Undressing Moll Flanders. Identity and Vestimentary Performances in the Long Eighteenth Century

In her radical reassessment of Enlightenment rationalism, Terry Castle points out how eighteenth-century culture can be defined as a culture of travesty. Indeed, due to new forms of public interactions entailed in modern city life, the rapid socio-economic transitions of early Georgian consumer society favored the practice of manipulation of appearances. In this perspective, early novelists capitalized the potential of popular narratives of disguise and metamorphosis by using dress as a means through which characters could structure and subvert their identity in relation to others. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders is arguably one of the most accomplished novelistic examples of the thematization of clothing as a material correlative of modern subjectivity in the context of the progressive ideology. Configured both as an exigible currency and a disguising tool, clothes enable Moll to elaborate a variety of vestimen- tary performances which transcend class and gender boundaries. Not only do such performances allow her to carry out her successful career in larceny, they also contribute to baffle her audience in their attempts to read-through the deliberate indeterminacy of her fictional persona. This article analyses the role of clothing in Defoe’s Moll Flanders in light of the ontological crisis of status that characterized the early eighteenth-century society. After illustrating how literature deployed the function of dress within the novelistic genre, the article sets out the historical coordinates of transition towards modernity paying particular attention to the image of clothing as luxuries within the consu- mer revolution. In sequence is presented a close-analysis of Defoe’s construction of his heroine Moll Flanders who manipulates the traditional housewifely virtues of clothes-making and account keeping to accomplish her dream of elevation within the manly arena of capitalist economy.