Moll Flanders and the Bastard Birth of Realist Character

This essay applies genre theory to the 1722 Moll Flanders in order to outline a new history of character, reinterpreting the accepted division between early modern, “flat” characterization and the ostensibly more complex psychological practice of later realism. In the last fifty years, this contradictory text has become an important site of contention for critics examining narratorial unreliability, the origins of the novel, and nascent modernity. Critics have interpreted its inconsistencies as the result of deliberately designed irony, as the expression of the emerging ideologies of the modern world, or as simple incoherence. At base, however, Moll’s contradictory nature is an exaggeration of the kind of generic process common to many of the narratives of early print culture, a process emphasizing both formulaic repetition and fragmented generic mixture. Moll Flanders is only a more intense, more thoroughly mixed version of these ephemeral narratives, the product of an endemic bastardization of genres that lasts from the 1590s through the 1730s and beyond, particularly inhabiting the lower registers of mass culture. Yet at the same time, the text prefigures the structure and complex ethical and psychological dynamics of later realism. This confluence suggests that the later form of characterization, usually understood as a more concrete representation of individual and social life, is actually a naturalization of the fragmented generic mixtures of the earlier field of narrative. What we see in Moll Flanders, in other words, is the generic instability of early print culture transforming itself into modern character. This text also illuminates the familiar genre theory I use—one that sees genres as variously institutionalized sets of reader expectations—by displaying irony as a kind of generic negotiation.