ABSTRACT
Personal identity is a contentious issue in the context of any autobiography, memoir or other confession as such works are the public attestation of a subjective experience. This chapter engages with the binary ascription of the 'person' through Defoe's assumption of two female voices in Moll Flanders (1722) and The Fortunate Mistress (1724). It focuses on gendered identity with two women who inhabit different versions of London, the capital of a colonial empire. The Family Instructor recommends patterns for graded hierarchy and degrees of subordination while presenting the dangers of hierarchical disruption from resistance and insubordination and from the abuse or lack of authority. Moll Flanders and Roxana cast dark figurations of personal identity in terms of parturition and separation. The ambitions of both central characters to achieve independence and assert autonomy through self-renewing identities are denied by their bodies that gave them birth and by the children that they have borne into the world.
