“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
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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.
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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)
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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
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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, who sees Haywood mostly as a politically disengaged writer whose “greatest innovation in the field of amatory fiction was to revitalize the representation of a desiring conflict into social, rather than party political, myth” (Seductive Forms 157), King’s biography focusses primarily on the importance of recognizing Haywood’s interest in partisan politics and aims to clarify and uncover
Haywood’s shifting and deeply ambiguous political affiliations throughout her career. By fully taking into consideration Haywood’s less discussed publications, King’s approach serves as an important moment in the critical reception of Haywood, shifting the conversation to Haywood’s secret histories, plays, periodicals and pamphlets, which have hitherto received only modest attention. Recent scholars have happily taken up this call not only to discuss her lesser-studied texts but also to reconsider old favourites with a renewed understanding. For instance, in the introduction to their special dedicated issue on Haywood for the Journal for Early Modern
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Cultural Studies (2014), Fowler and Hiner rightfully point out that “shared paradigms make the exchange of ideas between members of a scholarly community possible, but they also limit— in frighteningly tenacious ways—what can be seen, heard, and understood” (8). Instead, this issue thus examines her work from a “diversity of approaches, topics, and critical lenses” (3), ranging from the possibility of queer spaces in her fiction to the critical assessment of her periodical work, among other perspectives.
One area which remains relatively unexplored is Haywood’s contribution to the so- called Golden Age of Satire, an area of literary production that reached unknown heights during
Haywood’s career. King, for instance, posits that critics have overlooked “her affinities with
Pope and the other great Augustan satirists” (A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 44). She argues that a more thorough exploration of how her writings have “more in common with the work of Pope and Swift than either of her fellow satirists cared to admit” (44) is duly needed.
Especially Haywood’s early amorous, non-political fiction produced in the 1720s seems at odds with satire in virtually every way imaginable. When critics do mention her ventures into satiric writing, they do so only briefly and usually tend to resort back to the same two more overtly satirical texts that were written considerably later in her career. For instance, Joseph Bartolomeo includes Haywood in his survey of early eighteenth-century satire, but only mentions Anti-
Pamela (1741), her parodic response to the Pamela vogue, and The Adventures of Eovaai
(1737), an attack on the Walpole administration (260). Few critics, however, have read
Haywood’s works as fundamentally satirical.
In this thesis, I take my cue from King’s call to recognize Haywood’s contributions to the history of satire and I argue that previous scholarly efforts have emphasized this notion of the rise of the novel in Haywood’s amatory fiction to such an extent that it has obscured the satirical flavour of her early proto-novels. I more thoroughly explore Haywood’s role in this satiric tradition in The Masqueraders: or, Fatal Curiosity. Being the Secret History of a Late Vandenberghe 11
Amour (1724). This almost comically typical piece of amatory fiction contains all the elements one would expect from Haywood’s writings of this period: in a series of titillating seduction scenes, we follow the stereotypical libertine anti-hero Dorimenus and his sexual adventures in the whirl of the London masquerade. This leads to the eventual downfall of the two main female characters Dalinda and Philecta: both engage sexually with Dorimenus and both, it seems, are essentially punished for their sexual curiosity.
Given her enormous output during this period and the relatively unoriginal, repetitious nature of the story (at least at first glance), The Masqueraders unsurprisingly remains an understudied text. Ballaster treats the text somewhat extensively, but focusses solely on her usage of the trope of the masquerade. She claims that it serves as an opportunity for her protagonists to simultaneously indulge themselves sexually while maintaining their public reputation and goes on to argue that The Masqueraders subtly points out the relative artificiality of concepts such as femininity and masculinity (Seductive Forms 185). In recent years, critics such as Karin Kukkonen and Susan Lanser have reassessed these earlier assumptions, in a similar way as King, but these have similarly tended to be brief discussions. Using cognitive sciences as her theoretical framework, Kukkonen argues that, rather than merely arousing her readers, Haywood frequently highlights moments of “mind reading” and mental processes necessary to the practice of the masquerade in order to make her readers aware of the workings of certain mind games (165). In similar revisionist terms, Lanser addresses the difficulty of recognizing non-normative relationships and identities in inherently domestic, normative narrative and discursive structures. Taking The Masqueraders as an example, she writes that the sexually arousing gossip about heterosexual intercourse between the two female characters is an example of structurally sapphic and erotic relationships (275). It is, however, only with
Tiffany Potter’s publication of a critical edition of The Masqueraders in 2015 (which also contains The Surprize: or, Constancy Rewarded), that we see the first longer, sustained piece
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“the story” of Haywood by linking these two texts in particular because of their seemingly opposing views on morality and appropriate social conduct. Taken together, they serve as a much-needed illustration of the “nuance and variation of Haywood’s first period, so long dismissed as formulaic and repetitive” (4).
This is all to say that The Masqueraders, though relatively understudied, serves as a strong test case for the critical reassessment Haywood underwent over the course of the past decades: from Ballaster’s mostly gender-focussed approach to more recent explorations of, for instance, the narratological dimensions of her work with the aid of cognitive sciences.
Following such scholars as King who ask to recognize the wide variety of genres within which
Haywood wrote, I take a similar revisionist stance and use The Masqueraders to establish
Haywood as an astute satirist. More specifically, I contend that Haywood both employs and subverts common satiric conventions, showing the limitations and the inherent misogyny of such forms. I then go on to argue that she also uses elements of the now largely forgotten genre of secret history – sometimes described as a peculiar form of female-authored satire (Ballaster,
“Manl(e)y Forms” 218) – and combines those satirical elements with her trademark titillating and erotic descriptions that increase the reader’s affective identification with the characters
(Lubey 310). In this way, Haywood seems to suggest that a satiric practice in which the reader is simultaneously encouraged to identify with and condemn the satiric victim is a more effective way of instructing her readers than more traditional satiric defences, which staunchly insist on and endeavour to create an absolute difference between satirist, satiric object and reader (Bogel
21).
I discuss both satire and secret history in chapter one based on the works of such scholars as McKeon, Rachel Carnell, Dustin Griffin and Fredric Bogel, with a particular focus on the definitional problems and gendered dimensions of both genres. My research is in accord with Vandenberghe 13 that of such recent critics as Ashley Marshall, who criticizes the tendency to define the era’s satiric production based on a small number of highly canonized works (4), and Melinda Rabb, who emphasizes the limitations of traditional definitions of satire to account for women’s contribution to satire (Satire and Secrecy 10). Both scholars have a thoroughly more inclusive perspective on satire that enables the possibility to include texts which do not readily conform to commonplace definitions of satire, such as The Masqueraders, in the history of satire.
Further, I also provide a theoretical methodology with which to approach The Masqueraders as satirical. The text borrows certain elements of the then immensely popular genre of secret history – highly self-reflexive, thinly veiled political allegories in which authors criticized the moral and sexual corruption of politicians and the court. Rabb explores the marked similarities between satire and secret histories and argues persuasively that considering secret histories as satirical “opens satire to the feminization of various kinds” (Satire and Secrecy 7).
Following this theoretical framework, I establish Haywood’s early fiction as satirical with a two-fold approach. First, in chapter two, I examine contemporary reader responses to
Haywood’s work by Alexander Pope and James Sterling, as well as how Haywood employs and puts pressure on the satiric tradition over the course of her career. Such a contextualization is important because it illustrates not only that contemporaneous readers thought of Haywood as satirical but also how Haywood and her contemporaries perceived a similarity between secret histories and satire. This critical attitude towards common satiric defences and a persistent interest in the interconnectedness of secret history and satire form a valuable starting point for my analysis of The Masqueraders. Second, then, I analyse The Masqueraders in chapter three and show how Haywood puts pressure on common satiric practices and lays bare the similarities between secret history and satire. Despite the satirical undercurrents of this text, I also stress that Haywood’s approach to satire is decidedly different: she creates a unique kind of compassionate satire by incorporating these satirical elements in an otherwise typically
Vandenberghe 14 amorous novel, an argument I laid out above. In so doing, I take the first tentative steps in more extensively establishing Haywood as a satirist and, more importantly, one who does not slavishly imitate her male contemporary satirists but constructs her own distinct type of female- authored satire.
In the fourth and final chapter, I conclude this thesis by considering the larger implications such an analysis of The Masqueraders has on not only Haywood studies, but also prevailing conceptions about both the relationship between satire and the novel and women’s contribution to the history of satire more generally. First, I argue that Haywood’s particular brand of satire should cause us to question when we locate the gradual mitigation and domestication of satire into the novel, which is usually thought to occur only around mid- century (Knight 226). Second, my reading of The Masqueraders is part of an increasing tendency to portray eighteenth-century women writers not solely as novelists, but also as active participants in the history of satire. However, I also suggest that a stronger emphasis on both a more thorough historicization of satiric practice and an awareness of the limitations and inherently biased nature of the common definitions of satire with which we work, opens up the possibility to find a larger and more varied assortment of female-authored satires.
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1. Theoretical Framework: Satire and Secret History
1.1 Secret History
Though long dismissed as topical and poorly written proto-novels, scholars have recently become increasingly interested in secret histories as a genre worth examining in its own right
(Bullard 23). They have called attention to the fact that, for eighteenth-century readers, this would have been recognizable as a distinct genre and thus deserves closer analytical scrutiny than critics have previously assumed. Secret histories came in many shapes and forms, which makes it arguably one of the more complex genres of the eighteenth century to define. In what follows, my intention is not to expand on its intricate history or to delineate every possible variant, but to clarify some of the key features of the genre in general, as well as to touch upon the state of secret history by the time Haywood was writing in the 1720s.
Incredibly popular during the Restoration period and the reign of Queen Anne (1702-
14), secret histories re-plot official accounts of recent political events (Bullard 4). A central rhetorical strategy is a dichotomy between “concealing” and “revealing”: writers aimed to expose the private secrets and sexual intrigues of those in power but did so by allegorizing and obscuring both the individuals in question and themselves (McKeon 472). For instance, writers denounced the contemporary British political landscape but opted for a thinly veiled temporally and spatially removed (or romantic and imaginary) setting. Though secret history was originally a genre associated with the Whig opposition, since the first decades of the eighteenth century,
Tory writers readily made use of the format as well. For example, Manley’s best-selling and thoroughly studied The New Atalantis (1709) was published anonymously and was presented as the translation of the history of Atalantis, a thinly disguised version of contemporary Britain.
Manley’s text follows the three allegorical figures of Astrea, Intelligence and Virtue on their journey through Atalantis and the story is structured “as a collection of gossipy anecdotes referring to court and public figures through pseudonyms” (Carnell, “From Secret History to
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Novel” 7). It also usefully illustrates this central interplay between revealing and concealing:
Intelligence reveals Atalantis’ state secrets and the sexual intrigues and vices of those in power, which, in reality, obliquely referred to the era’s most prominent politicians and members of the court.
By the 1710s, secret history saw a decline in its political and cultural importance and, by the time The Masqueraders was published, the genre was well past its heyday. However, when a genre loses its literary and cultural prominence, it “begins simultaneously to adapt and deconstruct itself” (Backscheider, Selected Fiction xxxv), resulting in interesting experimentation with its conventions. Many scholars study the afterlife of secret history because they consider it one of the many voices that helped shape the early novel. McKeon, for instance, is one of the first scholars to write about secret histories and he positions them in a larger epistemological movement of the emergence of separate spheres of the public and the private, in that it “domesticates state political through the “sexual politics” of amatory intrigue and erotic romance” (472). McKeon is particularly interested in what he calls the “privatization” or “internalization” of secret history, that is, “the gradual shift of normative weight from public referent to private reference” (621), or, in other words, the integration of its conventions in the more private and psychologically interior energy of the newly emerging novel. Similarly,
Carnell argues that its “layers of narrators and abrupt shifts between third- and first-person narration” can be seen as a precursor “to the complex narrative shifts—from “objective narrative” to “coloured narrative” and “free indirect style”—that later novelists would begin developing towards the end of the eighteenth century” (“From Secret History to Novel” 7).
Particularly interesting for this thesis is that scholars consider Haywood to be a key contributor to the development of the genre. They mostly highlight her engagement with its conventions as a way to elucidate her political affiliations or to show secret history’s influence on the novel. They have recognized the genre’s influence on Haywood’s Secret History of the Vandenberghe 17
Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1725) and Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1727), both of which echo more or less conventional interpretations of the genre because they had a corresponding key and targeted real individuals (Carnell,
“Slipping from Secret History to Novel” 16). Carnell, for instance, argues that Haywood’s use of secret history is especially fruitful in uncovering her shifting political affiliations:
“Haywood’s facility in deploying these dual narratological devices of concealment and confession helps explain our difficulty in pinning down either her intrinsic political sympathies or her shifting partisan allegiances” (“Eliza Haywood and the Narratological Tropes of Secret
History” 103). More importantly, critics have also addressed how Haywood transfers certain tropes of the genre to texts that are less overtly political and recognizable as secret histories, showing how “her contribution to the development of secret history lies as much in the literary as the political sphere” (Bullard 181). For example, less interested in its implications about
Haywood’s political alliances, Eve Tavor Bannet has shown how Haywood’s experimentation with the narrative devices of secret history in The Invisible Spy (1755) have influenced the evolution of the novel. These tropes “that she deployed in much of her amatory fiction as well as in her secret histories” illustrate that “Haywood was making a polemical statement both about her own career and about the ‘novel’ at the end of her life” (“The Narrator as Invisible Spy”
143).
Such research demonstrates abundantly that Haywood was familiar with secret history’s conventions and self-consciously experimented with them for other purposes than their obvious polemical and political function throughout her career. As such, it serves as additional support for this thesis because I similarly examine secret history’s literary afterlife in The Masqueraders by examining Haywood’s engagement with and adaptation of such key rhetoric devices as secrecy, revelation and gossip.
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1.2 Satire
This section offers a relatively brief introduction to eighteenth-century satire because the specific elements that are relevant to my analysis of The Masqueraders (such as the mock- heroic, satiric naming practices and satire’s relationship with the novel) will be elaborated on and explained more fully in chapter three and four. In particular, I focus on recent studies of eighteenth-century satire that are more sceptical about how the genre has traditionally been defined. I also introduce the ideas of Fredric Bogel, who characterizes Augustan satire as centrally and obsessively concerned with the creation of difference between satirist and satiric object, because, as I argue in chapter three, this is precisely where Haywood’s satiric practice diverges from such well-studied satirists as Pope. More importantly, in a second subdivision, I define the ways in which scholarship on the satiric production of this era has obscured women’s contribution to the genre. I identify some of the feminist efforts of the past three decades that have attempted to address this lacuna, illustrating how the neglect of Haywood’s role in the history of satire is the expression of a larger structural problem that has unsuccessfully acknowledged the biased nature of prevailing attitudes on satire and has failed to study satire from a more gender-sensitive perspective.
1.2.1 Eighteenth-Century Satire
Haywood’s exceptionally long-spanning career coincides roughly with the great age of satire in English literature, perhaps the only period during which satire was a distinct genre. The literary production of satire reached unknown heights between 1660 and 1800 (Griffin 1) but flourished especially in the last decades of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth centuries with the publications of major works by such celebrated satirists as John Dryden, Pope and Jonathan Swift. Satire is hard to pin down conceptually, but, traditionally, scholars have insisted on two crucial elements: it must be an attack and must contain some element of humour Vandenberghe 19 or irony (Frye 224). M.H Abrams, for instance, likewise writes that satire “can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn or indignation” (284). Ruben Quintero echoes this view: “some form of attack or ridicule is necessary for something to be satiric” (6).
Functionally speaking, the idea went that satire’s moral norms are “relatively clear” (Frye 224), making the satirist a moral arbiter who exposes and ridicules the vices and follies of others in order to instruct the reader: “the idea that satire is justified in its nastiness by its moral or didactic functions has run through the history of satiric theory” (Knight 5). Dryden, for instance, holds the view that “the best and finest manner of Satire” was “that sharp, well-manner’d way, of laughing a Folly out of Countenance” (qtd. in Bricker 154). In other words, through a combination of these two elements – both ridicule or attack and humour – the satirist is able to reform or correct the victim’s or even the reader’s behaviour.
However, both then and now, critics of satire have successfully complicated such accounts of the nature of satire: they are highly sceptical of this supposed instructive function and satire’s ostensible moral clarity. As Griffin puts it, “the notion that clear moral standards are at the center of satire is likewise open to challenge” (37), just as Knight argues that satire is
“independent of moral purpose” and its merit is “in perception rather than changed behaviour”
(5). In other words, rather than offering an easy ethical and moral agreement between satirist and reader, the power of effective works of satire lies in forcing the reader to think critically and sceptically about not only the satiric target but also their own understandings and beliefs.
Swift’s ambiguous satires, for instance, seem more concerned with “vexing” (Griffin 27) its audience, than with making a declarative statement on how to reform the world. In a short essay on a broomstick – a meditation of the nature of satire – Swift writes that “he sets up to be a universal Reformer and Corrector of Abuses, a Remover of Grievances, rakes into every Slut's
Corner of Nature, bringing hidden Corruptions to the Light, and raises a mighty Dust where
Vandenberghe 20 there was none before, sharing deeply all the while, in the very same Pollutions he pretends to sweep away” (4). Rather than casting the satirist as a high-minded corrector of vice, Swift acknowledges the profound and perhaps deeply unsettling proximity between satirist and satiric object, resisting “the kinds of black-and-white binaries that divide author and reader from victim and target” (Bricker, “Laughing a Folly out of Countenance” 171).
Most notably, Bogel has written extensively on this troubled relationship between satirist, satiric object and reader. He rebuts how the relationship between satirist and satiric object has traditionally been conceptualized as stable and securely different. Instead, he persuasively argues that “Augustan satire is better understood as a literary mechanism for the production of differences in the face of anxiety about replication, identity, sameness and undifferentiation” (21). He views satire as fundamentally rooted in and motivated by the satirist’s identification of an entity that is not alien enough: “this book’s foundational contention is that the satire of this period does not simply register a prior difference between satirist and satiric object . . . satire works to produce a difference between two figures whom the satirist – who is usually one of these figures – perceives to be insufficiently differentiated” (42). Bogel rightfully observes that this anxiety about sameness seems to drive much of eighteenth-century satire, but this is not without exceptions. Certain contemporary satirists, such as Swift and – as
I will argue in chapter three – Haywood, nonetheless position themselves as deeply sceptical of satiric practices that purport to offer an easy, unproblematic relationship between satirist, victim and reader.
This is all to say that critics of eighteenth-century satire have thoroughly questioned the motivations which compelled satirists to ridicule certain subjects and the extent to which moral instruction was central to satiric practices. Though often admirably illuminating studies, such scholars of Augustan satire have generally tended to characterize eighteenth-century satire based exclusively on its most famous practitioners, especially Dryden, Swift, Pope and Vandenberghe 21
Fielding. In her recent revision of the practice of satire in eighteenth-century England, Marshall criticizes this approach and proposes a radical redefinition of satire by taking into account a much broader and representative sample of texts. This necessarily complicates most conventional notions of satire, which still typically define it as an attack that involves humour or wit. Griffin’s persuasive argument, for instance, rightfully assesses that it is rare that “satirists
(or their readers) attain a secure eminence from which their enemies can be seen in their petty simplicity” (168), but still assigns the power of this nuanced stance to humour and laughter
(169). Rather than characterizing satire as a homogenous and stable category, then, Marshall’s taxonomic methodology allows for a wide variety of works with different motives, judgements and intensities to be classified as satirical: “much of this satire is not terribly funny, some of it is written not to punish or reform a target but to instruct like-minded readers (and hence is positive, not negative, in thrust) and “attack” is a crude oversimplification or simply not true in a substantial number of cases” (3).
Such an approach to the literary production of the eighteenth century provides an important backdrop for this thesis. In chapter four, I compare my findings with Marshall’s detailed overview of the type of satire this period produced because it confirms that, though
The Masqueraders is “not terribly funny” and is not simply described as an “attack” (3), it can nonetheless still be categorized as satirical. Because Marshall’s study is one of the most recent and authoritative works on eighteenth-century satire, some of my methodological choices are informed by her approach; my decision to include contemporary reader responses, for instance, stems from her call to include works which do not necessarily fit traditional definitions of satire, but were nonetheless considered satirical by contemporaries (4). Moreover, though Marshall’s perspective is not explicitly gender-informed, her inclusive view encompasses a more diverse group of texts – including those by female writers – in contrast to those earlier studies that have
Vandenberghe 22 done little to broaden their scope beyond the era’s most enduring satirists and continue to define it as an inherently masculine genre.
1.2.2 Female-Authored Satire
As explained above, most of the field’s prominent scholars such as Griffin, Bogel, and Knight have thoroughly explored eighteenth-century satire, but have only studied a limited number of works written by, overwhelmingly, male writers. With the rare exception of, for instance, a chapter on Jane Austen in Claude Rawson’s Satire and Sentiment 1600-1830, women writers remain largely excluded from such major studies of the history and theory of eighteenth-century satire: “few women writers have been considered worthy of membership in the clubby world of satire” (Rabb, Satire and Secrecy 11). Scholars contribute this absence to women’s inaccessibility to this type of writing because of prevailing patriarchal ideologies about femininity and they argue that satire’s aggressiveness and public nature made it a predominantly male genre: “the organization of culture has made it difficult for women to write and publish satire . . . because women were long permitted little knowledge of the world outside their own domestic domain” (Hammond, Pope Among the Satirists 5). Though the past decades have seen an exceptional surge in scholarship on women’s contribution to the novel, similar sustained efforts to female satirists of the eighteenth century are yet to be undertaken. When critics do take a gendered approach to satire, these tend to examine women as the objects, and not the practitioners, of satire. For example, in her influential The Brink of All we Hate, Felicity
Nussbaum explains that the idea of the “unruly woman” is a recurring trope in eighteenth- century satire: “the myth of satire against women includes the myth that women create chaos, and the imposition of form (satire) on formlessness provides meaning and rationality when the fear of meaninglessness and insanity arises” (20). Vandenberghe 23
None of these scholars, however, seem to deny that female writers actively contributed to the genre and that such authors do, in fact, deserve a more extensive exploration in their own right. Griffin, for one, recognizes that discovering “how women writers sought to evade or overcome such discouragements”, would not only help establish a female satiric tradition but
“might also enhance our sense of how satire functions within a culture” (190). Similarly, Bogel acknowledges that there is such a thing as a female satiric tradition, but that because it “defines itself as both different from and in opposition to the male tradition”, a more thorough exploration of masculine satire is needed for “an adequate representation of the parallel tradition that presupposes and differs from it” (viii). Despite this acknowledgement of the urgent need for further research, a more extensive exploration of what such a female satiric tradition would look like or how it would function within known paradigms of satiric theory remains a lacuna that needs to be addressed.
This is not to say that female satirists have gone by completely unnoticed, but they are still, at best, marginal figures in these studies. More recently, then, scholars with a more explicit feminist approach have occasionally shed light on the satirical elements of the work of a handful of individual authors. Elizabeth Young examines Behn’s satiric verse, which shows “her familiarity with the masculine conventions of satire but also reveals her original contributions to the development of the complex theory and practice of satire” (185). Similarly, Adeline John-
Putra studies late eighteenth-century women poets such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld and their subversion of the mock-heroic: “while some women poets used satire in the service of domestic womanhood, others exploited the gap between the high and low to complicate and critique the terms of domesticity” (“Satire and Domesticity in Late Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry”
4). In so doing, these scholars highlight that women writers wrote satirically while also putting pressure on those very practices they were employing.
Vandenberghe 24
Others move away from more conventional satiric verse1 and examine how women, in a similar way to Fielding or Tobias Smollett, helped integrate satire into the novel. Though it has been established women wrote novels before it became the most popular mode of writing in the 1740s and 1750s, most of this research focusses on mid- to late-eighteenth-century novelists’ use of social satire in the increasingly dominant sentimental and domestic discourse of the novel2. Most notably, Nussbaum and Sara Gadeken find this process in the writing of
Sarah Fielding whose novels are “gently satirical without being vengeful or explicitly personal”
(Nussbaum 444) because they allow “certain strains within an overwhelmingly male satirical tradition to intersect with a newly developing sentimental discourse that is more amenable to women” (Gadeken 542). Similarly, often discussed as a predecessor to Austen, the novels of
Frances Burney have recently come to be appreciated as important works in the history of satire as well: “devotees of the ‘rise of the novel’ theory have been too focused on how Burney can be made to serve as a transitional novelist between Smollett and Austen to recognize her own considerable satiric accomplishments” (Fung 953). All of this shows how there was a wealth of female satirical novelists in the second half of the century.
Though slowly and arduously, scholars seem to be increasingly interested in how female writers navigated the satiric literary landscape of the period and the ways in which they helped shape the history of satire. All the above suggests that women only contributed to the history of satire either as writers of a more toned-down, domestic variant of novelistic satire in the latter half of the century or as lesser-known and imitative participants of the dominant poetic tradition
1 Kairoff offers an overview of female satiric poets of the era and identifies a handful of lesser-known satiric poets including Elizabeth Tipper, Anne Finch and Elizabeth Carter (281-85). These are all preliminary surveys, at best, and further sustained research would have to be done in order to fully grasp their contributions to this poetic tradition. 2 Other notable and highly influential works on late eighteenth-century social satire by female novelists are the 1995 collection Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire which dedicates several chapters to the works of such female novelists as Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney or Elizabeth Hamilton and Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (2002) by Audrey Bilger, which does not analyse satire specifically, but elucidates the power of comedy and laughter as a weapon of critique on patriarchal conceptions of womanhood in their novels. Vandenberghe 25 during its heyday in the Restoration period and the early decades of the eighteenth century. As early as the 1990s, Ballaster recognizes the danger of this tendency to only search for female- authored satire in forms traditionally defined as satirical. In a similar way as Marshall, she is sceptical of defining the entirety of a period’s satiric production based on a handful of canonical authors. Ballaster sees scandal chronicles of the early decades of the century “as a peculiarly feminine form of satire” and argues that secret history writers, like Manley, “set out to develop and ‘authorize’ a position for the female satirist other than that of meta-satirist” (“Manl(e)y
Forms: Sex and the Female Satirist” 218). Rabb further expands on this idea and proposes that redefining what counts as satiric discourse would allow female-authored texts in the style of secret histories to be more easily included in the history of satire. Because The Masqueraders’ indebtedness to secret history is a crucial part of establishing the text as satirical, the next section elaborates on Rabb’s intervention in more detail.
1.3 Secret History and Satire
This chapter explains the intricate connection between secret history and satire, which is most elaborately theorized upon in Rabb’s Satire and Secrecy. In the second part of this section, I explore how this connection is manifested in a concrete example: I look at how Pope’s The
Rape of the Lock (1714) is indebted to and differentiates itself with the highly scandalous genre of secret history.
1.3.1 Theory
This idea of the rise of the novel has dominated conversations on eighteenth-century female writers over the past decades and it has been equally as pervasive in scholarship on the importance of secret histories to literary history. Though scholars have advocated to recognize secret history as a genre worthy of being studied in its own right (Bullard 2), most research still
Vandenberghe 26 tends to focus on its importance as a predecessor to the novel. An exception to this rule is the work of Rabb, who asks what happens when “we consider the power dynamic of secret history as not toward equality but toward aggression, not as toward the novel but as toward satire” (82).
Her revisionist intervention is also explicitly a feminist one. Like Ballaster, she views secret histories as a peculiar form of female-authored satire because, though both men and women wrote secret histories, women wrote many of them (Rabb 69) and such writers as Behn, Manley and Haywood are often considered its primary practitioners. Rabb offers a conceptual framework within which to approach secret histories as satire and stresses two crucial elements in particular: the importance of secrecy in satiric discourse and, most importantly, the similarity of the verbal dynamics of gossip and slander to that of satire’s typical blazing aggression.
Scholars often define satire as an attack or emphasize the crucial role of, for instance, irony and humour, which conversely has “deflected attention away from its secretiveness”
(Rabb 3). Both genres have in common an intense and obsessive interest in secrecy and both imply access to secret information. Rabb sees this shared wish to expose the secrets and vices of the world as a way to connect the “amatory practices of secret history with the ironic aggression of satire” (31). Further, one reason for women’s relative absence in most major works on eighteenth-century satire, Rabb argues, might be that we need to adjust the very parameters with which we define satire. Rather than exclusively associating satire with aggressive discourse that ‘kills’, ‘pierces’ or ‘wounds’ its victims, Rabb’s gender-informed approach reassess aggressive language and “positions manly satire along a spectrum of aggressive language beginning in gossip and slander. That gossip and slander are traditionally associated with women opens satire to the feminization of various kinds” (7). Griffin tentatively explores possible reasons why so little women writers have been accounted for in the history of satire and hints at a similar explanation when he suggests that “women have been trained not to develop or display aggressiveness” and that “hostile images of gossip, nag, complainer, Vandenberghe 27 termagant, and virago may have discouraged women from cultivating in public a form that deals in grumbling and railing” (190). Though he sees this as a reason why female writers would refrain from writing satire, women did, in fact, write a range of gossipy narratives (such as secret histories), which suggests that this might be a productive place to start to explore women’s contribution to this satiric tradition.
Gossip is aggressive, Rabb argues, because it erases and confuses the boundaries between private and public (53) and because it gains its power from the “illusion of mastery gained through taking imaginative possession of another’s experience” (Knight, qtd. in Rabb
52). Drawing from such scholars as Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman, Rabb goes on to highlight the aggressiveness of such speech acts as gossip because it inflicts or performs pain, making it a particular feminine manifestation of satire. Even though both satirist and gossip disclose information about the satiric victim without their consent and both have tangible social and moral aftereffects in the real world because it can kill reputations (Rabb 48), the difference between the two is not so much a functional or moral-ethical disparity, but one of social status: gossip is idle chatter, whereas satirists reach heroic heights.
This inclusion of gossip’s aggression and blurring of the boundaries between public/private as a key satiric rhetorical device enables the possibility to incorporate secret history in the history of satire. Rabb characterizes the narrative voice of secret history as “a gossipy third-person narration of scandalous characters and sexual/political events” (75).
Nicola Parsons likewise sees gossip’s importance to the genre of the secret history and argues that gossip and secrecy were ubiquitous in the literature of the early decades of the eighteenth century: “gossip, and its reiteration in the mediated form of the secret history could have serious material effects” (56). Like gossip, and like personal satire, secret histories reveal and release stories about the scandalous secrets of a third party. Perhaps the biggest difference is the difference in reception: “what might seem mere tabloid exposure of dirty secrets” in secret
Vandenberghe 28 histories, “is transformed by satirists (who sometimes read “trash” and sometimes appeared in it, Pope especially)” (Rabb 69) into high art.
1.3.2 Alexander Pope and Delarivier Manley: the Connection Explained
Pope’s mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock, serves as a useful example of the tension between secret history and satire as described above and illustrates how the inclusion of secret histories in our history of satire does not only allow us to include a wider variety of texts in the canon but also alters our understanding of the era’s most enduring satirical works. Moreover,
Haywood chooses The Rape of the Lock as an epigraph to The Masqueraders, so this section provides valuable background information for my analysis of Haywood’s text in chapter three.
Pope is famously scornful of grub street writers and was eager to distance his own poetic practice from such hack writers. In contrast, he presents himself as a “hyper-masculine epic hero”, who embodies “solitary moral integrity in an age of beautiful social hypocrisy” (Deutsch,
“Pope, Self and the World” 15). In The Rape of the Lock, he derides such scandal writers and alludes to the period’s most popular secret history – Manley’s The New Atalantis. The thief of
Belinda’s lock of hair proclaims that “so long as Atalantis shall be read, or the small Pillow grace a Lady’s Bed . . . So long my Honour, Name, and Praise shall live!” (70). Through its mock-heroic tone, Pope pokes fun at the ephemerality of The New Atalantis and, by extension, the genre of secret histories more generally. His disdain towards The New Atalantis might have originated from his recognition that it “was meant to be read far into the future, and had been written to join the immortal pantheon of classical satire” (Santesso 195). For instance, in her introduction to the second volume of the work, Manley demonstrates her familiarity with
Dryden’s “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (131) and squarely positions herself within this tradition of satirical writing: “The New Atalantis seems, my Lord, to be written like Varonian satires, on different subjects, tales, stories and characters of Vandenberghe 29 invention, after the Manner of Lucian, who copy’d from Varro” (132). Pope’s contemptuous attitude, thus, illustrates not only his fear of being linked with such scandalous “scribblers”, at the same time, his effort to distance his own satiric writings from such works also acknowledges secret history’s marked similarity to satire.
Interestingly, despite Pope’s continuous efforts to distance his work from secret histories, amatory fiction or any type of “feminine” literature, The Rape of the Lock does not only subvert epic conventions, it also blends “aspects of secrecy, gossip, and secret history with mock-heroics and Ovidian allusion” (Rabb, Satire and Secrecy 152). For instance, it shares with the genre the importance of concealing and revealing secrets: “Already hear the horrid things they say, / Already see you a degraded Toast, / And all your Honour in a Whisper lost!” (76).
Similarly, to avid readers of amatory fictions, such as those by Behn and Manley, some of the poem’s erotic language and titillating voyeurism would surely have felt familiar. Pope speaks of, for instance, “Trembling hands” (60), “ardent eyes” (60), “am’rous sighs” (60) and “Melting tears” (60). Moreover, the poem is inspired by a real event: a lord snipped off a lock of Arabella
Fermour’s hair, which initiated a fight between the two families: “The Rape of the Lock was a kind of ‘secret history’ – a story that had a ‘true story’ behind it” (Mullan 3). In his introduction to the poem, Pope claims that his literary reinterpretation of this event was originally “intended only to divert a few young ladies”, but that “as it was communicated with the air of a secret, it soon found its way into the world” (40). In this way, the private becomes public and his mock- heroic poem almost literally takes the form of a piece of social gossip.
Besides this reference to The New Atalantis, the general prominence of secrecy and scandal in the poem and its roots in a piece of real-life social gossip, Pope also more openly recognizes the similarity between The Rape of the Lock and secret histories. In 1715, Pope pseudo-anonymously published A Key to the Lock under the name of Esdras Barnivelt. This text is stylized as a key which offers the reader the names of the individuals to whom the
Vandenberghe 30 characters of The Rape of the Lock refer to. Rabb is the first to recognize that this text
“resembles the textual apparatus that accompanied secret memoirs more than it does the conventions of heroic epic” (Satire and Secrecy 139). Here, Pope explicitly draws from and satirizes secret histories, which often had keys identifying the referents of its characters, either published separately or bound in with the texts themselves. It identifies the usual suspects such as Sarah Churchill and Abigail Masham, Queen Anne’s favourites who were famously satirized in The New Atalantis. A Key to the Lock’s language also strongly echoes secret history’s claims to reveal hidden truths that are of incredible importance to state politics: Barnivelt, whose “deep
Knowledge dark Designs reveals” (8), is said to “save this Land from dangerous Mystery” (7).
Similarly, the title page describes the text’s objective as “proving, beyond all contradiction, the dangerous tendency of a late poem, entituled, The rape of the lock, to government and religion”
(1).
Pope, however, ridicules the possibility of the poem’s similarity with secret histories
(Rabb 141). He mocks the genre by identifying more than one, and often blatantly absurd, referents for his characters. Shock the lap-dog, for instance represents Dr. Sacheverell, a high- profile clergyman, just as the main character Belinda is identified as both “Great Britain, or
(which is the same thing) her late Majesty” (13) (i.e. Queen Anne) and “the Popish Religion, or the Whore of Babylon” (29). In other words, he creates a key which clearly alludes to such popular secret histories as The New Atalantis but exaggerates it to such an extent that the mere possibility of The Rape of the Lock as a secret history seems almost ridiculous.
All of this illustrates secret history’s and satire’s shared interest in secrecy and intrigue, an acknowledgement Rabb has forcefully advocated for. Moreover, Pope’s decision to satirize
Manley’s text, and secret histories more generally, also confirms Bogel’s characterization of
Augustan satire as fundamentally producing difference, rather than defining it. These elements are important because, as I will explain in chapter three of this thesis, Haywood chooses The Vandenberghe 31
Rape of the Lock as an epigraph for her secret history precisely to mock Pope’s staunch insistence on their absolute difference and, by extension, she is critical of the very process of satiric differentiation itself.
Vandenberghe 32
2. Contextualization: Haywood as Satirist
In what follows, I attempt to determine the nature of Haywood’s satire by adopting an approach that is consistent with Marshall’s recent critical rethinking of Augustan satire. She proposes a more open set of formulae and studies a much wider set of texts including works labelled as a satire, works that would have been considered satirical by contemporaries, and works which modern critics have studied as satirical (4). It is this second element, contemporary reader responses, that this section seeks to address. I survey a review by James Sterling, which was included in the preface to Secret Histories, Novels and Poems (1725), and Pope’s depiction of
Haywood in The Dunciad and argue that Haywood’s secret histories and early fiction more generally were almost certainly considered satirical in their own time3. I conclude this section by considering how not only her contemporaries but also Haywood herself routinely points towards both the limits of common satiric practices and the connection between secret history and satire throughout her career. This serves as additional support for my claim that Haywood’s experimentation with the conventions of secret history forms a valuable heuristic for establishing Haywood as a satirist. Furthermore, including a wider set of test cases, rather than offering a decontextualized reading of merely one text, also contributes to what King has called a “long view” of Haywood’s career that recognizes that “she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the course of nearly forty years as a professional writer” (A Political
Biography 7).
3 Needless to say, perhaps, these responses are highly idiosyncratic cases. They do, however, elucidate individual instances of eighteenth-century responses to Haywood’s work, illuminating certain aspects of her career which might have been evident for her contemporaries, but are perhaps less so for modern scholars because of the complicated and convoluted path Haywood’s works have undergone. Further archival research into contemporary reader responses (such as diaries, epistolary correspondence etc.) would prove highly useful in creating a more accurate picture of the extent to which Haywood was considered satirical, but such investigations were beyond the scope of this project.
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2.1 Contemporary Reader Responses
2.1.1 James Sterling
Unfortunately, no documented critical responses to The Masqueraders exist, but the 1725 collection Secret Histories, Novels and Poems (which features this text) contains four reviews at the beginning of its first volume, giving us a sense of how her amatory fiction of the 1720s more generally was received and providing an insight into how Haywood (and her booksellers) sought to frame herself and the texts included in this collection. Most of these confirm this longstanding perception of Haywood as a writer who writes passionate novels that provoke extreme emotional and affective responses in her readers. For instance, Richard Savage admires the lyricism of her amorous prose which “in sweeter Harmony refines, than Numbers flowing thro’ the Muse’s Lines” (qtd. in Potter 164). Others continue in the same vein and write that
“’Tis Love Eliza’s soft Affection fires, Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires” (anonymous, qtd. in Potter 166) or that they “feel that Fire YOUR Words alone can paint! YOUR Looks inspire!”
(anonymous, qtd. in Potter 165).
Sterling’s response to Haywood’s writing is possibly the most often cited of all these reviews because he famously dubs Haywood the “Great Arbitress of Passion” whose
“wond’rous Art, mov’st the Heart” (qtd. in Potter 163). For the most part, he likewise commends her ability to instil passion in her readers and even observes the instructive nature of her writing: “the tender Maid here learns Man’s various Wiles” (qtd. in Potter 163). However, the little-discussed last verses starkly contrast with the rest of the poem, both in tone and in terms of the qualities he compliments in her writing. Sterling ends his poem, rather surprisingly, by mentioning Haywood’s skilful abilities as a satirist:
Pathetick Behn, or Manley’s greater Name;
Forget their Sex, and own when Haywood writ,
Vandenberghe 34
She clos’d the fair Triumvirate of Wit;
Born to delight as to reform the Age,
She paints Example thro’ the shining Page;
Satiric Precept warms the moral Tale,
And Causticks burn where the mild Balsam fails;
A Task reserv’d for her, to whom ’tis given,
To stand the Proxy of vindictive Heav’n! (qtd. in Potter 163-64)
Sterling never specifies the works he assigns these satirical overtones to, but it is worth considering for a moment which texts he even could have been reviewing. By the time Secret
Histories, Novels and Poems was published in 1725, Haywood had already published 24 works, none of which could be classified as satirical in the way that the satirical production of this decade is usually characterized. Since satire and secret histories did share some characteristics, the only work that bore some more obvious similarities with popular satirical writing was her
Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, which was published a few months before the Secret Histories, Novels and Poems collection. However, this work was published anonymously, and it is unlikely that readers would – at that point, at least – have known that Haywood was the author of this work. Even if they did, it “is quite likely that
Haywood did not want the other eight anonymous titles to be published in SNHP under her own name” (Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood 64). If we consider this to be true, it seems improbable that Haywood and her booksellers would include a review that alludes to Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia. Moreover, in earlier parts of the poem, he casts her characters as “tender Maids” and “Libertines with Shame” (qtd. in Potter 163), both stock characters of her typical amatory fictions, implying that it is these amorous texts he is describing. Perhaps most importantly, it appears that Sterling also notices a connection between Vandenberghe 35
Haywood’s scandalous (self-stylized) secret histories and satire. He considers Haywood’s writing a continuation of that of the most notorious female secret historians of the preceding decades – “Pathetick Behn” and “Manley’s greater Name” - and it is the inclusion in this “Fair triumvirate of Wit” that warrants the possibility of Haywood as a satirist.
In other words, Sterling’s review indicates that Haywood’s amatory fictions (and, in particular, her “secret histories”), to a certain extent, function satirically. However, it is important to note that this perception of Haywood as biting satirical reformist who stands in
“the Proxy of vindictive Heav’n” and “Smiles at the Tempests”, that she has “rais’d below”
(qtd. in Potter 166) coincides with the ability of her passionate prose to “mov’st the Heart”.
This raises questions about the compatibility of satire and amatory fiction, a central concern of this thesis to which I will return in chapter three when I address a similar dichotomy in The
Masqueraders.
2.1.2 Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad
Pope’s infamous portrayal of Haywood as a scandalous grub street writer in The
Dunciad4(1728) is perhaps the most well known and most frequently cited contemporary response to Haywood’s work because it offers a unique and particularly harsh glimpse into
Haywood’s authorial brand of this period. In his mock-heroic apocalyptic vision of Britain, reigned by a goddess named Dulness, Pope satirizes the contemporary literary and cultural landscape and expresses his anxiety about the increasing popularization and commercialization of literature by way of voicing his disdain for hack writers. One memorable example is his grotesque objectification of Haywood as the prize of a pissing content between two booksellers,
Edmund Curll and William Chetwood:
4 The edition consulted in this thesis is The Dunciad Variorum (1729), a revised version of the original poem because it includes full commentary and apparatus by “Martinus Scriblerus”, a pseudonym used by other members of the Scriblerus Club on other occasions as well.
Vandenberghe 36
“The Goddess then: 'Who best can send on high;
the salient spout, far-streaming to the sky;
His be yon Juno of majestic size,
with cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes” (233).
Most scholars agree that, to Pope, Haywood and her works function as the embodiment of novelization, that is, the gradual pre-eminence of prose narrative as the most widely consumed form of writing, consequently marginalizing other poetic forms. His cruel portrayal also showcases his general anxiety about the decline of high culture in favour of a profit-driven consummation of literature (Potter 10). Pope’s grotesque description of her body – she is of
“majestic size”, has “cow-like udders” and “ox-like eyes” – highlights that this process of ostensible cultural deterioration is inextricably linked with the feminine. Haywood unflattering depiction, Catherine Blouch argues, is “an economical rhetorical means of effecting both a social and aesthetic marginalization of the female subject” (540).
Pope heavily links Haywood with the scandalous, feminine and commercial, but it is also worth asking why precisely he decides to satirize Haywood and which elements of her works he takes issue with in particular. When considering Pope’s attack in light of Bogel’s notion of the creation of difference, Pope does not satirize Haywood in order to demonstrate the difference between his own writing and Haywood’s but denies any kind of kinship between their writing precisely to create this difference. King makes similar claims when she observes an unjust tendency in criticism to consider Haywood’s unflattering and misogynistic portrayal in The Dunciad as the be-all and end-all of her relationship with Pope and a general trend “to associate Haywood with the figure of Dulness rather than with the satiric aims of her creator”
(A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 44). Accordingly, Bogel’s notion of the production Vandenberghe 37 of difference forms a valuable framework for interpreting The Dunciad because it illuminates that, in many ways, Haywood’s writing was similar to that of her contemporary satirists.
Significantly, Pope’s primary targets of Haywood’s works are her secret histories and the libellous nature of her writing, opening up the possibility to find similarities between secret history and satire. For instance, the only work by Haywood he mentions by name is one of her secret histories, The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania, which is depicted on one of the book spines on The Dunciad Variorum’s frontispiece. Furthermore, in one of Pope’s footnotes, “Martinus Scriblerus” describes Haywood as a writer whose “libellous memoirs and novels, reveal the faults or misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness” (232). This choice for “libellous” is significant because, whereas satire implies a morally and aesthetically respectable stance, libel similarly exposes its victims’ vices, but has a connotation of nothing more than spiteful slander. Michael Seidel explains that “in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, satire, libel, lampoon and slander were inextricably mixed”, but when commentators “wished to separate good vilification from bad the distinction was one of style” (33).
In addition, in the second appendix to The Dunciad Variorum, which contains a list of literary works in which the author was supposedly attacked, Pope attributes the anonymously published Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput to “Mrs. Eliz. Haywood” (327). Most critics agree that this attribution is in all likelihood incorrect because the style of this secret history, which contains a supplementary account of the intrigues of Swift’s imaginary nation of Lilliput, is unlike any of her other works of this period (Schonefeld 82). Regardless of its veracity, the attribution is still remarkable because it shows how Pope “attempts to redefine what
“Haywood” meant as an author in order to distinguish the Scriblerian practice of personal satire from the genre of amorous and political scandal-writing, or “secret history,” to which it was unwillingly indebted” (Brewer 219). David Brewer argues that Pope falsely attributes Haywood
Vandenberghe 38 as the writer of Memoirs of Lilliput, creating “a conviction in his readers that an unmistakable difference in kind exists between the tactics of the Scriblerians and those practiced by authors of amorous “secret histories”” (220).
In sum, though Pope does not explicitly describe Haywood’s work as satirical, viewing his false attribution, his particular problem with her keyed secret history and the “libellous” nature of her work in light of Bogel’s notion of the creation of difference illustrates how Pope’s desire to distinguish his own practice of personal satire from Haywood’s writing is rooted in his own anxiety about the similarity between satire and secret history. This, in conjunction with
Sterling’s positioning of Haywood in a lineage of secret historians, shows not only that contemporaries thought of Haywood as satirical, but also indicates that her engagement with the genre of secret history might be a productive place to start exploring her contribution to the history of satire.
2.2 Satire and Secret History in Other Works
Despite the fact that Pope proclaims an unmistakable difference between secret history and satire in both The Dunciad and The Rape of the Lock, Haywood lays bare the similarities between both genres in one of her more traditional keyed histories of the 1720s and in two of her later works, The Adventures of Eovaai, an oriental tale which attacked Robert Walpole and
The Invisible Spy, in which the narrator Explorabilis has the ability to record and make public the secrets of London’s inhabitants. Because this thesis is primarily concerned with The
Masqueraders, the following short discussions are in no way exhaustive analyses; especially their largely undiscussed indebtedness to satire, and the Scriblerians in particular, would prove fruitful ground for further research. These texts are included in this thesis nonetheless because
Haywood links secret histories and satire in a more overt way than in The Masqueraders, serving as additional support for my claim that Haywood routinely explores this connection Vandenberghe 39 between both genres throughout her career. In addition to serving as circumstantial evidence, I also argue that these works that seamlessly blend elements of both modes establish Haywood as a writer who puts pressure on Augustan satire’s seemingly intrinsic misogyny and its reliance on satiric differentiation, a stance she also implements in The Masqueraders.
First, in her keyed secret history Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (published in the same year as The Masqueraders), The Rape of the Lock appears as an important intertext. Like The Dunciad, this secret history envisages a gloomy, apocalyptic vision of England that exposes the country’s moral corruption and degeneration: “we can trace and uncanny mirroring of the trajectory of the writer who sought to put the most distance between his work and her own, Alexander Pope” (“A Gender of Opposition” 147). Haywood imitates Pope’s sylphs – supernatural, aerial spirits that act as guardians for his protagonist
Belinda in The Rape of the Lock – when one of the characters, Bellario, drops his love letters from several love-interests in a coffee-House: “He dropt, in a publick Coffee-House, the other
Day, a Packet of Letters, written to him by several Ladies, with a design to expose them, and make known the force of his own Charms; but a Silph, who happened to have a particular
Regard for one of the fair Scriblers, prevented his Intention, and snatch’d it from the Ground unseen by any body” (131). A previous section on Pope’s concern about the resemblance of
The Rape of the Lock to secret histories helps us explain why Haywood’s reference to sylphs is significant: she taunts Pope about his anxiety about their similarity by incorporating his supernatural machinery into one of her scandal chronicles.
A second and more elaborate example is The Adventures of Eovaai, perhaps Haywood’s most overt attempt at satire in the more traditional sense of the word. In a similar way as in The
Masqueraders, Haywood leaves valuable interpretative clues on the title page of the work in order to make the reader think about the connection between secret histories and satire. The subtitle of the book informs the reader that it is “interspersed with a great Number of remarkable
Vandenberghe 40
Occurrences, which happened, and may again happen, to several Empire, Kingdoms,
Republicks, and particular Great Men” (41). Earla Wilputte notes in her introduction to this text that “great men” is a clear reference to Prime Minister Robert Walpole (16). This ironic description of Walpole as ‘the great man’ can be found as early as 1725 but was popularized most notably in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743).
Throughout Walpole’s rule, political opposition literature increasingly started to associate
Walpole with the figure of a corrupt statesman or a thief, so Haywood’s evil wizard character
Ochihatou fits nicely into that trend. By using this specific phrasing, Haywood explicitly positions herself within this set of anti-Walpole attacks that flourished during the 1730s and
1740s and which were often written by high-profile satirists.
Though The Adventures of Eovaai was written decades after secret history’s heyday, the title page and the preface also strongly allude to secret histories similar to those by Manley
(Carnell, “From Secret History to Novel” 17). Haywood presents the story as a real “pre-
Adamitical History” that took place in China centuries ago, a similar technique as used by secret historians who often opted for temporally and spatially removed settings. Furthermore, she creates a complicated textual framework with multiple layers of translators, historians and editors, which distances the book from the present day, but, because it was highly conventionalized to do so, would have immediately encouraged the reader to read it as a text relevant to contemporary society and politics. Additionally, Haywood dedicates The
Adventures of Eovaai to Sarah Churchill, The Duchess of Marlborough, who was famously satirized in The New Atalantis, forging yet another connection with her secret history predecessors.
Haywood immediately shows her awareness of the conventions of both secret history and satire and seamlessly interweaves elements of both forms throughout the remainder of the text. Ballaster notices this reference to the Scriblerians and their satiric practice as well and Vandenberghe 41 argues that Haywood simultaneously imitates commonplace satirical defences and critiques
“the structuring misogyny in the available discourses of such “opposition” satire” (“A Gender of Opposition” 151). Consequently, “readers are encouraged to snigger not only at her satiric targets, but at the allegorical seriousness of satire itself” (Ballaster 152). An excellent example of this is Haywood’s use of extensive footnotes that are strongly reminiscent of such quarrelling footnotes by ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ in The Dunciad. In them, the Chinese translator, a Historian and a Commenter reflect on the events in the text, but also on each other’s interpretations. For instance, the Historian disapprovingly describes Eovaai’s feelings and longing for the villainous
Ochihatou, but the translator delightfully points out the misogynistic bias of this Historian who initially transcribed the events in the annals: “the Cabal were at a loss for the Author’s Meaning in this Expression; and having consulted the Ladies about it, were assured by them that the Sex is wholly free from any Inquietudes of that nature. As it would be unmannerly to doubt their
Veracity in this Point, we must either believe it Malice in the Historian, or that the Women of those times were of Constitutions very different from the present” (92). Put differently, rather than offering additional sexist comments as Scriblerus would in The Dunciad, Haywood employs this apparatus to do the exact opposite, exposing “the misogynist underpinning of the aesthetics deployed by masculinist satire that she imitates” (Ballaster 14).
Finally, one of her more popular works at the time, The Invisible Spy is Haywood’s last major work and notoriously hard to interpret. Most critics agree, however, that Haywood is making a final statement about authorship, print culture, the literary marketplace and the role she played in it: Backscheider writes that it is about “the power of print” (Selected Fiction and
Drama of Eliza Haywood xl) and King describes it as a “meditation on authorship in the time of politics, publicity and the emerging public sphere” (A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood
193). More specifically, both Carnell and Bannet argue that the work was influenced by some of the narratological techniques of secret histories and there is evidence to suggest that
Vandenberghe 42 contemporary readers readily made this connection as well. For instance, The Monthly Review states that the book was designed “upon the plan of the Atalantis” (498 qtd. in Bannet) and fellow writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes that she wishes that there was an accompanying key because she could not figure out “whether the Conjugal Happiness of the
[D]uke of B. is intended as a Compliment or an Irony” (xii qtd. in Stewart). Moreover, Haywood makes explicit references to both Behn and Manley which “links her in a chain of self- consciously political secret historians” (Bannet, “The Narrator as an Invisible Spy” 144). For example, Haywood revises some of the arcs of Behn’s Letters between a Nobleman and his
Sisters and one of the characters Marcella “sigh’d, and seem’d all dissolv’d in the most tender languishment” when reading “the novel of Silvia and Philander” (I: 38).
Haywood shows her familiarity with such secret history writers through explicit allusions, but perhaps more important are the narratological techniques that she borrows from the genre. Haywood emphasizes the power of her narrator to “divulge or conceal secrets at her own discretion” (Carnell, Eliza Haywood and the Narratological Tropes of Secret History 118), one of the key features of the genre. In a similar way as earlier secret histories, the narrator has the gift “to set both things and persons in their proper colours” and has the “power to pluck off the mask of hypocrisy from the seeming saint; to expose the vice and folly in all their various modes and attitudes” (I: 23). Because of his invisibility belt, the narrator is able to anonymously record and reveal the secrets of private people. In so doing, Explorabilis virtually completely effaces himself from the text, sometimes making it difficult to pin down exactly who is speaking. According to Bannet, this “reproduces on the narrative level the anonymity and secrecy with which writers such as Behn, Manley or the early Haywood published their scandalous secret histories” (148). In other words, because of the interplay between concealing and revealing scandalous secrets, the obvious allusions to other secret histories and the narrator’s invisibility, Haywood links The Invisible Spy to a rich tradition of secret histories. Vandenberghe 43
Because of their preoccupation with the novel and how this narratological perspective influenced the “the anonymous and invisible narrator of realist domestic fiction” (Bannet 158), these critics have overlooked how Haywood explicitly connects these practices reminiscent of secret histories to the satirical writing of the Scriblerians. The narrator inserts a number of letters that the author “has received from unrequested correspondents” (II: 1), one of which is signed as “Scriblerius”, which, as only Daniel Froid has pointed out, is a reference to either the
Sriblerus Club or to Fielding, who sometimes used the pseudonym Scriblerius Secondus (483).
This allusion to the Sriblerus Club is made even more obvious when she quotes Pope’s An
Essay on Man a few pages before this. This was quite rare for Haywood as she only cited Pope a handful of times during her career: “in spite of pride, unerring reason’s spite, one truth is clear, - whatever is, - is right” (II: 6).
Scriblerius is enraged about Explorabilis’ shameless revelation of people’s secrets and considers this a violation of privacy: “what but the very Devil incarnate can have tempted you to assume one so ungracious to all degrees of people?” (8). However, Scriblerius is presented as an author with a similar tendency for the divulgence of secrets as he has “already, at the request of some leading men, prepar’d a thing for the press which will effectually do your business” (II: 9). His problem thus seems to lie not so much with the practice of revealing secrets, but with the way Explorabilis does so, which, as established before, Haywood links to secret histories. Explorabilis comments on the letter and says not to respond until he finds himself “oblig’d to declare my sentiments in an answer to the treatise with which he threatens me” (II:9). He looks forward to a future scuffle with Scriblerius which links both “with a well- known group of satirists”, undermining the Scriblerians’ role as moral arbiters “by emphasizing the book’s scandalous nature” and showing their “own propensity for in-fighting with fellow authors” (Froid 483). In other words, by linking Scriblerius’ motivations for writing with those
Vandenberghe 44 of Explorabilis, and, by extension, secret history writers, Haywood links the Scriblerian project with the scandalous nature of secret histories.
In conclusion, Haywood continuously lays bare the similarities between secret history and satire throughout her career. Rather than insisting on their incompatibility, she interweaves elements of both secret history and satire in her works, revealing that both aim to disclose other people’s secrets, and both thrive off scandal. Crucial, also, is the “peculiarly double nature of
Haywood’s satirical enterprise” of “both imitation and critique” (Ballaster, “A Gender of
Opposition” 153). In The Adventures of Eovaai, she positions herself as a skilled satirist who employs satiric conventions while simultaneously recognizing and critiquing the misogyny intrinsic to this form. This provides a valuable starting point for my analysis of The
Masqueraders as these two elements – her continuous interest in the similarities between secret history and satire and the double nature of her satiric writing – are crucial in understanding this text.
Vandenberghe 45
3. Analysis: The Masqueraders (1725)
3.1 Note on the Text
I consulted the modern scholarly edition of The Masqueraders, which is edited by Tiffany
Potter. The first edition of this text was published anonymously in 1724 and quotes Joseph
Addison’s Cato (1713) on its title page. From the second edition onwards, The Masqueraders bore Haywood’s name on the title page and the epigraph changed to that of The Rape of the
Lock. All subsequent editions, including the text’s reprint in the highly commercially successful collection Secret Histories, Novels and Poems, had this version of the title page. My decision to work with this second version is simple: first, it is the edition most readers would have had their hands on and, second, a considerable part of this chapter is concerned with Haywood’s authorial self-fashioning as a satirist and, as such, working with the edition that was published under her own name is evidently the best choice. Moreover, the change of epigraph implies that
Haywood’s paratextual framing of The Masqueraders is, at least to some extent, intentional and significant for the further interpretation of the text.
3.2 Materiality and Paratextual Elements
This section is underpinned by a material and print culture approach5 and takes as its starting point that we should consider it a possibility that the material form in which The Masqueraders was circulated and presented is not merely incidental or solely an issue of marketability6. In
5 This print culture approach has been present more implicitly throughout this thesis and has, for instance, influenced my decision to spend a considerable amount of time on contemporary reader responses. Especially Sterling’s review that praises both her passionate and satirical abilities, which was included as prefatory material in Secret Histories, Novels and Poems is relevant because this collection also contained The Masqueraders. As such, a considerable amount of this text’s initial readers would have been influenced by these paratextualities that explicitly position and endorse Haywood as a satirist. 6 A commonplace assumption about eighteenth-century title pages seems to be the sense that “we must largely leave authorial intent behind” (Barchas 61). Despite the fact that it is difficult to assess creative and authorial intent, as this section will illustrate, recent research by such scholars as Spedding, Creel and Al Coppola suggests the possibility of at least some sense of agency. Even so, regardless of whether this editorial choice was in Haywood’s or her publisher’s or bookseller’s hands, my argument about the value
Vandenberghe 46 fact, such an approach fits in neatly with a relatively new body of scholarship that calls attention to the importance of paratextual materials, such as ornaments and visual representations of
Haywood, to uncover the way Haywood carefully constructed an authorial persona for herself.
Sarah Creel argues that “a study of the visual representations of Haywood complicates and expands our knowledge of Haywood’s career and helps us better understand how the circulation of her image was used to shape her own brand of authorship—and how it has continued to shape how we think and write about her in the present day” (27-28), just as Patrick Spedding examines ornaments and printed illustrations in order to explore its influence on eighteenth-century conceptions of Haywood (“Imagining Eliza Haywood” 345).
My thesis builds on such research and, in this chapter, I examine such aspects as The
Masqueraders’ title page and epigraph and argue that this is a vital part of Haywood’s self- fashioning as a satirist. By choosing to situate The Masqueraders within this tradition of secret histories and by linking her writing to The Rape of the Lock, she creates an image of herself as a satirist. Further, Creel’s and Spedding’s virtually exclusive focus on Haywood’s authorial self-fashioning, however, overlooks the equally as prominent importance of paratextualities in framing the text itself. Second, then, rather than solely focussing on how such paratextual materials help shape Haywood’s authorial self-representation, I add that this likewise shapes readers’ experience of Haywood’s texts. Because she alludes to both satire and secret history, it asks the reader to adopt a similar reading practice as they would with such genres, making them more aware of certain elements typical of both genres that are already present in the text, such as the mock-heroic and such themes as secrecy and gossip. Third, I also argue that
Haywood comments on the generic and functional similarities between secret history and satire and, by extension, Pope’s writing and her own. By way of putting these two aspects in such
of this text’s title and epigraph in providing its audience an interpretative framework with which to approach The Masqueraders still stands.
Vandenberghe 47 close proximity, she interrogates this common satiric process that aims to create a difference in the face of anxiety about “sameness”.
A first indicator of The Masqueraders’ connection with secret histories can be found in plain sight on the title page: its full title reads as The Masqueraders; or Fatal Curiosity: Being the Secret History of a Late Amour. As explained in the introductory theoretical chapter,
Haywood is considered a key player in the development of secret history and critics are primarily interested in the importance of Haywood’s work for the evolution of the novel, with a particular focus on Haywood’s later work, possibly because the novel had by then become more conventionalized which makes it easier to spot Haywood’s narrative experimentation.
These critics tend to overlook the fact that a fair amount of Haywood’s texts from the 1720s were openly stylized as “secret history” on their title pages, even when, at first sight, they did not resemble such narratives – neither thematically nor in terms of their spatial or temporal settings. The Masqueraders, for instance, bears “secret history” on its title page, but is not invested in partisan politics as secret histories of preceding decades would have been. Similarly, the story takes place in London and mentions fashionable places such as the masquerade, which would have felt modern for readers and reflected their social reality but does ultimately starkly contrast with the announced secret history of the title page
When scholars do mention this generic tagging, many seem reluctant to consider this as more than merely a commercial strategy. Often described as the first piece of scholarly criticism on Haywood, George Whicher’s The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (1915) states that she “attached no particular significance to her use of the term secret history but employed it as a means of stimulating meretricious interest in her stories” (92). Recent scholars have done little to refute this. Sarah Prescott, for instance, continues this line of thinking and argues that
“this use of Secret Histories can be seen as a ploy to grab the attention of the reader, and to play on the popularity of scandal narratives and inside gossip about high-profile society figures or
Vandenberghe 48 members of the government” and that it was “a deliberate attempt to make Haywood more commercial” (74). Carnell, likewise, asserts that Haywood is “clearly taking advantage of the appeal of the “secret history” in order to promote her probably fictional work” (“Slipping From
Secret History to Novel” 2). While such explanations shed an interesting light on the manifold and complex ways in which women writers positioned themselves in the literary marketplace, they ultimately fall short because they fail to recognize that this generic tagging has influence on the reader beyond their decision to buy the work: it impacts the way readers think about
Haywood as an author and influences the way in which they approach the text. As a matter of fact, such influential scholars on the history of reading as Bannet also highlight the considerable importance of title pages in the reception and consumption of eighteenth-century texts, putting the emphasis on readerly agency in the generic classification of texts rather than restricting it to a limited set of formal characteristics present in the main body of the literary text (12,
Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810). This reinforces my claim that the material form in which Haywood’s texts circulated had a more important impact on readers’ generic expectation than perhaps earlier Haywood scholars have assumed.
Though a small minority, some recent critics have gestured towards the possibility of this overt generic signalling providing a valuable heuristic for exploring Haywood’s works.
McKeon, for instance, notices this peculiar categorization: “two decades earlier, however, the phrase was a frequent one on her title pages, and it is worth asking what she meant by it” (631).
Al Coppola, similarly, explains that “it would seem to be a mistake to assume that her secret histories were sham fronts” and that “the fact that these secret histories may or may not have been true would seem to have been the very source of their particular pleasures.” (158). I agree, then, with such critics about the importance of paying closer attention to the generic categorization and material form of Haywood’s texts and I argue that this generic tagging is an important element in Haywood’s creation of a satiric authorial image. I also stress that it Vandenberghe 49 immediately both incites curiosity and encourages the reader to approach the text with a similarly critical attitude as they would a more conventional topical secret history. Moreover, in conjunction with the epigraph, it serves as a comment on the similarity between secret history and satire.
To begin with, Michel Foucault’s notion of the author function – the idea that the name of the author not necessarily refers to an individual, but instead encompasses a literary
‘discourse’ surrounding this author (19) – is interesting with regards to Haywood’s authorial self-fashioning. According to Foucault, the author’s name “points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture” (19).
As such, Haywood deliberately creates an authorial identity related to the discursive realm of secret histories – which is inextricably linked to scandal, gossip and libel – in similar way as when she, for instance, establishes herself as a successor of such secret historians as Manley and Behn by including Sterling’s review in the preface to Secret Histories, Novels and Poems.
Coppola makes a similar argument when he states that Haywood capitalizes “on a wider discursive field of “secret history,” and in doing so it ensures that all of Haywood’s work would come to participate in the frisson of the illicit and obscene” (157). Accordingly, considering the similarity between secret histories and satire, openly presenting herself as a libellous, scandalous secret historian is an important part of her authorial self-fashioning as a satirist.
Perhaps more importantly, by means of choosing an epigraph of one the era’s major satiric works, she does not only link her name with the discursive field of secret history but also that of more highly-respected literary satire. In doing so, she occupies and ensures a place for The
Masqueraders – and arguably secret histories and her works more broadly – in a satiric tradition that is severely unaccommodating to female writers.
Second, most critics agree that the reader plays a crucial role in secret histories because they were expected to become actively involved in trying to identify the real identity of the
Vandenberghe 50 characters. Parsons, for instance, continuously stresses the role of the reader: “readers were intimately involved in this experimental inquiry and were invited to participate in delineating the domain of both the public and private through the referential structure of the secret history”
(42). Though The Masqueraders was written in a period during which the genre of secret history was starting to lose its direct cultural and political impact, this active role of the reader in the reception and deciphering of secret histories seems to still hold true. Kate Loveman’s recent exploration of the widespread prevalence of sceptical reading practices in the early eighteenth century and its legacy in the choices that informed early novelists confirms such assertions: “as writers became familiar with readers’ common tactics for identifying and interpreting dubious truth-claims this knowledge influences them in their creative choices” (3). So, though
Haywood’s amatory tale likely does not refer to any political or public figures, Haywood, by way of presenting the story as a secret history, appropriates the common sceptical reading attitude readers had when engaging with such secret histories. The title gives the reader the impression that it might just refer to a real piece of social gossip and “allows for the free play of the reader’s interpretive imagination: “Could this character be that insufferable fop?” “Could she be that loose widow?” As much as anything else, it was the gratification of this impulse — a drive to find out secrets — that readers sought out when consuming ‘Haywood’” (Coppola
158). In the upcoming sections about satiric naming practices and affective reading experiences,
I will go into more depth about the importance of the curious and scandal-hungry for The
Masqueraders’ instructional agenda and how this is functionally similar to satire.
Finally, this process of creating an authorial identity and influencing the reader’s expectation of the text is further complicated by the epigraph. The inclusion of an epigraph is especially significant since epigraphs were a relatively uncommon practice in the early decades of the eighteenth century (Barchas 88). Gerard Genette offers a useful account of the four functions of an epigraph: he explains that the epigraph justifies the title, or, vice versa, the title Vandenberghe 51 modifies the meaning of the epigraph; second, it comments on the text by means of emphasizing or specifying it, which is undoubtedly the most canonical function; third, it references a text, not so much to make a thematic connection, but to forge a connection with the author; and, lastly, it marks the genre or tenor of a piece of writing (156-160).
This second function – the idea that the intertext with The Rape of the Lock emphasizes certain aspects of the story itself – will be expanded on in the next section of this chapter, which examines mock-heroic elements in The Masqueraders. Especially Genette’s first function which considers the epigraph as an interaction with the title is crucial in supporting my contention that Haywood comments on the similarities between secret histories and more traditionally “masculine” satire. Haywood’s decision to connect secret histories with The Rape of the Lock, in particular, is especially significant since Pope ridicules the genre in this very text and exaggerates the possibility of their likeness in A Key to the Lock. Rather than insisting on their absolute difference, Haywood allows The Masqueraders to be both a satire and a secret history at the same time. As discussed in an earlier section, this idea of the relative compatibility and similitude between both genres is something which occupied Haywood throughout the entirety of her career.
This third and fourth function necessarily bring to the fore questions of authorship and generic choices. In her introduction to the text, Potter seems to notice this as well: in choosing an epigraph by Pope, Haywood puts pressure on rigidly hierarchal classifications of artistic value by way of recontextualizing quotations from such male canonical writers as Dryden and
Pope in a highly feminized genre (47). In doing so, Haywood engages critically with more highly valued literary forms in her popular fiction in order to show the similar implications of both models: “they address the same human natures, values, and social issues, often reaching the same conclusions and teaching the same lessons” (Potter 48). In other words, according to
Potter, Haywood seems to suggest that Pope’s more highly regarded writing and her own
Vandenberghe 52 amatory fiction were, perhaps surprisingly, functionally similar. This coexistence of Pope and secret history on the title page does not only serve as a more general comment on the similarity between satire, secret history and amatory fiction. More specifically, it also sheds new light on
Haywood’s textual and personal relationship with Pope. Though many consider Pope’s relentless portrayal of Haywood in The Dunciad as the first instance of their textual relationship, this epigraph grants Haywood more agency as it is, in fact, Haywood herself who initiates this quarrel. This shifts our perspective from Haywood as a satiric victim, to a more active participant in this relationship: by a mere allusion to his work on the title page of The
Masqueraders, she subtly criticizes Pope’s haughty high-mindedness about female writing and their supposed inadequacy to live up to literary standards.
By allowing all these elements to exist on the same title page – Haywood, Pope, satiric mock-epic and secret history – Haywood does not only make the reader conscious of the similarity between secret history and satire, and Pope’s writing and her own. The most important thing to bear in mind is that she also puts pressure on the very practice of satire itself:
Pope’s satire is coloured by what Bogel calls the process of ‘satiric differentiation’: it aims to create clear-cut boundaries between his own work and his satiric object (in this case secret histories) in the face of anxiety about sameness. Instead of denying these connections, Haywood happily accepts their proximity and, in doing so, already shows herself as a writer who is wary of dominant satiric discourses.
3.3 Mock-Heroic
Haywood alludes to the mock-heroic, not only on the title page but also in the text itself.
Scholars interested in the mock-heroic define it as a long poem or drama which derives its meaning from exploiting the burlesque gap between the “high” style of epic poetry and the
“low” subject matter of the everyday, the mundane and, oftentimes, the feminine in order to Vandenberghe 53 ridicule and expose the triviality of the latter (Johns-Putra, History of the Epic 99). It seems difficult, then, to claim that The Masqueraders could be classified as a mock-epic, because, in virtually every way, it defies adherence to such a traditional definition of the form. However, even though the text is by no means a full-blown mock-epic, Haywood does incorporate elements from many different genres and modes, as was typical of her notoriously fluid novelistic prose of this period. Moreover, critics have recently begun to argue that it is more useful to consider the mock-heroic as “neither one technique nor one effect”, which
“encompasses a variety of authorial attitudes and tones” (Terry 3), opening up the possibility to include less typical and more subtle contributions to the mode. Terry characterizes the most essential technique of the mock-heroic as a “contravention of the canon of fit style, the principle, that is, that the content and style of work should be in sympathy with each other” (13). Seidel confirms this idea that the subversion of literary and generic form was at the heart of the
Scriblerian project: “always at issue in the Scriblerian world is the impulse to invade the design of other literary forms and subvert their premises” (53).
This principle of generic subversion is likewise reflected in The Masqueraders.
Haywood clashes both the epic and amatory fiction by using specific formal and metrical features typical of the mock-heroic to convey the passionate and affective scenes that are so characteristic of her amatory fiction. Moreover, she also likens her stock amatory characters – the reckless libertine and the seduced maidens – to the heroes of Dryden’s epic tragedy The
Indian Emperor. First, I argue that Haywood questions the process of satiric differentiation by colonizing Pope’s trademark poetic form – the heroic couplet – with her typical passionate, amorous discourse. This argument is in accord with the previous section of this chapter, which established that Haywood already cautiously questions this staunch insistence on difference and distance on The Masqueraders’ title page. Second, I show how Haywood uses the mock-heroic to a similar end as her contemporaries, while at the same time revealing its limitations: she
Vandenberghe 54 criticizes the mode’s tendency to mock the trivial and the feminine. This echoes Ballaster’s notion of the double nature of Haywood’s satirical enterprise: Haywood imitates the mock- heroic, while also exposing the structuring misogyny that underlies this mode.
Haywood’s first allusion to the mock-heroic tradition is obvious: the epigraph of The
Masqueraders is a quotation from Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, perhaps the most well-known example of the mock-heroic, both in its own day and in existing scholarship on the mock-epic.
Haywood does not only hint at the heroic and the mock-heroic through intertextual and paratextual allusions to specific texts but also colonizes certain formal conventions associated with such forms. The inset poem near the beginning of the narrative contains ten lines written in iambic pentameter, neatly making up five heroic couplets and mirroring the exact poetic pattern and rhyming scheme as the verses of The Rape of the Lock included on the title page.
Though this particular form was already employed in poetic and dramatic texts well before the eighteenth century, such satirists as Dryden and, particularly, Pope readily made use of and perfected the heroic couplet: “For Pope, whether the medium be text or landscape, poetic form was most indisputably exemplified by the heroic couplet. In his hands the couplet achieved its apotheosis” (Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace 2). It is worth including both the poem and the epigraph in full because it becomes clear that, through their obvious metrical and, perhaps surprising thematic resemblance, Haywood encourages her audience to read the two excerpts alongside each other. This also recalls Genette’s second function of the epigraph in which the epigraph functions as a comment on what is happening in the main body of the text. Haywood’s inserted poem reads as follows:
An amourous Pair with mutual Warmth describ’d,
Alike desiring, and alike desir’d,
Clasp’d in each other’s Arms, resolv’d to know Vandenberghe 55
Th’ extremest Bliss which Nature can bestow:
Love made the Banquet, each a hungry Guest,
With greediness devour’d the luscious Feast!
While their full Eyes with Extasy ran o’er,
Enjoying all, yet craving still for more!
Joys too sublime for Language to express,
And which even Thought itself must render less. (72)
Haywood infuses the heroic couplet with a passionate discourse typical of her amatory fiction. The description of the couple, whose “full Eyes with Extasy ran o’er” and who are
“clasp’d in each other’s Arms”, and her trademark comment on the inadequacy of her prose to convey the amorous “Joys too sublime for Language to express” virtually read as a checklist for all of the key elements of her amatory fiction of this period. Haywood uses the form as a way to show her awareness of common satirical practices and makes yet another connection between satire and her own amatory fiction. Moreover, by decontextualizing this passage from
The Rape of the Lock, it is seemingly devoid of its original satiric meaning and almost reads as a celebration of the exact thing Pope is trying to condemn:
What guards the Purity of melting Maids,
In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades;
Safe from the treacherous Friend and daring Spark,
The Glance by Day, and Whisper in the Dark:
When kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires,
When Musick softens, and when Dancing fires (64)
Vandenberghe 56
It illustrates that, though The Rape of the Lock tries hard to distance itself from such trivialities as masquerades and balls that attract “melting Maids” with their “warm Desires” – often the subject matter of amatory fiction by such writers as Haywood – it is ultimately centrally concerned with similar subject matter. In a similar way as the interplay between the text’s subtitle and epigraph, Haywood’s recontextualization of The Rape of the Lock and the heroic couplet in her characteristic amatory discourse, “undoes” the difference Pope attempts to create between his own writing and that of female scandal writers.
A second way in which Haywood employs the genre is through an intertextual reference to Dryden’s heroic tragedy The Indian Emperor. By integrating an allusion to Dryden’s tragic play in her otherwise typically amatory tale, Haywood makes “heroic epic, conservative values, and moral regulation into parts of popular discourse” (Potter 52), creating a clash of style and content typical to mock-heroic, as described above. The Indian Emperor depicts the experiences of the Spanish conquerors and their encounters with the native people in the Aztec Empire and primarily deals with “complex and intersecting series of love and honor” and “imperial loss and regret” (Brown 71). Interestingly, Haywood evokes these themes of honour and imperialism more implicitly later in the story. She describes the world of love and relationships in terms of
“Conquests” an “Conquerors” six times throughout the short narrative. Dorimenus, for instance, is characterized as the “lovely Conqueror” (72), just as Dalinda “prefer’d” his “Conquest of her
Heart to all the others he had made” (72). More importantly, the second time the characters attend the masquerade, Dorimenus dresses up as a Spaniard and Dalinda and Philecta as Indian slaves: “She soon distinguish’d the charming Spaniard (for it was in that Disguise that her unthinking Friend told her he was to be) and he as soon found his Dalinda (as he thought) in a neat Indian Slave.” (76). Significantly, this conflation of the epic and the trivial takes place at the masquerade, a popular event in the early eighteenth century which sparked debates about ethics, morality, gender and sexuality, especially because it offered women a relative amount Vandenberghe 57 of sexual freedom as they could attend the masquerade unescorted. Similar to the mock-heroic, this was a popular site “where elite and popular dissolved together practically and symbolically”
(Potter 21). In this way, Haywood transfers the epic to something seemingly as trivial as the masquerade, in which the epic is reduced to merely a costume and object of fetishization.
By reducing the epic to merely a game of role-play in such a morally questionable event as the masquerade, Haywood gently pokes fun at contemporary society’s inability to live up to epic ideals in a more traditional mock-heroic sense in that she exposes that “the modern realities”, seem to “fail to rise to its standard” (Rawson 169). However, she also “interrogates the material in its form as she relocates it into a specifically feminized genre at the same that she interrogates the whole question of hierarchies of artistic value” (Potter 47). At the same time, then, Haywood also employs the epic, not to trivialize women’s experiences, as Pope does, but to elevate and validate Dalinda’s experiences. Dorimenus attempts to seduce Dalinda after she faints at the masquerade and right before Dalinda gives in to his advances and fails to maintain her public role of the frail woman because “she had not artifice enough to disguise the pleasure she took in his Conversation, from a Penetration so nice” (70), Haywood inserts this quotation from the epic drama:
The Poet says,
------In Love there is a Time,
When dull Obedience is the greatest Crime. (69)
Interestingly, in Dryden’s play, this line is uttered by an unheroic character, Odmar, who attempts to defend his decision to flee the battle in order to protect Alibech, his love interest.
Alibech, however, is not interested in Odmar, in part because of his cowardice, and condemns this decision. Potter offers an intriguing interpretation as to why Haywood alludes to this
Vandenberghe 58 specific scene: “Haywood’s allusion explicitly regenders Odmar’s rejection of obedience to martial honour into Dalinda’s rejection of feminine virtue as obedience to sexual social standards” (67). Both in the play and in The Masqueraders, self-indulgence in the name of love leads to the eventual downfall and loss of reputation for both characters. By framing Dalinda’s experience in terms of martial honour, Dalinda’s tragic abandonment and dishonouring are elevated to epic significance.
To conclude, Haywood has an ambiguous relationship with the mock-heroic: she shows that she is well-aware of its conventions and can employ it to similar ends as such established authors as Dryden and Pope, but also reveals the inherent misogyny of the form by, for instance, recontextualizing The Rape of the Lock as a celebration, rather than a trivialization of the feminine, or by using the heroic not necessarily to mock Dalinda’s experience but to momentarily elevate the “near-epic significance of these sorts of defining moments in female experience” (Potter 67).
3.4 Naming Practices
The Masqueraders points outwards to the exterior world through the use of gutted and veiled names, a common procedure in both satire and secret histories. Such gutted names are usually dismissed as merely a legal defence in order to avoid prosecutions of defamation. Literary scholars and legal historians alike argue that such innovative print technologies (dashes, asterisks etc.) of the early eighteenth century protected the author from legal culpability: “if a satirist composed a work on a specific individual and used only his victim’s initials . . ., the author was legally safe” (Kropf 159). Rabb largely supports such a traditional view but she also draws attention to the fact that they involved the reader closer into the text: “they alter the effect of injurious language from an attack by one author on one victim into a more communal experience, reminding us of the relationship slander (of all kinds, including libel) bears to Vandenberghe 59 gossip” (65). Simply put, readers are asked to fill in the blank and, as such, to perform the injurious speech act themselves.
In his article “Libel and Satire: The Problem with Naming”, Andrew Bricker examines legal records of the period and finds that these naming practices offered writers little to no legal protection (890). He refutes this commonplace legal explanation and, instead, explains that satirists continued to gut names because of commercial, aesthetic and, above all, vaguely ethical reasons. The idea went that particular satire – and thus the act of directly naming someone – was callous, shameful and a violation of ethical and moral codes. Dryden, for instance, felt that satirists had no right to directly attack others: “Lampoon . . . is a dangerous sort of Weapon, and for the most part Unlawful. We have no Moral right to the Reputation of other Men. ’Tis taking from them, what we cannot restore to them.” (910 qtd. in Bricker). And so, even though satirists might not have actually been concerned about their victim’s reputation, they confirmed to “such practices”, because it “allowed satirists to feign a margin of ethical safety” (910). In addition, like Rabb, Bricker emphasizes the role of the scandal-hungry reader in decoding and constructing the meaning of a satire: “satirists may have committed the crime, but readers proved rather willing accomplices” (913).
These two elements – the pseudo-ethical stance of the satirist and the idea that readers were complicit in the production of satire – can help to explain why The Masqueraders employs these naming practices. Haywood uses gutted and veiled names, I argue, as part of her satirical agenda: she invites the reader to partake in constructing the meaning of the satirical text and, consequently, condemning the victim. At the same time, however, Haywood draws explicit attention to her employment of these common naming tactics, underlining the seemingly arbitrary and conventional nature of these satirical defences. In this manner, her approach to these naming practices is similar to the “double nature” of her treatment of the mock-heroic: she both uses and demonstrates her awareness of satiric conventions and seems to be critical of
Vandenberghe 60 them. In so doing, she lightly criticizes that satirists gutted and veiled names, not necessarily because they were such heroic defenders of morality (as they eagerly cast themselves), but to
“fulfil a pro forma ethical obligation” (Bricker 891), more than anything else.
Haywood makes use of such techniques in The Masqueraders in the following letter, where Philecta pretends to be Dalinda and suggests a meeting place to Dorimenus:
To Dorimenus.
A Relation being come out of the Country with a design to pass some days with me,
makes it wholly improper for me to see you at home, but shall be glad to meet you at
the appointed Hour, at the House of Mr.------in St.------Street; I have a particular
Friend lodges there, enquire for Philecta, and you will find,
Your most Passionate
and Faithful
Dalinda.
Though “Mr. –” and his house in “St. – Street” are only minor elements that have relatively little importance to the plot, readers are also reminded on several occasions that the narrator has concealed the real names of protagonists. For instance, she writes that Dorimenus was a “gentleman, whose real Name, for some reasons”, she “shall conceal under that of
Dorimenus” (67). Similarly, when Dalinda is introduced, Haywood calls explicit attention to the fact that this is a pseudonym ostensibly conceals the identity of a real individual: “Dalinda,
(for so shall I call the present Victim of their force)” (71). By explicitly pointing towards an outside reality, Haywood encourages the reader to participate in identifying who and where these characters and events might allude to. As such, it is not only the writer but also the reader who must “perform the injurious speech act of filling in the blank or completing the rhyme” Vandenberghe 61
(Rabb 65). Though The Masqueraders is most likely a fictional work, Haywood takes advantage of the effect that gutted and concealed names had on its audience: it asks readers to participate in making a judgement about the characters and “invited readers in, signalling to them the promise of a scandal” (Bricker 910).
Interestingly, Haywood also draws attention to her use of veiled names and, more importantly, presents her employment of them more as an afterthought, than an intentional ethical decision. She chooses to conceal the name of Dorimenus “for some reasons” (67), a deliberately vague rationalization. Similarly, in the case of Dalinda, her reasoning behind disguising the victim’s name is syntactically reduced to a mere afterthought: “(for so shall I call the present Victim of their force)” (71). For Haywood, concealing the target’s name, so it seems, is mostly about mindlessly fulfilling a common satiric convention. By emphasizing its artificial and conventional nature in this way, Haywood implicitly pokes fun at more traditional satiric stances that only pretend to veil names out of ethical or moral beliefs about the nature of attacking an individual’s reputation.
3.5 Secrecy and Gossip
The Masqueraders is centrally concerned with secrecy and gossip and this arguably drives the entire plot: Dalinda’s gossip about Dorimenus is what incites curiosity in Philecta and persuades her to pursue Dorimenus. Similarly, the story abruptly comes to an end when Dalinda spreads a rumour about Philecta and Dorimenus’ relationship. In the theoretical framework of this thesis, I explained how such scholars as Rabb have argued persuasively that secret histories and gossip often went hand in hand and that this fundamental aggressiveness of gossip opens up the possibility to include a discourse typically considered to be feminine in the history of satire.
This section uses this theoretical methodology as put forward by Rabb, as well as the work of
Vandenberghe 62
Patricia Spacks7 about gossip more generally, and analyses how certain elements of this can be found in The Masqueraders, both thematically and narratively.
The first part of this section discusses how these concerns with gossip and the divulgence of secrets are explored thematically. I suggest that Haywood comments on the differences male and female authors face when writing publicly by way of exploring the different forms secrets inhabit in her narrative and the different social consequences sharing secrets has for each of the characters. This thematic preoccupation with gossip as both a quintessentially female act and an aggressive tool to hurt someone’s reputation helps us better understand the implications of the narrative perspective Haywood opts for in The
Masqueraders. In the second part, then, I examine such elements in context of its narration and argue that the gossipy omniscient third-person narrator shares an aggressiveness that is similar to satire because it exposes their vices and can temporarily possess someone’s experiences.
Simultaneously, I also emphasize that it is markedly different from satire: it decentres narrative authority and, as such, does not possess a single morally straightforward voice.
It has long been a commonplace understanding that the power dynamics in amatory fiction should not only be read as reflections of the newly developing ideologies of gender and sexuality of this period but that such power relations also mirror the relationship between female writer, audience and textual production in the newly emerging, and often confusing, literary marketplace. Ballaster inaugurates such a “body as text”-reading in Seductive Forms when she argues that “the struggle for control over the identification and interpretation of amatory signs between male and female protagonists” is “a metaphorical substitution for the struggle for epistemological authority between male and female readers and writers” (24). Since then, similar interpretations have shed light on amatory fiction’s ability to reflect upon certain
7 Though Spacks does not specifically acknowledge the similarity between gossip and satire, I chose to include her work in my analysis, because, like Rabb, she elaborates on how gossip is inextricably linked to and originated in aggression. Vandenberghe 63 cultural anxieties caused by the rapidly changing ways in which readers bought and consumed literature. A relevant example of such work is King’s reading of A Spy Upon the Conjurer as a text that critically engages with the pertinence of scandal and curiosity in the making of the novel. She examines “moments of intense curiosity that riddle early popular fiction” because they “help us see more clearly the forces that shaped the early novel” (“Spying Upon the
Conjuror” 181). In other words, King suggests that Haywood’s self-conscious thematization of curiosity works as an allegorical representation of the relationship between Haywood’s amatory fiction and its readers in the sense that these readers were undeniably attracted to and fascinated by such texts because of its delight in gossip, dirt and scandal.
This possibility to read Haywood’s texts as “a kind of allegory for the generic anxieties of a literary form that sensed itself to have come loose of its traditional moral and didactic moorings” (King 185) provides a valuable framework for interpreting The Masqueraders.
Potter briefly touches upon this in her introduction to the text when she likens the relationship between Dalinda and Philecta, where the former recounts her sexual experiences, in turn, exciting erotic pleasure in the latter, to that of Haywood and her readers (36). According to
Potter, The Masqueraders reflects on the popularity of amatory fiction on the literary marketplace, but, more specifically, Haywood also scrutinizes the forces that shaped secret histories through the text’s self-conscious reflection on the importance of gossip and secrecy.
First, I argue that Haywood examines how this act of gossiping manifests itself differently in the male and female characters and shows how gossip is inextricably linked to the feminine. In doing so, she comments on the differences male and female authors face when writing publicly in this specific cultural moment. All the main characters engage in the practice of gossip, but in different ways and with vastly different consequences. Interestingly, though gossip is often considered a highly feminized discourse, Dorimenus similarly shares details about his illicit relationship with Dalinda to his friends. However, when he engages in what is
Vandenberghe 64 essentially the same activity as the two women, his language is quite literally allowed to be displaced from the private to the public sphere. Whereas Dalinda’s and Philecta’s storytelling often takes place in their closeted bedchambers, or sometimes even in bed (87), Dorimenus disclosure of the same information is suggested to take place in a more public way: “Dorimenus, who at some times was very poetically inclin’d, writ on the Transactions of this Night, and happen’d, a few days after to shew to some of his Friends, which to the best of my
Remembrance run thus…” (72).
Significantly, when Dorimenus is first introduced, he is described as both “a passionate
Lover of Intrigue”, who “has an affluence of Fortune and Wit” (67). He is portrayed as witty and, at the same time, someone who loves to indulge in scandal and intrigue. Wit implies “a combination of intelligence, understanding, judgement and liveliness of intellect” (Potter 67) and entails a type of clever and sharp intellectual vitality that was highly valued by such authors as Pope. Moreover, Haywood also immediately highlights Dorimenus’ propensity for writing:
“if his Thoughts and Pen had not been equally swift, he would soon have had no leisure for new
Attacks” (68). In short, Haywood introduces Dorimenus as someone who has wit, loves scandal and has a ‘sharp pen’, perhaps not unlike Haywood’s contemporary satirists.
More important is the form and language in which Haywood presents the different accounts of the same event. Dalinda’s gossip appears to be nothing more than a distorted and jumbled retelling of what happened, typical of Haywood’s early amatory fiction: “she flew to her fair Friend, gave her the whole History of what had pass’d between them –- repeated every tender Word he spoke – not the least fond Endearment was forgot – describe’d his Looks – his melting Pressures – his Ardours! – his Impatiences! – his Extasies! – his Languishments!” (73).
In contrast to this ephemeral and oral account filled to the brim with dashes and exclamation marks, Dorimenus’ side of the same encounter takes the form of written a poem and is elevated and materialized to the status of literature. This mirrors the practice of publicly disclosing Vandenberghe 65 private information in the literary marketplace: when women writers do so, it is menial gossip; when men do, it is considered literature. Rabb acknowledges this difference in register as well:
“both gossip and satirist reveal information without their subject’s volition”, and yet “the gossip has low status (George Meredith calls gossip “the beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the creature it devours”), while the satirist nears heroic heights” (48). In other words,
Haywood explores the different consequences men and women face when sharing information about others in public and characterizes gossip as a stereotypically female discourse.
It is worth further exploring the effects gossip has on the characters in The
Masqueraders. Gossip typically takes place “in private, at leisure, in a context of trust” (Spacks
5) and is a means to create intimacy and solidify bonds between those participating (Spacks 6).
Dalinda befriends Philecta and chooses her as the “Person she made Choice of, to be intrusted with the dear burthen of this Secret; and while she related to her the particulars of her
Happiness” (73) and through these retellings of her affair with Dorimenus, Dalinda and Philecta sustain their friendship. However, Haywood does not devalue the considerable social power and importance of gossip. On other occasions, gossip is shown to be a useful tool for women to navigate themselves in the world. For example, Dalinda “had often heard of Dorimenus, had seen him at a distance” (70) and this knowledge based on the stories she had previously heard about Dorimenus enables her to behave appropriately in such contexts.
More importantly, gossip does not only create intimacy, it is also malicious and aggressive: it “manifests itself as distilled malice” as “it plays with reputations, circulating truths and half-truths and falsehoods about activities, sometimes about the motives and feelings, of others” (Spacks 4). It is important to bear in mind that this cruelty and ability to kill another’s reputation, Rabb argues, is what makes it similar to satire. The story comes to an end because
Dalinda makes sure that Philecta and Dorimenus’ affair became “the Chat of the Town”: “you both are known, detected, and be assured the Affair shall be no Secret, I will at least have the
Vandenberghe 66 satisfaction of Revenge” (98). This illustrates the considerable amount of aggressive power gossip has: Dalinda is able to temporarily take hold of their narrative and experiences and, in doing so, ruins their reputation. Potter also notices the social power gossip possesses in the story: “information and knowledge”, she notes, “particularly the private knowledge conveyed by gossip, are forms of social power over the one whose secret has been shared” (35).
This is all to say that Haywood genders gossip as an explicitly female discourse but does not trivialize this often devalued mode of speech and recognizes the seriousness and vital utility of gossip. She highlights the power of gossip to not only solidify bonds between its participants but also to spread half-truths and rumours to hurt someone’s reputation. This thematic exploration of gossip and its immediate focus on the very real and tangible social consequences on those involved helps amplify the importance of Haywood’s choice to present The
Masqueraders as a secret history with its trademark “gossipy third-person narration of scandalous characters” (Rabb 75). Though much less narratively complex and not overtly political, it still evokes some elements of the genre. The previous sections of this chapter already discussed secret history to some extent – the generic tagging on the title page and the use of satiric naming practices – but its indebtedness to secret history is also reflected in the narrative perspective.
The Masqueraders is presented as a piece of social gossip. Though only quite subtly, the relatively detached narrator makes it clear that this piece of social information is something which was disclosed to them in retrospect. When the narrator cites the poem composed by
Dorimenus which he “shew to some of his Friends”, the narrator introduces it by saying that they will try to recount it “to the best of my Remembrance” (72), giving the audience the impression that they are revealing secret information. Similarly, upon meeting Philecta for the first time after the masquerade, the narrator writes that “whatever it was, it had something in it, which, as he afterwards confest, was infinitely more engaging than any thing he had ever seen” Vandenberghe 67
(80). The narrator’s information is based on what “he afterwards confest”, reminding the reader that this is a piece of social gossip and that this information “has been filtered through multiple consciousnesses” (Spacks 9).
Though The Masqueraders does not seem nowhere near as harsh and mean-spirited as one would expect in satirical texts, Spacks offers a useful framework to consider how even unmalicious, seemingly innocent gossip can be interpreted as, to an extent, aggressive:
“aggression disguises itself in information-sharing, with the relevant information falling into recognizable patterns” (49). As became clear from my previous example of Dalinda’s decision to spread Philecta’s and Dorimenus’ secret relationship, transmitting a story about someone else’s life means momentarily taking possession of another’s experience and this “expresses aggression partly by making other people into personae, actors in the talker’s play” (49). This process of taking imaginative possession of someone else’s experience also occurs narratively.
By the mere fact of continuously pointing to an outward reality (by explicitly referring to the sources of information that informed this text, but also through the use of satiric naming practices), The Masqueraders partakes in the aggressive act of co-opting the experiences of the individuals to whom the characters ostensibly allude.
The two following examples are just two moments of many which illustrate that the narrative voice of The Masqueraders is not neutral , but, in fact, takes hold of the characters’ experiences and casts judgement on them. When Dorimenus first approaches Dalinda at the masquerade, Haywood writes that “he was too well acquainted with his own Power of pleasing, to suffer thro’ a fear to offend” (69). Haywood’s omniscient narrator assigns certain motivations to Dorimenus’ actions and judges him for his ignorance of his own questionable behaviour.
Additionally, interesting in this regard is the very last sentence of The Masqueraders: “undone in all which out to be valuable, she curses the undoing Transport she so lately blest, - and is sufficiently convinc’d how infinitely to blame she was, in indulging a Curiosity which proved
Vandenberghe 68 so fatal to her Virtue, her Reputation, and her Peace of Mind; and which, ‘tis highly probable, will in a short time be found so to her Life” (99). In this passage, the narrator assigns certain emotions to Dalinda and, more importantly, also draws attention to their own practice of projecting feelings and a casting moral judgement on Dalinda’s actions by saying that “tis highly probable” (99) that Dalinda’s indulgence will prove fatal to her life.
Despite the fact that this malicious act of gossip can be considered similar to satire’s often aggressive energy of attack, it is nonetheless also important to highlight that it is different.
The narrator oftentimes displays a certain reluctance towards confidently stating the feelings and thought processes of the characters. For instance: “’tis probable she wish’d to be addrss’d by him in the manner she now was” (70). Or, “she might perhaps have been happy in his renew’d Endearments” (94). Further: “’tis hard to say, whether Amazement or Indignation had the greatest share in her Breast” (98). Again and again, one encounters such instances that highlight the narrator’s inhibition and uncertainty to fully commit to ascribing emotions or motives to the characters. So, even though The Masqueraders’ narrative voice can, to a certain extent, be characterized as aggressive or even satirical, it is vital to bear in mind that gossip also parodies “the idealized deployment of power operative within a given culture”, by decentring narrative authority (Rabb 54). Rather than deriving its authority from a single source and
“ensuring the certainty of a single ‘true’ patrilineage” (Rabb 54), The Masqueraders highlights moments of uncertainty. In so doing, the text seems to resist taking on a stance that aims to offer moral clarity, an element I will further explore in the final section of this chapter when I argue that The Masqueraders resists a morally unambiguous satiric attitude because of its insistence on the importance of both identifying with and condemning the characters.
All of the above is relevant for my analysis of The Masqueraders because it helps to illuminate its fundamentally aggressive tone. Haywood’s thematic insistence on gossip’s ability to simultaneously solidify bonds between its participants and, more importantly, deride or hurt Vandenberghe 69 the subject of their gossip, is helpful in interpreting the responses this text is supposed to evoke.
Haywood presents this text as a piece of social gossip with referents in the outside world and, in so doing, temporarily takes hold of their lives by making public their private experiences as a way to damage their reputations. Moreover, by way of asking the reader to partake in this gossipy discourse and to speculate about the satiric targets through, for instance, the use of gutted names and the generic signalling on the title page, the text “solidifies” the bond between reader and narrator, so to speak, and asks them to participate in casting judgement over these characters. Put differently, in light of Rabb’s and Spacks’ theorization of gossip as fundamentally aggressive, The Masqueraders’ use of secret history’s gossipy third-person narration makes it possible to see the similarity between this text and satire in terms of the cruelty of the act of divulging secrets about a third party without their volition.
3.6 Generic Hybridity and Affect
In the previous sections of this chapter, I showed how The Masqueraders borrows from both more dominant satiric defences and secret histories. Haywood critiques commonplace satiric conventions by, for instance, pointing out the inherent misogyny of the mock-heroic or its pseudo-ethical use of satiric naming practices. At the same time, she also uses those techniques, in conjunction with the gossipy third-person narrative of secret histories and interpretative clues on the title page, to criticize the characters in her story and to invite the reader to participate in the creation of its satiric meaning. In this final section, I emphasize the importance of viewing
The Masqueraders as a generically hybrid text and examine what it means for those satiric moments to coexist in a, for the most part, relatively conventional amatory fiction. In integrating these elements in an amorous tale that uses erotic and titillating descriptions as a way to increase the audience’s identification with its characters, I suggest that Haywood creates a satiric practice that is highly sceptical of what Bogel calls “satiric differentiation”, and, instead,
Vandenberghe 70 produces a distinct type of hybrid satire that simultaneously asks readers to identify with and condemn the characters.
King stresses the unproductiveness of reading backwards through a progressive and teleological narrative of the rise of the novel in recognizing the “inventiveness and even exuberance of women’s experimentation with hybrid forms” (“Genre Crossings” 90). Instead, she argues to read Haywood’s proto-novels, not as fixed and bounded to one genre, but through the lens of a “Bakthinian contact zone in which prose fiction, poetry and drama formed a dynamic continuum of expressive possibilities” (92). Gabrielle Starr presents a similar argument and focusses on the incorporation of the lyric form in the novel. She contends that
Haywood adds lyrical elements to her novelistic prose as a way to “align speaker and reader”
(63), which underlines “the ability of lyric to work affective consensus” and that “shared sensibility is its end” (64). Focussing particularly on the dynamics between theatrical elements and the newly emerging novelistic discourse in Haywood’s first novel, King argues that
Haywood disregards generic boundaries and picks and chooses between these two modes of writing in order to accurately convey her new understanding of female existence (95). King aptly concludes by saying that women writers’ “generic choices are probably better regarded as a set of interactive and evolving practices that involve engagement with tradition, convention, readers and fellow writers” (99).
This thesis, evidently, focusses specifically on secret history and satire in The
Masqueraders, but it is nonetheless worth exploring how the text engages with other modes of expression because it illustrates that Haywood freely appropriates a wide variety of genres and the different effects those instilled in its reader. Above all, The Masqueraders is an amatory fiction, that is, a short prose narrative from a female perspective which documents experiences of love, sex and seduction. Haywood’s amatory plots are so concerned with love and passion, critics argue, because its goal is to “engage the female reader’s sympathy and erotic pleasure, Vandenberghe 71 rather than stimulate intellectual judgement” and they “call upon the female reader to identify with the troubled heroine” (Ballaster, Seductive Forms 170). Through its erotic and arousing descriptions which describe “his Looks—his melting Pressures—his Ardours!—his
Impatiences!—his Extasies!—his Languisghments!” (73), The Masqueraders pulls its readers closer in the text and even explicitly asks them to identify with the characters and supplement their own experiences: “those only who have experience what it is to love or envy, can be judges what kind of pains the one felt in a hopeless Desire” (69). Significantly, the story itself also draws attention to this erotic component of narrative: “Haywood in effect sets up the primacy of narration over story as a sexual practice” (Lanser 175). It comments on how a retelling of an erotic moment can cause similar visceral reactions as the act itself: “and while she related to her the particulars of her Happiness, felt in the delicious Representation a Pleasure, perhaps, not so much inferiour to that which the Reality afforded” (73).
Haywood’s short fictional narrative can certainly be classified as an amorous proto- novel but the text is also clearly influenced by poetry, which Haywood incorporates in order to increase affective identification with her characters. After Dalinda and Dorimenus first have intercourse, the narrator declares that they “know no way to make the Reader so truly sensible of it, as to repeat a few Lines” (72). The poem itself also explicitly comments on the inability of language to completely capture their amorous encounter: “Joys too sublime for Language to express, And which even Thought itself must render less” (72). This sense of the impossibility of language to capture the characters’ extreme emotional conditions pervasively populates many of Haywood’s early fictions and is even present in other places in The Masqueraders. For instance, Haywood writes that “it would be impossible to describe the Pleasure these words created in Philecta’s Soul” (79) or that “there are no Words capable of doing Justice to the
Horrors, the Perplexities which at that Instant invaded her whole Soul (87).
Vandenberghe 72
John Richetti comments on this trope and argues that “Haywood’s narrators dramatize the inadequacy of their writing in the face of female experience at its most intense, extreme and therefore inarticulate” (266). Though Richetti is right to note that such expressions most often occur during steamy bouts of passion, he underestimates the complexity of this rhetorical move.
By changing generic registers multiple times as an attempt to “make the Reader so truly sensible” (72) of the experiences of her characters, Haywood also emphasizes her awareness of how her generic choices influence and affect her readers in different ways. She positions herself a writer who consciously switches between modes and genres in order to accurately capture a range of different experiences, which serves as a good reminder that Haywood’s writing, as
King has put it, “lies outside and possible beyond the imaginings of established genre” (“Genre
Crossings”, 99). In other words, amatory fiction is centrally concerned with pulling in its – mostly female – audience through its passionate discourse and such scholars as Starr and King agree that Haywood employs, for instance, poetic descriptions in order to increase these affective bonds between the reader, writer and the text.
It is worth asking why so many of Haywood’s erotic fictions routinely insist on enhancing the readers’ interaction with the text. Haywood’s harshest critics would brush off her sex and intrigue laden tales as mere “fantasy-delivery services for panting chambermaids”
(King, “Genre Crossings” 93) that arouse its readers’ erotic interests. Her reasons for choosing love and passion as her central thematic concern, however, are arguably more complex than that. In a somewhat rare moment of explicit self-reflection on her work, Haywood comments on what she is hoping to achieve in writing such amatory tales in the preface of Lasselia: or; the Self-Abandoned (1725). She justifies the “too great Warmth” of her texts because, without it, it would be impossible for the reader to realize “how probable it is that he is falling into those
Inadvertencies which the Examples I relate wou’d caution him to avoid” (2). According to
Haywood, her titillating and erotic scenes are the most apt way of increasing readers’ interaction Vandenberghe 73 with the text and improving their “capacity to reflect on their interiors and experiences” (Lubey
309). Kathleen Lubey argues that Haywood’s ‘amatory aesthetic’, as she calls it, transports readers into the extreme situations and emotional states of her characters, which helps them acquire knowledge about the workings of human consciousness and desire: “sex, far from being a degenerate literary content, is of great epistemological importance because it throws the human passions into relief, allowing readers unadulterated access to the workings of characters’ minds and bodies” (321). Ideally, readers would, in turn, convert this knowledge “into active self-scrutiny and self-government in social and sexual realms” (321). In this way, Haywood attempts to instruct the reader by inviting them to “both enjoy in the imagination and condemn in actuality the inadvertencies of her heroines” (311). Rather than through the novella’s conventional and often morally simplistic ending, it seems that Haywood seeks to instruct her readers through her employment of narrative techniques that fully immerse the reader in the amorous adventures of her characters, encouraging them to dissect not only the characters’ but also their own experiences.
In other words, Haywood liberally borrows from different genres and discourses in order to increase the affective connection between reader and text as a part of the text’s instructional purposes to make her audience more sensible to “the most essential knowledge regarding the workings of human consciousness and desire” (Lubey 321). The question remains, then, how this amatory and affectionate alignment between reader, text and character is reconciled with the satiric elements and the tropes of secret history from which The Masqueraders borrows.
Though satire is functionally similar to amatory fiction in that it has an instructive element to it and addresses “the same human natures, values and social issues, often reaching the same conclusions and teaching the same lessons” (Potter 48), it does so in different ways. It needs to be kept in mind that satire is still characterized as a sneering attack which ridicules and derides its victims, accordingly steering away from encouraging its readers to have great amounts of
Vandenberghe 74 empathy for the satiric victim. Rather than explicitly acknowledging an initial similarity or identification between satirist and satiric object, the satirist sets out to generate a difference
(Bogel 26). Surprisingly, however, Haywood combines elements from the seemingly uncomplimentary discourses of amatory fiction and satire.
This paradoxical interplay between two affective states of both identifying with and criticizing the characters is at the heart of The Masqueraders. Sterling’s poem identifies a similar dynamic in her instructive program and hits straight to the heart of this study: he asserts that she is “born to delight as to reform the Age” and “paints Example thro’ the shining Page”
(164 qtd. in Potter). He attributes this pedagogic quality of her writing not solely to the ability of her “wond’rous Art” to depict desire and “mov’st the Heart” (163), but also with the “satiric
Precept” that “warms the moral Tale” (164). When the affectionate power of her passionate prose fails, “Causticks burn where the mild Balsam fails” (164). This, then, is the crux of my argument about how satire functions in The Masqueraders: by integrating satiric elements in an affectionate amatory fiction, Haywood interrogates this practice of satiric differentiation which generates “difference in the face of a potentially compromising similarity” (Bogel 42).
She has already shown herself sceptical of the satirist’s attempt to completely detach himself from something which is not alien enough by, for instance, including a quotation of The Rape of the Lock on the title page of a work stylized as a secret history, a genre of which Pope refuses to accept his embeddedness. Throughout The Masqueraders, it becomes apparent that Haywood continues to challenge this for her deeply problematic practice of satiric differentiation and advocates for a satiric ethic that recognizes the initial proximity with the satiric object. In this way, she seems to advocate that a satiric practice that encourages readers to simultaneously identify with and condemn her characters is a more effective manner of instructing her audience. Vandenberghe 75
In fact, Erin Keating perceives a similar dynamic in Restoration secret histories that contain romance elements, an argument that helps amplify my assertion. Even though she does not explicitly address satire and primarily focusses on ideological changes with regards to political subjecthood by studying little-known political secret histories, Keating’s argument concerning the genre and its affective implications are still useful in this regard. She argues that secret histories create affective intimacy between readers and the characters under scrutiny:
“the secret histories that operate under the cover of romance narratives affectively lessen the distance between the reader and the monarch/hero” (59). As a result, this “temporarily enabled an illusory sense of power on the part of the subject, which acted as a perceived entitlement to sit in judgment over the behaviour of the monarch” (59). Keating examines the specific relationship between subjects and the monarch, but this affective process of identifying and judging can be extended to readers of secret histories more broadly.
These two elements – simultaneously identifying and condemning – provide an interesting starting place for examining satire in The Masqueraders. For instance, Haywood employs the mock-heroic by comparing Dorimenus’, Philecta’s and Dalinda’s convoluted amorous relationship to the heroic ideals of Dryden’s epic tragedy, “exposing the modern realities that fail to rise to its standard” (Rawson 169). In addition to this gentle ridicule of their romance, the generic signalling on the title page and the use of satiric naming practices also implicates the reader to participate in the creation of the text’s satiric meaning, allowing “for the free play of the reader’s interpretive imagination” (Coppola 160) in completing and speculating about the real identity of these characters. This sense of authority over the characters is further strengthened by the by secret histories inspired gossipy third-person narration. Presenting this story as a piece of social gossip elicits not only a sense of voyeuristic pleasure but also grants the reader a sense of power to exercise “dominance over the hated or
Vandenberghe 76 feared object”, which “assumes the guise of moral speculation” (Spacks 51). In sum, through all these elements, the reader is encouraged to judge and criticize the characters’ behaviour.
Perhaps more importantly, however, Haywood also acknowledges that her readers are not exempt or incapable of undergoing the same mistakes as these satiric victims. She affectively lessens the distance between the reader and the satiric targets by including an abundance of erotic and titillating descriptions, drawing the reader closer into the text. It is important to keep in mind that, according to Lubey, this close erotic alignment between reader and text calls “to the imagination and the body” and “most holistically secures their interest in her narrative and encourages them to recognize, while enjoying, the danger of “giving way to
Passion” she warns against” (320), consequently encouraging readers to “convert” this knowledge “into active self-scrutiny” (321).
This notion of Haywood’s “amatory aesthetic” containing a profoundly instructive function can easily be applied to The Masqueraders as well. Rather than the morally uncomplicated ending in which Philecta is punished for her sexual indulgence and curiosity when she “has heard the News, and to increase her Misfortune, finds herself with Child” (99), the numerous erotic descriptions (as illustrated earlier in this section) enhance the audience’s interaction with the text, encouraging the reader to reflect on the protagonists’ actions as well as their own. For instance, the narrator even explicitly urges readers to relate to their own experiences in order to understand the characters’ thoughts and actions: “let any of that Sex (of which I believe there are but few who have not plurality of Engagements) form to themselves, an Idea of what Dorimenus felt in so surprizing a Turn” (69). Similarly, when “the Sould- tortur’d Philecta” reads Dorimenus’ letter, Haywood “let those unhappy Women, who have felt the Force of a Passion as violent as her’s describe” the experience. Kukkonen seems to hold a similar opinion concerning The Masqueraders and argues that Haywood highlights “moments of cognitive salience” and invites “her readers to participate in them”, which are “part of her Vandenberghe 77 larger programme of educating her readers in the passions” (165). In other words, Haywood seems to consider the acknowledgement of the similarity between reader, writer and ‘victim’ to be a more useful way of instructing her reader, rather than a satiric practice that insists on, or desperately tries to create, an absolute difference between the satiric object and the reader/satirist.
All of the above raises questions about how satire is supposed to work. Most theorists would agree that “the aim of satire was reformation through perceptive ridicule. The satirist saw what was wrong with the world: the reader reciprocated by agreement and amendment”
(Morton 1), which, unlike The Masqueraders, implies a relatively straightforward reformative agenda in which reader and satirist align with each other against the victim of the satiric attack.
More recent critics of satire, however, are deeply sceptical about this reformative power and its potential for self-correction. They argue that this theoretical justification of satire as a method for reform fits poorly with how satire was actually practiced as it “represents not so much what satire was and had been”, as what satirists “wanted it to be” (Griffin 21). Marshall, for instance, shows how sometimes the satirist’s motive is not a genuine interest in education, but to “slash individuals out of sheer malice or for the pleasure of abuse” (293) or “for entirely personal reasons” (294), just as Bricker argues that the idea that laughter is a crucial part of satire’s instructive function does not hold true anymore: “rather than being complementary, then, instruction and pleasure were oppositional” (“Laughing a Folly out of Countenance” 167).
To be sure, this does not mean that satire is completely devoid of any kind of educational potential, but scholars have become more cautious in formulating its intensity and where exactly we might find its ability to reform. Knight proposes that its purpose lies much more “perception rather than changed behavior, although change in behavior may well result from change of perception” (5). Bricker offers another intriguing explanation when he argues that effective satire challenges readers and asks questions instead of offering solutions. Just as Haywood’s
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“amatory aesthetic”, it is not the morally clear ending that has the most lasting effect on a reader, but the lack of “moral certainty” that denies “readers the easy laughter of satires that reward too readily with pleasure – the simple head-nodding agreement that undergirds works that offer complacent, incontrovertible conclusions” (Bricker, “Laughing a Folly out of Countenance”
172). Satire in The Masqueraders seems to operate in much the same way as such critics suggest: it is critical of this practice of satiric differentiation and it appears that, for Haywood, a satiric ethic that ultimately lacks a morally unambiguous lesson and even refuses to offer friendly, uncomplicated boundaries between satirist, satiric victim and reader is a much more effective way of educating her readers.
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4. Further Implications: Satire, the Novel and Female Writers
The previous chapters have made it clear that such an interpretation of The Masqueraders has consequences for the critical reception of Haywood in that it shifts the conversation from
Haywood as a novelist to Haywood as a satirist. In this conclusory chapter, however, I take a step back from Haywood studies and want to cautiously consider the larger implications such an analysis has on certain commonplace assumptions and shared paradigms about eighteenth- century satire. In particular, Haywood’s unique brand of affectionate satirical prose should cause us to question both how we define satire’s relationship with the novel form and how we characterize women’s contribution to the satirical literary production of this era.
Scholars studying satire after its Golden Age – usually described as a decline followed by the deaths of its major practitioners, Swift and Pope, in the 1740s – notice two general trends about the fate of satire after mid-century. Satire does not only become less venomous and, instead, takes on a gentler and more amicable tone, it is also subsumed by the emerging novel and integrates into this increasingly dominant form of the domestic and sentimental novel. This transition from spiteful attack to more compassionate laughter has long been a critical commonplace since Ronald Paulson’s seminal Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century
England (1967) and even the most sceptical critics of scholarship of eighteenth-century satire agree that, by and large, this change is an indisputable fact: “as we move into the second half of the eighteenth century, good nature and benevolence are increasingly celebrated, while severity in judgement is increasingly scorned” (Marshall 239). Others suggest that satire was domesticated by the novel around mid-century in the works of such successful novelists as
Fielding, Smollett and Laurence Sterne: “despite being discredited and suppressed, satiric form continued to be appropriated, reinterpreted, and reshaped by . . . novels throughout the eighteenth century” (Palmeri 273). More recently, Knight describes the novel as an exceptionally accommodating form for satire as “satire and the novel are massively overlapping
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(203). He, similarly, locates this shift “in the mid-eighteenth century”, when “the functions of satire were subsumed and transformed by the emergence of the novel” (Knight 226).
Smollett’s Roderick Random serves as a useful example for this nexus between compassionate satire and the novel form (Knight 213). In the preface to his novel, which he deliberately models on such French and Spanish proto-novels by Cervantes and Lesage,
Smollett writes:
Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining, and universally improving, as that
which is introduced, as it were, occasionally, in the course of an interesting story . . . the
reader gratifies his curiosity, in pursuing the adventures of a person in whose favour he
is prepossessed; he espouses his cause, he sympathizes with him in distress, his
indignation is heated against the authors of his calamity; the humane passions are
inflamed; (89 qtd. in Nixon, emphasis mine)
Smollett hopes that the audience’s “humane passions are inflamed” and he expects that the reader of his satirical novel “sympathizes” with the protagonist “in distress”. In other words, he
“emphasizes the reader’s desire to feel “sympathy” for a character” (Nixon 88), creating a type of novelistic satire that is less vicious and more mild-mannered than those major works of satire of preceding decades.
The problem with these contentions about the shift from satire to novel by such scholars as Knight is that they still largely situate the emergence of the novel with mid-century novelists such as Fielding and Richardson. However, as mentioned in the introduction, by fully recognizing the role of female novelists in the first decades of the century, early feminist scholars have successfully challenged the idea that this supposed rise of the novel initiated with such canonical male writers. This is not to say, of course, that Knight’s overall argument does Vandenberghe 81 not hold true anymore. Acknowledging the importance of such early female novelists as
Haywood does, however, open up the possibility to find traces of this cross-fertilization earlier in the century, especially considering the fact that the novel was less solidified in the 1720s and thus showed less resistance to incorporating other discourses and modes. Bartolomeo makes a similar argument and stresses the importance of the relative malleability and fluidity of both satire and the early novel: “both satire as a mode and the novel as a genre remained flexible and open to considerable experimentation, allowing for a proliferation of hybrid forms” (273). In chapter three I explained how the complexity of Haywood’s early fiction is best understood and fully appreciated as generically fluid texts. This is all to suggest, then, that my analysis of The
Masqueraders as a hybrid text – satire, early novel, secret history and amatory fiction all at once – invites us to ask ourselves the implications this has on the interaction between satire and the novel and, more specifically, when we should locate this transition from one genre to another.
Moreover, particularly interesting in this regard is my contention that Haywood’s satire was deeply affectionate, and resists being categorized as biting or aggressive in a more traditional satirical sense. Rather than locating this shift to a gentler satire around mid-century and attributing it to the emerging energies of sentimentalism and sensibility, my analysis of the dynamic between The Masqueraders’ satirical elements and Haywood’s emblematic “amatory aesthetic”, enables us to question if this process cannot be traced back earlier in the century. In fact, this also confirms Marshall’s findings about satiric practices between 1726 and 1745 in which she argues that it is ultimately not particularly useful to reduce this period to its major works – for instance, The Dunciad or Gulliver’s Travels – and pleads for a much-needed diversification of the type of satire we associate with these decades. Marshall writes that “a great deal of less harsh and indignant satire” saw the light and that this is “at once a great age of abusive and cynical political satire and a period of transition toward increasingly sympathetic
Vandenberghe 82 and humane satire as described by Stuart M. Tave in The Amiable Humorist (1960), which traces a shift from judgemental to compassionate laughter” (237).
My analysis of The Masqueraders does not only allow us to interrogate certain familiar accounts of the gradual domestication of satire, it also adds to this growing body of scholarship that seeks to map out eighteenth-century female-authored satire, a field I briefly laid out in the theoretical framework of this thesis. Even though a more thorough attempt to theorize the gendered dimensions of satire remains a genuine desideratum, women’s contribution to satire is overwhelmingly situated in the second half of the century with the rise of an almost abundance of female novelists publishing works that contain some elements of social satire. In contrast, the production of satire by female writers during the Golden Age of Satire remains surprisingly understudied, a gap Rabb addresses as well: “if women writers were caught up in the rise of the novel and of the sentimental in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, might they also have been caught up in the dominating mode of the satirical in earlier ones?” (“Satire”
149).
Certainly, scholars have adamantly studied satiric verse by such authors as Behn or
Montagu, both of whom who were actively writing during satire’s heyday. Such approaches are useful in demonstrating how female writers put pressure on the satiric enterprises of contemporary male satirists because they seek to “expand the poetic arena in areas where male poets have excluded women” (Young 186). Montagu’s biting response to Swift’s “A Lady’s
Dressing Room”, for instance, is written in the same metrical pattern, but “questions the ability of Swift’s poem to function as satire, interrogating the poem’s central assumptions about the properties of satire itself” (Mannheimer 54). Put differently, female satirists are characterized as simultaneously working within and putting pressure on known paradigms of satiric discourse by colonizing such forms from a uniquely female perspective. As I argued in chapter three, The Vandenberghe 83
Masqueraders operates, to a certain extent, in a similar way because it both uses and questions the legitimacy of the mode of the mock-heroic.
One caveat of this perspective, however, is that it still confines satire to how we have typically defined it based on a limited number of highly canonized works. As such, it ultimately portrays such female writers solely in relation to their male counterparts and reduces these writers to satirists of satire, rather than as producers of a unique kind of female-authored satire.
As a means to counter this tendency, I adopted an approach that is consistent with both Rabb’s and Marshall’s recent attempts to reassess hegemonizing beliefs about eighteenth-century satire. Both projects are profusely more inclusive and steer away from this seemingly staunch insistence on satire as an inherently masculine and vicious affair, albeit in different ways.
Following Marshall’s call to include texts that we “have cause to believe was understood by contemporaries as satire” (4), I examined contemporary reader responses that suggest that
Haywood’s amatory fiction was, to a certain extent, received as satirical. Furthermore, Rabb envisages a theory of satire that includes secret histories’ gossipy and scandalous tone, traces of which can be found in The Masqueraders. Such an awareness of the need of not only a more thorough historicization and contextualization of satire, but also a re-definition of what it means to be satirical altogether, then, has opened up the possibility to find a unique kind of female- authored satire during the genre’s so-called Golden Age. All this suggests that women did write satirically, not necessarily in the era’s dominant satiric discourse or as a response to their male counterparts, but in a place where one would perhaps least expect it: amatory fiction.
Though it is worth emphasizing that The Masqueraders stands as a relative exception in both those narratives, important to note is that I am, by no means, trying to assert that an analysis of only one text radically displaces such major critical commonplaces about satire and the novel or women’s contribution to satire. Because characterizing Haywood’s amatory fiction as satirical is a relatively unexpected and unconventional approach, a considerable part of this
Vandenberghe 84 dissertation is devoted to both extensively contextualizing Haywood’s contemporary reception and laying out a methodology with which to approach Haywood’s texts as satirical. As a result,
I decided to limit my scope to the analysis of only one text – perhaps the biggest limitation of this study.
Applying this methodology to a broader test case of similar texts of this period, then, would prove fruitful for further research and would make these preliminary findings of the nature of satire and the novel – and women’s contribution to it – undoubtedly more nuanced.
This includes other amatory fiction by Haywood also bearing the generic tagging of “secret history” on its title page. The British Recluse; or, The Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos’d
Dead.(1722), for instance, is not only categorized as a secret history, it similarly points to an outward reality to arouse curiosity in the reader: the narrator assures the reader that they “can affirm for Truth, having it from the Mouths of those chiefly concern'd in it” (2) and that the character’s names they “shall beg leave to conceal” (14). Moreover, Haywood created an author-function associated with the discursive field of the illicit and the scandalous by marketing her novellas of the 1720s as secret histories, which also has implications on the reception of her wider literary production of this period, even those without this generic classification: “in doing so it ensures that all of Haywood’s work would come to participate in the frisson of the illicit and obscene” (Coppola 157). This makes it possible to include a larger number of texts not specifically titled secret histories in further explorations of Haywood’s satirical enterprises.
Besides surveying texts published in a similar time frame as The Masqueraders, tracing how this type of satire developed over the course of the century could potentially be another productive avenue for further research. Such an approach combines both Rabb’s perspective – who sees secret history as a movement towards satire (82) – and McKeon’s, who is particularly interested in secret history’s influence on the novel after the decline of its political and cultural Vandenberghe 85 importance and in the “shift of normative weight from the public referent to the private reference” (621). The Masqueraders’ satire of presumably fictional characters, then, is the first step of a gradual “privatization” or “domestication” of secret history’s otherwise often topical and allusive satire. This type of satire which feeds off gossip, scandal and the public disclosure of the secrets of private individuals might have developed and altered further over the course of the following decades. Austen8, for instance, is often hailed as a skilled satirist and scholars have located her satire in, among a wide range of other aspects, her usage of gossip as a powerful form of narrative authority: “in Emma gossip operates as the mechanism by which this comedic alignment of public and private spheres is enacted” (Finch and Bowen 2). Though published almost a century later, this text hints yet again at the relative similarities between satire and gossip, forming an interesting parallel with the texts discussed in this thesis.
8 Carnell has already started examining the influence of secret history on Austen’s writings. She sees the genre’s complex use of layers of narrators as precursors to the “free indirect style” that such writers as Austen helped develop later in the century (“From Secret History to Novel” 7). She also argues that Lady Susan, a short novel from Austen’s juvenilia, hearkens back, stylistically and politically, to secret histories (“Reading Austen’s Lady Susan as Tory Secret History” 3).
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Conclusion
Haywood’s early fiction first came under scrutiny during the feminist recovery project of the
1990s, a movement that explicitly challenged hegemonizing beliefs about the rise of the novel.
Because of this persistent focus on the novel and a general tendency to consider women writers unworthy “of membership in the clubby world of satire” (Rabb, Satire and Secrecy 11), the satirical undertones of Haywood’s amatory fiction have remained largely unexplored. The main objective of this study was to explore these satirical elements in one of Haywood’s early amorous fictions, The Masqueraders, and I endeavoured to do so by adopting a two-fold approach.
In the first part of this attempt to explore Haywood as a satirist, I contextualized her contribution to satire by analysing contemporary responses to Haywood’s work and by adopting a “long view” (King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 14) of Haywood’s career in tracing her continuous engagement with the satirical tradition throughout her life. Sterling’s favourable review of Haywood’s amatory fiction and Pope’s scathing portrayal of Haywood as a hack writer both indicate that Haywood was viewed as a satirist in her own time and suggests that her interest in and experimentation with secret histories provides a valuable starting point to uncover the satirical undercurrents of her work. In fact, Haywood herself routinely points towards the similarity between secret history – which Rabb considers a distinctly female type of satire (Satire and Secrecy 13) – and more traditional satirical defences such as those by the
Scriblerians over the course of her career, revealing how they are not unmistakably different but, instead, are surprisingly compatible and share a profound fascination with secrets and scandalous in-fighting. Moreover, in The Adventures of Eovaai, Haywood both imitates and criticizes more conventional satiric practices, exposing “the structuring misogyny in the available discourses of such “opposition” satire” (Ballaster, “A Gender of Opposition” 151). In this way, she posits herself as a writer who is sceptical of Pope’s need to differentiate his own Vandenberghe 87 writing with secret histories and is aware of the limitations and inherent misogyny of many of her contemporaries’ satirical works.
These two elements – her scepticism towards satiric differentiation and awareness of the limitations of popular satiric defences – were considered in context of The Masqueraders.
In this section, I traced a similar “double nature” of both imitation and critique in this text. For instance, Haywood demonstrates her awareness of the mock-heroic tradition but does not solely employ it to ridicule the romance that unfolds over the course of the story. She also draws from this mode to expose the tendency of this form to deride the feminine, by choosing not to ridicule
Dalinda’s experience, but to elevate it to near-heroic heights. Similarly, the title page and the presence of satiric naming practices invite the reader to participate in creating the satiric meaning of the text by decrypting the real individuals to whom the characters referred but, at the same time, Haywood shows herself critical of the mostly pseudo-ethical use of such practices. In addition to this, Haywood also employs a gossipy and somewhat aggressive third- person narrative perspective inspired by secret histories, creating a sense of authority over the characters and granting the reader the power to exercise “dominance over the hated or feared object” (Spacks 51).
In other words, despite these similarities to the satirical works of her contemporaries,
Haywood is also critical of common satiric defences. The most important point I want to drive home, then, is that this text’s satire functions in a markedly different way. It needs to be kept in mind that The Masqueraders is perhaps best understood not solely as a predecessor to the novel, but “in relation to the genre fluidity of the early 1720s” (King, “Genre Crossings” 92). As such,
Haywood interweaves these satirical moments and traces of secret histories in an otherwise typical amatory fiction, which aims to critically engage and educate its audience by aligning reader and text through its erotic and sexually arousing descriptions (Lubey 321). Taken together, Haywood’s “amatory aesthetic” and these satirical elements create a satiric practice
Vandenberghe 88 which encourages its readers to simultaneously criticize and identify with its characters. In so doing, Haywood seems to advocate for a satiric ethic that acknowledges the proximity between the satiric object and reader, instead of a practice that functions as “a rhetorical means to the production of difference in the face of potentially compromising similarity”, which characterizes much of the satiric landscape of the Augustan age (Bogel 41).
It is worth emphasizing that this reading of The Masqueraders as a surprisingly affectionate satirical proto-novel seems to stand as a relative exception both to how the relationship between satire and the novel and the nature of eighteenth-century female-authored satire is typically characterized. Though the integration of satire into the novel is usually located around mid-century, The Masqueraders indicates that traces of this cross-fertilization can be found earlier in the century as well. In addition, my analysis adds to this growing body of scholarship that aims to recover female-authored satire of the eighteenth century. By recognizing secret history as satirical and exploring its traces in The Masqueraders, I nevertheless also emphasize that slightly re-defining what it means to be satirical might be a more adequate way to fully uncover the satiric potential of early modern female writers, as such scholars as Rabb and Marshall have done before me.
This need to not only redefine the nature of satire, but also have a better awareness of what type of literature was historically deemed satirical also indicates that such views that assume that women simply did not write satirically in the eighteenth century (Hammond 5) are insufficient explanations for the lack of scholarship on female-authored satire. My impression is that contemporary definitions of satire have, in part, obscured their satiric efforts because it seems that, today, women and humour – and their relationship with satire in particular – are still perceived as deeply troubling. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, notoriously asked “why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny”, just as more recent examples, such as the outrage caused by Michelle Wolf’s comedy set at the White House Vandenberghe 89
Correspondents’ Dinner, raises questions about “what satirists are allowed to say and what women are allowed to say” (Groskop). More attention to what contemporaries deemed satirical and a more critical attitude towards our own conceptions of who we allow to be funny or satirical, then, might make it easier to secure a place for women writers in the history of satire.
To see Haywood in this light follows the views of such scholars as King, who criticize how scholarship today “is more likely to associate Haywood with the figure of Dulness rather than with the satiric aims of her creator” (A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 43). The
Masqueraders sheds new light on this relationship between Pope and Haywood because it traces their connection back a few years earlier than her infamous portrayal in The Dunciad and casts her as a more active participant in their relationship. My intention was also to give due attention to Haywood as a satirist more generally. Too often scholars still think of Haywood as solely a novelist, disregarding both the wide variety of genres within which she wrote and the diverse and hybrid nature of her early work. This study has taken the first steps, however, in more extensively mapping out the satirical undercurrents of her work, opening up the possibility to establish Haywood as a satirist, and, more importantly, one who does not slavishly imitate her fellow contemporary satirists.
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