“Satiric Precept Warms the Moral Tale” Satire and Secret History in Eliza Haywood’S the Masqueraders (1725)
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“SATIRIC PRECEPT WARMS THE MORAL TALE” SATIRE AND SECRET HISTORY IN ELIZA HAYWOOD’S THE MASQUERADERS (1725) Fauve Vandenberghe Stamnummer: 01507754 Promotor: Prof. Dr. Andrew Bricker Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad master in de richting taal- en letterkunde: Engels Academiejaar: 2018 – 2019 Vandenberghe 2 Vandenberghe 3 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Professor Andrew Bricker, for his kind and enthusiastic guidance and patience throughout the process of writing this thesis. I also thank my friends and family for their encouragement and support over the course of the year. I am particularly grateful to Emma and Eline, for the many hours spent together in the library and for being my sounding board for the at times questionable research decisions that eventually led to this thesis. Vandenberghe 4 Vandenberghe 5 Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 7 1. Theoretical Framework: Satire and Secret History ..................................................... 15 1.1 Secret History ............................................................................................................. 15 1.2 Satire........................................................................................................................... 18 1.2.1 Eighteenth-Century Satire ..................................................................................... 18 1.2.2 Female-Authored Satire ........................................................................................ 22 1.3 Secret History and Satire ............................................................................................. 25 1.3.1 Theory .................................................................................................................. 25 1.3.2 Alexander Pope and Delarivier Manley: The Connection Explained ..................... 28 2. Contextualization: Haywood as Satirist ........................................................................ 32 2.1 Contemporary Reader Responses ................................................................................ 33 2.1.1 James Sterling ....................................................................................................... 33 2.1.2 Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad ............................................................................. 35 2.2 Satire and Secret History in Other Works .................................................................... 38 3. Analysis: The Masqueraders (1725) ............................................................................... 45 3.1 Note on the Text .......................................................................................................... 45 3.2 Materiality and Paratextual Elements .......................................................................... 45 3.3 Mock-Heroic ............................................................................................................... 52 3.4 Naming Practices ........................................................................................................ 58 3.5 Secrecy and Gossip ..................................................................................................... 61 3.6 Generic Hybridity and Affect ...................................................................................... 69 4. Further Implications: Satire, the Novel and Female Writers ...................................... 79 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 86 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 90 (27 343 words) Vandenberghe 6 Vandenberghe 7 Introduction Though one of the most prolific and best-selling authors of the first half of the eighteenth century, Eliza Haywood was largely forgotten until she received scholarly attention during the feminist recovery project of the early 1990s. This early revisionist work questioned traditional accounts of the rise of the novel as put forward by such works as Ian Watt’s influential The Rise of the Novel (1956), and more recent works by such scholars as Michael McKeon and Lennard Davis. Scholars such as Ros Ballaster and Nancy Armstrong critiqued these theoretical accounts of the history of the novel because they largely dismissed or devalued the crucial role women writers played within this supposed rise of the novel. Ballaster, for instance, takes issue with Watt’s staunch insistence on “formal realism”, the idea that the novel gradually became more referential because it reflected the daily concerns and authentic emotional experiences of the rising and increasingly literate middle class (31), as the defining characteristic of the early novel – to be found in the works of such authors as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson. She argues that it not only dismisses the continuous use of romantic elements in these writers’ work but also that it necessarily fails to take into account the considerable number of novelistic works written by women in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Ballaster explains that such writers as Haywood, Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley wrote amatory fiction – titillating, erotic and highly formulaic novelistic prose that is preoccupied with romance, passion and sexual desire – and argues that Watt’s definitional criteria of the early novel necessarily exclude and devalue this early fiction written by women (Seductive Forms 10). Even more recent accounts, such as McKeon’s less teleological and more dialectical model of “novelization”, Ballaster argues, do “little to displace the hegemony of this triumvirate in the history of the rise of the novel” (13). As a result of these pioneering efforts, such scholars as Ballaster firmly established Haywood, alongside with other female writers, on Vandenberghe 8 the map as key players in the early- to mid-eighteenth-century literary marketplace and, today, Haywood is considered a crucial figure in the literature of the first half of the eighteenth century. Such early feminist scholarship has been indispensable in recuperating Haywood but, at the same time, more recent scholars have become wary of the heavily politicized nature of this early work. Later scholars have justifiably put pressure on this strongly gender-focused approach, showing how it severely limits both the kind of writers we deem worthy of recovery and the questions we ask about the work of these female writers. Such an approach ultimately risks dismissing the aesthetic and narratological particularities of their writings and fails to recognize their deep engagement with other political and socio-historical issues. For instance, in her aptly titled article “Recovering from Recovery”, Laura Rosenthal acknowledges that early feminist forays have been incredibly important, but that “since these women were brought into the canon at a particular time and through the lens of particular questions, we still have much to learn beyond those initial inquiries” (10). Though Rosenthal’s focus is primarily on the political, economic and intellectual dimensions of their work, the same questions about women writers and their generic and formal choices need to be asked. Investigations into women’s experimentation with and subversion of generic conventions have proven fruitful in earlier scholarship, but often begin and end with the novel. Scholars argue that “we often privilege certain types of authors and certain genres” (Batchelor and Dow 5) and that it is high time that we look beyond these usual suspects. Such concerns about the need to diversify our understanding of the enormous breadth of genres within which women wrote and the issues they tackled thus seem to lie at the heart of countless recent works on eighteenth-century women writers more generally. Similar questions have been put forward specifically about Haywood and her long and wide-ranging career. Haywood has received vast amounts of critical interest over the past three decades, but more recent criticism questions the potentially stifling and limiting role the novel plays in how we Vandenberghe 9 have shaped our narratives around Haywood’s life and works. Paula Backscheider, for instance, urges scholars to reconsider the traditional “story”, as she calls it, of Haywood as a writer who wrote salacious, repetitive amatory fiction in the 1720s and later reformed and became a moralizing novelist (“The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels” 19). Instead of “a marked break in Haywood’s fiction”, she finds “a remarkable consistency in her stated ‘morals’ and the plots and themes that dramatize them” (31). Backscheider still primarily focusses on Haywood’s novelistic fiction, but scholars such as Kathryn King, Patsy Fowler and Amanda Hiner have expanded on such thinking and have been especially vocal about further derailing the “story” of Haywood. King’s A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (2012), the first critical biography of Haywood in almost a century, was a watershed moment in Haywood studies and, like Backscheider, King argues for a “long view” of her career: “we can begin to take the long view of her career and recognize that she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the course of nearly forty years as a professional writer” (7). Perhaps as a counterargument to Ballaster,