SOURCE: Michael, Steven C. “Thinking Parables: What Moll Flanders Does Not Say.” ELH 63, no. 2 (summer 1996): 367-95.

In the essay that follows, Michael examines the “apparent absence of a moral center” in Moll Flanders, and applies the work of several Postmodern theorists to demonstrate the ways in which Moll's language is a form of capital.

By 1644, rhetoric in England was still as deadly a weapon as the recent introduction of gunpowder and artillery. In book 5 of Paradise Lost, the debate between Abdiel and Satan anticipates the clash of sword and artillery in book 6, and it is certainly no accident that Abdiel finds it “naught but just, / That he who in debate of Truth hath won, Should win in Arms.”¹ Milton, of course, was only one of many pamphleteers in a politically-charged era, the tangled semiotic relations of which would have their indirect effects in the next century on Daniel...