Virtuous Women? -- Moll Flanders and Pamela

Both Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Samuel Richardson's Pamela tell the tales of what the (male) authors perceive as extraordinary lives of two virtuous but lower class women. However, for Richardson, Pamela's virtue is defined solely in terms of her ability to resist the sexual advances of her employer, Mr. B. The novel evolves through a series of eloquent letters whereby poor Pamela is pursued, spied upon and conspired against in the B. family home and country estate, all the while the girl attempts to retain her virginity, even going so far as to hide in the bed of another female servant's to do so. Daniel Defoe's Moll is subject to more economic and worldly hardships, and her virtue is defined not in terms of her resistance and denial of her body and sexual circumstances but in terms of her openness to others,...
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