다니엘 디포우의 『몰 플랜더즈』와 18세기 여성의 모성적 태도

초록

This thesis discusses eighteenth-century's maternal attitude from social perspective through the Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. The crimes caused by a side effect for growth of economy occurred in the eighteenth-century Britain. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders well reflects a phase of social life at that time. The novel is the story of female protagonist, Moll Flanders, who as a low class woman has a sense of value of middle class. She committed crimes for money too;swindle, prostitute, robbery, thief etc. As well as those crimes,however, infanticide and child abandonment often happened in the eighteenth-century. Those crimes are related to each other because women who committed infanticide or abandonment were low class women, and most abandoned children(or killed children) were bastards or foundlings. Defoe, in Moll Flanders, shows with indirect expression that infanticide and abandonment had happened in the part of the society. Most women in eighteenth-century did not bring up a child with her care but hired a wet nurse instead. Unlike rich women,poor women sent their children to a distant country because they had to hire wet nurses more cheaply. In that process, many children were sick or died due to poor condition. Also, some parents did not bring back their children and often give fostering expenses. Moll also sent her children to a wet nurse, and she did not bring her children back. In this novel, she hardly shows maternal sense and act. For that reason, Moll's maternal attitude has been criticised as immoral and unnatural by critics. However, Defoe's intention shows that widely spread wet nurse custom in eighteenth-century society was used as a method of infanticide and abandonment. Moll's maternal attitude represents many low class women's attitude. Moll seemed to give priority to economic aspect rather than maternal instinct and we thus have to discuss Moll Flanders with historical and social context in order to get a full picture of maternal attitude in the novel.

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