Moll Flanders

Main Characters and Their Development

• Moll Flanders — the heroine whose life unfolds as a kaleidoscope of changes: from innocent orphan to skilled adventuress, she passes through a series of marriages, love intrigues, and crimes, never losing her inner thirst for freedom and happiness. Her character is a complex blend of vulnerability and cunning, passion and calculation, and her journey toward repentance and inner transformation becomes the culmination of her spiritual quest.
• James — Moll’s lover and husband, embodying the image of an unstable companion whose feelings and actions reflect the fragility of human attachments and moral bearings.
• Moll’s mother — a figure whose absence and fate as a convict become a fateful omen for her daughter, a shadow that shapes Moll’s drive to escape poverty.
• Moll’s brothers and husbands — a gallery of characters, each of whom becomes a trial for the heroine, a mirror of her own passions, hopes, and disappointments, and whose relationships with Moll reveal the complex fabric of human weaknesses and illusions.