The Deconstructive Reading on Moll Flanders

Abstract

As the first female protagonist in Daniel Defoe’s novels with first-person narrators, Moll Flanders is a highly ambiguous, problematic character. Emerging into the man-dominated, money-orientated society as an orphan from the lowest social class, she courageously defies her birth and eventually manages to achieve the self-designated identity of a gentlewoman. Centering on Moll’s search for personal identity, which is undergone in extreme circumstances, this thesis discusses her three processes, which actually forms a circle to obtain gentlewoman-ship. From the territorialization of gentlewoman-ship at the beginning to the de-territorialization of gentlewoman-ship to the re-territorialization of gentlewoman-ship in the end, Moll has experienced a progress of subversion, rebellion and re-subversion. Therefore, we can find Defoe’s hidden patriarchal discourse in the novel.