Matriarchal Space and Formation of Identity in Moll Flanders

Authors : Berkem SAĞLAM

Pages : 18-30

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Publication Date : 2023-05-10

Article Type : Review Paper

Abstract :Despite the apparent disadvantages of women in the eighteenth century, Moll in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders encounters and learns from many women who have established a place for themselves. Although she never legitimately owns a home of her own until the end of the novel, Moll’s adventures feature her movement from establishment to establishment where a matriarch governs—“Nurse,” who schools her as a child, the gentlewoman she works for, her landlady in Bath, “Mother Midnight” throughout her years of thievery, and indeed her own mother in America. Each of these arguably strong women inhabits what Gillian Rose in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge has termed a paradoxical space, “a space imagined in order to articulate a troubled relation to the hegemonic discourses of masculinism” insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(159);. Despite the indisputable dominancy of men in both the external and internal sphere at this time, the women in this text seem to enjoy spaces in which they can establish their own authority, although these may not be as easily identifiable as the well-established patriarchal norms. This paper aims to discuss the public and private spaces governed by women in Moll Flanders and to analyse how this use of space and place contributes to Moll’s formation of identity as a strong and liberated woman.
Keywords : Daniel Defoe, On sekizinci yüzyıl romanı, Alan çalışmaları, Kadın alanı, Kadın kimliği