The Depiction of American Life in Moll Flanders
Jamie Daugherty

Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Moll Flanders has been considered by many critics, such as Virginia Woolf and Alan Dugald McKillop, as an accurate depiction of urban life in early 18th century England. The novel has been celebrated for capturing, among other things, the daily struggle for survival among the impoverished, the corruption and hopelessness within Newgate prison, and the importance of outward appearances of respectability among the emerging middle class in Britain. Yet this assertion might leave one wondering, how well did Defoe recreate life in colonial America in this book? This essay will examine Defoe’s attempt at depicting everyday life in the young colonies, as well as his more impressive ability to express the developing sentiments of opportunism and materialism in colonial America.

While it is known that Daniel Defoe “traveled widely in England and on the Continent” (Blewett 29), he never ventured across the Atlantic. Although he never actually visited America, he surely would have known some friends or acquaintances who had and who would have been willing to provide some information on the experience for his book. Defoe “spent eighteen months in Newgate and talked with thieves, pirates, highwaymen, and coiners before he wrote the history of Moll Flanders” (Woolf 338), so it seems logical that he would be prepared to conduct more of the same type of research in order to truthfully portray American life in the sections of the novel that address it. However, even a casual examination of the text suggests that he did not do so.

The text of Moll Flanders shows that Defoe possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of the geography of North America: “Maryland, Pensilvania, East and West Jersy, New York, and New England, lay all North of Virginia” (Defoe 409). It also reveals his awareness of the lucrative tobacco crops grown in Virginia.
However, Defoe makes the business of running a plantation seem wonderfully easy and infinitely profitable. Moll owns a plantation that she inherits from her mother, which she has only to visit once a year in order to retrieve the profits from her son who oversees it: “I went over the Bay to see my Son, and to receive another Year’s Income” (426). She and her husband live on and profit from another plantation, although her husband seems less concerned with managing his business and more preoccupied with that “which they call Hunting there, and which he greatly delighted in” (415). In reality, plantation life was far from simple.

Although tobacco crops did not require large tracts of land and could be grown successfully on relatively small plots, “it was a crop that demanded a great deal of hand labor and close attention” (Faragher 56). Tobacco plants would sap the soil of all nutrients very quickly and would thus have to be replanted in fresh land every few years (76). Numerous workers, either African slaves or indentured servants from England, were needed to perform the complicated labor necessary to produce quality tobacco leaves. There were various other tasks that also had to be attended to, as “on the eighteenth-century Virginia plantation of George Mason, [where] slaves worked as carpenters, coopers, sawyers, blacksmiths, tanners, curriers, shoemakers, spinners, weavers, knitters, and even distillers” (58). Understandably, the most rebellious slaves often did their best to undermine this labor system by “refus[ing] to cooperate: they malingered, they mistreated tools and animals, they destroyed the master’s property” (60).

Given this information, it is difficult to imagine how Moll’s husband could have been so nonchalant about the workings of his plantation. Slave labor on large plantations was commonly supervised by overseers, “but often [plantation owners] themselves had direct financial control of daily operations” (198). Meticulous management would have been necessary on a daily basis in order for a plantation to be as profitable as Moll claims hers to be. Clearly, although slave labor was free, it was not easy.

In addition to organizing this specialized labor, slave owners perpetually had to worry about slave insurrections. In many places in the South, slaves made up the majority of the labor force, if not the total population, and “in the Chesapeake colonies, slaves represented about 40 percent of the population by mid-eighteenth century” (Nash 176). In Maryland, Virginia’s neighbor to the north, a “census of 1707, for example, tabulated 3,003 white bound laborers and 4,657 black slaves” (165). The sheer numbers of the slave population in such areas created a paranoid fear in white lawmakers as well as slave owners, as the laws and practices of the time reflect. Already, “by the 1640's in Virginia blacks were being forbidden the use of firearms” (166). Plantation owners kept their slaves under tight control by punishing rebellious ones “with extra work, public humiliation, or solitary confinement, [along with] the threat of the lash” (Faragher 60).

Yet the dread of these punishments did not always outweigh the desire for freedom, as several slave revolts took place in the first half of the eighteenth century. At least five violent rebellions took place in South Carolina and Georgia during this time period, the most serious of which involved nearly one hundred escaped slaves who murdered about thirty white colonists in a march toward Florida (61). In attempts to prevent recurrences of such events, some terrified slave owners went so far as sentencing slaves to “burning at the stake for plotting or participating in insurrection” (Nash 176).

Moll Flanders and her husband would surely have been aware of such frightening upheavals, as were all slave owners throughout the South. If they had any desire to preserve their lives and property, they should have taken precautions to protect themselves from becoming the victims of slave retaliation. As is clear from the above descriptions of the punishments and laws leveled against slaves, the fear of insurrection was a constant concern for slave holders in the eighteenth century and beyond. Indeed, as they lived “surrounded by those whom they had enslaved, control became a crucial factor for white slave owners, who lived in perpetual fear of black insurrections” (176). In light of this striking facet of history, it would certainly have been bizarre and foolish for a planter to “say he would much rather [go hunting], than attend the natural Business of his Plantation” (Defoe 411), as Moll’s husband does. It seems that if Defoe had spoken to any slave owner, or even someone with reasonable knowledge of their lifestyle, he would have learned of this obsessive fear. In leaving this out of Moll Flanders, he neglected a crucial part of eighteenth-century Southern American life.
Other than this, the hugest discrepancy between reality and the novel lies in the fact that Moll makes no distinction between African slaves and English indentured servants. She refers to them in equal terms, telling the reader that “we bought us two Servants, (viz.) An English Woman-Servant just come on Shore from a Ship of Leverpool, and a Negro Man-Servant” (414). Moll even refers to herself and her husband as slaves, “in the despicable Quality of Transported Convicts destin’d to be sold for Slaves, I for five Year, and he under Bonds and Security not to return to England any more” (391). In actuality, the difference between a slave and an indentured servant was tremendous.

In the earliest days of Virginia’s colonization, most labor was performed by indentured servants, both black and white. Historical evidence shows that at this time, “the Africans who worked in the tobacco fields were not slaves at all, but servants” (Faragher 56). For about the first forty years of the seventeenth century, imported Africans “were bound to labor for a specified period of years and thereafter were free to work for themselves, hire out their labor, buy land, move as they pleased, and, if they wished, hold slaves themselves” (Nash 166). Over time, various developments led to the shift from temporary servitude to lifelong bondage. Human lifetimes increased, most likely due to dietary improvements and increased resistance to disease. Therefore, many people were now able to survive their indentures. So even though it was more expensive to purchase a slave than an indentured servant initially, in the long run this became more profitable because the buyer owned that person for life instead of just a matter of four or five years (Faragher 56). This deal was made even more lucrative by a law passed by the Virginia legislature in 1662 which declared that “children inherited the status of their slave mothers” (56). Thus, a slave owner could get two, three, four, or more slaves for the price of one if he bought a female slave and kept her offspring instead of selling them.

Besides the 1662 law mentioned above, numerous others were passed due to the fear resulting from the numerous slave insurrections outlined earlier. These laws were designed to downgrade the slave from the status of a human being to that of property. A 1669 law gave Virginian masters absolute power over their slaves, “declaring . . . that the death of a slave during punishment ‘shall not be accounted felony’ ” (56). By the end of the century, blacks were not allowed to “testify before a court; to engage in any kind of commercial activity, either as buyer or seller; to hold property; to participate in the political process; to congregate in public places with more than two or three of their fellows; to travel without permission; and to engage in legal marriage or parenthood” (Nash 166). Legislation was also enacted to prevent the education of slaves, and sadly, “these laws were so effective that by 1860, it is estimated, only 5 percent of all slaves could read” (Faragher 200). The rights listed here are among the most basic rights enjoyed by humans; the loss of them left slaves with little more to their lives than eating, sleeping, and working. In short, they were treated like livestock.

Given this description of the life of a slave, it is outrageous that Moll would dare to compare herself to one. Her intended five years of servitude is nothing compared to the lifetime of drudgery slaves were forced to endure. It is actually less than what was normal, as “during the eighteenth century the British sent over, mostly to the Chesapeake, some 50,000 convicts sentenced to seven to fourteen years at hard labor” (Faragher 78). Moll does not even end up working a single day; she buys her freedom by making to the boat’s captain “a present of 20 Guineas” (Defoe 402) along with a promise to later give him “6000 weight of Tobacco” (402) after she and her husband have established themselves. Moll’s journey to America is replete with fancy dinners and luxurious comforts, in stark contrast to the nightmarish Middle Passage that many captured Africans did not even survive. Clearly, Moll’s tendency to equate slavery with indentured servitude is fallacious, and reflects either huge insensitivity on her part and a desire to exaggerate her suffering, or Defoe’s inadequate research of his topic. Another line in the novel suggests that the former possibility could quite easily be true.

Right after Moll tells the reader about buying the English servant and the male slave, she calls them both “things absolutely necessary for all People who pretended to Settle in that Country” (414). Moll’s flippant reference to these two human beings as “things” shows that she has already adopted the American slave owner’s perception of his workers as his property. In fact, she has surpassed his cold avarice because she sees the indentured servant, who will one day be freed, as her property also. It is in this sense that Defoe has captured the essence of the burgeoning American spirit, specifically its highly individualistic drive to achieve as much wealth and social status as possible.

The so-called New World presented seemingly infinite opportunities for everyone to advance socially and economically, as antiquated systems of nobility and titles were no longer relevant. To a much greater extent than they did in the mother country, “in British North America people celebrated social mobility. The class system was remarkably open, and the entrance of newly successful planters, commercial farmers, and merchants into the upper ranks was not only possible but common” (Faragher 79). Here, Moll’s dream to “come to be a Gentlewoman” (Defoe 48) would have been entirely attainable and would not have resulted in her ridicule as it did in England. Moll’s assertion that she should be a gentlewoman echoes the beliefs of one of America’s most renowned thinkers, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” (266-7). Moll’s story exemplifies this philosophy beautifully. As she learns indirectly the same lessons as her noble master’s daughters, she states that “in some things, I had the Advantage of my Ladies, tho’ they were my Superiors; but they were all the Gifts of Nature, and which their Fortunes could not furnish” (Defoe 56). Moll is much more talented than her noble counterparts, and (if only for a while) is just as virtuous as they are. Clearly, Jefferson’s sentiments of a natural and artificial aristocracy are in keeping with Moll’s life experience.

Another aspect of Moll’s social mobility that is in keeping with the spirit of early America is her willingness to use other people in order to achieve this goal. Again, her reference to her servants as “things” shows that to her, they are merely tools that she can use to claw her way up the social ladder. In this sense, she is no different from the brutal slave owners who used property laws to justify their inhumane treatment of people as slaves. Like Southern slave owners and traders, Moll never stops to consider the source of her incoming wealth, or its cost in terms of human lives as well as the quality of those lives. This is also true of her willingness to steal from innocent people repeatedly without showing any feelings of guilt or remorse until her capture. She regrets her actions only because they got her in trouble, not because they inflicted undeserved suffering on others. Even after her alleged spiritual enlightenment, she is still able to unflinchingly use people, including her own son, for her personal gain, rendering her statements of religious reformation incredibly hollow. Her attitude is reminiscent of that of the former Confederacy, where Jim Crow laws were passed to keep African-Americans in virtual social bondage. Such actions showed that the members of this former slave-owning society learned nothing from their tremendous losses of lives and property in the Civil War, and conveyed their stubborn insistence on viewing others as inferiors in order to increase their own perceived social standing.

Moll’s lack of repentance, and that of Southern slave owners, is even more disturbing when one considers the reasons for the crimes committed. If Moll had been stealing bread to feed herself or her children, she would be completely deserving of compassion and would have no reason to regret such actions. Yet she does not steal the necessities of life, she steals luxuries: jewelry, watches, fine cloth, dishes, flatware, even a horse. She chooses not to stop stealing even after she is financially secure: “as to the Arguments which my Reason dictated for perswading me to lay down [the lifestyle of thievery], Avarice stept in and said, go on, go on; you have had very good luck, go on till you have gotten Four or Five Hundred Pound . . . and then you shall live easie without working at all” (Defoe 268). It is obvious that Moll is not committing these crimes because she has to; she is doing this because she wants to.

In this sense, her justification of her actions is just as faulty as that which Southerners used to justify slavery, by claiming that the institution was necessary to maintain their traditional lifestyle. This assertion was logically unsound, as the Southern slave owners’ lifestyle was ridiculously decadent, as it “entailed a large estate, a spacious, elegant mansion, and lavish hospitality” (Faragher 198). Such opulence is especially deplorable in light of the pitiful conditions in which these same people forced their slaves to exist. These illegitimate masters stole their slaves’ freedom in order to make themselves incredibly rich without really working for it themselves. These actions parallel Moll’s willingness to steal people’s belongings in order to fuel her ability to make the appearances of a gentlewoman and live an easy life. In each case, one has difficulty feeling sympathy for the thief, be it the master of a hundred slaves living in a grand mansion, or the independently wealthy Moll Flanders.

Moll often attempts to rationalize her behavior in ways that are just as disturbing as those in which Southerners tried to justify slavery. In one case, she agrees with her governess’s assertion that by swindling an unsuspecting gentleman, she has done him a favor by teaching him a lesson: “the usage may, for ought I know, do more to reform him, than all the Sermons that ever he will hear in his life” (Defoe 297). Amazingly, Southern slave owners also claimed to believe that their exploitation of people was actually doing them a favor. They adhered to the idea of the white man’s burden, envisioning themselves as father figures who were responsible for feeding and clothing their underlings, who in exchange “were to work properly and do as they were told, as children would” (Faragher 198). In the case of both Moll Flanders and the slave owners, a justification is given for the inexcusable act of exploitation, with the rationalization only serving to add insult to injury. Slave owners condescendingly equated their slaves with ignorant children, without ever acknowledging the fact that these people had been feeding and clothing themselves just fine in Africa for centuries before the arrival of European traders. Meanwhile, Moll’s proclaimed belief that she has done the gentleman a favor by robbing him and falsely leading him to believe that he had sex with her insults his intelligence and morality while causing undue emotional pain to him and possibly his wife and family. It is abundantly clear that in each case, the offender does not have the victim’s interests at heart, but only claims to do so in order to quell any objections from their own consciences, as well as outside critics.

Given the evidence described in the preceding essay, the character Moll Flanders exhibits many of the characteristics of early America, particularly the South: materialism, greed, a readiness to steal from and exploit others. In the novel based on her life, Daniel Defoe did an imperfect job of depicting the day-to-day life of an Anglo-American colonist. However, through the title character, he skillfully exemplified some of the most prevalent sentiments permeating colonial American society in the eighteenth century: the desire for upward mobility, the unlimited accumulation of wealth, and a willingness to view people as property in order to accomplish personal goals.

Works Cited

Blewett, David, ed. “A Chronology of Daniel Defoe.” Moll Flanders. NY: Penguin, 1989. 29-31.

Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. David Blewett, ed. NY: Penguin, 1989.

Faragher, John Mack, et al. Out of Many: A History of the American People. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Letter to John Adams.” Social and Political Philosophy: Readings from Plato to Gandhi. NY: Anchor Books, 1963. 266-70.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Woolf, Virginia. “Defoe.” Moll Flanders (Norton Critical Edition). NY: Norton, 1981. 337-343.

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