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At home in England, or projecting liberal citizenship in Moll Flanders
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2001 by Yahav-Brown, Amit
The difficulty that Moll faces here-the reason why the family has to go through such a lengthy and painful deliberation process-stems from a conflict between social circumstances and the narrative's more general concern in securing Moll's status as a deliberating agent. In Moll's world, once a marriage is discovered to be illegal (as it would if husband and wife are siblings), it is immediately dissolved, and wife and children are left with very few legal rights. Thus, Moll explains, if her husband/brother "should take the Advantage the Law would give him, he might put me away with disdain, and leave me to Sue for the little Portion that I had, and perhaps waste it all in the Suit, and then be a Beggar; the Children would be ruin'd too, having no legal Claim to any of his Effects" (76). Moll and her children would have no rights to property-not even an unquestionable entitlement to the (little) wealth that Moll brought with her into the marriage; the only right that Moll would retain is the right to sue. But without money or property, Moll might be very well reduced to necessity, the luxury of deliberation in court necessarily given up for the more urgent claims of survival. Thus, revealing the secret to her husband/brother could make Moll's deliberative capacities vulnerable in the extreme: the risk that Moll runs is less a matter of losing the chance of satisfying her will in this particular situation, than a matter of losing access altogether to the conditions that make it possible for her to deliberate. In keeping her husband out of the picture for as long as she can and then taking great care in how she involves him, Moll not only prolongs the process of this particular deliberation, but also attempts to ensure her ability to remain party to any such processes in the future.
Yet the incestuous alliance not only endangers Moll's material ability to follow through with future deliberative processes; it also conceptually jeopardizes Moll's status as a deliberating agent. As Claude Levi-Strauss explains in The Savage Mind, what distinguishes the logic of endogamous and exogamous marriages is that while the first is a strictly biological relationship, the second also serves as a site for the construction of social value. The guiding principle behind endogamous marriages is the sexual capacities of the partners-what their physical organs make them-while the one defining the logic of exogamous marriages is their social characteristics-the identity of the persons beyond their sex. The added social difference in exogamous marriages makes it possible to conceptualize the alliance between husband and wife not as a sexual necessity-something like the call of nature-but rather as a deliberative alliance! And, indeed, marriage in Moll Flanders is always a contract negotiated between Moll and her future husbands; it is one of the primary activities through which Moll exercises her deliberative capacities.
When Moll first tells her family that she wants to leave, her brother accuses her of being an "unnatural Mother" for prioritizing her own interests over those of her children (72). This accusation emphasizes the double bind that the endogamous marriage puts Moll in, as far as the conventional take on "nature" goes: living in incest, as Moll considers it, is "shocking to Nature" (71), while abandoning children is also "unnatural." These conflicting versions of what a woman should do in order to be considered "natural" only underscore the fact that what is at stake here isn't defending the true value of nature, or, for that matter, the natural value of virtue. For, whatever course of action Moll might have resolved to take, she would have been condemned as "unnatural." Thus, when Moll argues that dissolving the incestuous marriage is the thing to do, she is entirely bypassing the question of naturalness in order to defend her own ability to participate in the production of evaluative criteria. Her preference for exogamy amounts to a commitment to the logical presuppositions that make it possible for her society to recognize her as more than a biological resource. In dissolving the endogamous marriage, Moll protects her status as a deliberating agent-as a person who is more than what her physical organs make her and as one who can participate in the process of evaluation.8
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