Reading and Righting Moll Flanders.(Critical Essay)

Kinship laws, which govern the system of combinations in mating, correspond to linguistic laws governing the combinations of words in a sentence or letters in a word... [I]ncest is bad grammar.

Maud Ellmann

The connection between the rules that govern kinship and grammar offers a critical reader of Moll Flanders a tool to understand the connection between the troubling presence of incest and the renowned problem of language in the novel. [1] Kinship and language are most tangled in the preface, a part of the text that, with few significant exceptions, has been treated as little more than an interesting addendum to the body of the novel. However, within the preface the character of the editor attempts to situate the novel's characters, readers, and text itself in a recuperative family dynamic that undoes the familial and linguistic "bad grammar" that appears throughout the novel. By exploring these efforts and failures, I extend and re-craft the traditional critical problems and arguments regarding irony and voice; the force of my argument coincides with the assertion that incest informs the (mis)use of language and that language constructs incest.

The character of the editor is rife with ambiguity. The gender of the editor is never clearly stated; almost every critic assumes that the editor is male, and most make the distinction between Defoe and this character. I argue that it is the recuperative function the editor performs that must be understood loosely as male and specifically as paternalistic. These qualities are consistently revealed by the editor's rhetoric: he rewrites Moll's "own memorandums" (p. 1) and has "had no little difficulty to put it into a Dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak Language fit to be read" (p. 3). The "moral laundering" [2] Moll's story undergoes through a process of censorship and "finishing" (p. 3) is clear in the preface, but what is not so clear is the editor's motive in performing this "laundering. "While he emphasizes the reader's "Instruction" (p. 5), not every episode neatly fits this purpose. The notorious ironies of the preface are irresolvable conundrums unless read together with the rest of the narrativ e and vice versa. [3] When read together, the editor's act of making Moll "tell her own Tale in modester Words than she told it at first" (p. 3) obliterates the notion that the narrative is Moll's at all; instead, the narrative reveals itself as a tale of figurative and recuperative paternalism over an unruly narrative child.

The editor positions himself as the figurative father who "dresses up" his narrative daughter, but he is no single parent: his rhetorically savvy construction of his reader as figurative mother shackles both the reader and Moll to a recuperative fiction of bourgeois family norms intended to rework the original and disruptive "amorous Chain of Story" (p. 4). What is at stake in this creation of a normative family structure is only revealed during the narrative's descriptions of figurative and literal incest. For the critical reader--distinguishable from the editor's constructed reader--who finishes the novel and then turns back to the beginning, the discovery of incest by Moll is arguably the most pivotal revelation in the text.4 The passages about incest allow the critical reader to return to the preface and detect the paternalistic intent of the editor. The practice of incest threatens social structures and, by extension, the very practice of narrative that contributes to the cultural work of this society. Because Moll discovers maternal and economic fecundity through incest without punishment, and because she "was not so extraordinary a Penitent as she was" (p. 6) at the time she wrote her memorandums, the editor demonstrates the necessity of recouping her narrative for a purpose vastly different from what Moll's "original" narrative teaches: the reconstruction of the bourgeois family structure in order to perpetuate it.

The editor's paternal role in Moll's narrative is established progressively over the course of the novel, but the groundwork is set as early as the title page: Moll was "five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother)" (p. 1). As a parenthetical statement, the act of incest is subordinate because it appears as an aside to the information that she was married five times and, at the same time, the parenthetical holds the privileged position as the most noteworthy of her marriages, deserving its own clause. The aside acts as a lure for the yet-to-be-constructed reader: it tantalizes because it announces transgression and begs for explication, but no further explanation is found in the preface. Instead, what the critical reader finds is the editor's construction of an ideal reader who "know[s] how to read" the text "and how to make the good Uses of it" (p. 4). Without specifically naming them, the editor appeals to his assumed readers' awareness of, and agreement with, dominant fictions regarding morality, t he law, and normative family structures. The absence of any discussion of incest in a preface that explicitly addresses many of Moll's other crimes and misadventures marks the incest as an ideological battlefield because it, more than anything else, threatens the dominant fictions that rely upon stable familial relationships and, thus, of gender as well: a male "Author [is] hard put to it to wrap it up so clean" when a "Woman debauch'd ... comes to give an Account of all her vicious Practises" (p. 3). Both the explicit and implicit lines drawn in the preface pit male against female and, more specifically, figurative father against daughter and editor/husband against reader/wife.

The editor's pen fathers the narrative, but destruction is the prerequisite for his (re)production. ...