Love and Money in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Ya-huei Wang

Abstract
The essay discusses one woman’s relationship to early capitalism in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). Defoe uses Moll as an exemplum of a woman who is looking for security through money, and has opportunities to acquire money only through marriage, selling her body, and stealing. Moll marries many times in an attempt to find good settlements and money, and does so without regard for mutual affection. By being a mistress, by whoring, through marriage, and ultimately by stealing, Moll seeks out not only money but the respectability that can be purchased through money. Moll is not obsessively greedy or a hard capitalist, but simply a woman who seeks the security of money and does so with a clear picture of her possible fate in the patriarchal system.

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