ABSTRACT
As a preliminary, it must be noted that Moll Flanders again—like Captain Singleton—has a basically bipartite structure, the first part containing Moll’s sexual adventures, the second her life as a thief, her imprisonment, and her transportation to America. The difference is that Defoe has effected an organic rather than merely schematic relationship between the two halves. The chapter narrates the episode of the two brothers, an episode which is crucial to our understanding of the novel. Since the episode of the two brothers is so important to the author's reading of the novel, it is examining whether Defoe himself is likely to have attributed to it the traumatic implications that the author saw it as possessing. Even more than Moll Flanders, Roxana conveys the horror of being pursued by guilt. In the whole of the long final section of the novel the wealthy Roxana, now a baronet’s wife and a countess, suddenly finds that her money and position mean nothing.
