MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740
______
A Dissertation
Presented to
The Faculty of the Department
Of English
University of Houston
______
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
______
By
Chrisoula M. Gonzales
May, 2017
MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740
______Chrisoula M. Gonzales
APPROVED:
______Ann Christensen, Ph.D. Committee Chair
______David Mazella, Ph.D.
______Maria Gonzalez, Ph.D.
______Lynn Voskuil, Ph.D.
______Robert Shimko, Ph.D. University of Houston
______Antonio D. Tillis, Ph.D. Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Hispanic Studies
ii
MAKING SPACE: THE CASE FOR AMATORY FICTION, 1660-1740
______
An Abstract of a Dissertation
Presented to
The Faculty of the Department
of Psychology
University of Houston
______
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
______
By
Chrisoula M. Gonzales
May, 2017
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores amatory fiction as a genre significant to English literary history. I ground the study of amatory fiction in literary history, specifically exploring the ways that amatory fiction participates in the development of the novel. In amatory fiction, female characters express desire in a public setting, a feature that distinguishes amatory fiction from the novel, where characters more often express themselves in private, domestic spaces. By analyzing the various expressions of female desire in the works of Aphra Behn,
Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe, I show that female characters are motivated to inhabit public space because they seek to know themselves as sexual, social, and political agents. I also locate representations of the Restoration and eighteenth-century coquette in amatory fiction in order to illustrate how female characters manage both their spatial and social position in various public settings. This study’s taxonomy of characters ranges from minor characters to titular heroines, revealing an equal representation of female desire in amatory fiction and, subsequently, English history.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The guidance and support of Dr. Ann Christensen and Dr. Dave Mazella have made this dissertation possible.
I would like to thank Ann for taking such great care in reading my work and providing me excellent feedback at every stage of the dissertation. Ann has been both a teacher and a friend, and I am grateful to have her as a mentor.
I would like to thank Dave for his continued interest in my project and his invaluable instruction and advice along the way.
I am grateful to Dr. Maria Gonzalez, Dr. Lynn Voskuil, and Dr. Robert Shimko for serving on my committee and encouraging me with their important questions.
Above all, I am grateful to my family, near and far, for their enduring love and patience.
To my husband, Matthew, I am better because of you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Amatory Fiction as History 1
Chapter 1: A Prelude 18
Chapter 2: The Formation of Desire; Locating Behn’s Heroines in Public Space 34
Chapter 3: Desire and Privacy in Manley’s New Atalantis and The Adventures of Rivella 81
Chapter 4: The Philosophy of the Coquette; or Fantomina’s “Innocent Curiosity” 116
Chapter 5: Roxana and Amy’s Divided Desire 139
Coda: The Space Amatory Fiction Makes 171
Bibliography 178
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Introduction
Amatory Fiction as History
The writers of amatory fiction who inspired this project owe their legacy today to the late twentieth-century feminist theorists who recovered them from obscurity. Without the introduction of encomiast biography to the world of feminist literary criticism, Aphra
Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, would likely have remained unknown or ill reputed. This new strain of scholarship illuminated the presence of women writers in
England at the time of the Restoration and eighteenth-century, as this was the period when women first worked alongside men in the male-dominated profession of writing. The discovery of women in this professional setting prompted several feminist scholars to ascribe these early writers an exceptional status—a gesture Virginia Woolf made famous in
A Room of One’s Own (1927), where she says that all women writers should strew flowers on Aphra Behn’s grave for being the first woman to earn a living by her pen (50). Despite
Woolf’s laudatory nod to Behn, very little was known about women writers (and women’s history in general), so the arrival of the late twentieth-century feminist recovery movement was both exciting and empirically advantageous. Scholars exposed the lives of Behn,
Manley, and Haywood to be simultaneously public and mysterious, scandalous and sexy.
For example, in the 1988 special edition of Women’s Studies, Catherine Gallagher’s “Who
Was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra
Behn” and Janet Todd’s “Life After Sex: The Fictional Autobiography of Delarivier
Manley” refer to Behn and Manley as “author-whore” in order to demonstrate the public nature of women writers’ professional lives, which came with the understanding that
1 women writers needed to “seduce” their readers (and publishers) in order succeed in the early British literary marketplace1 (Gallagher 24; Todd 54). Nevertheless, this increasing interest in the sensational lives of women writers had the unintended effect of overshadowing the literary merits of their work, rendering it anomalous to the more male- unified trajectory of literary history. Women’s writing is then placed in a separate group: that which is not male and, consequently, that which is secondary, even inferior.
However, in the twenty-first century, scholars began to question the sustainability of the women writers recovery project for very similar reasons; this was evident at the 2010
ASECS Women’s Caucus, where Laura Rosenthal argued that “while recovery has been, and continues to be, indispensable, it has nevertheless framed women writers in ways that sometimes limit our full understanding of their intellectual, historical, and artistic force”
(2). In other words, while women writers are certainly discussed more frequently today thanks to the recovery movement, there were limitations to the method that brought attention to women writers in the first place, particularly the designation of gender-specific writerly markers like author-whore, prostitute-playwright, or scandalmongering hack2.
1 Gallagher’s “Who Was that Masked Woman?” becomes a chapter in her book, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (1994) and Todd’s “Life After Sex” is adapted for her book, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (1989). The phrase “author-whore” proliferates in the recovery scholarship on women writers, giving the label its own literary history, which I believe unintentionally undermined the literary merit of these women writers. As literary historians, Gallagher and Todd acknowledge that the author-whore was a reputation that pervaded the minds of Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences and so, for the most part, women writers, or the successful ones anyway, used it to their advantage. There is some disagreement among critics, though, on whether Behn flaunted the title, as Gallagher asserts, or if she “savagely resented” it, as Behn’s biographer, Angeline Goreau, argues instead. In 2000, Derek Hughes’s “The Masked Woman Revealed” unravels Gallagher’s thesis, suggesting that her New Historicist approach distorts the amount of influence the label supposedly had. 2 These terms recur in Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story. For example, on Manley: “[t]he combination of sexual scandal and venality in Manley’s self-presentation made her, indeed, the archetypal ‘hack’ [ . . . ] short for ‘author-whore’ and had an especially appropriate ring when applied to a ruined scandalmongering woman” (Nobody 133).
2
Because these gendered identifiers align the woman writer with the notoriety of her biography rather than that of her literary oeuvre, her writing is often excluded from larger discussions of authorial legacy and canonicity.
I open with this (very) brief survey of early English women writers’ literary history in order to expose the discrepancy between the encomiast critical effort to revive women writers and the subsequent assessment of women writers’ work as simply not that good.
Virginia Woolf demonstrates this by encouraging women writers to “let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,” as noted above, because “[s]he made, by working very hard, enough to live on,” but then Woolf adds, “The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote” (50, 48). This kind of caveat recurs in the twenty-first century, nearly eighty years later, in Susan Stave’s A Literary History of Women’s Writing in
Britain, 1660-1789 (2006), where she identifies Behn and Manley as writers of amatory fiction, saying, “Manley follows Behn in helping to create the clichéd prose of debased romance,” and then concludes that much of their work is “badly written” (148). Staves justifies her accusation of their “bad writing3” by prefacing that “literary merit is an important principle of selection in [her] literary history,” and “[i]t cannot be a sin against feminism to say that some women wrote well and others badly” (2, 3). Even if I disagree with her opinion on amatory fiction’s aesthetics, Staves’s twenty-first century survey of women’s writing calls attention to what the recovery movement largely lacks—sustained critical attention to the extensive work of women writers. Nevertheless, A Literary History
3 This also appears in Staves’s essay “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (1993), where she reviews Ros Ballaster’s survey of women’s amatory fiction, Seductive Forms (1992), and says that she is “bothered by Ballaster’s not addressing what seem to [her] some obvious features of ‘bad writing’ in Behn or Manley” (660). 3 is, itself, an extensive work, arranged chronologically, and inclusive of all literary forms, and because Staves’s assessment of literary merit determines the length at which she elaborates on a particular writer and text, she passes over what she considers badly-written women’s writing fairly quickly.
I use Staves’s example, specifically, because her assumption about amatory fiction—as “clichéd prose of debased romance” and “bad writing”—deserves to be challenged. This assumption gets at a problem in feminist literary history—the tendency to explain women’s writing in ways that foreground women writers’ historical circumstances, as Staves follows her assessment of Manley’s amatory fiction by saying that the writer “did more to reinforce resistance to women’s entitlement to write than to advance the cause”
(149). If the scholars of the recovery movement were inspired to answer a question like
Gallagher’s “Who Was that Masked Woman?” then this study intends to answer a similar question regarding the unstable genre of amatory fiction, not because it lacks a proper literary history4, which I will describe shortly, but because amatory fiction was recovered in the same movement as early women writers, treated with the same critical exceptionalism, and is consequently considered separately from the more established literary tradition of the
English novel. I define amatory fiction by considering the ways that it has been pitted against the novel. While many critics have used the elements of realism or individualism to distinguish amatory fiction from the novel, my study demonstrates that the main difference between the two forms is in the space where desire is expressed. Desire in amatory fiction
4 For a more detailed literary history of amatory fiction, see: Janet Todd The Sign of Angellica: Women Writing and Fiction, 1600-1800 (1989), Jane Spencer The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (1986), Toni Bowers Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760 (2011). 4 is public, whereas in the novel, it is private. In the prelude chapter that follows, I clarify my use of the terms “desire” and “space,” and I more fully explain the parameters of amatory fiction in order to situate it firmly in literary history as a genre in its own right. However, in order to make a space for amatory fiction in literary history, I must first examine extant definitions of the literary form and the ways that it has been compared to the novel.
One of the earliest studies of amatory fiction is Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms:
Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684-1740 (1992), which defines the genre as “a particular body of narrative fiction by women which was explicitly erotic in its concentration on the representation of sentimental love” (31, emphasis my own). Not only does Ballaster define amatory fiction as female-authored, but she also suggests that these “experimental texts dramatize the seduction of the female reader” (30, emphasis my own). These emphases, by women and for women, direct the reader’s focus on gender as an important marker of literary distinction, and readers may assume that women’s writing is somehow vastly different from men’s writing and, therefore, should not be discussed as equal. While
Ballaster suggests that amatory fiction is “experimental” because of its “explicitly erotic” illustrations of female seduction, I find that it is the public setting of female desire that only makes it appear so “explicitly erotic” in amatory fiction. Nonetheless, Ballaster is not alone in emphasizing amatory fiction’s representations of eroticism and female seduction. For example, Janet Todd calls the literary form “romantic prose” and finds that “love” in amatory fiction is actually depicted as “lust with all its physical pleasures and social disadvantages for women” (Sign 50). Toni Bowers simply refers to amatory fiction as
“seduction stories” or “scandal fiction,” both concerned with “depict[ing] female
5 experience5,” (Force 7). Todd and Bowers demystify Ballaster’s dramatic “seduction of the female reader” by clarifying that amatory fiction draws attention to female experience, which also happens to be a goal of the novel6. Even the titles of popular novels, like
Richardson’s Pamela or Clarissa, demonstrate the texts’ attention to women’s interests and experiences. By looking at these definitions together, we see that amatory fiction is not as gender-exclusive as Ballaster’s study suggests.
Ballaster’s study of amatory fiction intends to fill in some of the gaps of studies of the novel by comparing the inventiveness and work ethic of male and female authors.
However, she seems to at once clarify and undermine her own argument when she says,
“the early woman writer was very far removed from the modest and amateur lady of letters most histories would have her be. She was rather a prostitute of the pen, trafficking desire for profit and, in this respect, no different from many of her male contemporaries” (29). By referring to women writers of amatory fiction as “prostitutes of the pen,” Ballaster reminds her audience of the highly sexualized, gender-segregated conditions women faced as new professionals in Restoration England, but she does not demonstrate for her modern readers why these dated sexual biases about women writers are irrelevant to their actual accomplishments in prose. The second part of Seductive Forms goes on to explore the work of Behn, Manley, and Haywood in fiction, but Ballaster’s analysis largely focuses on the various depictions of Restoration England’s social climate and the ways society affected the writers’ biographical circumstances. While Ballaster’s analysis of amatory fiction allows
5 Janet Todd The Sign of Angellica: Women Writing and Fiction, 1600-1800 (1989) 50. Toni Bowers Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760 (2006) 7. 6 In his study of Pamela, Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957) attributes Richardson’s huge success to the novel’s “appeal to the interests of women readers” (151). 6 readers to better understand the history of Restoration England, the lack of close textual analysis does not translate that history into one that has literary resonance.
Close textual analysis of amatory fiction allows for readers to understand England’s
Restoration history through the lens of literary tradition. For example, when critics compare representations of the Restoration libertine7 in amatory fiction to real-life historical figures, they ignore the libertine as an intentional literary persona that allows for characters to pursue desire in public space. The libertine is “[a] person (typically a man) who is not restrained by morality, esp. with regard to sexual relations; a person of dissolute or promiscuous habits8.” Given the emphasis on sexuality in the definitions of both amatory fiction and the libertine, it makes sense that scholars would locate representations of the persona and its philosophy of unrestrained morality in the textual analysis of these early narratives. To put it plainly, the libertine is a historical figure/philosophy used in literature to represent desire. If amatory fiction is considered, as Staves suggests, “debased romance,” separate from the larger category of romance that belongs to the novel, then one might assume that the novel lacks debased scenes of seduction that are so often included in amatory fiction, scenes that Ballaster calls “explicitly erotic,” but even a passing familiarity with Samuel Richardson’s popular novel Pamela disproves that assumption.9 However, the
English novel is not bound to a single figure or movement in the way that amatory fiction is inextricably linked to Restoration libertinism—a convenient marker for historians of the
7 A popular example of the libertine in history is Restoration poet and satirist John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester. Paul Davis calls Rochester the “arch-libertine” in his 2013 introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Rochester’s poetry. (Rochester: Selected Poems xxxvii). 8 Oxford English Dictionary 9 Pamela’s infamous closet scene, where Mr. B hides in Pamela’s closet, watches her undress, and attempts to rape her. I return to Richardson’s Pamela in my conclusion. 7 novel looking to categorize early English prose. John Richetti’s The English Novel in
History: 1700-1780 (1999) defines amatory fiction by its “melodramatic or libertine sexuality” and “amorous (and somewhat unreal or impractical) encountering” of romance
(20). In this parenthetical note, Richetti, like notable historian of the novel Ian Watt before him, identifies realism as the commonly alleged distinction between amatory fiction and the novel.10 While Richetti pinpoints amatory fiction’s unrealistic depictions of desire as the discerning difference between the two prose forms, he does not explain that libertine sexuality only appears so melodramatic because it manifests in public space.
However, John Richetti continues that “[u]nderneath its stylistic extravagance, preposterous actions, and carelessly formulaic approach to characterization, this new
‘romance’ asserts a continuity between narrative and ordinary life” (20). In this context, realism in amatory fiction exists; it is simply buried in the text, where scholars have yet to fully explore. Watt excludes amatory fiction from his study because of its fanciful and unrealistic naming of characters, which “excluded any suggestion of real and contemporary life” (Watt 19). This seems a bit fussy when, for Watt, the novel’s “primary criterion was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new” because amatory fiction certainly meets that requirement (Watt 13). Amatory fiction’s realism is “more frequently articulated through a discourse of [Restoration] party politics”
(i.e., Tory and Whig partisanship), so a character’s authentic individual experience is largely tied to gender ideologies of the public, political realm, unlike the novel’s “bourgeois
10 Watt’s Rise of the Novel famously defines the novel by illustrating its formal realism, which, Watt says, should be evident throughout the narrative, in originality/truth, plot, character, time, setting, and style (10-30). 8 paradigm of femininity as domesticity11” (Ballaster 11). Watt goes even further to say that
“it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work” (13). By his logic, then, the novels of Richardson and Defoe, which he includes in his study, are in great danger, given that Richardson both uses the epistolary form in
Pamela like Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between and Nobleman and His Sister (1684) and
“attempts to appropriate and convert the risky immoralities of scandal fiction and seduction narrative” (Keymer xx). Meanwhile, Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724)12 are characterized by the quintessential coquette of amatory fiction like Haywood’s
Fantomina. Fortunately, historians of the novel after Watt13 are more inclusive in their literary histories and offer writers of amatory fiction more than a terse line or two. Richetti devotes a detailed chapter to amatory fiction in his English Novel in History, and unintentionally points out why it so easily segregated from the novel—the realism of amatory fiction is buried in stylistic narrative devices.
Richetti examines representations of individual experience in the writing of Behn,
Manley, and Haywood, and he proves that while realism exists in amatory fiction, it appears as “a function of the plot rather than an object of representation” (84). Realism in amatory fiction only appears to be a plot device because it represents a large, multi-faceted body politic, like society in Restoration England, whereas the novel’s object of representation illustrates a more unified individual, like the domestic woman. This
11 Ballaster cites Nancy Armstrong’s ‘redefinition of desire’ in domestic space as a “culturally produced and historically specific ideology, the genesis of which can be traced to the mid- and late eighteenth century” (11). 12 In Chapter Five, I place Defoe’s Roxana in the category of amatory fiction. 13 See Michael McKeon Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987), Susan Staves A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660-1789 (2006), John Richetti The English Novel in History: 1700-1780 (1999). 9 distinction, however, does not make realism in amatory fiction any less authentic than what the novel represents. Richetti also proves, in his own close readings, that in order to uncover amatory fiction’s depictions of “ordinary life,” one must apply close, textual analysis of various works of amatory fiction and read past “melodramatic” representations of desire (20). As Alice Eardley points out in her 2007 essay “Recreating the Canon,” feminist scholars, including Janet Todd in 1988 and Margaret Ezell in 1990, had already
“advocate[d] the close textual analysis of women’s writing in relation to the wider literary canon,”14 but given the “prevalence of historical research within women’s writing” at that time, close reading was considered “outdated and treating women’s writing as literature
[wa]s almost shameful” (279, emphasis my own). While the twenty-first century has certainly invited more scholarship that treats women’s writing like literature and not history, Eardley nonetheless observes a “feminist discomfort” with textual analysis because it threatens the stability of women writers’ place in the literary canon. According to
Eardley, feminist scholars assume that women writers are only included in the canon because of their historical circumstances, so if critics begin reading women’s writing as literature and not history, they might discover that it lacks the literary merit required for canonicity (273). However, if scholars have proven that amatory fiction is similar to the novel for the same reasons that the novel is so acclaimed (attention to individual experience and realism), then it seems, at this point, any lingering doubts about amatory fiction’s literary merit and aesthetics are really a matter of the critic’s personal preference.
14 Eardley cites Janet Todd’s Feminist Literary History: A Defence (1988) and Margaret Ezell’s “The Myth of Judith Shakespeare” (1990) 10
If twenty-first century criticism still defines amatory fiction by its “debased romance” or “libertine sexuality,” then it is worth noting what it is about this particular brand of seduction that makes it so different from the novel’s representations of sex. The unrestrained sexuality of the libertine certainly makes sense, especially when the persona largely emerged from the philosophical discourse of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan15 (1651), where he expounds, “Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire” and
“[f]elicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another” (38, 62). The crux of Hobbes’s philosophy depends on movement, and the libertine appropriates this method to better serve his sexual desires, moving freely from one lover to the next. This freedom of motion necessitates the libertine’s use of public space, where he finds more room to express desire unrestrictedly. Therefore, the sexuality of the libertine alone does not distinguish amatory fiction from the novel, but rather the public setting that the figure inhabits. The libertine persona is a reflection of society in Restoration and early eighteenth- century England, like other public and literary figures of that period—the coquette, the jilt, the fop, etc.—but what the libertine makes public is unrestrained desire, which is unique to amatory fiction. Because the other personas are a bit more heedful in their expressions of desire, such as the coquette that I describe in the following chapters, they can be adapted to fit both literary forms.
In the novel, desire (even unrestrained) is private, confined largely to domestic space, as Nancy Armstrong demonstrates in her important Desire and Domestic Fiction: A
Political History of the Novel (1987). According to Armstrong, the history of sexuality can
15 For more evidence on Thomas Hobbes Leviathan’s influence on libertinism, see Klaas Tindemans’s “Nature, Desire, and the Law: On Libertinism and Early Modern Legal Theory” (2012). 11 be traced in the study of early English novels because the discourse of the latter made known what were typically matters of private concern. Then, in “The Prenovel: Theory and
Archive” (2011), Goran Stanivukovic makes a space for amatory fiction alongside the history of the novel, suggesting that “[w]hile the history of sexuality is no doubt central to the history of the novel, the history of sexuality cuts into both private and public concerns of the fictional world of the novel” (194). Because of amatory fiction’s unique attention to public interests, “the history of the prenovel is also a history of the novel,” and, as
Stanivukovic shows, a study of both literary forms is necessary to illustrate a fuller history of sexuality (195). Stanivukovic historicizes amatory fiction in order to demonstrate its relationship to a wider literary culture, and by highlighting the prenovel’s emphasis on public matters, he presents amatory fiction as a form that has polyphonic, global resonance.
Even if scholars find the aesthetics of public desire to be “explicitly erotic,” “debased,” or
“melodramatic,”16 amatory fiction offers readers a realistic account of sexuality in late seventeenth and early-eighteenth century England. As Toni Bowers finds in Force or Fraud
(2011), amatory fiction’s “representations of heterosexual relations opened up ways to imagine various possible effective agencies within broad structures of power and subordination,” and writers of amatory fiction “were the first convincingly to represent female subjectivity as something in its own right, something more than mere abjection, vacancy, or complement” (10). In this context, amatory fiction shows readers how women, in their careful observations of power dynamics in Restoration era party politics, were capable of attaining sexual agency to serve their own interests.
16 Definitions of amatory fiction, in order in which they appear, from Ros Ballaster, Susan Staves, and John Richetti 12
If amatory fiction shares a literary history with the novel, the question remains as to when and why the setting of desire shifts from public to private space in fiction. Ballaster suggests that the “pre-novelistic period of fiction” represents “the ideological scene from
Charles II’s restoration in 1660 to at least a decade after the death of Queen Anne in 1714,” whereas the novel’s “bourgeois paradigm of femininity as domesticity . . . can be traced to the mid- and late eighteenth century” (11). This timeline leaves a space after the death of
Queen Anne in 1714 and before mid-eighteenth century for the shift in desire’s setting in fiction, from public to private, to occur. Moreover, in my reading of the previously cited literary histories of both amatory fiction and the novel, I began to notice a discrepancy in the placement of Daniel Defoe’s fiction. For example, Watt designates Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) as novels, but not Roxana (1724), commenting only on Roxana’s fanciful name as “a pseudonym which is fully explained” (19). Watt’s introduction to his chapter on Moll Flanders hints at his reasons for choosing one amatory tale and not both, particularly when he says, “There has been much disagreement among critics about Defoe’s achievement than about that of the two later claimants to the paternity of the novel, Richardson and Fielding” (93). Given the critical concern regarding Defoe’s achievements in the novel, Watt’s choice of only one of Defoe’s two amatory tales appears to be one of restraint, so that the historian is not seen as indulging in the novelist’s purported lack of literary achievement. Watt’s reference to critical opposition here is also much different from how he opens his previous chapter on Robinson Crusoe, which readily illustrates Crusoe’s “serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people” (60). The critical disparity Watt points to at the beginning of his chapter on Moll Flanders is
13 indicative of the discomfort scholars expressed in treating publicly performed female desire. Bowers elaborates on this kind of discomfort when she refers to women’s desire as
“originary,” or self-constructed female desire, which amatory writers often had difficulty representing because society perceived it as “unnatural, dangerous, and transgressive” (10).
Because eighteenth-century readers became increasingly reluctant to accept literary representations of public female desire as accurate portrayals of their own lives, the shift to domestic fiction was “culturally produced” in order to make a space for the more private bourgeois individual17. For Watt to choose Moll Flanders, then, suggests that female desire is somehow less explicit there than it is in Roxana, possibly because Moll is more expressive of her repentance18 by the novel’s end than Roxana.
Given that the study of amatory fiction coincided with the recovery of women writers, most of the criticism of amatory fiction omits Defoe, not only because of his gender but because he, at least as a writer, never necessitated a recovery. Armstrong points out, though, that “Moll Flanders and Roxana had to wait until [the twentieth] century before they could be classified as novels,” which means these works were treated as inferior to the novel because of their portrayals of desire in the public sphere, just as in fiction by Behn,
Manley, and Haywood (49). Nevertheless, when critics mention Defoe’s amatory writing, like Ballaster’s Seductive Forms and Todd’s Sign of Angellica, they often reference Moll
Flanders. The discrepancies in locating Daniel Defoe’s amatory novels in literary history suggests to me that desire and space are more problematic in Moll Flanders and Roxana than elsewhere in Defoe’s fiction; while I categorize both texts as amatory fiction, I choose
17 See Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Fiction p. 11 18 Watt explains Moll’s moral and spiritual reformation in Rise of the Novel p. 125 14
Roxana for this study because critics discuss it less frequently in the discourse of amatory fiction than they do Moll Flanders.
In the following chapter, I discuss amatory fiction as a genre that is important to literary tradition because of its unique representations of desire in public space. I clarify my terms: ‘desire,’ ‘space,’ ‘public,’ and ‘private,’ and I show that amatory fiction’s depictions of space are intentionally malleable because they represent the ever-changing body politic of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. I also provide the methodology of my close readings, in which I explain a character’s motivation to pursue desire in public space and the way she navigates her pursuits using coquetry. To demonstrate my understanding of female desire in amatory fiction, I refer to texts, old and new, from eighteenth-century tracts like Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and Eliza Haywood’s The
Female Spectator to contemporary criticism like Elizabeth Kraft’s Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814 (2008) and Theresa Braunschneider’s Our Coquettes:
Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century (2009).
The second chapter begins my analysis of amatory fiction, with my reading of
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), The Fair Jilt (1688), and The History of the Nun (1689) as the formation of female desire in fiction. In Oroonoko, I focus on the minor character’s use of interstitial space to express desire in a narrative that is otherwise centered on the desires of the male hero, Oroonoko. In Fair Jilt, I identify Miranda as the libertine-coquette because her desire is expressed publicly, as a coquette, but she, like a libertine, is careless with its expression; Miranda appears in contrast to her sister, Alcidiana who pursues her desires more furtively in public space. In History of the Nun, the central heroine Isabella
15 struggles to locate a space in which she can freely express desire; her movement between public and private arenas illustrates her wrestling with her desires from city, to convent, to countryside. In ending with History of the Nun, I emphasize the presence of a didactic narrator in Behn which is even more prevalent in the fiction of Delarivier Manley.
The third chapter explores Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709) and The
Adventures of Rivella (1714) and identifies them as two parts to one tale: innocence and experience. The didactic narrators in The New Atalantis, while providing commentary on the political corruption embedded in Manley’s scandal stories, identify inexperience as the tragic flaw of both Charlot and Delia. The experienced heroine comes to fruition in The
Adventures of Rivella, in which a male narrator details the failures and successes of his dear friend Rivella, a woman whom he describes as capable of reviving herself from obscurity because she became an author. Rivella’s experience lends her the confidence she needs to move freely between public and private spaces and negotiate desire on terms that match her interests.
In my penultimate chapter, I examine Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725), introducing Fantomina as the philosopher-coquette. Despite her youth and innocence, the heroine uses the coquette’s vanity and levity to pursue her desire for both a lover and a better understanding of courtship in public space. Fantomina’s expressions of pleasure as she discovers something new make the overarching theme of amatory fiction much more explicit—that despite the myriad ways she might fail, the heroine’s experiences in public space are necessary to her perception of success.
16
The fifth and final chapter is a study of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) as an enigma in amatory fiction. Roxana expertly employs her coquettish charms to secure success for herself in the form of wealth, sex, and social agency, yet she remains unfulfilled. Her narrative is full of inward, stifled expression, which, though not uncommon in amatory fiction, is accompanied by a lack of action, as well. It is Amy, the maid, who possesses the motivation and exerts the effort of a real amatory heroine; Amy outwardly expresses both excitement and despair, and she takes action to secure her mistress’s affairs so that Roxana is able to continue in her seemingly endless pursuit of fulfillment.
Finally, I conclude with a coda that identifies a critical marker of the English
Novel’s beginning—Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). I look for ways that domestic space showcases Pamela’s subjectivity in order to trace the novel’s privatization of desire.
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Chapter 1
A Prelude: The Case for Amatory Fiction as Literature
In the society of Restoration England, the freedom to openly pursue desire was a privilege that belonged primarily to the male libertine, and in representations across all literary forms, the libertine’s pursuit of desire almost always reads as sexual fulfillment.
However, libertinism only represents a single narrative of desire in Restoration England— that of unrestrained sexual desire and its careless pursuit in public—which surely limits the scope of amatory fiction in terms of what it contributes to a larger literary tradition. If
Goran Stanivukovic acknowledges that the prenovel’s attention to public concerns contributes to a fuller history of sexuality, then it is important to examine even the interstices of public space in amatory fiction, in order for a wider representation of the issues that emerge there to become available. Furthermore, given that space is
“heterogeneous and multidimensional, refusing the simplicity of a linear narrative,”19 the opportunities for mapping variations of desire in amatory fiction—where characters not only inhabit public space, but move freely between private and public locales, urban and rural spaces, etc.—are endless. This project focuses specifically on the ways that amatory fiction’s heroines manage their movements within and between private and public space as a method of pursuing and fulfilling their desires for sex, love, knowledge, wealth, and influence. This focus allows me to argue that representations of female desire appeal to a wide range of women’s interests, which cannot be bound by a single narrative.
Space, Desire, and the Lesson of Coquetry
19 Patricia Yaeger’s “Introduction: Narrating Space” belongs to her edited anthology The Geography of Identity (1996). 18
Throughout this dissertation, I use ‘public space’ to mean a visible site of
“sociability” which, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century “meant involving the company of others in a range of different settings and combinations”20 (Klein 104).
When amatory heroines inhabit public space, they understand that they and their behavior belong to, what Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina calls, “the talking world,” which suggests that while they have more opportunities to pursue their desires in public space, they are vulnerable to the criticism of the spectating public (11). As such, they often manage their presence in public space with an awareness that the carelessly unrestrained male libertine ignores. Even though the amatory heroine must navigate public space conscious of the threat of exposure, she chooses to pursue her desires there anyway, if not for the appeal of sociability, than for the experience that might satisfy a curiosity. I use ‘private space,’ on the other hand, to refer to locales that are not necessarily removed from public space altogether, but are lacking sociability, in other words, “solitary” spaces (Klein 140). Even though the amatory heroine is not immediately attracted to private space, she does not perceive of it as threatening, but rather a transitory space, where she might temporarily retreat from public view. It then becomes the role of the didactic narrator to expose the heroine’s innocence and naivety and suggest to the audience that private space will ruin the heroine if she remains fixed in solitude. In this context, the amatory heroine is vulnerable in both public and private spaces, but with the careful management of her presence in public, she is capable of both pursuing and fulfilling her desires to some degree of her own satisfaction.
20 I use Lawrence Klein’s definitions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century” (1995) to refer to space throughout this dissertation. 19
Each amatory heroine that I discuss has a different method of managing space to satisfy her desires, but before I explain these methods, it is important that I clarify the motivation that most often prompts the heroine’s pursuit of desire in public space. In the chapters that follow, I use “desire” to refer to amatory heroines’ longing to achieve greater self-awareness as sexual, social, and political beings. Because the studies of women’s writing that emerged from the recovery movement largely focus on “the structures of power” that demonstrated women’s position in society as opposite and inferior to men, scholars “came to accept as theorem the theory that women are and have long been victims of patriarchal power, that their own formulation and articulation of desire of any kind— sexual, political, material—is and has long been impossible” (Kraft 1-2). As Elizabeth Kraft points out in Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814 (2008), readers and scholars often understand expressions of female desire as “merely the echoes of language spoken by men,” and so when female desire is analyzed, it is often portrayed as a tragically oppressed response to male desire, which eliminates the possibility that her desires are ever her own in the narrative (2). What this study demonstrates is that while there is no single narrative of female desire—for example, Charlot and Delia in Manley’s New Atalantis respond more to male interests than their own, while desire is more “originary”21 in
Haywood’s Fantomina—amatory heroines share the common interest of mastering public space. Kraft notes that when amatory heroines inhabit public space, they experience a
“sexual awakening,” in which they see “the birth of a self-awareness necessary to participate in the actions of the world” (50). As such, female desire in amatory fiction is
21 Toni Bowers uses “originary” to describe self-constructed female desire that is “not merely responsive,” and she suggests that “women’s originary desire might be just as powerful as men’s” (Force or Fraud 10). 20 tied to the skill and management they demonstrate to achieve their desires in public space; they desire to nurture their self-awareness by endeavoring on new experiences, which is more difficult for heroines who are less familiar with the varied sociability of public terrain.
While the amatory heroine certainly desires sexual love, she more frequently expresses satisfaction at her mastery of public space (or dissatisfaction at her missteps) because it adds to her understanding of both herself and the society in which she lives.
The primary texts I include in this project illustrate desire as a heroine’s pursuit of
“conversation,” “interest,” or “curiosity,” and all are terms that I use interchangeably with my above-mentioned definition of “desire.” For example, in Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt, women attempt to “manage” the “gallantries” of men by practicing their “female arts,” so
“all the study of these maids is to accomplish themselves for these noble conversations”
(79, emphasis added). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century, “conversation” denoted not simply discourse but various social relations in public space—“The action of consorting or having dealings with others; living together; commerce, intercourse, society, intimacy.”22 Additionally, in Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis¸ the narrator, Astrea, points out that “charms . . . are not revealed but by conversation” (45, emphasis added).
The wise Countess also informs young Charlot that “the first thing a woman ought to consult was her interest,” or her “right or title to a share in something” (Manley 40 emphasis added; OED). Furthermore, in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, the heroine endeavors to gratify her “innocent curiosity,” her “desire or inclination to know or learn about anything, esp. what is novel or strange” (Haywood 2; OED). Eliza Haywood’s
22 Oxford English Dictionary 21 eighteenth-century periodical for women The Female Spectator (1747) also provides a poignant example of female desire: “To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject” (154). As such, amatory fiction not only represents female desire as a heroine’s attempt to master public space—by simply moving successfully between one place and the next—but also a mastery of herself in that space, as the narrative discloses what the heroine learns about herself along the way.
Because my definition of female desire in amatory fiction depends so heavily on the heroine’s experiences in public space, I use coquetry as the method by which she pursues her desires, not only because representations of the coquette “creat[ed] a cultural common sense about women” in the period, but also because the figure “resists any constraint upon her choices” (Braunschneider 3, 2). The coquette’s management of public space, as described in Theresa Braunschneider’s Our Coquettes (2009), is necessary to her livelihood, in that she manipulates the pretense of the persona, using her vanity and levity, to direct and redirect the public’s attention, not only making it easier for her to pursue desire, but also for the pursuit to go unnoticed. The coquette is also defined by her
“capacious desire, a commitment to enjoying everything that pleases her,” as when
Fantomina discovers her beau’s inconstancy very early in their relationship, she still takes pleasure in disguising herself to deceive him (Braunschneider 4-5). Like the male libertine, the coquette exercises freedom of choice and represents the modern woman of the
Restoration and early eighteenth-century, just as the domestic heroine of the novel represents the modern woman of mid-eighteenth and nineteenth-century England. While
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Braunschneider’s study surveys different literary representations of the coquette to better define the modern eighteenth-century woman, she largely presents a unified illustration of the persona, whereas this study examines variations of the coquette—amatory heroines who manage their presence in public space, using coquettish vanity as a skill, not necessarily to accumulate “crowds of admirers” the way that Braunschneider suggests, but possibly to select a single admirer who serves a particular purpose—so that the focus is not only on her presence in public space, but her pursuit of desire there, as well.
The amatory-coquette personas that this project illustrates are often self-motivated; when they see that their management of public space pays off, by occupying a certain corner in a room to secretly express desire for a lover, or by standing outside of a bookstore to negotiate business with an estranged husband, they become more cognizant of their influence and take their experiences as lessons to guide their future actions. However, when amatory heroines realize, often too late, that they have not made the best use of public space, like Manley’s heroine who willingly leaves the court where she has amassed influence to hide at a faraway country estate and await her lover, then a didactic narrator comes in to comment on the error of the heroine’s ways. Nevertheless, whether the amatory heroine narrates her own failure and expresses sorrowfully what she could have done differently, or if it becomes the responsibility of the narrator to pinpoint the heroine’s failures, the recurring motif in amatory fiction is the learned female experience. The narrative didactic overtones of amatory fiction also hint at the writer’s relationship with the reader, as when “female characters who act out of originary (not merely responsive) sexual desire come to grief and are held up as warnings to readers” (Bowers 10). Because, as
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Bowers points out, “it could be difficult for amatory writers to represent originary female desire except as unnatural, dangerous, and transgressive,” it becomes the narrator’s responsibility to both mediate the reader’s potential discomfort with the sometimes abrupt, tragic tales of amatory heroines and offer the reader a lesson that transcends the space of the text (10). While the view that amatory fiction’s representation of female desire as
“dangerous” adds to our understanding of female experience, this view focuses only on the outcome of the narrative, the inevitable punishment/tragedy, and does not follow the heroine as she comes to know her desires. Bowers concludes that despite these bleak representations of female desire, women’s originary desire is still present in the narrative, which means “something important is happening” (10). In order to understand how
“women’s originary desire might be just as powerful as men’s,” I look at the development of amatory fiction in history, as it appears chronologically, as evidence of the amatory heroine’s increased awareness, and thus increased influence, over time, which, when thinking about how amatory fiction eventually shapes into the novel, the amount of public influence women attain in amatory fiction might explain why novelists relocate that power in private spaces, instead.
Variations of the Coquette in Amatory Fiction
The amatory heroines I discuss implicitly or explicitly express a desire to know more about the public space they inhabit, yet their approaches to pursuing desire are different. In this, I identify the multiple extensions of the coquette that appear in the following chapters in order to better understand how their varied experiences shape their learning so that by the time I arrive at Defoe, I will have presented a cohesive narrative that
24 traces women’s trial-by-error sexuality in fiction. In the amatory fiction of Aphra Behn, three variations of the coquette emerge—first, is Onahal, the minor-coquette, a seemingly marginal character in Oroonoko who uses her role, having been discarded as the king’s primary bride, as an opportunity to scope out areas in the Coramantien court, where she can fulfill her desire for pleasure elsewhere. Onahal is older than the other young brides, like
Imoinda, who occupy the court space more centrally, and, because of Onahal’s experience both as the king’s former bride and a current governant to the other young women, she is able help prince Oroonoko when he needs her assistance to satisfy his longing for Imoinda.
As the minor-coquette, Onahal does not flaunt her beauty in the way that Braunschneider’s vain coquette is wont to do. Instead, it is Onahal’s keen assessment of the space she occupies that she manipulates for her pleasure. The minor heroine moves between the partitioned arenas of the Coramantien court effortlessly, making it possible for her to be in the right place at the right time to help Oroonoko and Imoinda consummate their sexual passion, while she herself simultaneously spends a night with her own young lover, Aboan,
Oroonoko’s companion. Although Onahal is not central in the story, the small space she occupies in the narrative is one she makes for herself.
In Behn’s The Fair Jilt, I identify Miranda as the libertine-coquette because her beauty, wit, and charm seem to enable the unrestrained, even aggressive expression of her desires, features of desire that typically belong to the male libertine. Despite society’s initial excusal of her unruly behavior, Miranda knows she must manage her coquette persona carefully if she plans to keep up her libertine charade. As such, the narrator often describes
Miranda’s management as calculating—by feigning tears, lifting her veil at church at just
25 the right moment, or falsely crying rape after climbing into a friar’s lap. Miranda uses men, even her husband Prince Tarquin, to assist in her endeavors, for sex, a title, fortune, etc.
There is also a minor character of importance in The Fair Jilt, Miranda’s sister, Alcidiana.
Given that her desires are deemed secondary to her Miranda’s, Alcidiana is often seen moving along the interstices of public space, like Onahal. Alcidiana attends the theatre with her lover, but waits for the right time to step out of her carriage. The sisterhood they demonstrate in the narrative is full of inconsistencies; even though Miranda attempts to murder her sister twice, Alcidiana is the one who entreats the public to excuse Miranda’s behavior after they have called for her exile.
Behn’s posthumous History of the Nun illustrates the turmoil of the inexperienced coquette Isabella. Stricken with the pressure to take vows at an early age, Isabella chooses the convent over a secular life, thinking she is pleasing her father, and her aunt, the lady abbess. Isabella, described as beautiful and intelligent, largely depends on men to satisfy her desires, which results in her losing a sense of herself, so much so that she murders both husbands by the tale’s end. As a coquette, Isabella mobilizes her desires, from the convent, to the countryside with Henault, where she is better equipped to provide for their livelihood than he is, given her stronger social ties in public space. Even as Isabella awaits execution for the punishment of her crimes, she manipulates the space she is given to attract sympathy, prayers, and forgiveness from the public.
The three characters I discuss in Manley’s fiction are represented in two texts, The
New Atalantis and The Adventures of Rivella, but Manley presents them in such a way so that they belong to one story, where innocence in New Atalantis grows into experience in
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Adventures of Rivella. The innocent coquette is somewhat of an anomaly, given the skill and management that coquetry requires, yet I identify Charlot and Delia as innocent coquettes because they reveal, in brief glimpses, as in Charlot’s seductive reading of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, the potential to secure their desires more intentionally. Because Charlot and Delia rely on the guardianship and instruction of men who only tend to their own interests, the amatory heroines often end up in isolation, in secluded spaces where they lack the mobility to understand and pursue their desires at their leisure. The narrators in New
Atalantis ultimately present these unreliable men as ineffective educators of young women.
The heroine’s desire to become self-aware in and of society, then, depends on those impeding the her access to public space, for Charlot, that is her guardian, the Duke, who misleads her to a life of miserable seclusion. For Delia, it is her husband, Don Marcus, who secludes her from the public so that she does not know of his other wife in the city.
Manley’s narrators propose a solution to the innocent coquette’s miseducation: the amatory heroine must be self-motivated and persistent in her own education by remaining mobile in public space. The result of such an endeavor is Rivella, in Adventures of Rivella, whose accomplishments eliminate the need for pedantic narrators, making room for a male narrator to admiringly tell her story, instead. The theme of women’s education is prominent in both texts—with several references to reading (from classic, to romance, to pornography) and teachers in various forms (the unreliable guardian, the worldly-wise countess), and it seems that Manley’s solution to the various threats to women’s instruction is the persistent, self-educated heroine, like Rivella.
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Eliza Haywood seems to have picked up on the importance of women’s education when she created her philosopher-coquette, Fantomina. Fantomina appears to perfectly illustrate Theresa Braunschneider’s vision of the eighteenth-century coquette. Fantomina delights in nothing more than seeing how her skill at coquetry pays off, in duping her inconstant lover Beauplaisir in masquerade so that she can acquire a better understanding of courtship in society. The philosopher-coquette is not deterred by her lover’s inconstancy, but rather she delights in imagining and executing a succession new plans. What becomes evident in Fantomina that Behn’s and Manley’s texts lack is the increasingly private roles that the heroine takes on; the more she learns about society, the more she hides of herself from the public. Given the philosophic nature with which Fantomina approaches her pursuit of desire, Fantomina’s increasingly private behavior indicates that her outward, physical desire adds depth to her metaphysical consciousness, which allows her to more intentionally choose what she shares and what she does not, further lessening the chances of her being exposed as, herself, inconstant.
The enigma in amatory fiction, Defoe’s Roxana takes metaphysical consciousness to new heights (and depths) for Roxana, the self-loathing coquette. The bourgeois abandoned wife, Roxana sulks at having to work to pursue her desires, but luckily, she does not have to work very hard, thanks to the minor-coquette Amy, Roxana’s maid, who decides what her mistress should pursue, where Roxana should pursue it, and how, by managing any affairs left in the margin so that Roxana is free to enjoy the attention of some new beau, uninterrupted. It is also thanks to Amy that expressions of satisfaction appear at all in Roxana; otherwise, the central amatory heroine, Roxana, is content to bemoan her
28 public life. When Roxana thinks or utters her feelings, she is quick to suppress it, as she does not feel worthy of feeling desire, much less satisfying it, as well. The self-deprecating
Roxana complicates the prototypical coquette, in that she seems to demand her own reform by “associat[ing] the pursuit of pleasure with moral selfishness and a bleak future,” which, for Braunschneider hints at the arrival of “anti-coquette novels” (138).
Defoe’s Roxana demonstrates a lack of motivation by the coquette heroine. Roxana learns how to rid herself of debt, manage her newfound wealth, and attract lovers such as princes and wealthy merchants, but her motivation is Amy. It is Amy who spurs Roxana into action, yet, as a coquette on her own, Amy is restricted by her subject position to her mistress. Even so, Amy manages, like Onahal, to satisfy her own desires by using her working-class experience to hide her affairs. In the end, when there are no more obstacles to interfere with Roxana’s happiness in the public world, Roxana is defeated by her own private self-awareness. Defoe takes the learned female experience in amatory fiction and exposes how destructive its depth can be, which might be readily interpreted as a lesson against coquetry. However, Roxana’s self-awareness exhibits a pattern of self-deprivation, which is better explained by her lack of motivation. As mindful as she is, Roxana has more potential to right her wrongs than, perhaps innocent Charlot in Manley’s New Atalantis, but she is inactive because public space does not motivate her the way that it does the other coquettes. Not only does Roxana complicate the literary representations of female experience in public space, but the narrative hints at a change in literary tradition. If “even the harshest critics cannot help but appreciate the skill and knowledge that successful coquetry entails,” but they see that the coquette derives no pleasure from her success, then
29 what choice does society have but to do away with her (Braunschneider 33)? Defoe’s
Roxana helps readers transition to the domestic novel because the text exposes the limitations to female experiences in public space. It is as if a public life has taught the amatory heroine too much, and because there are no other curiosities in that space to excite her, she will look for desire in a more clearly defined arena, where her desires serve a more recognizable purpose.
The Lesson of Mobility
Despite the myriad approaches to coquetry that this study illustrates, the one feature each amatory coquette shares is mobility. Because public space exists as both “a field of opportunity” and “a scrim or veil,” in Patricia Yaeger’s words,23 amatory heroines must remain mobile so that they are able to locate the appropriate space for their desires at any given moment. Every heroine, except for Roxana, is somehow exposed to public censure— by the discovery of an affair, a public court scandal, or a pregnancy that becomes revealed at the moment of labor—but narrators describe the most tragic of tales as those belonging to heroines who choose fixity over mobility, like Isabella in Behn’s History of the Nun and
Charlot and Delia in Manley’s New Atalantis. As such, the lesson of amatory fiction is not simply to become more self-aware, but to do so by remaining mobile and intentionally present in public space. Amatory heroines are often depicted “contemplating being in another place, pondering differences between a here and a there, or moving between locations that are understood to contrast one another” (Braunschneider 65, emphasis my own). Successful coquetry, then, requires both the thought of mobility and the action to
23 Patricia Yaeger “Introduction: Narrating Space” p. 8 30 accompany it. Some amatory heroines move across landscapes altogether, as in Miranda’s escape from Flanders to Holland in order to evade public scrutiny in The Fair Jilt; other heroines simply use their immediate landscape to get from one place to the next, by holding objects to cover their faces, cloaking themselves in hoods, or retreating to less-visible corners of a room. These kinds of intersectional spaces, though not lavishly described in their respective stories, are imperative to the heroine’s success, and the heroine’s seeking these spaces out indicates just how skilled she really is. It is also because the heroine’s intentional, skilled movement is so subtle that the writer manages to present female desire as originary. Because amatory fiction often presents “male desire” as “a uniquely irresistible force,” as Bowers states, then readers might readily assume that the heroine’s mobility is a merely response to male lust, but a closer reading reveals the heroine’s autonomy in mastering public space as an effort to secure her own desires.
Nevertheless, the changeability of public space poses a threat to more inexperienced heroines, who, after thinking themselves satisfied in securing their desire for, say, a lover, they do not continue to ponder the next space, and choose, instead, to remain fixed in one locale. What results is the tale of the seduced-and-abandoned24 heroine, whose story critics often present as the central and only narrative of female desire in amatory fiction. The amatory heroine who becomes fixed in isolation is certainly worthy of study, so long as readers also discuss the unique path that brought the heroine to this fixed state. As the following chapters will clarify, amatory heroines are vulnerable to confinement in both public and private spaces, as each space poses its unique set of consequences regarding the
24 Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud p. 37 31 expression of her desire, and as we will see, it is not necessarily the space that subjects women to marginalization, but her fixity in space. Manley even attempts to disrupt the pattern of reading for a single narrative of female desire, when her male narrator in
Adventures of Rivella informs readers that Rivella’s public life is actually a continuation of
Delia’s private story in New Atalantis. Furthermore, given amatory fiction’s emphasis on didactic desire, the potential for the lesson of unfixity to transcend the boundaries of the text is certainly apparent. By this, I mean that to read amatory fiction as a collective effort to define a learned, skilled, and resilient heroine, a fictional character that represents a woman in time—one who becomes even more knowledgeable as the literary form progresses from one writer to the next—is to read with an awareness that questions the depth of female experience across literary boundaries, of genre, history, and space. By looking for ways that amatory heroines’ manipulate space and thus confound readers’ notions of public and private arenas, readers begin to think about space as more diverse than the public/private binary narrative that emerges with the history of the novel.
As I mentioned earlier, Roxana is the only heroine who does not endure censure in public space; her torment is private because she only shares the intricacies of her public affairs with her maid Amy, who, though devoutly loyal, would not likely have the social agency to expose Roxana in any threatening way. Even though Roxana continues to move freely between public and private space throughout the narrative’s entirety, she ultimately becomes fixed in her interiority, which proves that marginalization is not limited to any spatially defined public or private arena; even in metaphysical space, there are both opportunities and dangers for the desirous amatory heroine. Nancy Armstrong presents the
32 metaphysical space in the novel as site of female agency, as “a self that is deeper than and essentially different from the self that has already been written,” which allows the heroine to transcend the confines of the domestic sphere. Though Eliza Haywood is not included in
Armstrong’s study, this notion could apply to Fantomina; even though her pregnancy, her physically going into labor, exposes Fantomina to public censure, she seems to maintain some sense of metaphysical detachedness. As such, amatory fiction’s discourse on mobility is not consigned to physical space. The didactic narrators in amatory fiction support this conclusion as well, given the telling of a story mobilizes the narrative of experience and thus gives it potential to inhabit some agency elsewhere. Even though Roxana (1724) is published one year earlier than Fantomina (1725), I conclude with Defoe because of what his text reveals about the transitory space between amatory fiction and the novel.
Nonetheless, I think the lesson of amatory fiction comes about more explicitly in
Fantomina, as Haywood’s masquerading philosopher-coquette illustrates with her several disguises and single purpose—that while there is no unified narrative pursuit of desire, there is a cohesive, underlying motivation: the pleasure of experience.
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Chapter 2
The Formation of Desire; Locating Behn’s Heroines in Public Space
As a royalist and a professional writer, Aphra Behn had the opportune insight to imagine even greater potential for character trends such as the Restoration libertine in fiction. Elizabeth Kraft notes that although Behn “lived at a time in which [she] could not hold political office, [she] did [her]sel[f] enjoy and express political agency, and [she] gave political voice to [her] desiring female characters as well” (51-2). Behn successfully imagined new avenues for the expression of female desire in late seventeenth-century fiction. Not only does Behn allow female characters like The Fair Jilt’s Miranda and
Oroonoko’s Onahal to inhabit public spaces that typically belonged to men, including the city or the court, but Behn allows these characters to express and pursue their desires in those spaces, as well. As such, Behn forms a new kind of heroine—one that participates in the regular happenings of day-to-day society as much as the male libertine, even as she works against the public’s ubiquitous sexual binary system—male libertine/female whore— that attempts to diminish her sexual agency. In order for Behn’s heroines to succeed, they must seek out and identify the interstices of the public arena that allow them to participate freely in a desirous exchange. In amatory fiction, a heroine’s success is defined by her ability to express, pursue, and fulfill her desire in public space—be it sexual, social, political, or otherwise. Behn’s characters are those cognizant of their vulnerability in public space, but they remain committed to fulfilling their own desires and resistant to such obstacles, as the threat of exposure, in their way.
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Each of Behn’s heroines is, in her own way, a coquette—a female variation of the male libertine; the difference between Behn’s desirous coquettes and Restoration male libertines is in the spaces they occupy and the awareness that accompanies their movement.
The male libertine moves freely and openly from one public space to the next, in order to express and fulfill his desires. Because heroines in amatory fiction are aware that public space has gendered consequences for them, these heroines look instead for partitioned, non- politicized areas within public space where they can express and attempt to fulfill their desires. It is only when the author temporarily directs the attention, of both the public inside the story and the reader outside, elsewhere that these spaces become available. The imaginative and desirous heroines Behn presents persisted in amatory fiction throughout the early eighteenth century, which suggests that the clever amatory coquette was just as representative of the female desire in the period as the male libertine was of male desire. In this chapter, I move chronologically through three of Behn’s most compelling works of amatory fiction in order to explore the ways that Behn places female desire in the public sphere.
Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave. A True History
I frame my study of Aphra Behn’s desirous female characters in Oroonoko (1688) around Elizabeth Kraft’s thesis on the ethics of desire; she argues that, for Behn, desire is an exchange that “should occur between two subjects, not a subject and an object of desire”
(30). Because for Kraft female desire in public requires the woman’s vulnerability, “[t]he end result . . . is not necessarily peace and happiness and placidity,” a warning Onahal, the text’s minor character, appears to keep in mind as she moves cautiously through the
35 interstices of public space (30). Onahal cannot, like the male libertine, carelessly move through open spaces, for “when a woman is a subject rather than an object, she will have as much to say after she has opened herself to the demands of an unreliable other as she will after she has opened herself to the demands of a trustworthy other” (Kraft 30-1). The
“other” Kraft refers to represents a figure in public space, and given the unreliability of the public arena, the amatory heroine must be persistent in her expression of desire, so that when she is met with an unreliable other, she is prepared to respond, yet again.
Furthermore, Kraft’s attention to the “other” suggests that even when women are able to secure their desires—by enjoying a night with a lover; or by voicing the terms of their pleasure—they are still vulnerable to exposure, as exposure is simply the nature of public space. As such, for Behn’s amatory heroine’s, “her subjectivity, her voice, her willingness to respond is the essence of her desire, an ethical desire that does not seek to possess or own but rather to know the other on his own terms (Kraft 31, emphasis my own). Ethical desire, for Kraft, is equitable because it is not directed at someone but is rather an exchange with someone. Behn’s depictions of public female desire is illustrative of Kraft’s ethics of desire, in which male and female expressions of desire come to fruition in spaces that do not privilege sexual difference, where the expression is a matter of “response,” not dominance.
Kraft defines “response” as “an opening to the other’s demand for recognition of the very difference that defines otherness,” an opening that creates a space for the expression of female desire alongside male desire, and “[t]o respond to the other is not to transfer power, to capitulate, to lose some sort of contest. It cannot be thus because the response is momentary, transient, and equivocal” (33). The amatory heroine’s expressions of desire,
36 even when brief, are the only way she will come to understand the public space she inhabits, and this knowingness is what drives the seduction plot forward.
In Oroonoko, dialogue is the primary means of negotiating desire on an equal playing field. This kind of dialogue happens only in in-between spaces, meaning spaces that belong to public space, but are conveniently removed from both the audience’s and the main characters’ direct view. The author and the narrator manage these momentary spaces by directing readers’ and characters’ attention away from this action. The result is a contrived private space within a public realm, an egalitarian space in which two characters can freely express and negotiate their desires. Because these expressions of and responses to desire are both momentary and fleeting readers may have difficultly locating the non- politicized spaces in which they occur. For this reason, I first direct readers’ attention to characters whose desire is complementary, particularly that between Oroonoko and
Imoinda and Aboan and Onahal, where each character gains something from the desirous exchange, the result of which leads readers to the larger amatory plot. I begin with the latter two characters because they are positioned marginally in Behn’s narrative, and I argue that
Onahal and Aboan’s status as minor characters allows Behn to be more explicit in her representation of ethical desire than she is when representing desire between the central hero and heroine.
While the tale of Oroonoko is familiar to many, it is worth recounting the novel’s amatory plot. In Coramantien, Prince Oroonoko, a “brave and gallant” general falls in love with a beautiful young woman, Imoinda. After a brief courting period, the prince professes his love and loyalty to her, which Imoinda reciprocates (12). They marry in secret, but
37 tradition requires that Oroonoko’s grandfather, the king, extend his blessing first.
Unfortunately, the one-hundred-year old king desires Imoinda for himself. He sends
Imoinda the royal veil, which she, by duty, is required to accept. The king is outraged when he learns that Imoinda and Oroonoko have already married without his blessing, so he keeps her guarded within the confines of his palace. Nonetheless, Oroonoko, with Onahal’s help, manages to sneak into her chambers and consummate his marriage with his bride.
When the king discovers this betrayal, he sells Imoinda into slavery but tells Oroonoko that he has put her to her death, the latter being the more honorable sentence. Oroonoko reluctantly returns to his role as general. One night, after succeeding in battle, the prince celebrates his victory by drinking too “hard of punch” and finds himself in shackles on a boat to Surinam, waiting to be sold into slavery (Behn 33).
Upon arrival at Surinam, the plantation manager, Trefry, soon recognizes that
Oroonoko’s royal status makes him unfit to serve as a slave among the rest; the colonists call him Caesar and treat him more leniently than the others. With the freedom and insight that his royal status affords him, Oroonoko quickly learns that Imoinda was sold to the same colony; the couple reunites, and they resume their life together as husband and wife.
When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko devises a plan to flee the colony so that their child does not have to be born into slavery. After his first attempt to escape fails, Oroonoko proposes a new idea: He will kill Imoinda, then his enemies, and finally himself; their death, he says, will bring Coramantien much greater honor than their slavery would.
Imoinda agrees to this plan, but after the prince kills his beloved wife, he has no strength left to kill his enemies. The colonists find him in a deplorable condition and nurse him back
38 to health only to make him pay for his treason on the whipping post. The executioner dismembers Oroonoko, who honorably endures his brutal death in silence.
The narrator, who presents herself as Behn25, emphasizes the romance between the central hero and heroine, Oroonoko and Imoinda. She introduces Imoinda as “the beautiful black Venus to our young Mars,” and she concludes the story with a lamentation of “the brave, the beautiful, and the constant Imoinda” (12, 73). However, their desire for one another would have been kept between “love-darting eyes,” were it not for the most unlikely of heroines—Onahal, Imoinda’s governant (19). When the king takes Imoinda as his prize, Oroonoko must watch the young beauty from a distance, and in these moments, the prince suffers tremendously. The narrator’s elaborate description of Oroonoko’s strength, wisdom, and influence is all but forgotten when he watches Onahal lead Imoinda away to the king’s chambers: “what wild frenzies seized his heart, which forcing to keep within bounds, and to suffer without noise, it became the more insupportable, and rent his soul with ten thousand pains. He was forced to retire to vent his groans, where he fell down on a carpet and lay struggling a long time” (Behn 20). Onahal returns to find the prince in this pitiful state, and it is only with Onahal’s help that Oroonoko is capable of devising a plan to win back his bride.
The narrator introduces Onahal as
one of the cast-mistresses of the old king, and ’twas these (now
past their beauty) that were made guardians or governants to
25 In her dedication to Lord Maitland, Behn says Oroonoko is “a true story” of a man she “had the honour to know in [her] travels” (5). Biographers Maureen Duffy The Passionate Shepherdess (1977) and Angeline Goreau Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn (1980) have since confirmed Behn’s travels to Surinam. 39
the new and the young ones . . . And certainly nothing is more
afflicting to a decayed beauty than to behold in itself declining
charms that were once adored and to find those caresses paid
to new beauties, to which once she laid a claim; to hear ‘em
whisper as she passes by, ‘That once was a delicate woman.’
These abandoned ladies therefore endeavor to revenge all the
despites and decays of time on these flourishing happy ones.
(21).
Behn’s description of Onahal as the king’s forsaken mistress appears to be a critique of
England’s own double standard of male and female desire, with which Behn was certainly familiar. In “Behn, Women, and Society,” Susan Staves suggests that a “serious problem for Behn” was that England’s Restoration libertinism “typically figured women as provided by nature for men’s pleasure” (21). This meant that the “maximally desirable woman” must possess “a beautiful female body” in order to be deemed valuable, yet Behn “repeatedly imagines efforts to disaggregate” this masculinist value system, which depended largely on a woman’s “youth and beauty” (Staves 23-4). From Behn’s description of Onahal, readers can assume that Coramantien is a nation that decides upon a woman’s value much the same way as England in the seventeenth century. However, Onahal does not participate in society’s judgment of women in the way that the narrator describes; she does not envy
Imoinda’s youth, beauty, and virtue. Instead, the neglected mistress acts as Oroonoko and
Imoinda’s aide. Onahal’s role as discarded wife is atypical in that she now explores a kind of sexual sovereignty that the young virgins are denied. Onahal’s liberation from the king’s
40 supervision allows her to more freely pursue her own passions, and her tenure as the king’s mistress grants her the wisdom necessary to advise and encourage the young couple.
Furthermore, Onahal’s role is imagined by Behn, who, despite her claim to be eye witness to the events, is not actually present in Coramantien with Oroonoko. In “Oroonoko:
Reception, Ideology, Narrative Strategy,” Laura Rosenthal reminds us that Behn “includes a synthesizing, semi-omniscient authorial voice that differs from that of the narrator, for certain events take place that none of the three story-telling characters witness” (157). The events Rosenthal refers to are those that include Onahal and present her as a desirous woman. Behn, then, has created a unique space for Onahal that exists even outside the boundaries of her eye-witness narrative account. The function of this space allows Onahal even greater mobility in the narrative; not only is she presented as a minor character, but she operates outside of Behn’s authorial narrative voice, outside of her eye-witness account.
This freedom also allows Onahal to influence the narrative’s amatory plot; she is the first female character to insert her voice into the public space and negotiate her value in the
Coramantien sexual marketplace. By allowing Onahal to take control of the narrative, Behn is seemingly relinquished of any ethical responsibility in depicting female desire; she is not required to present female desire in the way that readers might expect because she is no longer telling the story from her own (skilled, authorial, English, female) perspective. The success of the major characters actually depends on Onahal’s ability to act in this liminal free space that Behn has offered her; Onahal’s seemingly marginal position ends up influencing the trajectory of Behn’s seductive narrative.
41
In fact, Onahal approaches Oroonoko (rather than he her), when she hears him
“sighing in the other room,” outside of Imoinda’s chambers, where Onahal finds him in a
“deplorable condition, which she thought needed her aid”; she engages with him so that she might know what ails the prince (20). Onahal’s role as governant does not require her to wait on Oroonoko, but her curiosity here is suggestive of Kraft’s ethical desire, where
Onahal puts herself in the position to negotiate with another person by responding to his distress. Onahal reassures Oroonoko of Imoinda’s reciprocal desire for him, and “all sitting down on the carpet,” Oroonoko thanks Onahal and “half persuade[s] her to be of his party”
(20, emphasis my own). The emphasis on “half” in this discourse appears to indicate that the goal in Oroonoko and Onahal’s exchange is not “power over the other but response,” which, as we will see, creates a space for Onahal to negotiate for her desires in the other half of their agreement (Kraft 33).
Later, when the king commands his young wives to dance before him, Imoinda
“perform[s] her part with an air and grace so passing all the rest as her beauty,” that while the men “gazed and she danced,” Onahal “retire[s] to a window with Aboan” (Behn 20-1).
The men’s focus on Imoinda allows Onahal greater mobility so that she can find a space where she is free to express her own desires. The description of Imoinda’s “new beauties and graces” also prompts the reader’s eyes to be fixed on her as well, as she is the object of the central hero’s desires, which leaves Behn free to position Onahal as a desirous female subject. As a result, neither the reader nor this scene’s operative characters notice when
Onahal shifts over to the window to engage with Aboan, a young man who “took pleasure in entertaining her with discourses of love” (Behn 21).
42
Meanwhile, as Aboan flirts with Onahal, he realizes that he can simultaneously satisfy his own desire and that of Oroonoko, so Aboan “fail[s] not to sigh in her ear” and is quick to tell Oroonoko “how advantageous the service of Onahal might be” (22). Oroonoko then instructs Aboan to “caress [Onahal] so as to engage her entirely; which he could not fail to do if he complied with her desires. ‘For then,’ said the prince, ‘her life lying at your mercy, she must grant you the request you make in my behalf’” (22). In this, Oroonoko attempts to manipulate Onahal’s seduction of Aboan by using their affair as a diversion— one that will distract the king from the prince’s illicit desires. Because the narrator directs our attention to Oroonoko’s power here, readers likely find Onahal’s romance ancillary, yet she has already (intentionally) made herself of service to him, by tending to him outside of
Imoinda’s chambers. Because Onahal approaches her own desires by first offering a response to Oroonoko’s desire, her “inferior role” is no longer “absorbable” by the prince but necessary to his happiness (Kraft 33). While it is easy to perceive Onahal’s seduction of Aboan as nothing more than a ploy in Oroonoko’s plan, the careful reader knows that she intends to have her desires satisfied in this exchange, as well.
Furthermore, although Aboan reciprocates Onahal’s affection, it is Oroonoko who instructs the “half-feigning youth” to do so. Onahal is naïve to this falsity when she takes
Aboan to her room; she does not know that he merely “suffer[s] himself to be caressed in bed” by her (25). Readers might pity Onahal in this moment, as she willingly risks the danger of discovery for pleasure, only to receive some of Aboan’s tenderness. On the other hand, it is likely that Onahal would seduce Aboan for this much of his pleasure even if she were wise to Oroonoko’s manipulation, given that she initiates the seduction by “giv[ing]
43
[Aboan] glances more tender and inviting than she had done to others of his quality” (Behn
21). The implied sexual contract between Onahal and Aboan has been negotiated by both participants, and their responses are representative of Kraft’s ethical desire, where the lovers enter into this space as equals, each aware of the other’s subject position. In fact, of the two female characters, excluding the narrator, Onahal is the only one to actually speak her desire into action. Most of the Coramantien lovers sigh and gaze, and even though
Oroonoko “listen[s] to a discourse so charming from [Imoinda’s] loved lips,” the main heroine Imoinda has no actual dialogue in her first love scene with the prince (25).
Meanwhile, Onahal “confess[es] it with [her] mouth,” and she tells Aboan to “‘not fear a woman’s invention when love sets her a-thinking’” (23). Behn bestows the power of speech and also the expertise in the creative art of lovemaking, “invention,” onto Onahal, and as a result, the antiquated beauty is able to fulfill her desire for the young man.
With phrases like “do not fear” and “woman’s invention,” both Behn and Onahal seem to acknowledge that female desire is unsettling or at least unexpected when it is presented as originary. However, Onahal is capable of seducing both Aboan and the reader by masterfully inhabiting the periphery of public space, expressing her desires secretively.
Despite having “some decays in her face, she ha[s] none in her sense and wit,” and she “had not forgot how pleasant it was to be in love” (21). In order for readers to believe Aboan and
Onahal’s romance, Aboan must hesitantly yield to her seduction. He cannot be overeager, as this would upset readers’ notions of normative gender roles and the public’s notion of originary female desire as transgressive.26 Behn leaves it up to the reader, then, to decide
26 Toni Bowers Force or Fraud 44 how Aboan really feels. The secret of his pleasure is revealed only to Onahal, and readers can either indulge in it with her or ignore it. As Robert Chibka suggests, “Onahal provides an emblematic posture of half belief toward something one wishes to believe, indeed
‘cannot forbear’ believing. This something, though indeterminate as to truth or falsity, provides satisfaction for those willing to entertain its possibility” (531). Chibka acknowledges Onahal’s unique position as both a minor character and a desirous woman; with Onahal, it is as if Behn offers the reader a choice: be satisfied with Behn’s ethical depiction of desire in amatory fiction by entertaining the possibility of Onahal’s affair as real, or ignore Onahal’s seduction because it belies the narrator’s authority as eyewitness and is secondary to Oroonoko and Imoinda’s romance. It is Behn’s use of space with
Onahal that allows readers these choices.
It is through this minor character that Behn seems to make her most poignant statement: fruitful expressions of female desire can only exist in nonhierarchical spaces.
The Coramantien king resides primarily in the Otan, which is “the palace of the king’s women, a sort of seraglio,” (Behn 17) a term that in the period meant an “enclosure” and
“place of confinement27.” Onahal’s participation in service to the king’s patriarchal culture makes her vulnerable to this confinement, but she is able to evade his authority by locating spaces like the window beyond the Otan, and, later, her private chamber just past the orange groves, outside of the Otan. Onahal’s role is unique in that she functions both in and out of this space, tending to her “necessary affair[s] within” his court and later “retir[ing] to a window with Aboan” (20-1). Onahal benefits from being the king’s discarded wife because
27 Oxford English Dictionary 45 she is no longer the target of his lust. In order for Onahal to successfully seduce Aboan, she must operate beyond the king’s supervision, which she manages effortlessly given her tenure at the Otan and her knowledge of its partitioned spaces.
Although it seems that Oroonoko manipulates Onahal’s affair, he is actually dependent on the spaces Onahal creates that exist beyond the king’s sight, the spaces she has located to express her own desire for Aboan. Indeed, it is the amatory tale of the minor couple—Onahal and Aboan—that creates an opportunity for Oroonoko’s desires to come to fulfillment, as the royal prince is otherwise obstructed by his own inferior position to the king. Aboan recognizes Onahal’s agency in the Otan, as he sees “that to make his court to these she-favourites was the way to be great, these being the persons that do all affairs and business at court” (21). Because the king seems to believe that his discarded wives’
“decayed beauty” and “declining charms” make them more reliable, he charges his she- favorites with the “business” of teaching his younger mistresses “all those wanton arts of love” (21). As such, Behn’s Coramantien court proves to be a curious public space for female desire, a space where a woman’s authority actually increases with her sexual experience. Because Oroonoko thinks that “these abandoned ladies” would “endeavor to revenge all the despites and decays of time on the flourishing happy ones,” like his beloved
Imoinda, he “has a thousand fears he should never prevail with Onahal” (21). Nonetheless,
Onahal is described as the exception because she does not treat the younger women as inferior. In fact, Onahal teaches Imoinda her version of the “wanton arts of love,” by inviting Imoinda to move through the palace with her, showing Imoinda how to escape the
Otan’s hierarchal space so that she, too, can learn to freely negotiate desire.
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Onahal’s power is that she understands all the intricacies of the king’s court, but she is no longer singled out as the primary object of his desire. Onahal’s desires are now her own, and so she waits for “the whole company” of the Otan to be “taken up in beholding the dancing and antic postures the women royal made to divert the king” in order to “single out Aboan, whom she found most pliable to her wish” (22). Within this provisional space, operating with authority both in and out of the Otan, Onahal becomes subject, not object of the sexual exchange; [w]hen she had him where she believed she could not be heard,” she tells Aboan “I have still a rest of beauty enough engaging, and have learned to please too well not to be desirable. I can have lovers still, but will have none but Aboan” (23).
Onahal’s confidence and authority in these lines seduces both Aboan and the reader, suggesting, as Kraft notes, that “acute awareness of the bodily self is tied to acute awareness of self as political subject and agent” (51). Onahal “press[es] [Aboan’s] hand,” telling him, “‘This night you shall be happy’” (Behn 23). Onahal instructs Aboan to meet her at “the gate of the orange grove,” where she will direct Oroonoko to Imoinda’s chamber, leaving the prince to “make the best of his opportunity” with Imoinda, and take
Aboan to her own room (Behn 25). By inviting Aboan into her chamber, Onahal presents herself not only having sexual agency but political as well—both her furtive mobility throughout the Coramantien palace and her defiance of the king demonstrate her authoritative position in that space.
Behn ingeniously creates a space for female desire in seventeenth-century fiction; her masterful narrative strategy allows for more than one character to express desire, and
Behn extends the privilege of that expression to both sexes. However, because female
47 seduction is unexpected, it is also vulnerable and susceptible to men’s coercion. As Kraft notes, ethical desire is a response that, when made, enters into an unreliable space (31);
Onahal risks the unreliability of Aboan’s response as well as being discovered and punished by the king, but she makes these choices on her own. The unreliability of ethical desire plays out when the king learns of Imoinda and Oroonoko’s affair. He punishes Imoinda because she is now a “polluted thing, wholly unfit for his embrace;” Oroonoko because he violates the royal veil; and Onahal because she fails to protect Imoinda from Oroonoko’s advances (Behn 27). The king has both women “sold off as slaves to another country,” a
“cruel sentence, worse than death, but Onahal’s voice is persistent, even in punishment, as she testifies on behalf of Imoinda, saying that Oroonoko “broke into [Imoinda’s] apartment and ravished her” (27). Onahal exploits her position to not only advance her desire, but
Imoinda’s, Oroonoko’s, and Aboan’s, people with whom she has entered into an equitable desirous exchange. However, because the king’s desire is, instead, defined by “individual achievement” and not “social bond,” Onahal interferes on behalf of her friends, proving her reliability (Kraft 33). Furthermore, it is Oroonoko, not Onahal, who causes the lovers to get caught. The jealous king instructs his guards to “narrowly and privately watch
[Oroonoko’s] motions,” and the royal prince is unknowingly followed to the gate behind the Otan, where Onahal has already made herself available and hence vulnerable. She chooses to trust Oroonoko because, for her, the reward of desire outweighs the risk of discovery. Onahal’s understanding of and participation in this amorous exchange makes her desire equally as important to the narrative as Oroonoko’s and Imoinda’s. Not only does
Onahal’s role as “discarded” wife grant her the freedom to move freely in the Otan’s
48 periphery, beyond the king’s surveillance, but her secondary status allows her desirous endeavors to remain in the margins of the novella, as well.
The king never realizes that Onahal has actually orchestrated this entire scene. It is she who both leads Oroonoko to Imoinda’s chamber and also takes “her dear Aboan to her own” (25). However, the king is so troubled by Oroonoko’s betrayal that he is not even aware of Onahal and Aboan’s romance. The king’s punishment of Onahal is a formality; he does so more out of necessity than cruelty, as suggested by his “great deal of reluctancy”
(27). Unlike Imoinda, Onahal is responsible for her own seduction, and the king’s former mistress is capable of this autonomy because she exists beyond the king’s supervision. It is also, ironically, Onahal’s unique experience as the king’s former sexual partner that offers her the expertise and mobility she needed to freely negotiate desire. With Onahal’s experience comes awareness; she is now able to recognize the danger of exposure that comes with being confined in the hierarchal space of the king’s Otan. In amatory fiction, as
Laura Brown suggests, “the desirable woman serves invariably as the motive and ultimate prize for male adventures” (205). This is true for Imoinda; Oroonoko, the Coramantien king, and Trefry all lust after the young beauty. Their desire puts Imoinda in numerous precarious situations, but all is not lost for Behn’s heroines. The writer capitalizes on
Onahal’s assumed undesirability and minor character status by covertly granting her access to private royal spaces so that she can make use of privileges like seduction and rebellion— privileges her central heroine, Imoinda, is denied.
Of course, the danger of confinement and its resulting exposure in the hierarchal space is not limited to gender in Oroonoko. “It “is ‘race’ as Behn commonly uses the term,
49 to mean lineage—most clearly when lineage is royal or noble—that is put forward as visible and intrinsic,” as Joanna Lipking points out in her essay “‘Others,’ Slaves, and
Colonists in Oroonoko” (169). Lipking also argues that “for all Behn’s designating and describing of skin colours, ‘race’ in its modern sense is a word she almost never uses”
(169). In this context, one’s race, one’s lineage, is as fundamental to hierarchal classification as is one’s gender. It is ultimately Onahal’s servile role at court that makes her inferior to Imoinda. While both women are sent off into slavery, Imoinda’s story is the one picked up again by Behn. As such, Imoinda’s royal lineage becomes a means of survival, one that Behn challenges by placing her in the slave colony of Surinam. The colonists at Surinam spectate and wonder about the beautiful slave now called Clemene, especially after she is reunited with Oroonoko and is exposed to be Imoinda. Surinam becomes another hierarchal enclosure, and Imoinda finds herself, again, the object of everyone’s attention. At this point, Oroonoko is much more aware of the power in their speculation, as he was once on the same side of it as the colonists. Before Oroonoko realizes that Imoinda and Clemene are one in the same, he listens to Trefry’s stories about
Clemene, the “fine she-slave” who was the object of “the whole country[‘s]” desire (Behn
41). Oroonoko even questions Trefry’s authority, asking him why he “do[es] not oblige her to yield,” being that Clemene is his slave (42). Behn implicitly aligns the unequal sexual relationship between men and women with that of master and slave, subject and object.
When Oroonoko reunites with Imoinda, his happiness is short-lived; in Surinam, the royal slave finds himself on the other side of the spectrum—the object, the inferior other. He learns firsthand how dangerous this kind of cloistered exposure can be.
50
In the end, Onahal is the only character to escape public scrutiny, as she operates marginally at the Coramantien court and in the reader’s attention, which makes her amatory tale the most successful. Onahal is wise, vocal, and determined. The narrator cleverly shrouds details of Onahal’s seduction in Oroonoko’s more central love story, and, as a result, readers have a tendency to overlook her subjectivity and mobility. In a matter of eight pages, wedged in between the burgeoning romance of Oroonoko and Imoinda, Onahal speaks more frequently and acts more resolutely than Imoinda does throughout the entire novel. More than that, though, Onahal redefines heroism. When Behn juxtaposes the influence of Onahal’s desires against Oroonoko’s, she illuminates the possibilities for female desire in fiction. It seems that Onahal was having no trouble seducing Aboan on her own prior to Oroonoko’s involvement, but rather than selfishly securing her desires, she uses her expertise to assist three others. Onahal protects both Oroonoko and Imoinda when their affair is exposed; she knows that the prince’s status protects him, and she lies for
Imoinda in hopes that doing so will save her life. The king may not be privy to this information, but readers are. Behn successfully manages the tricky threshold of female desire in fiction by illustrating Onahal’s mastery of the Otan’s public space and positioning
Onahal as a minor character.
Aphra Behn introduces a new heroine in romance. She allows a seemingly ‘minor’ character, a king’s old, discarded mistress, to pursue and fulfill her desire without direct consequence. Her seduction of Aboan turns out to be the matrix from which the rest of the action emerges. Because Oroonoko’s happiness depends on Onahal’s participation, she finds herself in an unexpected position of power. Fortunately for Oroonoko, Onahal pities
51 his suffering, and she uses her role as seductress and court-insider to help him, while, simultaneously, helping herself. In this context, Onahal’s service to herself—her longing for Aboan—ends up benefitting Oroonoko and Imoinda (and Aboan) along the way. By arranging Onahal’s seduction within the more central love story, Behn is able to cleverly depict variations of female desire that would have otherwise been rejected by early readers.
Behn’s positioning of Onahal as a minor character, then, seems to have been successful for both Onahal and the readers, which might explain Oroonoko’s long(er)standing success in the literary canon.
The Fair Jilt: or; The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda
There were variations of the male libertine in Restoration culture; one of the more recognizable figures in literature was the rake hero. The rake is the criminal extension of the Restoration libertine, or, as Erin Mackie puts it, a “correspondence between the illicit and the illustrious” (130). The male rake flaunted his wit, sexuality, and his outlaw status, and, like the libertine, his persona was attractive to late seventeenth and early eighteenth- century English audiences. Mackie suggests that the libertine rake is fashionable because he is male, because “‘boys will be boys,’” and any female variation of the rake is rejected because she is female (129). Furthermore, late seventeenth-century notions of femininity dictated that “‘masculine’ characteristics in a woman were to be avoided because men found them ‘forbidding’,” (Hill 17). If libertines were, as Mackie states, “hyperbolically masculine,” then any variation of a female rake, such as the jilt or the coquette, would have been doubly problematic, at once deficiently feminine and hyperbolically masculine.
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In The Fair Jilt (1688), Behn depicts contrasting expressions of female desire in sisters Miranda, the showy and transgressive Restoration coquette, and Alcidiana, the desirous, yet marginal heroine in order to show two narratives of female desire that speak
“to a specific historical moment” (Kraft 11). Miranda’s expressions of desire are often unruly, her behavior reckless, much like the male Restoration rake, but because of gendered social norms, readers, both early and contemporary, struggle to find her a heroine whose success, whose survival at the novel’s end, is worth celebrating. By the late seventeenth century, English society was familiar with the libertine’s various female counterparts, the jilt and, later, the coquette. The term ‘coquette’ was not defined in English until 1699 when
Abel Boyer published his Royal Dictionary28 and simply translated the term from the
French “coquet” to the English “cocquet.” Readers began to align the jilt with the newly- fashioned coquette, as the two types exhibited similar behavior. Then, in Spectator 187
(1711), Richard Steele writes collectively of “Jilts,” “Coquets,” and “Libertine Women” to say that these are all female personas of whom English men should be wary. Steele explains that “[t]he Coquet is indeed one degree towards the Jilt; but the Heart of the former is bent upon admiring herself, and giving false Hope to her Lovers, but the latter is not contented to be extreamly Amiable, but she must add to that Advantage a certain Delight in being a
Torment to others” (para. 1). Steele’s conflation of these three “species of women” proves that English society was not as fond of rakish libertine behavior in women as it was in men and that the terms ‘jilt’ and ‘coquette’ were often used interchangeably to describe
“libertine women.”
28 Theresa Braunschneider’s Our Coquettes (2009) traces this history of the term and identifies Boyer as the first to translate the term in a dictionary from French to English. 53
Miranda, The Fair Jilt’s central heroine, embodies several characteristics of the jilt, coquette, and the libertine. In the beginning of the narrative, she unapologetically moves from one public space to the next, openly expressing her desire, without fearing the consequences, much like the male libertine. She also lives up to the jilt stereotype in that she does, as Steele describes, “[d]elight in being a [t]orment to others,” particularly to an innocent friar and, later, her own sister, and, true to Steele’s description of the coquette,
Miranda is indeed “bent upon admiring herself.” In this context, it is obvious why Behn’s contemporary readers had difficulty accepting Miranda as deserving of a happy ending; she occupies a role, or several roles, that were frowned upon for women, despite Restoration
England’s seemingly progressive sexual culture. Theresa Braunschneider traces the French etymology of ‘coquette’ and finds that “‘coquette’ is the feminine for coq, or rooster, encoding in its very syllables the idea of behavior contrary to gender norms” (3).
Nevertheless, the coquette is a woman of her time, and “even the harshest critics cannot help but appreciate the skill and knowledge that successful coquetry entails”
(Braunschneider 33). For Miranda, that means managing her use of space so carefully that the public sees only what she wants it to see.
From beginning to end, the narrative revolves around Miranda’s perpetual search for and attainment of satisfaction. By studying Miranda’s interactions with her sister,
Alcidiana, and her husband, Prince Tarquin, readers find a carefully constructed libertine coquette, whose happy survival at the end of the novella is both logical and well deserved, if also unsettling. A summary of Miranda’s multiple and increasingly daring adventures is helpful here. The heroine first sets her sights on Friar Francisco, whose rejection of
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Miranda’s charms incites her to incriminate him for attempted rape—the lie Miranda contrives to save herself from embarrassment. Miranda then seduces and marries the newcomer to town, Prince Tarquin, and she enjoys the all the spoils that his royal privilege provides. Because Miranda’s grandeur exceeds that of her assets, she quickly squanders her fortune. Eventually, she realizes she can use both her age and royal status to acquire her younger sister’s assets. As the older sister and manager of their fortune, Miranda repeatedly thwarts Alcidiana’s marriage proposals in order to keep her younger sister’s inheritance for herself. However, Alcidiana does not submit to her sister’s tyranny, and when Miranda realizes this, she asks her page, Van Brune, to poison the younger sister. Eager to do
Miranda’s bidding, Van Brune poisons Alcidiana, but not effectively enough; Alcidiana survives. Miranda then turns to her husband, who assures his wife he will finish the job.
Tarquin fails in his attempt to shoot and kill his sister-in-law and is, instead, exposed, and imprisoned. Miranda suffers and repents while her husband awaits his execution. On the day of Tarquin’s beheading, the executioner botches the job, and the prince manages to escape Flanders with Miranda following him shortly thereafter. Behn closes the novel with the two living happily together in Holland, where they spend their remaining days
“penitently” and in “as perfect a state of happiness as this troublesome world can afford”
(Behn 119).
Behn’s introduction of Miranda to the narrative immediately points out the very public reputation the eighteen-year-old has already garnered; “’Twere needless to say how great a noise the fame of this young beauty . . . made in the world; I may say the world, rather than confine her fame to the scanty limits of a town: it reached many others” (79).
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Because Miranda knows she is “universally adored,” she does not take kindly to rejection; her unsettling behavior begins with her response to thwarted desire. When, at church, Friar
Francisco refuses Miranda’s advances, she reacts the way society has conditioned her to act:
[S]he prevailed so far with him by her sighs and tears, as to
own he had a tenderness for her, and that he could not behold
so many charms, without being sensibly touched by ‘em . . .
but [he] utterly forbade her to hope. Behold her now denied,
refused, and defeated, with all her pleading, youth, beauty,
tears . . . What shall she do? She swells with pride, love,
indignation, and desire; her eyes grow fierce, and from grief
she rises to a storm, and in her agony of passion, which looks
all disdainful, haughty, and full of rage . . . Tells him . . . ‘I will
ruin thee, and make no scruple of revenging the pains I suffer,
by that which shall take away your life and honour.’ (Behn 93)
Behn exaggerates Miranda’s dissembling; her coquettish “shower of tears” and “sobs” compete with the more rakish tendency to “snatch” the friar into her arms and “violently pull” him into her lap (94-5). When the head priest arrives to find Miranda in the arms of
Friar Francisco, where she has forced herself, she uses the charms of a coquette to displace the blame onto the innocent friar. She blushes, sighs, and cries rape until the provincial promises “all assurances of revenge” (95). Miranda meets rejection with hostility, but it is her acute awareness and management of space that saves her from exposure here. Because
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Miranda knows her beauty is famous, she is correctly confident that the other friars will believe her when she cries rape.
At this point, the reader alone knows that Miranda has deceived the public by falsely accusing the friar. If the friars have taken Miranda’s account of attempted rape as true, then society would have no reason to think otherwise, except that she has been implicitly identified by the public as a coquette. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, the coquette, like the jilt, was characterized as airy and indecisive.
Despite all of Miranda’s dissembling, her “sobs so naturally acted and so well managed,” the coquette does not always “take seriously the potentially negative consequences of her behavior: behavior that jeopardizes her ‘reputation’ even when her ‘honour’ or ‘virtue’ remains intact” (Braunschneider 4). To accuse a friar of rape, then, provokes the public’s thinking: What might Miranda have done to cause the friar to act so uncharacteristically?
Because “The Fair Jilt” is “a drama of public opinion, with the careers of the protagonists played out within a fully public sphere,” the mere publicity of the scandal will prompt society to question Miranda’s character, regardless of her purported status as a victim
(Pearson “Short” 196). In this context, Miranda’s mastery over Friar Francisco’s rejection establishes her as a forceful presence in the public arena, one that can easily manipulate public opinion. Nevertheless, the coquette’s management must be constant, and that task becomes even more difficult for Miranda when she meets Prince Tarquin, whose extravagant arrival in Flanders causes quite the scene. For Tarquin “was all the discourse of the town,” and “all wondered where this revenue was that supported this grandeur . . . Thus everybody meddled with what they had nothing to do” (Behn 98, emphasis my own).
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Miranda understands that by aligning herself with Tarquin, she will also invite “all” the town’s discourse, which is precisely what a coquette is inclined to do.
Miranda skillfully manages to capture Tarquin’s attention by positioning herself appropriately during a church service; “she got to kneel at the side of the altar just over against the prince, so that, if he would, he could not avoid looking full upon her. She had turned up her veil,” and when Tarquin’s eyes met hers, she “cast her eyes downward with such inviting art” that when the “ceremony being ended, he sent a page to follow that lady home, himself pursuing her to the door of the church, where he took some holy water and threw upon her and made her a profound reverence” (99). Miranda goes from quietly kneeling at the side of the altar, under her veil, to standing at the door, which is exactly where she needs to be in order for Tarquin to pursue her and sprinkle her with holy water for all to see. On the coquette’s manipulation of various spaces, Braunschneider points out that “the coquette in church wrenches men’s attention from the event they have ostensibly come to witness”; Miranda manipulates the space of the church, “co-opt[ing]” and “subtly corrupting its intended function—by making herself, . . . not God, the object of adoration”
(79). Each of Miranda’s positions in church is carefully constructed, and only readers understand the irony of her contrived movement from one space to the next; as Pearson rightly notes, in The Fair Jilt, there is a “constant contrast between outward appearance and inner reality” (196). Behn sets up a unique dynamic between the fictional public and the reader. Behn’s narrator tells readers that the public will meddle, regardless of the circumstances, but readers are given access to more intimate details, as Miranda’s contrived movement, that the public is denied. It is as if Behn challenges readers in the same way that
58 her narrator challenges the public. Will readers be as critical of the coquette as society is?
Or will they recognize that the coquette is a product of society’s obsession with pretense and spectacle? If the answer is, indeed, the latter, then the reader can appreciate the details of Miranda’s mastery and watch as she cleverly directs the public’s attention back and forth, from one elaborate scene to the next.
Miranda also needs resources in order to manage public space successfully— resources in the form of people, people she can seduce. When Miranda fails to seduce Friar
Francisco, she moves on to Tarquin, and “in spite of all that would have opposed it, he married this famous woman” (Behn 99). Because coquettes “insist upon marrying only whom they want, when they want, and if they want,” the public perceives them as threats
“to a general rule of feminine modesty and chastity,” (Braunschneider 2, 32). The public understands Miranda to have seduced Tarquin—that she has “bewitched” him into this decision (Behn 99). In the late seventeenth century, marriage was certainly a public contract, largely influenced by public opinion, so when Miranda ignores society’s very public disapproval of her marriage to Tarquin, she invites even more scrutiny into their lives. The coquette figure exposes the trouble with the public’s unwarranted scrutiny, especially given that their scorn is almost entirely directed at Miranda rather than to
Miranda and Tarquin equally. A key function of the coquette in literature is that she reveals
“key truths about the contemporary world” (Braunschneider 2). As it turns out, the truth about life in Antwerp for Miranda and Tarquin is the same as the truth about life in London for Behn: there are gendered consequences to living in public space, as the punishment of
59 exposure for Miranda’s originary female desire in her seduction of Tarquin is much harsher than if he would have initiated the seduction.
Behn elaborates on this truth by contrasting Miranda’s unapologetic use of public space with that of her sister’s more subtle movement in the public periphery. Alcidiana is introduced to the novella as “not altogether so great a beauty as her sister,” but with “charm sufficient to procure her a great many lovers” (100). Not by coincidence, Behn’s central heroine is always the most beautiful; the minor character’s beauty is typically secondary to her charm, as in Onahal’s case. This strategy directs both the reader’s and the fictional public’s attention to the most beautiful character, and subsequently allows Behn more narrative freedom in her depiction of the minor character’s desire (recall Imoinda dancing at the center of the Otan while Onahal arguably does another kind of “dance” at the window, beyond the king’s vision). Readers are given details about the younger sister only as they pertain to Miranda, but Alcidiana, despite the fragmentation of her story, like Onahal’s, is actually central to the Miranda’s success. Miranda rejects all marriage proposals that come her sister’s way in order to maintain control over Alcidiana’s inheritance. Like Onahal,
Alcidiana finds herself capable of greater satisfaction away from the confines of public scrutiny. When Alcidiana inadvertently becomes the next obstacle to Miranda’s happiness, the younger sister runs away, secures a new guardian, and chooses to arrange her own marriage—a variation of the coquette in her own right.
Alcidiana’s subversive mobility threatens Miranda’s power, and the princess’s response is to have her younger sister killed. As Miranda manages the murder, it is notable that she does so from a distance. She is never directly involved; instead, she supervises the
60 action, again using her coquettish charms to influence first, her page Van Brune, whom
“she had long managed for her purpose,” then her husband (102). Miranda “caress[es]” Van
Brune and entices him with her “joyful blushes”; her seduction is so effective that the page agrees to murder Alcidiana, “without so much as a starting” (102). When Van Brune fails and is put to trial, he tells his story, and “the whole city” is so “overjoyed that [Miranda] should be punished” that “she found no more favour than the meanest criminal” (105). The same scenario plays out when Tarquin proposes to murder Alcidiana, and this time, there is no need for negotiation. The prince commands her to “cast her eyes of sweetness and love upon him . . . forget her sorrows and redeem her lost health” because he will “dispatch this fatal stop to her happiness out of the way” (108). In a strangely comic scene, Tarquin shoots and misses Alcidiana, striking her elaborate petticoat, instead. Alcidiana’s coachmen confront the disguised Tarquin and expose him as the intended murderer of his sister-in- law. “[E]veryone knew that Prince Tarquin” was responsible, but the public had such “a real sorrow and compassion for him” that they made a “thousand addresses” to Alcidiana
“not to prosecute him” (111). Van Brune and Tarquin’s willing participation makes them equally guilty, but the people of Flanders blame Miranda entirely and excuse her male accomplices.
While the reader focuses both on Miranda’s unsettling behavior and the narrator’s exposure of the public’s hypocrisy, Alcidiana’s pursuit of desire goes largely unnoticed.
Alcidiana attends the theatre every Sunday, “for she never missed that day seeing the play,” but she does so at night and without the grand equipage that typically accompanies her sister (109). Alcidiana arrives on the scene with only two people, her lady and her lover.
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Because the reader is so focused on Tarquin’s murder plot, it is easy to overlook the fact that Alcidiana is attempting to enjoy a night out, in public, with her lover, who conducts her to the “threshold of the theatre,” behind several coaches (110). Alcidiana’s movements are much subtler than Miranda’s, but there remains a sense that her movement is intentional, proving she has the same astute awareness of space as her older sister but is less inclined to disrupt society’s gendered social norms the way that Miranda is. Like Onahal, Alcidiana focuses primarily on that which she can control—her own choices. Miranda, on the other hand, takes risks more impulsively and puts herself at the center of attention because she buys into the public’s perception of her. It is precisely people’s perception of her that
Miranda wishes to control, an impossible task, but one that promises the coquette endless entertainment. In this sense, Miranda is very much the coquette Braunschneider describes; unwilling to choose a single object of desire, she “embodies an erotics of multiplicity, locating pleasure . . . in plurality” (20). Miranda’s desire is not limited to sexual satisfaction; if it were, her story would have ended with her marriage to Tarquin. Miranda possesses both the coquette’s tendency to choose not to choose and the jilt’s impulsive choosing of something else (Friar Francisco, Tarquin, Alcidiana’s inheritance, etc.).
By the end of The Fair Jilt, Alcidiana’s face and hair have been marred by poison, her sister has spent her inheritance, and her lover abandons her “for want of fortune” (118).
It seems that Alcidiana has the best case against her sister, but it is she who ultimately helps
Miranda obtain the pardon of the “officers of justice” (117). Behn’s minor character has the greatest responsibility—that of appraising Miranda’s guilt. While a series of failed crimes certainly help the prince and princess along, Alcidiana’s influence saves them from a life of
62 debt and imprisonment. Behn, in a narrative sleight of hand, rewards Alcidiana’s compassion by uniting her with a young merchant, “the man to whom she was destined”
(118). With Alcidiana, Behn proves to her readers that it is indeed possible for a woman to express desire in public space and still be successful, despite the many, many obstacles in her way. Alcidiana successfully negotiates her way through the public sexual marketplace.
She chooses her lover, and later, her husband, and enjoys privileges that the bourgeois public space offers, from something as serious as maintaining a certain amount of influence over public opinion (as in pardoning Miranda) to the simple pleasure of attending the theatre every Sunday.
Alcidiana’s response to her sister is particularly helpful for readers who are unsure how to respond to Miranda’s transgressions. Alcidiana understands Miranda’s malice for what it is: a byproduct of society’s enduring obsession with her every move. In the end,
Alcidiana manages to forgive her older sister, despite being the direct target of her villainy.
This is an important, albeit brief moment, in the text; Alcidiana “sought all means possible of getting [Tarquin’s] pardon and that of her sister” (Behn 118). It is Alcidiana’s pardoning of Miranda that exposes the irony of the public’s contempt. The younger sister has not only been the victim of Miranda’s crimes, but the unsuspecting target of the public’s hate as well. For example, after she survives being poisoned, Alcidiana receives letters with death threats from Van Brune’s family; “indeed, the death of the page had afflicted so great many, that Alcidiana had procured herself abundance of enemies upon that account” (109).
The question that lingers at the end of the novella is not why Miranda survives to live happily ever after, but why Alcidiana pardons Miranda in the first place. There is evidence
63 that suggests Alcidiana only pardons her sister and brother-in-law because she is pressured into doing so, because she fears that people will disapprove of her “having been the prosecutor of this great man,” Tarquin. The narrator’s repeated emphasis on the public’s unwavering devotion to Tarquin, “not one had but a real sorrow and compassion for him,” supports this conclusion (111). Read in this context, Alcidiana’s pardoning of Tarquin (and
Miranda by default) is more an attempt to save her own life than it is a compassionate move to save theirs. By presenting the public’s scrutiny as a skewed, even comical view of justice—Tarquin attempts to murder Alcidiana, yet they “repented from the bottom of their hearts their having any hand in the ruin of so gallant a man”—Behn implies that public scrutiny is to be taken lightly. Society’s meddling also justifies the narrator’s emphasis on the external, on the extravagant lives of the central characters. If it society’s business “to ogle and ensnare,” then it should also be held responsible for enabling, even encouraging,
Miranda’s (and Tarquin’s) vanity. Ultimately, Miranda and Alcidiana resort to placating the public’s scrutiny, seeking pardons and assuring penitence, in order to secure their own happiness, which happens to be the only “punishment” Behn imposes on these desirous female characters.
The novella’s happy ending should not be entirely shocking. In fact, Miranda’s success at the end of The Fair Jilt is typical of the male libertine’s triumph. M. L. Stapleton finds that “libertinism requires some enabling and consent to take root,” which appears to be true, given that Prince Tarquin and Van Brune readily acquiesce to Miranda’s desires, enabling her aggression, even when she is forthcoming about her intentions (138). Without these two men She manages to appeal to each character’s interests in different ways. For
64 example, as Miranda “grew more familiar with [Van Brune],” seeing “love dance in his eyes, of which she was so good a judge,” she began to treat “him more like a lover than a servant” (Behn 102). Miranda waits until Van Brune can no longer “bear her charming words, looks, and touches” before she asks him to poison her sister. Because Tarquin is also easily seduced by flattery, Miranda “caress[es] him in the most endearing manner that love and flattery could invent” and “kisse[s] him to an oath” to kill Alcidiana, to which Tarquin agrees because his wife is “so obstinate and powerful . . . in dissembling well” (108).
Nevertheless, while Miranda spends the first part of her marriage feigning love and dissembling sorrow, she eventually tells her husband the real extent of her crimes. After hearing her confession, “the prince still adore[s] her” and says he is happy to die at her service (115). Miranda survives the very public exposure of her bad behavior because she proves to be keener than society itself. The narrator ultimately leaves it up to the reader to decide whether or not Miranda’s alleged “peniten[ce] for her life past” is genuine. The final lines in the narrative—“Since I began this relation, I heard that Prince Tarquin died about three quarters of a year ago”—certainly complicates the reader’s understanding that decision (119). Before these brief final lines, though, the narrator describes Miranda living in “as perfect a state of happiness as this troublesome world can afford,” which makes the ending even more unclear, given the various ways readers might interpret Miranda responding to (or possibly contributing to) her husband’s death. In the context of this ambiguity, Miranda manages to escape the audience’s scrutiny, leaving them in wonder, instead.
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Nevertheless, Miranda’s escape to Holland again implies that a separate space for female desire is necessary in order for it to actually endure, as this kind of spatial manipulation is depicted as both punishment and female agency. In her creation of those separate spaces, Behn’s narrator is discrete; we must read carefully in order to locate them as readers because otherwise, we only see the more obvious public and private spheres. The place for female desire seems to be somewhere in between. Behn’s sly narrative strategy disrupts the idea that appropriate spaces for gendered expressions of desire even exist.
Rather, she seems to critique the exploitation of desire in general, the public’s meddling, interference, objections, and judgments. Behn’s characters, both male and female, are subject to society’s criticism, and we can read this as a critique of criticism, especially as it pertains to narratives of sexuality. In both Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, the public becomes the greatest enemy to women’s sexual and marital fulfillment. Because Behn’s works
“speak to all times—[her] own, of course, and ours as well,” then we, as readers, should be familiar with the representation of the fictional public Behn presents in The Fair Jilt (Kraft
11). Are we satisfied with Miranda as a representation of female desire in the Restoration period, as a libertine-coquette, or do we critique her for the same reasons that she was critiqued then—her female desire too transgressive to go unpunished? Our answers come to light in our criticism and affect future readings of the text, as well.
The History of the Nun: or, The Fair Vow-Breaker
I include Behn’s posthumous History of the Nun (1689) it in this study because it signifies both a change in the amatory heroine’s expression of desire and the fictional public’s reception of it. The History of the Nun has no minor character with which to
66 compare the central heroine’s expression of desire. Isabella, the inexperienced coquette, must adapt to the confined spaces she inhabits largely of her own accord, as she decides at age thirteen to take vows as a nun in order to please her father, a decision she that later regrets. Despite the more limited public space available to her, Isabella is the most mobile of Behn’s heroines in that she moves from the town of Iper (modern Ypres in
Flanders/Belgium), travels abroad with her aunt to Hyde Park in order to “see all that was diverting,” returns to Iper to commit herself to a nunnery, then elopes with her lover to the countryside, only to return back to town again (143). Because Isabella’s father, from the outset, forces her to choose a single, preordained path for her life, either to “marry a nobleman” or “take orders” as a nun, Isabella lacks the mastery of self-awareness required to navigate her desires in these various locales. (141). Isabella is not the female libertine; her pursuits, while bold, are often filled with hesitation and self-deprecation because her happiness depends on pleasing another, whether her father, her aunt, or her husbands. Not only are Isabella’s expressions of desire different from Onahal’s or Miranda’s, but so, too, are the spaces in which these expressions occur. Despite her mobility, she expresses desire in more private spaces—the convent and eventually the two homes she shares with her husbands. Isabella’s punishment is unusual in that she is not scolded in the way of Onahal or Miranda; when her unruly behavior is exposed, she manages to maintain the public’s and the reader’s sympathy and admiration. Behn accomplishes this by invoking a more vocal narrator than in her past amatory fiction, a narrator who acts as a barrier between Isabella’s transgressions and the public’s criticism. Because the inexperienced heroine is so
67 expressive of her own shame, which the narrator emphasizes and depicts as a lesson to the reader, Isabella remains a character that also warrants the reader’s sympathy.
Isabella is thirteen-years-old with a wit “apt for all impressions” when she decides to commit herself to the nunnery where she has already resided since she was two-years old, after the death of her mother (142). Because Isabella is “ignoran[t] of the world’s vanities,” she believes “there [i]s no joy out [side] of a nunnery, and no satisfactions on the other side of a grate” (143). For Isabella, the nunnery grates not only represent a separation from “the world” and “the wretches that were condemned to it,” but this border also signifies her own commitment to “lov[ing] an enclosed life” (145). The announcement of
Isabella’s taking orders dismays her several admirers, particularly nobly born Villenoys, who begins an exchange with the young heroine during her brief stint “abroad” before confirming her resignation to the monastery (144). Isabella chooses the nunnery to act
“according to the wish[es] of [her father’s] soul,” despite having the “most compassion” for
Villenoys (145). Her suitor is so tortured by this decision that he becomes gravely ill, and
Isabella blames herself for the “crime” of giving him false hope (147). After some time,
Villenoys recovers his strength and goes off to war. At the nunnery, Isabella befriends
Sister Katteriena and falls in love with her brother, Henault, who regularly visits the convent grates. After several attempts to “remedy” the “disease” of love, Isabella and
Henault decide to give in and plan her escape. They successfully flee the monastery and marry, but their happiness is short-lived. They reside in the countryside, away from the public’s possible scrutiny, but the displaced, “bookish” Henault struggles to secure their livelihood. Eventually, he decides that he will enlist in the army so that he will regain his
68 father’s favor, which will help support his and Isabella’s growing family. However, upon hearing this news of his impending departure, Isabella miscarries and worries that she does not know how to live without him.
While Henault is away at war, he meets Villenoys, and they become “like two sworn brothers” (174). Soon after, Henault is reported dead in battle; Isabella receives a letter with the news and mourns privately for an entire year. When Villenoys returns from war, he pursues Isabella again, now that she is neither nun nor wife. Isabella refuses his proposals for five years, until she comes to the conclusion that “’twas for interest she marr[y] again,” and “since she was forced to submit herself to be a second time a wife, she thought she could live better with Villenoys than any other” (177). The couple marries, and
Isabella enjoys the ease of her new life. One night, a travel-stained Henault arrives on her doorstep while Villenoys is away hunting. Isabella does not have the courage to tell Henault the truth about her marriage to Villenoys, so she devises a plan to get rid of her first husband, instead. To her own horror, Isabella smothers Henault to death in his sleep. When
Villenoys returns, she lies and says that Henault died after hearing that she remarried.
Villenoys proposes to dispose of Henault’s body so that his beloved wife avoids being exposed as a bigamist. Isabella’s lie to Villenoys disturbs her so greatly that she impulsively decides to kill him, too. With needle and thread, she fastens the sack containing
Henault’s corpse to Villenoys’s jacket, so that when he throws Henault’s body over the bridge, he falls to his own death. Isabella briefly lives with the shame of her lie until her husbands’ bodies are found and identified. She is accused, imprisoned, and beheaded.
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Before readers arrive at Isabella’s story, the narrator tells us what we can expect and how we might respond. She sets up Isabella’s story in relation to her own:
I was once designed an humble votary in the house of devotion,
but fancying myself not endued with an obstinacy of mind
great enough to secure me from the efforts and vanities of the
world, I rather chose to deny myself that content I could not
certainly promise myself, than to languish (as I have seen some
do) in a certain affliction, though possibly since I have
sufficiently bewailed that mistaken and inconsiderate
approbation and preference of the false, ungrateful world (full
of nothing but nonsense, noise, false notions, and
contradiction) before the innocence and quiet of a cloister.
Nevertheless, I could wish, for the prevention of abundance of
mischiefs and miseries, that nunneries and marriages were not
to be entered into till the maid so destined were of a mature age
to make her own choice, and that parents would not make use
of their justly assumed authority to compel their children
neither to the one or the other, but since I cannot alter custom,
nor shall ever be allowed to make new laws or rectify the old
ones, I must leave the young nuns enclosed to their best
endeavors of making a virtue of necessity, and the young
wives, to make the best of a bad market. (140-1)
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In this dismal assessment of women’s choices, the narrator sets herself up to be the didactic, experienced purveyor the action, presenting Isabella’s inexperience as a tragic flaw, compounded by her father’s enforced decision at such a young age and her dependence on her male suitors, rather than a critical fault. The narrator also expresses disappointment in her lack of influence on young women, in her passive participation in a society she cannot change. She sets the scene as one inescapably hierarchal; Isabella must navigate her desire within those spaces—either in the “ungrateful world (full of . . . contradiction)” or in the
“quiet of a cloister” (141). From the narrator’s early assertions, readers can predict
Isabella’s potential to fail. After repeatedly referring to Isabella’s youth, the omniscient narrator sets herself up as the older, experienced authority in the text. We will see this narrative strategy reemerge in Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis.
However, Isabella’s father is not the only one who influences her decision to take religious orders. When her father gives Isabella time to choose between a secular or enclosed life, he ends up leaving Isabella in the care of his sister, who happens to be the lady abbess of the St. Augustine monastery. If Isabella chooses the nunnery, the lady abbess would not only add to her own “fame,” but she would acquire Isabella’s “considerable fortune,” as well; so, she “use[s] all her arts and stratagems to make [Isabella] become a nun, to which all the fair sisterhood contributed their cunning” (143). It is unclear whether or not Behn’s language here is meant to satirize the corruption of Catholic orders or simply point out that, despite its seeming sisterhood, the convent is another hierarchal space.
Regardless, she defines the nunnery as a space that collectively stifles female desire; as
Kirsten Saxton notes, the narrator’s language “critiques the ways in which nuns, and by
71 extension all women ‘cloistered’ in the role of idealized virtue, are forced to consider their passion unnatural (36). When Isabella is first affected by desire in the nunnery, her immediate impulse is to punish it; Sister Katteriena shows Isabella a picture of her brother,
Henault, and Isabella is so “confounded with shame . . . that she (blushing extremely) hung down her head, sighed, and confessed all by her looks” (151). Isabella’s response is certainly a change from Onahal’s vocal promises of pleasure or Miranda’s thrusting herself in the lap of her beloved; her blushes appear more like those that are described in eighteenth-century conduct-book tracts for women,29 as an appropriate response to feeling desire.
Isabella initially understands the nunnery to be a space where she should suppress her desire, but she later learns from Sister Katteriena that taking orders is a punishment for desire, as well. Isabella thus finds herself amongst women who are guilty for expressing desire, the very passion the inexperienced heroine believes she must contain. When Sister
Katteriena suspects Isabella’s desire for Henault, she describes her own love story in order to comfort the young nun. The telling of Katteriena’s brief life as a lover is indicative of the public’s tendency to stifle representations of female sexuality. First, she tells Isabella that her father’s discovery of her romance with his page was “the occasion of her being made a
29 For example, John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774) illustrates the period’s notions of female restraint and modesty. Gregory writes, “One of the chief beauties in a female character is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration . . . When a girl ceases to blush, she has lost the most powerful charm of beauty . . . This modesty, which I think so essential in your sex, will naturally dispose you to be rather silent in company, especially in a large one (qtd in Hill 19). Gregory’s advice to his daughters fails to take into account the danger in women’s modesty, where women’s blushes and silence are also indicative of frustration and self- deprecation, represented in fiction much more explicitly. In a sense, Isabella is Behn’s attempt to look ahead and predict the kind of eighteenth-century heroine with whom readers could more easily sympathize, where the heroine’s self-deprecating nature is simply another extension of her virtue, as it is in the domestic novel. 72 nun”; then, when Katteriena begins to recall the intimate details of her affair, Isabella interrupts her, shouting, “No more, no more . . . thou . . . mak’st me know my weakness and my shame” (Behn 152). Because her surroundings dictate that she should feel guilty about desire, Isabella realizes the only way she will survive her passion is to escape the grates that now serve as a reminder her of her shame.
Isabella attempts to rid herself of her shame by “fasting long, praying fervently, rigid penances and pains, severe disciplines, all the mortification almost to the destruction of life itself,” but the “unruly flame” of her desire still “burnt and raged” (166). She ultimately decides that her guilty desire for Henault is worth “the losing of Heaven for,” and she plans her escape from the nunnery, resolving to “think over all she had to do and to consider how she should manage this great affair of her life” (145, 165). Isabella and
Henault surprisingly flee the convent, escaping with Isabella’s jewels and gold, and they marry without interruption. Behn’s narrative strategy directs readers’ attention, subsequently, to Henault, who has assured Isabella that the quiet life she desires away from the city’s “grandeur,” “magnificence,” and “trifles” is one he wants, as well (168).
However, his display of ineptitude and unhappiness in their new country life that follows suggest otherwise. The narrator subtly hints that Henault will fail in his role as a husband in this new rural space, being “unused to action and of a temper lazy and given to repose” with a “melancholy temper, fit for soft impressions” (149). But the inexperienced Isabella is not privy to his habits beyond the exchanges she shares with him at the nunnery grates. Isabella chooses to elope because she desires “nothing but [her] Henault; no riches but his love; no grandeur but his presence” (168). Nothing, on the other hand would “satisfy the great heart
73 of Henault,” who cannot adapt as easily to this new setting as Isabella, for Henault “must let the man of quality show itself even in the disguise of an humbler farmer” (171).
Meanwhile, Isabella’s experiences in the nunnery serve her well in their farming trade; she,
“being bred to a devout and severe life,” is equipped to survive their meager lifestyle, and she, “unused to worldly vanities,” enjoys their life “far from the noise of the crowded busy cities” (170, 168). Inevitably, though, Isabella’s inexperience at negotiating desire, choosing Henault before realizing he, too, makes false promises, forces her to move back to
Iper in order to satisfy her husband, “hoping the change of place might afford ‘em better luck” (171).
While Isabella easily adapts to new locales, she fails to negotiate desire that equally serves her own and Henault’s joint interests, proving her inexperience in negotiating desire from the subject position. The couple moves back to Iper and settles in “a very pretty house
. . . fitting for the reception of anybody of quality that would live a private life30” (172).
Isabella easily adapts in this new space, as well, “perpetually progging and saving all that she could to enrich and advance her and at last, pardoning and forgiving Henault, lov[ing] him as her own child” (172).31 Because Isabella continues to build her life around Henault’s desires, she suffers the consequences of his selfish interests. Henault makes decisions
30 Given the context of “private life” here, I take it to mean family life, as the narrative continues by describing the way that the public perceives of Isabella and Henault as a couple and then reveals Isabella to be pregnant. When I refer to Isabella’s domesticity, I simply mean her role in their new home, saving money, tending to her husband, conceiving a child. I don’t use “domesticity” with the same connotation as “the domestic sphere”—as Amanda Vickery notes, “although the language of domesticity implied privacy, it was not necessarily synonymous with female seclusion and confinement” (“Golden Age to Separate Spheres” 411). Furthermore, even though Isabella’s domestic household is more private, it still “had public, social, or communal dimensions,” as the public comments on their “private life” throughout the narrative (David Cressy “Response: Private Lives, Public Performance, and the Rites of Passage” 187). 31 A prog is a “hoard, a reserve supply (esp. of money); savings” (OED). 74 without consulting Isabella, even after they conceive a child together. When Henault decides to “go into the French campaign” in order to satisfy the wishes of his father, he first tells “all his friends and all who loved him joined in this design, and all thought it convenient,” and “[a]t last, he lets Isabella know what propositions he had had made” (172-
3). At this news, Isabella “almost fainted in his arms while he was speaking and it possessed her with so entire a grief that she miscarried” (173). Isabella submits to Henault’s desire to move back to Flanders after failing in their country life, only for him to abruptly leave her there in Iper alone. The narrative thus undermines Isabella’s pursuit of domesticity, by moving her from one household to another and having her miscarry their first child, all of which recalls the narrator’s earlier admonition that young women should avoid entering into marriages before they are mature enough to foresee the consequences.
When Isabella manages to “re-establish her repose,” she attempts to negotiate the terms of Henault’s departure for the French service. She tells Henault that she, too, will satisfy her duty, “determining to retire to the monastery” while he is away (173). This time,
Henault loses his composure, and when “he grew pale and disordered,” Isabella remits her terms, promising him, instead, that she will “never go again within the walls of a religious house” (173). Isabella reverts back to her inexperience, sacrificing her desire to wait for
Henault at the monastery, where she might enjoy the company of her aunt, the abbess, and sister-in-law, Katteriena, in order to subdue her husband’s fear that she may not be able to escape the nunnery a second time. Not long after Henault departs for the army, Isabella receives news that her husband died in battle, yet Isabella’s experiences at the nunnery again prove useful, as she adapts to this new life of solitude so well that “she acquired a
75 reputation such as never any young beauty had . . . She daily increased in beauty, which, joined to her exemplary piety, charity, and all other excellent qualities, gained her a wondrous fame and begat an awe and reverence in all that heard of her, and there was no man of any quality that did not adore her” (175-6). In this context, the newly widowed
Isabella regains the same fame she acquired as a nun at the monastery; her seclusion is appealing, only adding to the quality of her character. The fleeting moments when Isabella appears to know herself are also those when she most effectively manages the public’s opinion of her. However, when Isabella is tasked with knowing how to please another, she quickly loses that mastery over her composure. This is evident when Villenoys returns to court Isabella and eventually marry her, causing her to unknowingly become a bigamist.
When a ragged but alive Henault arrives at Isabella’s doorstep, in the home she now shares with Villenoys, the inexperienced heroine’s impulse is to escape the sudden guilt of her bigamy, no matter how. The domestic space she sought to create, where she could “live in what method she liked best” and “was esteemed the fairest and best of wives,” continually eludes her. Isabella gets rid of her first husband, smothering Henault in his sleep so that he does not discover the truth of her bigamy. Then, when she imagines that
Villenoys will “be eternal reproaching her, if not with his tongue, at least with his heart,” she resolves to kill him, too, her inexperience rendering her ignorant of other any other option (Behn 186). The narrator certainly portrays Villenoys as Isabella’s better match, for
“the most indulgent and endearing man . . . had almost worn [Henault] out of her heart,” but because Isabella never has the opportunity to fully explore her desires in public space, the narrator exposes her to be incapable of managing desire in any space, public or private.
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Isabella’s inability to secure her own interests in their relationship—setting herself up as the object of Villenoys desire rather than positioning herself as his equal—causes her to fear her second husband’s reproach. Isabella goes to identify Villenoys’ dead body, and
“coming near the table, the body, whose eyes were before close shut, now opened themselves wide and fixed them on Isabella, who, giving a great shriek, fell down in a swound, and the eyes closed again” (188-9). In what appears to be an eerie metaphor of the public’s ever-watchful scrutiny, Isabella ultimately realizes that there is no reprieve from her guilt in any space.
In a matter of moments, Isabella is a happy wife, an exposed bigamist, a double murderess, a liar, and, by her own hand, a widow. The narrator, however, stresses not the danger of her actions, but of a woman’s inexperience, preparing us for Isabella’s failure from the beginning, with her emphasis on the heroine’s feelings of guilt, shame, and fear.
Furthermore, according to Pearson of Behn’s narrator:
All the metaphors in the opening paragraphs of the novella
suggest that female powerlessness justifies female acts, so that
vow-breaking, bigamy, and even murder are presented not as
unproblematic sins but as horrific, extreme, but logical
consequences of a social order that routinely allows women no
freedom of choice over their own lives. (“History” 246,
emphasis my own)
Isabella commits two murders in one night with her own hands, yet the narrator responds sympathetically. Much of the narrative is spent delineating Isabella’s many feminine
77 virtues—her tremendous guilt for fleeing the nunnery, her loyalty to Henault despite his failures, her five-year grieving period before remarrying, and her sorrow upon learning she is unintentionally a bigamist. The narrator’s repeated emphasis on the danger of inexperienced vow-taking suggests that Isabella’s acquiescence to social norms is her only real mistake. Isabella is denied the opportunity to enter into an ethical desirous exchange— one where she is able to negotiate her desires equitably. Despite offering Isabella the choice to enjoy the “vanities of the world,” her father’s initial proposition is disingenuous, for he should understand that a young woman needs not only a place from which to express her desires, but an appropriate time, as well—indeed, a space.
The narrator gradually guides the reader to an ending where Isabella’s beheading appears more serious a crime than the very ones she commits. Because the narrator explains early on that female depravity is actually a consequence of male vice—“What man does not boast of the numbers he has thus ruined, and who does not glory in the shameful triumph? . . . The women are taught by the lives of the men to live up to all their vices”— the reader is inclined to blame normative gender roles that allow male vice to go unpunished (139-40). Isabella does not revel in her “shameful triumph” of accidentally securing two husbands, yet her “vice” must be punished. In this, the narrator aligns
Isabella’s crime of murdering two husbands with the same weightiness as male inconstancy, further diminishing the heroine’s guilt. She does not kill Henault so that she can remain happily married to Villenoys. She smothers her first husband because she is too inexperienced to handle the scandal that would inevitably come with her being exposed as a bigamist. Nonetheless, Isabella earns the public’s sympathy and respect because she is so
78 expressive of her own miserable guilt, making “a speech of half an hour long, so eloquent, so admirable a warning to the vow-breakers, that it was as amazing to hear her, as it was to behold her” (190). Even though Isabella’s pandering to society results in her own unfulfilled desire, she successfully secures the public’s sympathy, which allows Isabella to finally escape the fixity of her guilt. The heroine “was tried and condemned to lose her head, which sentence she joyfully received,” and “[w]hen the day of execution came,” she
“all cheerful as a bride,” endured her beheading (190). While Isabella fails to satisfy her desire for domesticity with Henault or Villenoys, she instead enjoys society’s endearment of her on the scaffold, as a paragon of repentance. It is the ending eighteenth-century readers would accept as appropriate punishment for unruly female behavior, but with a subversive twist. The female narrator sympathetically relates Isabella’s fate as a lesson, not against vow-breaking, but of vow-taking.
As this chapter sets out to prove, amatory fiction is not always women’s stifled desire and suffering. Its multidimensional heroines, central, and especially minor, prove that the narrative of female desire is not restricted to one amatory experience. In three of
Behn’s most compelling works of amatory fiction, she represents several female characters that are necessary to the formation of female desire in literary history: The clever, desirous, yet marginal heroine like Onahal and Alcidiana, the libertine-coquette Miranda, and the virtuous, yet subversive heroine, Isabella, whose role reappears frequently in eighteenth- century romantic fiction. Each of these Behnian characters functions only as well as their counterparts in the narrative. Onahal relies on Oroonoko, Imoinda, and Aboan to hold up their end of the amatory negotiation; Miranda anticipates her sister’s participation in a
79 design to manipulate her wealth; Alcidiana depends upon Miranda’s showiness to distract the public from her own public expressions of desire; Isabella requires her suitors’ assistance in freeing her from one confined space to the next. The narrator’s bleak assertion in The History of the Nun lingers: “since [she] cannot alter custom, nor shall ever be allowed to make new laws or rectify the old ones,” she will leave women to “make the best of a bad market” (141). This seems to have been Behn’s choice for Isabella, whose desire she resigns to the public’s more normative expectations of female desire—as responsive, not originary—and, as one of Behn’s last novels, Isabella’s fate represents the difficulty in sustaining female desire in public space, hinting at the setting of fiction’s future.
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Chapter 3
Desire and Privacy in Manley’s New Atalantis and The Adventures of Rivella
As I indicate in the Introduction, amatory fiction takes on several names throughout the course of its literary history,32 but when critics refer to the form as “scandal fiction,” it is most often to credit the work of Delarivier Manley. According to Toni Bowers, Manley’s literary success is built
out of a series of highly personal, even intimate, fictionalized
exposes intended to undermine the moral authority of a large
number of specific, recognizable Whigs—politicians, publicly
active aristocrats, and partisan operatives among them—whose
sexual peccadilloes, embarrassing eccentricities, and personal
failures were displayed in juicy particularity. (Force 162)
In Manley’s amatory fiction, desire is portrayed as both personal and political scandal.
Unlike Aphra Behn, whose obscure early life necessitated biographical inquiry for her later recovery, Manley’s biography is immediately available in two of her most popular prose works The New Atalantis (1709) and The Adventures of Rivella (1714). The story of Delia in The New Atalantis is a representation of Manley’s life as a young woman, married to her bigamous cousin, Don Marcus, who represents John Manley. Rivella, in The Adventures of
Rivella, is a representation of Manley as the more experienced, single woman in London.33
32 Ros Ballaster calls it “seductive fiction”; Janet Todd says “prose romance”; Toni Bowers, “scandal fiction” 33 This assertion is supported by several of Manley’s respected biographers. In New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Century Literature (2016), Aleksondra Hultquist and Elizabeth J. Mathews find that Manley’s “self-crafted emblematic image, that of Rivella in The Adventures of Rivella (1714) and Delia in The New Atalantis, was the one she wanted to leave as her biographical legacy” (2). Rachel Carnell’s A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (2008) refers to The Adventures of Rivella as Manley’s “quasi- fictional autobiography” (12). According to Ros Ballaster’s entry on Manley in the Oxford Dictionary of 81
These texts reveal that Manley was “seduced, married, possessed, and ruined by her cousin
(and possibly one of her legal guardians), John Manley, about fifteen years her senior, whose wife was alive at the time” (Hultquist and Mathews 3). The exposure of Delarivier’s bigamous marriage to John Manley and his abandonment thereafter left Delarivier in need of financial support. After a few years of moving in and around London in search of work, by 1700,34 Manley established herself as a professional writer, and she saw the success of her new career as an opportunity to continually rewrite her reputation. The New Atalantis is a published collection of satirized political scandal stories that earned her both literary fame and (more) public censure, as she was charged and briefly imprisoned for libel upon its publication.35 Persistent in protecting her reputation, Manley defends her writing of New
Atalantis by including the story of its scandal in Adventures of Rivella. In this way,
Manley’s amatory fiction is largely inspired by her own story of success: She begins, like
Charlot and Delia in New Atalantis, as an innocent, naïve young woman in the unreliable protection of her husband and matures, like Rivella in Adventures of Rivella, into an experienced, independent woman whose mastery of public space allows her social, sexual, and political agency. Both Rivella and Manley become writers.
National Biography, “The principal source for Delarivier's biography is her own account in the 1714 Adventures of Rivella . . . a brief account is also provided by Manley in her most successful work of scandal fiction, the New Atalantis (1709)” (para. 2). 34 Hultquist and Mathews attribute this to Manley’s two staged plays in London and a draft of Letters Written in 1696 along with her published poems The Nine Muses in 1700 (New Perspectives 3). 35 Political satire was a popular literary form in early eighteenth-century England. Richard Steele and Jonathan Swift also contributed to this kind of allegorical political commentary in their news journal The Tatler. Meanwhile, amatory fiction allowed Manley to conveniently disguise names of the aristocrats whose private affairs she publicized, and because Manley carefully adapted political scandal to fit the parameters of amatory fiction in The New Atalantis, she managed to evade prosecution when the Whig government accused her of libel in 1709. Manley’s simple “rechristening [of] individual real-life targets with made-up, vaguely romantic names” was well within the appropriate legal and social boundaries (Bowers Force or Fraud 191). 82
In order for Manley’s amatory heroines to successfully navigate their desires in the public arena, their mobility must be deliberate; they must remain cognizant of their position in each locale, as both a desirous subject and object, so that they avoid fixity and its subsequent confinement. In New Atalantis, Manley’s amatory heroines, Charlot and Delia, are mostly familiar with private, domestic spaces, yet their respective circumstances abruptly relocate them to more public settings, where they are then challenged to navigate and negotiate their desires in unfamiliar sociable terrain. Manley’s amatory heroines then become increasingly mobile; rather than move between interstitial locales within the public arena, in the way of an Onahal36 for example, they deliberately move back and forth between public and private spaces as they attempt to locate the appropriate venue for their desire. Thus, Manley’s heroines appear in homes, at court, at lovers’ homes, and back at court, again. While Manley’s narrators expose the dangers of a woman’s fixity in any space by stressing the heroine’s continuous movement, they prove that the biggest threat to female desire is a woman’s lack of experience in society—a lack that renders her vulnerable to seclusion, exposure, and exploitation. For Manley’s narrators, experience is not the alleged “virtuous education” the public normalizes, but rather the experience of inhabiting public, sociable settings, where the heroine can learn to negotiate her own interests and manage her desires independent of unreliable male influence. In fact, the word “interest” pervades the story of Charlot in New Atalantis, as pursuing one’s interest37 is the ideal, yet often unrealized goal of Manley’s amatory heroines.
36 See Chapter Two for my discussion of Onahal’s movement in and around the Coramantien court in Oroonoko 37 The OED defines interest as “Right or title to a share in something; share, part.”
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In The New Atalantis, Charlot and Delia either suffer from their own thwarted desire or respond to coercive male seduction, but Manley eventually presents an alternative to this dichotomous deny-or-comply narrative of desire. Unlike the heroines in New Atalantis,
Rivella in The Adventures of Rivella is so experienced that she is able to successfully manage her desire, refusing to allow the pressure of men’s expectations of her to limit her mobility from place to place. In order to transcend the fixity of a Charlot or Delia and arrive at a state of autonomy like Rivella, Manley’s amatory heroines must learn from their own unfortunate experiences so that they (and the desires they represent) are also capable of surviving past their tragic endings. One way Manley accomplishes this is through the pedantic style of her narrators. In The New Atalantis, the dialogue between narrators Lady
Intelligence and Astrea offers readers a guide by which to read the text. After Intelligence, the primary narrator, finishes telling a story, Astrea responds, and the two “invisible divinities38” exchange comments on the action, discussing a solution that might have saved the heroines from their tragic fates. By now, the presence of a didactic narrator should be familiar, as the previous chapter discusses Behn’s narrator’s cautioning tone in The History of the Nun. Both Behn and Manley emphasize the importance of edifying experiences in women’s lives. This kind of coming-of-age learning curve is evident in both Behn’s History of the Nun and in Manley’s New Atalantis, where inexperienced heroines are in desperate need of instruction and guidance. Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella is more in line with
Behn’s Oroonoko and The Fair Jilt, where more experienced heroines are introduced to the
38 There are actually four narrators: Intelligence, Astrea, Virtue, and Truth. Toni Bowers describes them more fully in Chapter 6 of Force or Fraud (2011). I include Intelligence and Astrea here because they narrate more didactically than the others, especially after the stories of Charlot and Delia, which are the focus in my study of New Atalantis. 84 text, female characters who do not shy away from expressing and fulfilling their desires, sexually, politically, and otherwise. Manley chooses male narrators in Adventures of
Rivella: Sir Charles Lovemore and Chevalier D’Aumont. Lovemore not only narrates
Rivella’s history, but he acts as an admirer of and companion to her, as well. Nonetheless, the motif of reading as both instructive and seductive recurs frequently throughout both of
Manley’s texts, as many of Manley’s characters are, themselves, avid readers.
From The New Atalantis, I focus on two amatory tales, 1) Charlot and the Duke and
2) Delia and Don Marcus, in order to illustrate how the heroines’ pursuit of desire in the public arena becomes obstructed by unreliable and wayward male guidance.
The Duke’s Court-Literacy and Charlot’s Inopportune Education
Manley’s narrator, Lady Intelligence, begins with a lengthy introduction of the
Duke as Charlot’s ill-equipped caretaker and educator. As a young boy, the Duke was a page in the court of Prince Henriquez, and when the prince fell ill with a “malignant distemper,” the page volunteered his own life to save him (Manley 26). The young boy “got into bed to the Prince, embracing closely his feverish body,” and eventually, “[t]he disease passed” (26). The narrator concludes this early scene with the following conjecture: “if [the
Duke] still wear the cruel marks of so malignant a distemper, they are in him but glorious proofs of love and duty to his Prince” (27). With this interjection, the narrator not only satirizes the Duke’s seemingly antiquated Roman understanding of honor, but she also foreshadows the likelihood of the distemper’s reemergence in him, given its pervasive physiological39 effects. Beneath the apparent praise for the Duke’s youthful expression of
39 Distemper is a “[d]eranged or disordered condition of the body or mind (formerly regarded as due to disordered state of the humours); ill health, illness, disease” (OED). 85
“love and duty,” the narrator may suggest that this level of dedication is outmoded, just like the “virtuous education” he presents to Charlot.
Mademoiselle Charlot is “left to [the Duke’s] care by her father, for whom he had as great a friendship, as a statesman can be supposed to have” (29). The Duke’s responsibilities are thus split between his roles as guardian and statesman, and he also wavers between virtue and vice. Intent on giving Charlot a virtuous education40, the Duke denies her access to popular literature—“endeavor[ing] to cure her of those number of affections and aversions so natural to young people” (30). For the most part, the Duke devotes time for Charlot’s education at court; it is there that he teaches her the importance of a young woman’s silence and modesty (31). By locating Charlot’s instruction at court, the narrator points to a carefully constructed, yet ironic space for a young woman’s education, even more so with the Duke as instructor. The narrator, Intelligence, reminds readers that the Duke, despite his unwavering loyalty to the prince, “is not free from the vices of men in power; the greediness of gain and unbounded ostentation . . . what he by cunning had acquired in this” (26). In fact, according to Bowers, Intelligence’s description of the Duke as a “natural-born politician” exposes him to be “at bottom, corrupt and self- serving” (172). The narrator’s portrayal of the Duke as an unqualified teacher is made even more evident when she points out the discrepancy between his mannerisms and those he recommends to Charlot, a habit Intelligence hints at early on, for “these are not times when the heart and tongue do agree!” (30). He is described as having a “seeming admiration for
40 Erin M. Keating’s essay “Interrupting Pleasure” points out that “the legal and educational relationship of testamentary guardianship . . . gives the Duke control of Charlot.” Because the Duke initially designs Charlot to be his son’s wife, she “is brought up in all the virtues appropriate to that role” (77). 86 virtue wherever he found it, but he was a statesman, and held it incompatible (in an age like this) with a mans making his fortune. Ambition, desire of gain, dissimulation, cunning, all these were notoriously serviceable to him” (30). In fact, the Duke has already “offered sixteen hundred thousand crowns” to the Princess dowager in order secure the succession, as he always “aimed at something more” (29). These are qualities the Duke has learned at court, which further renders it an ironic space for the restrained, virtuous education he has in mind for Charlot.
Nevertheless, the Duke begins Charlot’s instruction at court with a seemingly standard eighteenth-century model of virtuous education; his goal is that she is “educated in the high road to applause and virtue,” so “her diversions were always among the sort that were most innocent and simple, such as walking . . .music, in airs all divine: reading and improving books of education and piety” (30). When the Duke sees that Charlot “ha[s] a brightness of genius that . . . often break[s] out in dangerous sparkles,” he “show[s] her that true wit constituted not so much in speaking, but in speaking much in few words” (30). The premise of the Duke’s virtuous education depends on young women’s restraint; he tells
Charlot
never to desire any thing with too much eagerness […] all other
embellishments of the mind [are] more dangerous than useful,
and to be avoided as her ruin. That the possession of ‘em [are]
attended with self-love, vanity and coquetry, things
incompatible and never mingled in the character of a woman
of true honour. (30-1)
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The Duke, it seems, does not want Charlot to feel desire at all. When he refers to female desire, he calls it “violent inborn desire” and aligns it with “acquired arts,” “languishing charms,” and “contemptible dominion” (31). Given this language, it is evident that the
Duke recognizes the power in female desire and its influence over others. The Duke’s long spiel on the importance of a virtuous education ends with a reference to Plato, who taught
“that the first step to wisdom was not to love; the second so to love, as not to be perceived”
(31). Up to this point in the narrative, there are only vague hints that the Duke desires
Charlot for himself, as when he refers to her “dangerous sparkles,” but the reference to
Plato—initially indicative of the kind of virtuous education the Duke strives to teach— makes his desire for her an even greater possibility. This is the first of several scenes, as we shall see, where the Duke misappropriates classic literature, where he interprets a text to have distinct meanings for himself and Charlot, and his meaning is always laced with vice.
The narrative of Charlot’s virtuous education is suddenly interrupted by a change of place. Prince Henriquez dismisses the Duke to his private villa “to take a rest from power, a calm of greatness, a suspense of business, a respiration of glory” (32). The Duke retreats from service here only because Henriquez “had received a new favourite into his bosom”
(32). This minor detail is crucial to readers’ understanding of the plot; recall the Duke’s devoted service to his beloved Prince, his selfless attempt to save Henriquez from malignant distemper. If the Duke finds recess from court, it is because Henriquez does not need him at his immediate disposal; as such, the villa is a place where the Duke is not likely to be called upon or interrupted by courtly matters. His private estate is described as
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a magnificent villa within five leagues of the capital adorned
with all that’s imaginable beautiful, either in art or nature; the
pride of conquest, the plunder of victory, the homage of the
vanquished, the presents of neighbouring monarchs, and
whatever curiosity could inform, or money recover, were the
ornaments of this palace. (32, emphasis my own)
It is clear from the narrator’s description that Duke’s power extends beyond the court.
Furthermore, the emphasized words in the passage are ones often used to describe scenes of rape in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.41 If there is still evidence of
Henriquez’s contagious distemper in the Duke, it would likely manifest itself here, where he can rid himself of pretense, respond naturally to his bodily impulses, and be far enough away from public scrutiny, or to recall the Duke’s citation of Plato’s adage, “to love, so as not to be perceived.”
Meanwhile, Charlot’s education continues in this new, more private space, where the Duke now conveniently permits her to “unbend her mind from the more serious studies,” allowing her to read poetry and drama, instead (32). The Duke initially keeps
Charlot away from literature because he tells her she will be seduced by its racy content, but it is actually he who appears most vulnerable to the seduction of literature, not young
Charlot. For example, one evening, in the privacy of the Duke’s villa, Charlot and the
Duke’s son enact the roles of Diana and Acteon from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Duke is
41 In distinguishing between amatory fiction’s use of the terms seduction and rape, Toni Bowers identifies the latter as “‘force,’ the quintessential act of prerogative and domination.” She also points to various references in seventeenth and eighteenth century literature, where rape is referred to as “sweet tyranny” or “conquest” (Force or Fraud 2, 12). 89 so mesmerized by Charlot’s performance that it becomes “poison to his peace,” and “the cleaving sweetness thrilled swiftly to his heart, thence tingled in his blood, and cast fire throughout his whole person” (32). The Duke’s distemper reemerges, this time manifesting itself in the form of fiery, uncontrollable desire. Lady Intelligence describes the Duke’s undoing for two pages before he finally “settle[s] his thoughts” and thinks only about “how to corrupt her” (34). However, the Duke displaces the shame of his unwieldy desire onto
Charlot, encouraging her to “seek her diversion among those authors he had formerly forbid her the use of” (35). In this, he hopes she will, indeed, be seduced by the romances within so that she might learn how to more effectively employ her own charms.
The Duke continues to read and interpret classic texts ironically, consulting everything from Pythagoras to Machiavelli and even singing “the history of the gods” (32).
The Duke’s misreading becomes especially evident when he instructs Charlot to perform parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, particularly the story of Diana and Acteon. In
Metamorphoses, the chaste goddess Diana is bathing with her nymphs when the mortal
Acteon stumbles upon them. His arrival startles the unsuspecting goddess, who then uses her power to transform Acteon into a deer. This story within a story has two purposes in the narrative, the latter of which unfolds later; In the moment that it appears in the text, the
Metamorphoses scene explains the Duke’s sudden passion for Charlot, for he never intends to feel so strongly for her. He is presented, then, as an innocent bystander, inadvertently drawn in by Charlot’s beauty and innocence, the same way Acteon accidentally comes across Diana bathing. Like Acteon, the Duke is punished, but his punishment is in the form of tortuous, suppressed desire. Even the narrator’s use of the feminine pronoun and active
90 verb implies that Charlot is responsible for the Duke’s punishment. In these scenes, Charlot controls the action; “she acted with so animated a spirit, cast such rays of divinity about her
. . . and so admirably she varied the passions, that gave birth in his breast, to what he had never felt before” (32, emphasis my own). The narrator depicts the Duke as innocent to these new feelings, which justifies the lengthy description of his unbearable passion.
Manley’s positioning of Charlot as the scapegoat for the Duke’s unruly desire foreshadows the subsequent events.
In order to effectively relinquish himself of any guilt, the Duke keeps her at his private villa; this way, no one at court will know how he violates his duties as Charlot’s guardian by interfering with her virtuous education. From this removed space, the Duke is able to manipulate the public’s perception of Charlot as a young student who, by her own reading of licentious literature, becomes a temptress, using the “native pride and cunning of
[her] sex” to invite his seduction. He tells Charlot “that now her understanding was increased, with her stature, he resolved to make her mistress of her own conduct” (35, emphasis my own). The hypothetical scenario the Duke imagines is one where he would be innocent of her undoing, as this new direction of Charlot’s instruction would certainly position her as the seducer,42 and upon hearing about this new direction of her education,
Charlot is flattered, as “[n]othing is more pleasing to young girls than in being first considered as women” (35). To Charlot, the private villa appears more like a domestic
42 The link between a woman’s desire and a woman’s guilt in scenes of seduction was made evident in several 18th century tracts on proper feminine behavior. For example, Bernard de Mandeville’s popular philosophical poem Fable of the Bees (1714) states that a “young lady of refin’d education keeps a strict guard over her looks, as well as actions, and in her eyes we may read a consciousness that she has a treasure about her . . . which yet she is resolved not to part with at any terms . . . the wise sort of mankind are well assured that the free and open countenance of the smiling fair, is more inviting and yields greater hopes to the seducer, than the ever-watchful look of a forbidding eye (qtd. in Hill 28). 91 space, where she will now learn how to prepare for her role as a wife, but she misreads the intentions of the Duke, “whom she called and esteemed her papa” (35). The Duke intentionally opens his copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the story of Myrrha in order to
“show her that there were pleasures her sex were born for, and which she might consequently long to taste!” (35). When Charlot becomes unsettled at Ovid’s incestuous depiction of father/daughter love in the tale, the Duke pretends to comfort her; he “drew her gently to him, drank her tears with kisses, sucked her sighs, and gave her . . . new and unfelt desires,” and because she is “a girl who knew no hypocrisy,” she remains “rather unapprehensive of him for an invader” (36). Again, the Duke misuses classic literature to corrupt Charlot; he wants Charlot to believe she is seducing him, just as Myrrha43 tricks her own father into her bed, but the reader knows that the responsibility belongs to the Duke, whom the narrator describes in this moment as the “master of all mankind” (36).
The motif of reading-for-instruction continues to unfold in various layers of the text, but Manley’s reader witnesses only the Duke’s interpretation of literature, not Charlot’s, even though she is supposed to be the student. As such, in the scenes that lead up to her seduction, the narrative revolves around the Duke’s passion and his strategic misreading of classic literature. For example, when the Duke struggles to suppress his desire for Charlot, he turns to Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) and reads a maxim “that none but great souls could be completely wicked.” The narrator continues, “He took it as an oracle to himself. He would be loath to tell himself, his soul was not great enough for any attempt. He closed the
43 Ballaster’s note on Myrrha’s tale: “Book ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Myrrha of Cyprus fell in love with Cinyras her father. Her nurse, filled with pity after [Myrrha] attempted to hang herself, procured her father for her without his knowledge of his sexual companion. When her identity was disclosed, he attempted to kill her; she fled, and was turned into a myrtle tree, from which Adonis was born” (275). 92 book, took some turns about the gallery to digest what he had read, and from thence concluded . . . Charlot was necessary to his very being!” (34). Machiavelli’s The Prince explains the wide-ranging capacities of a prince’s power. The Duke, in all his passionate suffering, ironically appropriates the strength of Machiavelli’s imagined princes in order to triumph over the innocent, chaste Charlot. By showing the Duke’s reading of Machiavelli, the narrator sets up this tawdry reader as the powerful victor over his torturous passion;
Intelligence’s subtle mockery of his repeated misappropriations of texts presents him, instead, as an inadequate, even dangerous guardian for poor Charlot. It becomes increasingly obvious that Charlot’s inexperience and the wayward instruction of the Duke render her vulnerable to his control.
Charlot proves her inexperience when the Duke gives in to his Machiavellian will and proceeds to kiss her. The Duke then professes his love for Charlot and begs her to reciprocate (36). Because Charlot is “ignorant of the power of love,” her “soft answer [i]s that she was indeed reciprocally charmed, she kn[ows] not how” (36). Shortly after this first passionate exchange, the Duke is “obliged to return to court,” instructing Charlot to read more amatory tales in his absence. The Duke leaves orders that “she should not be controlled in any thing,” so Charlot spends several nights at a time in his library, where she has access to “books dangerous to the community of mankind,” or, as the Ros Ballaster’s footnote explains, the Duke’s personal collection of pornography (37n). The narrator maintains the reader’s focus on Charlot’s intimate “indefatigable” reading, as this is what eighteenth-century readers would assume is the cause of her demise. As we will see,
93 however, it is not Charlot’s reading that that fails her, but her seclusion, as the Duke’s leaving Charlot behind quickly becomes a habit.
This cause is made clearer when the Duke sets up “a post for [Charlot] at court with
Henriquez’s queen. The young lady was sent for; neither art, money, nor industry was wanting, to make her appearance glorious” (37-8). Charlot’s new position at court, alongside Henriquez’s queen, grants her more agency than in her solitude in the prince’s library. Charlot possesses the most autonomy and influence at court, where the public can witness the results of her education, notably her newfound management of her charms. In this public space, “all are devoted to her service [and] [t]he very glance of her eyes commanded their attention” (38). Of course, it is not only the public’s attention that she manages, but the Duke’s, as well, for in her new placement at court, she becomes “mistress of his heart and fortune” (38). At court, Charlot “learn[s] to manage the Duke and to distrust herself,” so she “no more permit[s] of [his] kisses” (38). She manages the Duke’s desire like an experienced eighteenth-century coquette, cautious in the pleasures she allows him to enjoy and cognizant of her vulnerability. The narrator also describes Charlot as newly perceptive in her return to court: “Charlot by this time had informed her self that there were such terrible things as perfidy and inconstancy in mankind, that even the very favours they received often disgusted, and that to be entirely happy one ought never to think of the faithless sex” (38). However, while Charlot “informs” herself of this truth, she fails to behave accordingly, as she continues to think about the Duke and only “tenderly drop[s] a word” at her desire to marry him (38). Even though the Duke is “submissive, passionate,
[and] eager to obey and to oblige” Charlot’s will at court, she does not seize these
94 opportunities to negotiate desire on equitable terms (38). While “the very glance” of
Charlot’s eyes “commanded [the court’s] attention,” she does not use her mouth, as Onahal in Behn’s Oroonoko, to communicate her desire for the Duke’s commitment (38).
Furthermore, because Charlot is “unwilling to do any thing against the interest of a man whom she so tenderly loved,” she does not pursue marriage further (38-9). In fact, when the Duke explains to Charlot why he postpones their marriage, as the “treaty was still depending [that] he might marry the Princess dowager,” the inexperienced heroine naively puts aside her own interests and appears “very well satisfied with [his] reasons” (38).
Charlot’s management at court is thus short-lived, as her deference to his interests only allows the Duke to selfishly pursue his own ambition to “amass up riches” with the Princess dowager (29). Because the Duke teaches Charlot restraint and not ambition, she is ill- prepared to navigate her desires and see them through to fulfillment at court; Charlot, as
Kraft notes, “exist[s] in a political world of shifting borders and changing realities” (71). In addition, her ironic virtuous education at court is not only confusing to the inexperienced heroine, but impractical in serving her own interests. Charlot’s temporary management of court space suggests that she has the potential to fulfill her desires in the ambitious way of the Duke, but her inexperience causes her to hesitate, deferring to the Duke, her supposed protector, rather than trusting her own perceptive awareness. For example, when the Duke tells Charlot he must leave to go on campaign with the King, she “drown[s] in tears” (39). It is unclear at this moment whether Charlot’s tears are genuine or dissembled in order to elicit a response from the Duke that will get her what she wants. Regardless, Charlot does not outwit the Duke; when she discloses her fear that “all the court would ridicule her
95 melancholy,” the narrator tells us, “this [i]s what he wanted” (39). The Duke takes advantage of Charlot’s expression of weakness and tells her that people will “ridicule” her because “a maid was but an ill figure, that brought her self to be the sport of laughters”
(39). His condescension toward Charlot thus gives him back the upper hand, and he convinces her to go back to his villa, “even to depart that hour” (39). It is only in his private villa that the Duke is capable of manipulating Charlot’s desire for his intended use.
The narrator reimagines the story of Diana and Acteon a second time, and, in this scene, more explicitly. The Duke leaves Charlot at his villa, alone, while he pretends to go on campaign with the King. This leaves Charlot just enough time to bathe and return to the bed “with only one thin petticoat and a loose nightgown, the bosom of her gown and shift open” (39). Like Acteon with Diana, the Duke startles Charlot after her bath, but, unlike
Acteon, the Duke is not punished for invading her private space; instead, the Duke preys on
Charlot’s vulnerability and rapes her:
She was going to rise but he prevented her by flying to her arms
where, as we may call it, he nailed her down to the bed with
kisses. His love and resolution gave him double vigour; he
would not stay a moment to capitulate with her. Whilst yet her
surprise made her doubtful of his designs, he took advantage
of her confusion to accomplish ‘em. Neither her prayers, tears,
nor strugglings could prevent him, but in her arms he made
himself a full amends for all those pains he suffered for her.
Thus was Charlot undone! (39)
96
In this scene, readers are reminded of the first description of the Duke’s villa, as a location adorned with images of conquest and plunder. When Charlot’s prayers, tears, and struggles do not prevent the Duke from raping her, she has no recourse other than to oblige him. The question of Charlot’s responsive desire, her “espous[ing] [of] his crime by sealing his forgiveness” is answered by her happiness at his stay at the villa (40). Charlot’s previous fear of being left behind, while the Duke leaves on campaign with the king, is quelled by his remaining in bed with her “a whole week” (40). She falsely believes she has conquered the heart of the Duke when she sees him temporarily abandoning his service to Henriquez to serve her pleasure, instead. The narrator further hints at Charlot’s delusion, describing the Duke’s supposed submission to her like that of a deity: “He neglected Mars to devote himself wholly to Venus” (40).
When the scene changes, yet again, Charlot’s imagined power in the narrative is undermined by the sudden introduction of a new, more influential character, the Countess.
When the Duke leaves “for the army, Charlot return[s] to court” (40). There, she meets a young Countess, a widow who “knew the management of mankind,” meaning men (40).
Unlike Charlot, the Countess “was bred up in the fashionable way of making love, wherein the heart has little or no part” (40). Lady Intelligence’s description of the Countess is similar to Behn’s in History of the Nun, as she presents the Countess as a woman who has learned from experience not to trust a man’s inconstant passion. The Countess, like Behn’s
Nun narrator, negotiates sexual desire using the male example, which dictates that one must first protect one’s “interest and establishment in the world,” and “love should only be a handle towards it” (40). Both the Countess and the Duke equate love with sexual desire, a
97 passion that they know must be carefully managed, but Charlot is too young and innocent to know this as well as they do. According to Todd, “The answer to . . . the male predator, who stalks through so much female fiction of this century is . . . the recommendation that women achieve more awareness, wit, and self-control” (“Life After” 48). Manley seems to introduce the Countess to the narrative for precisely this purpose—to model for Charlot
“awareness, wit, and self-control” that might give her a fighting chance.
However, when the Countess warns Charlot against trusting with her heart, she responds naively, sure that the Duke “ha[s] not a soul like other men” (41). Charlot’s naivety is not merely a symptom of her youth and inexperience; her response is also the result of the Duke’s failures as both caretaker and educator. While he certainly fails as a constant, trustworthy lover in his private villa, his first failure is as Charlot’s guardian at court. Not only does the Duke attempt to lead Charlot’s mind astray, by redirecting the focus of her education, but he transports her physically, as well. It is clear that Charlot’s greatest potential is at court, where she questions “the danger of [the Duke’s] commerce” and befriends the worldly, wise Countess. However, each time Charlot attempts to negotiate desire on her own terms at court, the Duke, pretending to be her protector, moves her to a more isolated locale. Because Charlot is now privy to the secret of the Duke’s “guilty passion,” he imagines her as a threat to his good standing at court, as his devotion to her might make others question the potential of his duties elsewhere. The Duke ultimately decides that the best way to avoid exposure is to send Charlot farther away from court, to an secluded estate in Angela44, “within a short mile of the capital,” where Charlot will have
44 Angela is Manley’s fictional representation of London, also referred to in New Atalantis as “the capitol” (9). Ros Ballaster’s edition of New Atalantis notes that Angela is a “reference to the story of bishop Gregory’s first 98
“many hours of solitude” (Manley 42). Charlot “consent[s] with joy,” and she fails to realize that this is “her time to push for what [the Duke] possibly might have consented to” because she is “afraid that he should think her love [is] the result of interest” (41). Yet, interest is the very entity that the Countess instructs Charlot to consult first. In Charlot’s failure to negotiate on behalf of her own interest, the Countess’s warning rings true: “when she left the pursuit of [interest] to give up herself to her pleasures, contempt and sorrow were sure to be her companions” (40).
When Charlot arrives at his estate in Angela, she becomes increasingly aware of her own seclusion. Charlot then begins to feel similarly about her desire—it must remain private, suppressed. What initially began as “a pleasing solitude” turns into an “omen,” for the Duke arrives at the country estate only to tell Charlot “to take a journey down to her relations,” away from court, where she should stay “the whole winter” (43). She despairs at the news that she should be even farther away from the Duke, and cries to the Countess, who happens to visit her regularly, “Oh Madam! that I had but believed you!” (43). In what
Bowers calls one of the most “memorably cold” scenes in amatory fiction, the Duke sends for Charlot’s coach and he and the Countess follow Charlot to the gates, until she departs, out of sight (Bowers 178). Afterwards, the Countess’s occupation at court becomes much more convenient to the inconstant Duke, as her experience in furtively managing her desire allows him to court her, as well. The Countess, realizing what the Duke’s title could do “to raise her to a rank and fortune she could not . . . have expected,” marries him, the news of which spreads quickly to Charlot, whose remaining life “was one continued scene of horror,
encounter with slaves from England and his nomination of them as ‘angels,’ from which the name England derives” (270). 99 sorrow and repentance” (45). According to Kirsten Saxton, the “[a]ppropriate behavior for a female character who has lost virginity, love, and reputation, is, of course, self-immolation”
(51), and this is certainly true for Charlot, whose “black and corroding thoughts . . . incessantly devour her” (Manley 45). However, Manley does not present this as the final word in the young heroine’s story.
The dialogue between Intelligence and Astrea that follows Charlot’s story serves to remind readers about the importance of communicating one’s experience. The narrators’ emphasis on the art of “conversation”—“The action of consorting or having dealings with others; living together; commerce, intercourse, society, intimacy45”—prompts readers to look more carefully at instances in the novel proper of self-conscious verbal exchanges. For example, on his abandonment of Charlot, the Duke explains to the Countess, “I had doubtless loved [Charlot] a long time if the vivacity of your wit and conversation had not interfered” (Manley 44). Charlot fails because of her passive, silent consent, while the
Countess succeeds because of her active, intentional sociability. In fact, when the Duke and
Countess discuss marriage, the word “interest” is repeated four times in a matter of a few sentences, which only reaffirms the Countess’s earlier admonition with Charlot. The Duke
“offer[s] to share interests” with the Countess, and he tells her, “Whatever is mine may be yours” (44). Their marriage is thus portrayed as a negotiable contract. Charlot is incapable of managing her desire as an equitable negotiation because she allows the Duke to control the private nature of their affair. It is Charlot’s consent in places where she should have been vocal that stifles her voice, her willing relocation from one space to another, without
45 OED 100 questioning the potential of her position in each space that inevitably leads to her seclusion, and subsequent demise.
After hearing Charlot’s story, Astrea, Manley’s fictional goddess of justice, concludes that she “do[es] not so much condemn the Duke for quitting as corrupting
[Charlot]; one is natural, and but the consequence of the other” (45). By telling Charlot’s story and finally placing the blame on the Duke for Charlot’s failure, Manley’s narrators undermine the Duke’s various attempts to manipulate literature for his own seduction. If we recall, the Duke initially had “banished far from [Charlot’s] conversation whatever would not edify, airy romances, plays, dangerous novels, loose and insinuating poetry, artificial introductions of love” (30). As it turns out, Charlot’s story, which ironically belongs to one of the aforementioned categories, instructs readers to be cautious of men like the Duke in order to avoid her tragic fate. The lesson is not, then, to remain virtuous so as not to be defeated by someone as cruel and manipulative as the Duke. The lesson is to demand a more proper education, to avoid the “modest” education purported to be the “principle, the foundation upon which [women] ought to build for esteem and admiration” because it is so clearly flawed (Manley 45). For Astrea, an education built on modesty is destined to fail because it demands that women be solitary; once modesty is violated, “[women] totter and fall, dashed in pieces upon the obdurate land of contempt, from whence no kind hand can ever be put forth to rescue or to compassionate ‘em” (45). The Duke’s frequent misreading of literature proves he is not a suitable educator or guardian for Charlot, and Manley’s narrators implicitly encourage readers to be suspicious of this gendered quality of education. Astrea’s warning on education concludes Charlot’s story so that readers are not
101 left with the dismal details of Charlot’s isolated misery but with a lesson on avoiding the heroine’s fate. By presenting literature as both seductive, from the Duke’s perspective, and instructive, from her narrators’ perspective, Manley accomplishes two goals: she validates her own occupation as a writer, who hopes to successfully seduce her audience, and she prepares readers for her gender subversion in The Adventures of Rivella, where, as we will see, the amatory heroine moves from object of desire to its subject.
Delia’s Story, or the Brief History of a Woman Confined
Delia’s story in The New Atalantis is the first half of Manley’s fictional autobiography46; the latter half, as Rivella in Adventures of Rivella appeared in print five years later. Delia’s tale helps readers make sense of Rivella’s accomplishments later by demonstrating how the inexperienced woman can transcend her fixity, despite her spatial confinement. Delia eventually develops a distrust for private space, as it turns out to be the location of her suppressed desires. The story of Delia begins when her dying father leaves her in the care of her aunt, who lives “in the country a vast distance from Angela” (224).
Delia recounts the time she spends in this secluded locale, away from the city, with her “old out-of-fashion aunt, full of heroic stiffness of her own times” who “would read books of chivalry and romances with her spectacles” (223). Delia is “infected” by such tales and ultimately concludes that the “books had poisoned and deluded [her] dawning reason”
(224). Like Charlot, Delia does not have any prior experience in love, except what she gleans from her aunt’s reading of literature. When her aunt dies, Delia’s “cousin guardian,”
46 In her introduction to New Atalantis, Ballaster points out that “[t]he narrative of Delia in the second volume of the New Atalantis documents the period from her father’s death to her departure from her marriage” (vi). Delia and Don Marcus are simply pseudonyms for husband and wife, Delarivier and John Manley. 102
Don Marcus, “immediately declare[s] himself [her] lover with such an eagerness that none can guess at who are not acquainted with the violence of his temper” (224). Delia reveals that she “married him only because [she] thought he loved [her],” but Don Marcus turns out to be “so perfect a libertine that he never denied himself the gratifications of any of his passions, every way a debauchee” (224). Delia gestures to the reader with that description, nudging conspiratorially: “You know him,” referring to the popularity of the libertine persona in Restoration England (224). Delia reveals that her husband “brought [her] to
Angela, fixed [her] in a remote quarter of it, forbade [her] to stir out of doors or receive the visits of [her] dearest sister, any other relation, friends or acquaintance” (224). This solitary stagnation contributes to Delia’s undoing, and she wastes little time conveying that moment, saying, “To sum it all in a little, I was married, possessed, and ruined” (224).
However, the real cause of Delia’s ruin is not simply that she marries Don Marcus, but her tragic inexperience, having only lived a life of total seclusion.
Delia, though “uneasy at being kept a prisoner” does not, at first, describe her confinement as her ruin, but rather the sudden discovery of Don Marcus’s bigamy. When
Delia tells Don Marcus that she is pregnant, he “stab[s] [her] with the wounding relation of his [first] wife’s being still alive” (224-5). Delia is more defeated by this news than anything else, suggesting that she could live with a man whom she did not love as long as he claimed to love only her (224). It is not the loss of her virginity to an undeserving lover that Delia bemoans, as many readers might initially expect; it is the loss of reputation resulting from “living in such a clandestine manner” (227). From the elaborate expression
103 of Delia’s “rising grief,” her disappointment eventually demonstrates insight, as she begins to conclude:
Oh, that some pitying god had that moment tore me
from his impious embraces! that I had had but strength,
or courage, to have abandoned the villain! to have left
him to perpetual remorse! to the neverending invasions
of his own conscience! Oh, that I had but them
proclaimed him through all the streets of Angela for the
betrayer of my glory! the destroyer of an ancient,
worthy family which had never (in their women) had a
stain! Then had I probably secured my self from the
reproach of a conscious partner to my own undoing.
Oh, unexperienced youth! (226)
If Delia were not so inexperienced and isolated, she would have been privy to the knowledge of Don Marcus’s other wife and might have been able to avoid bigamy or, at the very least, expose him to responsible for the scandal. When Delia learns of her husband’s bigamy, three pages describe her grief, and Delia’s story ends with a sorrowful lamentation about male vice going unpunished; “Unequal distribution!” Delia cries, after Don Marcus abandons her completely, forcing her “to look abroad in the world” to recover her reputation (227).
Following Delia’s story, the narrator Astrea asks, “How is it possible to hinder the women from believing or the men from deceiving?” Though it seems that Astrea feels both
104 sexes are to blame, Intelligence quickly reminds her that Delia is “innocent of her undoing” because Don Marcus “owe[s]” her “a thousand obligations,” which he fails to provide.
Furthermore, because Delia’s “indelible stain” is “got in an age before she knows the use of reason,” she is “blameless as to honour” (228-9). This sentiment reiterates the importance of awareness and experience in the desirous exchange and is reminiscent of the Countess’s instruction to Charlot—that women must protect their interests. After all, the narrators’ intentions are not to instruct women about the importance of virtue and virginity; instead, by including her own story as Delia, Manley seems to warn women against too easily trusting men who pretend to care about women’s interests because, as these two stories in
New Atalantis prove, it is dangerous to make any assumptions regarding the reliability of male desire. In Adventures of Rivella, Rivella avoids makings these kinds of assumptions and chooses to seek out information on her own.
Lesson Learned: Rivella’s Management of Desire and Space
In Adventures of Rivella, Manley accomplishes several goals. First, she frees herself of the ruined reputation Delia acquires in New Atalantis. Second, she, as Rivella, is able to choose her lovers freely. Third, she inhabits several roles that enable her to move freely to different places in public space. If Charlot and Delia learn from their tragic experiences to equate desire with confinement, then Rivella debunks that lesson by pursuing her desires both publicly and privately. By traversing between public and private space decisively and effortlessly, Rivella eliminates the imagined boundaries of desire in each space. Manley decides, as Rivella, that she will not remain the silenced heroine whose sorrowful story is told too late. The narrator, Sir Charles Lovemore, tells readers that Rivella is “the only
105
Person of her Sex that knows how to Live,” and “in relation to Love . . . she has so particular a Genius . . . and has made such noble Discoveries in that Passion, that it would have been a Fault in her, not to have been Faulty” (AR 120). Rivella’s faulty experiences, which are glimpses into Manley’s own past, ultimately shape Rivella into the worldly-wise heroine whose story no longer needs the guidance of a pedantic narrator. Manley uses her personal history as an opportunity to continue the motif of reading as both instructive and seductive; the purported “dangerous poison47” of an “airy romance” that seemingly corrupts
Charlot in New Atalantis is subverted in Adventures of Rivella, where Sir Lovemore’s narrates Rivella’s story to entertain his companion, Chevalier D’Aumont. The narrator’s goal of seducing D’Aumont with Rivella’s story is also subversive in that Manley uses this narrative expose to disclose the truth of her past, which had hitherto been shrouded in scandal and told by others.
In Rivella, the narrator, and Rivella’s intimate acquaintance, Charles Lovemore, tells Chevalier D’Aumont the story of Rivella’s scandal, adventure, and romance. The opening image of the two men casually walking through the Somerset-House48 garden, engaging in airy conversation about Rivella’s story, presents her amatory tale as harmless entertainment. The story of Rivella begins with the heroine attempting to find work as a writer so that she can recover from her ruined reputation. Lovemore meets Rivella again, after her four-year hiatus as a secluded married woman (i.e., Manley, Delia), in the
47 Throughout New Atalantis, the Duke describes amatory tales as “dangerous novels” or “dangerous poison” that causes “dangerous convulsions of the mind” (30). 48 Somerset-House was “a palace that had for generations been reserved for the use of English queens, and so was associated with Roman Catholicism (Stuart Kings tended to choose Catholic wives) and with potentially subversive female political power” (Toni Bowers Force or Fraud 196). 106 company of King Charles II of England’s mistress, Madam Mazarin49. He observes that
Rivella, still, “was much impair’d; her sprightly Air, in which lay her greatest Charm, was turn’d into a languishing Melancholy” (AR 30). Upon speaking to Rivella about her misfortunes, Lovemore weeps, saying that his “[t]ears were Witnesses of [his] Grief,” and he worries that “[t]he Diversions of the House she was in were dangerous Restoratives: Her
Wit, and Gaity of Temper return’d, but not her Innocence” (31). To Lovemore, Rivella’s temporary residence in Madam Mazarin’s home, a woman whose reputation was also maligned with scandal, is dangerous because it will not allow her to recover her
“innocence.” However, to the reader already familiar with the importance of women’s experiences in public space, Rivella’s position at Madam Mazarin’s home is more likely to add to her social and political agency than detract from it. Lovemore represents the general male reader of eighteenth-century England; he initially admires and respects the woman writer’s wit and charm, her ability to persist despite the obstacle of her scandal in the way, but as he becomes seduced by these qualities, he also believes, like the general public, that she should eventually return her attention to more “innocent” or private affairs. Instead of celebrating the fact that Rivella has freed herself from a destructive marriage, Lovemore scolds her for taking refuge in a public woman’s home instead of his own. Regardless of her companion’s expressions of disappointment, Rivella stands firm; she refuses his many invitations to “retire to [his] Seat in the Country,” saying, “she must first be in Love with a
Man before she thought fit to reside with him,” and, given that “her Love of Solitude was improved by her Disgust of the World . . . she said her Design was to waste most of her
49 Hortense Mancini, Duchesse of Mazarin 107 time in England in Places where she was unknown” (40-1). In these excerpts, Rivella displays an astute understanding of public and private space and what each arena means for her, in particular. She verbally insists on occupying the public arena but intends to do so in places where she can avoid exposure.
Rivella’s insistence on a solitary, leisurely life is not wasted at all; her “design” allows her the time and the freedom to write her first play, the first step in establishing herself as a professional writer. However, Rivella’s professional success means that her privacy will be severely limited. According to Lovemore, writing is “another wrong Step towards ruining Rivella’s Character with the World” (AR 42). Because publication forces
Rivella to inhabit public space, “[h]er Appartment was daily crouded with . . . the Men of
Vogue and Wit” (42). Although Manley allows for Lovemore’s censure throughout, she is sure to keep Rivella in control; he never possesses her nor does he manage to influence her decision-making. Rivella openly tells Lovemore of her exchanges with other men—sexual, political, social, etc.—even when she knows he will disapprove. As Marta Kvande notes,
the narrators treat Rivella’s gender as a marker that disqualifies
her from participation in public discourse . . . When Rivella
does speak for herself within the text, she finds ways to insist
on her specific political identity as a Tory, a gentlewoman, and
an injured woman . . . For her, those kinds of individual and
social markers actually function to empower her public voice
because her work appeals to a different paradigm of public
discourse. (163)
108
The narrator’s disapproval of Rivella’s public life becomes even clearer when he discusses her involvement in a legal battle, a section that comprises nearly half of the text. In these scenes, Manley uses Rivella to expose a very real problem: women who attempt to participate in the patriarchal worlds of law and politics are ridiculed and excluded. This is precisely the case when Rivella’s friend, Calista, approaches her about a legal dispute concerning her friend Cleander, which happens to involve Rivella’s “Kinsman,” her estranged husband, Oswald50. After hearing Calista’s story, Rivella insists upon speaking directly to Cleander, a proposal that makes Calista blush because women do not typically involve themselves directly in such public matters. Rivella seeks out knowledge on her own and does not rely upon the “dissimulation” of others. In order to do this successfully, though, Rivella must locate a partitioned space in the public arena so that she can speak with this “Man of Business in Private” (AR 67).
Cleander sends a gentleman “in a Chariot, with an unknown Livery to bring
[Rivella] to Town, and even to the Serjeant at Arms’s house” (67). While she waits for the crowd to disperse, Rivella hides behind a book, “the Duke de Rochfoucaut’s Moral
Reflections”51 (67). In this scene, the book has multiple purposes. It allows Rivella to partly disguise herself while she waits on Cleander; it provides her with entertainment so that she can pass the time, and her reading of it positions her as a knowledgeable, worldly educated woman, someone whose conversation is worthwhile, someone like New Atalantis’s
Countess. Cleander, taking the book from her hand, perceives her as such and, at supper
50 Oswald is another pseudonym, like Don Marcus, for Manley’s own estranged husband, John Manley. 51 Original is published in French in 1693. One of the most popular maxims in La Rochefoucauld’s “Moral Reflections” is on self-love, which likely suited Manley’s purpose given that Rivella is a story about herself. 109 that evening, the two formed a “[f]riendship which endured for several years even to
Cleander’s death” (68). Their newfound friendship aside, Cleander enlists Rivella’s help in his legal battle. In the scenes that describe Cleander’s legal battle, Rivella shifts into and occupies several roles. She is Cleander’s confidante and love-interest; she is a mediator between the men involved, Lord Crafty, Tim Double, and Baron Meanwell. Her home becomes a site for these legal exchanges, which further subverts readers’ ideas about private spaces as wholly domestic. As Kathryn Temple points out in her essay, “Manley’s
‘Feigned Scene’: The Fictions of Law at Westminster Hall,” “Manley reveals herself basking in the role of legal insider, a member of a powerful elite rather than an outsider figure” (593-4). Not only does Manley allow Rivella to traverse public and private space effortlessly, but she eliminates the boundaries of those spaces, as well. Rivella’s negotiations at home are just as meaningful as those in town.
As a part of her deal with Cleander, Rivella attempts to meet with Oswald, in hopes that she can convince him to help Cleander on her behalf. She leaves “[e]arly in the morning . . . to Westminster-Hall” and “took up her post at the Booksellers-Shop, by the foot of those stairs which go up to the Parliament-house” (AR 69). Despite finding Rivella in this more secluded and book-based locale, Oswald “blush’d more and more” and could not “imagin[e] what business she had there, unless to expose him” (69). Rivella possesses knowledge of Oswald’s bigamy, his abandonment of her and their children, which threatens his reputation in this very public setting. For Oswald, Rivella’s appearance at Westminster
Hall, a survivor of his neglect and lies, seems both frightening and appealing. After Rivella negotiates her business, Oswald is relieved; he
110
seem’d very well pleas’d that nothing but interest had engag’d
her: He bid her be sure to cultivate a friendship with Cleander,
who would doubtless come to return his thanks for the service
she had done him; recommending to her at the same time, First,
not to receive the money which had been promised her,
because there were better views . . . and Secondly, to leave her
house in the country for some time, to come and take lodgings
in London, where he would wait upon her to direct her in the
management of some great affair. (70)
Oswald treats Rivella like a business woman, not like the wife he left behind several years earlier. Rivella’s keen management of her public persona, which she derives from experience, leads not only Oswald to change his opinion of her, but other men who do business in public, as well. Rivella’s positioning of herself at the book stall not only depicts her as intelligent, but it also reveals the literary scene as one of influence in society. In New
Atalantis, Manley presents reading as furtive and private libraries as sites of “danger” whereas in Rivella, the bookstore is a public space where the well-read amatory heroine can negotiate her interest with her estranged husband.
Even when Rivella faces the threat of exposure, she manages to reclaim control over her own fate by consistently expressing ownership of her desires. For example, Lovemore not only exposes Rivella as the author of The New Atalantis, but he subsequently shares
Rivella’s response at being accused of and imprisoned for libel, giving her a voice in her own scandal. In the scenes that describe Rivella on trial, she is front and center: “But after
111 several times exposing her in person to walk across the court before the bench of judges . . . the Attorny General . . . dropt the prosecution” (115). Rivella’s mere physical presence at court, her seemingly unashamed strut before the judges presents the heroine taking ownership of the charges, whereas another woman, like a Charlot, might be inclined to accept the accusation of guilt. Moreover, by allowing Lovemore to speak so openly about her trial, Rivella undermines the scandal of it all; writing New Atalantis is not a secret she will be made to be ashamed of. More importantly, while Lovemore narrates Rivella’s trial, he does so from afar. Rivella is not actually present when he tells the story to D’Aumont, and when Lovemore discusses Rivella’s current whereabouts, he often locates her enjoying her private life somewhere out of town, unbothered by her public scandal.
Lovemore shares scattered insets of Rivella’s life that reveal both her successes and failures; without a unified plot, Manley is capable, with Lovemore’s narration, of proving to her audience that she persists. When she is not attending to business in the public arena, where she is “always inclin’d to assist the Wretched,” Rivella enjoys her “pretty
Retirement, some few miles out of town, where she divert[s] her self chiefly with walking and reading” (64). In this more private locale, Rivella is able to negotiate her desire for
Cleander, who, upon the death of his wife, proposes a marriage which Rivella refuses.
Instead, she negotiates on behalf of Calista, who is revealed to have been Cleander’s lover at one time. In addition, Rivella is able to manage men’s desire for her from afar, by securing a reputation as “delicate, sensible, and agreeable” (117). No matter where
Lovemore locates the heroine, in public or private, she is lively, mobile, and autonomous.
112
Rivella’s past life experiences seem to have afforded her to luxury of operating as master of her own desires.
Rivella’s ending ultimately proves satisfactory for all. Chevalier D’Aumont feels as if he’s possessed Rivella simply by hearing Lovemore’s description of what a night in her arms might be like, but in the end, Rivella remains free and untouched. Desired, not discarded. In Lovemore’s telling, Rivella would conduct D’Aumont after the imaginary love scene, like a cold shower, “towards the cool of the Evening, either upon the Water, or to the Park for Air, with a Conversation always new, and which never cloys” (120). It is no coincidence that Manley chooses to end Rivella with a conversation by the water or out in the open air. Both elements represent the capacity for infinitude, continual movement, and fluidity, just as Rivella has managed in her life. Thus, the text does not end with abandonment, as do many of the stories that make up The New Atalantis. Instead, the internal audience, D’Aumont expresses his impatience to hear more from Rivella in person.
Lovemore concludes with praise of her “Genius” and a pardon of her “Fault[s]” (120).
Rivella is a subject of her own desire, capable of expressing and fulfilling her own interests, which grants her political agency in the public world. Manley’s descriptions of
Rivella’s public adventures (e.g., in Madam Mazarin’s home and at Westminster Hall) are meant to be politicized sexually. As Temple notes, “In terms of sex, Manley offers an equal opportunity tale: she sexualizes herself just as she also sexualizes the law, creating of it an object of desire. In her world, there are no grand narratives; even institutions can be reduced to human relations and thus assumed to have human motivations and human agency” (591). By participating as a woman in matters of litigation and business, Rivella
113 exposes the sexual politics therein, as illustrated in the courtroom scene, when she is asked to walk back and forth before the male judges before they decide her fate. The men’s insistence on positioning her this way at court, at least one last time before declaring her innocent, is proof that politics are a gendered enterprise. Nonetheless, Rivella succeeds because she is aware of gendered sexual politics and has enough experience to conduct herself accordingly. Although Rivella chooses to spend much of her time alone, when she does make a public appearance, she is sure to act intentionally. Rivella insists on turning herself in for being the author of The New Atalantis, despite Lovemore’s “angry Threat”
(AR 112). When Lovemore tries to shame her “of her Writings,” she says she “will delight and entertain her readers” with an arguably more public mode—“a Tragedy for the Stage,” instead (117). Manley recreates the amatory heroine into one that persists despite her repeated failures. While Manley’s primary motive in Rivella may be to salvage her reputation, it can also be assumed that she hoped to redefine the eighteenth-century English woman: autonomous, successful, intelligent, desirable, and desiring.
In the five years that passed between the publication of The New Atalantis and The
Adventures of Rivella, Manley seems to have learned how powerful her position is as an eighteenth-century woman writer. She acknowledges her motivations for writing The New
Atalantis, and she recovers from the scandal that ensued because of its publication. Her unfortunate bigamist marriage to John Manley left her not only isolated but ruined, at least by society’s standards, but she does not allow the publicity of her private life to marginalize her voice. She reclaims the private space as her own; it becomes a space in which she is master of her own narrative. Manley manages the unpredictability of public opinion in
114 writing; she moves stories of scandal from the unstable public arena to boundaries she can control with her own pen. For Manley, an autonomous private space is created through language52; not only does she reclaim her life in society by writing about it in amatory fiction, but she offers her heroines the potential for autonomy by way of literature. The stories that make up The New Atalantis, though shrouded in fanciful names, have undeniable resonance, not just for early readers but today’s readers, well. The narrators’ messages regarding the importance of awareness, education, and independence are certainly ones that transcend time and space. The following chapter reveals how Eliza Haywood, writing after Manley, picks up on these lessons and applies them directly to her characters, eliminating the need for a didactic narrator altogether.
52 Even though Nancy Armstrong likely leaves out Manley’s work from Desire and Domestic Fiction because of their different renditions of private space (i.e., for Manley, private desire simply means not public, whereas for Armstrong, private desire is always in the domestic sphere), Armstrong’s thesis about desire—that women’s language/writing has the power to shape modern, public culture—has resonance in Manley’s amatory fiction. 115
Chapter 4
The Philosophy of the Coquette; or, Fantomina’s “Innocent Curiosity”
Like the English women writers who precede her, Eliza Haywood’s work as a professional writer in the public sphere earned her both fame and censure in the early eighteenth century. After launching her career in 1719 with the publication of Love in
Excess, Haywood earned both fame “as the new decade’s unrivaled monarch of seduction fiction” (Bowers 223) and censure as a “shameless scribbler of semipornographic romances” (Hultquist “Marriage” 31). Haywood enjoyed a long career as a writer, working as a playwright, journalist, translator, and the editor of The Female Spectator from 1744-
46.53 Haywood’s publications in amatory fiction are, themselves, wide-ranging, with amatory tales, like Love in Excess, that center on male desire and seduction in the way of
Manley’s New Atalantis, and coquette narratives like History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
(1751), where the central heroine is subject of her own desire, refusing marriage until she has time and space to decide on a husband herself.54 Some critics, most recently Lynn M.
Wright and Donald J. Newman in Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and the Female
Spectator (2006), explain Haywood’s oeuvre of amatory fiction as “bifurcated by moral reformation,” suggesting that Haywood’s late coquette narratives, particularly Betsy
Thoughtless, read more like novels of the reformed, domestic heroine because they end in marriage55(31). Aleksondra Hultquist debunks this critical theory in 2011 by rereading
53 Biographical information from Kirsten T. Saxton’s introduction to The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood (2000) 54 Brief description of these two texts 55 Clara Reeves 1785 cites “reform; see other critics in Hultquist’s essay- Marta Kvande “The Outside Narrator in Eliza Haywood’s Political Novels” 116
Betsy Thoughtless through the lens of amatory fiction in order to highlight the coquette’s continued resistance to the popular idea of “marriage-as-reward56” (“Marriage” 32). I agree with Hultquist that “a drastic reformation in style and theme did not really occur” in
Haywood’s amatory fiction, and, further, I put forth Haywood’s Fantomina; or Love in a
Maze (1725) as the text to which readers and critics should refer when they attempt to locate a common thread that runs through all of Haywood’s amatory fiction. Stated simply, for Haywood, a woman’s desire for public experience supersedes her fear of public censure.
This chapter presents Fantomina as the most poignant, thorough example of amatory fiction in the genre’s history because, as we will see, its protagonist, Fantomina, encapsulates the most authentic qualities of amatory heroines before her. Not only does
Fantomina openly declare her dissatisfaction with society’s normative gender roles, but she perseveres in spite of the public’s unfair treatment of female desire. Furthermore,
Fantomina even identifies a method of survival: she prioritizes her philosophical desire for knowledge and subsequently accumulates information as a coquette in order to embody her other desires in public space, including sexual pleasure and agency, mobility, and privacy.
In this, I acknowledge, with Leonore Davidoff, that the public sphere, or what I also refer to in this chapter as the public, has “multiple and shifting gender connotations” and needs to be recognized “within particular contexts and particular times” (22). In this chapter, I use
“public sphere” as Haywood seems to have understood it: “the talking world,” that is, the social context of London that has the power to “triumph over [her]” (Haywood 11). The narrator presents Fantomina as “a Stranger to the World,” with “no other Aim, than the
56 Hultquist argues that marriage in Betsy Thoughtless is not depicted as a reward for Betsy’s virtue but rather as a suitable, equitable option for her life by the novel’s end. 117 gratification of an innocent Curiosity” to know why men “should have Tastes so very
Depraved” (1-2). However, Fantomina must remain “undiscover’d” in this endeavor so that the public is denied the “Power to touch her Character” (4, 9).
If Fantomina intends, as she claims, to manage her “excited Curiosity” without the threat of “publick Ridicule” at her heels, then she must accept that the public sphere is, itself, inherently inconstant and learn to adapt accordingly (1, 7). To accomplish this, the amatory heroine makes use of her role as a coquette, whose vain attention to physical appearance allows her to seamlessly inhabit disguise after disguise, from inexperienced prostitute to wizened aristocrat, each role more private than the one before, and whose mobility allows her to move freely from one space to the next, from the theatre in London to beds in Bath, from carriages to childbed to convent. I locate moments in the narrative when the heroine expresses pleasure at both her discovery of new information and her ability to deceive the public to show this dual pleasure in intellectual pursuit and deception identifies her as the philosopher-coquette. To demonstrate Fantomina’s desire of knowledge as necessary to her coquettish livelihood, I use Aleksondra Hultquist’s recent study on philosophical discourse in Haywood’s fiction, supplemented by Luce Irigaray’s theory on philosophical love. I also refer to Theresa Braunschneider’s study of the eighteenth-century coquette in order to explain Fantomina’s astute management of her masquerade.
Fantomina desires, first, to learn more about the world in which she lives (which is to say London society) and, second, to be able to do so undiscovered. To accomplish her first goal, Fantomina decides to seduce Beauplaisir, whom she “had often seen . . . in the
Drawing-Room” at the theatre (2). Even though Fantomina has spoken to Beauplaisir
118 before, as her own person, she notices that “her Quality and reputed Virtue kept him from using her” as freely as he would use a mistress (2). In order to accomplish her second goal, then, Fantomina returns to the theatre disguised as a prostitute, and she finds Beauplaisir immediately at her disposal. However, eventually, Fantomina’s “rifled Charms . . . lost their
Poinancy” with Beauplaisir, and she discovers him to be inconstant (12). At this finding,
Fantomina attempts to manage Beauplaisir’s inconstancy by taking on a succession of new disguised personas. She secures several amorous encounters with Beauplaisir, presenting herself as a new lover each time. Beauplaisir fails to recognize Fantomina as a prostitute, a country chambermaid, a widow, and a wealthy aristocrat.
While confronted with the bleak discovery of Beauplaisir’s rampant inconstancy,
Fantomina continues the masquerade, comforted only by the foresight of her earlier observation in the theatre—that men have “tastes so very depraved” and women do not
“consider anything very deeply” (1). Despite this prediction, Fantomina discovers a consequence of her and Beauplaisir’s sexual escapades that she fails to predict; she is pregnant. She manages to hide her pregnancy from the public until her mother returns to
London, and Fantomina goes into labor shortly after her mother’s arrival. Up to that point,
Fantomina manages to keep all interaction with Beauplaisir secret; however, her mother demands to know the father’s name, and Fantomina finally reveals it. Beauplaisir arrives but does not recognize Fantomina, as she is no longer wearing one of the many disguises she used to sleep with him. As such, he denies he is the father until Fantomina is forced to divulge the truth, a truth that leaves both her mother and Beauplaisir in speechless reverie.
Ultimately, Fantomina’s mother turns Beauplaisir away, even when he offers to care for the
119 child, and the mother sends Fantomina to a monastery in France. This summary affirms what is, by now, a familiar truth in amatory fiction: a woman’s desire in the public sphere makes her vulnerable to the dangers of inconstancy, exposure, and confinement, regardless of the role she inhabits.
Aleksondra Hultquist has explored Haywood’s participation “in the public debate about passions in the eighteenth century” through her fiction, which demonstrates an
“interest in the private understanding of feeling” (“Eliza” 89; 88). I find that Fantomina’s longing for knowledge illustrates the “authentic personal emotional experience” that
Hultquist locates in Haywood’s fictional treatises on love57 (Hultquist “Eliza” 88).
Moreover, the form of amatory fiction catalyzes Fantomina’s desire for knowledge because the pleasure of experience is not limited to the mind; instead, Haywood “gives precedence to feeling and the body” so that Fantomina’s “passionate experience” is heightened (“Eliza”
88-9). In order to illustrate this amplified experience of desire, Hultquist finds that
Haywood “articulates the personal experiences of her protagonists in the first person” and
“uses a third-person narrative voice to comment on the story’s emotions and outcomes”
(“Eliza” 89). I interpret this model as a representation of Fantomina’s twofold desire; the first-person account of her experiences provides readers with evidence of the heroine’s pleasurable discoveries, while the third-person narrative voice represents the public’s view of her coquettish escapades. This narrative model also makes it possible for readers to more easily identify the collective purpose of Haywood’s amatory fiction, that works like
Fantomina were not written “just to raise the passions, but to demonstrate that passions
57 Hultquist’s “Eliza Haywood’s Progress Through the Passions” focuses specifically on Haywood’s Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726) and Life’s Progress Through the Passions (1748). 120 cannot be subdued or cured as effectively as their indulgence and acceptance can teach a person about the self” (Hultquist “Eliza” 90). Amatory fiction also has its own vocabulary for Fantomina’s philosophical engagement; the heroine disguises her desire for knowledge as “innocent curiosity” and her pursuit of desire as a “frolick,58” playful terms that lend themselves to narratives of both coquetry and seduction. However, beneath this lighthearted language is Fantomina’s increasingly palpable desire for knowledge, for “the longer she reflected on it, the greater was her Wonder” (Haywood 1). If Fantomina inhibits her philosophical yearning, then she subdues her desire before it even has a chance of manifesting.
Furthermore, Fantomina’s amatory pursuit of knowledge is amplified by her occupation of several bodies, using various disguises. As an innocent prostitute, Fantomina learns that sex is the best way to both incentivize and hinder Beauplaisir’s desire, so when he departs for Bath, intending to leave Fantomina behind in London, Fantomina reacquaints herself with Beauplaisir as the inn’s country chambermaid, Celia, who delights in knowing what to expect from her lover, readily submitting to his renewed passion. With the expectation of Beauplaisir’s inevitable inconstancy, Celia prepares measures, using her
“inventing Brain,” to meet him when his chariot departs again for London, as someone new, the sorrowful widow, Mrs. Bloomer (16). By now, Fantomina’s skill at feigning works so well that Beauplaisir authorizes Mrs. Bloomer to “command any Thing in his Power,” and so he makes room for her in his carriage and takes her back to London with him (17-
18). When the masquerading heroine receives letters from the inconstant Beauplaisir,
58 Fun, merriment, sportive mirth (OED). 121 addressed both to Fantomina, the prostitute, and Mrs. Bloomer, the widow, she,
“indefatigable in the Pursuit of whatsoever he Humour was bent upon,” contrives a fourth disguise—the wealthy, private aristocrat, Incognita (27). The narrator introduces personas that become increasingly more private, from the inexperienced prostitute Fantomina, who, in the vulnerability of losing her virginity, reveals the secret of her innocence to
Beauplaisir, to the masked Incognita, who denies Beauplaisir the pleasure of even looking at her face. The biggest obstacle Fantomina faces in these various pursuits is in the discrepancy between her roles as private autodidact and public coquette, the latter of which renders her vulnerable to exposure.
Nonetheless, the coquette is the role fitting for Fantomina’s task. While Fantomina possesses an undeniable inclination for coquetry, given her natural vanity, it is the coquette’s levity that Fantomina subverts for her philosophical pleasure. I use
Braunschneider’s definitions of both vanity and levity to establish Fantomina as the philosopher-coquette. Braunschneider points out that “the coquette’s fundamental ‘vanity’ evokes, through its etymological evocation of the Latin vanitas, the idea of emptiness or hollowness, a surface without any interior,” and, similarly, a coquette’s levity is described as airiness, or “lacking [of] weight” or substance (91). If the coquette is identified as empty and airy, then so, too, are her desires, yet these characteristics obviously contrast those of the philosopher, whose primary aim is the study of reality, knowledge, and existence. As such, Fantomina’s management of these qualities as the philosopher-coquette is intentional and multidimensional: First, the management of her vanity renders Beauplaisir “transported to find so much Beauty and Wit in a Woman” (3). Second, her levity, or “the Hurry of her
122
Spirits” solicits her quick responses to Beauplaisir’s own inconstancy (4). Third, it is precisely because the public will perceive her coquettish behavior as vain and airy that her philosophical desire for experience goes undiscovered for so long. Another layer of the criticism regarding the coquette’s vanity and levity is that she uses both qualities as excuses to prolong, or even prevent, the choosing of a spouse,59 yet, after Fantomina’s first affair with Beauplaisir, she declares that she desires only his love, sincerity, and constancy (9).
Despite Beauplaisir’s failure to fulfill these terms, Fantomina continues to choose him and applies the coquette’s tendency to “want things, weigh options, [and] make decisions” as a method of adding dimension to her masquerade, instead (Braunschneider 12).
Fantomina’s initial choosing of Beauplaisir reads like a philosophical undertaking.
The heroine’s decision to seduce Beauplaisir because she “discover’d something in him” seems to illustrate Luce Irigaray’s notion that love is a mediator that “leads to knowledge— both practical and metaphysical” (Haywood 2; Irigaray 33). In “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech,” Irigaray suggests that “[i]f we did not, at each moment, have something to learn in the encounter with reality, between reality and already established knowledge, we would not perfect ourselves in wisdom” (33). Fantomina’s masquerading pursuit of Beauplaisir, despite the continual revelation of his inconstancy, seems illustrative of Irigaray’s suggestion. This is made clear when Fantomina expresses more delight following a moment of epiphany—“hugging herself with Joy” at her
“Reflections”—than she does following a moment of “ruinous Extasy” (4, 8). Even though, at times, Fantomina’s encounters with Beauplaisir cause her distress, she translates her
59 According to Braunschneider, “the noun ‘choice’ in eighteenth-century English widely functioned to name a woman’s elected spouse,” (97). 123 sorrow into pleasure by identifying it as added experience, as foresight that will prevent her from further ruin, so when Fantomina discovers herself (and her virginity) vulnerable and allows Beauplaisir to “gain a Victory” over her, she begins to “exult with the Imagination that she had more Prudence than all her Sex beside” and resolves to keep her “Intreague” a secret (7, 11).
Each of Fantomina’s disguises adds dimension and value to her philosopher- coquette character, given that she acquires new knowledge with each persona she inhabits.
Fantomina’s masquerade allows her to explore her position in society from various vantage points; for example, before she, the feigning prostitute, reveals to Beauplaisir that she is a virgin, he actually believes her to be a prostitute “of superior rank,” one who “would be much more expensive than at first he had expected,” so much so that when she cries at the loss of her virginity and admits she “assumed this Manner of Behaviour only to engage him,” he still attempts to pay her (6). Fantomina’s expert design gives her the option to accept Beauplaisir’s payment or negotiate for a desire more suited to her philosophical interests, like testing his constancy. The multidimensionality of her character presents her with these options, the mere availability of which subverts the typical ruined-virgin scene that recurs in amatory fiction. While Fantomina laments the loss of her virginity, she does not despair; instead, she discovers another way to negotiate as a subject, by securing another desire of hers—that of protecting her identity. Because the public assesses a woman’s value based upon her virtue, Fantomina decides that her “Disgrace” will be her secret and therefore assigns value to the “management of [her] Intreague,” instead. (11-2).
As such, she does not negotiate a contract of desire with Beauplaisir, but with herself: “I
124 shall hear no Whispers as I pass . . . The odious Word Forsaken will never wound my Ears; nor will my Wrongs excite either the Mirth or Pity of the talking World” (11). If “forsaken” means “deserted, left solitary or desolate,” then Fantomina must retain the coquette’s mobility in order to lessen the chances of her exposure.
As ever, the threat of abandonment is readily apparent; when Beauplaisir grows tired of “his little Mistress” Fantomina, he departs for Bath and “pretend[s] her going would be inconvenient,” but Fantomina manages to “endur[e] . . . the Discovery,” as she “had already laid a Scheme” for following him there (13).When she arrives, Fantomina “ma[kes] it her Business to find out immediately where he was” and secures a position as chambermaid at the house where he lodges (14). In this “second Expedition,” Fantomina disguises herself as Celia, who not only dresses the part of the country maiden, but also speaks “with a broad Country Dialect, a rude unpolish’d Air, which she, having been bred in these parts knew very well how to imitate” (16, 14). This description of Celia calls to mind a comparison Fantomina makes earlier in the theatre about the ladies seeming unsurprised by the men’s accosting of their attention because they are more “accustomed to such Sights, than she who had been bred for the most part in the country” (1). As such,
Fantomina’s “Designs” as Celia defy the country-lass stereotype in fiction, a figure whose non-urbanity exemplifies her as ignorant and innocent. While she pretends to be the unsuspecting object of Beauplaisir’s desire, she actually enjoys the privilege of knowing what comes next. When Beauplaisir first encounters Celia at Bath, he “giv[es] her two or three hearty Kisses, yet she, who now understood that Language but too well, easily saw they were Prelude to more substantial Joys” (15). This marks a change in the heroine’s
125 behavior from her first encounter with Beauplaisir, where Fantomina is so surprised by
Beauplaisir’s “Amorous Violence” that she ends up in tears. This time, as Celia, she is prepared, and when Beauplaisir gives her “a handsome Sum of Gold,” she humbly accepts it with a “Curtesy, and a well counterfeited Shew of Surprise and Joy,” crying, “O Law, Sir!
What must I do for all this?” (16). She enjoys the spoils of her learned behavior for a nearly a month, until she, again, notices the diminishing fervency of his desire.
In the meantime, Celia remains “privately in the town” until she manages to intercept Beauplaisir leaving Bath. Because she “kn[ows] that Beauplaisir came alone in his
Chariot to the Bath” and “hear[s] nothing of any Body that was to accompany him to
London,” the coquette “hir[es] Horses and a Man to attend her to an Inn,” where she waits for his carriage to pass so that she can approach him, in her new disguise, as that of “the sorrowful Widow” Mrs. Bloomer (17). As the risk of Fantomina’s exposure increases, so does the privacy of her personas. The discovery of Beauplaisir’s inconstant behavior gives
Fantomina more reason to withhold information from him, as there will be less of her that he can then possess and discard, therefore the grieving widow is an opportune role for
Fantomina, who now needs another reason to conceal her identity. Given that a wife is the property of her husband in the eighteenth-century, any inquiry regarding the identity of
Mrs. Bloomer would undoubtedly include her husband, as well, so it would have been impolite for Beauplaisir to pry into the widow’s personal business at this moment in her grief. By this point, Fantomina “knew so exactly how to form her Behaviour to the
Character she represented,” that Beauplaisir, though briefly thinking Mrs. Bloomer’s face familiar, “suppos’d his Mind had been deluded” (22). Because Beauplaisir’s seduction of
126 the widow requires more effort and time, his passion for Mrs. Bloomer persists longer than with Fantomina and Celia.
However, despite “perceiv[ing] a prodigious Difference” in Beauplaisir’s seeming preference of the widow, the philosopher-coquette continues to test his constancy by writing to him as Fantomina and scolding his cruelty. When she receives two letters in return, one with Beauplaisir’s false exclamations of continued devotion to Fantomina and one describing his impatient longing for Mrs. Bloomer, the heroine responds:
Traytor! . . . ‘tis thus our silly, fond, believing Sex are serv’d
when they put Faith in Man: So had I been deceiv’d and
cheated, had I like the rest believ’d and sat down mourning in
Absence . . . How do some Women . . . make their life a Hell,
burning in fruitless Expectations, and dreaming out their Days
in Hopes and Fears, then wake at last to all the Horror of
Despair?—But I have outwitted even the most Subtle of the
deceiving King, and while he thinks to fool me, is himself the
only beguiled Person. (24)
Unlike other scenes of suffering in amatory fiction, like Charlot’s gradual confinement in
Manley’s New Atalantis, Fantomina is quick to associate her misfortune with the pleasure of her foresight. With the experience that her amorous masquerade has afforded her,
Fantomina is able to both acknowledge the coldness of Beauplaisir’s falsity and express
“herself most certainly, extremely happy” for avoiding a more miserable fate in one breath.
If amatory fiction often reveals that a woman’s “[d]isengagement from worldly experience
127 worsens [her] tendency to receive deep impressions,” then Haywood attributes Fantomina’s ability to cope with feelings of despair to the heroine’s coquettish masquerade (Lubey 313).
Despite her ability to endure her passions, Fantomina’s discovery of Beauplaisir’s duplicity puts her into a prolonged state of reflection, from which manifests her ironic critique of coquetry.
Before Fantomina moves on to her next disguise, she contemplates what could have been a potential future with Beauplaisir. However, the heroine’s “Knowledge of his
Inconstancy and Levity of Nature kept her from having that real Tenderness for him she would else have had” (24). In this, Haywood blatantly redirects the public’s criticism of the coquette’s levity towards men who behave the same way by suggesting she might have loved him, her “real Tenderness” even hinting that she might have chosen him for a spouse, but his inconstancy and levity prevent her (24, emphasis my own). The added layer of irony is that it is her own keen management of coquetry that allows Fantomina to reflect “on the
Unaccountableness of Men’s Fancies” (25). As such, she is better “prepar’d” when
Beauplaisir tires of Mrs. Bloomer and already “had another Project in embrio, which she soon ripen’d into Action” (25). It is worth noting here that the narrator uses amatory philosophical discourse to liken metaphysical development to the more physical planting of a seed, foreshadowing of events to come. Meanwhile, Fantomina’s new plan comes to fruition thanks to the coquette’s understanding of “space as instrumental—not just where one happens to be but a resource one can make use of” (Braunschneider 74). Fantomina’s mobility is necessary to her success as a philosopher-coquette, not only for the purposes of acquiring experience but also for further masking her whereabouts to avoid exposure.
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Fantomina’s final disguise is indeed her most private. To inhabit the role of
Incognita, the experienced amatory heroine “proceed[s] in a Manner, if possible, more extraordinary than all her former Behaviour,” and, rather than deploy her coquette vanity to invite men’s attention, she “[m]uffl[es] herself up in her Hood . . . [and] went into the Park about the Hour when there are a great many necessitous gentleman” in order to furtively scope out only those who might aid in her autodidactic enterprise, instead (26). Incognita selects two men for their “Physiognomy”—her choosing of them based on their outward appearance, again inverts the coquette’s vanity—and tells them that her “Business is only an innocent Frolick (26-7). As it turns out, the heroine employs these men because they fit neatly as Incognita’s court servants, in her role as wealthy aristocrat. Incognita also secures new lodging in London solely to entertain Beauplaisir as Incognita; “she went in search of a house for the compleating of her project.—She pitched on one very large, and magnificently furnished,” (27). Incognita’s choosing of the lavish, albeit temporary home and hiring of fake squires illustrates the coquette’s urge to “consolidate a spatialized vision of [her] modern world” (Braunschneider 71). She intends to inhabit a site that is advantageous to the kind of sexual exchange she desires, one where she can be sought after, yet still secretive, much like the private aristocrat Incognita purports to be. The courtly nature of the home, then, is representative of Fantomina’s desires as Incognita; the home is gilded in more ways than one, much like the philosopher-coquette. Not only is this temporary lodging quickly assembled by Incognita’s keen management—even “tak[ing] care to blind the Windows in such a manner, that not the least Chink was left to let in the
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Day”—but her secret is buried in the expansive lavishness of this artificial domestic space
(34).
This is not the first time Fantomina invites Beauplaisir to her (temporary) home for the purpose of their mutual pleasure. The first seduction occurs in the lodging she secures as Fantomina, the pretending prostitute, but she fails to negotiate the terms of their relationship prior to her ruin. This time, however, Incognita discloses the conditions of her pleasure in a letter to Beauplaisir, before he even knows where to find her. She asks that
Beauplaisir “endeavor not to dive into the Meaning of this Mystery,” meaning her “Name” and “Sight of [her] Face,” to which Beauplaisir replies that she “need not doubt [his] glad
Compliance” (29-30). Given everything she now knows about Beauplaisir, Incognita is sure to be skeptical of his eager obedience. When Beauplaisir arrives at this new home, in hopes of seducing the woman he has only hitherto conversed with in writing, Incognita presents herself wearing a vizard, “as if she were that night at a ball at court” (32). Her donning a mask is more secretive than the Widow Bloomer’s inability to “keep her Handkerchief from her Face” (19). Although, as the wealthy aristocrat, Incognita is more entitled to privacy than her previous personas, Beauplaisir seems threatened by her subjectivity and contends he will only acquiesce to her wishes to remain anonymous if he can be “permitted to tarry with her the whole Night” (33). In this, he expects that Incognita will remove her vizard at night, thus “satisfy[ing] his Curiosity with the Sight of her Face, but “she was not without a
Thought . . . and had it immediately in her Head how to disappoint him” (32-3). Incognita allows Beauplaisir to enjoy her bed but only after sending him into her room first so that she can enter later, in the dark. Then, in the morning, she flees from her chamber and has
130 her hired servants entertain Beauplaisir while she hides in another room. Beauplaisir is “so much out of humour . . . at the disappointment of his curiosity, that he resolv’d never to make a second visit” (34). The irony of his disappointment is that he has never known the actual identity of the supposedly different women he sleeps with, so for him to suddenly be out of sorts because Incognita denies him that pleasure is not only amusing, but also telling of the philosopher-coquette’s mastery; she has only subjected Beauplaisir to a small fraction of the same coldness with which he treats women, and he still cannot bear it.
Beauplaisir’s abrupt departure and the flippancy with which Incognita entertains it reveal her to be at the height of her philosophic potential.
Given Incognita’s heightened state of awareness, it is not surprising that
Fantomina’s learned, insightful conclusions come to fruition in this disguise, for it is also in this final amatory scene that the narrator presents Incognita negotiating her desire on her terms, telling Beauplaisir that “she would rather part with him for ever than consent to gratify an Inquisitiveness, which, in her Opinion, had no business with his Love” (33). She uses her very first lesson—embodying the role of prostitute to gratify her “innocent curiosity” only to find him more inconstant than she imagined—as punishment for
Beauplaisir’s deception. In this context, she explicitly brings together physical and philosophical pleasure, in implying that his “inquisitiveness,” like her “innocent curiosity,” is intrinsically tied to bodily experience. However, if we follow the trajectory of the couple’s amatory experiences, we find a major discrepancy between the metaphysical effect of Fantomina’s pleasure and that of Beauplaisir. Because the philosopher-coquette desires an understanding of sexual pleasure and not merely its physical satisfaction, Fantomina’s
131 knowledge (and her capacity for knowledge) increases as she continues along in her amatory masquerade. I will not go as far as to say that the opposite is true for Beauplaisir, but his potential for rewarding philosophic pleasure seems severely limited, given his monotonous pattern of sweet talk, sex, and abandonment. Meanwhile, Fantomina continues to delight in the lesson of Beauplaisir’s inconstancy, for
[S]he could not forbear laughing heartily to think of the Tricks
she had play’d him, and applauding her own Strength of
Genius, and Force of Resolution, which by such unthought-of
Ways could triumph over her Lover’s Inconstancy, and render
that very Temper, which to other Women is the greatest Curse,
a Means to make herself more bless’d. –Had he been faithful
to me, (said she, to herself,) either as Fantomina, or Celia, or
the Widow Bloomer, the most violent Passion, if it does not
change its Object, in Time will wither.” (31)
Not only does Fantomina understand the general nature of inconstancy, but she understands it so well that she now knows how to manipulate inconstancy as “a Means to make herself more bless’d,” a feat for which she heartily congratulates herself.
Fantomina continues to expound on the lesson of Beauplaisir’s inconstancy, this time petitioning women to join in on the freedom of her newfound knowledge:
Possession naturally abates the Vigour of Desire, and I should
have had, at best, but a cold, insipid, husband-like Lover in my
Arms; but by these Arts of passing on him as a new Mistress
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whenever the Ardour, which alone makes Love a Blessing,
begins to diminish, for the former one, I have him always
raving, wild, impatient, longing, dying.—O that all neglected
Wives and fond abandon’d Nymphs would take this
Method!—Men would be caught in their own Snare, and have
no Cause to scorn our easy, weeping, wailing Sex! (32)
Fantomina’s deference to the unlucky women who are trapped by male inconstancy illustrates Hultquist’s analysis of the Haywoodian passions: “the only way to avoid mishaps in love is to guard against it; wit and reason can only help so much” (Hultquist “Eliza” 94).
Drawing this conclusion from Haywood’s fiction Reflections on the Various Effects of Love
(1726), Hultquist helps to explain Fantomina’s resistance to marriage, for which the coquette is so often criticized, as the method by which women guard against the passion of love’s destructive tendencies. In this context, Fantomina’s expression in the passage above is a poignant reminder that it is her role as philosopher-coquette that allows her to succeed, not as philosopher or coquette. For example, a mere philosopher, who possesses “a good wit, a kind of emotional intelligence . . . [and] firm judgement,” would ultimately fail because love is “more painful to intelligent women,” and she would have “the reason to see all the hazards, but not the ability to stop the emotion” (Hultquist “Eliza” 93, emphasis my own). The evidence for what would happen to a woman acting solely as a coquette, without the prudence to prevent the threat of public ridicule, appears in the following chapter, in my discussion of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana.
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Nevertheless, with her perceptive final conclusions, Fantomina justifies her behavior as a philosopher-coquette, “secure she never should have any Reason to repent the present Gaiety of her Humour,” a sentiment that appropriately segues the reader of amatory fiction to the discovery of the heroine’s pregnancy (32). After the “sudden Arrival of her
Mother” in London and the discovery that “She was with Child,” the remainder of
Fantomina’s story is told by the narrator; any first-person insight Fantomina expresses is by way of dialogue. Given that the text concludes with the narrator’s commentary on
Fantomina’s escapades, I align the narrator here with the public, or the “talking world,” whose ridicule Fantomina tries to prevent from the beginning. However, Haywood adds a new, strange maternal dimension to the amatory heroine’s inevitable confinement with both mother and baby exposing Fantomina, a dimension that protects the heroine from the public’s criticism. As for Fantomina’s mother, she is described as “severely virtuous,” and
Fantomina resents her mother’s return because the heroine can no longer “act with the same unquestionable Authority over herself, as she did before” (36). The mother only learns her daughter is pregnant when Fantomina is in physical labor, which either further underscores
Fantomina’s skill at masquerade or reveals her mother to be much less perceptive than her philosopher-coquette daughter, or both, considering Fantomina designed a strategy to
“escape [from her mother] to some Place where she might be delivered with Secrecy,” before going into labor (36).
Despite the mother’s “Astonishment and Horror” at the discovery that her daughter’s convulsions are labor pains, her immediate response is “commanding
[Fantomina] to reveal the Name of the Person whose Insinuations had drawn her to this
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Dishonour” (37). It is the mother’s acknowledgement that Fantomina did not arrive at this condition on her own—that even though her daughter carries the embrio, which her labor ripens into action, Fantomina did not plant the seed—that eases the threat of Fantomina’s confinement. When Beauplaisir arrives to hear the mother’s complaints and sees the
Fantomina he only knows as the virtuous “Court Beauty” from the theatre, whom he only admires from afar and does not recognize as any woman he has bedded, he denies any responsibility. Not only does Beauplaisir’s genuine insistence on his innocence solidify his dullness, but it also infuriates Fantomina’s mother, who, at this point, still prolongs censure of her daughter, only telling Fantomina that “she should not hope to Escape the Scrutiny of a Parent” (38). In fact, the punishment Fantomina fears most, the talking, scolding, censure of her behavior, never happens. When Fantomina finally “relat[es] the whole Truth,” both her mother and Beauplaisir “s[i]t for some Time in a profound Revery,” until the mother admits, “I must confess it was with a Design to oblige you to repair the supposed Injury you had done this unfortunate Girl, by marrying her, but now I know not what to say” (39).
With the mother’s rejection of marriage as a solution and subsequent silence, Fantomina remains invulnerable to her greatest fears: ridicule and confinement.
As for the baby, Fantomina’s mother rejects Beauplaisir’s assurance “that if she would commit the new-born Lady to his Care, he would discharge it faithfully,” and given the just-divulged story of his inconstancy, it is no wonder “neither of [the women] would consent” (39). The motif of maternity in these last episodes of Fantomina’s fate is illustrative of the depth, multiplicity, and embeddedness of Fantomina’s amatory philosophical experience. Therefore, the baby is not only the consequence of her “innocent
135 frolick,” but, for Hultquist, it is also a “memory and experience of love that is impossible to shed” (Hultquist “Eliza” 33). When Beauplaisir repeatedly returns to inquire about
Fantomina’s health, the mother, “perceiving there was nothing likely to ensure . . . entreat[s] him to refrain” in order to protect her daughter from “a renewing of the Crime”
(40). As it turns out, the prolonged “Scrutiny of a Parent” is the mother’s dismissal of
Fantomina to “a Monastery in France,” where, according to Melissa Mowry, she will likely be among “other like-minded and like-behaving women” (Haywood 38, 40; Mowry 656).
Not only that, but narrator adds that the monastery’s abbess is also the mother’s “particular friend” (40). Because Fantomina’s maternity exposes her to her mother at the birth of her baby, the threat of the “talking world” is lessened by this sudden introduction to a community of women: the mother, Fantomina, the baby girl, and the friendly Abbess.
Moreover, it is the final disclosure of Fantomina’s “truth”—the sharing of a story as another method of increasing learning—that conceives of this protective community, reaffirming Fantomina’s position as the philosopher-coquette.
According to Braunschneider, “representations of coquettes produce a knowledge effect: a sense that author and readers share information about this type of person and can therefore share a stance of knowingness about everything she demonstrates” (3-4). By leaving the mother and Beauplaisir in revery, “a moment or period of being lost, esp. pleasantly, in one's thoughts; a daydream,” the narrator seems to suggest that the same is true about Fantomina, given that the characters walk away from the childbed with a greater propensity for knowledge than when they arrived. The mother leaves Fantomina’s bedside more perceptive of Beauplaisir’s inconstancy and her daughter’s “Skill,” while Beauplaisir
136 departs, “full of Cogitations, more confus’d than ever he had known in his whole Life”
(39). The profundity of their silence speaks more to their understanding and silent acceptance of the reasons for Fantomina’s behavior than it does to their reproach of her. It is, after all, the “talking world” Fantomina wishes to avoid, not the silent one.
This study of Fantomina demonstrates several familiar topoi of amatory fiction: the desirous heroine, the unreliable male lover, the pursuit of desire in public space, and the inevitable exposure of the heroine with subsequent confinement. However, there is one convention more explicit in Fantomina than in the other works of amatory fiction that I include in this study, and that is the amatory heroine will always consciously choose to pursue her desires—even with no experience doing so in the public sphere and even with the foresight to perceive of her own failure—because the pleasure of her experience, even if brief, outweighs the suffering of her confinement. As Haywood proves, knowledge derived from personal (and passionate) experience is infinitely more useful to female characters than virtue, femininity, or any other gendered dictate the public deems appropriate. If
Fantomina’s passionate experiences in masquerade add to her understanding of pleasure, then the inverse is also true—“As reason increases, so do the passions” (Hultquist “Eliza”
91). This is evident in Fantomina’s repeated exclamations of pleasure following a new discovery, and especially at the climax of her pleasure, where she locates a “Method,” inconstancy, as a “Means to make herself more bless’d” (32, 31). However, if we interpret
Fantomina’s solution of “passing on [a lover] as a new Mistress whenever the Ardour . . . begins to diminish” through the by-now familiar lens of amatory fiction, then, it reads more like the didactic narrative responses to Behn’s nun, Isabella, or Manley’s virtuous student,
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Charlot—that in order to avoid tragic ruin, women should not subject themselves to men who make them vulnerable to isolation and confinement.
When female characters are confined to a single role, they are denied the pleasure of experiencing the multiplicity of their desires, to which male characters have always been privy, even if not to the same depth that Haywood’s philosopher-coquette attains.
Fantomina’s self-congratulation affirms the importance of the female experience in public space; it suggests that a woman should do as she pleases, but with a keen understanding of her desires, an awareness as to how her desires render her vulnerable in public, and the foresight to potentially forestall her ruin. While she does not fulfill her desire for a reliable lover in Beauplaisir, Fantomina succeeds in fulfilling her desire to be prudent. As Hultquist points out, Haywood’s “fiction is most interested in private understanding of how to negotiate passions and how those negotiations lead to individual identity” (“Eliza” 86). In the end, Fantomina’s pregnancy is physical evidence of the once innocent heroine’s endeavor to privately understand desire in the public arena, and the birth of her child leads the now socially-savvy Fantomina to another new identity in a new place.
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Chapter 5
Roxana and Amy’s Divided Desire
In the previous chapter, I referred to the alleged shift in Haywood’s fiction between
1725 and 1750, which scholars explain as Haywood’s attempt to reform the amatory/coquette heroine in order to accommodate readers’ changing tastes.60 Aleksondra
Hultquist debunks that theory and proves that Haywood writes consistently within the parameters of amatory fiction throughout her prose oeuvre. However, the critical methodology that supports the purported divide in Haywood’s career might be better used to identify a similar kind of shift in the fiction of Daniel Defoe, given his proclivity for amatory fiction near the end of his career. If Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina (1725) is the last, and, in my opinion, the fullest example of amatory fiction in the genre’s history, then
Defoe’s Roxana (1724) is the most enigmatic example of amatory fiction. Roxana is
Defoe’s last work of fiction, and while Defoe might have thought he secured his reputation with the success of Robinson Crusoe (1719), critics seemed to have felt differently about his final heroine’s amatory escapades.61 As this chapter illustrates, Roxana’s portrayal of female desire is in some significant ways inconsistent with the amatory fiction I have
60 See Chapter Four’s discussion of the purported divide in Haywood’s work that suggests she eventually reforms her coquette heroine and elevates her to fit needs of the domestic novel. 61 John Mullan’s 1996 introduction to Roxana asserts that “it was critically invisible for the first fifty years or so of its life,” and Mullan argues that even among the “excited disputes” regarding the novel’s “low subject matter and their vulgar heroes and heroines . . . Roxana was never mentioned” (viii). Mullan then concludes that Roxana “led a life beneath the gaze of critics, satirists, or even other novelists, and alongside the many other equally unpolite works of fiction that have not survived” (ix-x). Given Roxana’s exclusion from discussions of the novel, I take Mullan’s “other equally unpolite works of fiction” to mean amatory fiction, which is also where I locate Roxana. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction also refers to the canon’s early exclusion of Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders: “In 1809-10, Walter Scott put together the first collected edition of what he called The Novels of Daniel Defoe, which excluded Roxana and Moll Flanders” (37). 139 discussed in previous chapters, where Roxana’s increased self-awareness in the public arena is more destructive to her success than it is useful. I view this discrepancy, particularly the central heroine’s grudging pursuit of desire in public space, as a way to help explain eighteenth-century writers’ shift from amatory fiction to the novel. I place Roxana within the category of amatory fiction because of the way it uses a public setting for female desire. The narrative follows an amatory plot, where the central heroine seeks, albeit reluctantly, to fulfill her desire in public space; Roxana possesses many coquettish tendencies, including her extant mobility in public; her interest in fashionable, material goods; and her vain, seemingly airy behavior.
Even with such fundamental topoi of amatory fiction at work, Roxana illustrates an increasingly visible tension between the self-deprecating heroine and her publicly expressed desire. This tension denotes the gradual shifting of desire from public to private domains, which then justifies the historical move from amatory fiction to the domestic novel. In the amatory fiction I have discussed thus far, the setting for female desire is public space, and once amatory heroines express and fulfill their desires in public spaces, they do not voluntarily return to the private domain. As we have seen, amatory fiction heroines are multidimensional; they thrive on their ability to locate, pursue, fulfill, and understand their desires within public spheres. The genre of amatory fiction is defined by such characters— the Mirandas, Rivellas, and Fantominas, who enjoy their successes in public spaces, even if those successes are temporary. Roxana strays from this narrative of physical and metaphysical fulfillment, as she appears to secretly covet her past life of bourgeois
140 domesticity and despises the depravity of public space, even more so when she is forced to partake in it in order to survive.
However, importantly, Roxana does not participate in public life on her own; Amy, her loyal maid is a domestic servant who takes pleasure in cavorting through public spaces alongside her ruined bourgeois mistress. Even though Amy often initiates the active pursuit of desire, while Roxana is wont to fixate in her misery, the maid only does so on Roxana’s behalf. Furthermore, because Roxana narrates their story, Amy’s originary desire, apart from pleasing her beloved mistress, is not elaborately represented. While Roxana, as central heroine, largely enjoys the spoils that their collective pursuit of desire brings, it is Amy’s acuity that moves Roxana along, from England, to France, Holland, and back. The text’s narrative of desire thus moves back and forth between Roxana’s passively expressed desire and Amy’s vocal expressions and dutiful efforts to secure that desire in public space. As we will see, Amy’s actions only exacerbate Roxana’s guilt, which increases the tension between the heroine’s public expression of desire and her private misery.
The story begins with a lengthy warning to readers about the dangers of marrying a fool—a narrative technique readers have seen before, but this time, the warning comes from
Roxana herself, as she functions as both central heroine and narrator. Roxana then introduces her husband, a brewer, as the kind of fool she warns readers against marrying, and she tersely describes her husband’s sudden abandonment of her and their five children, after which, Roxana’s only companion is her maid, Amy, who is so sympathetic to
Roxana’s plight that she remains by her side, even when Roxana cannot afford to pay her.
Roxana and Amy live in poverty for about a year before the maid contrives a plan to lessen
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Roxana’s financial burden. Amy begins by slyly imposing Roxana’s children onto their estranged aunt and uncle. With the children no longer a burden, Roxana’s landlord begins to see her in a new light; he takes pity on Roxana and offers his assistance. Amy is elated by the landlord’s kindness, and she encourages Roxana to do whatever it takes to maintain his generosity, even if it means becoming his mistress. Roxana vehemently protests Amy’s suggestion, calling her a “Hussy,” and insisting she would rather “die before [she] would consent” (28-9). However, her protestations are short-lived, and after exclaiming that
“Poverty was [her] Snare; dreadful Poverty,” Roxana agrees to be his mistress, even though the landlord/jeweler (I will refer to him as the jeweler from now on) prefers to think of her as his wife (39). On a trip to Paris, the jeweler is murdered, and Roxana briefly finds herself alone again. Amy assists Roxana in securing her affairs back home, while Roxana finds herself the happy recipient of a French prince’s affection. Roxana and the Prince continue their affair for several years, and she bears him three sons before deciding to quit his company after seeing how he is affected by the death of his wife, the Princess.
After fleeing Paris, Roxana meets a Dutch merchant who offers his assistance in her business dealings. He eventually proposes marriage to Roxana, but she refuses, insisting she “had, perhaps, different Notions of Matrimony, from what the receiv’d Custom had given [them] of it” (147). She moves back to England, and finds herself at Court, again
“throng’d with Admirers,” receiving “Visits from Persons of very great Figure,” including an unnamed English Lord (172). Just as she tires of the Lord’s company, she discovers that her children are now much nearer to her than she had realized. Her abandonment of them begins to haunt her, particularly when her oldest daughter, Susan, arrives to demand
142 answers from Amy. Since Roxana becomes distracted by yet another marriage proposal from the Dutch merchant—one she finally accepts—Amy, ever the accommodating maid, puts Roxana’s fear of being exposed to rest and murders Susan. In the last line of the novel,62 Roxana says she lives happily for some time until she “fell into a dreadful Course of Calamities . . . the Blast of Heaven seem’d to follow the Injury done the poor Girl,” and
Roxana is “brought so low again, that [her] Repentance seem’d to be only the Consequence of [her] Misery, as [her] Misery was of [her] Crime” (329-30).
True to the form of amatory fiction, Defoe’s central heroine is forced to navigate her desires in public spaces, and Roxana’s inherent coquettish charms help her along in her endeavors. She manages to secure her desire with the jeweler, the prince, and the Dutch merchant, and each man allows Roxana to negotiate the terms of their relationship.
However, unlike Behn’s Miranda or Haywood’s Fantomina, who are governed by their own desires for equitable pleasure in the form of sex, financial security, and/or worldly experience, Roxana is externally motivated. She does not choose to be the whore of these men; she accepts the role of a prostitute as the only option society has allotted her and sets out to fulfill society’s base expectations of her as such. When Roxana first finds herself
“frighted with the Prospect of Beggary, and surrounded with Rags, and Fatherless
Children,” she turns to Amy, a “poor Girl” and a convenient resource on the nature of working-class life (74, 16). When Amy suggests that Roxana “deny [the jeweler] nothing” so that she does not starve, Roxana is insulted at the mere thought, and yet that thought lingers. Roxana grudgingly takes the maid’s suggestion, “Comply and live; deny and
62 There have been several adaptations to this ending, none of which are Defoe’s. His original ending concludes all current editions of Roxana. 143 starve,” as the driving force of her decisions thereafter (110). Roxana allows the jeweler to kiss her, lodge with her, and profess his love to her; yet she is shocked when he declares his intention to marry her. Again, Roxana consults Amy, who tells her mistress plainly, “you own you love this Gentleman,” and “you . . . ought to be free to marry who you will,” but
Roxana falters (37). While Roxana seduces the jeweler with very little effort, managing her coquettish charms quite naturally, she also resents “the Brutallity and blindness of
Mankind” that allows her to succeed this way. She ponders the logic that “because Nature had given [her] a good Skin, and some agreeable Features,” “Beauty [should] be such a Bait to Appetite” (74-5). Because Amy suggests that Roxana use her beauty to bait the jeweler’s generosity, Roxana aligns the maid with the public—a people whose admiration she both esteems and despises. Consequently, Roxana often treats Amy just as divisively as she does the public, with a loyal, yet loathsome deference.
If it were not for Amy, who is the catalyst for Roxana’s desires, the narrative would read more like a domestic novel than amatory fiction, since on her own, Roxana seems as if she would accept the confines society has imposed on her. Roxana only “wish[es] secretly” and “say[s] in [her] Thoughts” what Amy makes happen. Roxana despises her first husband because he is “a meer motionless Animal,” a “Nothing-doing Wretch,” and she wonders
“how so well-bred” a gentleman “as he once was, could degenerate into such a useless thing,” a (95-6). Yet, readers begin to wonder about Roxana’s own degenerate state, given that she seems content to fixate on society’s depravity rather than take action against it. As the female characters I discuss in the previous chapters make clear, desire is hard work.
Onahal risks discovery when she meets Aboan and Oroonoko at the orange grove; Rivella
144 must plead with her bigamous ex-husband to assist her as she navigates life on her own in public; Fantomina makes herself vulnerable to the pains of Beauplaisir’s rape and inconstancy in order to satisfy her curiosity about desire in society. Roxana, however, hesitates to do this kind of dirty work, which is why Amy’s position as servant becomes useful; Amy tends to the difficult task of securing Roxana’s desires—for financial stability, sexual fulfillment, and even privacy. Even though Roxana is glad to have Amy at her service, she resents the maid for making her private desires known. Roxana says, “I shou’d have repell’d this Amy, however faithful and honest to me in other things, as a Viper, and
Engine of the Devil” (38). The tension is evident, especially at the “shou’d have,” which suggests that Roxana does not really want to refuse Amy, even though she has the authority to do so.
Furthermore, Roxana’s skewed perception of the lower class renders Amy vulnerable to her mistress’s resentment. What Amy sees as supporting her mistress’s success, Roxana perceives as encouraging debased behavior, and so Amy must share in her mistress’s shame. Throughout most of the narrative, Amy volunteers her service freely, without provocation, or sometimes pay, from Roxana. As such, their relationship often appears as that of companions, of equals, more than it does master/servant. Roxana violates that dynamic once, early in the narrative, in one of the most notorious scenes of rape in amatory fiction. When Amy comments on Roxana’s inability to produce a child with the jeweler, Roxana scathingly forces Amy to do it for her. Amy protests with “No,” “I won’t,”
“Not now,” and “Nay,” a total of nine times before Roxana “stript [Amy] . . . threw open the Bed, and thrust her in” (46). The jeweler “held [Amy] fast, and the Wench being naked
145 in the Bed with him . . . lay still, and let him do what he wou’d with her” (46-7). Amy’s objections belie her position as servant, and Roxana is sure to put the maid in her place, for
Roxana “stood-by all the while,” thinking, “as I thought myself a Whore, I cannot say but that it was something design’d in my Thoughts, that my Maid should be a Whore too, and should not reproach me with it” (47). Roxana forces Amy to be complicit in her shame so that the maid is denied any further authority over her. Kirsten Saxton cites Defoe’s 1725 tract Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business to explain Amy’s rape; by conflating the master/servant relationship between Roxana and Amy, Defoe presents the maid as a dangerous threat to social order. Saxton concludes, “It is the potential of the lower-class female body for social and sexual mobility that poses a danger both serious and common enough that it should be criminalized” (Narratives 95). In this context, then, Defoe portrays
Roxana as sympathetic and Amy as criminal, for the maid’s transgressive rhetoric and behavior seems to demand Roxana’s punishment.
Amy’s response to the rape also reveals her to be the more expressive amatory heroine, as she communicates her desire, even when no one is listening, a characteristic
Roxana lacks. In John Mullan’s introduction to the text, he points out that Roxana repeatedly, “meet[s] the limits of her powers of expression” (xv). This is evident when
Roxana manages to coldly and silently watch the rape because she has “effectually stifled
[her] conscience” (46). Amy, on the other hand, is known for having “too much Rhetorick,”
(39). After the rape, Amy is “grievously out of Sorts,” and she “cry’d, and took-on most vehemently; that she was ruin’d and undone, and there was no pacifying her . . . she was undone! undone!” (47). This, the familiar cry of the ruined amatory heroine, is what makes
146 her so sympathetic to readers. Not only that, but Amy persists in her pursuit of desire, in spite of Roxana’s and the jeweler’s offenses; afterwards, “Amy retain’d the same kind
Temper she always had,” unlike Roxana, who calls herself “harden’d” after becoming the jeweler’s whore. Amy continues to manage both her mistress’s desire and her own, even though the narrative largely centers on Roxana’s seemingly aimless, unsatisfying pursuits.
Roxana presents only brief glimpses of the central heroine’s short-lived happiness—
“I thought myself happy when [my husband] got another Man to take his Brewhouse”—but such sentiments are quickly replaced—“I saw my Ruin hastening on, without any possible
Way to prevent it” (10-1). While amatory fiction indeed moves quickly from one sentiment to the next, usually action accompanies the feelings of both happiness and ruin, pleasure and pain. Defoe’s Roxana is unique in that the central heroine dwells on her feelings but does not seek out a plan to resolve her disquiet. In fact, Roxana hesitates to take any action at all; it is Amy who must repeatedly instruct her mistress on what to do next: “[M]y Maid put it into my Head one Morning . . . Amy . . . put it into my Thoughts” (14). In her consideration of Amy’s several ideas, Roxana cannot decide whether the maid “argue[s] for the Devil” or has “too much Rhetorick in the cause.” Nonetheless, Amy’s ability to argue with the “utmost Skill” causes Roxana to resent her; the maid’s persuasive language seems to give Amy the upper hand. Additionally, from Roxana’s description of her earlier life, readers might easily assume that her comfortable lifestyle left her with little need to experience the world on her own. At fourteen years of age, Roxana has “all the Advantages that any Young Woman cou’d desire,” and at fifteen, her father marries her “to an Eminent
Brewer in the City” (7). Amy’s position as a lower class girl working for a living wage
147 gives her the advantage of experience over Roxana, especially when it comes to navigating a means of survival the public arena. Amy, then, becomes an extension of Roxana’s desire; the maid is as much a part of Roxana’s coquette persona as Roxana herself. The difference is that Roxana’s status affords her the privilege of physically inhabiting the coquette persona in public, whereas Amy’s, as servant, does not. Without Amy, though, Roxana has neither the propensity nor the motivation to pursue an alternative to the dismal circumstances she is suddenly dealt.
Furthermore, it is evident very early in the narrative that Roxana’s fixation on public opinion prompts her own metaphysical fixity. Even before her first husband abandons her,
Roxana is stagnant and unmotivated. For example, she disparages her husband’s character because she is ashamed of him in public; whenever “he came to defend what he had said, by Argument and Reason, he would do it so weakly, so emptily, and so nothing to the
Purpose, that it was enough to make any-body that heard him, sick and asham’d of him”
(8). She expresses discontent, yet there is no evidence of Roxana attempting to change her circumstances. Instead, she settles with the guise of a happy marriage and focuses on the external aspects of her role as wife. When her husband either “look[s] like a Fool,” or is
“laugh’d at for a Fool,” she is “oblig’d to Blush for him every time she hears him speak,” and yet, Roxana insists she “liv’d eight Years in good Fashion, and for some Part of the
Time, kept a Coach” (8, 7). Roxana describes their marriage as the public sees it, stressing fashion and coaches but with no insight into their private life. She purposely withholds such information, saying, “I could enlarge here much, upon the Method I took to make my Life passable and easie with the most incorrigible Temper in the World; but it is too long, and
148 the Articles too trifling” (9). In fact, the “trifling” details of an unhappy woman’s life are the bread and butter of amatory fiction. This type of detail provides female characters with a motive to pursue their desires; the “method” inspires action and drives the plot that captivates so many readers. Defoe bypasses these details because Roxana understands them as irrelevant to her story, which, she summarizes as “once fall, and ever undone; once in the
Ditch, and die in the Ditch, once poor, and sure to starve” (96). It is Amy who must remind her mistress that there is work to do, and so the maid manages the trifling pursuits Roxana seems content to avoid.
It becomes difficult, then, for readers to enjoy Roxana’s successes because she is always quick to remind the audience of her resentment. Nonetheless, she manages her public appearance so well that there are several interludes where readers forget just how miserable she really is. This is especially evident when the jeweler is murdered and Roxana meets the French prince. Upon the surprising news of the jeweler’s death, Roxana is “a good-while as one stupid,” so she sends “dext’rous” Amy back to England to “secur[e] every thing . . . very punctually and honestly” (55, 57). Amy’s keen management of her mistress’s affairs allows Roxana to transition smoothly into the role of widow, and Roxana does so “with all possible Advantage,” for she “[i]s not ignorant that [she] [i]s very handsome” and “[i]s soon made very publick,” as “the pretty Widow of Poictou” in France
(57). The heroine is “very well pleas’d to see [her]self thus handsomely us’d,” as she takes great “Care to let the Ladies see that [she] kn[ows] how to receive them; that [she] [i]s not at a Loss how to Behave to any of them; and in short, [she] beg[i]n[s] to be very popular there” (58). Roxana derives pleasure from being “us’d,” from being perceived as something
149 she is not. She quickly gains the Prince’s attention, which renders her “the vainest Creature upon Earth, and particularly, of [her] beauty; which, as other People admir’d, so [she] became every Day more foolishly in Love with [her]self, than before” (62). This passage complicates Roxana’s desire; in this moment, readers expect the heroine to profess her love for the Prince. Instead, she falls in love with the public’s admiration of her, which, in her mind, makes her more worthy of his affection, and for that, she “foolishly” loves herself.
Given Roxana’s endurance of her hated husband, the fool, and the frequency with which she reports her own foolishness, the reader begins to wonder whether Roxana has not become the very character she so despises. Julie Crane, in “Defoe’s Roxana: The Making and Unmaking of a Heroine,” argues that “Defoe [does] not let us escape from Roxana’s intelligence—her restless, turbulent, desperate energy as a thinking being” (13). This may be true, but Roxana’s intelligence appears more like John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of
Rochester’s “reason” in “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind”63 (c. 1674), where metaphysical depth causes a person to be fixated in thought, rather than active in her pursuit of desire:
Reason, an ignus fatuus of the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wand’ring ways it takes
Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes;
63 Given that the setting of Roxana is Restoration England—Roxana says, “I was brought to England by my Parents . . . about the Year 1683”—it is likely that Defoe would incorporate popular Restoration themes in his amatory fiction (5). Paul Davis says Rochester “was praised as the epitome of verbal refinement” and finds that Rochester’s poetry and its “libertine literary culture . . . flourished during his short adult lifetime” (“Introduction” Rochester: Selected Poems xvi, xi). 150
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys, heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubt’s boundless sea where, like to drown
......
But thoughts are given for action’s government;
Where action ceases, thought’s impertinent:
Our sphere of action is life’s happiness,
And he that thinks beyond, thinks like an ass. (12-9, 94-7)
The Earl of Rochester argues against reason in favor of the libertine’s natural impulse because the latter is more fulfilling. Roxana as a rendition of Rochester’s proud, rational
(wo)man makes sense, given the Restoration Era setting of the novel. In this context, however, it is Amy who represents the libertine’s natural impulse: “Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat” (Rochester 107). While Crane is right to call Roxana a “thinking being,” the social climate she inhabits demands that she be more diligent, like Amy, in order to succeed. For Rochester, a successful life is one governed by the senses because it yields more happiness than one ruled by reason: “His wisdom did his happiness destroy,/
Aiming to know that world he should enjoy./ And wit was his vain, frivolous pretense/ Of pleasing others at his own expense” (Rochester 33-6). Similarly, Roxana’s tendency to overthink and ruin would-be happy moments is prompted by her vanity, in that she takes pleasure in how others see her rather than how she sees herself. Roxana repeatedly compares herself to society’s upper echelon, as people like the French prince and the
151 wealthy Dutch merchant represent those who are good, honest, and “compleat”64(180).
When Roxana compares herself to these men who are “above the World,” she can only perceive of herself, the “wickedest Creature upon Earth,” as “infinitely below it” (41, 158).
Nowhere is this self-sabotage more evident than in the strange scene where Roxana dresses up for the French prince and he presents her with a diamond necklace. When
Roxana enters the bedroom dressed in a silver suit, she begins to cry, “not Tears of Sorrow, but Tears of Joy,” for, in that moment, it is impossible for her “to contain [her]
Satisfaction” (72). This is the first time Roxana both feels joy and expresses it. However, she quickly ruins the moment by overthinking the way the prince might perceive her. When he gives Roxana a handkerchief to wipe away her tears, she takes “the Hint immediately,” assuming the prince does not wipe away her tears for her because he believes that her face is painted with the “false Colours” of cosmetics (72). Rather than move past the insignificance of this moment and enjoy his caresses, Roxana grabs the prince’s hand and forces “him [to] wipe [her] Face so hard, that he was unwilling to do it, for fear of hurting
[her]” (72). Roxana does not stop there, even after the prince swears for the first time in her presence. She calls Amy in “and bade her bring . . . a Cup-full of hot water . . . and when it was come, [Roxana] desir’d his Highness to feel if it was warm; which he did, and [she] immediately wash’d [her] Face all over with it” (72). Roxana attempts to show the prince some semblance of her authenticity, as a woman who does not need make up or lavish gifts, but she does so by still demonstrating her vanity, rubbing her face so that she can further reveal her beauty. The prince reads the gesture as a demonstration of her vanity, which only
64 Roxana refers to the Dutch merchant as “one of the honestest compleatest Gentlemen upon Earth.” The OED defines compleat as “perfect in nature or quality; without defect.” 152 prompts him to enact a demonstration of his own. He bestows a diamond necklace upon her, unintentionally undermining her effort to appear modest: “he leads [her] to the darkest
Part of the Room, and standing behind [her], bade [her] hold up [her] Head, when putting both his Hands round [her] neck . . . he held [her] Neck so long, and so hard, in his Hand, that [she] complain’d he hurt [her] a little” (72-3). As Crane points out, “Roxana is a character who is continually making and remaking herself,” but because Roxana always makes herself in the vision of someone else, she is incapable of constructing an authentic self. When the prince forcefully places the necklace around her neck, mimicking her perturbed demonstration, he reaffirms their relationship as one based on merit, and Roxana is again reminded of how she, a whore, is “unquallified to receive Benefits” (73). He leads
Roxana from the dark “to a Peir-Glass [sic],”65 where sees in her reflection one of “the most worthless creatures” and subsequently becomes “dumb,” her “Vanity . . . fed up to such a height that [she] had no room to give way to such Reflections” (73-4).
Because Roxana’s desire depends so heavily on what “other People admir[e]” about her, she finds herself perpetually unfulfilled (62). She does not see the potential in any woman’s role—wife, destitute mother, whore—beyond society’s expectations, and this narrow mindset severely limits her capacity to function as a subject in any desirous exchange in the public arena. As James Maddox suggests in his essay, “On Defoe’s
Roxana,” the protagonist is so “intensely preoccupied with the public display of self” that
“she believes that she is really a whore and not a loveable lady, really a carcass rather than a beautiful body” (674-5). Roxana determines her own pleasure by observing the
65 A pier-glass is “a large mirror, originally one fitted in the space between two windows, or over a chimney piece” (OED). 153 satisfaction she brings to others, which means that the fulfillment of her desire must always depend on another person. She appears to resent the subject position, even when she has the privilege of negotiating desire from that standpoint herself. For example, with each new endeavor, Roxana acquires more wealth, influence, and mobility, but rather than enjoy or exploit these privileges, she resents them. While the French prince dotes on Roxana with lavish accommodations and gifts, she merely thinks, “What valuable Pains were here thrown away upon One, who he was sure, at last, to abandon with Regret! How below himself, did a Man of Quality . . . behave in all this . . . all this to a Whore!” (101). Roxana sees that she has influence over the Prince, but she does not set out to manage his desire in a way that better serves her needs, whatever those might be. Instead, Roxana considers herself “the Instrument in the Hand of the Devil” for ruining the prince, who is “one of the most excellent Persons in the World,” which is also the way the public would see it (102).
Confined by her own shame, Roxana does not use her coquettish charms as a vehicle for her other potential desires, as there is seemingly no depth to her desire beyond a title. There is no fluidity of character, no multifaceted masquerade, no underlying motivation. In fact, there is no unmasking Roxana. She can only conceive of herself as occupying a single role.
She cannot be both a prostitute and a mother, a whore and a friend. It does not matter if
Roxana acquires more autonomy and mobility along the way because she ultimately resents having to be independent in the first place.
Roxana’s expression of self-congratulation, even if it comes from her vanity, is a rare, noteworthy occurrence. When Roxana effectively manages her desire to attract a prince without Amy’s help, she expresses what seems to be genuine pleasure. However,
154
Roxana’s pleasure is eventually interrupted by a moment of self-reckoning, in which she remembers how she arrived at this particular junction in her life. For example, even when
Roxana concludes that she “liv[es] indeed like a Queen” with the prince, the heroine must also admit that she has “still the Reproach of a Whore,” so that she is, instead, “the Queen of Whores” (82). This sentiment is also quickly followed by Roxana’s interjection, “I might have interspers’d this Part of my Story with a great many pleasant Parts, and Discourses, which happen’d between my Maid Amy, and I; but I omit them” (83). This kind of caveat functions as a reminder to readers of Amy’s consistent presence, even though she is missing from the narrative itself. Roxana reminds not only herself of Amy’s role in her pleasure—
“like Mistress, like Maid”—but also the audience, for Amy is an inescapable reminder of
Roxana’s initial choice to “comply and live” (83; 110). As such, the heroine continually debases her own pleasure because she aligns it with the wretched solution of her poor maid.
In each new endeavor, Roxana’s perverse enactment of her maid’s pragmatic advice is so haunting that she ultimately finds no pleasure in the management of her coquettish charms.
Indeed, there are several hints that suggest Amy’s pragmatism renders her better equipped to navigate amatory matters, and, in a sense, worldly matters, than her mistress.
Not only does Amy mobilize Roxana’s desires, but the maid navigates her own space for desire, as well (although, as noted, Roxana’s narration largely omits the details of Amy’s erotic life). Before Roxana can enjoy her role as the French prince’s sought-after widow,
Amy seamlessly manages her mistress’s financial affairs back in England. In this sense,
155
Amy is to Roxana what Oroonoko’s Onahal is to Oroonoko and Imoinda.66 If it were not for Amy, Roxana might have “cry’d [her]self to Death for [the jeweler]” (54). Amy later rejoins Roxana in France and secretively tends to her own desire for the French prince’s gentleman, a relationship that seems to have endured just as long as Roxana’s affair with the prince. Roxana only learns of Amy’s affair with the Gentleman when the maid asks
Roxana to plead for the French prince’s pardon on the Gentleman’s behalf. Roxana says the
Gentleman “ begg’d [Amy] to interceed for him; which I [Roxana] did, and on my Account, he was receiv’d again, and pardon’d; for which, the grateful Dog requited me, by getting to-
Bed with his Benefactress, Amy; at which I was very angry” (83). Not only does Roxana express her anger at their affair, but she narrates the intimacy between Amy and the
Gentleman by setting up this hierarchy of social order, in which the Gentleman must defer to Amy, then Amy to Roxana, and finally Roxana to the Prince. Yet, Roxana avoids pressing Amy further about her affair for fear that the maid might have “answer’d
[Roxana’s] Question with a Question, and have said, Why, how did [she] and the Prince come to be so intimate?” The answer to this question would then remind Roxana of her own lowly position as the prince’s whore, a reminder she tries desperately to ignore.
Nonetheless, Amy answers that “as they had many leisure Hours together below . . . when his Lord and [Roxana] were together above . . . they could hardly avoid the usual Question to one another, namely, Why might not they do the same thing below, that [Roxana and the
Prince] did above?” Roxana concludes their affair as seemingly irrelevant, for “Amy had
66 In Chapter Two, I describe Onahal’s arrangement of the secret meeting between Oroonoko and Imoinda. The governant leads Oroonoko to Imoinda’s private chambers. After this, Onahal secures her own pleasure by taking Aboan to her room. 156 been hansell’d67 before, as well as her mistress . . . , as you have heard” (84). Roxana wrongly assumes that Amy’s relationship with the Gentleman is trivial, merely physical because that is how she perceives her own relationships.
Amy’s lover also reappears in the narrative when Roxana is in Holland and the maid back in London. It is Amy’s Gentleman who informs her of the death of Roxana’s first husband, a message that Amy in turn delivers to her mistress. Again, Roxana gives only very brief attention to the couple’s enduring relationship; she describes the Gentleman as
“Amy’s extraordinary friend indeed; for Amy own’d . . . he had lain with her a hundred times; that is to say as often as he pleas’d; and perhaps, in the eight Year which that Affair lasted, it might be a great deal oftner: This is what she call’d her friend” (131). Not only does this scene describe the longevity and quality of Amy’s relationship with the
Gentleman as contrary to Roxana’s description of him as “hanselling” Amy, but it also, again, proves how necessary Amy is to Roxana’s mobility. Amy provides Roxana with the news of her deceased husband and is also the one to make sure that the brewer, while he was alive, does not discover Roxana when they were living in France. Roxana tells Amy about seeing the brewer in the street, and it is Amy, “an indefatigable girl,” who “found him out” (87). Amy confronts her old master about the wretched condition in which he left
Roxana, but the brewer pleads with Amy regarding his own dismal circumstances. At the end of their conversation, the brewer begs for the commission of 8000 livres to be made lieutenant, and upon hearing this from Amy, Roxana is so moved by his story that she “was
67 In the explanatory note to the Oxford World Classics edition of Roxana, John Mullan says, hansell’d “clearly means ‘tried out’ sexually; it seems likely that this is one of the narrator’s inventive applications of a word rather than a conventional usage” (345). The OED defines “hanselling” as “The first use, experience, or example of anything.” 157 once going to have sent him” the money. Amy, on the other hand, “pretend[s] poverty” at her next meeting with the brewer, lending him only a Pistole. The maid out-shams the fool’s sham, while though her mistress entertains the idea of sending the brewer ten thousand Crowns to see if he will return to her. So when Roxana claims later that she has graduated “from a Lady of Pleasure” to a “Woman of Business,” the reader knows that
Amy is the savvier business woman of the two (131).
As Amy’s consistent resolve continues to pay off for Roxana, the maid’s voice becomes increasingly more prominent in the narrative than her mistress’s. According to
Crane,” Amy’s “voice fills in the spaces where Roxana cannot speak” (17). Crane refers here to Defoe’s portrayal of Amy as “the Devil’s spokeswoman,” which Roxana, the master, can punish but chooses not to (18). The critic concludes that because “Amy keeps her voice intact, her spirits unwearied, and . . . preserves a kind of pragmatic integrity,” she represents “the people of London,” who, “it seems, never stop talking” (18). Roxana only heeds her maid’s advice because she represents the public, whose opinion she so greatly regards. At the same time, though, Roxana aligns the public’s and Amy’s “pragmatic integrity” with depravity and corruption. The reader can conclude, then, that Roxana longs to imagine herself as superior to the general public, as someone who should be better than
Amy, but due to her husband’s abandonment and her own subsequent poverty, she is not.
Roxana cannot imagine a society in which class lines are blurred, where the bourgeois wife can find herself a beggar and rise back up again. Consequently, when Roxana finds herself at the same impoverished level as her maid, she intends to stay there and live as she
158 imagines her maid to live—a debased life. Because Roxana sees her fate from bourgeois housewife to lowly prostitute as irrecoverable, she does not dwell in thoughts of repentance.
Amy is much more expressive of repentance, especially when the two women endure a brutal storm on the ship from France back to England. Roxana cries out, two or three times, “tho’ softly,” whereas Amy goes “farther; she pray[s], she resolv[es], she vow[s] to lead a new Life” (126-7). When the ship reaches land, “Amy [is] much more sensible of her Deliverance,” than Roxana, who remains “in a kind of Stupidity” (128-9).
Roxana’s “[t]houghts got no Vent, as Amy’s did,” and so she is possessed by “a silent sullen kind of Grief, which cou’d not break out either in Words or Tears” (129). When
Roxana considers her own repentance during the height of the storm, she describes “every one of Amy’s Cries” as reverberations of her own wickedness. The difference between them is that Roxana “said all these things within [her]self, and sigh’d and mourn’d inwardly; but Amy, as her Temper was more violent, spoke aloud, and cry’d, and call’d out aloud, like one in Agony” (126). Although Amy’s repentance eventually “wore off,” the maid’s penitence allows her to imagine a life beyond her shame, whereas Roxana has “no
View of a Redeemer,” only the “Repentance as a Criminal has at the Place of Execution, who is sorry, not that he has committed the Crime, as it is a Crime, but sorry that he is to be
Hang’d for it” (129). Amy’s vent, her outward expression, validates her amatory heroism; she provides the audience with a resonant passion, which the reader can choose to pity or not. With her silence, Roxana goes against the tradition of heroines in both amatory fiction
159 and the domestic novel68 and denies readers any extremity of feeling beyond the numbness of her guilt.
Roxana repeatedly incriminates the fulfillment of her desires, even when her coquettish skill enables her to rid herself of debt, enjoy the affection of a prince, and find an honest husband in the Dutch merchant. If the public’s biggest critique of the coquette is that she chooses too much, as Braunschneider claims69, then Roxana certainly subjects herself to disapproval. She can only be a wife or a whore, not both. When Amy sends notice to
Holland that her mistress’s first husband is dead—news that would allow Roxana to honestly marry the Dutch merchant—the heroine pauses to consider herself a wife, again.
While Amy “congratulate[s] [Roxana] upon [her] being now a real Free-Woman,” Roxana distorts the maid’s meaning, that she is free to marry the Dutch merchant, and, instead, identifies the free woman as a whore (132). Amy interprets the desire to be free as potential for her mistress to do as she pleases, whereas Roxana sees it as further evidence that she is indeed a whore:
The Whore sculks about in Lodgings; is visited in the dark;
disown’d upon all Occasions, before God and Man; is
68 Even in the domestic novel, where desire exists largely in the private sphere, the heroine uses language to either express or resist power. Nancy Armstrong’s thesis for Pamela in Desire and Domestic Fiction states, “On [Pamela’s] language alone depends the power of her resistance” (119). There are moments when Roxana verbally expresses her feelings to Amy and/or her lovers, but it is Roxana’s tendency to stifle those feelings on her own that makes her an anomaly in both amatory fiction and the novel. The heroine in domestic fiction is confined by actual, physical boundaries, by actual men or actual walls; Roxana is not, yet she shuts herself up anyway. 69 Braunschneider notes that “women’s power to choose resides most importantly, and perhaps even entirely, in the arena of spousal selection,” so when critics of the coquette say she chooses too much, they mean she chooses to live her life unmarried (99). While Roxana does not intend for her husband to abandon her, she is proposed marriage several times after the brewer’s abandonment, and, she refuses them all except for the Dutch merchant’s proposal, which she only accepts near the end of the narrative. 160
maintain’d indeed, for a time; but is certainly condemn’d to be
abandon’d at last, and left to the Miseries of Fate, and her own
just Disaster: If she has any Children, her Endeavor is to get
rid of them, and not maintain them; and if she lives, she is
certain to see them all hate her, and be asham’d of her; while
the Vice rages, and the Man . . . begins with her; leaves her;
uses her as she deserves; hates her; abhors her; and sees her no
more; . . . and the more effectually [Man] looks in, the more
his Aversion to her, encreases; and he curses her from the
Bottom of his Soul. (132-3)
The only freedom in Roxana’s definition of a whore is a radical one—that she is
“disown’d” by both God and Man. She debases Amy’s ideal notion of freedom to better fit society’s perception of her as a depraved, abandoned creature, in which there is no pleasure at all. Roxana narrates herself as a Devil, her life a hell. She exacerbates society’s negative perception of whores in order to punish herself more harshly. The irony is that the punishment she imagines is far worse than society could actually inflict upon her; in fact, at this moment, Roxana negotiates her relationship with the Dutch merchant, a man who willingly hears Roxana’s pleas for autonomy but sees that she only inhibits herself, for he concludes, “Dear Madam, you argue for Liberty at the same time that you restrain yourself from that Liberty” (157). The Dutch merchant’s willingness to negotiate marriage on
Roxana’s terms suggests that he is an equitable partner, and this is clear, even to Roxana,
“If ever any Man in the World was truly valuable for the strictest honesty of Intention, this
161 was the Man” (157). However, she limits herself so scrupulously in the role of whore that she cannot conceive of herself as worthy of this autonomy, especially alongside someone as good and honest as the merchant.
Roxana takes no pleasure in the luxuries coquetry affords her. Theresa
Braunschneider finds that “[w]ith the waning of the figure of the comic coquette comes the rise of the novelistic heroine who is a paragon of female virtue, who does not primarily seek pleasure or happiness but wants more than anything to be good” (138). Roxana is unimpressed by any of the choices she secures as a coquette because they do not elevate her to any position beyond a whore. She feels as if she violates class structure in her exchanges with the jeweler, the prince, and the Dutch merchant; in each relationship, she is sure to illustrate the contrast between herself, “the most cursed Piece of Hypocrisie” and the men who are “good-humour’d” and “honest” (Defoe 300). She aligns goodness with the upper class, baseness with the lower class, and she locates herself in the latter category. More importantly, Roxana understands the classes to be completely separate and immutable.
Roxana’s only intentional choice is employing Amy as her maid so that Amy becomes the site of her mistress’s displaced desire and shame. According to Saxton, “Amy is . . . the tool of the authorized heroine,” so when Amy takes action on behalf of her mistress, she does so, under the assumption that Roxana will be pleased with her work (Narratives 93). Amy, as both an amatory heroine and a servant, is doubly oppressed. Not only is Amy cognizant of the public arena’s various obstacles that limit her potential for desire, but she is also subject to Roxana’s unreliable tutelage, and so her work is never done. Because Amy puts into action that which Roxana only considers secretly, Amy is burdened more heavily by
162 guilt. Roxana, however, only narrates part of her maid’s guilt because the expressiveness of
Amy’s passion seems to make Roxana feel worse.
In this context, then, the reader has very little insight as to the extent of Amy’s fears when she is finally confronted by Susan, Roxana’s estranged daughter. Roxana only describes the maid’s terror as it relates to her duty; Amy tells her mistress, “I’ll put you out of your Pain, and her too; she shall never challenge you for her Mother in this World”
(273). Roxana also speaks of fear and guilt collectively, even though Amy does most of the discoursing with Susan face-to-face; when Amy says she “was ready to sink into the
Ground,” Roxana interjects, “and so I was too,” and, “this Girl’s Conduct terrify’d Amy to the last degree, and me too” (269-70). Roxana’s vanity does not allow her to see past her own fear, so she lumps Amy’s fears in with her own. Saxton explains Amy’s intention to murder Susan as indicative “of her role as obedient servant,” which also mitigates the maid’s guilt (Narratives 93). However, this explanation only allows the reader to see the murder of Susan as a solution to relieve Roxana’s shame, not Amy’s. As the true amatory heroine, tasked both with securing her own desires and those of her mistress, Amy is vulnerable to feeling the insurmountable pressure of her own guilt. It is Amy who rids
Roxana of her children in the first place, who dances around the room in response to the jeweler’s seeming kindness only to be raped by him later, who keeps up the pretense for her mistress for thirty years, lying to others about how they arrived at such success. Roxana explains Amy’s murder of Susan as the maid’s remedy against her mistress’s exposure, but what about Amy’s own fears of exposure? What might Susan reveal about Amy that renders her the more shameful of the two women? It is as if Amy finally realizes the
163 boundaries of her servile role; if Susan exposes Roxana, it is not Roxana who will be made to suffer, but Amy.
As such, Amy’s aggression towards Susan is a response to her own increasingly tortured conscience. This is evident in Amy’s talk of self-violence, which only appears at the end of the narrative, after Susan taunts her with a grin, saying, “I know how it all is, well enough” (Defoe 270). When Amy, “so provok’d,” says to Roxana that “it wou’d be absolutely necessary to murther [Susan],” the mistress responds angrily, saying she will hang Amy herself, if she dare tries (270-1). Roxana repeats this to Amy a second time;
“why you ought to be hang’d for what you have done already” (273). Amy interprets
Roxana’s genuine anger as her own inevitable punishment, and afterwards, the maid is described as “ready to hang herself” (281). The only way for Amy to escape the confines she now sees herself in under Roxana’s rule is to defy her mistress’s orders not to kill
Susan. Roxana’s relationship with Amy comes to an end when the mistress says, “I wou’d not murther my Child, tho’ I was otherwise to be ruin’d by it,” to which Amy replies
“somewhat rough and short” that “she wou’d” (313). Amy’s last words to her mistress hint at a double meaning. Not only does the maid admit that she will kill Susan if she finds the opportunity to do so, but Amy also reveals that she would be ruined by the child, whereas
Roxana would not.
Defoe reinforces class distinctions by the narrative’s end. Even though Roxana consigns herself to be as lowly as Amy, her inherent upper middle-class status prevents her from doing the maid’s dirty work. Amy’s story ends much like Onahal’s in Oroonoko, in that both maids violate the rules of their superiors to serve their own interests. Both are also
164 subsequently removed from the narratives altogether. Roxana does not find out what happens to Amy, only that “whatever was done, Amy had done it” (325). In fact, after grieving for Amy “for above a Month,” Roxana assigns Amy’s duties to her “Friend the
Quaker” and finds her new servant “as faithful as Amy cou’d be, and as diligent” (326). Not only does Amy essentially disappear from the narrative, but Roxana places the Quaker “in
Amy’s stead,” seemingly undermining the maid’s long-standing loyalty (326). The final displacement of Roxana’s shame falls to Amy, and their story ends abruptly afterwards.
Scholars like Kirsten Saxton and John Mullan portray Amy as Roxana’s “bad angel,” but I think doing so casts Amy’s story as less important than Roxana’s, when Amy is the reason
Roxana has a story to tell at all.
Murdering Susan against Roxana’s will is the only recourse Amy has to her own subjectivity, and this reality speaks volumes about the sustainability of female desire in fiction. Defoe presents female desire as threatening and shameful for his central heroine, and for Amy, given her role as maid, desire is both elusive and fraught with dangerous consequences. Amy does not have the class agency to function as a coquette, so her tragic fate is a bit easier to explain with so few options available to her. Roxana, on the other hand, does possess that agency, and yet she squanders it, which is suggestive of Defoe’s foresight in imagining an end to the coquette’s popularity in fiction. Roxana is what
Braunschneider might call an “anti-coquette” narrative because it “associate[s] the pursuit of pleasure with moral selfishness and a bleak future” (138). Roxana falls short of other leading heroines in amatory fiction because she is unhappy when we meet her and yet does nothing to remedy her disquiet. Plenty of heroines before Roxana experience the monotony
165 of shameful desire; they sigh, weep, and dwell on their misery, but Roxana, even after succeeding in her various endeavors—to abandon a life of poverty, to be well-kept and desired by all—remains unexpressive and unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Amy seem to yearn for her mistress’s mobility, influence, and wealth, and the reader imagines that if Amy had access to those privileges, then she would surely execute them for her own pleasure.
Nonetheless, Amy finds satisfaction in the opportunities she is given and does not perceive of her life as marginalized or ill used by Roxana until the end. With Susan, Amy finally realizes that Roxana cares only about herself, despite the many sacrifices the maid has made on her mistress’s behalf. When Amy realizes her relationship with Roxana is inequitable, and just how inequitable it is (via Roxana’s several threats of violent punishment), Amy kills Susan as if to spite her mistress, to reinforce her power over
Roxana. In the end, it is only Amy who knows “the Secret History of [Roxana’s] Life,” which also means that Amy is the only one with the power to undo her.
The abrupt ending of Roxana has earned a fair amount of critical attention; the various alternative endings to Roxana that followed its publication hinted at the text’s initial unpopularity. Defoe’s original ending is best explained by Robert D. Hume, who says that the author intended “to jolt the reader and leave him, like Roxana, hanging in a state of suspense and suspended expectation. The reader is not allowed to stand off and coolly watch Roxana’s agonies. Instead, he is thrust into her perplexed condition and left to flounder—a device Defoe can well afford, for the novel’s point is already complete” (490).
Hume’s explanation makes sense because Defoe’s heroine also denies readers the satisfaction of their sympathy. By withholding information from the audience, Defoe also
166 withholds feeling. Throughout the novel, Roxana exists solely as an object of consumption, for both the fictional and reading public, but Defoe breaks that cycle in the final two paragraphs, when he denies readers the pleasure of witnessing her final demise. In fact, in the final lines of the text, no other characters appear with Roxana, except for Amy, who makes a sudden reappearance, with a quick “and Amy also,” so that she is the only one to share in her mistress’s misery. There is no indication that Roxana reveals the truth to her husband or her children, and so, in this context, her ending is successful; the self- deprecating heroine punishes only herself, and by Defoe’s narrative logic, Amy, too. In fact, in Defoe’s preface to Roxana, he explains away the reader’s need to sympathize with or castigate Roxana’s unruly behavior, as we already know she is repentant:
It is true, She met with unexpected Success in all her wicked
Courses; but even in the highest Elevations of her Prosperity,
she makes frequent Acknowledgements, That the Pleasure of
her Wickedness was not worth the Repentance; and that all the
Satisfaction she had . . . cou’d [not] quiet her Mind. (2)
Even more interesting than Defoe’s justification of Roxana’s unruly behavior is the preface’s omission of Amy. However, the reader might assume he refers to her, obliquely, as “Vice . . . painted in its Low-priz’d Colours, ‘tis not to make People in love with it, but to expose it” (2). On the surface, Defoe seems to describe his figurative depiction of
Roxana’s wickedness, but the reader might also interpret this as Roxana’s vice, exacerbated, or “painted,” by Amy’s low-prized character, her lowly “colour,” or status. It
167 is Amy, after all, who Defoe exposes as responsible for Roxana’s evil, for the maid commits the most heinous crime of all in murdering Susan.
In Roxana, Defoe recognizes and exposes the limitations of female desire in the form of amatory fiction. Having lived through the English Restoration, Defoe’s last publication was likely influenced by Behn and his own contemporaries, Manley and
Haywood. He must have known how the reception of their work was changing, and it is as if Defoe wrote Roxana in order to bring the narrative of female desire in public space to its conclusion. If the imaginative coquette finds it difficult to attain metaphysical pleasure in public spaces, then she might find her desires better satisfied somewhere else. By the time
Defoe makes this contribution to amatory fiction, readers are well aware of the obstacles that coquettes face, which also means that, given the contemporary setting of amatory fiction, Defoe’s heroines are aware, too, and they can either endeavor to face the inequitable public, as Fantomina, or despise it as the world-weary Roxana. Amatory fiction begins with ill-prepared heroines and didactic narrators, but it ends with the jaded, conscientious
Roxana. The titular character is markedly aware of her own circumstances and the way that society will define her; she says, in clarifying the terms of her “marriage” with the jeweler,
“[we] were no more than two Adulterers, in short, a Whore and a Rogue; nor . . . was my
Conscience silent in it, tho’, it seems, his was; for I sinn’d with open Eyes, and thereby had a double Guilt upon me” (Defoe 43). The motif of multiplied guilt allows for a meta-critical interpretation of Defoe’s authorial intentions. By Roxana’s logic, people can avoid the burden of guilt if they choose to silence their conscience, or better yet, they can remain ignorant of the secret altogether, as knowing is half the shame. The challenge Defoe poses
168 is whether or not we readers, too, sin with open eyes—do readers indulge in Roxana’s defeat, or does her defeat expose the limited equitable opportunities that fail to accommodate women’s interests in public space? Because readers share in entertaining
Roxana’s history, they are implicated in the same seductive vices as she is and are thus denied the privilege of punishing her at the end.
Even if Roxana is the least satisfied coquette character in this project’s selection of amatory heroines, she is important to the study of the genre because she exposes the flaws in a patriarchal society that presents options for female desire as dichotomous, and her indifference to her upward mobility reaffirms her disgust with the scanty options society makes available to women—bourgeoisie housewife or prostitute, “above the world” or
“infinitely below it.” Is there potential for a woman’s mobility in the public arena beyond the life of coquette? The voice of Roxana’s self-deprecation throughout the narrative is a resounding “no.” Unlike Fantomina, Roxana’s metaphysical pleasure decreases in each new role, suggesting that she moves further away from a place where she was once possibly content—as a wife, where she was free of the stain of her public reputation. Other amatory heroines adopt the coquette persona to maneuver through public space and redirect the public’s attention from their real purpose, to experience desire in society on their terms, but
Roxana does not choose coquetry for these reasons. Her first husband’s abandonment thrusts her into this public position, and Roxana seems to resent that the role of housewife was so abruptly taken away from her. If the successful heroine in amatory fiction is to locate an appropriate space in which to express and fulfill her desires, then, for Roxana, this space does not exist in public. Roxana is the most mobile, conscientious of amatory
169 heroines, and she exhausts all available options to satisfy her desires in the public arena; from England, to France, to Holland, Roxana fails to locate a space where she can negotiate desire honestly and equitably. In this context, by reimagining the trajectory of amatory fiction in the fixity of Roxana’s private misery, Defoe finds a space for the domestic novel’s arrival.
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Coda
The Space Amatory Fiction Makes; On Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
I use my brief discussion of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded
(1740) to show how amatory fiction aided the development of the novel. While Richardson himself and several literary critics70 insist on Pamela’s distinction from amatory fiction because of its “purging of the erotic,” on the one hand, or its exceptional depictions of subjectivity, on the other, this coda identifies the novel’s private setting of desire as the crucial difference between the two literary forms (Keymer xxii). Pamela incorporates several of the same topoi of amatory fiction: 1) the presence of an inexperienced heroine,
Pamela; 2) a motivation to pursue desire, (in this case, Pamela’s endeavor to be honest in all facets of her life); 3) an unreliable male lover/protector, Mr. B; and 4) an amatory plot that the expression of desire in Pamela’s letters and Mr. B’s subsequent seduction upon reading them. Additionally, the amatory heroine, “Pamela Andrews is assailed by the sexual enticements/threats of an older, richer, better-educated and well-connected man,” as
Bowers notes, just as Charlot is accosted by the Duke in Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis
(253). Also as in amatory fiction, Pamela “never resists Mr. B so far as to end his pursuit, even when it is within her power,” just as Fantomina never resists her Beauplaisir (255).
Richardson’s prefatory intention in Pamela—“to paint Vice in its proper Colours, to make it deservedly Odious”—recalls Defoe’s preface in Roxana—“when Vice is painted in its
70 Thomas Keymer’s introduction to Pamela discusses Richardson’s openly stated intention “to elevate the novel of passion and intrigue” (Oxford World’s Classics Edition xxii). Richardson’s preface states his larger goal to “Improve the Minds of the Youth of both Sexes” (3). John Richetti claims that Richardson’s fiction is “moralized and localized, purged of erotic effects and rooted more clearly in particular legal and moral circumstances” (English Novel in History 15). 171
Low-priz’d Colours, ‘tis not to make People in love with it, but to expose it” (Richardson 3;
Defoe 2, emphasis added). The difference between the vice in Defoe’s Roxana (as well as in all the amatory fiction I have discussed) and that in Richardson’s Pamela is in the space in which it appears. As Nancy Armstrong points out, desire in Pamela manifests in “the new domestic world,” while desire in amatory fiction, as I have demonstrated, is represented across all spaces, both public and private (109).
For Armstrong, Pamela is a unique representation of female desire because the servant heroine’s private expression leads to her rise in status, which Armstrong finds is a representation of modern sexual agency. Armstrong focuses on Pamela’s writing as a
“distinctively female form of subjectivity” because, in writing, “a servant girl” manages to
“claim possession of herself as her own first property” (118). However, I believe that
Armstrong overstates the uniqueness of this novel: “Pamela can dramatize, as no other kind of writing can, the triumph of this sexual self over traditional forms of political identity because the novel arose out of the struggle between modes of writing to define sexuality”
(119). As I have shown in this dissertation, amatory fiction represents desire in very similar terms. For example, heroines in amatory fiction possess sexual selves that also transcend traditional forms of political identity, such as Roxana’s maid Amy, a servant and letter writer like Pamela, who not only fulfills her desire for a lover in the French prince’s
Gentleman but also operates as a respected business woman, securing her mistress’s affairs and subsequently her own financial stability. Armstrong’s thesis implies that expressions of female desire in amatory fiction were not defining sexuality the way that Richardson’s
Pamela is somehow uniquely capable of doing, and when literary historians celebrate the
172 novel for its ability to do what “no other kind of writing can,” then the problem of amatory fiction’s second-class status remains unresolved. This kind of criticism denotes a clearly defined marker between amatory fiction and the novel, suggesting an impermeable boundary between the two forms rather than the gradual development of the novel from amatory fiction.
John Richetti asserts this distinction more explicitly, when he says that “the social realm in amatory fiction (when it appears) is a function of the plot rather than an object of representation,” as it is in the novel (84). My discussion of the amatory coquette heroines disproves this limitation evidenced by their broad criticisms of society. For example,
Fantomina wonders why men “have tastes so very depraved” and Roxana comments on the
“Brutallity and blindness of mankind” (Haywood 23; Defoe 74-5). As Theresa
Braunschneider also notes, “the eighteenth-century English coquette functions as cultural shorthand, citing a series of contemporary concerns and conveying judgments about particular groups defined by gender, race, and class,” (3). The novel is continuously hailed for something that amatory fiction lacks, yet the evidence reveals that realism, individualism, and representations of modern sexuality are simply buried in the text—in the quick-paced thought processes of amatory heroines, or the sudden hailing of a chariot from
Bath to London. The narratives of amatory fiction, like the space they represent, are constantly in motion, yet close textual analysis of amatory fiction reveals heroines’ perceptive understanding of their individual experiences.
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In amatory fiction, the heroine is largely on the move gaining experience and subsequent knowledge from her desirous pursuits in society.71 For example, when Isabella stands on the scaffold in Behn’s History of the Nun, she poignantly reflects on her crimes and extols her life an as invaluable lesson, even though that lesson results in her death.
Pamela’s self-awareness, in contrast, is represented in the heroine’s interiority, the expressions of which match the domestic space she inhabits. In particular, Pamela’s letters home record and reflect on her thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The only threat to
Pamela’s desire in her master’s home is Mr. B himself, not the “talking world” as it is for
Fantomina and Roxana. As such, the narrative of Pamela’s desire resides in her interiority in private space, where her thoughts are less prone to outside influence, giving them an endurance that public space denies the amatory heroine’s repeatedly interrupted thoughts.
Armstrong describes the heroine’s interiority in the English novel as the development of “a self that is deeper than and essentially different from the self that has already been written,” locating examples of this identity in the various rooms that the novel’s domestic space presents, such as libraries, enclosed dining rooms, and bedchambers with a single window
(207). Pamela, in particular, demonstrates a keen awareness of her domestic space, the manipulation of which shows her endeavoring to attain autonomy. For example, from within her “doubly secur’d closet,” using only “Pen and Ink,” Pamela not only writes letters but also contrives a plan to escape Mr. B’s estate altogether (Richardson 170). Because
Pamela’s interiority manifests in secure spaces that match her domesticity, the expression
71 This mobility does not preclude the desire to know herself. For example, Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1747) clearly states this intention: “To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject” (154). 174 of her self-awareness is illustrated more lucidly in the novel than it is in amatory fiction’s mutable public setting.
The private setting of Pamela also accommodates the heroine’s interiority because it provides Pamela with a tangible physical space in/on which to express her desire. The walls of the house, including the “lock’d Closet,” the “two Bars of the Window,” and “the
Leads,”72 are domestic constructs that prevent the outside world from knowing and/or exploiting Pamela’s desires, and the blank paper itself imposes a boundary on how much or how little the heroine chooses to reveal (168). In Pamela, there is no danger of her desire running off of the page; it is confined by the page, as well as in the home. In contrast, the amatory heroine’s desires are continually in a state of redefinition and relocation, responding to the outside world, and sometimes the subject of scandal. While female desire in amatory fiction certainly meets a more abrupt ending than in the novel, the self- awareness of amatory heroines that develops alongside their extant mobility still allows for their desire to transcend the space of the narrative, prompting readers, like other characters in the text, to sit in reverie at the amatory narrative’s conclusion.
Furthermore, while amatory heroines’ interests are both shifting and, at times, shrouded by the plot’s attention to public space, Pamela’s desires in her domestic setting are known and consistent. In an early letter to her father, Pamela assures him that “by God’s
Grace, I will never do any thing that shall bring your grey Hairs with Sorrow to the Grave. I will die a thousand Deaths, rather than be dishonest in any way,” and she signs it as his
“dutiful Daughter till Death” (Richardson 15). Her desire to be dutifully honest is repeated
72 “The lead frames of the panes in lattice or stained glass windows” (OED)
175 throughout the novel; for example, she begs Mr. B to let her “enjoy [her] Poverty with
Honesty” (192). Pamela is not one of Behn’s nuns peering out of the convent grates, in search for a more secular, public life; when Pamela attempts to flee Mr. B’s estate, she hopes that “God will direct [her] Steps to some good place of Safety” (169). In fact, because Pamela never imagines a role for herself beyond her private life, her marriage to
Mr. B is, in some ways, the logical outcome of the plot. Despite her aborted attempt to escape, marriage appears to be the only way Pamela will remain honest in this domestic setting, given the ever-present threat of Mr. B’s wayward desire. Pamela appears to adapt quite easily to her eventual role as wife, as when she walks through the garden with Mrs.
Jewkes and reflects on how differently Mr. B’s estate appears to her: “But, Oh! my Prison is become my Palace,” using monarchic language to describe her sudden rise in status
(349). Armstrong similarly notes that, after her marriage, Pamela’s “writing waxes suddenly stuffy, static, and both patronizing and obsequious” because as “mistress of the household,” she now rules the other servants by her “moral example” (124-5). Pamela’s intentions to retain her honesty are fulfilled when she is both servant and mistress of the household. The enclosure of the household, which largely prevents threatening outside interference, allows her to fulfill her desire to be honest in either role, as servant or mistress.
Amatory fiction’s space, always in flux, simply did not allow for the level of interiority that the confines of the domestic novels could offer. Less interiority in the heroines does not mean that amatory fiction does not represent female desire. My dissertation has shown that amatory fiction is an indispensable part of the history of the
176 novel. The hastiness with which female desire is represented in amatory fiction—in theatres, carriages, and seraglios—in some ways resembles the relatively little attention that amatory fiction receives in literary history. Out of necessity, heroines in amatory fiction live a life in motion to match the constant flux of public space, whereas heroines in the novel find recourse for their desires in domestic implements, like letter writing. Whereas
Armstrong argues that Pamela’s epistolary form “redirect[s] male desire away from the surface of the female body and into its depths,” I show how the many and varied amatory fiction narrators transform the physical seduction scene into a lesson on female experience.
For instance, Manley’s narrator, Sir Charles Lovemore operates similar to Pamela’s eavesdropped letters: he tells both an interlocutor, Chevalier D’Aumont, and the reader the fascinating story of Rivella as he enjoys a walk in the garden. My project’s focus on space as the difference between amatory fiction and the novel is intentionally amenable, as space readily lends itself to multiple interpretations, physical, metaphysical, textual, and so on. By analyzing amatory fiction through the lens of space, we can better view the various gendered, aesthetic, and ethical assumptions about the literary form that have relegated it as secondary to the novel and irrelevant to literary tradition.
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