이제 고전이 된 『소설의 발생』(The Rise of the Novel)에서 와트(Ian Watt)는 소설의 언어가 다른 어떤 문학 형식의 언어보다 지시적으로 기능한다고 역설한다(30). 그는 소설을 인간 경험에 대한 완전하고 진솔한 보고서(a full and authentic report of human experience)라 정의하는데, 여기서 방점은 보고서가 다루는 내용의 범주가 아닌 보고서가 갖는 형식상의 특징에 있다. 소설 장르의 특수한 형식으로서 리얼리즘은 등장인물의 개인적 면모나 사건이 일어난 시공간의 자초지종(the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions)을 지시적 언어의 사용(referential use of language; 32)을 통해 실감나게 재현하는 것을 일컫는다. 형식적 리얼리즘이 가장 성공적으로 구현될 때 독자는 소설의 서사가 2차원의 종이 위가 아닌 3차원 세상의 특정 장소와 시간에서 정말로 일어나고 있는 것처럼 느낀다. ; Just like many other eighteenth-century British novels, the editor in Daniel Defoes Moll Flanders claims that the book is a historical account of a person named Moll Flanders. Its preface, however, distinguishes the novels structure from others by insinuating that something genuine and original is missing: the editor professes that Moll Flanders is a pseudonym and that the text is a result of a censorship. The strategy that assumes the non-existent truth behind the given text provokes the readers fancy, ironically engraving a fictional depth into the flat surface of the text. The same strategy applies to Molls own fictions that drive the novels narrative. While Moll disguises in various shapes and figures to profit from others, what should be her genuine identity tantalizes readers behind her dress, culminating in the episode she encounters her lost mother via her incestuous marriage to her brother—an episode that strongly implies, but never explicitly tells, her origin. As it is shown in the fact that the list of Molls fortune in the end of the novel is completed by her inheritance from her mother, Defoes self-conscious construction of the absent core—the original textual body, the autonym, and the body behind the dress—critically contributes to the three-dimensional fancy of verisimilitude in Moll Flanders.