Women's Sexual Agency in Eliza Haywood's Fiction Lucy Ellis
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“Her panting heart beat measures of consent”: Women’s sexual agency in Eliza Haywood’s Fiction Lucy Ellis Thesis submitted to the University of Ottawa in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Lucy Ellis, Ottawa, Canada, 2019 ii Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: The Empire of the Father ........................................................................................ 17 Corruption in the court and the home........................................................................................ 24 The father as lover ..................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter Two: The Semiotics of Consent ...................................................................................... 42 Body language: when beating hearts do the talking .................................................................. 46 Intersections of class and consent ............................................................................................. 56 Masquerade: consenting to the unknown .................................................................................. 65 Owning women’s consent: material gain and legal concerns ................................................... 69 Chapter Three: Female Intimacies ................................................................................................ 74 Enabling rape: Haywood’s emphasis on female betrayal ......................................................... 79 Seeking pleasure through female friendship ............................................................................. 92 Queering the ending: female solace in exile ............................................................................. 99 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 107 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 110 iii Abstract Through her texts depicting amorous adventures, Eliza Haywood engages with critical, contemporary discussions about power relations and consent in both social and legal constructs. Her texts resist the boundary between the private domain of interpersonal relationships and the public domain of political relations. Rather, her fiction engages in a wide-reaching discourse that explores the interrelations between power, agency, consent, and education, and lays bare the ways in which societal roles and expectations are reinforced in damaging ways. This thesis aims to prove that Haywood’s repetition of central motifs—including the continued tension between resisting and yielding to sexual pressure or temptation, and the line between seduction and rape—serves to question how these behaviours become normalized and naturalized. Through analyzing three categories of relationships—women and their fathers or guardians, women and their lovers, and women with other women—this thesis unpacks how women’s agency is stifled by parental relationships, transferred to male lovers, and finally empowered by female intimacy. iv Acknowledgements First and foremost, this thesis would not have happened without my supervisor, Dr. Sara Landreth. My introduction to Eliza Haywood occurred in her third year course on eighteenth- century novels. What followed—an inability to stop thinking about Fantomina, a fascination with Eliza Haywood, and a desire to spend a lot of time and effort thinking and writing about consent—is due to Sara’s enthusiasm and continued support. Thank you for your patience over the past few years. A part-time thesis is not the easiest journey to undertake, and I truly appreciate how supportive and thought-provoking you have been throughout the process. I am also indebted to loving parents and siblings. As the token arts child—the rest of the family being comprised of an oncologist, a nurse, an accountant, a mad scientist, an MSc, and a Psychology student—I felt free to pursue my passion. Thank you for keeping me on track with gentle questioning. As a preview to my third chapter, I want to dedicate the longest and final section of thanks to my beloved female friends. Heather, Becca, and Steph, as my childhood friends, you have the distinct honour of having stuck with me through the best and worst times of my life. You are always in my heart. To Jas and Beth, our trio has given me strength and encouragement in times of doubt. Jas, I can’t imagine university without you. Thank you for every study session, every time you called me out for not working, every bottle of wine… To the English Baes—Mia, Kelsy, Kelsey, Kato, Rachel, Nicole, Vanessa, Steph, ABD, and Emma—if I ever need to concoct an elaborate plot to save myself from a bad situation… I know where to turn. Thank you for the study sessions, the late night Facebook messenger crowd-sourcing, the continued encouragement, and thank you most of all for your love of literature. There are few things that bring joy like excitedly yelling about a poem or a book or a piece of critical theory. To Jillaine and Dayna, two of my first friends at university, our conversations and debate practices expanded my worldview and my critical thinking. I’m so lucky to have met you. And to my newest bae, Alyssa, thank you for listening to my ideas and encouraging me through this part- time MA process. You’re an awesome friend. 1 Introduction Eliza Haywood published her first novel, Love in Excess, in 1719. Amidst the intriguing tales of Count D’elmont’s amorous adventures, Haywood explores critical themes of power relations and consent in both social and legal constructs. The text demonstrates how power over women is transferred from one man to another through the legal system, either by marriage or by testamentary guardianship. Haywood’s popular novel, while seemingly conforming to typical aspects of the amorous romance genre, also contains underlying hints of an imperfect social structure wherein women’s bodily signifiers are read through a cultural lens that gives men permission to take liberties that would otherwise be unacceptable. Further, Love in Excess lays bare the ways in which men teach and reinforce this cultural understanding to one another, perpetuating a system that devalues women’s verbal consent and prioritizes male sexual gratification and control. Thirty-five years later, near the end of her career and her life, Haywood published The Invisible Spy in 1754. Recent scholarship has considered this work to be Haywood’s meta-reflections on her own writing career, and on the various genres in which she engaged. As such, I will reference it throughout the thesis in order to chart Haywood’s continued preoccupation with the interrelations between power, agency, consent, and education. I analyze these themes primarily in relation to sexual narratives, but this thesis will examine the legal and philosophical contextual underpinnings behind them, and demonstrate that Haywood engaged in a wide-reaching socio-political discourse through her fiction. In my analysis, I retrospectively apply the second-wave feminist analysis of the inter-connectedness of the personal and the political. This thesis looks at the ways in which women’s daily personal lives and relationships were both predicated on and contributed to social norms, and the ways in 2 which their ability to exert agency was steeped in their contemporary political situation. Further, amatory in the eighteenth century flourished in the “political culture organized around relations of dominance and subordination” (Bowers 128). Questions about ambiguous agency and coercion had a deeply political connotation for Haywood’s audience across party lines. Although her first text was published 30 years after King James II’s abdication, the political climate was still strongly influenced by those events. Tories challenged the language of abdication because it connoted that James had willingly abandoned his position as king; it suggested that he had consented to leave, rather than that he was forced to flee both by the Duke of Orange’s army arriving on England’s shores and the increasing English support for the invading forces (Bowers 132). Haywood’s partisan affiliation falls outside of the scope of this thesis, but regardless of her political leanings, her culture was steeped in discourse about coercion, consent, and power. This thesis will delve into the legal realities of Haywood’s England, with particular focus on the Court of Chancery. This court was meant to protect vulnerable populations, but showed itself to be more interested in defending property rights and primogeniture than in defending women. This thesis follows in the tradition of scholars such as Kathryn King, Catherine Ingrassia, Helen Thompson, and others who emphasize the importance of taking the long view of Haywood’s career. Earlier decades of Haywood scholarship viewed her amatory fiction from the 1720s as less politically