Defoe's Daydream: Becoming Moll Flanders

Abstract

Donning the layman’s cloak of naiveté, Freud sets out to characterize the "stuff" of which literature is made in his 1908 essay "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming." He traces the connection between the art of daydreaming and the act of writing: writing is the formal transformation of the wish into the text, the work of art. The materiality of language gives the literary text a hide-and-seek quality. It is possible that one might look into the text just as the analyst might decipher the text of the dream, for writing is daydreaming on paper. The proper moment for pinpoint Daniel Defoe’s wish as he wrote Moll Flanders has arrived, heralded by Geoffrey Hartman’s directive that there is a name (a "specular name") hidden within the folds of the text which calls out to be read. This piece seeks to illustrate the transformation of wish into writing by way of the specular name; to deconstruct by staging a brief unveiling of Moll Flanders, text of lace—of desire.