Moll’s struggles in being a gentlewoman in Georgian Era in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders

ABSTRACT

Moll Flanders is the early feminist novel that describes the struggle of woman main character. It was written in eighteen century as era of the rise of novel. The woman main character was figure out as beautiful, strong, and autonomous woman. Moll Flanders was written by Daniel Defoe in Georgian Era. In this era, woman was oppressed by patriarchal culture.

This research intends to find out the reason of the main woman character to be a gentlewoman and to describe Moll’s struggle to be a gentlewoman. The problem of the study, they are (1) what are the reasons of Moll’s desire to be a gentlewoman in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders? (2) how are Moll’s struggles to be a gentlewoman?

This study uses literary criticism with feminism approach, because it is to describe the struggle of the woman main character to be a gentlewoman in Moll Flanders. In addition, the data are taken from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Feminist literary criticism is the most appropriate approach to analyze this novel. This research is categorized into literary criticism because the researcher conducts the discussion of literature, including description, analysis, and the interpretation of literary work.. It emphasizes on the finding the data related to the woman main character’s struggle to be a gentlewoman.

Data collecting procedure are reading the novel, identifying, choosing and coding the sentences of the novel by highlighting the text which relate to the topic of analysis, and selecting the data.

There are some steps in doing data analysis those are: categorizing and interpreting data in accordance the classification of the data based on the problems of research. Then, organizing according to the objectives of the study. Finally, the last step is making conclusion.

The results of this study are: 1) the reason of being a gentlewoman for Moll are her background of her childhood as an orphan and obligation or must be a servant. 2) Forms of struggles are struggle against stereotypes of servant, marrying a gentleman, being a prostitute and being a thief. In the conclusion, Moll want to prove to the society that woman from lower class can be the upper class when she does a struggle.