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Article Excerpt
Although Eliza Haywood's works have generally not been considered political, examination of three of her novels from the 1720s reveals a significant political component. The narrators of these novels identify themselves as political actors by taking up the position of outsiders whose apparently disinterested position endows them with virtue and qualifies them to offer criticisms. These criticisms argue that behavior excused by politicians as merely private is, in fact, political behavior that affects the public sphere. Haywood thus aligns herself with the Tory element of the opposition to Walpole and claims a place for herself within the political sphere.
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Eliza Haywood's works have generally been viewed through the lens of amatory fiction. Eighteenth-century critics such as Clara Reeve saw Haywood's career as defined first by her beginning as an amatory writer and second by her apparent reform; and modern critics have tended to follow this division, though they have largely dropped its moralistic component. (1) But this paradigm obscures the significant place that party politics holds in Haywood's work. While recent scholarship has drawn attention to the role of politics in Haywood's writings in the 1730s and 1740s, (2) little serious consideration has been given to her political works of the 1720s. Although critics such as Toni Bowers have recently argued that novels such as Love in Excess do carry political meaning, (3) most discussions of Haywood's novels of the 1720s follow Ros Ballaster in considering them only as amatory fiction; even an avowedly political text such as Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) is dismissed in Ballaster's terms as "social ... myth" rather than political critique. (4) Yet careful consideration of Haywood's political novels in the political context of the time reveals that they do, in fact, constitute a specific party-political attack on the corruption and vice of those in power. Two main features of these works demonstrate (and indeed constitute) their political assault: first, the presentation of the novels' narrators as political figures, and second, the novels' persistent identification of the private with the political. In all three of Haywood's explicitly party-political fictions Memoirs of a Certain Island, The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727), and The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-Adamitical History (1736)--Haywood's narrators identify themselves as political actors by taking up the position of outsiders whose apparently disinterested position endows them with virtue and makes them uniquely qualified to offer criticisms. The criticisms these narrators offer, in turn, consistently argue that behavior excused by politicians as merely private is, in fact, political behavior that affects the public sphere.
Haywood had strong Tory and Jacobite sympathies, and, like the earlier writers Aphra Behn and Delariviere Manley, drew on the political ideology of the Tory party as material for her fiction. But by the time Haywood began to write prose fiction, the political landscape was quite different from the one occupied by her predecessors. After the Jacobite invasion attempt in 1715, the Tories were excluded more and more from power; although the party never truly gave up hope of a return to governmental positions, (5) it came to depend increasingly on the rhetoric of opposition. From the late 1720s on, Tories began to form a loose coalition--together with a number of disempowered Whigs--in opposition to Robert Walpole and his government of Court Whigs. As Tory ideology and rhetoric adjusted to proscription and opposition, Haywood used the Tory position in a new way to claim a public voice for her narrators. Instead of making her narrators political insiders like the narrators of Behn's and Manley's novels, her narrators identify themselves as political outsiders, those who deserve political power but are excluded from it by corrupt politicians. These narrators use Tory and opposition rhetoric to establish their authority as exemplars of public virtue.
In constructing this particular kind of narrative authority, Haywood claimed a role in public discourse. Though her narrators position themselves as outsiders, they do not seek to place themselves outside the sphere of public and political activity. (6) Rather, they claim that the position of outsider is the only virtuous one and thus the most authoritative stance from which to comment on public issues. This stance is most obvious in Haywood's overtly political novels because she aligns herself with the opposition to Walpole. As the work of J. G. A. Pocock illustrates, opposition discourse found one of its most powerful tropes in the idea that a disinterested civic virtue was necessary to battle the corruption resulting from the intrusion of exchange and trade into politics. (7) Haywood's narrators cast themselves as outsiders in precisely this way: that is, as those who have been thrust out of or denied positions of power but who still claim the right of public, political discourse because of their virtue. The politicized claim to outsider status renders her novels and their narrators emphatically public and rejects Whiggish and Lockean efforts to push Tories and women into a private sphere cordoned off from public influence. (8)
Perhaps Haywood's most obvious instance of a narrator using outsider status to construct narrative authority occurs in the political scandal novel Memoirs of a Certain Island, which is narrated for the most part by Cupid. The mode of narration owes an obvious debt to Manley's New Atalantis: here, an unnamed youth fills Astrea's and Virtue's role as the naive visitor, and Cupid takes the place of Intelligence as the knowledgeable and talkative narrator. Unlike Intelligence, however, Cupid does not base his authority on a claim to a place in a court or political hierarchy. Instead, he positions himself as an outsider, a once-honored god whose worship has been rejected in favor of corrupt and licentious practices. His use of this trope aligns him with the opposition to Walpole and sets up the stories he tells as a series of attacks on the effects of Walpole's government on the moral state of the country. Cupid first appears as a figure "astonishing to humane Eyes" (9) observed by the "Noble Youth" who arrives at the "Island famous for Arts and Sciences" (MCI, p. 1). (10) The stranger is overcome first with the beauty of the landscape of the Island and then with Cupid's beauty, but his reactions to each differ slightly. In responding to the landscape, the stranger is excited about how he might get something out of it: "How could I ever wander thro' this enchanting Scene, and still Find something new to entertain Reflection!" (MCI, p. 2). No such coherent thought is possible, however, when he sees Cupid, Instead, he is almost "depriv[ed] ... of his Senses" by "Amazement" and "Terror," and "prostrate[s] himself on the Earth in humble Adoration" (MCI, p. 3). This difference in his reactions points to an important issue in the politics of the time: the distinction between self-interest and civic virtue. The stranger's first reaction is one of self-interest; he focuses on how he might enjoy the scene. His second reaction, however, is quite the opposite: he is so overcome with awe that he is unable to think of himself. Cupid thus immediately functions to turn the traveler away from corrupt self-interest and toward the recognition of proper authority.
As the audience for the stories Cupid tells, the stranger thus serves, in part, as a figure for an ideal reader who accepts the authority of the novel's narrator. For...
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