ok you don't really have time for pre-departure question four. i just insist that i receive 3 postings from each of you by the time of the first class on 5 june. readings are below, although you should have already read the first chapters of cannadine and the beginning of defoe.
extra credit: quote a sentence from defoe (within the first approx. 80 pp.) that discusses social relations (class?) and a sentence on what you think it shows.
4 comments:
This is a sentence early in the book, but one of importance:
(speaking of customs in other countries for orphans) "Had this been the custom in our country, I had not been left a poor desolate girl without friends, without clothes, without help or helper, as was my fate;(...)but brought into a course of life scandalous in itself and which in its ordinary course tended to the swift destruction both of soul and body."
I think this is suggesting that she ws somehow predisposed to the life that she will eventually leave. As if to say that instead of a class system it is more like a caste system. As if people are bound to the class they are born into. However, as it will turn out this book being set in the early 1700s is actually closer to an individualistic hierarchy because people can easily move up and down in society because a person's outward reflection of class can easily be bought, it is very porous.
Here is the quote I chose:
" Now, all this while, my good old nurse, Mrs. Mayoress, and all the rest of them did not understand me at all, for they meant one Sort of thing, by the Word Gentlewoman, and I meant quite another ..." (50)
In this beginning part Moll wants to be a "Gentlewoman." She wants to be able to work for herself instead of going into service. However, the townswomen she sews for have a different images of a "Gentlewoman." Their gentlewoman is someone who does not work, who has a substantial income and perhaps a lineage. Even being self-sufficent, which is what Moll wants, does not have a universal meaning. It is the difference between a Genlewoman and a women of reduced circumstances. However, with Molls having no parents to speak of, either definition might not apply. Both titles or terms denote a respectable past.
The quote I chose is on page 73 and reads: " In the next place she tells her husband that I had at least 1500 (pounds) fortune and that after some of my relations I was like to have a great deal more. It was enough to tell her husband this there needed nothing on my side; I was to sit still and wait the event for it presently went all over the neighborhood that the young widow at Captain -s was a fortune she had at lest 1500 l"
I know this was a long one but I think that it definetly demonstrates the desire for people at this time to have a well established place in the world. this lie was told to draw a gentleman to come and escort her, so she herself could no live in poverty. This was a common practice, most gentlemen would only court those women that had a fortune already bestowed to them. They all desired the upperclass life, and needed that money to begin that life. This lying shows Moll Flanders desire to be of a better class than she was brought up to be in.
"I wonder at you brother, says the sister; Betty wants but one thing, but she had as good want every Thing, for the Market is against our Sex just now; and if a young woman have Beauty, Birth, Breeding, Wit, Sens, Manners, Modesty, and all these to an Extream; yet isf she have not Money, she's no Body, she had has good want them all for nothing but Money now recommends a Woman; the Men play the Game all into their own Hands.
This was an early quote during Moll's experience with the two brothers. It is a showing of how the upper class looks at the lower class especially women. Everything you did in life even fallin in love was done for an individual financial benefit. If getting married did not benefit you financially then you should not marry that person. As the lower class has no money to their names then they are not worth marrying. It also makes a good example of how difficult it is to make any advancement in the class system.
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