SOURCE: Pollak, Ellen. “Moll Flanders, Incest, and the Structure of Exchange.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Imagination 30, no. 1 (spring 1989): 3-21.

In this essay, Pollak explores the role of incest in Moll's struggle for financial, linguistic, and sexual autonomy.

In many ways, Moll Flanders is a literary character who moves impressively and resiliently outside the constraints of familial, and especially maternal, obligation.¹ Her story, however, reminds us that there are dangers attendant upon being or believing oneself outside the family. Like the story of Sophocles's Oedipus, another memorable literary figure whom circumstance early removes from the place and knowledge of familial origins, it demonstrates that families are biologically determining and that incest is a possibility always present in not knowing where one belongs. For Moll, who discovers midway through her quest for economic independence that she has unwittingly become the wife of her own brother, the coincidental return of...