Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law

Moll Flanders and English Marriage Law MelissaJ. Ganz Halfway through Moll Randers, Daniel Defoe's eponymous heroine receives a marriage proposal from a bank clerk. A cuckold, the clerk has won a decree ofseparation from his wife and now seeks to make good on his promise to marry Moll. Moll, however, raises "some Scruples at the Lawfulness of his Marrying again" and advises her friend to "considervery seriously upon [this] Point before he resol·/[s] on iL"1 Moll's objection, ofcourse, is richly ironic, as Moll herselfis already married. Her husband, the Linnen-Draper, has long since left her, but she remains his lawful wife. Keenly aware of the restrictive nature ofEnglish marriage law, Moll has capitalized upon the clerk's own conjugal trouble. She has advised the clerk to turn to the courts—knowing that he could obtain only a separation from his wife, rather than a full divorce enabling him to remarry—because she wished to delay their match. Now that the clerk has obtained the decree, Moll objects to his proposal because she is pregnant and needs to put him off a litüe longer. In Moll's words, in her dealings with her banker friend, she "Plays the Hypocrite" (195). Moll's scruples, however, turn out to be more than a matter ofconvenience . At many moments in the narrative, Moll anxiously muses on 1 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes ofthe Famous Moll FLanders, ed. David Blewett (1722; reprint, NewYork: Penguin, 1989), 230. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 2,January 2005 158 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION her illicit sexual behaviour, invoking the legal prohibition on her remarriage immediately after she contests iL She highlights the fact that the law continues to view her as a wife long after her husband has deserted her, attempting to persuade her readers that this legal category does notadequately define heridentity. Indeed, she sprinkles her narrative with repeated reminders ofher plight Published in a society where the laws made itvery easy to form unions and yet made it impossible to dissolve them, MollFlandersenters into important debates about the legal rules structuring intimate sexual and emotional life. Scholars have carefully examined the novel's treatment ofthe institution ofmarriage, but they have devoted less attention to the legal issues raised by Moll's many matches.2 Maximillian E. Novak's Defoeand the Nature ofMan is a crucial starting pointfor an analysis ofDefoe's ideas aboutEnglish marriage law. Focusing on the influence ofnatural law fhought on Defoe's fiction, Novak notes the ways in which Moll defies the legal restriction on her remarriage and follows, instead, the demands ofnature and reason. He suggests that Defoe agrees with the idea articulated by natural law philosophers that desertion dissolves a marriage contractandjustifies a deserted spouse's remarriage.' Shirlene Mason, by contrast, reaches a different conclusion about Defoe's position on this question. In DanielDefoe and the Status ofWomen, she 2 For discussions ofmarriage, see David Blewett, "Changing Attitudes toward Marriage in the Time ofDefoe: The Case ofMoll Flanders," HuntingtonLibraryQuarterly44 (1981), 77-88; Lois A. Chaber, "Matriarchal Mirror Women and Capital in Moll Flanders" PMLA 97 (1982), 212-26; Ellen Pollak, "MollFlanders, Incest, and the Structure ofExchange," TheEighteenth Century: TheoryandInterpretation30 (1989), 3-21;John Richetri, "The Family, Sex, and Marriage in Defoe's MollFlandersand Roxano," Studies in theLiteraryImagination 15 (1982), 19-35. On the importance of female relationships as an alternative to unstable marriages, see Srividhya Swaminathan, "Defoe'sAlternative ConductManual: Survival Strategies and Female Networks in MoUFlanders," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15 (2003), 185-206.John P. Zomchick examines gender roles and female sexuality in MollsFlandersand contemporary trial narratives, but he does not discuss the novel's treatment ofEnglish marriage law. Zomchick, "? Penetration Which Nothing Can Deceive': Gender andJuridical Discourse in Some Eighteenth-Century Narratives," SEL-Studies inEngUshLiterature 1500-190029 (1989), 547-52. Scholars interested in legal aspects of the novel have generally focused on Defoe's treatment ofcrime and the novel's relationship to criminal biography. Seejohn Bender, ImaginingthePenitentiary:Fiction andtheArchitectureofMind inEighteenth-CenturyEngland (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1987), 43-51; Uncoln Faller, CrimeandDefoe:A NewKindofWriting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);John Rietz, "Criminal Ms-Representation: MollFlanders and Female Criminal Biography," Studies...