The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood This page intentionally left blank The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood

Essays on Her Life and Work

Edited by Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 2000 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-0-8131-2161-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

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Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of American University Presses Contents

List of Illustrations Vll

Acknowledgments Vlll Introduction Kirsten T. Saxton 1 The Story of Eliza Haywood's Novels: Caveats and Questions Paula R. Backscheider 19 Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess Toni Bowers 48 Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina Margaret Case Croskery 69 "Blushing, Trembling, and Incapable of Defense": The Hysterics of The British Recluse Rebecca P. Bocchicchio 95 Telling Tales: Eliza Haywood and the Crimes of Seduction in The City jilt, or, the Alderman turn'd Beau Kirsten T. Saxton 115 A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood's Scandal Fiction Ros Ballaster 143 vi Contents

"A Race of Angels": Castration and Exoticism in Three Exotic Tales by Eliza Haywood Jennifer Thorn 168 Speechless: Haywood's Deaf and Dumb Projector Felicity A. Nussbaum 194 "Haywood," Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution David Brewer 217 Histories by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding: Imitation and Adaptation John Richetti 240 Shooting Blanks: Potency, Parody, and Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless Andrea Austin 259 "Shady bowers! and purling streams!-Heavens, how insipid!": Eliza Haywood's Artful Pastoral David Oakleaf 283 "What Ann Lang Read": Eliza Haywood and Her Readers Christine Blouch 300 Works Cited 326 Contributors 348 Index 351 Illustrations

Frontispiece to The History of . .. Mr. Duncan Campbell 195 Sign-language alphabet, The History of . .. Mr. Duncan Campbell 203 Acknowledgments

We dedicate this book to our parents, Ruth and Paul Saxton and Gloria Roland Pautz. Thanks for the love, support, and storytelling that helped to get us here. This project was conceived at the University of California at Davis. We would like to offer special thanks to Joyce Wade, for her consistent help, humor, and faith in us. Her friendship, wit, and practical advice helped us through the rigors of this project. The book would not exist without the wonderful essays by our contributors. We thank you each for your dedication, scholarly rigor, and good humor. We would like particularly to thank Toni Bowers­ who participated in its early incarnation as an MLA special session­ and Paula Backscheider-who has served as a mentor. Our thanks and appreciation also to everyone who read the manuscript at each stage; it is a far better book thanks to your combined efforts. Rebecca would like to thank her husband Michael for his love and encouragement through it all ... you make it possible for me to be my best. Kirsten would like to thank the Williams Andrews Clark and Huntington libraries, where she wrote the introduction and her essay. Thanks also to my eighteenth-century novel class of fall1999-thanks for their enthusiasm and for honing my readings of Haywood's texts, Acknowledgments ix and to my research assistant Jennifer Campell, whose help was invaluable. Heartfelt thanks as well to my friends and family, who all make my life richer and more possible. Particular thanks to Ruth Saxton, my mother and best reader, for the splendid example she sets as professor, writer, and parent, and to my husband, Karl, for love and support. This page intentionally left blank Introduction

Kirsten T. Saxton

I first read Eliza Haywood on creaky microfilm machines when I be­ came interested in learning more about Restoration and Augustan women prose writers. Spurred by a love of Aphra Behn, I was deter­ mined to track down references I had seen to this other, even more obscure author, Eliza Haywood, referred to as "the Great Arbitress of Passion," an epithet that tantalized me. I moved eventually from mi­ crofilm to rare book rooms, and to the few extant modern editions of her work I could find, eagerly poring over Fantomina, Betsy Thought­ less, and The City Jilt. Now we can read Haywood in any number of excellent modern editions; she has even made it into the Norton, al­ beit only the Literature by Women volume. This collection was spurred by my initial love of Haywood's works and my sense that she de­ served further critical attention. An MLA special session garnered a host of wonderful papers on Haywood and the genesis of this volume was born. Rebecca and I are delighted with the breadth and depth of the essays in the collection, and only wish it could have included twice as many. This book focuses largely, although not entirely, on Haywood's fiction, and we hope soon to see more Haywood studies focusing on her drama and journalism, as well as her fictional texts. We hope that this collection serves as a spur to other work, to a continuation of the exciting conversation that is Haywoodian studies, and to the prolif­ eration of more of her works in scholarly editions and anthologies. 2 Kirsten T. Saxton

We hope also that the volume fills some of the gaps that we encoun­ tered when we began working on Haywood in the early 1990s, when we would never have guessed that she was one of the most celebrated novelists of her day. The most prolific British woman writer of the eighteenth century, Eliza Haywood was a key player in the history of the British novel, and a leading figure in a brilliant and competitive London literary scene that included Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson. She came resoundingly to fame in 1719 with the publication of her first novel, Love in Excess, or the fatal enquiry, which, until the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740, was one of the three most popular works of eigh­ teenth-century English fiction, an honor it shared with Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliver's Travels (1726). After publication of Love in Excess, Haywood wrote a novel roughly every three months in the 1720s. She turned primarily to non-fiction work during the first half of the 1740s, returning to fiction in the latter half of the decade, and her 1751 novel The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless was a stun­ ning bestseller. As well as being a prolific and acclaimed novelist, Haywood was a playwright, actress, writer of conduct books, translator, bookseller, publisher, and journalist, and from 1744-46 she was the editor of The Female Spectator, the first English periodical written by women for women. She, with her predecessors Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, was praised by contemporary poet/critic James Sterling as one of the "Fair Triumvirate of Wit": the three most popular, influen­ tial, and controversial women writers of the Restoration and Augustan eras. As was the case with Behn and Manley before her, Haywood's literary talent reaped her both rewards and reproach: she commanded a huge readership and earned financial success and independence, yet she also gained the disdain and malice of her male literary contempo­ raries, whose tendency to mock and deride her seems to have had less to do with her prose and more to do with her extraordinary sales and her critiques of the gendered status quo. After more than two hun­ dred years of neglect, Haywood is finally receiving the attention she is due as the writer whose name was, in the eighteenth century, "more than any other native fiction writer ... identified with the British novel" (Beasley, Novels 162). Introduction 3

In the early to mid-1970s, the rise of feminism within the acad­ emy led to a flurry of facsimile reprints of Haywood's work. By the 1980s, her masquerade novels (particularly Fantomina) had garnered feminist attention, most often influenced by contemporary psycho­ analytic theories. Finally, in the 1990s, modern critical editions of her work were produced and her reprinted works are included in antholo­ gies, ensuring that Haywood will now be read by scholars and stu­ dents alike. This volume is the first critical book-length study on Haywood, and it reflects the range and depth of contemporary Haywood studies. Approaching Haywood's work from thematic, his­ torical, and formal vantage points and from multiple theoretical posi­ tions, the essays speak to Haywood's centrality to eighteenth-century English literature and explore her texts' engagement with the critical social, aesthetic, and political discourses of her day. Haywood may strike some as a slightly vexed feminist foremother both because of her politics and because of the nature of her writings. She was an ardent Tory who located in the monarchy a space for the female independence and freedom that she saw as an impossibility in the more morally strident Whig party. She believed in the concept of a natural elite, a ruling class whose innately higher moral and aesthetic values would lead England onward, away from what she saw as the money-grubbing tendencies of the Whigs. Her anti-Walpole writings of the 1730s and her 1740s periodical, The Parrot, explicitly support Tory causes, and she was jailed for some weeks in 1750 for her pam­ phlet-letter in praise of the Young Pretender.1 In addition to her royalist sympathies, Haywood was also famous for the scandalous nature of her early novels. Haywood inaugurated what exists today as an autonomous feminocentric sphere of romance fiction, fiction of seduction written explicitly by and for women (Ballaster 158). Known in her lifetime as "the Great Arbitress of Pas­ sion," Haywood wrote steamy prose fictions that shocked and titil­ lated eighteenth-century audiences with legions of "unnumbered kisses ... eager hands," "Shrieks and Tremblings, Cries, Curses, [and] Swoonings. "2 Reviled as "licentious and lewd" in her own day, Haywood then and now has often been dismissed solely as an ex­ travagant exemplar of eighteenth-century female audacity. 3 In fact, Haywood's well-plotted and carefully crafted novels may well have suffered from neglect because of their frankness about fe- 4 Kirsten T. Saxton male sexuality and the complicated machinations of heterosexual ro­ mance, marriage contracts, and female economic independence. In her prefaces and narrative asides, Haywood explicitly defines her au­ dience as female and presents her texts as a means by which women readers can negotiate the dangerous waters of heterosexual romance. Haywood's amatory novels of the 1720s and 30s subtly subvert and challenge reigning notions of gender, insist that woman's active desire is natural and inevitable, and attack the double standard by which women are denied active subjectivity. In Love in Excess, for example, the narrator declares: "[P]assion is not to be circumscribed ... it would be mere madness, as well as ill-nature, to say a person was blame-worthy for what was unavoidable" (205).4 Rather than assum­ ing that women should have no sexual desires, Haywood creates a space for active, if dangerous, female appetite. It is not the desire per se that does in the Haywoodian heroine, but her lack of awareness of how to negotiate that desire within a heterosexual marketplace. Haywood's titles hint at her texts' focus on seduction and peril, a gendered battlefield of bed and hearth: The Injur'd Husband (1722); The Unfortunate Mistress (1723 ); The Fatal Secret (1724 ); Fatal Fond­ ness (1725); The Mercenary Lover ( 1726). It is telling that the central work of her later, less erotically explicit stage, Miss Betsy Thought­ less, has been widely reprinted, while only a few of her more forth­ right fictions have become available, and these only in the 1990s. In her own time, Haywood's "scandalous fictions" were tremen­ dously popular with the reading public. However, the politics of rep­ resentation were seriously attenuated in early eighteenth-century England; the nature and import of "truthful" representation was de­ bated on multiple fronts, including that of literature. If a story could not claim to be historically true, based on fact, then it could not be taken seriously and could not engender any positive moral effects (McKeon, Origins 121). Since fiction as a project was seen to be largely characterized by irreverent mendacity, even when it was written by men, it is not surprising that fiction written by women would have engendered a particularly vitriolic response. Haywood came onto the literary scene during the 1720s, a decade that heralded a regulatory moment in English history. The Waltham Black Act of 1723 created more than two hundred capital offenses and "signaled the onset of the flood-tide of eighteenth-century re-