Moll Flanders

In an example of situational irony, when Moll marries the Plantation Owner, she is not aware of the fact that he is her half-brother. It is only after she has moved to Virginia to build a family with him and listens to his mother tell her life-story that she realizes her mother-in-law is also her mother:

I heard this part of the Story with very little attention, because I wanted much to retire and give vent to my Passions, which I did soon after; and let any one judge what must be the Anguish of my Mind, when I came to reflect that this was certainly no more or less than my own Mother, and I had now had two Children, and was big with another by my own Brother, and lay with him still every Night.

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When Moll and James get married, they each believe the other to be wealthy when, in fact, they are both broke—an example of situational irony. Moll’s description of the moment in which they realize the truth about each other effectively captures the irony of this “double fraud”:

I was confounded now as much as he, and knew not what to say: I thought many ways that I had the worst of it, but his saying he was undone, and that he had no Estate neither, put me into a meer distraction; why, says I to him, this has been a hellish Juggle, for we are married here upon the foot of a double Fraud; you are undone by the Disappointment it seems, and if I had had a Fortune I had been cheated too, for you say you have nothing.

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During the height of her criminal activity, Moll stations herself by a series of carriages looking for someone to steal from and starts talking to a woman who is carrying a package. The woman explains that she is worried about leaving the package in the carriage with her child while loading the carriage because she worries someone will steal it. In an example of dramatic irony, Moll convinces the woman to trust her with the package and then walks away with it:

The Maid had a great Bundle under Arm […] and I said, you had best put your Bundle into the Coach too; No, says she, I am afraid some body should slip it away from the Child; give it me then, said I, and I’ll take care of it; do then, says she, and be sure you take care of it.

[...]

As soon as I had got the Bundle, and the Maid was out of Sight, I goes on towards the Ale-house, where the Porter’s Wife was, so that if I had met her, I had then only been going to give her the Bundle […] but as I did not meet her I walk’d away.

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In an example of situational irony, Moll—who has been impoverished almost her whole life and faced a seemingly endless barrage of challenges and disadvantages—ends up wealthy, happily married, and content. While readers expect her story to end with misery and disgrace, it is quite the opposite, as Moll describes at the end of the novel:

Thus all these little Difficulties were made easy, and we liv’d together with the greatest Kindness and Comfort imaginable; we are now grown Old: I am come back to England, being almost seventy Years of Age, my Husband sixty eight, having perform’d much more than the limited Terms of my Transportation: And now notwithstanding all the Fatigues, and all the Miseries we have both gone thro’, we are both in good Heart and Health.

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