Subversion And Reconstruction: Orphan Image Under Economic Individualism In Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe is known as a pioneer novelist of English literature and a controversial writer of the eighteenth century.Having lived a varied life as merchant,writer,journalist and politician,he made his most significant achievement in writing.A rich life experience enabled him to have a sufficient observation of the English society.He was mainly concerned about the ordinary people and depicted in a matter-of-fact,straight-forward manner.As a novelist,he advocated the educational purpose of the novel and adapted the writing techniques of realism.Moll Flanders,as one of the most unique works of Defoe,has endured extremes of praise and criticism from generations of writers and critics.Published in 1722,the novel develops in the first-person narration of the heroine,Moll Flanders.Born in Newgate prison to a convicted mother,Moll starts her life as a homeless,property-less orphan standing at the meeting point of the forces of social revolution.While the novel has attracted abundant critical interest since the early twentieth century,research importance is barely attached to the identity of the heroine as an orphan.With an emerging interest in the ordinary life of individual,the eighteenth-century literature valued orphan figures differently.Instead of social margin,they were put under spotlight along with their quest for identity and their interaction with social structures.In valuing the orphan,the eighteenth-century novel was valuing the social individual.This thesis will investigate Moll’s construction of identity as a valued orphan in the eighteenth-century England.In her personal journey,Moll shifts her identity from a social outsider to a valued orphan—the center of property,family,and body—with the new notions of economic individualism.Approaching from the three aspects of property,family and body,the thesis will look into Moll’s exploration and subversion of social order and her reconstruction of the self under the spirit of economic individualism.By doing so,it attempts to forge a clear link between the orphan image and economic individualism in Moll Flanders.From the narration of this orphan figure,Defoe discussed the ideologies about gender,family,and property in the eighteenth-century England as he observed.Embodying his capitalistic and individualistic spirit in his orphan heroine,Defoe expressed a contradictory attitude with deeper reflections of capitalism.