ABSTRACT

When Daniel Defoe, turned to novel-writing and, through his conduct manuals, to an exploration of the human heart, the times were indeed decisively changing. It was perhaps in response to those changes that we find Defoe relinquishing his intense engagement in the politics of the day and releasing all his extraordinary energy into imaginative works and didactic insightful psychologising treatises. Defoe, ever the risk-taker, was playing a dangerous game, and nowhere can this be observed more acutely than in Moll Flanders. In Moll Flanders Defoe is singularly reminding us that perversion and creativity have a common primitive origin in the pre-genital phase of our development; while the creative writer sublimates that selfsame drive and, thus desexualised, a work of art can emerge. In the hermaphroditic production of Moll Flanders, staged at Defoe’s theatre, he and his actors are never gender-bound, never confined to playing one role; untrammelled by the bondage of a fixed sexual identity.