Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood Susan Muse Marquette University Recommended Citation Muse, Susan, "Gender Politics in the Novels of Eliza Haywood" (2012). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 201. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/201 GENDER POLITICS IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZA HAYWOOD by Susan Vida Muse, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2012 ABSTRACT GENDER POLITICS IN THE NOVELS OF ELIZA HAYWOOD Susan Vida Muse, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2012 This study investigates how Eliza Haywood addressed ideological conflicts about gender produced by modernization in early eighteenth-century England. Expanding Michael McKeon’s theory of the novel to include “questions of gender,” I address a wide sample of novels in order to show how Haywood’s writing developed during her long career. Her first preoccupation was the sexual double standard that defined “fallen women” as society’s exiles. Influenced by the “she-tragedy” of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Haywood wrote novels that elicited pity for fallen women and searched for reasons to explain their condition. Haywood’s writing became overtly political with her first secret history, Memoirs of a Certain Island, Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725-6). Conceived as an imitation of an earlier political fiction, this novel figures the South Sea Bubble of 1720 as an organizing metaphor for the corruption of English government and society. Haywood uses amatory fiction as allegory to show that in public and in private life, worthy persons lost their places to ambitious social climbers as the nation’s institutions were made to serve the greed of a minority of self- interested individuals. Haywood’s appreciation of the connections between public life and the private subjugation of women is demonstrated in the novels she writes later that expose how men benefit and women are exploited by economic and legal structures that render women powerless. Although Haywood’s later period of writing (1740-1756) has previously been characterized as a shift towards more conservative views, I argue that The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) is in fact Haywood’s most politically radical work. She is the first English novelist to portray an abusive marriage and an attempted legal separation, and in her analysis of a husband’s legal prerogatives, Haywood shows that women share common political interests because of their gender. i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Susan Vida Muse, B.A., M.A. It is a common convention for students to acknowledge that their work would never have come to completion without the help of their advisor. In my case, it is also quite true. Professor Diane L. Hoeveler shepherded this dissertation, and me, through to the end, and I am more grateful than I can say. I benefitted tremendously from her questions, challenges and engaged readings of my work. She is a model mentor, excessively generous with her time and advice, and she has made me a better writer and scholar. I was also lucky to receive the wise guidance of two exemplary readers. Professor Stephen Karian helped me work out my ideas in numerous conversations and provided helpful support during this process. Professor John Curran, too, was generous with his time and concern and managed to rally my spirits with encouraging sports metaphors. Both men helped me improve this thesis with thoughtful comments and criticisms. The faults of this document, then, are mine alone. In addition to the members of my committee, I would like to thank Professors Krista Ratcliffe and Amelia Zurcher, who provided their advice and support at critical moments in my graduate education. Furthermore, I am indebted to the Graduate School of Marquette University for its liberal financial support, both when I was a graduate assistant and when I was a fellowship recipient. I would also like to thank the Newberry Library in Chicago: their one-month fellowship award helped me begin my research. Finally, this dissertation would never have been possible without the constant love and support of my husband, Kevin Muse. Even when I doubted myself, his belief in me never failed. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………..……………………………..........i CHAPTER INTRODUCTION: ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL......1 I. “DEARLY SHE PAID FOR BREACH OF GOOD BEHAVIOUR”: FALLEN WOMEN.………………………….……………………….……….…48 II. “THUS EVERY PART WAS FULL OF VICE”: POLITICAL FICTION......88 III. “POLITICK SCHEMES FOR FORMING INTERESTS AND CARRYING ON BUSINESS”: THE MARRIAGE MARKET…..……….…………….……120 IV. “IT WOULD HAVE BEEN AN INJUSTICE NOT ONLY TO HERSELF, BUT TO ALL WIVES IN GENERAL”: COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE......161 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………….….…..197 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..…..200 1 INTRODUCTION ELIZA HAYWOOD AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was one of the most prolific English writers of the eighteenth century, perhaps second only to Daniel Defoe. She wrote in a variety of genres, including the periodical essay, the conduct book and drama. She was most famous, however, for her novels. Henry Fielding famously acknowledged her reputation when he cast her as “Mrs. Novel” in his play The Author’s Farce (1730). Recent bibliographic research shows that she authored at least 44 texts between 1719 and 1753 that she and her readers called “novels.” 1 Most were written in the 1720s; of these, most are novella length and almost all of them are primarily love stories. 2 Critics have called these books “romances” (Whicher), “amatory fiction” (Ballaster) and “amatory novellas” (Richetti, Popular Fiction 173). There has been some resistance to calling them “novels,” partly because scholars long viewed Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) as the first novel, partly because the novel was closely associated with formal realism, and partly because the novel was accorded high culture status that, until the 1980’s, was denied to many women writers. Furthermore, twentieth-century criticism has tended to divide the novel from romance, and because Haywood wrote love stories, her fiction is frequently identified as romance. Michael McKeon changed our conception of the novel when he redefined it as a form that mediated cultural and ideological conflicts generated by the momentous social 1 This number excludes some works of fiction that seem to lack the single story line of books we identify as novels. For instance, The Tea-Table (1725) is a representation of polite conversation between the sexes that includes stories told as exemplars, but I see this text more as a didactic work of manners than a novel, per se. 2 Novels like Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1725), for instance, may include elements of Haywood’s love stories, but they are not primarily about love. 2 and intellectual modernization of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. “The genre of the novel,” he argues, “can be understood comprehensively as an early modern cultural instrument designed to confront, on the level of narrative form and content, both intellectual and social crisis simultaneously” ( Origins 22). McKeon has expanded our understanding of the novel’s purpose and function beyond entertainment or aesthetic pleasure; the novel both reflects and shapes cultural ideologies, and it is in this respect that Haywood’s early novels need to be re-examined. Her novels have too often been categorized as simple entertainments that lack a serious purpose. For instance, John Richetti argues that her 1720s novels are “popular fiction” that served as “fantasy machines” ( Popular Fiction 9), and William Warner labels her early novels “formula fiction” that were read by the masses for entertainment ( Licensing 112). Few scholars have approached her early fiction as politically inflected or socially engaged, and most of those who have study only one or two texts. 3 This study aims both to understand Haywood’s early texts as ideologically motivated in McKeon’s sense and to show how Haywood’s political commitments developed over the course of the 1720s and into the last decade of her career. In addition, since Haywood’s later novels of the 1740s and 1750s are often considered separately, almost as if Haywood were two different authors, this study will examine how the concerns she developed in her amatory fiction survive 3 George Whicher’s The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood (1915) was the first twentieth-century monograph to consider Haywood’s oeuvre in light of the history of the novel, but his treatment of her work is generally derogatory. Mary Anne Schofield’s Quiet Rebellion: The Fictional Heroines of Eliza Fowler Haywood (1982) was the second, and she does treat Haywood seriously as a feminist; however, her analyses too often reduce Haywood’s work to expressions of feminist “rage.” Juliette Merritt’s Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (2004) examines only three of Haywood’s novels. Margaret Rose’s Political Satire and Reforming Vision in Eliza Haywood's Works (1996) addresses only Haywood’s overtly political works. Kathryn King’s The Political Biography of Eliza Haywood will be published in June 2012. There are, to date, no other published monographs on Haywood’s many novels. 3 into her “mature” period. Thus, this study will provide a more extensive understanding of Haywood’s career as a whole. McKeon’s research suggests that the novel is both a product of and producer of social change. This study will explicate how Haywood’s early novels did their cultural work of confronting social change. Specifically, I will argue that Haywood’s “amatory disaster narratives” 4 expose the fault lines in the bourgeois ideology that shaped female subjectivity in the eighteenth century. They are witnesses to a complex historical transformation: England’s traditional, religious and largely agrarian society transformed into one that was individualistic, secular and commercial.