In the events that follow, Galesia is apparently undone by pride –
though it is also possible that pride might in fact have saved Galesia from an even sorrier fate, for Bosvil’s intentions are as puzzling to the reader as they are to Galesia. When he eventually visits her home, his behaviour is coolly respectful but no more, and he speaks to her father, not about marriage to his daughter but seeking his advice on another woman who had been proposed as a suitable marriage prospect. With considerable effort Galesia maintains her mask of indifference, but just as she is regaining her equanimity Bosvil’s manner changes and she is able to read in his behaviour the ‘Declaration of a violent Passion’:
‘though he made no formal or direct Address … his Eyes darted Love, his Lips smiled Love, his Heart sighed Love’ (p. 90). But while his tongue remains silent she cannot appear even to notice his failure to speak, without risking ridicule as an ignorant country girl who has mistaken an idle town flirtation for a genuine declaration of love. Her hopes are revived when she learns he has warned off a rival, but then he tells someone else that he has fixed on a neighbour’s daughter. She does not hear from him for weeks, but he returns more assiduous than ever, addressing her in the language of the romantic lover, begging a speedy marriage or else he will die, and brandishing a marriage licence.
She remains outwardly reserved, affecting not to take him seriously
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and resorting to that old standby, a preference for the single life. But when he once again retreats from courtship into mere civility, she cannot turn around and quarrel with him for not courting her without
‘making [herself] the Lover, instead of the Person beloved; which was not only contradictory to [her] haughty Humour, but seemed in a manner to invert Nature’ (p. 99).
Part of the problem is, on the one hand, a society that speaks in code and acts in masks and, on the other hand, a young girl who foolishly presumes to have conquered the code and who is absurdly confident her lover will be able to decipher the signals she sends him, however esoteric their meaning. She believes not simply that ‘the merest Freshman in Love’s Academy’ would be able to read and understand the language of her own ‘broken Words, stolen Sighs, [and] suppressed Tears’ (p. 95) but, more particularly, that Bosvil will be able to interpret a letter telling him to go away and leave her in peace as an invitation to renew his suit in earnest.25 Galesia has obviously been reading too many books, her expectations of a lover’s powers of penetration based on the intuitive grasp of the romance hero, who routinely performs feats of deductive brilliance. When thwarted in love, Galesia also resorts to other romance expedients, turning to the single life of poet, scholar and ‘Arcadian shepherdess’.26 These too, in romance, form part of the language of love – less lifestyle alternatives than statements of silent suffering – but Galesia seems to take them seriously as career options, and in fact proves so adept in rural affairs that her father hands over to her the management of the farm. A romance heroine would no doubt find it galling to have her pastoral inclinations taken so literally,27 and at least some of Galesia’s difficulties stem from a too-ready application of the assumptions of fiction to common life.
Drawing on the autobiographical element in Barker’s works, some critics suggest that her fiction rehearses an alternative identity for the single woman,28 but there is also something farcical in the way Galesia plunges into a new vocation each time Bosvil fails to fulfil his promise and then promptly abandons it the moment he beckons. (Deep in the study of Latin in her vocation of scholar, for example, she is speedily convinced of Bosvil’s sincerity by information she receives third-hand, at which point grammar rules become ‘harsh Impertinences’, and
‘the only syntax I studied, was how to make suitable Answers … when the longed-for Question should be proposed’ [p. 91].)
The romance conventions upon which Galesia relies – the language of eyes, smiles, and sighs and the traditional device of pastoral retreat
– seem to be understood, by her at least, as practical solutions to the
110 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre social conventions constraining women in her own world. She is governed by a code of behaviour that requires a young woman to appear neither to be trying to win a man nor to be incapable of or averse to returning love should it be offered, and Galesia thinks that she has performed this balancing act consummately, avoiding both a ‘too ready Compliance’ and a ‘too rigid Opposition’ (p. 91), neither encouraging Bosvil nor being uncivil towards him. But the danger lies, not simply in overbalancing, but also in too zealously guarding against an embarrassing tumble, and Bosvil in the end claims that Galesia’s studied indifference – assumed, she tells her friend, in accordance with ‘the exact Rules of Virtue and Modesty’ (p. 98) – finally convinced him that her heart was as cold as her behaviour towards him. Galesia questions the sincerity of his explanation, arguing that he was simply blaming her for his own inconstancy, and remarking that men are more apt to make the opposite mistake, believing women to be ‘forwarder than they really are, taking even Complaisance and Civilities for Affection’ (p. 110). But Bosvil conceivably finds her behaviour quite as frustratingly indecisive as she finds his.
Love Intrigues provides a host of good practical reasons, aside from the more idealistic dictates of virtue and modesty, why it is safer for a woman not to love, and certainly not to be aware that she loves, until the man has made public his intentions. It is not simply that, as Jane Spencer suggests, ‘an admission of love [is] tantamount to a loss of chastity’;29 an admission of love, even if only to herself, commits a woman to a dissimulation that carries with it the threat of disaster if her mask of indifference is so hard and cold that the potential lover is driven prematurely to despair. The ‘supreme adventure’ of courtship is, as Amanda Vickery describes it, ‘a tightrope of romantic excitement’, and a ‘fastidious decorum’ could prove quite as disastrous as
‘imprudent encouragement’.30
Vickery is speaking as a social historian, describing the constraints on courtship in eighteenth-century England. It is not a feminine ideal that she identifies as constraining courtship behaviour but a family dynamic in which the major concern is over who has the right and the power to dispose of a woman in marriage. In this context, the prohibition on loving first acquires an even more pragmatic rationale, serving to eliminate what is assumed to be the one impediment to a daughter’s trouble-free disposability: a preference for someone other than the family’s preferred suitor.31 In Love Intrigues the issue of a prior affection is also raised by Bosvil as an explanation of his readiness to interpret Galesia’s modesty as indifference (claiming that Galesia’s persistent
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reserve led him to believe that all her amorous inclinations had been laid to rest with an earlier suitor who had died before he could press his claim). A prior claim on the woman’s heart is, if nothing else, a reassuring alternative to the mortification of outright rejection.
For all the passionate intensity of these heroines – even Galesia’s decorum and circumspection are not proof against her fury when Bosvil proposes his friend as a potential husband, and she starts out for his house fantasizing murder – the convention that a woman ought not to love first still exerts a powerful influence, even if it extends only to outward appearances. In many respects the feminine code has changed very little from the English romances of the preceding 200
years, though, if amatory fiction is any guide, the assumptions on which it is based are increasingly being understood as more notional than real, and more expedient than ideal, at the same time as the advice literature is formulating the feminine virtues as natural and normative. It is not until much later that conduct books seem prepared to acknowledge the force of circumstance rather than ‘nature’ in models of female perfection, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, John Gregory’s advice on courtship is informed as m
uch by the practical realities of social life as by the nature of being female. He observes that
‘it is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is, That love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the consequence of our attachment to you’, and he is confident that such prudence is well within a woman’s keeping, if only because of the odds against happening upon a half-decent prospect within the limited circle of a woman’s acquaintances: ‘supposing a woman to have sense and taste, she will not find many men to whom she can possibly be supposed to bear any considerable share of esteem. Among these few, it is a very great chance if any of them distinguishes her particularly’.32
At least, such is the case, Gregory suggests, in England, where women are endowed with a more modest share of that sensibility that disposes towards tender attachments. But even in fiction that takes advantage of warmer climes and warmer dispositions to flout behavioural constraints, the cultural authority of the feminine ideal still exerts itself.
Sexual politics in Love in Excess
In Eliza Haywood’s fiction, there are numerous admirable women who love first – or at least love independently of firm evidence that their feelings are already reciprocated – and by the end of the first decade of
112 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre her highly prolific career (stretching from 1719 to 1756) her name had become synonymous with ‘the profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers’ who were prepared to defy the rules of decency and decorum in their portrayal of illicit female desire.33 Yet, even in a novel such as Love in Excess ( published in 1719/1720, in three parts), which portrays sympathetically a number of women who love with a passionate integrity that defies the constraints of decorum and even chastity, there is still, for all their spirit and good faith, an implicit hierarchy of justifiable forwardness within this cohort of intrepid women. And at the pinnacle can be found the ‘matchless Melliora’, who alone does not love first – even if there are only milliseconds in it.
Melliora does not appear until Part 2 of Love in Excess, establishing herself immediately as of a different order to the throng of women who yearn for Count D’Elmont the moment they set eyes on him.
Convent educated and unacquainted with fashionable society, Melliora is called to the deathbed of her father, who had also been D’Elmont’s guardian and who had earlier asked D’Elmont to perform the same role for his daughter. But the moment Melliora’s eyes meet D’Elmont’s, ‘their admiration of each others perfections was mutual, and tho’ he had got the start in love, as being touched with that almighty dart, before her affliction [her grief] had given her leave to regard him, yet the softness of her soul, made up for that little loss of time, and it was hard to say whose passion was the strongest’.34
Melliora’s distraction – initially grief-stricken and with eyes only for her dying father until consoled by D’Elmont – allows her to claim the delicacy of a truly virtuous woman, and allows Haywood, too, the advantage of having it both ways: a heroine whose sensibility is both passionate enough to support love at first sight and modest enough not to betray inflammatory symptoms (symptoms that might be accused of actually precipitating desire in the other party). Melliora’s virtue is also protected by having misheard her father’s dying words, so that she at first thinks D’Elmont is being recommended to her as a husband rather than as a guardian, a misunderstanding that can be credited with putting the idea of love into her head, thus avoiding the imputation of prior amorous inclinations.
When we consider how far Haywood is prepared to go in giving women the initiative in affairs of the heart, it may seem surprising that such protection should be necessary. Love in Excess is a morass of love intrigues, beginning, prior to Melliora’s arrival on the scene, with the rivalry of Alovisa and Amena for the love of D’Elmont – Amena having been brought to D’Elmont’s attention by his misinterpretation of an
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overture from Alovysa (in the form of an anonymous letter advising him of an admirer). Alovysa dispatches her rival and marries D’Elmont (who is more attracted by Alovysa’s fortune than her person), but her subsequent jealousy when she detects another, though unidentified, rival complicates a second intrigue, the affair of Ansellina (Alovysa’s sister) and Brillian (D’Elmont’s brother), which was already complicated enough due to the jealousy of Bellpine (Brillian’s rival for the hand of Ansellina). The couple are further harassed by the interference of Alovysa seeking to revenge herself on D’Elmont through his brother.
The unidentified rival is Melliora, but D’Elmont’s designs on her, hampered by his marriage to Alovysa, are further complicated by the amorous schemes of Malantha, daughter of his friend Baron D’Espernay (who also has designs on Alovysa), and are complicated yet again by the mayhem that climaxes this series of intrigues, when an evening of thwarted assignations culminates in D’Elmont’s accidental killing of Alovysa (do not run in the dark with an unsheathed sword) and Melliora’s mortified retreat to a convent.
The first half of this story (comprising Parts One and Two) takes place in France, where, a new admirer writes to D’Elmont at the beginning of Part Three, for women ‘it would be a crime unpardonable to modesty, to make the first advances’ (p. 166). There has so far been little evidence of such strict modesty, but in Italy, where D’Elmont repairs after Melliora’s renunciation of the world, women are even more audacious, prompting a new series of entangled intrigues. First there is Ciamara (the letter writer) and her increasingly brazen and shameless lust for D’Elmont. His endeavours to extricate himself from her scheming are complicated by involvement in another intrigue involving Frankville (Melliora’s brother) and his love for Camilla, step-daughter to Ciamara and intended for Ciamara’s brother, Cittolini, who is also Frankville’s friend and benefactor and who has promised him the hand of his daughter, Violetta (who in turn suffers a chaste and unrequited passion for D’Elmont). In the meantime, the final entanglement has been provided by Sanguillier, who has spirited Melliora away from the convent and holds her captive until she submits to returning his love. The disentangling of this intrigue also ties up the various threads of the story when D’Elmont, Frankville, Camilla, and Violetta (disguised as the page Fidelio) just happen to take refuge in Sanguillier’s house in a storm.
For all the book’s celebration of a love that is, for women as for men, an uncontrollable, all-encompassing tyrant, there is nevertheless a scale of virtue discernible here, closely parallelling the boldness of
114 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre a woman’s initiatives.35 Apart from the matchless Melliora, all the major female characters love first, though not all make the first advances. In order of merit, after Melliora comes Violetta, who loves first, but selflessly, even when there is no hope of return, and who does not speak her love until her deathbed. Ansellina also loves first, though she does not speak until she knows her love is returned (and at first speaks anonymously in lines added to a poem Brillian writes on the pedestal of a statue). Camilla also loves first, or at least loves independently of Frankville, and has to resort to a stratagem to determine the state of his heart. Amena loves first, and lets it be seen in her eyes, though by a D’Elmont already primed (by a misdirected stratagem) to search out the signs. Alovisa loves first, and speaks her love and, though anonymously, in a fashion that promises satisfaction.
And then there are Ciamara and Malantha, who not only love first, and speak first, but are also prepared, shamelessly, to make all the running. There is clearly a standard that determines degrees of culpability among these women who are all prepared to love in excess of the limits of propriety, though propriety is not the only measure of a woman’s honour.
Perhaps the most sympathetic and moving account, amongst all the fiction of this period, of a woman’s justification in taking the initiative in love is a letter of extraordinary sensitivity and composure that Camilla writes to Frankville after he has re
jected her, persuaded of her inconstancy by a ruse of Ciamara’s. Frankville and Camilla had already consummated their passion, and Frankville does not explain why he has turned against her, preferring to seem simply inconstant himself rather than have her think he is jealous and take satisfaction from it.
Camilla’s reply is achingly candid, and unusual in its suggestion of a moral life outside the proprieties society demands of a woman: in spight of your inconstancy, I never shall deny that I have loved you – loved you even to dotage; my passion took birth long before I knew you had a thought of feigning one for me, which frees me from that imputation women too frequently deserve, of loving for no other reason than because they are beloved, for if you ne’er had seemed to love, I should have continued to do so in reality.
(pp. 220–1)
It is a remarkable defence, flying in the face of the convention that a delicate woman would never love at all were it not for gratitude at being beloved,36 and remarkable also for accepting without regret or
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resentment the reciprocation of a passion that has proven, she thinks, unfounded:
I shall always esteem your virtues, and while I pardon, pity your infirmities; shall praise your flowing wit, without an indignant remembrance how oft it has been employed for my undoing; shall acknowledge the brightness of your eyes, and not in secret curse the borrowed softness of their glances, shall think on all your past endearments, your sighs, your vows, your melting kisses, and the warm fury of your fierce embraces, but as a pleasing dream, while reason slept, and wish not to renew at such a price. (pp. 221–2) From the very beginning of Love in Excess it is ‘custom’, not reason or nature, that silences women’s desires and forces them to resort to stratagems designed to provoke men to speak first – the custom that
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