Moll Flanders

Creative Works Inspired by Moll Flanders and her Story

Caught

He called me late,
just when I thought
he wouldn’t, like so many times before
when he and I were we. We exchanged
passionate conversation
and rosy laughter until the waking
of the morning.

He said he wished for one more,
one last night of love
once cut too short by circumstance.
I long to oblige him,
but my obligation is now
to my circumstance.

The name of Friend remains,
but that favourite word Whore
sneaks in. Wife to another, I dare
to break Virtue with the highest name,
Love.

But I cannot break
my Faith for anything.
We know it cannot be more
than the phone.

The Christian guilt I tried
to banish, banish from this body
lingers in small, warm parts
I would expose to him.
But no regret resides in me.

I fall into the same Snares
again and again. Am I seeking
them out, or are they merely seeking me?

Moll Flanders: A Comparison of Film to Text

Metro Goldenmeyer’s version of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders has little or no basis in the actual novel.

From the opening of the movie the viewer is compelled to feel sorry for Moll, who is depicted as a wronged orphan, a “Cinderella” type in the home in which she comes to work in as a maid. The movie completely eliminates record of Moll’s marriage with the brother from her adoptive family, instead having her kicked out and forced to work as a prostitute in a brothel, at which she finally meets an artist with whom she marries for love, a complete mockery of the original story.

The movie depicts Moll as having maternal instincts, devastated when she learns that she must leave her baby behind during a move, a decree ordered by the Madame of the brothel. Later, she will twirl ribbon around on a beach with this same daughter, a scene, like many others in this rendition, completely the inventive work of the screenwriters and not at all present in the book.

This version of Defoe’s novel is framed with a meeting between one of Moll’s cast-off daughters and an inexplicable character played by Morgan Freeman. In addition to the fact that this bit is neither written nor implied in the book, it does not fit the overall tone or meaning of the story at all. In the book Moll has no yearnings to meet up with her ‘misplaced’ child, yet the movie asserts that she does. In the book no males reach out to help her in time of distress, yet in the movie Morgan Freeman plays an interested ally.

What is perhaps most upsetting of all, however, about this tacky version of Moll Flanders is how wrongly it depicts Moll’s character. At the beginning she is modest and plain, unable to stand up to her snide adoptive sisters. Yet Morgan Freeman’s character continually tells Flora, Moll’s long lost daughter, that Moll is a bad person, full of all sorts of lewd qualities. The two depictions simply do not match up. Furthermore, by eliminating all of Moll’s marriages (and by adding one that was not written in the book), this version of Moll Flanders completely rewrites Moll’s identity. We who read the book know that Moll must leave her first adoptive family because her caretaker dies, not because she was accused of being flirtatious, as the movie suggests. The movie entices us to direct our anger at haughty individuals, not the rigidity of a fixed class system. Those who actually read the book also know that she was quite happy to leave her second family when her husband died because he left her a small fortune. She was similarly glad to be rid of her child. She is hardly the innocent victim the movie makes her out to be, without explaining how this innocence does not undermine her ability to prostitute. One who reads the book and has knowledge of Moll’s business-like marriages, knows that she is a person who does what she can to survive. The movie portrays her as sentimental and helpless, yet somehow a whore.

It is as if the screenwriters for the movie Moll Flanders simply read the back of the book jacket and applied it to the screen without consideration for theme, context or symbolism. At one point, a character actually states “Yeah, and there is green cheese on the moon.” I hardly think this was a popular phrase in the time during which Moll Flanders lived. In all aspects, the only thing about Moll Flanders the movie that resembles the book is its title.

Moll Flanders

The story of Flanders, Moll, her fall, is moral.
Hardly nothing is evil done unseen
And slips away for good, but sin is final,
Booked and indexed for a shyster's spleen.

Hell is almost bound by Newgate's wall,
And from within the cry of chastened crime
Breaks on the acting thief to tell
How watches stolen steal the stealing time.

Moll is caught, convicted, and released
A penitent. And thus the Arch Fiend, foiled,
Convinced of his fallacious drift, debased,
Goes back to where he came from spoiled,

To Newgate, where the adamantine doors
Stand open for the felon and the whores.

from Heroes and Heroines by Reed Whittemore (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ©1946), p.47.
(the book I found the poem in:)
Robert C. Elliott, editor. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moll Flanders.
Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Englewoood Cliffs, NJ, 1970.

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Last updated July 27th, 2001.