Spin the tale

The opening lines of the novel proper (as opposed to the various preambles) which I am taking as the actual point when Moll begins to tell her tale on p7 of the Oxford University Press Edition of 1971, employ several techniques to hook the reader in and establish credibility for something which is made up. ‘My True Name’ she declares ‘is so well known in the records, or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old-Baily, and there are some things of such Consequence still depending there, relating to my particular Conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my Name, or the Account of my Family to this Work’.96 The recognised and established authorities of Newgate and the Old Bailey are used to give credibility to her existence in a circular referentiality which paradoxically starts to dislocate the reader in time and space. The real and the imaginary are blurred.

Although ‘My True Name’ is declared boldly as the opening promise of the novel the text then spins the reader around and in fact declares that the reader will never know the true name. There is a tease in these opening lines. Moll is to narrate her own story, directly to the reader, who is addressed as ‘you.’ She is a female protagonist who seems to assume that she is addressing a male reader in the coquettish turn of phrase in which she reveals that ‘it is not to be expected I should set my Name, or the Account of my Family to this Work...it would not be proper’. 97 So we learn she is not actually known as Moll in the records of Newgate and the Old Bailey. Some of her ‘worst Comrades’ who have gone out of the world ‘by the steps and the string’ knew her ‘by the name of Moll Flanders’ she tells

us and that will do for the reader ‘till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am’.98 We are warned however, that this is not likely to happen until ‘after my Death’. In the event, that is by the end of the book, we never know her ‘true name’.

These opening lines display a consummate sleight of hand. ‘My True Name’ is established as the mystery of the text while we are warned that we will never know the true name. This establishes the trick of the novel: a promise that we will ‘know’ intimately, a real character and/or narrator and/or person speaking, while simultaneously warning that the promise cannot be fulfilled. It cannot be fulfilled because the promise is a fiction. This is the psychological contract which is agreed to in the opening lines of this work, and in the opening lines of every novel – what Paul Davies has called ‘the invitation to a fictional world’.99 The contract is stated in particularly bald terms in the opening lines of Moll Flanders – we are privileged in that we are to be told the story but it is made clear that we will never know the secret.

2.3 Naming

We know her as Moll Flanders. Ian Watt in the Rise of the Novel pointed out the power of naming: ‘Proper names have exactly the same function in social life; they are the verbal expression of the particular identity of each individual person. In Literature, however, this function of proper names was first fully established in the novel’.100 As noted above, previous to the novel, characters in histories, or plays or epic poems, had tended to be drawn from myth or history; their tales were well-known, the art was in the telling. Moll Flanders marks a huge shift in that the name can be seen as contemporary, the name of a woman from the time. Defoe is making the story up. However, the name also draws on past characters. The name ‘Moll ‘seems to have had early associations with the idea of a gangsters Moll. ‘Moll Cutpurse’, based on the criminal Mary Frith from the sixteenth

century, was a character in a well-known play by Middleton and Dekker first performed in the early seventeenth century. 101 There are a number of public figures Moll could have been based on - these are explored in detail in Chapter Four. Flanders means cloth. Rebecca Elisabeth Connor in Women, Accounting and Narrative points up the irony in a scene where Moll has just stolen some cloth: ‘Not to be overlooked is the symbolism of the contraband, it is Flemish, or “Flanders” lace - the commodity after which Moll is named’.102 It is an appropriate name for the protagonist who is a trickster, a rogue and a victim in the harsh commercial world of exchange and barter in 1720. All of these connotations play into the naming of Moll. As the next section demonstrates, the nature of the Bank is of the same kind of deceit as the novel and employs exactly the same techniques.