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 addendum to the body of the novel. However, within the preface the character of the editor attempts to situate...