Moll Flanders, Madame Bovary, & The Joys Of Motherhood Essay -- essays

Moll Flanders, Madame Bovary, & The Joys of Motherhood     Daniel Defoes Moll Flanders, Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary, and Buchi Emechetas The Joys of Motherhood are troika novels that portray the breeding of woman in many different ways. They all depict the turmoils and strifes that women, in many cultures and time periods, suffer from. In some cases its the womans fault, in others its simply rugged opportunity. In any case, all three novels succeed in their goal of showing what a life of selling oneself short is like through the look of a woman.     In Daniel Defoes Moll Flanders, a woman, Moll is simply trying to get by and is given a wonderful start because she was born in a prison. Moll Flanders leads a life full of crime and prostitution because she feels it is the only way she can survive. She becomes do dependent on theft that she steals eventide when she does not need any more luxuries. In Moll Flanders, the lector at tim es feels bad for the main character because she really has no luck when it comes to husbands or life in general. Yet at other times we resent the fact that she leaves her children and continues larceny for no reason.      Moll Flanders is somewhat ambiguous because the reader does not know whether to feel sorry for Molls disadvantages, or feel hatred for her irresponsibility. Moll is somewhat portrayed as ignorant, in that she does not know that what she does is wrong. E. M. Forster wrote that "A nature such as hers cannot for long distinguish between doing wrong and getting caught."      Although there are time when the reader feels bad for Moll and feels that she simply does not know better, there are times when Moll admit that she is doing wrong. However, Moll feels no sympathy for the people she steals from. Even after she stops stealing for some time, she being again without remorse. "Thus you see having committed a Crime onc e, is a sad Handle to the committing of it again whereas all the Regret, and Reflections wear sour when the Temptation renews itself" (184). Moll understands that the crimes she commits are unjust, but she blames temptaion for her delinquency.      The most direct reason that the reader feels sympathy for Moll is because she eventually feels guilt. "I had ... ...py, she was abandoned by them in the end. Still, Nnu Ego did everything in her power to give everything to her children, and "The joy of being a mother was the joy of giving all to you children" (224).     These three previously mentioned novels all consisted of three extremely different woman selling themselves in one way or another to action some sort of self worth or ultimate happiness. Although the situations and acts of the characters were considerably different, one must feel some sort of sympathy to these woman. Not only did they lower their standards, but the y also went to extreme lengths to achieve a happiness that in most cases never came.Works CitedDefoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. W.W. Norton & Company, stark naked York 1973.Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. Hinemann, Oxford 1979.Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. W. W. Norton & Company, New York 1965Forster, E.M. "A novel of Character" from Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt, Brace, New York           1927. Thibaudet, Albert. "Madame Bovary" from chapter 5 of Gustave Flaubert. Gallimard, Paris 1935.