gaining the hope of someday fulfilling these romantic and passionate desires. Emma devours books that involve "romantic woes, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses...gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs" and always "impossibly virtuous."
In regards to Flanders having sex with her own brother it would be difficult to argue that this was a predetermined event considering she truly did not know her husband was of her own flesh and blood. If, indeed, she was aware of the relation and then chose to proceed then one could discus it further in the context of freewill. As for being a whore there is no question that Flanders, especially later in her life, involved herself with such happenings, but for me it was the thievery that seemed to capture the essence of Flanders continual undoing and constant need for penitence. There is no better part of Defoe's work to capture the feelings of utter despondency then when Moll is going to steal for the first time from the apothecary's shop. Defoe prefaces the scene with a few paragraphs where Moll explains her absolute "desolate state". The crime is then set in what James Sutherland explains, "...Moll's first theft he sets the scene with such careful attention to detail that he fixes it in our minds, and gives to it that air of authenticity which, for Defoe, is almost justification of fiction". This is where Defoe's journalistic stylings shine. The reader is indeed in the apothecary and sees Moll's gaffe unfolding before him.
The Eighteenth-century literature is popular for its peculiar style of writing that gives the readers an insider’s view in the novel. By combining the two aspects such as Psychological and Presentational Realism, authors have created works of pure masterpiece such as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. Defoe illustrates Moll, the protagonist’s psyche by writing the narrative in the first person to imply it as an autobiography. This allows psychological realism to work at its finest since the readers can feel a personal relationship to the character. The two important instances that occur with this type of realism are when Moll realizes that she is married to her own brother and her meeting with Humphrey, her son. In addition, Defoe also uses Presentational Realism to describe Moll’s initial career as thief with her first episode at the apothecary’s shop and later stealing a gold necklace from a child. The manner in which the setting is described gives the readers a sense of feeling of being there and at the same time experiencing her escape from the scene.
In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the protagonist's rollercoaster journey began with her birth in the Newgate prison and ends in England where she lives the rest of her life repenting her sins. Along her journey, Moll Flanders meets many people as she attempts to avoid the deadly snares of poverty prevalent in the seventeenth century. Throughout her life, she fails to form emotional attachments with most of the people she encounters. However, Moll Flanders forms an everlasting relationship with the governess who helps her deliver an unwanted child and helps her survive as a single woman. The governess is an important character in Moll Flanders as her morally ambiguous personality has a profound effect on Moll Flanders; though the governess expresses mother-like love for Moll, she introduces her to the life of crime and her influence on Moll contributes significantly to the outcome of her journey.