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CRIMINAL MS-REPRESENTATION: "MOLL FLANDERS" AND FEMALE CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHY Author(s): JOHN RIETZ Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 23, No. 2 (summer 1991), pp. 183-195 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29532777 Accessed: 08-03-2019 01:12 UTC

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CRIMINAL MS-REPRESENTATION: MOLL FLANDERS AND FEMALE CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHY

JOHN RIETZ

I

Femininity and criminality clash in Moll Flanders, a fact that may not be immediately evident to the modern reader because Defoe is not thinking of femininity and criminality in quite the same way we do. The best?perhaps only?access to his conception of the relationship between these two qualities is by way of contemporary texts that shed further light on how that relationship

was perceived by others at the time. And a close look at some of those texts strongly suggests that the roles of woman and criminal were perceived as

mutually exclusive, and that a figure who straddled these two categories gave rise to considerable confusion. Like other biographers of female criminals before him who also struggled to conceive a model of female criminality, Defoe seems to have been unable to reconcile satisfactorily the contradictions of an unfamiliar social hybrid.

But to suggest that certain writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were unable to grasp a concept that we entertain with little or no difficulty need not be the historical condescension it may appear to be. John J. Richetti, in discussing Defoe's Roxana, offers an explanation of her social status as a criminal that could just as appropriately be applied to Moll Flanders: "As a woman suddenly stripped of her domestic identity, Roxana is an open field, a deserted psycho-social space in which anything can be enacted and in which a newly thorough self-consciousness is possible. The cultural implica? tions of Defoe's book are that female identity in a normal social order is so limited and fragile that once ordinary conditions are altered, a woman is turned into a pure opportunity for free-floating selfhood."1 His observation is a shrewd one. If a female criminal is unthinkable, then a woman who found her way into such a role could be as uncertain of her identity as anyone. If Richetti is correct,

183

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then these women, ungoverned by convention or even a sense of consistent selfhood, could in fact behave in ways that are wildly incongruous, unthink? able, and a return to a more conventional role would involve the return of more

comprehensible and consistent behavior as social scripts would once again exert their usual influence. This is the pattern we see not only in Moll Flanders but also in two of its most important predecessors in this subgenre.

Prior to the publication of Moll Flanders, there were only two book length biographies of female criminals in English, Francis Kirkman's The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled (1673), concerning Mary Carleton, the so-called German Princess, and the anonymously published Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith (1662), alias Mai Cutpurse.2 In these texts, as in Moll Flanders, femi? ninity and criminality clash, and when they do, the result is that the crimes of women are portrayed as a perversion of their sexuality. And not only does this leave them at odds with male society and authority, but ultimately, because of the competing claims of their femininity and criminality, they resist catego? rization and are placed even farther outside the larger social order.

II

In part, the representation of female criminals in these biographies is somewhat predictable, relying on conventional means of portraying women. The constellation of basic traits that these women bring to their criminal activities are very much traits of traditional womanhood: wit, passivity, beauty. The hermaphroditic personality of Mai Cutpurse, ironically enough, is helpful in separating what seem to be two distinct sets of characteristics? female and male?that give rise to two distinct approaches to crime. She, of course, embodies both: she was "not to be guided either by the reservedness and modesty of her own Sex, or the more imperious command of the other; she resolved to set up a neutral or Hermaphrodite way of Profession . . . like the Colossus of Female subtlety in the wily Arts & ruses ofthat Sex; and of manly resolution in the bold and regardlesse Rudenesses of the other, so blended and mixed together, that it was hard to say whether she were more cunning, or more impudent."3 The crimes of these women are aggressive, but physical aggres? sion is clearly set up here as a male domain, whereas a more subtle passive aggressive style is appropriate for women, a style that involves the use of "cunning" and "ruses." Women are thieves, not robbers. Thus, throughout his narrative, Kirkman refers to Mary Carleton's "old tools, her wits" in explaining the methods of "this subtle female thief."4 Likewise, Moll Flanders' favorite

words to describe her skills are "dexterous" and "art," and although she chooses to focus on physical skill in the former term, hers are the subtle skills of a thief, not the forceful ones of a robber. She is not as insistent on the matter

as Kirkman is, but Moll clearly thrives on her wits and cunning. Her most

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MOLL FLANDERS / 185

profitable ventures are her confidence scams, not her shoplifting or pocket picking, and even in these her wits must rescue her from occasional lapses in dexterity.

Even in the seemingly aggressive crimes of pocket picking, shoplifting, and confidence games, however, female criminals are figured, as much as they can be, as passive agents, demonstrating the "reservedness and modesty" of which Mai Cutpurse speaks. Kirkman claims that criminal opportunity came to Mary Carleton unbidden: "commonly she did not seek for any because it fell out readily to her hand; the bird usually came into the net of its own accord" (p. 75). Similarly, Moll a number of times describes herself as merely being vigilant for opportunities, not creating them: "The next day I. . . walk'd the same way again; but nothing offer'd."5 At times her activity seems almost aimless: "I had taken up the Disguise of a Widow's Dress; it was without any real design in view, but only waiting for any thing that might offer, as I often did: It happened that while I..." (p. 241). These situations "happen" to her as much as they happen to her victims.

It is curious, though, that these women, especially Moll and Mary Carleton, who are depicted as attractive, avaricious, and passively waiting for the occasion to sin, should not often?if ever?resort to prostitution, the classic female crime. Kirkman acknowledges that this runs counter to expectation when he points out that "this crime she was not so guilty of, as the world supposes" (p. 55). We see Moll take payment for sex from only one man, and in that case she becomes more of a kept mistress than an indiscriminate whore; at least that is how she views the arrangement.6 As Lois Chaber points out, Moll carefully disassociates herself from the profession in her defense of it, speaking of the "passive Jade" in the third person.7

This is not to say, of course, that female criminals don't make capital use of their most marketable asset, but their use of their female sexuality is presented as a perversion of it. In the accounts of male criminals, such as Don Tomazo or Will Morrell, for example, a romantic involvement is usually pursued for its own sake and can even be so enthralling that it may temporarily distract them from their criminal pursuits.8 By contrast, their female counter? parts usually pursue such involvements only so far as they are profitable. Both Moll and Mary Carleton parlay the admiration of amorous men into financial support, gifts, or an opportunity to steal. Even Mai Cutpurse is "obeyed from the two great Principles of Subjection, Love [female] andfear [male]"(p. 101). But her exploitation of sex is generally more parasitic. As a bawd, she knows how to pique her customers' desires (and thereby maximize her profit) with what she calls her "amorous tricks and pranks," either delaying or suddenly and unexpectedly bringing about their tryst. One young woman, "a very curious Piece" who has drawn many admirers, is "as free for [Mai's] turn as for any bodies" (p. 123). Mai's lust, however, is not for the woman's flesh but for the

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money that can be gained by pimping for her: "I accosted her, using such Caresses, promises and invitations as I knew the Market would bear, so that I made her entirely mine, and gratified a friend with her" (p. 124). The language of love and trade are used interchangeably here, as once again Mai's position at the outer limits of sexuality allows us to see what are normally subtle traits exaggerated.

Clearly, her sexual desire has been perverted into cupidity, and we see a similar pattern in Mary Carleton and Moll, whose relationships with men are

more often pursued for financial gain than for love, either by baiting their traps with the promise of sex or by the more legitimate (but still predatory) practice of gold digging. But once the woman's beauty fades, so does the possibility of capitalizing on it. When Moll reaches this stage in her life, she turns to outright thievery?a sort of career change, and one that lays bare the motivation behind her romantic involvements. "I would gladly have turn'd my Hand to any honest Employment if I could have got it," she explains. "If I had been younger, perhaps [my Governess] might have helped me to a Spark, but my Thoughts were off of that kind of Livelihood, as being quite out of the way after 50, which

was my Case" (p. 198). Mal Cutpurse's criminal career begins when she comes to a similar conclusion: "Mais converse with her self (whose disinviting eyes and look sank inwards to her breast, when they could have no regard abroad,) informed her of her defects; and that she was not made for the pleasure or delight of Man; and therefore since she could not be honoured with him she would be honoured by him in that garb and manner of rayment He wore ... she resolved to usurp and invade the Doublet, and vye and brave manhood, which she could not tempt nor allure" (pp. 17-18). Believing herself too unattractive to marry, then, and having been cheated out of money by the shoemaker of whom she is enamored?these "took her off from the consideration or thought of Wedlock, but reduced her to some advisement which way she might maintaine her self single," and she settles on "living by the quick" (p. 22). These women turn to crime when legitimate attachments to men seem unlikely? or simply unprofitable. Again, female criminality is portrayed as a perversion of?or, in more extreme cases, a substitute for?female sexuality. Their crimes seem specifically tied to a breach in the social order as they break ties with men,

either preying on them or establishing independence from them.

Ill

The idea that crime involves a breach in the social order, of course, amounts to little more than a tautology, nor does it seem especially enlightening, at first glance, to point out that female criminals disrupt a patriarchal system. The same can be said of male criminals as well. But in the case of women, their

crimes are not represented as the violation of a social order that simply happens

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to be patriarchal. Attention is clearly drawn to the patriarchal nature of the system they renounce, and this is accompanied by the establishment of female authority separate from and hostile to its counterpart. Moreover, just as it is this renunciation that signals the start of a criminal career, so it is a reaffirmation of male authority that signals its end.

Once again, Mai Cutpurse is the exception that proves the rule?and proves it rather convincingly. She is said to have had an especially solicitous mother, and her father is symbolically rejected in the figure of her shoemaker boyfriend who takes advantage of her affection and who is explicitly set up as a parallel to her father. In fact, this incident quite directly precipitates her choosing a life of crime. From this point on, the author seems to be setting up a contrapuntal structure in which the assertion of female power is deliberately counterbalanced by the assertion of its opposite, reflecting not only Mai's uncertain sexual status but also the uncertain status of her fencing operations as legitimate business or crime. As the female organizer of a gang of male thieves?referred to by her with the diminutive appellation "the Boyes"?Mal has inverted the normal social hierarchy and placed herself in a position of authority over a group of men. But at the same time, she is an ardent royalist who has such affection for the king that she shakes his hand and personally welcomes him home during a parade to celebrate his successfully putting down a rebellion among the Scots and reasserting English sovereignty, the same sovereignty her gang of thieves work to undermine. Later in life, she finds herself in financial straits because, ever the royalist, she had been giving too generously to the cavaliers during the Civil War. What money she does have left at her death, however, she bequeaths to her maids?"that and some of my

Arts which they have had time to be expert in" (p. 172)?setting them up as financially independent women (and potential criminals, as well). Perhaps the most eloquent expression of Mai's position in regard to male authority is in her alias, "Cutpurse," with its suggestions of castration. Mai says that she "could by no means endure" (p. 84) the name, claiming, "I never Actually or Instrumentally cut any Mans Purse; though I have often restored it" (p. 168). But her henchmen do cut purses and strip men of their economic power, and so she is both the agent of their emasculation and, in selling their stolen goods back to them again, the agent of their restoration.9

While Mai Cutpurse lends support to our theory, however, The Coun? terfeit Lady Unveiled provides a pattern that more closely approximates that of

Moll Flanders. Mary Carleton's criminal career is launched with the creation of her fictitious German parentage with which she "denied her earthly parents, and particularly her father in her words, and in her actions denied or practiced against the laws of God, her Heavenly Father" (p. 14). Throughout her subsequent career, too, her gestures are often anti-patriarchal, as she steals items that are inherited family pieces and often bases her "chouses" on a

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promised but nonexistent paternal inheritance. When finally apprehended and convicted, she continues to deny her guilt and defies the authority of the court by pleading her belly, which necessitates a second trial presided over by "a jury of women [who] brought in this verdict, 'that she was not quick with child'" (p. 96). She might have effectively circumvented the verdict of the male courtroom with this ruse and did in fact transfer her fate into the hands of the

jury of women, but their judgment passes her back to the men who sentence her to death. Her career thus ended, "she was quite altered" (p. 96). She is suddenly penitent and en route to Tyburn puts a picture of John Carleton to her bosom and asks that it be buried with her, suddenly acknowledging him to be her husband once again. In her final speech, she reaffirms both the earthly and the heavenly male authority she had earlier renounced: "I pray God forgive me and my husband. I beseech God lay nothing to his charge for my fault" (p. 101).

This same general pattern is present in Moll Flanders, the structure of which centers around Moll's search for a mother, a figure of female authority. Born to an unwed mother in Newgate, it is no accident that the woman whom she comes to call "Mother" is another criminal. Having been abandoned by her husband Jemy, Moll returns to London, pregnant by him. Under the Governess ' s

care, Moll gives birth to a son, which she is then counselled to put out for adoption, thus stripping herself of this final vestige of her relationship with Jemy?and men in general. Their discussion of this plan is framed in the hypothetical third person as the Governess persuades her that affection and "nursing up" are more important for children than biological motherhood? and all the while the two address each other as "Mother" and "Child." In this

central passage, Moll finds the mother she has been seeking. Having thus accepted this woman's authority, she subsequently turns

criminal with her; it is about the time that the Governess begins to fence stolen goods that Moll begins to hear the voice that prompts her to steal. And the incident that forces the Governess to curtail her house for lying in and turn to crime images her anti-patriarchal stance and also suggests Moll's current status: the Governess "had been Sued by a certain Gentleman, who had had his Daughter stolen from him; and who it seems that she had helped to convey away" (p. 197). This direct confrontation with the familial and legal authorities over a suspected threat to their sovereignty precipitates the Governess's final break with them as she and her "stolen" daughter Moll begin to operate outside the law.

Like Mary Carleton, Moll's reaffirmation of patriarchal rule comes when she is apprehended and her career is thus brought to an end. In prison, she is reunited with her husband Jemy and is born a second time in Newgate, this time to a life of legitimacy and under a figure of masculine authority. She is socializing with the other female inmates, eagerly awaiting the arrival of a group of freshly captured male criminals, "brave topping Gentlemen" (p. 280),

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when she discovers that Jemy is one of them. Immediately, she says, "I quitted my Company, and retir'd as much as that dreadful Place suffers any Body to retire" (p. 280) and repents the misery her sins have caused. Not only is the renunciation of her criminal life symbolically enacted here, but the meaning of this gesture is underscored by the mercantile language Moll habitually uses when discussing her "trade": she quitted her company and retired. Tallying up the books one final time, she finds herself indebted to Jemy. "This Gentleman's

Misfortune I plac'd all to my own Account" (p. 280), she says, echoing Mary Carleton in assuming the blame for the misery of the husband she has reclaimed. The suddenness of her transformation is striking, and it is precipi? tated by the reappearance of masculine authority. Finally, it is only after this state of legitimacy is made complete by the death of her husband-brother and the shadow of that marriage is removed from her relationship with Jemy that

Moll is able to claim the legacy of her biological (I hesitate to say "natural") family.

IV

Female criminals, then, are figured as being outside the social order, and their behavior is figured as somehow incompatible with their sexuality, crime being either a perversion of or a substitute for it. These two factors complicate the representation of characters like Moll Flanders. How does a writer effec? tively portray a character with the incompatible traits of femininity and criminality? One way is to render her neuter, or even masculine?or even, in the case of Mai Cutpurse, simultaneously masculine and feminine. But even

Mai is predominantly masculine in behavior, if genetically feminine. Except for her housekeeping (in which she is proudly nonpareil), Mai is defeminized in her aversion to all of the traditional female arts and to female sexuality in general, but "above all she had a natural abhorrence to the tending of Children, to whom she ever had an aversness in her mind, equall to the sterility of her womb" (p. 13). Mary Carleton likewise dies without issue and is never cast in a maternal role of any type, and, although her femininity is not as problematic as Mai's, it is perhaps not an accident that Kirkman has rechristened her the counterfeit lady. Critics have long been uneasy with Moll Flanders' sexuality, sensing that she was somehow more male than female. Ian Watt calls her "essentially masculine" in character and action; Richetti calls her a female impersonator; and Frederick R. Karl calls her "virtually interchangeable with a man."10 But Marsha Bordner is more discriminating and limits Moll's masculinity to her criminal years only, a more telling observation for our purposes.11 Very commonly Moll is criticized for abandoning her children so easily, and her preying on unescorted children in her pocket picking has been offered as proof of her lack of maternal feeling.

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Thus, one solution to the problem of embodying conflicting traits in a single believable character is to focus on one at the expense of the other, but there is a second solution: to mask the incompatibility by having the heroine adopt a role that is foreign to her "true" self. Hence the popularity in female criminal biography of the motif of imposture and disguise?and especially cross-dressing, a practice taken up by both Mai Cutpurse and Moll Flanders. There are, of course, obvious practical reasons for disguise and imposture in crime, and we find these tactics almost as popular with male as with female criminals, but they seem clearly to have a more profound significance in the portrayal of the latter.

Perhaps the popular appeal of a book like The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled lies partly in the fact that it allows for the satisfying recuperation of a social anomaly. Kirkman repeatedly compares Mary Carleton to an actress playing a part, a metaphor that becomes literal truth when she plays herself on stage, reenacting her own imposture. In much the same way, Moll Flanders' disguises ease the cognitive dissonance that may go along with imagining a woman committing a crime in that a disguise gives the image a cast of artificiality, and her cross-dressing is particularly effective in this, since it not only is more patently artificial but also obscures her problematic sex. Lincoln Faller has pointed out that such artificiality is a common feature of criminal biographies,12 but in the case of women, the veneer of unreality often overlays their sexuality? something that we don't see happening to their male counterparts. Disguise and imposture are not the tricks of women alone, but cross-dressing does seem to be, and for good reason, I think. If the aggression that crime involves is seen as a masculine trait, it is not unexpected that a woman might adopt a male persona to steal, but for a man to disguise himself as a woman would create the very contradictions that a woman's cross-dressing serves to alleviate.

A third means of representing the paradox of a female criminal is to forego any attempt at recuperation and simply present her with all of her perceived incongruities intact, as did Mal Cutpurse's biographer. In fact, that aspect of her is emphasized. As "the Living Discription and Portraiture of a Schism and Separation" (p. A3), she is the most explicit evidence of the problem of satisfactorily placing female criminals. In the preface, her biographer asks that we "Excuse the Abruptnesse and Discontinuance of the Matter, and the severall independencies thereof; for that it was impossible to make one piece of so

Various a Subject, as she was both to her self and others, being forced to take her as we found her though at disadvantage" (p. A6). Such disclaimers are standard fare in criminal biographies and bespeak the fact that, operating outside the social structure, such characters tend to resist categorization. The biographies of male criminals may depict their lives and personalities as motley and irregular also, but this is not tied directly and insistently to their sexuality as it is with women.

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Mal Cutpurse's biographer can't seem to go to lengths extreme enough to express the profundity of her sexual contradictions. Her clothes?the man's doublet and the woman's petticoat?are said to be "the chief remarque of her life" (p. 18). Indeed, the sexual confusion to which they point is the book's primary leitmotif, and certain incidents seem to be chosen specifically for the purpose of deepening this confusion beyond its more comprehensible bipolar nature. For instance, on a bet she is induced to ride through the streets one day dressed entirely in men's clothing, but when mocked by onlookers, her response is to fantasize that she is a woman, first the "Squieresse to Dulcinea of Tobosso, the most incomparably beloved Lady of Don Quixof (p. 77) and then the martyr Jane Shore. Thus, a gesture that could have served to make her less of an enigma by at least bringing her outward appearance more in line with her essentially masculine personality is instead made problematic by her sinking into an uncharacteristically feminine self-image involving romance, grace, and helplessness. Obviously the text is working against our recuperating Mai's character, and that is part of the author's explicit project. She fits into no category; there is "nothing appertaining to her, being to be matcht throughout the whole Course of History or Romance; so unlike her selfe, and of so difficult a mixture, that it is no wonder she was like no body, nor could not be Sorted by any Comparison, or Suited with any Antick Companion" (p. A3). She cannot even be comfortably classified as a social outsider since her criminality is ambiguous. The legality of her fencing stolen goods is uncertain, and, when arrested for her strange clothing, her proctor reassures her that her "Crime, if such, [is] not cognizable there or elsewhere" (p. 69). The social space she occupies is without a name. But for all his efforts at delineating Mai's contradictions and "unplaceability," the author betrays his discomfort with them. She may be amusing, but she finally must be given a position in the cosmic order. In an epitaph, he imagines her body at the last judgment:

Dust, to perplex a Sadducee, Whither it rise a He or She, Or two in one, a single pair, Natures sport and now her care; For how she'l cloath it at last day, (Unlesse she Sigh it all away) Or where she'l place it none can tell, Some middle place 'twixt Heaven and Hell. (p. 175)

Not even her maker can figure out what she is or where she belongs?and is anxious about it, too.

A good deal of critical attention has been paid to the contradictions in Moll Flanders' personality, most of it centering around the question of whether these "ironies" are hers or Defoe's?or whether they were altogether unin? tentional, evidence of primitive or mishandled techniques of characterization.

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Probably the most often discussed of these contradictions is in her supposed repentance and her apparent lack of moral compunction. Most of her other contradictions, however, stem rather directly from the competing claims of her femininity and criminality. Her femininity urges her portrayal as a passive creature, but as a criminal she must be aggressive. She is both, sometimes simultaneously. Her femininity urges her portrayal as maternal and solicitous towards children, but as a criminal she must be self-serving and predatory. She is both. Not only does she steal from children, but when reunited with Humphrey, one of the sons she has abandoned (with no apparent difficulty) along the way to financial security, she falls weeping to her knees to kiss the ground on which he walks. Her femininity urges her portrayal as submissive in her relationships with men, but as a criminal she must be independent and, again, predatory. At various times, she is both. Is Defoe's narrative getting away from him here? Perhaps we can better understand the genesis of her ironies if we view Moll Flanders within the tradition of criminal biographies, a tradition in which disjunction is excused as a feature of the subject and not just the text. Moreover, if we narrow our focus to the tradition of female criminals in particular, we may begin to understand why her contradictions are tied to her sexuality.

Like Mai Cutpurse, although less dramatically, Moll Flanders is a figure whose sexuality heightens her "unplaceability." In a society which defines women by their relationships to men, Moll is hard to fix until the very end of her story. Born without a father, she cannot fall back on a relationship that normally gives a woman her identity when other means fail. She enjoys a brief legitimate marriage with the Younger Brother, but the series of marriages she

makes after his death leave her in a shadowy borderland between marital categories. After her separation from the linen draper without legal divorce,

Moll says, "My Condition was very odd, for ... I was a Widow bewitch'd, I had a Husband, and no Husband" (p. 64). Her status is further compromised, as George A. Starr points out, when she "more than once [becomes] involved with men who have 'a wife and no wife,' so that the ambiguities of her own situation will be compounded by those of the people she moves among."13 One of the men whom she can number among her "husband and no husband" relationships is her own brother, a marriage so problematic that it makes her other entanglements look simple by comparison.

She is gradually placing herself farther and farther outside the law and outside of accepted categories, and once that movement is made complete by her rejection of male authority and the onset of her life of thievery, her contradictions deepen. This process reaches its peak in the episode in which she cross-dresses; at that point she is an outsider even among outsiders. Not only are some of the thieves threatening to turn her in out of jealousy, but one woman

who was arrested while acting as Moll's accomplice is being offered a pardon

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if she can produce Moll. This danger, says Moll, "took off all my tenderness" (p. 223), and so she is psychologically defeminized prior to her outward defeminization. Indeed, once dressed as a man, her impersonation is convinc? ing enough to fool her partner, even though they "grew very intimate" (p. 215). Their relationship is given a sexual cast, set up as something of a marriage? "She [the Governess] joyn'd me with a Man... And as we kept always together, so we grew very intimate ... and four or five times [I] lay with him all Night" (p. 215)?but it is strictly sexless and sterile in actuality, underscoring the completeness of her transformation. But at a moment's notice, after about three weeks in drag, she is able to doff this disguise, don her women's attire, and fool a mob of pursuers. Her ability to straddle categories, her protean nature, allows her to escape detection in both legitimate and illegitimate society. Her status at this point is perhaps best suggested in that she says her partner "never knew that I was not a Man" (p. 215), rather than saying he "never knew that I was a

Woman." She defines herself negatively, not as belonging inside categories but outside them. And at this period when she is most thoroughly the outsider, Defoe uses her sexuality as the metaphor for her contradictions.

V

I have argued that Defoe's conception of Moll Flanders is shaped by the conventions of female criminal biography, suggesting that many of the patterns and problems in her characterization are common to that genre. And apparently those patterns and problems have sprung from a difficulty in recuperating a social anomaly, a creature that straddles categories. But what we might take to be evidence of a problem in characterization and an unsuccessful effort at resolving incongruities may actually result in a certain psychological realism if we keep in mind Richetti's image of Roxana as "a deserted psycho-social space." That is not to say that these writers aren't working to resolve incon? gruities in one way or another; the evidence indicates that they are. But as the record of a mind engaged in this enterprise, such a biography may bring us close to how that mind perceives its subject?or even how the subject may perceive herself. In this way, Moll Flanders may be an even more realistic portrait of a female criminal than we have recognized.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

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NOTES

1 John J. Richetti, "The Family, Sex, and Marriage in Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana," Studies in the Literary Imagination 15.2 (1982): 33.

2 It is preferable for our purposes to look at examples of female criminals in sustained narratives such as these since their more detailed and extended portraiture more nearly approximates that of the novel. But there are other reasons why these two texts ought to serve as our standards of what Defoe may have been influenced by or reacting to. Perhaps most obviously, the heroines of Mary Frith and The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled are men? tioned in Moll Flanders and Roxana, respectively, and in both cases Defoe's women compare themselves directly to their predecessors. Moll claims that she "grew as impudent a Thief, and as dexterous as ever Moll Cut-Purse was" (Moll Flanders [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971], p. 201); and Roxana says, "I might as well have been the German Princess" (Roxana [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964], p. 271). Moreover, the sheer popularity of these narratives urges their consideration in such a study. Not only is it possible that such texts actively shaped popular conceptions of female criminality, but also the fact that they were so widely read would suggest that their portrayals were in some way congruent with such conceptions to begin with.

It might be objected that the character Defoe created, being fictional, is not really comparable in manner of construction to those found in biographies of actual women. In fact, they are surprisingly close. Ernest Bernbaum (The Mary Carleton Narratives: 1663 1673 [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1914]) has convincingly demonstrated that, although based on a core of actual information, The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled is largely fictitious, and he points out that one of Kirkman's primary concerns in extrapolating from and fabricating around these facts was, as Kirkman himself says in his introduction, to offer the reader a view of her psychology. Robert Singleton, in his catalogue of "English Criminal Biography, 1651-1722" (Harvard Library Bulletin 18 [1970]: 63-83), places Mary Frith in his list of those books "known to be fictitious" (p. 79). The fact that The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, factual only in broad outline, is in his list of legitimate biographies indicates how much more thoroughly fictional Mary Frith is, even though it does include a handful of substantiated facts. Defoe's impulse and even his methods in writing Moll Flanders seem to have been fairly similar to those of Kirkman and Mai Cutpurse's biographer. Literary historians have long suspected that Defoe probably used some?perhaps a significant amount?of factual detail in writing about Moll's career. Gerald Howson, for example, has argued that Moll may have been modelled on one Mary Godson (alias Moll King), a woman Defoe could very possibly have met in Newgate just prior to writing Moll Flanders ("Who Was Moll Flanders?" Times Literary Supplement [ 13 January 1968]: 63-64). Like the criminal biographers that preceded him, then, Defoe seems to have built his heroine at least partly on a loose collection of factual materials, his concern, like theirs, being the construction of a compelling character, not the chronicling of an actual life.

3 The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith (London: W. Gilbertson, 1662), p. 26. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text.

4 Francis Kirkman, The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, in The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Spiro Peterson (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 86,93. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text.

5 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 257. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically in the text.

6 Shirlene Mason offers a clear analysis of Moll ' s status as a mistress rather than a prostitute (Daniel Defoe and the Status of Women [St. Albans, VT: Eden Press, 1978], p. 98).

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MOLL FLANDERS / 195

7 Lois A. Chaber, "Matriarchal Mirror: Women and Capital in Moll Flanders," PMLA 97 (1982): 214.

8 See Don Tomazo, or the Juvenile Rambles of Thomas Dangerfield and Elkanah Settle, The Complete Memoirs of the Life of that Notorious Impostor Will. Morrell, both in The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled and Other Criminal Fiction of Seventeenth-Century England (pp. 177-289,291-372).

9 See Capt. Alexander Smith, A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, Shoplifts, and Cheats of Both Sexes, ed. Arthur L. Hay ward (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1926). Smith's account of Simon Fletcher demonstrates that purse cutting was in fact seen as a metaphorical castration by at least one other writer. Fletcher, mistaking the scrotum of one of his victims for a purse as it dangles out of its codpiece, applies his knife and makes his escape. The unfortunate man's response, when he comes to realize what has happened, continues the metaphor: "Oh! I am ruined, I am ruined, & quite undone" he says. "I have lost a good pair of b_ks, for which I shall have more noise with my wife than if I had lost a hundred pounds" (p. 306).

10 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1964), p. 113; John J. Richetti, "The Portrayal of Women in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature," in What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977), p. 88; and Frederick Karl, "Moll's Many-Colored Coat: Veil and Disguise in the Fiction of Defoe," Studies in the Novel 5 (1973): 94.

11 Marsha Bordner, "Defoe's Androgynous Vision in Moll Flanders and Roxana," Gypsy Scholar 2 (1974): 81.

12 Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 169.

13 George A. Starr, "Moll Flanders " in Twentieth C entury Interpretations of "Moll Flanders," ed. Robert C. Elliott (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 89.

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