Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe | Thomas Grant Olson (essay date summer 2001)
Thomas Grant Olson (essay date summer 2001)
SOURCE: Olson, Thomas Grant. “Reading and Righting Moll Flanders.” SEL 41, no. 3 (summer 2001): 467-81.
[In the following essay, Olson explores the relationship between language and kinship taboos in Defoe's novel.]
Kinship laws, which govern the system of combinations in mating, correspond to linguistic laws governing the combinations of words in a sentence or letters in a word … [I]ncest is bad grammar.
—Maud Ellmann
The connection between the rules that govern kinship and grammar offers a critical reader of Moll Flanders a tool to understand the connection between the troubling presence of incest and the renowned problem of language in the novel.1 Kinship and language are most tangled in the preface, a part of the text that, with few significant exceptions, has been treated as little more than an interesting...
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