Existential Anxiety In Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe,who is considered as an innovator of modern novels,is one of the best-known writers of the eighteenth-century England.Multiple identities and abundant life experiences equip him with a good knowledge about people's struggle in a society full of insecurity and instability,providing him with rich writing material.Defoe's works not only vividly and realistically present the details of social life but also reflect the psychological state of social man.Moll Flanders was firstly published in 1722,purporting to be the true narration of Moll Flanders' s life.Moll is born to a criminal serving her sentence in Newgate.In about seventy years,Moll experiences five marriages with four men and is a mistress,whore and thief.After numerous criminal adventures,she is arrested and imprisoned in Newgate.Then she applies for transportation to America where she becomes rich.Finally,she goes back to England with her husband and lives a penitent life.For a long time,the protagonist Moll has received a substantial amount of attention for her inconsistencies.Critics generally regard Moll's inconsistencies as strong evidence to Defoe's employment of irony in this novel.However,it is still disputable whether Defoe is capable to handle irony or whether Moll's inconsistencies are totally out of his intention.There seems to have been only slight consideration about the possibility that the inconsistencies are partially the direct expression of Moll's contradictory psychological state.This thesis,on the basis of the text and the social historical background of the novel,probes into Moll Flanders from the perspective of anxiety.The study of anxiety mainly relies on anxiety theory interpreted by Rollo May and Paul Tillich from existential philosophy.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One analyzes the causes and performances of Moll's existential anxiety which is embodied in the anxiety of death,meaninglessness and guilt.Chapter Two explores the influence of existential anxiety to Moll and how she successfully deals with anxiety.Chapter Three studies Defoe's role in Moll's anxiety and re-establishment.It argues that Moll,caught in existential anxiety which prompts her to strive to keep her existence but meanwhile pushes her into degeneration,triumphs over anxiety in the end by re-establishing herself,and that Moll's re-establishment is an outlet for Defoe's anxiety which is partially reflected in Moll's psychological state.Terrible and turbulent social environment and personal sufferings endanger Moll's existence,resulting in her existential anxiety.Anxiety functions as both a help and a hindrance to Moll development.On the one hand,it promotes her to endeavor to preserve physical existence,explore individual potential,improve self-awareness etc.;on the other hand,it leads to her degeneration,as a result of achieving goals at all costs.At last,Moll bravely confronts anxiety and completely solves the conflicts behind anxiety by recovering morality,achieving economic independence,regaining fixed identity and building harmonious interpersonal relationship.After the triumph over anxiety,she gains inner peace and contentment.Similar to Moll,Defoe,living in hardship and terror,struggles for existence.Moll's anxiety is partially a reflection of Defoe's psychological state.Moll's spiritual release is the desire of Defoe who gives affirmation to her and permission to her re-establishment.Moll or the fictional “Defoe” deals with what cannot be solved by Defoe in reality,which is a comfort to Defoe's troubled heart and releases him from anxiety temporarily in the fictional world.Moll Flanders becomes an outlet for Defoe's anxiety.