| Defoe's Moll Flanders presents a narrator whose identity changes from the fluid dynamism of criminal to stable unity of bourgeois proprietor over the novel's course. I take the latter identity position to be a manifestation of Locke's model of the self, a model I characterize as intrinsically dialectical. Drawing on the work of Karl Marx and Georges Bataille, I argue that the textual shape and movement of Moll's resolution demonstrates inherent contradictions with the modern dialectic of the self. |
