Reading Moll Flanders reminded me of an article I read recently about moral alarmists throughout history: Today video games, a relativly young art form, earn the ire and concern of society. In the 80's it was gansta rap. In the 20's, jazz music was morally reproachable and in the 1880's people felt the same way about the first films. Surpisingly, there was a similar moral panic over novels in the early 1700's. The un-academic content wasn't the only problem (for these books certainly weren't among the ranks of Locke and Hobbes) but there was concern about what that content would do to the minds which absorbed it. Women, in particular, read the most novels at the time and it was said the romantic content, adventure, et cetera would inflame the passions of the female, making them completely unreasonable and thus bringing about a massive moral decline.
Moll Flanders strikes me as the kind of book which would have raised the eyebrows of these myopic alarmists. I imagine some people thought women would read this book and attempt to emulate Moll's hijinks. Admittedly, the sexual details are modest; this certainly isn't smut even by older standards. But there is a certain undertone of sensationalism throughout. On the very title page this is evident: "was twelve year a whore, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve year a thief..." There was some discussion in class about why Daniel Defoe published this anonymously, and this topic of moral concern was my first thought. I would understand not wishing to have your name associated with a form of literture under such scrutiny, but that begs the question: why publish this at all?
Moll Flanders is art because the reading of her experiences explore moral ambiguity. She no doubt has a set of morals as we can see from her initial eagerness to retain her chastity, and even though she was the daughter of a criminal and born in a prison, she senses this moral compass (perpetuating the Lockean notion of a benevolent state of nature). Despite this, her circumstances force her to operate outside the boundries of traditional moratily. There is an aesthetic beauty in the aristotelian mimeticism of the story, meaning the account of a real life, no matter how fringe, is inherently beautiful. I think Defoe published this because it is art, even though it troubles some people.
I completely agree with your idea of this novel being a slam to the moral judges of the time period and the idea that Defoe published it anonymously as a way to save himself from persecution at their hands. The fact that this novel made people aware of such problems as poverty and made women question their roles and ideas about how women were treated in this time if they had no family support or help was also pretty acurate.
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