By Eva König (auth.)
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Additional info for The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Vicissitudes of the Eighteenth-Century Subject
Example text
The Lady had Masters home ... to teach her Daughters ... I learn’d by Imitation and Enquiry, all that they learn’d by Instruction and Direction’ (55). She appreciates her education and praises her own merits. This pride is the mark of a middleclass consciousness and indicates a belief in the inherent possibility of social advancement through the proper application of one’s talents. Nevertheless, a female foundling is disadvantaged in capitalist society. Without family connections and money to bolster her chances in the marriage Moll Flanders and Fluid Identity 33 market, Moll must use her own talents to secure her future.
Thus, it is the work of a thoroughly bourgeois consciousness. The macrostructure of the novel traces a spiritual trajectory that begins indifferently for the protagonist, then deteriorates to its lowest point when Moll is imprisoned in Newgate, from which she emerges as a repentant sinner and her ‘fortunes’ pick up again. This structure shows ‘the gradual but inexorable moral degeneration of the heroine until the moment of ... 23 The cycle of the microstructure is replaced by a linear trajectory, and at the end of life the accounting is to be given to God in order to ensure passage to heaven.
In prison she repeats her mother’s plot as a convicted thief who gets her sentence changed to transportation, while on her return to Virginia her mother’s valuable legacy awaits her. Although her husband-brother will never be useful to her after her discovery of the incest, her son from this marriage will become her best ally in the New World. It seems important that the change in the family’s significance follows Moll’s spiritual conversion in Newgate from wicked sinner to penitent. Moll can achieve her goals partly due to the concealment of her real name.