Moll Flanders: The Making of a Criminal Mind, and: "Robinson Crusoe": Island Myths and the Novel (review)

76 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:1 Paula R. Backscheider. Moll Flanders: The Making of a Criminal Mind. Twayne's Masterwork Studies, no. 48. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. xiii + 116pp. U.S.$18.95 (cloth); US$7.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8057-9429-8. Michael Seidel. "Robinson Crusoe": Island Myths and the Novel. Twayne's Masterwork Studies, no. 64. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. xiv + 134pp. US$20.95 (cloth); US$9.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8057-8074-2. Texts invoke particular readers, and these two recent volumes in the Twayne's Masterwork Studies project distinct types of undergraduate hermeneuts. Paula Backscheider cajoles her readers of Moll Flanders into an essentially humanist appreciation of character and context, while Michael Seidel challenges his readers to cultivate comparatively complex responses mediated by theories of genre, myth, and intertextuality. Backscheider 's analysis suits an early undergraduate readership while Seidel's addresses a more advanced student; both works fulfil the purpose of the Twayne series: to discuss the literary and historical context of a single "classic" text and provide a detailed analysis of that text. Like other volumes in the series, these two books follow a predetermined structure— short introductory chapters on the biographical background, the importance of the work, and its critical reception precede the current writer's interpretation in a much longer section called "A Reading." Within the admittedly restrictive limits of the Twayne format, these books manage to expose the reader to a range of issues and effective close readings. The merit of Backscheider's book is that, by suspending rigid moral judgments, it encourages students to read and to pay attention to the nuances of Defoe's technique. The most effective part of the book, the section on "Language and Style," provides an excellent rhetorical analysis. She closely associates Defoe's success with his realism and the affective power of his writing. By varying the "emotional intensity of the narrative" Defoe creates a style that "mimics the experience of most actual lives and contributes to the reader's sense of the reality and immediacy of Moll Flanders" (p. 9). Much more than Seidel on Crusoe, Backscheider strives to generate a consensus about the singular effect of Moll's autobiography: "no one who reads her story ever forgets her" (p. 8); "readers find life in it" (p. 17); and "the reader has observed the predatory, harsh world in which she lives and has largely accepted her desperation" (p. 67). While Backscheider briefly and sympathetically assesses the impact of post-New Critical analysis, the bulk of her book aims to link all elements of the text to the transcendent power of literary character. These elements include Defoe's biographical affinities to his subject; his knowledge of the criminal context; his "sensitivity to injustice" (p. 3); the two structural patterns in the novel (one based on spiritual autobiography and criminal lives, the other on incremental repetition); the manipulation of an urban setting to project the heroine's isolation, anomie, and self-invention; and his idiomatic, colloquial style. As her title suggests, Backscheider wants to chart Defoe's ability to create a "mind" and to substantiate convincingly the social context it delineates. Backscheider's Defoe is not an author in the new historical senses—a subject who writes the fictions of his culture— but a fully self-conscious writer who controls every effect of his narrative and subsumes the reader in the process. Indeed, her analysis presupposes what Roland Barthes in his typology of readers calls an "hysteric reader"—one who embraces the fictional world, who seeks to fuse with the text, accepting its totality and its vision: "Readers can follow [Moll's] thoughts as precisely as they can map her movements through the city streets. They come to trust the fullness as well as the variety of her tale and give themselves over to her consciousness" (p. 31). If there is a weakness to Backscheider's approach, it is her overdetermined treatment of character. While not exactly duplicating the intentional and REVIEWS 77 affective fallacies, her appeal to the "emotional intensity of the narrative" occasionally endorses an essentialist perspective that Seidel treats more sceptically. While Seidel, like Backscheider, is interested in Defoe's...