Kirsten Saxton | Northeastern University (original) (raw)

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2001

and to my research assistant Jennifer Campell, whose help was invaluable. Heartfelt thanks as wel... more and to my research assistant Jennifer Campell, whose help was invaluable. Heartfelt thanks as well to my friends and family, who all make my life richer and more possible. Particular thanks to Ruth Saxton, my mother and best reader, for the splendid example she sets as professor, writer, and parent, and to my husband, Karl, for love and support. This page intentionally left blank In her own time, Haywood's "scandalous fictions" were tremendously popular with the reading public. However, the politics of representation were seriously attenuated in early eighteenth-century England; the nature and import of "truthful" representation was debated on multiple fronts, including that of literature. If a story could not claim to be historically true, based on fact, then it could not be taken seriously and could not engender any positive moral effects (McKeon, Origins 121). Since fiction as a project was seen to be largely characterized by irreverent mendacity, even when it was written by men, it is not surprising that fiction written by women would have engendered a particularly vitriolic response. Haywood came onto the literary scene during the 1720s, a decade that heralded a regulatory moment in English history. The Waltham Black Act of 1723 created more than two hundred capital offenses and "signaled the onset of the flood-tide of eighteenth-century re-Brosse (1725), she poignantly describes the gendered inequities of power within the Augustan literary arena: "It would be impossible to recount the numerous Difficulties a Woman has to struggle through in her Approach to Fame: If her Writings are considerable enough to make any Figure on the World, Envy pursues her with unweary'd Diligence; and, if on the contrary, she only writes what is forgot as soon as read, Contempt is all the Reward, her Wish to please, excites; and the cold breath of Scorn chills the little Genius she has, and which, perhaps, cherished by some Encouragement, might in Time, grow to a Praiseworthy Height" (n.p.). Here, Haywood presents herself much like one of the heroines of her early fiction: she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. Yet, ironically, it is within the literal space of the proof positive of the successful commodity of women's writing-the pages of her book-that she defines the position of the woman writer as ultimately untenable. Haywood's move from amatory to domestic fiction and conduct book literature was lauded for years as a moral conversion. By the mid-eighteenth century, Richardson had shifted and cornered the fictional market, offering an iconic vision of female passivity as a moral model, and Haywood altered her tone accordingly, producing a series of novels and periodical writings which, at least superficially, tended toward moral instruction, including, for example: A Present for a Servant-Maid (1743), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), The Female Spectator (1744-46), Life's Progress Through the Passions (1748) Epistles for the Ladies (1749-50), The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and The History of ]emmy and Jenny ]essamy (1753). Infamy.-Consider ... the Reasons why Women are debarr'd from reigning? Why, in all the Earth, excluded from publick Management? Us'd but as Toys? Little immaterial amusement, to trifle away an Hour of idle Time with?" (242). Haywood still has not broken into our established literary canon: almost no work has been done on her drama or journalism; her early works are grouped under the slightly suspect category of "amatory fiction," with its hints of lascivious, not quite top-drawer literary production, and her later novels are often dismissed as overly didactic, decent copies of male-authored work. I hope that this collection opens the door for continued conversations about Haywood as she, no longer "debarr'd from reigning," enters the canon. Haywood's experiments with form and theme, her engagement in current socio-political debates, and her breadth of literary accomplish-of the Camp," which is set in a coffeehouse)-all forms that Haywood would employ. In that same decade, Joseph Addison and Defoe wrote memoirs, serial novellas, and fictions about Count Tariff, Lady Credit, and Sir Politick Falsehood, 4 and Jane Barker began Love Intrigues with allusions to England's recent wars and rebellions. It was the decade in which Defoe and others used the forms of memoirs, journals, and secret histories to fight the major political battles of the day. All of these forms had a long history, especially in France, of being vehicles for political commentary and argument, and all were well-developed forms. 5 These forms were what we call formula fiction; readers expected and got a certain kind of narrator, a set of characters in a predictable configuration, obligatory scenes, revelations, and confessions, and the "news behind the news"-in other words, "explanations" of the personalities, motives, and machinations behind news events. Many of these forms used private conduct and conversations to reveal character and scheming. Their subjects were often power and privilege; politics, sex, economic gain, and cultural capital functioned in the narratives as signifiers, as subjects, and as metaphors for each other. In 1709, The Diverting Works of the famous Miguel de Cervantes, Author of the History of Don Quixote ... With an Introduction by the Author of the London Spy appeared. It was one of many collections of novellas that were precursors to, or contemporaneous with, the type that Behn, Gildon, and many others wrote or collected and translated. 6 Lust, avarice, mercenary values, and "arousal literature" are all here. These Southern European-style tales can be traced backward at least as far as Boccaccio and, by the end of the seventeenth century, were likely to be violent, salacious, and morbid. Collections such as Diverting Works and those by Samuel Croxall and Aphra Behn brought together translations, adaptations, and original tales; little care was taken to attribute authorship.? Yet even the writer of the introduction to Diverting Works, Edward Ward, author of The London Spy, is notable, for Ward was one of the writers who helped make London a popular setting for fiction, a revolutionary step in the history of the English novel; the fourth edition of London Spy, the gritty tour of everything from the saltpeter house near Islington to Westminster Abbey, had just been published. 1. All references in the text are to the 1997 Oxford paperback edition of Betsy Thoughtless.