"The Gift of My Father's Bounty": Patriarchal Patronization in "Moll Flanders" and "Roxana"

Abstract

What would a feminist analysis of Moll Flanders and Roxana-two of Defoe's most anti-institutional novels-look like which presented as its theoretical framework not a Marxian critique of market economies but rather ethnographic studies of gift-based economies? Two points I want to contend in this paper are that such an analysis would both open up new avenues for exploring how female identity is constructed and female experience shared, and would also immediately enter into debate between Marxists and Feministsspecifically, issue raised by Marilyn Strathern, whether primacy should be accorded to class or to gender divisions (Gender 25). In one of more popular examples of this debate, Lois A. Chaber shows how Moll Flanders represents Defoe's critique of an emergent capitalist society and bourgeoisie who inhabit it: intricacies of marriage laws, overarching maleficence and disorder of Newgate, and nuances of all attract Defoe's satire and social criticism, while finally revealing the more longstanding evils of sexism (213). No longer, implies Chaber, can deepest impulses of Defoe's narratives be analyzed unless one is of a joint Marxist and feminist persuasion, who emphasize[s] contradictions in condition of women under capitalism (213). But can Defoe's own genuine critique of those institutions which sustain patriarchal imperatives be construed as Marxist, especially since Defoe's most recent biographer, Paula Backscheider, details Defoe's own creative, often lucrative, yet finally doomed capitalist projects (50-52, 55-67)?1 And although Marxist critics have rightly attempted to shift critical emphasis on Defoe's characters from their souls to their material social conditions, can author of An Essay on South-Sea Trade and Atlas Maritimus be regarded as source for a critique of capitalistic market economies, especially when this latter suggests how London might become axis for world-wide