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Thinking Parables: What Moll Flanders Does Not Say

By 1644, rhetoric in England was still as deadly a weapon as the recent introduction of gunpowder and artillery. In book 5 of Paradise Lost, the debate between Abdiel and Satan anticipates the clash of sword and artillery in book 6, and it is certainly no accident that Abdiel finds it "naught but just, / That he who in debate of Truth hath won, Should win in Arms."' Milton, of course, was only one of many pamphleteers in a politically-charged era, the tangled semiotic relations of which would have their indirect effects in the next century on Daniel Defoe. The fiction and nonfiction of the latter author-a skilled rhetorician in his own right-would test the "truths" of the first half of the eighteenth century, and frequently their rhetorical artillery would rely on, as well as target, perceptions of morality. Like Milton, Defoe evidenced deep concern for the condition of England-its economic strength, its prognosis for longevity among neighboring nations, and, often inseparable from these, its need to adopt or revive a course of "right thinking." As in much of Milton's writing, the state of the nation in Defoe's work is largely bound up with the state of the soul, or moral rightness. What I hope to show here is that an apparent absence of a moral center or controlling lesson about goodness constitutes the very presence of the center or lesson of Moll Flanders. This ambiguous operation of goodness can be at least minimally clarified by a brief look at Defoe's moral psychology and by a workable, though admittedly incomplete, definition of goodness, which we will consider shortly. More pertinently, however, we may predict that a "nonsolution" to the presence/absence mystery-that "truth" which the space signifies-can be located in a comparison of linguistic and monetary signs. The play and permutations of rhetoric in Moll Flanders confront the reader with the proposition that language is a form of capital. Language, in fact, functions as a resource for Moll because it becomes part of her economy of accumulation; it is constantly associated with capital, in the sense that capital is a resource for Moll's continued identity as a "gentlewoman." Indeed,