The Politics of Negotiation: Moll Flanders and Defoe’s Ethic Codification

Abstract

Daniel Defoe is often perceived as one of the most influential and prolific writers in the world literature as well as the inventor of the English novel. Among Daniel Defoe’s various works, Moll Flanders (1722) is neither the most enduring nor the most popular one. But it is Defoe’s first novel, also the first one in the history of English literature, with a woman protagonist from the lowest social class. By analyzing three women authors’ works and three men authors’ works in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Spivak proves the complicity between the ideology of writers, both male and female, and their class in their literary representation at certain social context though sometimes the ideology of their class is not the dominant culture power at society. This thesis aims at proving the heroine in Defoe’s Moll Flanders—Moll Flanders’ detour of identity and at interpreting this transformation of connotation of gentlewoman with the help of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theoretic analysis of complicity relationship between author and his class and literary representation.