At home in England, or projecting liberal citizenship in Moll Flanders

See Watt 99-101 and 115-18. Those who disagree with the initial claim about the absence of coherent moral order in the novels also tend to disagree among themselves regarding the nature of the judgment that is implied. For example, Zimmerman finds Moll guilty of degeneration from natural purity to the corruption of social expediency; Richetti, by contrast, commends her for successfully transcending the ideology of possessive individualism that governs her society. The presence or absence of an objective perspective that allows for judgment is also the pivotal issue in the debate about irony in Defoe's novels. For a good explanation of the stakes of the debate and a survey of its early phase, see Watt, "The Recent Critical Fortunes of Moll Flanders." In a more recent discussion, Novak makes the case for irony by an analysis of Defoe's use of innuendo and his command of the two different temporalities of Moll's narrative (the present of her narration and the past of her actions).

5 See Starr's Defoe and Casuistry.

6 My understanding of casuistry relies not only on Starr's but also on Chandler's in England in 1819, chapter 4. Chandler suggests that casuistry instantiates the very form of deliberation as value-constructing activity, and he explains its historical evolution from the classical Jesuit activity to English Romanticism. Romanticism transformed casuistry, according to Chandler, from the adjudication of discrete cases and independent rules to the adjudication of cases and rules that are mutually constitutive.

Levi-Strauss argues that the totem system (in which exogamy is practiced and which is opposed to the caste system, whose marriage practices are governed by endogamy) stands as the conceptual basis of modern individualism. Such "social individualism" can also be understood as an alternative model to Watt's "possessive individualism."

8 For an account of the incest episode that relies on a similar theoretical apparatus but arrives at an antithetical conclusion, see Ellen Pollak. Pollak notes the centrality of this episode to Moll's mastery of her political life, but she identifies its significance as Moll's failure: "the Virginia episode has the effect of both organizing and ultimately neutralizing the subversive force of Moll's subsequent transgressions against institutional authority" (6). If Moll would have adhered to endogamy, Pollak argues, she would have subverted the last and most oppressive institution of patriarchy. Pollak picks up on the fact that in the initial form of the totem system

women were in fact treated as objects of, rather than parties to, the marriage alliance. However, endogamy, as I have tried to explain, puts women at an even further remove from achieving the status of deliberative agent and thus of political rights; exogamy, at least in principle, attributes to women capacities beyond their sex. Moreover, in Moll Flanders as in his other writings (for example, Conjugal Lewdness), Defoe conceptualizes marriage as a mutual agreement between husband and wife, not as an agreement between a husband and a wife's family.