The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work

At last, this long-awaited volume of essays has arrived. Saxton and Bocchicchio’s edition is the first critical book-length study devoted entirely to Eliza Haywood, and hopefully it is the forerunner of many to come. Thirteen thought-provoking essays, plus an introduction, illustrations and bibliography make this a valuable volume. Most of the essays are historicized studies or concerned with Haywood’s engagement with or reworking of popular novelistic forms and writers. Studies of politics, parody, imitation, fiction-making, and exoticism among other themes successfully demonstrate that Haywood merits, withstands, and rewards close critical examination. Saxton and Bocchicchio’s excitement about the possibilities for Haywood criticism is infectious and most of the scholars in this collection match the editors’ enthusiasm in their critical offerings. The collection considers Eliza Haywood’s “passionate fictions” chronologically, ranging from one essay on her first novel, Love in Excess, through her often studied Fantomina and The British Recluse, her lesser known scandal novels, exotic tales, and histories, to three critical considerations of her 1751 domestic novel, The History of Betsy Thoughtless. Rounding out this excellent reconfiguring of Eliza Haywood and her works are two essays on what contemporary perceptions of Haywood and her imagined readers represented in the fashioning of the literary canon.

The first essay establishes the direction of the volume. In “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions,” Paula R. Backscheider states that it is time to rewrite Haywood’s  “story.” It is no longer acceptable simply to assess Haywood’s long career as “mercenary and bipolar” (43). We must ask how we can connect Haywood’s texts of the 1720s and the 1750s in meaningful ways; and we need to give her work more primacy in the history of the novel rather than seeing it as derivative or reactive. In a broad summary of Haywood’s texts, Backscheider shows how Haywood was innovative in her style and themes and continued to develop concerns, motifs and forms throughout her career. As the essays in this collection prove, Backscheider’s questions are being addressed: Haywood is taken seriously as an original writer and she has been discovered as a skillful author with specific social, political and literary interests.

Many of the articles in this collection demonstrate how Haywood was concerned with the fictionality of social and cultural institutions and how she used her own fictions to expose those artificial constructions. Margaret Case Croskery’s “Masquing Desire: The Politics of Passion in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina,” is a rewarding new perspective on a tale that has long been the focus of feminist criticism. Croskery looks not only at the “politics of seduction [but also] the shared contingencies of social and narrative fictions” (70), contending that Haywood destabilizes the gendered dichotomy of the victor/vanquished paradigm to unmask its inadequacies. As the heroine dons her many masks to keep the interest of her lover, she manipulates her role as “other” to create and celebrate alternative social fictions for herself. Dealing with another popular text, Rebecca P. Bocchicchio’s “’Blushing, Trembling, and Incapable of Defense’: The Hysterics of The British Recluse” rewrites Spacks’s and Ballaster’s earlier interpretations of Haywood’s hysterical heroines. Using eighteenth-century formulations of hysteria, Bocchicchio exposes the destructive power for women of the conflict between social constructions of “female” (insatiably desiring) and “feminine” (the complete absence of desire). Haywood uses the “hysterical overpresence” of her heroines to show that it is not a “naturally feminine” condition (102). Cleomira’s and Belinda’s stories of their hysteria enable them to articulate their histories, using the debilitating condition productively. However, their ending is not optimistic: they remove themselves entirely from the conflict between the female and the feminine. This is “an evasion rather than a solution, and this text can offer no answers for the desiring woman” (112). Also concerned with fictional depictions of women and how they attempt to negotiate their reactions to a hostile world is Kirsten T. Saxton’s stimulating “Telling Tales: Eliza Haywood and the Crimes of Seduction in The City Jilt, or, the Alderman turn’d Beau.” Saxton demonstrates how Haywood, through satire, her reworking of the romance and the Southern European revenge novel, and her destabilization of narrative cohesion “unsettles patriarchal fictions of law, heterosexual romance, and textual authority” (117).

Particularly welcome in this volume are the studies of four of some lesser-studied works by Haywood. In “’A Race of Angels’: Castration and Exoticism in Three Exotic Tales by Eliza Haywood,” Jennifer Thorn tracks Haywood’s representation and development of these compelling motifs in a tale from Letters from the Palace of Fame, “The History of Montrano and Iseria” from The Fruitless Enquiry, and Philidore and Placentia. Thorn presents Haywood’s “dream of non-gendered, because non-reproductive, individual autonomy” as well as the idea of the patriarchal European “race” played against “the Orient as liberating” (191; 190). Felicity Nussbaum’s study of Haywood’s foray into the cultural phenomenon that was Duncan Campbell, “a deaf-mute secular prophet who flourished from 1710 to 1730” (194) is a fascinating piece on the little known A Spy upon the Conjuror and The Dumb Projector. “Speechless: Haywood’s Deaf and Dumb Projector” examines eighteenth-century literature on Campbell for its images of disability and otherness. It compares Haywood’s use of his condition as “an emblem of women writers’ struggles to be heard and their difficulty in articulating that condition” (209). Both essays reveal that Haywood’s works and interests were wide-ranging and that much more study remains to be done before we can truly appreciate the scope of her oeuvre.

Two essays consider the significance of party politics in Haywood's writing with varying results. “Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess” by Toni Bowers begins with the controversial and unsubstantiated claim that Haywood’s first novel “functioned in its day as a powerful work of Tory partisan polemic” (48). Concentrating on the virtuous Melliora’s resistance and capitulation throughout the novel, Bowers offers that these actions are “consistent with Tory strategies for constructing ideological integrity and partisan resistance at a difficult time” (49). The reading of Melliora’s relationship with D’Elmont as one of “collusive resistance” or “ideological purity within unavoidable complicity” (63) is an attractive one as far as sexual politics go (though Bowers does not consider the fact that Melliora does love D’Elmont), but it is definitely strained when she adds the dimension of national politics. Without textual or contextual proof to back up her theory, Bowers merely reinterprets Melliora through the now popular move of labeling Haywood (with absolute confidence) a Tory. The essay has some valuable insights about the novel, but the forcibly applied Tory template is unconvincing.

A much more rewarding work is Ros Ballaster’s “A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction.” Changing her 1992 opinion that Haywood retreated from Behn’s and Manley’s style of figuring “(female) party political agency through sexual political narrative” (143), Ballaster now finds that Haywood effectively used satire, irony, and intertextuality to make her political statements in the 1720s and 1730s. Careful readings of Memoirs of …Utopia, The Secret History of … the Court of Caramania, and Adventures of Eovaai, demonstrate how Haywood used “both imitation and critique” of Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Dunciad to satirize Walpole (151). Ballaster concludes her essay by stating how Haywood cleverly stands the Scriblerians on their heads in her writing: “If the mock-epic identifies a feminized “romance” as undercutting the heroic potential of masculine agency associated with the epic, Haywood’s “mock-romance” [Eovaai] identifies a masculine force of “rigid” interpretation as restricting, perverting, and containing the wayward libidinal affections of female romance” (164). In an essay that creatively dialogizes with Ballaster’s, David Brewer’s “’Haywood,’ Secret History, and the Politics of Attribution” shows what the construction of “Eliza Haywood” meant to writers like Pope and Swift. What Brewer discovers is that the Scriblerians were anxious to distinguish their satires—like Gulliver’s Travels which satirizes political figures like Walpole—from secret histories like Haywood’s. “Prior to the Travels, fictionalized partisan narrative, as a genre, was inextricably bound up with amatory fiction” (231). Brewer makes the case that any popular woman writer—Centlivre or Thomas, for instance—could have stood in for Haywood in the Dunciad. Pope simply needed a signifying “Authoress,” “something of a scapegoat, a figure pilloried in an attempt to distinguish categorically the kind of writing “she” embodies from that engaged in by the Scriblerians” (230).  

The next three articles, each examining Betsy Thoughtless in different ways, are complementary as well as contestatory in their juxtaposition. Andrea Austin’s “Shooting Blanks: Potency, Parody, and Eliza Haywood’s The History of Betsy Thoughtless” and David Oakleaf’s “’Shady bowers! and purling streams!—Heavens, how insipid!’: Eliza Haywood’s Artful Pastoral” each examine how Haywood cleverly plays with established literary forms to create her own ironic visions of women and literature. Austin historicizes parody as a masculine form in the eighteenth century, “a type of literary ambition, … and so an act particularly publicly inappropriate for the woman writer” (262). Austin convincingly argues for Haywood’s “flexible use of intertextuality” as the “vehicle for pointed, critical comment, giving the work the effect or purpose of a parody” (264). Her study of Haywood’s techniques of characterization, repetition, imitation and quotation, depict Haywood as an artist thoroughly in control of her material. Like Austin,  Oakleaf contends that Haywood artfully uses form for parody. Oakleaf’s essay is scholarly with a light tone as he examines Haywood’s employment of pastoral oppositions in Betsy Thoughtless. Trueworth is proven a dangerous seducer who entices in the role of the pastoral swain; while Betsy's nymph recognizes the ploy and refuses his offer of pastoral retreat. Haywood’s deconstruction of seductive language proves that women must be careful readers, and readers must be attuned to Haywood’s self-parody.           John Richetti’s “Histories by Eliza Haywood and Henry Fielding: Imitation and Adaptation” pits itself against all of the other essays here. Presenting Fielding’s criteria from Tom Jones on how to write a history, Richetti reminds us that by “invention” Fielding meant “a quick and sagacious Penetration into the true Essence of all the Objects of our Contemplation” (241). According to Richetti, Eliza Haywood could not meet Fielding’s criteria. By focusing mainly upon The History of Betsy Thoughtless but with a brief glance at The Fortunate Foundlings and a few others, Richetti suggests that Haywood was “literal-minded and vulgar, lacking true inventiveness” (258).

Christine Blouch’s concluding essay, “’What Ann Lang Read’: Eliza Haywood and her Readers” can be productively juxtaposed with Backscheider’s and Brewer’s presentations of Haywood as author. Blouch examines the political act of gendering and classifying Haywood’s readers that resulted in her exclusion for so long from the literary canon.

Saxton and Bocchicchio have successively compiled an informative and exciting collection of essays on some of the fictions by, and about, Eliza Haywood. In her introduction, Saxton states that Haywood’s works demand “rereadings on multiple fronts” (17) as “Haywood’s experiments with form and theme, her engagement in current socio-political debates, and her breadth of literary accomplishment across the genres combine to make her a crucial figure in eighteenth-century letters” (10-11). The essays in this volume certainly demonstrate that Haywood is a skilful and evocative author who can amply repay close critical readings.