by Steven Moore
“The novelty pleased,” as Roxana says about some rival Oriental dancers, “but yet there was something wild and bizarre in it . . .” (179). I’m not sure what to make of Roxana, or of Defoe’s other novels. On the one hand, they seem like commercial novels that merely tweak well-established genres—except for the sui generis Journal of the Plague Year—and read like they were dashed off between more important projects, which they were. They look gauche compared to some of the sophisticated French novels published around this time, such as Challe’s Illustrious French Lovers and Hamilton’s Comte de Gramont (which may be where Defoe got the name Roxana, if not from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters). Their concern with sin and repentance is almost medieval, though Defoe’s grasp of the implications of capitalism is perceptibly modern. Yet there’s a rude vitality to them, an immediacy to these earnest monologues by questionable characters who can’t be bothered to organize their stories into tidy chapters, an illusion fostered by the fact they were all published anonymously. They talk openly about money—bad manners in most previous novels—and do so in a plain-as-porridge prose style that was fairly new to the novel. (Only Roxana features any figurative language.) They didn’t have an immediate impact on other novels, except of course for Robinson Crusoe, which launched its own genre (the robinsonade). Indeed, until the 20th century, that was read as a boys’ adventure novel, the Journal as history, Moll Flanders and Roxana as trashy entertainment: only a few readers considered them literature. Since then critics have overcompensated by heaping more praise on them than they perhaps deserve, but it can’t be denied Defoe left a footprint on the history of the novel as indelible as the one that thunderstruck his most famous character.
“Amatory fiction” is the preferred term for the female-authored novels that began flooding the market in the years following the publication of Manley’s novels, essentially romances with a makeover and a new attitude. They still dealt with romantic relationships, but as Paula Backscheider notes in her book on Defoe,
the heroines in increasing numbers came to be less conventional, less interested in marriage, more aware of their conflicts with society, which might be represented by parents, friends, or fiancé, more talented and intelligent, more students of books, people, and the world, more altruistic, and more likely to find partial fulfillment in life than to end in death, infamy, or bliss. . . . These women characters tended to be conventionally reared, if a bit spoiled, unusually independent and enterprising, unwilling to behave conventionally, and strong in defeat. . . . They refuse to accept the roles their families and society have chosen for them, they work for their own material and sexual gratifications, and they remain unrepentant. (183–84, 187–88).
A few push their defiant independence to ludicrous extremes, such as the woman who tears out her eyeballs and throws them at the Turkish emperor threatening to rape her (in The Noble Slaves by Penelope Aubin [1722]), but in general these women are more proactive and knowing than their romantic older sisters—which is to say their authors self-consciously manipulate the conventions of the romance genre they inherited. Like the “chick lit” that emerged in the 1990s, most of these novels were intended merely as mainstream entertainment rather than works of art, written for money rather than for critical acclaim, but there are a few that rise above the norm, beginning with a pioneering novella published in 1713, Love Intrigues by Jane Barker (1652–1732). Its narrator possesses virtually all the qualities of Backscheider’s composite heroine: at age 15, Galesia attracts the attention of her cousin Bosvil, a law student, who strikes her as a much more interesting suitor than her neighbor Mr. Brafort (who rather creepily has loved her since she was “about ten or eleven”). For the next three years they have trouble defining the relationship: she likes him but fears he’s not serious; he likes her but fears she’s devoted to Brafort, even after the neighbor suddenly falls ill and dies; Bosvil teases her by pretending he’s in love with another woman, Galesia pretends she doesn’t care, etc. etc.—typical teen stuff. Finally fed up with her excessive “caution and circumspection,” Bosvil marries another woman, and Galesia beats herself up for “all my feigned indifferency and forced coldness towards him.”135 It’s like a season of MTV’s Awkward.
Though Barker acutely conveys all the confusion of a smart girl grappling with relationships for the first time, she is more concerned with depicting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. After her first rebuff from Bosvil, Galesia walks in the woods and begins composing poetry in her head: “Methinks I hear the Muses sing,/And see ’em all dance in a ring,/And call upon me to take wing.” She writes out her poem on a smooth-barked ash, and “thinking it impossible ever to love any mortal more, resolved to espouse a book, and spend my days in study” (14–15). She asks her older brother to teach her grammar, which he does, but not without the sexist condescension that male critics would treat Barker and other emerging women novelists: Galesia complains that he’s convinced she’ll be “overthrown by the first difficulty I should meet with in syntax, knowing it to be less easy to make substantive and adjective agree than to place a patch, curl, or any other additional agreement on a young face” (15). She’s aware that “many count a studious woman as ridiculous as an effeminate man, and learned books as unfit for our apartment as paint, washes, and patches for his. In fine, the men will not allow it to be our sphere, so consequently we can never be supposed to move in it gracefully; . . . But let the world confine or enlarge learning as they please, I care not” (37). As her relationship with Bosvil fails to progress, Galesia turns more of her thoughts into verse, but when it looks like Bosvil will propose after all, she receives a warning in a dream that he will disappoint her and is reminded by “an angry Power” of her true vocation: “my uncouth guardian said,/—Unlucky maid,/Since, since thou hast the Muses chose,/Hymen and fortune are thy foes” (25). Sure enough, Bosvil changes his mind—since Galesia is narrating this, the reader never learns why Bosvil blows hot and cold—and she’s so enraged that she snatches a steel rapier and rushes off to kill him, but then settles on a different kind of revenge: “I will go home, and write the whole scene of this treachery and make myself the last actor in the tragedy” (33).
Telling this story to a female friend years later, “Galesia”—she has given herself and “Bosvil” romance names—converts her life into “a diverting novel” (7), often interrupting her story to criticize her younger self, especially for resembling all teenagers in having “too great an opinion of their own wisdom” and refusing to confide in her mother (17). On a metafictional level, Jane Barker is telling the reader how and why she became a writer instead of a housewife (she never married), and showing off her intellectual cleavage: the novella is filled with her own poetry, literary allusions, learned references (e.g., to the legal commentary Coke upon Littleton136 and Harvey’s medical textbook Circulatio sanguinis), and much striking imagery. (“For love is like ghosts or spirits that will appear to those to whom they have a mind to speak, and to others are quite invisible” [33].) Barker got her revenge against whoever the original Bosvil was—beginning with calling him Bosvil—but more important, she dramatizes in Love Intrigues the difficulties facing women who heard the muses sing to them at a time when female authorship was still regarded by many as unladylike, even as a form of prostitution. “Punk and poetess agree so pat./You cannot well be this and not be that,” snickered a critic named Robert Gould in reference to Aphra Behn.137 Born during the Cromwell dictatorship into a family of Catholic royalists, Barker was old enough to remember how Behn had been treated (though Barker modeled her herself on chaste poet Katherine Philips, not on the profligate Behn), and she had watched the literary profession change from a coterie activity practiced by intellectuals and aristocrats to a commercial enterprise practiced by and for members of the middle class. She had written an allegorical romance in the 1680s for that earlier elite group (eventually published in 1715 as Exilius, or The Banished Roman), but Love Intrigues was the first of three novels she wrote for that lat
er, larger audience, and is a harbinger of the scorn and condescension women novelists could expect from male critics. Before I get to the two even more impressive novels Barker published a decade later, however, I want to introduce a woman who attracted a load of scorn and condescension but who so dominated the genre in the 1720s that she was acknowledged as “Mrs. Novel” by future novelist Henry Fielding.
Eliza Haywood (1693?–1756) burst onto the scene in 1719 with the aforementioned Love in Excess, or The Fatal Enquiry, a three-part novel that begins like a feminist spin on traditional romances, but ends up validating their old-fashioned mores.138 We’re introduced on the first page to an independent young Frenchwoman named Alovisa, who chafes against “that custom which forbids women to make a declaration of their thoughts” (37), meaning their attraction to a man, and in her specific case, a gorgeous man named Count D’Elmont. In a refreshing role-reversal, D’Elmont plays the beautiful woman in earlier novels who is indifferent to love but can’t help attracting unwanted suitors. Like Backscheider’s composite, Alovisa is “unusually independent and enterprising, unwilling to behave conventionally,” and devises a way to let the count know he has an admirer; but her proactive attitude, appealing as it is to the modern reader, is soon revealed to be her fatal flaw. Her rival for D’Elmont’s affections is a simpler, less enterprising girl named Amena; through a misunderstanding, D’Elmont assumes Amena is his secret admirer and takes advantage of her genuine love for him one night by attempting to rape her—the first of many such scenes in the novel, always interrupted at the point of penetration. He thens learns that it is Alovisa who has been sending him the flirty letters, and since she’s rich and Amena is not, he marries Alovisa and is relieved to hear the latter decides to hide her shame in a convent. But what seems like a victory for Alovisa in part 1 turns to defeat in part 2, where D’Elmont is again positioned between another alliterative pair of women: party girl Melantha and convent-bred Melliora, who becomes D’Elmont’s ward a few days after his wedding. Watch and ward fall in love with each other at first sight; Alovisa jealously senses she has a rival, but assumes her husband still pines for Amena. Melliora, “restrained by honour, and enflamed by love” (137), struggles with her mixed feelings for the married count, and literally struggles against him in three near-rapes cock-blocked by the coquette Melantha, as much to Melliora’s confused frustration as his. (Haywood’s acknowledgment that convent-bred virgins have sexual feelings too is one of her innovations.) Via a bedtrick, Melantha manages to have sex with D’Elmont the night he accidentally kills his jealous wife—piercing her with his sword in the dark after symbolically doing the same to Melantha—which sends Melliora fleeing to (where else?) a convent. Haywood repeats the pattern in the rather ludicrous part 3: in Italy, D’Elmont is sandwiched between modest Camilla and immodest Ciamara, and I don’t have to tell you which one dies. (Actually, Camilla is beloved by Melliora’s brother, but she fulfills the same function as Amena and Melliora.) After some ridiculous plot twists and turns, the novel ends with a group wedding in which D’Elmont is united with Melliora and lives happily ever after.139
Love in Excess is a 17th-century novel in racy 18th-century clothing. Several times it approaches pornography in its panting, heaving depictions of the attempted rape scenes, and Haywood rarely misses an opportunity to portray D’Elmont without his clothes on. (He’s often in bed when he receives visitors, and has a habit of leaping out naked in response to their news; in one such instance, Melliora looks down and beholds “the effects of her unbounded passion” on him [250].) The female characters all itch with desire, even the good girls, and favor nightgowns or other flimsy garments that have a tendency to “fly open” and expose their charms. Yet the novel’s 18th-century erotic and domestic realism—unhappily married Alovisa and D’Elmont get into shouting matches—can’t disguise what is at heart a 17th-century French romance. Ciamara’s defense of free love in part 3 echoes that of Galathée in D’Urfé’s Astrea published a century earlier; there are inset “histories” formally similar to those in midcentury heroic romances; and Haywood relies on traditional 17th-century themes and plot devices (innocence besieged, love versus affection, a bedtrick, letters recited from memory, disguises, crossdressing, incredible coincidences, a group wedding, etc.). All she does is turn up the heat: as Richetti insists, the success of this and her later novels is due “to her ability to manipulate the fable of persecuted innocence to obtain the maximum erotic-pathetic intensity.”140
At times Love in Excess reads like a parody of 17th-century romance, and at other times Haywood seems to pander cynically to “respectable” readers who require their heroines to be virtuous but who relish seeing their virtue menaced, repeatedly, by handsome noblemen. It’s disappointing to see a witty, intelligent woman like Haywood punish witty, intelligent female characters such as Alovisa and Ciamara; the latter is a sophisticated intellectual who spends “the greatest part of her hours” in her own personal library, which may be a “satire on [French] ladies whose disposition to gallantry seldom affords much time for reading” (190), yet she, like the urbane Alovisa, is killed off. True, Melliora is seen reading a book of philosophy in public, but in private she reads an erotic book by Ovid while reclining half-naked after a bath (in which compromising position the count, of course, catches her), as though her earlier display of intelligence were just an act. (The reading tastes of Amena and Camilla, if any, are unrecorded.) For this reason the novel feels compromised, hypocritical even, as Haywood seems to acknowledge when her narrator suddenly bursts out and defends women who love in excess:
These insipids, who know nothing of the matter, tell us very gravely that we ought to love with moderation and discretion—and take care that it is for our interest—that we should never place our affections but where duty leads, or at least where neither religion, reputation, or law may be a hindrance to our wishes. Wretches! We know all this, as well as they; we know too that we both do and leave undone many other things which we ought not; but perfection is not to be expected on this side the grave. And since ’tis impossible for humanity to avoid frailties of some kind or other, those are certainly least blamable which spring only from a too great affluence of the nobler spirits. (186).
That blanket apology would seem to cover the passions of Alovisa, Melantha, and Ciamara, but Haywood sacrifices them to the Mammon of the marketplace; only the decorous virgins survive. More than any other novel, Love in Excess gave birth to the soft-core bodice-ripper that has titillated modern women ever since Rosemary Rogers revived Haywood’s formula in the 1970s.
Buoyed by the financial success of Love in Excess, Haywood began churning out an excess of novels over the next decade. There’s no happy ending to her third novel, Idalia, or The Unfortunate Mistress (1723), nor does it waste much time getting to the prurient stuff: as early as page 12, the headstrong, 14-year-old title character—an Italian nobleman’s daughter who has run away from home to meet an admirer—fends off a rapist, only to submit to him two pages later. Thereafter she passes through the hands of one abductor after another who, enticed by “her malevolent beauty,” threaten to rape her; in one rare flight of fancy—the rest of Idalia is written in standard romancese—even the sun, “if capable of those desires which poets have described him with” (112), is tempted to jump her. Escaping from her abductors and disguising her self as a young man, she is rescued by a woman, but she too is “half mad with desire” and wants to have her way with Idalia. This woman, a jealous fury named Antonia, happens to be the new wife of one of Idalia’s earlier abductors, whom she had fallen in love at first sight with, and after getting rid of the wife and living in sin for a while, the couple is forced to separate. Idalia’s reputation catches up with her and she is treated like a courtesan until, after some soap operatic twists and turns, she accidentally kills her lover, and then commits suicide to put an end to her unfortunate life.
Haywood spells out the moral on the first page—“we shall find almost all the woes we languish
under are self-caused, . . . either to pursue the gratification of some unruly passion, or shun the performance of an incumbent duty”—but I looked in vain for evidence “that Idalia is one of Haywood’s most detailed examinations of the female psyche in her early fiction,” as editor Mary Anne Schofield claims.141 I saw only a vain airhead and a vengeful harpy overacting in a melodramatic rehash of 17th-century clichés (ravished virgins, abductions, pirates, a shipwreck, crossdressing, bandits, two interpolated “histories,” poisoned wine, the monastery as a haven for distressed maidens, etc.) It’s efficiently done, and I can see why it was popular, but I can’t see calling it literature.