Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject English Language and
Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Frankfurt
(Main) (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course:
Self-Conscious Commodities: Defoe's Women, language: English, abstract:
Natural law, throughout the seventeenth century, served as a touchstone
for human beings as social and political animals, evolving into an
ignitable mixture of moral and political doctrine and demanding the
individual's rights of self-preservation and self-defence. The Catholic
thinker Jean Gerson used the term 'state of nature' in the fifteenth
century, followed by Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth
century, though according to Richard Tuck, Thomas Hobbes was the first
to coin it. Hobbes defined "the state of meer Nature" as a condition of
constant competition, where every man fights the other and each
individual is entitled to everything by nature. This environment is
exclusively governed by the laws of nature, which are rather inherent
principles designed to ensure self-preservation. In this world without
written laws, there is no justice, and everyone lives in fear and
mistrust of the others. Born into the very same environment, in London's
notorious Newgate Prison, as the illegitimate daughter of a thief, Moll
Flanders seeks for a way to escape social misery all her life.
Throughout the narration, she faces significant challenges but, despite
numerous setbacks, continuously manages to defy her fate. This paper
will shed light on the characters' "state of meer Nature" on a social
level with particular focus on the protagonist: their world is dominated
by predators, the characters constantly struggle for self-preservation,
and, in this fight for appropriation of property to secure survival, are
situated in an equilibrium of threats.
