Female Economy and the Limits of Male Imagination: Women, Money, and Narrative Control in Pamela, Moll Flanders, and Roxana

Abstract

This paper takes up the question of how female economic agency is represented in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Roxana. What it cares about most is the link between women, money, and who controls the narrative in the eighteenth-century English novel. The analysis draws on feminist literary criticism, materialist feminism, and narrative theory, and from there the author argues that male-authored fiction of this period gradually gives women more room to act economically, though it never lets that room go unbounded, since narrative limits are placed on it at the same time. Pamela is the starting point: the heroine’s economic advancement only becomes acceptable because it is tied to virtue and ends in marriage. Moll Flanders goes further, as its protagonist moves through the marketplace far more actively, yet her agency is brought under control in the end by confession and repentance. With Roxana the situation changes again; the heroine’s economic independence is pushed to a more radical point, and the result is a narrative that wobbles and finally stops without any resolution. Taken together, the three novels form a progressive line, and what stands out along it is that the more autonomy female economic subjects gain, the more clearly the limits of patriarchal narrative structures show through. The early English novel can picture a woman who is economically free, but it has trouble holding on to one whose independence no longer depends on a male intermediary.