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

Insofar as Moll's situations often span conspicuously long periods of time, Defoe asks us to ascribe the temporal dimension-and, with it, the difficulties of judgment or valuation-to the deliberative process itself rather than to its retroactive narration. The incest episode, for example, runs for eight years, with Moll aware of the true nature of her affiliation with her partner for at least five years (but possibly more).

During no less than three years, Moll is occupied with individual deliberation, trying to figure out how she feels about incest and what she can do to respond to it. If she reveals her knowledge of incest, she might lose the financial and social status of her married life, since, as she thinks, her husband "was too nice and too honest a Man to have continued my Husband after he had known I had been his Sister" (70). But keeping their consanguinity a secret turns out to be an impractical solution; under the weight of her knowledge, Moll develops an aversion to her husband: "I liv'd therefore in open avowed Incest and Whoredom, and all under the appearance of an honest Wife; and tho' I was not much touched with the Crime of it, yet the Action had something in it shocking to Nature, and made my Husband, as he thought himself even nauseous to me" (71). Her husband, in turn, grows impatient and even violent with her. "We had many Family quarrels," Moll explains, "and they began (in time) to grow up to a dangerous Height" (73; emphasis added). Even after Moll learns how she feels about incest, she needs time to figure out what to do next: the violent quarrels bring Moll "to a Resolution, whatever came of it to lay open [her] whole Case; but which way to do it, or to whom, was an inextricable Difficulty, and took me up many Months to Resolve" (73). When Moll finally confides in her mother, individual deliberation doesn't give way to instantaneous solution, but, instead, a process of social deliberation begins. The mother believes that the secret should be kept between the two of them and family life should be maintained as is. "In this directly opposite Opinion to one another my Mother and I continued a long time, and it was impossible to reconcile our Judgments," Moll explains and adds, "many Disputes we had about it, but we could never either of us yield our own, or bring over the other" (78). To break the tie, Moll finally involves her husband/brother, using an elaborate quasi-legal negotiation process by which she tries to secure his opinion to her side. But her husband, just like Moll and her mother before him, at first thinks that ignoring the secret is the best solution, and it takes him several months to realize that he, took cannot live with its burden. The man becomes depressed, tries to kill himself twice, falls "into a long ling'ring Consumption" (82), and finally agrees with Moll that the best way to solve their problems would be to let her return to England on her own.