Irony Moll Flanders

A detailed Summary of Irony Moll Flanders

I love but hate, I laugh without a smile, I am ridiculous and respected, hypocrite and honest, a nonsense with reason , a convict and a gentleman. Isn't that the world we live in ? He is using a subtle form of humour by saying things that he does not mean. This situation is odd or amusing because it involves a contrast. Irony kills, laughs, denounces, argues but is hidden behind words to look not so politically incorrect. Daniel Defoe was one of those who wanted to denounce society's incongruities. He used his character, Moll Flanders, as an archetype of 18th century England society depicting the cruelty and the immorality of the time. In this autobiography (the novel is written in the first person) Moll's life seems to be fill of contrasts and ironic situations, but is that not interpretation? This essay will discuss the irony in the novel Moll Flanders taking examples from the book to prove whether or not it should be considered as a ironic novel. Let's have a look at the interpretations that one may have.

As a preliminary, it must be noted that Moll has a basically bipartie structure, the first part containing Moll's sexual adventures, the second her life as a thief, her imprisonment, and her transportation to America

The problem of secondary figures in the novel has been developed to clarify the nature of Moll's character, both the way in which it is developed and the way in which it is not. Moll's character is developed largely in terms of her self-awareness and not through her awareness of others; even her minimal relationship with other people serve only to reinforce her intrinsic qualities. From Defoe's preface we know that the emphasis was to be on the adventures in which she was engaged. At this point in the novel there is an apparent separation between the older and the younger Moll. The older woman can look back upon her behaviour years before and understand it from a mature and worldly-wise position. Moll can say of her younger self: "I saw him most unbounded stock of vanity and pride, but a very little stock of virtue... Thus, I gave up myself to ruin without the least concern, and am a fair momento to all young women whose vanity prevails over their virtue." We may be somewhat dubious about Moll's moralizing here, but unquestionably there is a difference between the character of the young girl, driven by vanity into precarious relationship, and the woman who censures this youthful behaviour. Moll is not behaving with financial prudence in her first affair with the two brothers. She has not yet learned the way of her world and the older Moll condemns her younger self for this. The girl is too taken up with her own beauty and its immediate, not long-range reward: "I...was taken up with the pride of my beauty... as for the gold, I spent the whole hours in looking upon it..."

She discovers the truth only when she is on her husband's plantation in Virginia and his mother narrates her life story. As she listen to it, Moll gradually gathers " that this was certainly no more or less than my own mother, and I had now had two children, and was big with another by my own brother"³, following this with declaration which echoes the one quoted above from page 68 "I lived therefore in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest wife; and though I was not much touched with the crime of it, yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me." At first she conceals the situation from her husband, merely telling him that the union is not a lawful one. This alone has a strong effect on him: " he turned pale as death, and stood mute as a thunderstruck, and once or twice I thought he would have fainted" . He recovers, but when Moll decides to at last that the full truth must be told the reaction is more severe: "I saw him turn pale and look wild" and nearly faint away, says Moll; then he became pensive and melancholy, "a little distempered in his head", eventually falling "into a long lingering consumption."

It is difficult to believe that all those rapid transfers of her affections were not contemplated ironically by Defoe; but although there is a rather more conscious irony than many of my friends are apparently prepared to admit. There is no consistently ironic attitude present in Moll Flanders, and what may appear to be highly ironic to the twentieth-century reader may not have seemed so to Defoe. For the most part Defoe simply followed Moll around; and having a perfectly clear idea of her character he was chiefly concerned to show her acting and feeling in every situation as he believed she would.

Every detail here matches one in the first episode. Just as Moll's brother begins to "turned pale as death" and nearly fainted, so does Moll when the elder brother begins to suggest that she might marry Robin (turning pale as death she nearly sinks down out of her chair). And just as Moll's brother becomes ill when he hears of his incest so, we recall, does Moll when the elder brother, on another visit, tries to persuade her to accept Robin's proposal. Anticipating her brother's illness almost exactly, Moll becomes melancholy, it is feared tha

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Approximate Word count = 2971
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English