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

If Crusoe's ingenuity lies in his mechanical inventiveness, Moll's ingenuity lies in her deliberative capacities. Her actions, though seeming to be nothing more than common-sensical, always involve elaborate calculations. Which of her suitors to favor, how to behave in an incestuous marriage, what to do with an inconvenient pregnancy, how to take a bundle that does not belong to her-all these questions turn into "situations" for Moll, cases that need to be weighed and considered, never just simply resolved. Moll's "situations" evoke a Hobbesian model of deliberation, representing a process of ranking coextensive desires and aversions that leads to willing and then to action. For the purposes of Moll Flanders, the force of this model is twofold: first, in locating the distance between sensation and action in the comparative analysis of sensation itself, it allows for the least abstract of calculations to be understood as deliberation. It thus recognizes the most basic actions as the outcome of the individual's will and takes these actions to be articulations of interest. When Moll, for example, responds to a situation by feeling nauseated-as when she discovers that her second husband is also her brother-such a visceral reaction can be regarded as part of the process of deliberation and as an articulation of her will. Second, since the deliberative process is grounded in individual sensory experience, judgments of appropriate behavior-that is, judgments as to whether actions are good or evil-are entirely subjective. And indeed Moll-who is hardly competing for a title of virtue-is never engaged in deliberation for the purpose of discovering the true or the good in any absolute or transcendent sense. Moreover, it is even difficult to tell whether her preferences are those that, in the final analysis, have served her best interest, since it is difficult to imagine what "the best" interest might be when it is defined solely by the individual's will. Insofar as Moll produces her own judgments through her own experience, and insofar as the novel doesn't offer a standard that is independent of Moll's own assessments, we have no alternative measure to which we might compare her preferences and judge them as better or worse.3

Many critics have noticed that Defoe doesn't represent a free-standing or coherent standard of value in his novels, but it has often been assumed that this is a result of a kind of primitivism in his craftsmanship. It has been argued that Defoe, pioneering in the invention of a new literary form and doing it in a hurry, failed to develop a mechanism for presenting an objective perspective, one that would allow the reader to confidently identify the judgment that he intends to pass on his characters.4 In Moll Flanders, however, the absence of a self-evident narrative norm constitutes the necessary background for emphasizing Moll's deliberative capacities. Insofar as nothing in Moll's world unequivocally determines what her choices should be, her actions can be understood as products of her lengthy deliberative processes. And it is the activity of deliberation, rather than the judgment of its end, that is privileged in Moll's story, not so much what her deliberation yields as the fact that she is deliberating rather than acting on an impulse.