Daniel Defoe and the Impossibility of Irony in Moll Flanders

In my previously published paper Daniel Defoe and the Possibilty of Irony in Moll FlandersI tried to show how this deceptively complex novel could be read as an unintentionally ironic look at gender and commerce in British society at the time.  In this article, I attempt to do the exact opposite.  I try to show in this paper that Moll Flanders is a coherent recapitulation of the economic theories espoused by the author Daniel Defoe.

Much of the critical debate surrounding Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders centers around whether the author makes good on his promise in the preface that the story will be morally instructive. For instance, Ira Konigsberg makes the statement that "One of the book's contradictions that Defoe never resolves is in the conflicting arguments for necessity and morality" (37). This seems to be a misunderstanding of the point that for Defoe necessity is part of morality and vice versa. 

A temptation certainly exists to view that attitude as an indication of irony, but Defoe was not, contrary to much opinion, writing an ironic novel. He was actually writing a very realistic novel which expressed not only his own, but much of society's view that there had emerged in the sixteenth century a tonal shift in morality away from religious values placed upon suspicion of commerce and avarice rooted in the Middle Ages toward morality based on a religious suspicion of indigence and sloth. 

The lesson in morality contained in Moll Flanders is that she is a positive and virtuous exemplar of the new paradigm of the economic individual that Defoe envisioned as being completely necessary to maintaining the growth of England as a power that was promised by the emerging economic structure of the 18th century.

That Moll Flanders is meant to be seen solely as a realistically rendered moral heroine can be adduced by comparing her economic worldview with that of her creator, and in doing so it is obvious that Defoe was creating a fully realized mouthpiece for his own personal theories on the necessity of economic aspiration as a means of moral salvation.