Moll Flanders: A demythologization of Masculinity

Abstract

The general impression about Moll Flanders is that it is an anti-woman novel. This critical reception is triggered by the identity of the heroine. As the paper demonstrates, Moll Flanders is exactly the opposite. The novel is a systematic demythologization of masculinity not of femininity. Most of the male characters  have something terribly wrong with them. Moll, playing the role of the catalyst, unmasks them and reveals the shocking truth beneath the façade of false appearances. The elder brother is a rapist. Robin, the younger brother, is open-eyed but fatally blind. The Captain is deceivable and defeatable. The banker foolishly runs from the arms of one prostitute into the arms of another. Her own brother goes into a coma after the first trauma. Moll manages to cure the curable and reform the reformable but some of them are unsavable. Robin dies. The banker dies and her own brother also dies. By contrast, after every fall, she stands tall.  No wonder, Moll is rewarded by the Hand of Providence. She reverses the roles and rewrites the social symbolic order.She demonstrates that inside man, there is anima but inside woman, there is animus. Metalepsis is complete. Man is demythologized and woman becomesa myth. Man is no longer the norm.  In the language of Bakhtin, Moll Flanders is about the de-crowning of a king and the crowning of a queen.