SOURCE: Suarez, Michael F. “The Shortest Way to Heaven? Moll Flanders' Repentance Reconsidered.” In 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Vol. 3, edited by Kevin L. Cope, pp. 3-28. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1997.

In the following essay, Suarez argues that Defoe stresses the insincerity of Moll's repentance with deliberate irony.

The proper habit of repentance is not fine linen, or any delicate array … but sackcloth and ashes.

—Robert Parsons (1680)

The reader of Moll Flanders (1722) must confront the “memorandums” of a seventy-year-old woman who professes to be a repentant sinner.¹ Moll tells her readers that she wishes to enlighten and edify her audience by relating the Providential progress of events that effected her moral and religious improvement. Yet, in both attitude and action, the ever-enigmatic Moll Flanders appears to adhere to a system of values directly at odds with her professed status as a “true...