How Did Moll Flanders Fail

The novel is telling a real experience of Moll Flanders about her entire life in 18th century in London and in America. She spends her whole life to become a gentlewoman by getting wealthy and trying to achieve a high social status. On the path she was pursuing those; she has to give up so many things; including love, self-respect, religion, and peace of mind, and all the decisions that she had made were just in order to satisfied her vanity and pride. Moll began her life in the low class. She was abandoned by her born mother, a transported felon in Newgate Prison. Her mother left her when she was only a baby, and in English society during that time of period, there was little chance for such a girl like Moll to escape this class. But Moll

However, all stories are started off with Moll’s “greed”. When she was fourteen years old, the kind nurse gets sick and died, and Moll starts living with a gentle woman and her family. The elder brother in the family used all the tricks and seduced her into become his secret lover. “’I’ll take care of you……here’s an earnest for you,’ and with that he pulls out a silk purse with a hundred guineas in it, and gave it to me; ‘and I’ll give you such another,’……so that I could not say a word, and he easily perceived it; so putting the purse into my bosom, I made no more resistance to him, but let him do just what he pleased, and as often as he pleased.”(Defoe 29). Unfortunately the older brother didn’t marry her, and Moll ended up with married his younger brother, which Moll doesn’t love at all. The husband died five years later after they got married. They have two kids and both of them were taken off by Moll’s husband’s parents. About giving her babies away, Moll seems feel happy about it, she feels like she finally drops the burden off, and she is free now. When I was reading the stories, I am picturing it if I was Moll, I would not get married if I don’t love that guy. But why Moll keep marrying those guys that she is not that interested in? Now those innocent children are put in misery, they are going to grow up without their mother’s

“It was past the flourishing time with me, when I might expect to be courted for a mistress, that agreeable part had declined some time, and the ruins only appeared of what had been and that which was worse than all was this, that I was the most dejected, disconsolate creature alive……I was left perfectly friendless and helpless. In this distress I had no assistant, no friend to comfort or advise me” (Defoe 172). We can’t blame Moll for stealing because she is not voluntary. It was the society, hierarchy don’t give her a chance to let her survive in this horrible situation. As Moll herself said: “Give me not poverty, lest I steal.” (Defoe