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Passion and Language in Eighteenth- Century Literature Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Passion and Language in Eighteenth- Century Literature The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke Earla Wilputte Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 PASSION AND LANGUAGE IN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY LITERATURE Copyright © Earla Wilputte, 2014. All rights reserved. An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 originally appeared in the essay “Eliza Haywood’s Poems on Several Occasions: Aaron Hill, Writing, and the Sublime,” Eighteenth- Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture 6 (2011): 79– 102 (AMS Press). Part of Chapter 5 originally appeared in the essay “Midwife for the Mind: Delivering the Passions in Aaron Hill’s The Plain Dealer (1724),” Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 1– 15. They are used here in revised form, with permission. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 44204- 8 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Wilputte, Earla Arden, 1959– Passion and language in eighteenth- century literature : the aesthetic sublime in the work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke / by Earla Wilputte. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 1- 137- 44204- 8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. English literature— 18th century— History and criticism. 2. Emotions in literature. 3. Haywood, Eliza Fowler, 1693?– 1756— Language. 4. Hill, Aaron, 1685– 1750— Language. 5. Sansom, Martha Fowke, 1689– 1736— Language. I. Title. PR448.E46W66 2014 820.9'353— dc23 2014007772 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 The Need for a Language for the Passions 1 2 Life’s Progress through the Passions 29 3 “Give Me a Speaking and a Writing Love”: Passionate Letters 51 4 The Miscellany’s Picture Poems and Haywood’s Poems on Several Occasions 83 5 The Plain Dealer’s Progress from the Garrison to the Midwife 115 6 The Dangers of Giving Way to Language 147 Conclusion: Hill’s, Fowke’s, and Haywood’s Progress through the Passions 187 Notes 197 Bibliography 219 Index 231 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Chapter4 1 The Need for a Language for the Passions Our Discourse is imperfect, unless it carry with it the marks of the Motions of our Will: It resembles our Mind (whose Image it ought to bear) no more than a dead Carkass resembles a living Body. — Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking [W]ords give way, like quicksand, beneath too weighty a pile of building. —Aar on Hill to Martha Fowke The ability of discursive language to communicate the passions begins to be questioned in the early eighteenth century. Are words “a dead Carkass,” lacking life, soul, and essence, “like quicksand,” an easily shifting, yielding mass engulfing and entrapping meaning? Some eighteenth-centur y philosophers thought that, with its gradual secularization, poetic language had become emasculated and weak, bereft of its ability to express and incite the passions. Conversely, liter- ary critics such as John Dennis theorized that “never any one, while he was wrapt with Enthusiasm or ordinary Passion, wanted either Words or Harmony.”1 A growing ambivalence over the ability of words to relate effectively one’s passions, and hence one’s subjectivity, devel- ops over the eighteenth century, with some believing that literature too blithely elicits passions from readers and others contending that language has lost its efficacy. The purpose of this study is to explore how three authors— Aaron Hill, Eliza Haywood, and Martha Fowke, Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 2 Passion and Language in 18th-Century Literature making up the nucleus of the London literary group, the Hillarian circle, from 1720 to 1724— attempt to develop a language for the passions that clearly conveys the deepest felt emotions. In essence, these three authors endeavor to transcend human separateness and bind one soul to another through words. Hill, Haywood, and Fowke and their personal and professional relationships with each other within Hill’s literary circle afford an intriguing and problematic context in which to study the passions and their communication in the first half of the eighteenth century. Writers in a variety of forms (periodicals, poetry, letters, plays, essays, and novels) over a long period of productive years, Hill, Haywood, and Fowke engage in a progressive and reactionary debate over how to express and write the passions. Whereas recent criticism notes “a clear intersection between the perceived crisis in the management of the passions and the emerging mission of the novel,”2 in the Hillarian circle we witness intelligent, passionate minds grappling with find- ing a language for the passions that can imaginatively convey one’s innermost feelings before the novel’s “agenda” of reforming and restraining those passions can be effectively put into action. The Hillarian circle is beginning to attract serious scholarly atten- tion in the wake of high- quality bibliographical, biographical, and critical work. Foundational studies on Hill, Fowke, and Haywood by Christine Gerrard, Phyllis Guskin, Patrick Spedding, and Kathryn R. King all reference the complex relationships among these three writ- ers within the larger Hillarian circle and present significant scholarship to which I am especially indebted. Guskin’s Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom, 1689– 1736, the first modern edition of Clio: or, A Secret History of the Life and Amours of the Late Celebrated Mrs. S– n— m, provides a detailed examination of Fowke’s life and her role in the Hillarian coterie; Gerrard’s biography Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685–1750 devotes two chapters to the making and the breaking of the Hillarian circle, including the part that the Fowke–Haywood dispute played in that breakup; Spedding’s A Bib- liography of Eliza Haywood is indispensable for linking biographical information with the publishing history of Haywood’s works; and King has authored several influential articles exploring the literary and personal relationships of Haywood with the Hillarians, including “The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719– 1725” and “When Eliza Met Aaron: A Story of Sublime Sensation,” as well as, most recently, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood. Each of these critical studies dedicates attention to the relationships and influences, the friendships and shifting alliances among the most Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 Copyrighted Material - 9781137442048 The Need for a Language for the Passions 3 famous Hillarians. My intention here is to focus specifically on Hill’s, Haywood’s, and Fowke’s experimentation with and attempts at the development of a language for the passions in their poetry and prose. As these studies have shown, the possible relationships among Haywood, Hill, and Fowke (her married name is Sansom but she established her poetic reputation under her maiden name) are col- laborative, competitive, and often eroticized. From 1720 to 1724, Haywood reveres Hill as a poet and as a man; once friends, Haywood and Fowke become bitter and vengeful enemies; Fowke and Hill engage in a clandestine extramarital affair; Fowke uses her sexuality unabashedly with men; and Haywood is scorned by the circle after publishing a scandal novel that includes a vicious personal exposé of her former friend. All three write, discuss, and theorize about the pas- sions and their passions for each other. As a literary coterie of young men and women, the Hillarians are fascinated with the passions— excessive emotions like love, sorrow, fear, anger, envy—and how they can be best expressed in social relationships and in writing. My study of works by these three writers traces their experimentation with philosophical and linguistic theories, including the aesthetic sublime. The members of the Hillarian circle variously argue in their individual works for the validity of a language built on experience, specifi- cally a sensory, sensual, and passionate experience. This argument aligns them with the empiricist project but insists on the place of the passions in a discussion of knowledge gained through experience. Suspended somewhere between the spiritual and the physical, the passions seem to elude any but abstract, poetic description. Hill often complains that “words give way, like quicksand” or “fall feath’ry like dew.” Hill, Haywood, and Fowke seek to develop a language that ensures not only a sympathetic comprehension of the excessive emo- tions that we all undergo but an understanding of the three writers’ own passionate subjectivity. Eliza Haywood, author of many novels
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