I'll Get Back To Being Funny Soon, I Promise
"And how are you going to deal with Moll Flanders big Christian Redemption ending?" ~ Hester
I'm within seven chapters of completing my adaptation of Moll Flanders, and I still don't have the complete answer to that question. I don't think any aspect of Moll Flanders is as difficult as that bloody ending, and it's even defeated Andrew Davies, who can usually be relied upon to overcome any hurdle in a novel with his customary brand of gloss, romance and staggering insincerity. (I am, as a sidenote, planning to make a "Worst Of Andrew Davies" post at some point, a place where we can all give works like Game On and B Monkey - the film adaptation of which was only saved by spot-on casting - the appreciation they deserve)
If you keep the ending, then the adaptation runs the risk of being as insincere to modern eyes as one of those ghastly old Cecil B DeMille epics like The Sign of the Cross, which teased the audience with (admittedly impressively-staged) sex and gore before delivering a closing moral homily about as sincere as Jerry Springer's Final Thought. But if you lose it, what is it then? It's not even a bedroom farce, which would be acceptable, it's a bedroom farce which takes sickening pleasure in having its heroine prostituted, incarcerated, reduced to poverty and at one point gang-raped. To use the old cliche, you can't live with that ending, and you can't live without it.
It's at this point that a good adapter should start to look beyond the text, specifically to try and understand what the author was thinking writing this passage in the first place. Daniel Defoe was more than 'just' one of the greatest of all British authors, he was also a profoundly religious man, and many people have interpreted the ending of Moll Flanders solely through this prism. But Defoe was not a quiet and compliant Christian; he was a Christian who took Jesus at His word and fought for social change, even ending up (like his heroine) in the notoriously vicious Newgate Prison for a spell after he wrote The Shortest Way With Dissenters, a furious satirical pamphlet which strongly implied that the more conservative wing of the Church of England was planning to introduce the death penalty for those who disagreed with its politics.
Defoe's works thrum with religious themes which appear uncomplicatedly Christian and conservative to a modern-day reader. What it's important to remember here, though, is that the political spectrum has been moving leftwards throughout all of history, so that rights which would have been thought heretical in the Tudor era (suffrage for all adults, for example) are now accepted without question, and social and economic policies which would have marked one out as a radical Jacobin during the French Revolution can be adopted by a certain female Tory Premier in the late twentieth century without complaint. Look at the demands made by the Chartist rioters in the 1830s - today they seem like pillars of common-sense democracy, back then they were so radical that people wondered whether England would survive their implementation.
Defoe was, in short, a radical, and if we are to fully understand Moll Flanders as a radical work today we must see it in the context of his and our time simultaneously. I have the great fortune to be writing during a time when the forces of Christian conservatism are striving (and, it must be said, failing, not that their failure should be an excuse for relaxed vigilance among free-thinkers) to return religion to the status it enjoyed in Defoe's time; a vast authority that is Christian but not in line with Christ. And I am lucky to be able to say that whereas I do not share Defoe's faith that Jesus is Lord, I can easily sympathize with him.
Observant readers will have noticed my quiet respect for the sort of socialist Christian household I grew up in before - when I capitalized "His" in this very entry, for example. To accept Jesus as an avatar of God takes a leap of faith (literally) which I believe is either innate or is not. To accept Jesus's philosophy takes no such thing. Think of the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Or even Michael Stipe:
"I can't say that I love Jesus - that would be a hard thing to say. But He did make some observations, and I'm quoting them today."
Or even my friend simian_jack, who noted after a viewing of Martin Scorsese's theo/philosophical masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ that, whereas he still believes the Gospels to be fictional, he is now starting to wonder whether Jesus, Judas and Paul are his favourite fictional characters.
The abuses of religion are a horrific thing, but the correct uses of it can be a beautiful thing, and it's in this spirit of honesty that I'm trying to write the final stretch of Moll Flanders. To me, it matters less whether Moll actually believes in Jesus than it does whether she can separate herself from the unfair and misogynistic and nominally Christian society which punished her so hard. I think the only thing I can write here is what I believe. I don't believe that Jesus was a deity, but I do believe He was a great man, and that someone like Moll can do remarkable things when inspired by His life.
I'm within seven chapters of completing my adaptation of Moll Flanders, and I still don't have the complete answer to that question. I don't think any aspect of Moll Flanders is as difficult as that bloody ending, and it's even defeated Andrew Davies, who can usually be relied upon to overcome any hurdle in a novel with his customary brand of gloss, romance and staggering insincerity. (I am, as a sidenote, planning to make a "Worst Of Andrew Davies" post at some point, a place where we can all give works like Game On and B Monkey - the film adaptation of which was only saved by spot-on casting - the appreciation they deserve)
If you keep the ending, then the adaptation runs the risk of being as insincere to modern eyes as one of those ghastly old Cecil B DeMille epics like The Sign of the Cross, which teased the audience with (admittedly impressively-staged) sex and gore before delivering a closing moral homily about as sincere as Jerry Springer's Final Thought. But if you lose it, what is it then? It's not even a bedroom farce, which would be acceptable, it's a bedroom farce which takes sickening pleasure in having its heroine prostituted, incarcerated, reduced to poverty and at one point gang-raped. To use the old cliche, you can't live with that ending, and you can't live without it.
It's at this point that a good adapter should start to look beyond the text, specifically to try and understand what the author was thinking writing this passage in the first place. Daniel Defoe was more than 'just' one of the greatest of all British authors, he was also a profoundly religious man, and many people have interpreted the ending of Moll Flanders solely through this prism. But Defoe was not a quiet and compliant Christian; he was a Christian who took Jesus at His word and fought for social change, even ending up (like his heroine) in the notoriously vicious Newgate Prison for a spell after he wrote The Shortest Way With Dissenters, a furious satirical pamphlet which strongly implied that the more conservative wing of the Church of England was planning to introduce the death penalty for those who disagreed with its politics.
Defoe's works thrum with religious themes which appear uncomplicatedly Christian and conservative to a modern-day reader. What it's important to remember here, though, is that the political spectrum has been moving leftwards throughout all of history, so that rights which would have been thought heretical in the Tudor era (suffrage for all adults, for example) are now accepted without question, and social and economic policies which would have marked one out as a radical Jacobin during the French Revolution can be adopted by a certain female Tory Premier in the late twentieth century without complaint. Look at the demands made by the Chartist rioters in the 1830s - today they seem like pillars of common-sense democracy, back then they were so radical that people wondered whether England would survive their implementation.
Defoe was, in short, a radical, and if we are to fully understand Moll Flanders as a radical work today we must see it in the context of his and our time simultaneously. I have the great fortune to be writing during a time when the forces of Christian conservatism are striving (and, it must be said, failing, not that their failure should be an excuse for relaxed vigilance among free-thinkers) to return religion to the status it enjoyed in Defoe's time; a vast authority that is Christian but not in line with Christ. And I am lucky to be able to say that whereas I do not share Defoe's faith that Jesus is Lord, I can easily sympathize with him.
Observant readers will have noticed my quiet respect for the sort of socialist Christian household I grew up in before - when I capitalized "His" in this very entry, for example. To accept Jesus as an avatar of God takes a leap of faith (literally) which I believe is either innate or is not. To accept Jesus's philosophy takes no such thing. Think of the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Or even Michael Stipe:
"I can't say that I love Jesus - that would be a hard thing to say. But He did make some observations, and I'm quoting them today."
Or even my friend simian_jack, who noted after a viewing of Martin Scorsese's theo/philosophical masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ that, whereas he still believes the Gospels to be fictional, he is now starting to wonder whether Jesus, Judas and Paul are his favourite fictional characters.
The abuses of religion are a horrific thing, but the correct uses of it can be a beautiful thing, and it's in this spirit of honesty that I'm trying to write the final stretch of Moll Flanders. To me, it matters less whether Moll actually believes in Jesus than it does whether she can separate herself from the unfair and misogynistic and nominally Christian society which punished her so hard. I think the only thing I can write here is what I believe. I don't believe that Jesus was a deity, but I do believe He was a great man, and that someone like Moll can do remarkable things when inspired by His life.