Moll Flanders Character Analysis

Are female characters equal to male characters in 18th century novel ‘’Moll Flanders’’ It is a well-known fact that 18th century in England is called as” the Classical Age” or in other words “Augustan Age” in Literature. Among the scholars it is also known as “the Age of Reason”. According to studies this period is called as “the Classical Age” because of the fact that authors and poets re-established, in other words polished the rules and the disciplines of Classical Age writers such as Horace and Aristotle. Besides, another important improvement in this era was that people began to think they could acquire information by their own reason, and so on the historians and critics called this period as the “Age of Reason”.

As different from his pioneers, Defoe used a woman in his work as a protagonist known as Moll Flanders. Briefly, in his novel, Defoe mentioned about Moll Flanders who is the protagonist, a beautiful, attractive, capable woman. She was born in New gate prison. She stayed with her mother until her mother exiled then she was given to a family to be grown up as a servant, however, she didn’t want to be a servant but a gentlewoman. It can easily understood from this quotation told by Moll Flanders “ I thought it was fine to be a gentlewoman indeed, for I had quite other notions of a gentlewoman now than I had before; and as I thought, I say, that it was fine to be a gentlewoman, so I loved to be among gentlewomen, and therefore I longed to be there again.” (Defoe,49). She had five marriages even with her brother and too many sex out of wedlock. As a result, she had too many difficulties during her life. Finally the main question is that Are female characters such as Moll Flanders equal to male characters. It is understood from Defoe’s novel “Moll Flanders” that female characters are not

As an example, in his essay “ A look at Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders” Ryan Kramer mentions that “In this society, men ran everything because they were seen as superior to women in everyday life. Women lived through their male partner, and marriage was the only way for them to hold any control in society.”(Kramer 1). It can be understood from Kramer’s study that there was a Patriarchal society. Women were seen as a goods which belonged to men. Besides, they have limited rights or they don’t have any right to speak, work even get married to someone. It can be said that they were seen as goods ruled by men. In her work “ A history of women in the west – Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes”, Crampe Casnabets claimed that men and women were not equal at this time even though each account for half of the human race population. She said this “is in fact ambiguous because, oddly enough, it was not reciprocal: men were never said to constitute the other half of the species. A subtle sophism was at work: women were a “half” without an “other half.” The female half existed only in relation to the male half, which was its ground and defining reference”( Casnabets, 317-318). What is more, the women could not tell even a word in front of their men because of Patriarchal society. In her words, Casnabets states that “Of course the most important discourse