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Moll's Fate: "Mother Midnight" and "Moll Flanders" Author(s): Robert A. Erickson Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 75-100 Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173996 Accessed: 08-03-2019 01:28 UTC

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Moll's Fate:

"Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

by Robert A. Erickson

How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags? What is't you do? (Macbeth, IV. i. 47-8)

IN the"Preface" to Moll Flanders, Defoe tells us that "two of the most beautiful Parts" of the "Story" remain to be told.' One of these is the "Life" of Moll's "Governess" (or Moll's "Mother Mid-

night," a cant generic term for a midwife-bawd in the early eighteenth

century).2 My purpose in this paper is to attempt, with the help of contemporary sources, particularly the midwife manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the works of Ned Ward, to

restore some of the historical particularity of Mother Midnight (as I

shall call the Governess), and to trace Moll's development under the influence of this powerful and mysterious character. We shall see that

a concern with Moll's relation to Mother Midnight entails a final

analysis of Moll's "grand Secret," her "true Name" (159) and actual origin. Moll Flanders is in many ways a searching examination of the

meaning of "name" and "fate" in the role of a "woman of the world."

What follows is not another attempt to discover the historical model

for Moll, but an effort ultimately to understand, with the help of Mother Midnight, who the real Moll Flanders is for herself.

'Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. . ., ed. G. A. Starr (London, 1971), p. 5. Hereafter all quotations from this edition (including the "Introduction") are cited by page number in the text and in footnotes.

2Although a sequel to the novel did appear in 1730 giving an account of Moll's governess under the name of "Jane Hackabout," the work has not been attributed to Defoe (see Moll Flanders, ed. Edward Kelly [New York, 1973], p. 6n). The London Spy offers these synonyms for "Mother Midnight": "Matron in Iniquity," "Reverend Doctress of Debauchery," "old Mother of the Maids," "Mother Beizebub," "Mother Grope." There is also a "Father Midnight," the watch (Ned Ward, The London Spy Compleat, in

75

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76 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

Martin Price has said that "if there is any central motive in Defoe's

novels, it is the pleasure in technical mastery: the fascination with

how things get done, how Crusoe makes an earthenware pot or Moll Flanders dexterously makes off with a watch."3 Closely allied with

this pleasure in "making" and "making off with" is the manufactory impulse in all of Defoe's writing: a strong concern with manual indus- try leading to the production and acquisition of goods. Moll Flanders learns her most important technical skills under Mother Midnight's

auspices ("it was to this wicked Creature that I ow'd all the Art and Dexterity I arriv'd to" [213]), and it is Mother Midnight's own unparalleled "Art and Dexterity" as a "midwife" (in all the asso-

ciations the term has for Defoe) which seals Moll's fate as a thief and fundamentally alters the course of her life.

The seventeenth-century English physician, William Sermon, pro- vides us with a convenient description of the roles of the complete midwife:

Among those [women] that have practised Physick, were many that have applied themselves most of all to deliver women; and that they might be

distinguished from others, they were frequently called Cunning Women, or

otherwise caused themselves to be so called; for women are of such a dispo-

sition (especially in these days) that they desire to excell men, or at least

would seem to go beyond them. . . [Midwives] took upon them three things, as Galen, and others do witness. The first was, to make the match, (there be too many of that Trade now) and to joyn the husband with the wife. . . . The Second was, to be present at the delivery of women, which work

was committed to none but such that have had Children, (as Plato saith) ... neither did the said Midzvives attempt this Art, till they were past Child- bearing, because Diana . . . was barren: and also a woman that beareth Chil-

dren is over-much troubled, so the more unfit to labour in such a great work. The Third thing was, to resolve or tell women whether they were with

Child or not; and therefore the Law did ordain, that three honest Midwives, skilfull in their Art, should view and make inspection, and then give their Judgement, &c4

Eighteen Parts. . ." reprinted from the edition of 1700" [London, 1924], pp. 9, 29, 32, 33, 57, 35). Cf. Starr's note, Moll Flanders, p. 391.

3Quoted in Moll Flanders, ed. Kelly, pp. 381-2. 4The Ladies Companion, or The English Midwife. . . by William Sermon, Doctor in Physick

... (London, 1671), pp. 3-5.

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Robert A. Erickson 77

The ultimate source of this description is Plato's Theaetetus where

Socrates acknowledges that he himself is the son of "a fine strapping midwife" and goes on to compare and contrast his own search for truth with the activities of a midwife.5 (Sermon too, on the word

of two ancient authorities, thinks fit to observe that "Phanerota, the mother of Socrates, was a midwife.").6 Socrates reminds Theaetetus that no midwife "attends other women while she's still conceiving and bearing children herself,"7 and reviews for him the art of mid- wifery: the recognition of pregnancy, the use of drugs and charms in

easing the pains of labor, knowledge of abortion, and skill in match- making (which Socrates likens to the arts of planting and harvesting). Good midwives avoid match-making, however, so as not to incur the

charge of procuring. Socrates calls himself a midwife to men's minds, and the greatest thing in his art is to distinguish between false and true intellectual conceptions: "God compels me to be a midwife, but has prevented me from giving birth."8

A crucial characteristic of midwives, for Socrates and for Sermon, is that they are past child-bearing. Though barren themselves, they are consummately skilled at bringing forth fruit in others. They are usually old women, rich in experience and wise in the art of pre- dicting human consequences. In these respects they are similar to the Greek Fates, or Moirai, conceived as three very old women who control the thread of man's destiny. (Sermon even ends his descrip- tion by referring to the "three honest Midwives"9-the Fates of their era, better known as the grave "Jury of Matrons"-who adjudge whether a female prisoner is pregnant and so may escape hanging.) The Fates belonged (and still belong) primarily to folk beliefs stem- ming from the permanent preoccupations with birth, marriage, and death.10 Hesiod identified the Fates by name: Klotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Apportioner, and Atropos the Inflexible. In later times their functions were further specialized, "Atropos spinning, or sing- ing, the past, Klotho the present, and Lachesis, the future; or Klotho holding the distaff, Lachesis spinning off the thread, and Atropos cutting it short."" Most important, as Hesiod asserts, the Fates "give

5Plato, Theaetetus, tr. John McDowell (Oxford, 1973), pp. 11-15. 6Ladies Companion, p. 3. 7Theaetetus, p. 12. 8Ibid., p. 13-

9Ladies Companion, p. 5. 10Cf. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, tr. Ralph

Manheim (Princeton, 1972), p. 231, and Eliot's "Sweeney Agonistes." 11H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (New York, 1959), p. 24.

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78 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

men at their birth both evil and good to have."12 The "fates" are birth spirits in folklore, taking the form of old midwives or witches or both. "The goddesses of lestiny are always goddesses of birth, and . .. for women there is an essential connection between child-bearing and

death as well as between marriage and death.'3 Like the Norns of Scandinavian lore, the Moirai assist at the birth of a child, and at the moment of birth they determine the child's fate. The Romans linked their birth spirits, the Parcae, with the "spoken" decree of the gods

(fatum). Tertullian's fata scribunda were Fates who apparently wrote the child's destiny. The spoken word has, from the time of the Egyp- tians (and presumably earlier), been associated with the rituals of birth. Sermon, in his Ladies Companion, referring to the older women in attendance at labor, recalls "a common saying among the hearty

good women . . . to the Midwife, if it be a boy make him good measure, but if a girl tye it short." 14 This cryptic joke refers to the custom of tying the umbilicial cord longer or shorter at birth. The complete midwife of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries carried with her certain indispensable tools, among which were a

spool of "soft thread" for tying the umbilical cord and "a sharp pair of scissors" for cutting it off. 15

Many do observe, that the Navell [cord] must be tyed longer or shorter according to the difference of the Sex, allowing more measure to the Males;

because (say they) it doth make their Tongues and privy Members longer; by which means they will speak the plainer, and become the more serviceable to

Ladies, (or to such as delight in long things).... And that by tying it short or almost to the belly in Females, will cause their Tongues not to be so nimble,

and their secret parts to be more strait, &c.16

Here the metaphor of the Fates controlling the thread of man's des-

tiny becomes a literal fact of life. It was thought, more or less seri- ously, that the midwife had within her power the means to determine the sexual (and verbal) fate of men and women through her control of the length of the "navel string," or umbilical cord, since this cord

t2Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, tr. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), p. 95.

13Neumann, pp. 231-2.

14Sermon, p. 107. 15See Henry a Daventer [Hendrick van de Venter], The Art of Midwifery Improv'd ...

(London, 3rd ed. corrected, 1728), for an account of the midwife's tools, excluding "Instruments," pp. 110-119, 321.

16Sermon, Ladies Companion, p. 107. Cf. The Midwives Book: Or the whole Art of Mid- wifery Discovered .... by Mrs. Jane Sharp Practitioner in the Art of Midwifery above thirty years (London, 1671), pp. 22-3.

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Robert A. Erickson 79

itself was part and parcel of one's sexual constitution. Thus the fatal

shears of Atropos are, in seventeenth-century birth lore, as effective at the beginning of life's thread as at its end.

The association of the old midwife with scissors, string, and sewing allies her, from the beginning, with the goddesses of fate who were

all spinstresses ("Klothes" in Homer), whatever their particular role in the spinning process was thought to be. But beyond the midwife's

link with sewing and her supposed control of sexual destiny is a

deeper connection between spinning and man's fate. Neumann points

out several examples, especially in representations of the "sewing" Madonna, of the mother who "spins" the child in her womb: "the

woman must not only provide the clothing of man in the literal sense but also clothes him with the body she spins and weaves. . . . the [Virgin] mother becomes the spinning goddess of destiny; the child becomes the fabric of her body."'17 The body itself is a suit of clothes. Long before Swift's "Taylor God" and the "Clothes Philosophy" of A Tale of a Tub, the authors of the midwife manuals rehearsed, in their introductory lectures on anatomy, the notion that man's body consists

of three layers or "coates" (an outer skin, a fleshy skin, and fat).18 The observations of Jane Sharp, expert midwife, on sexual anatomy have more the texture of the woolen manufacture than of the medical

textbook. Her language is full of "seams,' "wrinkles," "strings fast knit," "bridles," "coats," "woven networks," and allusions to "hollow weaving" and "Weaver's Shuttles."

"The Cod is as it were a purse for the Stones,"'19 and this submerged comparison of the value of the generative faculties to monetary values is carried on in the midwife manuals up to the man-midwife, Dawkes.

Even he would rather liken the womb "to a Purse turn'd upside down" than to the usual figure of the pear; it is also typical of him to

observe the dilation of the womb to be "as wide as a Shilling" in the last weeks of pregnancy.20 Ned Ward's immoderate "Spy" defined "Woman [as] a meer Receptacle" who should walk "Arse-upwards,"'21

t7Neumann, pp. 230, 233. 18See The byrth of mankynde, otherwyse named the womans booke . . . by Thomas Raynold,

Phisitian (London, 1545), p. 3; [Jacob Rueff], The Expert Midwife or An Excellent and most necessary Treatise of the generation and birth of Man (London, 1637), pp. 12 ff.; and Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, pp. 11-12.

19Jane Sharp, p. lo. 20The Midwife rightly instructed: or, the Way, which all women desirous to learn, should

take, to acquire the true knowledge and be successful in the practice of, the art of midwifery. By T. Dawkes, Surgeon (London, 1736), p. 16.

2'Ned Ward, The London Spy Compleat, p. 243. For yet another version of the "thread of fate" paradigm, cf. the words of one of "Posture Molls Scholars" in Bridewell: "What

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8o "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

and Moll Flanders herself says that "when a Woman is .. . left desolate and void of Council, she is just like a Bag of Money, or a Jewel dropt on the Highway" (128). The ancient idea of human mortality consisting of a series of layers of clothing, alternately being put on and put off, is expressed in more subtle ways in the novel by Moll's continual allusions to mental "Disorders," cases of conscience, and habits as alternately taking effect and then wearing off.

The language of midwifery is for the most part the same com- mon English of Ned Ward and Moll Flanders. At their crudest these speeches have a tendency to equate wombs and wallets, bags and women. Moll has an analogous tendency to take the human part for the human whole. One of her colloquies with Mother Midnight sets off in the narrator (the prosperous old penitent who is telling the story) a reflection on the helplessness of children and their need of "an assisting Hand, whether of the Mother, or some Body else" (173). This hand must possess "Care and Skill" if the child is to survive. As is typical of Moll (and perhaps of Defoe himself) when discussing human nature (here specifically the relationship between mother and child), individual "Parts" take precedence over the whole. The idea of motherhood is reduced to its salient components: the careful, skillful hand that keeps a child from becoming a "Fool" or a "Crip- ple" through neglect, with motherly "Affection" added as an extra ingredient.

But Defoe's language for human functions, as colloquial and mun- dane as it may be, is much more flexible and suggestive than this example might imply. Defoe insists upon "the infinite variety of this Book" in his Preface, and the "Story" insists, from many angles, upon the importance of Moll as a woman of "Fate." Moll, like other "archetypal" woman characters, is tied to the spinstress figure: she begins life as a seamstress and she resumes the work, although reluc- tantly, as an adult. Her adopted name of "Flanders" recalls fine cloth material. Her obsession with amassing quantities of fine clothes is a major expression of her lifelong desire to establish herself as a prosperous gentlewoman in the world. But it is the figurative corres- pondence in the novel between the arts of midwifery and thievery, as they are embodied in "Mother Midnight" and her relationship to Moll, which I find the most compelling feature of Defoe's deceptive

do you think . . . This buttocking brimestone came hither for? . . . 'twas for picking a Country- mans Pocket of his Pouch, and hiding it in her Oven; but when she came to be search'd, the Fool having forgot to take up the Strings, was discovered in her Roguery, and sent here to be lashed; and does she not deserve it, Sir, for trusting her Money in a box that has neither lid nor bottom to it?" (p. 140).

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Robert A. Erickson 81

art in the novel. It is perhaps impossible to determine how con- sciously Defoe uses midwifery as a metaphor for, or an analogue to, thievery. I have found no firm evidence in his other works of his possessing an uncommon knowledge of the subject. Still, an explora-

tion of this correspondence, and its "fateful" consequences, deepens

our understanding of Moll's evolution into the master thief and pow- erful "Mother," in control of her "name" and her "fate," which she becomes by the end of her story.

II

We are introduced to Mother Midnight at about the midpoint of the narrative when Moll, pregnant and "very Melancholy" (i6i), returns

to London after having parted with Jemy, her Lancashire husband. The old woman has an instantaneous good effect upon Moll: "Every

word this Creature said was a Cordial to me, and put new Life and

new Spirit into my very Heart; my Blood began to circulate immedi-

ately, and I was quite another Body; I eat my Victuals again . (162). An experienced midwife was acquainted with the best "cor- dials" for lying-in women, and this midwife, with her life-giving "words," seems to have delivered Moll anew into the world. From the point of view of seventeenth-century physiology, a baby's circula- tion began at birth. Mother Midnight, in a figurative sense which will be developed and enlarged for the rest of the novel, is Moll's spiritual mother.22

We are soon acquainted with the old midwife's practical philosophy of life: at the heart of the matter, for her as for Moll, is bare unaccom- modated "Money," "the thing indeed, without which nothing can be done in these Cases" (163). Whereupon she offers her famous three "Bills" of ascending order of expense, and Moll, smiling, chooses the short form. The whole tenor of their conversation is that of two women who "understand" each other. They speak the same language, despite Moll's ambivalent feelings about the "wicked Prac- tice" of this "eminent Lady," into whose hands Moll first admits she

"put" herself, and then says she "fell" (i66-8). Moll reveals that Mother Midnight, like so many of her sisterhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is not merely a midwife. "This grave Ma- tron had several sorts of Practise," one of which was to run a lying-in hospital for whores and another to sell babies procured from "private

22Cf. G. A. Starr on Moll's "recurring attachments" to older women, each of whom she "learn'd to call Mother" (x).

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82 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

Labours" (168). Ned Ward tells of a "Pimp" who gained two to three hundred pounds from such transactions,23 probably an inflated fig- ure; but there is no doubt that infants could, in the right hands, be valuable merchandise. This passage gives the first hint of Mother Midnight's traffic in stolen goods. We also learn, though very indi- rectly in words redolent of Moll's moral confusion under the influ- ence of this woman, that Mother Midnight is a bawd who does not seem to operate an actual brothel.

She is called "the Governess" by the "Ladies of Pleasure" in her house (169), and Moll henceforth adopts that name for her, a name which defines their relationship until shortly before Moll's capture as a thief. When the time for Moll's lying-in arrives, the "Governess did her part as a Midwife with the greatest Art and Dexterity imaginable, and far beyond all that ever I had had any Experience of before" (171). Since this is Moll's tenth lying-in, we may accept her occasional hyperbole as, at least in this case, genuinely meant. Mother Midnight is a true nonpareil in her profession, and Moll seems more attracted by the woman's technical mastery than repelled by her "wicked Practice."

While on the one hand Moll is being delivered of her "brave" but unwelcome burden, she is being relieved of concern on the other by the convenient suicide of the wife of her "Banker," whom she is now free to marry. At this point Moll begins, distantly, "to open her Case" about the Lancashire marriage to her friendly Governess, whose "Care of Moll in her confinement" has been so great "that if she had been my own Mother it could not have been better" (171-2). Indeed, the midwife reminds one of Moll's mother in several respects: they are both born story-tellers with shady pasts, they instruct Moll in the lore of the underworld, and each has a remarkable facility for extracting Moll's "Secrets." This aspect of what the two mothers have in common requires further examination.

In Virginia, Moll's real mother discovers, after considerable effort, that Moll is "her Daughter born of her Body in Newgate; the same that

had sav'd her from the Gallows by being in her Belly" (95) and who is now married to her son, Moll's brother. The whole process of this discovery is presented in terms of gestation and birth. While literally pregnant with her third child by her brother, the secret of her true relationship to him is such a "Load" on Moll's "Mind" that she

23London Spy, p. 9. This pimp is also an expert pickpocket and "rare Tongue-Pad," or fast talker.

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Robert A. Erickson 83

cannot sleep (88). Moll says, "I lived with the greatest Pressure imagin-

able for three Year more" (89), "no good Issue came of it" (go), "I found the thing too far gone to conceal it much longer" (94), and finally her mother "us'd her utmost Skill . . . to get the main Secret

out of me" (94). Her mother's "Opinion was that I should bury the whole thing entirely . . . and so let the whole matter remain a secret

as close as Death" (97), a solution all too reminiscent of ways of disposing of unwanted children.

When Mother Midnight is first described, in the Preface, she is

referred to as a "Midwife, and a Midwife-keeper, as they are call'd" (5). Sermon remarks that at the time of delivery the woman should "send for her Midwife and keeper,"24 that is, her midwife companion. But a good midwife was also considered an excellent keeper of secrets: Mother Midnight says "it was her business to Conceal every thing"

(172). Moll concludes that "she had such a bewitching Eloquence, and so great a power of Perswasion, that there was no concealing any thing from her" (172). So Moll resolves to "unbosome" herself to her and discloses the "History" of her Lancashire marriage and the

nature of the "good Offer" she has received from her faithful Citizen

(172). Moll freely represents to her Governess, "who I had now

learn'd to call Mother," the "dark Thoughts" she is having about giving up her little boy (174). Mother Midnight, becoming "graver," chooses to avoid the vague "Religious part" of Moll's meditation, then reminds her of the "Careful" and "Tender" handling she re- ceived from her expert midwife in her recent lying-in, and concludes: "and when you are gone, what are you to me? and what would it be to me if you are to be Hang'd?" (174). Long before Moll is to face the actual prospect of hanging, Mother Midnight forecasts that eventuality.

Hendrik van de Venter, one of the shrewdest of early eighteenth- century man-midwives, noted that "the Midwife ... has need of Sagacity, to discern the different Tempers of Women; for a great many, like Children, are to be treated with Gentleness ... and sometimes with Severity are to be school'd to do what they ought."25 Combining tenderness and sinister insinuation in a gesture sugges- tive of the expert midwife's mastery of the "Touch" (the external and internal palpitations by which she determines the readiness of her

patient to deliver), "the old Beldam" whispers, "Are you sure, you

24Ladies Companion, p. 92. 25The Art of Midwifery Improv'd, p. 12.

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84 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

was Nurs'd up by your own Mother? and yet you look fat, and fair Child . . . and with that she stroak'd me over the Face; never be concern'd Child, says she, going on in her drolling way ... I employ the best, and the honestest Nurses that can be had . . . we want

neither Care nor Skill" (174).26 The Governess has already delivered Moll of her unwanted child and knows the secret of its origin. Now she seems intent on a more important discovery. The touch over her face seems to herald the disclosure of Moll's "grand Secret" (159), her true identity. But Moll holds back. After this literal touch, Moll's "She touch'd me to the Quick" (175) seems the expression of one who has glimpsed an omniscient power which gives life and takes it away. The old midwife is in this passage no merely "quantitative"27 auxiliary character but a figure of "impenetrable" darkness: concerning Moll's secret '"she told me to unfold my self to her, was telling it to no Body; that she was silent as Death" (172). She exhibits the powers assigned to the Greek Fates in seeming to know at once Moll's past ("Are you

sure, you was Nurs'd up by your own Mother?"), her present ("yet you look fat, and fair Child") and her future ("what would it be to me if you are to be Hang'd?"). Moll now senses, in one of her deepest moments, that her fate is linked inexorably with Mother Midnight in what appears, if only fleetingly, a supernatural sense.

As Moll seems to grow up anew under the tutelage of her adopted mother, she stands before her now like a little girl in the naked terror of childhood and wonders if "this Creature cannot be a Witch, or have any Conversation with a Spirit that can inform her what was done with me before I was able to know it myself" (175). Perhaps the old folktales of the witch who demands possession of a child in exchange for her services and the other witch who fattens up children before eating them lie behind Moll's present relationship to Mother Midnight, for her fear would be reinforced by the proverbial super-

26Cf. Ned Ward's "Bawdy Governess"-"an Amphibeous Necessary, between Bawd and Midwife," "an old experienc'd Lady, whose wrinkl'd Brows, and hypocritical Elo- quence, seem'd to shew she had run thro' all the changeable Conditions incident to the complying Nature of the Female Sex," who after delivering a young unwed country girl, "cherish'd me up," in the victim's words, "with Caudle and boil'd Chickens till I was almost surfeited; so that I was grown so lusty in a Fortnights time that the Old Beldam would have merrily insinuated I had gather'd Strength enough for Humane Consola- tion" (The Rise and Fall of Madam Coming-Sir: or, An unfortunate Slip from the Tavern-Bar, Into the Surgeon's Powdering-Tub [Suffolk, n.d.-ca. 17001, pp. 25-27). See Starr's note, p. 381. Moll's Governess (who had also "run thro', it seems in a few Years all the

eminent degrees" of a disgraced "Gentlewoman" [5]), "Nurs'd . .. up" her charge as well (though before the delivery) with "a Chicken roasted and hot" (166-7).

27Terence Martin, "The Unity of Moll Flanders," in Moll Flanders, ed. Kelly, p. 371. I have nonetheless found this a stimulating and instructive essay.

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Robert A. Erickson 85

stitious identification of the midwife and the witch.28 The midwife-

witch was thought to possess uncanny powers of prophecy, a gift which Defoe and Moll both attribute to Satan's ministers.29 Mother Midnight passes over the "Disorder" Moll is in, but Moll's repetition

of "Mother" in addressing the "old Woman" after her fright, and her upsurge of relief at the Governess's assurance that Moll's "Child shall be used well" (176), indicate that Moll is now securely bonded to her new mother at the expense of her better impulses: "0 Mother, says I, If you can do so, you will engage me to you for ever." Mother Midnight has become Moll's "ill Fate."

III

Moll practices two main careers in her search for a respectable monetary establishment in life: the first revolves upon the use of her sex, the second upon her dexterity as a thief. At the outset of both

of these careers she is glimpsed for an indelible instant in an open doorway, each an entry into a new life. Defoe's language for describ-

ing Moll's commencement, apprenticeship, and career as a profes-

sional thief bears remarkable resemblance to the rhetoric and lore of the noble "Art of Midwifery," a resemblance which makes her transition from the life of sexual intrigue to the life of a thief seem the most natural thing in the world.

If we were to supply our own chapter titles to Defoe's continuous

narrative, we might choose to insert "The Birth of a Thief" after

Moll's admission that at "Eight and Forty" she was past the time

of child-bearing. Grass time is done ("it was past the flourishing time with me" [189]), her faithful Citizen is dead, bodily "Ruins" have succeeded the "Ruin" she once feared as "a Whore to one

Brother, and a Wife to the other" (31), and Moll is "the most dejected, disconsolate Creature alive" (189-90). The sexual games of her life and the "politick Schemes" (67) of marriage, in all their variety of manipulation and intrigue (which occupy slightly more than the first half of the novel), now give way to a new kind of game which Moll

learns to play with even greater relish than the ones of her lustier years.

The vital impulse is the same in Moll's first sexual encounter and her first theft, and the Devil, as tempter and prompter, plays a part in

28See my "Mother Jewkes, Pamela, and the Midwives," ELH (Dec. 1976), pp. 500-1 and notes.

29Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil, Part II, chap. 9.

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86 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

both. At the beginning of both scenes Moll has had a "smooth Story" to tell of-in the first case, life in a "Family Noted . . . for Vertue and Sobriety" (19), in the second, "an uninterrupted course of Ease and Content" with a "Husband . .. Quiet, Sensible, Sober. . . Virtuous"

(188-9). In the first scene the Tempter enters in the guise of the "Elder Brother" who is skilled at laying traps: the Elder Brother well knows "how to catch a Woman in his Net," baiting "his Hook" and laying it

in Moll's way (19). So too in the later scene, a more literal Devil, as Moll tells it, "carried me out and laid his Bait" (191). Both scenes are framed just inside a doorway, the first in the work room of the Elder Brother's sisters (who are absent), the second in an apothecary's shop, the two attendants with their backs turned. In the first scene, the Brother clasps and kisses her and his "Words," Moll says, "fir'd my Blood, my Spirits flew about my Heart . . . and my Heart spoke as plain as a Voice, that I lik'd it.... it was ... a Surprise ... my Head run upon strange Things" and "my vanity was elevated to the last Degree"; in the very next encounter they kiss again, and "tir'd with that kind of Work, we sat down" (21-3). In the scene of the theft the Devil's prompting is "like a Voice spoken to me over my Shoulder"; "I felt not the Ground, I stept on . . . I was tyr'd and out of Breath, I was forc'd to sit down . .. my Blood was all in a Fire . .. I was under such a Surprize that I . .. knew not . . . what to do" (191-2). The Devil's effect upon Moll is not much different from the Devil's workings with women in seventeenth-century literature. The best-known example is Milton's Satan who, through a dream, manipulates the senses of a highly suggestible Eve and. elevates her to

a new level of vanity and pride, preparing the ground for his later temptation in daylight. The whole process of the temptation is subtly orgasmic. For Defoe the process is more mundane, but characteris- tically lively. As Moll sums it up, "Thus the Devil who began, by the help of an irresistable Poverty, to push me into this Wickedness,

brought me on to a height beyond the common Rate, even when my Necessities were not so great" (202). "I that was once in the Devil's Clutches, was held fast there as with a Charm" (203).

As active as Moll's "Devil" is, however, in pushing her into her career as a thief, Mother Midnight, as an external confidante and "governess" allied with Satan's internal promptings, is far more in- teresting and important. What the Devil instigates the midwife fosters and brings to maturity. The spiritual presence of the old woman of the night seems to hover over Moll's first thefts. For much of the story, Mother Midnight is Moll's fate. She stands in relation to Moll at

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Robert A. Erickson 87

the end of the first half of the novel as Newgate stands to Moll near

the end of the second half-as the dark, powerful medium to a new life. Moll became "quite another Body" after first meeting Mother Midnight, and the old midwife was there to deliver and dispose of Moll's unwanted son just as she will later dispose of the goods Moll steals; she will provide Moll's "School-Mistress" in thievery just as

she will later provide the minister who delivers Moll from Newgate. Moll first steals from an apothecary's shop. Midwives and apothe-

caries were linked professionally. The "little Bundle wrapt in a white Cloth" (191) and lying upon a "Stool" is reminiscent of a new-born baby placed upon or near the itinerant midwife's stool. The bundle turns out to contain (among other things) "a Suit of Childbed Linnen in it, very good and almost new, the Lace very fine" (192), an item listed in Mother Midnight's third bill of particulars.

Moll's second sally into the new world of crime has often been cited as a "vivid" example of Defoe's art but with very little commentary on its excellence:

one evening . . . the Devil put a Snare in my way of a dreadful Nature indeed, and such a one as I have never had before or since; going thro'

Aldersgate-street there was a pretty little Child had been at a Dancing-School, and was going home, all alone, and my Prompter, like a true Devil, set me upon this innocent Creature; I talk'd to it, and it prattl'd to me again, and I took it by the Hand and led it a long till I came to a pav'd Alley that goes into Bartholomew Close, and I led it in there; the Child said that was not its way home; I said, yes, my Dear it is, I'll show you the way home; the Child had a little Necklace on of Gold Beads, and I had my Eye upon that, and in the dark

of the Alley I stoop'd, pretending to mend the Child's Clog that was loose, and took off her Necklace and the Child never felt it, and so led the Child on

again: Here, I say, the Devil put me upon killing the Child in the dark Alley, that it might not Cry; but the very thought frighted me so that I was ready to drop down, but I turn'd the Child about and bad it go back again, for that was not its way home; the Child said so she would, and I went thro' into Bartholomew Close, and then turn'd round to another Passage that goes into Long-lane, so away into Charterhouse-Yard and out into St. John's-street, then crossing into Smithfield, went down Chick-lane and into Field-lane to Holbourn-

bridge, when mixing with the Crowd of People usually passing there, it was not possible to have been found out... .(193-4)

The most disturbing thing about this passage is that the little girl is in danger of her life. She has been practicing postures in a dancing school, and Moll (taking her own instructions almost puppet-fashion from the Devil) takes over for the dancing mistress. With the compul-

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88 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

sive, slow-motion quality of a dream, Moll leads the girl into a "dark Alley" and there performs with her a chilling minuet. The child is hardly a person for Moll: "I talk'd to it, and it prattl'd . . . I took it by the Hand and led it a long." As in a dream, all that Moll can see is the necklace which she must have and the child becomes a mere instrument for that transaction. The "Necklace . . . of Gold Beads ... might have been formerly the Mother's, for it was too big for the Child's wear" (194-5). Moll very adroitly delivers the child (and by implication, the child's mother) of the cumbersome necklace and is then seized with her fatal impulse. For the moment, Moll, on that evening, in that dark alley, is invested with all the terrible power over life and death of "Mother Midnight" herself. She is terrified by that power, but her presence of mind allows her to "save" the child and the necklace at once.30

Most of the authors of the midwife manuals, whatever their verbal attainments, take great pains to make their important instructions concerning delivery as precise and lucid as possible. Defoe's language for Moll's thefts has this same charged, minute, intense quality, as if he, through Moll, were giving vital directions to the reader. The foregoing passage is vivid as well because the scene it describes is densely suggestive. It evokes the shadows of an underworld, images of snares, traps, lurking thieves, claustrophobic blind alleys, mid- wives who murder children that they "might not cry," and a whole labyrinth of crooked lanes (actually one of the most sordid and dis- reputable parts of the London of 1720)31 into which Moll recedes before "mixing" with the crowd of people.

I have so far been drawing merely analogical connections between Moll's thefts and the lore of midwifery. It is interesting that Defoe now chooses to reintroduce Mother Midnight into Moll's narrative. A businesswoman who made a good living in the illegitimate baby market would probably also provide a good "Market" for Moll's stolen goods, and indeed her old Governess, though fallen (like Moll) on hard times, still "stood upon her Legs" as a "Pawnbroker" and

30Moll's stooping to tie the lace of the child's "Clog" and the deliberateness of "I turn'd the Child about" may be compared with "the greatest Article of all in the Art of Midwifery... that of TURNING the Child.... Whatever the Posture be, (except when ... the Child comes right) you should search for the Feet ... When you have found one, secure it by tying it with a Ribbon ... draw them down ... so low, that you may make use of your other Hand . .. in turning the Child" (Dawkes, The Midwife Rightly Instructed, pp. 81-2). Cf. the description and illustration of "clogs" (overshoes tied with ribbons) in C. Willet and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed., (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), pp. 171, 173.

31See Starr's note, p. 388.

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Robert A. Erickson 89

fence (197). The manipulative side of Moll and her adopted mother is readily apparent in Moll's anticipation of their new life together and her farewell to the old life of sexual intrigue:

I Now began to think this necessary Woman might help me a little in my low Condition to some Business, for I would gladly have turn'd my Hand to any honest Employment if I could have got it; but here she was defficient; honest business did not come within her reach; if I had been younger, perhaps she 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, and so I told her. (198)

Like Plato's and Sermon's midwives, Moll is past child-bearing and ready for a new career. But her new career of thievery need not be any less exciting than her old one of sexual politics. Mother Midnight suggests a "School-Mistress" in crime for Moll: "I trembled at that Proposal," but the Governess soon "conquer'd all my Modesty" (201). It takes a certain boldness to become a midwife or a thief, and as Moll embarks on this dangerous new profession, Defoe explicitly establishes the midwife-thief parallel. Moll, old in years but "young in the Business" of crime, is apprenticed, "just as a Deputy attends a Midwife without any Pay" (201),32 to a hardened younger female thief ("no Woman ever arriv'd to the Perfection of that Art, so as to do it like her" [201]). Moll is an apt pupil. She had been good with her hands since the age of ten, when she was "Assistant" to her first "Nurse" (and mother surrogate) in Colchester: "I was very nimble at my Work, and had a good Hand with my Needle" (14-15). Had not the Mayoress of Colchester herself one day pronounced, after a close examination, that little Moll had "a Gentlewoman's Hand" (13)? In the first half of the book Moll has learned the ruses, deceptions, and stratagems of sexual intrigue from a variety of expert school- mistresses, particularly the Captain's widow ("I told her . . . I would give up myself wholly to her Directions" [771), her "Landlady" in Bath ("a cunning Creature" and prototype of Mother Midnight [Iio]), and the "she Devil" (143) of Lancashire,33 a "go-between" (149) who deceives her about the rich "Irishman," Jemy. Moll is thus more than ready for the intrigues of thievery.

32Dawkes's The Midwife Rightly Instructed is cast in the form of a dialogue between a man-midwife and his "Deputy," a young woman named "Lucina."

33Lancashire, of course, had long been associated with witchcraft. Jemy and Mother Midnight are perhaps the two most important people in Moll's life; each has associa- tions with witchcraft, and each is linked to Moll in a supernatural sense: Jemy via telepathy (154), and Mother Midnight as one who seems to know "what was done with me before I was able to know it myself," in Moll's words (175).

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9o "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

The first case ("Prize") for a "'Deputy Midwife"-thief would be,

appropriately enough, a pregnant woman expensively attired:

At length she put me to Practise, she had shewn me her Art, and I had several times unhook'd a Watch from her own side with great dexterity; at last she show'd me a Prize, and this was a young Lady big with Child who

had a charming Watch, the thing was to be done as she came out of Church;

she goes on one side of the Lady, and pretends, just as she came to the Steps, to fall, and fell against the Lady with so much violence as put her into a great

fright, and both cry'd out terribly; in the very moment that she jostl'd the Lady, I had hold of the Watch, and holding it the right way, the start she gave drew the Hook out and she never felt it; I made off immediately, and left my Schoolmistress to come out of her pretended Fright gradually, and the Lady too; and presently the Watch was miss'd; ay, says my Comrade, then it was

those Rogues that thrust me down, I warrant ye; I wonder the Gentlewoman

did not miss her Watch before, then we might have taken them.

She humour'd the thing so well that no Body suspected her, and I was got home a full Hour before her: This was my first Adventure in Company; the Watch was indeed a very fine one, and had a great many Trinkets about it,

and my Governess allow'd us 201. for it, of which I had half, and thus I was enter'd a compleat Thief, harden'd to a Pitch above all the Reflections of Conscience or Modesty, and to a Degree which I must acknowledge I never

thought possible in me. (201-2)

The woman cries out, perhaps, because she thinks first of her baby, and Moll, holding the watch "the right way" lets nature do the work for her: "the start she gave drew the Hook out and she never felt it."

As Sermon says, "Nature surpasseth all" in the art of midwifery,34 and Moll's "Schoolmistress," like a "mild, gentle" midwife, "hu- mours" the "Gentlewoman" after the "delivery," helping "the Lady too" to come out of her "Fright gradually." Like Sermon's "Lady's Companion," the schoolmistress is able "to speak many fair words . . .to deceive the apprehensive woman" in order to allay her fear. (Of course Sermon is speaking of a "commendable deceipt . . . done for the good of the person in distress .")35 It may be said of Moll and her tutor, as of male midwives, that they "have advanced their Dexterity by degrees, and are now come to the length of discharging [their] Office by Slight of Hand only. .t36

The language for Moll's smooth delivery stands in precise contrast

34Ladies Companion, p. 6.

35Ibid., p. 6. 36The Female Physician .... To which is added, The Whole Art of New Improv'd Midwifery

... by John Maubray, M. D. (London, 1724), p. 181.

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Robert A. Erickson 91

The language for Moll's smooth delivery stands in precise contrast

to the horror, expressed in many of the midwife manuals, of incom- petent midwives extracting dead (and sometimes living) children with the aid of "Hooks" and other instruments. But the most significant

contrast here, to Moll's mind, is that between an infant and a watch. From our point of view, the adjectives for describing babies and

watches in the novel are almost interchangeable ("pretty," "brave," "fine,' "good," "charming"), both entities are small and delicate (possessing "faces" and "hands") and are often decorated, and both may be considered emblems of mortality. (Moll's mechanical little dancing student in the dark alley combined most of these characteris-

tics.) But from Moll's point of view at this crucial stage in her life, gold watches are far more interesting and valuable objects than infants. She has had enough of producing children, unwanted, unpredictable

burdens as they are to the vulnerable mother. Watches now take their place, but the excitement of "producing" them is far preferable to Moll because the technical mastery ("Dexterity") involved in the activity enhances her illusion of "artistic" control over a life which has been all too often at the mercy of manipulators of both sexes. Her new skills are attained in part as an over-reaction to her very real incom- petence as a woman on her own in the "world."37

Moll soon serves out her apprenticeship as a "midwife"-thief and becomes a "compleat thief" (202), working on her own. Her descrip- tion of her new role could apply just as accurately to "the compleat midwife": "I pass'd with [my Governess] from this time for a very dexterous Manager in the nicest Cases" (211). Midwives from Sermon to Dawkes repeatedly refer to their "dexterity" as "Managers" of labor, to "nice and critical Points" in examination and delivery, and to "nice and difficult Cases" of labor which they have successfully resolved. In the famous "gold-watch" passage, Moll gives a post- operative analysis of her "narrow Escape" which reveals further refinements of her new "Trade":

This was a narrow Escape to me, and I was so frighted, that I ventur'd no

more at Gold Watches a great while; there was indeed a great many con- curring Circumstances in this Adventure, which assisted to my Escape; but

the chief was, that the Woman whose Watch I had pull'd at was a Fool; that is to say, she was Ignorant of the nature of the Attempt, which one would have thought she should not have been, seeing she was wise enough to fasten her

Watch, so, that it could not be slipt up; but she was in such a Fright, that she

37Cf. Everett Zimmerman, Defoe and the Novel (Berkeley, 1975), p. 101.

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92 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

had no thought about her proper for the Discovery; for she, when she felt the

pull scream'd out, and push'd herself forward, and put all the People about her into disorder, but said not a Word of her Watch, or of a Pick-pocket, for at least two Minutes time; which was time enough for me, and to spare; for as I had cried out behind her, as I have said, and bore myself back in the Crowd as she bore forward; there were several People, at least seven or eight, the Throng being still moving on, that were got between me and her in that time, and then I crying out a Pick-pocket, rather sooner than she, or at least as soon, she might as well be the Person suspected as I, and the People were confus'd in their Enquiry; whereas, had she with a Presence of Mind needful on such an Occasion, as soon as she felt the pull, not skream'd out as she did, but turn'd immediately round, and seiz'd the next Body that was behind her, she had infallibly taken me. (212)

The precision of this is remarkable. Moll's timing cannot be improved upon. In those critical "two Minutes," recorded as if Moll were timing herself by her own "Gold Watch," she is able to get away. She is here working alone, without a partner, and she has learned to manipulate the crowd, and extricate herself from it, as cleverly as she ever lifted a gold watch.38 In fact, extricating herself with art and dexterity from dangerous situations now seems to take precedence over extracting precious articles from others.

In growing up all over again as a thief, Moll attains her majority after amassing twenty-one gold watches, and her disclaimer that after the above incident "I ventur'd no more at Gold Watches" is as much an admission that they are no longer so interesting to her as it is a sign of caution. Moll's growth in crime is paralleled by a similar "aging" of the objects or victims of her thefts. We have followed Moll's career from her first theft of a bundle (containing "Child-bed Linnen") resembling a new-born infant to the safe delivery of a necklace from a little girl (who is herself delivered from a dark alley)

38Moll's skillful deliverance of herself from the "Crowd" may be compared with Ned Ward's less successful experience of the Lord Mayor's Day "Mob" (at "the End of Blow-Bladder-Street") as a kind of violent womb of humanity: "Whilst my Friend and I were ... staring at the Spectators . . . such a Tide of Mob over-flow'd the Place we stood in that the Women cry'd out for Room, the Children for Breath, and every Man ... strove very hard for his Freedom. For my own part, I thought my Intrails would have come out of my Mouth, and I should have gone shotten Home, I was so closely Imprisoned between the Bums and Bellies of the Multitude, that I was almost squeez'd as flat [as] a Napkin in a Press, that I heartily would have joyn'd with the Rabble to have cry'd Liberty, Liberty" (London Spy, pp. 298-9; cf. also pp. 251-2). Cf. one of the earliest descriptions of labor in the midwife manuals: "Also it shalbe very good for a tyme to retayne and kepe in her brethe for because that thorow that meanes the guttes and intrailles be thrust together and depressed downeward" (The byrth of Mankynde newly translated out of Laten into Englysshe . . ., tr. Richard Jonas [London, 1540], p. 20).

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Robert A. Erickson 93

to the theft of a "charming Watch" from the side of a "Lady big with

Child." The overall chronology of her life progresses from the largely passive role of bearing children in intrigue, to the active game of

stealing watches, to the predominating joy of bearing herself alive from ever-increasing peril. She will shortly amass "near 500 1 . . . in

ready Money" (221) and could retire comfortably, but she goes on. It

is not the lust for gain which drives her. Thievery is now a career

subsidiary to the art of eluding capture-and Newgate. The old Moll, the narrator, draws back after the gold watch passage

to give a fuller historical dimension to her story, paying homage to

the greatest professional (and personal) influence on her life with "a short Touch" (appropriate term for a midwife) at the "History" of her Governess, who

led me as it were by the Hand, and gave me such Directions, and I so well

follow'd them, that I grew the greatest Artist of my time, and work'd myself

out of every Danger with such Dexterity, that when several more of my

Comrades run themselves into Newgate presently, and by that time they had been Half a Year at the Trade, I had now Practis'd upwards of five Year, and the People at Newgate, did not so much as know me; they had heard much of me indeed, and often expected me there; but I always got off, tho' many

times in the extreamest Danger. (214)

The Governess, she says a little later, "told me she would never

recommend any Partner to me again, for she always found . . . that I had the best luck when I ventur'd by my self. ... I got out of

[Danger] with more Dexterity than when I was entangled with the

dull Measures of other People, who had perhaps less forecast, and

were more rash and impatient than I; for tho' I had as much Courage to venture as any of them, yet I . . . had more Presence of Mind

when I was to bring my self off" (220). Moll now sounds like the pretentious male-midwife instructors who deprecate "rash, hasty,

and passionate" practitioners: "these people do commonly want that other, almost inseparable Talent, a good and prudent Deportment ... let [them] spin and card (the properest Employment for them!),"39 and the one Moll knew but detested. Moll has attained a level of com- petence equivalent perhaps to "Men" who, according to Maubray, are "commonly endued with greater Presence of Mind . . . than com-

mon Midwives."40 Whatever knowledge of the lore of midwifery Defoe may have

39Dawkes, The Midwife Rightly Instructed, pp. xi, 7-8. 4'The Female Physician, p. 169.

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94 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

possessed, the analogues between midwifery and thievery we have observed tend to give Moll's life as a thief fresh significance and urgency. Defoe is at one with his creature as Moll offers her hard-

earned "Directions" to the reader, for if there is any motive more central in Defoe's novels than the pleasure in technical mastery, it is

the pleasure in telling how this mastery was achieved and how it operates. Moll-Defoe's descriptions of her thefts have no less impor- tance for her than the descriptions of proper delivery have for the midwives because both trades, at least as they were practiced in

the early eighteenth century, were life-and-death occupations, and both were considered "Arts." By 1720 men had gradually gained pre-eminence over women as self-styled "professional" midwives; the lowly "Trade" of midwifery had evolved, in the hands of male practi- tioners, into what they deemed a true "Art." Maubray (to choose just one example) refers to men as "the more Skilful and Judicious Practiser[s] of this Art," and he goes on elsewhere, in what must be the most self-flattering preface in the literature, to "expound the Truth of Things; and reveal the Mysteries of our great Art."41

Moll is not so pompous as Maubray, but in her own way she is just

as proud of herself. The midwife parallels to Moll's career as a thief call attention to her role as a woman -a "woman of the world" who, in a society and economy dominated by men, surpasses women and men in her proficiency and "Fame" as a thief. The parallels reinforce the sense of a woman's life-giving skill with her hands (a skill of which Moll becomes complete master), but it is Moll's own life ("many times in the extreamest Danger") which is being quickened, enhanced, and

preserved by these skills. She becomes in effect the expert midwife- thief to herself, "stealing" herself from danger time after time and living to tell about it. She not only survives, but survives in her "long Race of Crime" with a "Name" as the greatest "Artist" of her time. Moll's triumph is that she becomes autonomous and self- perpetuating, a genuine mythic heroine in her own time and in ours. And, as in all myths, but most significantly in the more "primitive" and vital ones, whether they emanate from a people or from one man (like Defoe's charging unbroken narratives), Moll's proper name, the name given her at birth by her real mother and everyone's first "Fate," is intimately connected with her destiny and essential self.

4'John Maubray, Midwifery Brought to Perfection, By Manual Operation; Illustrated in a Lecture . . . (London, 1725), p. ii.

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Robert A. Erickson 95

For as triumphant as Moll becomes as an "Artist," that is not who she really is in her own eyes.42

IV

Like "Mrs. B ," her Governess, Moll "runs thro' " many dif-

ferent names and appellations in the novel as she moves from one

personal crisis to the next. She begins the "World" over and over again, usually under a new name, and she is as careful to record every new name (every new "Fate"), as she is to account for her

goods in her well-known periodic "Stock"-taking. Most of her new names are open to connotations of promiscuity, and she sees herself

from the start as "'a poor desolate Girl without Friends . .. as was my Fate" (8). She seems always to need a friend or a guide, and often this

friend is a woman, as we have seen.

At age eight Moll, "the little Gentlewoman" (14), begins her work-

ing life as a seamstress to avoid the horrors of "working House-Work"

as a Servant. At the death of her kind old "Nurse," a foster mother to her, Moll, now fourteen, is almost frightened out of her wits at the

prospect of being "turn'd out of Doors to the wide World" (16). After

her sojourn as "Mrs. Betty" (the proverbial name for the loose servant girl) in the household of the two brothers, and her unhappy five-year

marriage to Robin, she is again "left loose to the World" (59). She is soon drawn into a "World of wild Company" (6o) where she becomes the "pretty Widow . . . that Name I got in a little time in Publick"

(6o). In her career as "Fortune" hunter (and as a self-styled figure of Fortune), "I was hurried on (by my Fancy to a Gentleman) to Ruin myself" (61); the shadow of "Ruin" and "Destruction" haunts Moll's rhetoric until her reprieve from Newgate. She continues in "the Habit of a Widow" (though she is still legally married to the linen-draper) and assumes the name of "Mrs. Flanders" (64).

We are never told Moll's married name in Virginia, but it is here,

apparently for the only time in her life, that she reveals her "True Name" to someone. Since this revelation to her real mother clinches her identity as the sister of her own husband, misery and ruin fol-

42Cf. G. A. Starr on the "special potency" of proper names in the narrative (xx), and Ian Watt on "Robinson Crusoe": "his author's name has been forgotten, while he himself has acquired a kind of semi-historical status, like the traditional heroes of myth" ("Robinson Crusoe as a Myth," in Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel [New York, 1975], p. 312).

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96 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

low with almost Oresteian inevitablity: "I know not by what ill Fate

guided, every thing went wrong with us" (90). From that time on Moll reserves, like a Rosicrucian adept, "the grand Secret" of her true identity. Speaking of Jemy, her Lancashire husband, she says "I ...

never broke my Resolution, which was not to let him know my true

Name, who I was, or where to be found" (159). Not Jemy, not Mother Midnight, not even posterity knows Moll's "True Name," though it is, by her open admission, "well known in the Records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily" (7), if one knew how to find it. The real Moll Flanders is the one with the name that can never be revealed, the innocent child who saved her mother from hanging ("the same that had sav'd her from the Gallows by being in her Belly" [95]), and who as a woman gave life to her one true love, Jemy ("a Life that had given him a new Life" [299], as he tells her in Newgate). Moll seems to feel about her name as some women feel about their

age, that to reveal it would be to lose a certain power. Moll's true name is a talisman tied to the precious illusion of her original self, the

innocent, life-bringing child. In some mysterious and non-rational

way, she seems to know that keeping the secret of her true name will preserve her and help her to flourish in the world.43

In Moll's words, "my own Fate pushing me on" (104), she returns to England, and the "new scene of Life" which greets her there has "a dreadful Appearance" (105). As "my Lady Cleave" (possibly a synonym for a wanton woman),44 Moll lives six years in a "happy but unhappy Condition" (120); when Sir Walter leaves her, she is again a "loose unguided Creature" (128) and "a poor friendless Widow"

(131). She has five years of "Ease and Content" with her Banker husband but his untimely death, like "a sudden Blow from an almost invisible Hand . . . turn'd me out into the World" (189) in worse

economic straits than she has yet experienced. The "World" has by this time become for Moll a huge, unpredictable, labyrinthine antago- nist, dominated by powerful commercial and legal forces, which has always defeated her and which she must now outwit and overcome.

We have seen how Moll grows up anew as a master-thief under the

43Before her actual Newgate ordeal, the scene of Moll's worst suffering was Virginia, a colony "half-Peopled" with the human refuse of Newgate: "there are more thieves and Rogues made by that one Prison of Newgate, than by all the Clubs and Societies of Villains in the Nation" (87), in the words of Moll's mother. After Virginia, Moll becomes a criminal. After Newgate, she becomes a new and prosperous woman. "Virginia" and "Newgate" represent the two poles of Moll's experience, and both names imply a fresh beginning.

44See Moll Flanders, ed. Kelly, p. 93n.

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Robert A. Erickson 97

guiding hand of her midwife-governess, and as she grows more and

more skillful in manipulating the London street crowds to her advan- tage, another crowd of her "Comrades" who first "run themselves"

and then are "catch'd and hurried to Newgate" (214) is growing in numbers and power to do her harm. This envious and angry crowd of thieves claims her for their own: "These were they that gave me the

Name of Moll Flanders: For it was no more of Affinity with my real Name, or with any of the Names I had ever gone by, than black is of Kin to white, except that once . . . I call'd my self Mrs. Flanders . . . but that these Rogues never knew" (214). This is a crucial distinction for Moll. None of the names she has ever gone by, since childhood, was her "real Name." That name is separate and inviolable. But she is now baptized by Newgate as certainly as she was born there, and she

can be "Impeached" by Newgate as well: "naming" her in this way will seal her destruction. Moll emphasizes that her real name is no more "of Kin" to "Moll" ("almost a generic name for a female crimi-

nal," as McKillop notes)45 than white is to black. Her real name, like the original identity she wishes to preserve, is unique, not generic; it is "white," innocent, and pure, despite the virtual blood kinship she has with Newgate through her mother's line. Though Moll seems only dimly aware of the fact, Mother Midnight, her real mother, her mother's mother, and a "Kinswoman of hers who . . . was . . . Condemn'd to be Hang'd but having got Respite by pleading her Belly, dyed afterwards in the Prison" (87) are all intimately tied to Newgate. This ancient prison is the "mother" of them all. It functions as an inescapable womb of fate. The more famous Moll becomes as a thief, the larger looms the prison behind her-and seems to draw her to itself. From this point until her reprieve, Newgate, her birthplace and her spiritual home, will come to exert more influence on Moll than any of the other mother (or "fate") figures in her life, even Mother Midnight. At the height of Moll's success as a thief, "the old

Gentlewoman began to talk of leaving off while we were well," but an unknown "Fate," allied to Moll's "Success" and her "Name [now] as famous as any Thief of my sort ever had been at Newgate" (262), guides her on. This "fate" is Newgate, a teeming mob held together in one place; a dread microcosm of her old antagonist, "the World"; "an Emblem of Hell itself" (274): "To conclude, the Place that had so long expected me, and which with so much Art and Success I had so

45Quoted in Moll Flanders, ed. Kelly, P. 347. For the best historical discussion of the origin of the character and name of "Moll Flanders," see Gerald Howson, Thief-taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (New York, 1970), PP. 156-70.

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98 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

long avoided" (273). When Moll arrives there, she says, "it seem'd

to me that I was hurried on by an inevitable and unseen Fate to this Day of Misery . . . I was now to give satisfaction to Justice with my Blood ... These things pour'd themselves in upon my thoughts in a

confus'd manner, and left me overwhelm'd with Melancholly and Despair" (274). Moll, the expert manipulator of crowds, is now seen,

ironically, to have been part of that same crowd of hapless comrades rushing towards the vortex of Newgate. Her language dissolves in the image of drowning.

Whether we believe in the sincerity of Moll's repentance in prison or not, there is no question that after Newgate she is a different woman. The other Newgate, the colony in the new world, Virginia, now draws her, but instead of the pressure of a malign fate impelling her actions, there is now "Providence" (326). More than ever, her

Mother Midnight, now extremely old, mirrors her experience in New- gate and after (the old woman too undergoes a virtual conversion, by way of a grave illness); she is still practical and helpful, ever faithful, a true friend, but she is now demythologized: no longer is there any sense of the fatal power she had over Moll as her "Governess." In

fact, their roles are now reversed: Moll is the director, her Governess the child. Referring to Mother Midnight in a conversation with Moll on the eve of her departure, the Boatswain says she "cryes after

you like a Child" (309). Even her husband and co-partner, Jemy, a prototype of "the great man" in Fielding's sense, "was as much at a

loss as a Child what to do with himself, or with what he had, but by Directions" (311), i.e., Moll's directions. Moll is as much the actress now as ever, pretending to be poorer than she really is on the ship, but she is now in control of her fate. Indeed, she has become her fate because she is now her own "governess." She has finally arrived at the level of practical competence and wisdom of the "World" which she always admired in her old Governess. Moll becomes her own "Mother Midnight." At the same time, her new self is a regenerated version of the innocent child (associated with her "True Name") who

brings fresh life to a new world.46 She and Jemy are set to "begin the World upon a new Foundation" (303): they will "live as new People in a new World" (304); as Moll sums it up, after an inventory of the "stolen Goods" which make up her dowry as an incipient "Planter"

46G. A. Starr notes, in a very suggestive phrase, that Moll has "a stronger sense of her unfulfilled destiny than of her actual identity" (xvii). I believe that by this point in her story Moll's "destiny" (or fate) and "identity" (her true self) have come together.

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Robert A. Erickson 99

and colonist: "in the Sixty first Year of my Age, I launch'd out into a new World" (312).

In her early sixties, she can even afford, emotionally and fiscally, to become a real mother for the first time.47 When she sees the hand- some and prosperous young Humphry, her son by her own brother, she experiences a final agony of childbirth: "It was a wretched thing for a Mother thus to see her own Son . .. and durst not make herself known to him . . . I thought all my Entrails turn'd within me, that my very Bowels mov'd" (322). This may seem "contrived and mere- tricious"48 to us from our perspective on Moll's hapless career as

a mother, but for her in the immediate moment it is a genuine emo- tion, and a love approaching veneration.49 She may now claim the material legacy her own mother left her, having survived the legacy of Newgate. Moll's mother had fallen into bad company in her Lon- don youth, became both "Whore and Thief," wound up pregnant in Newgate, bore Moll in prison, and was then transported to Virginia where she fell into a good family, married her master, presumably repented of her wicked past, and "improv'd the Plantations" after his death "to such a degree . .. that most of the Estate was of her getting, not her Husband's, for she had been a Widow upwards of sixteen Year" (88). Obviously Moll is her mother's daughter. Her life recapitu-

lates her mother's in several crucial respects (as "Whore," "Thief," convict, transported felon, penitent, "Planter," and "Widow"), just as it does Mother Midnight's.

Her real mother and her spiritual mother have bequeathed to Moll an impressive legacy as a wealthy and respectable planter and "Direc- tor" of plantations in the New World, but our experience of Moll's ancient alter ego, Mother Midnight, would not be complete without noticing her last gift to her disciple. The "Cargo" Moll ordered the Governess to send from England "arriv'd safe, and in good Condi- tion, with three Women Servants, lusty Wenches, which my old

47Again, cf. G. A. Starr: "Hitherto frustrated in the search for an ideal mother, Moll seizes on an alternative possibility, and the reunion with her son Humphrey serves as a testimonial that she herself, favoured with a proper child, would make an ideal mother" (x-xi).

48Michael Shinagel, "The Maternal Paradox in Moll Flanders: Craft and Character," in Moll Flanders, ed. Kelly, p. 410.

49Moll even shows signs of attaining to Mother Midnight's traditional alternate role of match-maker, in this case to her own son: responding to his mother's inquiry as to why he is still unmarried, Humphrey replies "that Virginia did not yield any great plenty of Wives, and since I talk'd of going back to England, I should send him a Wife from London" (337).

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100 "Mother Midnight" and Moll Flanders

Governess had pick'd up for me . . . one of which happen'd to come double, having been got with Child by one of the Seamen in the Ship

. . . before the Ship got so far as Gravesend; so she brought us a stout Boy, about 7 Months after her Landing" (340). The Governess and

erstwhile "Fate" still plies her midwife's trade even at a distance, and the three wenches are three young fates who will "begin the World," like Moll, all over again.

University of California, Sanita Barbara

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