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  • Strictly Business:Marriage, Motherhood, and Surrogate Families as Entrepreneurial Ventures in Moll Flanders
  • Ann Campbell (bio)

In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), surrogate families, or as John Richetti calls them, “small groups of friends who act as substitute families,” are the norm for the novel’s protagonist Moll Flanders, while families of origin and conjugal families are aberrations.1 These surrogate families are often no more than temporary families of convenience—formed, dissolved, and forgotten in a matter of pages—although a few of them, most notably Moll’s connection to her governess, are nurturing and enriching connections that sustain her for long periods of time. While this sustenance is sometimes emotional, it is most often financial. Moll discovers early, as a member of two types of what I argue are biological families—the gypsies and the parish orphanage—her intuitive entrepreneurial skills. Exercising these skills in these circumscribed arenas proves challenging, however, so Moll shrewdly seeks out other family models with greater exploitative potential. She learns over the course of the novel, having observed and experimented with marriage, motherhood, filial and sororal ties, as well as less clearly defined connections to what I call surrogate families, that these latter contingent relationships produce for her maximum profit with minimum risk. Husbands prove unreliable, while biological ties, which become conflated in her mind with incest itself, are stifling. Loyal attachments to spouses, fathers, mothers, and children [End Page 51] are not merely cumbersome, but to Defoe’s highly adaptable protagonist signify a deficiency of ambition. Surrogate families, on the other hand, are disposable and for-profit.

Although the structure of Moll Flanders is often described as episodic or picaresque, the novel follows a discernable trajectory based on Moll’s evolving wariness about the impositions, such as providing for children and being assailed by economic calamities not of her making, that biological and conjugal ties often entail.2 Her assimilation into the surrogate family she forms with the governess in the second half of the novel instructs her about the advantages of contingent ties, which are formed and dissolved based solely on whether they facilitate mutual benefit. Since profit is dear to Moll’s heart, the capital she accumulates during this period becomes the basis of daughterly affection for her governess, her mother midnight. Moll’s surrogate ties to the governess come to resemble the affective ideals of eighteenth-century family life far more than her previous marriages or connections to her mother, brother, nurse, and the gypsies.3 They form a companionable unit affiliated through mutual respect, much like the nuclear families idealized by Defoe in his didactic manuals, including The Family Instructor (1715) and Religious Courtship (1722), and described by Lawrence Stone as developing during the eighteenth century in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800.4 When Moll is eventually transported to the American colonies, her surrogate ties to the governess become the model she uses to revise marital and biological ties so they too can perform according to the profitable premises of surrogate families. Her relationship to her son Humphry and her husband Jemy are founded financially on money earned through her connection to the governess, and emotionally on strategies she develops as a surrogate daughter.

Although Moll shares with all Defoe’s other protagonists an enterprising energy associated with individualism that, as Hal Gladfelder observes, “tends, in its pure … form, to set the self against all others,” as a woman her ambition translates into a powerful attractive force towards others.5 Scholars sometimes overlook or underrate Moll’s connections to other people on the basis of assumptions that, as Tina Kuhlisch argues, “Moll never establishes true relationships with the many people she meets.”6 However, just because Moll’s relationships are formed for financial rather than emotional enrichment does not make them any less meaningful to her, or less significant to the trajectory of the narrative itself.7 Moll asserts that for a woman social connections are particularly important because she needs friends to “advise” and “assist” her: to help her out of “Difficulties and into Business.”8 Despite her atomistic impulses, Moll must seek [End Page 52] through ties to others the means...

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