The Arbitress of Passion and of Contract: Eliza Haywood
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THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this dissertation is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This dissertation does not include proprietary or classified information. ________________________________ LaShea S. Stuart Certificate of Approval: ___________________________ __________________________ Alicia Carroll Paula R. Backscheider, Chair Associate Professor Professor English English ___________________________ _________________________ Penelope Ingram Joe F. Pittman Associate Professor Interim Dean English Graduate School THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE LaShea Simmons Stuart A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama December 15, 2006 THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE La Shea Simmons Stuart Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this dissertation at its discretion, upon request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. __________________________ Signature of Author __________________________ Date of Graduation iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE Shea Stuart Doctor of Philosophy, December 15, 2006 (M.A., Auburn University, 2000) (B.A., Troy State University, 1996) 290 Typed Pages Directed by Paula R. Backscheider My dissertation is a cultural studies exploration of how the eighteenth-century British author Eliza Haywood legitimizes women’s presence in the legal landscape through illustrations of women’s experiences with contract, property, and marital law. Through an interrogation of the nexus of the legal/commercial with the personal, Haywood reveals the gaps in the social and sexual contract, and the contradictions of the patriarchal system are laid bare. I am concerned with the ways that Haywood explores the sexual and social contract and women’s position in relation to contract. Through contract, patriarchy is created and maintained, and Haywood often complicates issues of contract and patriarchy by creating characters who occupy positions that are difficult to define. By addressing issues which were foremost in the public mind, Haywood creates timely, important novels which insert iv women’s voices, women’s questions into debates over the Marriage Act, women’s separate property, and domestic violence. Eliza Haywood was an important participant in public sphere hegemonic negotiation about women and in the debates over women’s rights within the social contract and within marriage contracts. Haywood sees herself as an author who directly addresses women’s issues, and, through her novels, she enters the conversation concerning women’s subjectivity, the Marriage Act, and the inadequacies, even outright absences, of the law. Haywood was well aware that there was yet no real solution in the culture for a number of the issues she dramatizes in her novels, but her texts address the emotions and concerns women experienced as they negotiated their world and emphasize the need for real legal representation for women. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the many people who helped with the dissertation writing process. Thanks to Sharyn Pulling, Rhonda Powers, Joanne Campbell Tidwell, Jessica VanSlooten, and Kim Snyder Manganelli for love, patience, advice, laughter, and good chocolate. Thanks to Paula R. Backscheider, Alicia Carroll, and Penny Ingram for great help, useful advice, and for being wonderful mentors and to Donna Sollie for her thoughtful reading and questions. Thanks to Henry, Scout and Maisy who kept me company in the lonely hours of writing. Thanks also to my church family at Immanuel Presbyterian for prayers and comfort. My deepest gratitude is to my family for their love and support – my grandparents, Genese Gatlin and James and Mabel Simmons, great- aunts, great-uncles, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws who all kept me going. I especially want to thank my brother, Brandon Simmons, for his tech help and off-hours reading advice, my father, Rick Simmons, who taught me to par my way through, my mother, Beckey Simmons, who read to me, and my husband, Jamie Stuart, who always believed I could do this. vi Style manual or journal used: Chicago Manual of Style Computer software used: MS Word vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE ............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: HAVING IT BOTH WAYS: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, THE SEXUAL CONTRACT AND BIGAMOUS IDENTITIES .......................................................................................................49 CHAPTER TWO: “CARRYING ON THE LAW”: FINANCIAL (IN)DEPENDENCE AND THE AGENTS OF REVENGE...............................113 CHAPTER THREE: SUBVERSIVE DIDACTICISM: THE NEW METHOD OF ADVICE ....................................................................................173 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................264 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................282 viii INTRODUCTION THE ARBITRESS OF PASSION AND OF CONTRACT: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE LEGALITY OF LOVE “Great arbitress of passion!/Satiric precept warms the moral tale,/And causticks burn where the mild balsam fails;/A task reserved for her, to whom ‘tis given,/To stand the proxy of vindictive Heaven.”1 John Richetti, in his book Popular Fiction Before Richardson, describes his time sitting in the British Museum reading Eliza Haywood and longing for a cup of coffee and adult conversation.2 Even though Richetti finds merit in Haywood as a precursor to Richardson, his interest in her writing is clearly not piqued. Many years later, I sat in the British Library reading Haywood and wondering if the rather staid and stodgy librarians knew what they had handed me. I read Haywood’s novella Madam de Villesache with its graphic descriptions of domestic violence and murder, and I was reminded of when I had first read Haywood. After Mr. Munden seized Betsy’s pet squirrel and bashed its head on the hearth in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, I had read the rest of the book in a rush, horror and curiosity propelling 1 James Sterling, “To Mrs. Eliza Haywood on Her Writings,” (1732) Reprinted in Love in Excess, ed. David Oakleaf (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000), 278-279. 2 John Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson, Narrative Patterns: 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), xix. 1 me to the end. Those moments of shocking violence which punctuate Haywood’s writing are the few instances of her anger erupting on the page. Primarily, her critique of the society in which her characters and readers lived is more subtle. Her fabulous shifts in perspective, her placement of women in roles which directly question the values and assumptions of patriarchal society, and her glorious revelations of gaps and holes in the system to which women are subjected are her real techniques for laying bare the contradictions of the social contract. Since we know so little of the life of Eliza Haywood, although we are learning more,3 she becomes an empty sign, a site of contention and a gaping hole we as critics and readers fill with our own desires and ideologies. In this sense she is both an Arbitress of our own Passion and the chamber pot that Pope equates her with in the Dunciad.4 But the historical Haywood is not as important as the author Haywood. Although we know barely anything about the historical Haywood’s life, we do know that the author Haywood was well aware of the intricacies of the patriarchal and legal systems, and that she repeatedly schooled her readers in matters of contractual and marital law. Haywood herself is a cipher, but she attempted to keep her female readers from accepting roles as ciphers within the British legal system. 3 See Christine Blouch’s article, “Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity,” Studies in English Literature 31 (1991) and her introduction to The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, as well as Paula R. Backscheider’s “The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood,” Eighteenth- Century Fiction 11.1 (1998). Kathryn King is currently working on a full-length biography of Haywood. 4 For many years, critics assumed that Pope’s scathing portrayal of Haywood, with “cow-like udders and with ox-like eyes,” had affected her writing career, discouraging her from publishing novels. In recent years that theory has been debunked; her career as a playwright and journalist continued during the supposedly Pope-induced drought years, and she eventually wrote more bestsellers. 2 My dissertation is a cultural studies exploration of how Eliza Haywood legitimizes women’s presence in the legal landscape through illustrations of women’s experiences with contract, property, and marital law. Through pamphlets, broadsheets, novels, and public discussion, early to mid-eighteenth-century British men and women came to terms with new legislation on marriage, and with the implications of contractual monarchy. Haywood used her novels as vehicles for instructing her readers on