Although Moll Flanders gives the impression of reporting a tale of what would generally be likely to happen to a character like Moll, in actual fact, accident and indeed the supernatural intervene on several occasions to move the plot along. It is surely uncanny that a man Moll tricks into marrying her for a fortune she does not possess turns out to be
her half brother and she is thus reunited with the mother who ‘pleaded her belly in Newgate’ and gave Moll up. ‘Let anyone judge the Anguish of my Mind,’ Moll vents after her husband’s mother has been telling her life story, including her real name and her experiences in Newgate, ‘when I came to reflect, that this was certainly no more or less than my own Mother, and I now had two Children, and was big with another by my own Brother, and lay with him still every Night’.249This uncanny aspect of plot development is familiar in the novel of the early eighteenth century and of course, later.
Defoe goes further than the uncanny when he calls on the supernatural to move the plot along. When Moll first succumbs to stealing goods there is the suggestion that events are beyond her control; that she is in the grip of the devil:
Being brought, as I may say, to the last Gasp, I think I may truly say I was Distracted and Raving, when prompted by I know not what Spirit, and as it were, doing I did not know what, or why: I dress’d me...and went out, I neither knew or considered where to go, or on what Business; but as the Devil carried me out and laid his Bait for me, so he brought me to be sure to the place, for I knew not whither I was going or what I did.250
When Jemy has deserted Moll in the coach house in Chester, the supernatural is again called on; he apparently returns because he heard her cry out ‘ Oh Jemy! oh Jemy! Come back, come back.’251 Moll is astonished because she did indeed cry out. The incident establishes a strong connection between the two characters which will be played out in the novel. That there is an active mind also at work around the events, however, is evidenced by Moll refraining from quoting the rest of what she cried out in his absence: ‘I’ll give you
all I have.’252 Moll is always careful in the actual event never to give Jemy all she has, not even her real name.
Accident, the supernatural and the uncanny all play important roles in Moll and the novel as a genre. Defoe drew attention to these as aspects of projecting in general in his Essay .
As outlined previously, he muses over the fact that some of the most hazardous projects turn out to be successful and that it would be blasphemous to disallow them for providence has blessed them. The example he gives of such a project is the tale of the treasure seeker, Phips.
It is curious and accidental, that this tale is at the center of this thesis, not only does Defoe cite it as the example of the uncanny, the accidental, and the providential in projects, a key interest of this thesis, but it has turned out, uncannily, to be curiously accidental in the emergence of the Bank of England – without the success of this treasure seeking adventurer, the Bank of England as we know it, would not have come to be. I did not know this before I started this thesis, just as I did not know that the founders of the Bank and the Novel, Paterson and Defoe, were going to turn out to have been friends and co-projectors. There is something curious, accidental and uncanny about my choices which appear now, in regard to the narrative logic of this thesis, inevitable.
The metaphor of an invisible hand is brought into play in Moll to help with plot development and to ensure that the narrative logic of Moll is realised. Having disentangled herself from the incestuous relationship with her brother and the children that went with it, Moll returns to London. She seeks out a new husband, her Banker and a sober, safe bet. ‘I Liv’d with this Husband in the utmost Tranquillity...;’ she says, ‘I kept no Company, made
no visits; minded my Family, and oblig’d my Husband; and this kind of Life became a Pleasure to me.’ But the momentum of the narrative indicates that this is not to last, for it never does in Moll’s life. Moll reports that she ‘ liv’d in an uninterrupted course of ease and Content for Five Years, when a sudden Blow from an almost invisible Hand, blasted all my Happiness and turn’d me out into the World’.253 The Banker dies and Moll is left to fend for herself yet again. The image of an almost invisible hand is arresting. It is presumably ‘almost’ invisible because Moll can track the events which led to this calamity: The Banker lent money to a clerk, who lost it; the Banker’s fortunes could not sustain the loss so he ‘grew Melancholy and Disconsolate, and from thence Lethargick, and died’. 254 There is a series of events here which nobody planned but a pattern can be discerned, a pattern which is repeated time and again in Moll’s life story. As Carl Levitt notes in an article entitled ‘Defoe’s Almost Invisible Hand, Narrative Logic as a Structuring principle’,255 every time Moll is settled and secure something happens, an invisible hand intervenes and sends her out into the world again to make her own way. Levitt argues that there is an informing logic to the narrative which is driven by Defoe; I would suggest that the narrative logic is project-managed by Defoe.
The invisible hand shaping the story is clearly Defoe’s in that he is penning the story, but he is writing as if he is Moll, so her character must dictate what is likely to happen, and he is writing for a market which dictates the possibilities of what may happen if the book is to sell; as the narrative gains pace there is a sense in which it must fulfil its own requirements as a narrative and so dictate its own terms. The invisible hand is the process by which this complex interweaving of needs, desires and probabilities takes place. Clark in his study of Inspiration gives several examples of a force taking over writing (see Chapter one). It is recorded of Keats, for example, that
He has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed and written it down. It has then struck him with astonishment – and seemed rather the production of another person than his own.
256
Clark summarises that, ‘Both sexes testify to a sense of dispossession and uncertainty of agency during composition’.257 Forces beyond the comprehension of the author shape the text. Forces beyond the comprehension of the projector shape all projects.