Rivista FerraniaAutore non identificato - Francesca Bertini in "Moll Flanders", 1953
#Autore #FrancescaBertini #MollFlanders #photography #Italian #Cinema
Trevor BurrowsSo the malleability of identity becomes both a source of uncertainty and doubt - in assessing the character and history of others - and a means of raising your own prospects.
Finding the "habit of a Widow" to be limiting - particularly one without money - Moll resolves to "change my Station, and make a new Appearance in some other Place where I was not known, and even to pass by another Name if I found Occasion."
My cursory pre-reading knowledge of #MollFlanders did not prepare me to find in the book's heroine an early 18th-century #Feminist, calling out the inequities of her context's gendered courting scripts and expectations and devising some delicious revenge for women friends when wronged by men.
She would have much to say about men and marriage, for instance, that would jive with this weekend's NYT op-ed about contemporary #Marriage prospects for women (linked).
Holding forth on marriage, Moll says: "On the contrary, the Women have ten Thousand times the more Reason to be wary and backward, by how much the hazard of being betray'd is the greater; and would the Ladies consider this, and act the wary Part, they would discover every Cheat that offer'd; for, in short, the Lives of very few Men now a-Days will bear a Character; and if the Ladies do but make a little Enquiry, they will soon be able to distinguish the Men and deliver themselves[.]"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-men-dating.html
"So certainly does Interest banish all manner of affection, and so naturally do Men give up Honour and Justice, Humanity, and even Christianity, to secure themselves."
Although I'm almost always working on multiple books at once, my currently-reading list is a bit crazy right now. Not including more general reading for class prep and research, I'm currently working on...
- I resumed David Waldstreicher's *The Odyssey of #PhillisWheatley* after some time away due to work. So glad I didn't let it fall off completely -- it's fantastic.
- I started #MollFlanders a week or two ago. Although familiar with its story and historical/literary influence, have never read it.
- I've fallen headfirst into the Library of America #AldoLeopold volume.
- And some skimming for class prep turned into a full read of Kathryn Olivarius's award-winning *Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom*.