The previous three chapters have, in different ways, depicted various efforts to degrade the signifying systems or appropriate the labor of the poor and women. Yet extending the experimentation of the theater (as in Behn), resisting the naturalization of the conditions of war (as in Farquhar), or reimagining vagabond society (as in Defoe) provides vigorous responses to this renegotiation of power. That is, elite socioeconomic policies rupture but do not sever the ways in which the poor and women structure English life or even make sense of their surroundings. In this chapter, I will discuss a form, the novel, that threatens to render it impossible to represent experiential reality and therefore challenge marginalization. Eliza Haywood, one of the first English novelists, specifically considers the inherent limitations as well as the possibilities of this new form, lamenting the concomitant decline of romance, a genre that offers what the novel cannot, unbounded emotional and physical sensations. Barbara Fuchs summarizes how, contrary to our linear model of generic development, the novel neither immediately supplanted the romance nor was it considered less “dangerous for young people than the old romances” (despite the romance’s erotic and emotional excesses).1 The romance, in short, lives on. Despite women’s and the poor’s subordinate position prior to the appearance of the first novels, literature evidenced a deep interest in the ways in which they heralded new socioeconomic attitudes or energized English social and environmental life. The formalization of the novel and its fetishization of the individual produce the isolation that, by definition, disavows the source of their power—collective energies and transactions with the natural world.
In Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse (1722), Cleomira and Belinda recount their tales of seduction and betrayal to one another in a boarding house in London, describing their deep attachment to the dashing Lysander and Courtal, respectively, who, they learn by the end of their exchange, is the same man, Lord Bellamy. Like a sort of anti-Fantomina, Bellamy dons disguises in order to exploit women of different social classes, reinforcing the moral that despite the differences among men, men can be reduced to one archetype—the sexual predator. Cleomira discovers, “Your Courtal!—my Lysander are the same, and both are found only in the Person of the too lovely, faithless, Bellamy.”2 Despite the women’s shared susceptibility to Bellamy’s treachery, Cleomira’s and Belinda’s stories are categorically different, as the proprietor of the boarding house insists. The landlady enthralls the other boarders with hints of Cleomira’s history: shrouded in mystery, the recluse refuses to disclose her experiences or make them available for public consumption. And the landlady belittles or outright ignores Belinda’s plight. Belinda’s desire to meet and mingle tears with Cleomira, however, creates an opportunity for the landlady to aestheticize Belinda’s past; she will entice the recluse to listen to Belinda and, the landlady hopes, reveal her own history.
The landlady, then, identifies a clear distinction between Cleomira and Belinda. Cleomira commands fascination, and Belinda operates as an instrument to unlock the recluse’s story. Through Belinda—who operates as gloss for or a sort of simulacrum of Cleomira—one can experience the ineffable, Cleomira’s deepest emotions. Paula Backscheider, however, inverts the two stories, prioritizing Belinda’s as an example of women’s agency and consigning Cleomira’s to the oppressive past. She claims that The British Recluse demonstrates the nascent form, the novel, and the remnants of an old one: “Cleomira’s story, told first, could be part of a romance, but Belinda’s is told in the straightforward prose of the novel-to-be. Cleomira is the seduced, abandoned, helpless female; Belinda is the active agent determined to find a new life course.”3 This provocative claim—we can actually witness the birth pangs of a new genre in Haywood’s The British Recluse—is suggestive, and I would like to supplement Backscheider’s argument by noting how the two inset stories offer discrete responses to formal shifts and, moreover, to the Financial Revolution of the 1690s.4 Backscheider is right about Belinda; she extricates herself from the prospects of a loveless marriage with Worthly through her relationship with Courtal.5 While she does not think through the implications of jilting Worthly and pursuing Courtal, Belinda sets in motion the inevitable duel between the honorable Worthly and the duplicitous Courtal. Indeed, she manipulates their one-dimensionality to gain her ends. But, I argue, Haywood evinces an ambivalent stance toward evolving aesthetic forms, mourning the loss of the conceptual world of romances and regarding with trepidation the alternative world of the novel. Essentially, the shift from romance to novel entails an ontological transition from a vessel who transiently registers intense emotional and natural states that overwhelm her—love operates as the “heroine” of a romance—to the individual who works through and masters different circumstances—the individual as heroine. In order to explain these different worlds, I turn briefly to Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1914–15). His description of the ways in which the novel elevates the individual—at the expense of engaging with or disclosing the outside world—informs my reading of Haywood. While theories of the novel abound, I emphasize Lukács’s as opposed to other formulations because of the latter’s overemphasis on a dialectic of social class to explain the “rise” of the novel. For critics like Ian Watt, the middle-class emergence explains the focus on individual consciousness in the eighteenth-century novel.6 Lukács, though, underlines what was lost with the turn to novels rather than imposing a progressive paradigm on this literary trend.
In this critical work, Lukács describes the world of the novel derogatively as “second nature.” “First nature” entails humans’ complete immersion in and adaptation to socially constructed space: “Structures made by man for man . . . are his necessary and native home; and he does not know the nostalgia that posits and experiences nature as the object of its own seeking and finding.”7 In a sense, while one does not actually access nature—physical reality is unknowable—people believe they exchange with the outside world through literary symbols. “Second nature” entails a realm that self-consciously reflects on that constructed space. Michael McKeon summarizes second nature as an “estrangement from an estrangement.”8 “Second nature,” or the realm of the novel, mystifies the totalizing experience of alienation as, paradoxically, attunement and disclosure; through the novel, readers think they are accessing the world, but in reality they gain access only to an individual consciousness. What is important to this essay is Lukács description of emotional life. On the one hand, first nature is “dumb, sensuous, and yet senseless”—“senseless” because a person is not aware that she is enveloped in socially constructed space: “Nature is transformed—because of its lack of meaning—into a kind of picturesque lumber-room of sensuous symbols for literature.”9 The “symbol-creating moment” in the literature of first nature operates as a “sensually perceptible projection”;10 our representational practices can experience the “mood” of nature but cannot disclose its ontologies. Second nature, on the other hand, is “a complex of senses—meanings—which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities.”11 In second nature, novel writers can certainly represent the environment, but these representations are in actuality self-conscious aestheticized reproductions of socially constructed space: “Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of a parental home.”12 Lukács describes these phenomenological accounts, devoid of sensuality, as the empty husks of vital humanity, or, memorably, as “a charnel-house of long-dead interiorities.”13
Rather than a “dumb,” to use Lukács’s language, immersion in the “all-powerful Passion” of love,14 Belinda reflects on her world. Both ruthless and calculating, Belinda not only manipulates men, but also is complicit in Cleomira’s—and romance’s—demise. She appropriates the structures of feeling in romance to achieve her ends. On the one hand, Belinda insists that love creates its own world order and challenges (patriarchal) control: “But all in vain; the towering Flame grew higher by my Attempts to quell it, and a little time convinced me that Almighty Love despises all Control” (204). On the other, we cannot ignore that “Almighty Love” and her aims neatly coincide. That is, for Cleomira, love worsens her situation, while, for Belinda, love enables her independence. As such, Cleomira is associated with the form of the romance and Belinda with that of the novel.
Haywood, however, implies that socioeconomic forces compel her to revise her heroines as manipulative agents impervious to the forces of love. That is, the symbolic value of paper currency, as it spreads in the early eighteenth century, coincides with the development of the aesthetics of the novel in which the form, according to Lukács, “surmounts itself”15—namely, the multiple ontologies of the world are reduced to or transmuted into a form through which readers conceptualize their world. What Lukács describes as the “half-art” of the novel is not only a condemnation but also a definition: it is all form and no content. Haywood seems to use Cleomira’s history as a transitional formal and historical phase and as an excuse for the novel. Cleomira enjoys a noble ancestry, but this status does not protect her from unscrupulous business practices and spaces that serve as fertile ground for the bourgeoisie. Belinda, however, apprehends this new world order and thus is equipped to recognize Lysander/Courtal’s recourse to romance scripts or forms of seduction.
Even though the critical commonplace displaces the romance as a lower form than the epic, the romance enthralls the reader because it provides access to natural states and stimulates the vital passions. While the novel and the romance are characterized as absorptive fiction, the novel objectifies emotional states as modes to be dissected and manipulated and the romance envelops the reader in them. To explain these assertions, I have divided the essay into three parts. In the first two, I concentrate exclusively on how, in The British Recluse, Haywood provides a vigorous defense of the romance form and expresses ambivalence about the novel. I describe the landlady as voicing some of Haywood’s anxieties about this new form. Even when a hostile or indifferent audience insists that romances offer nothing fresh, this genre’s ability to disclose intense erotic and emotional states, displace the individual in favor of communal experiences, and call into question a subjectivity that gains its self-knowledge through mimesis or accumulation—more money, more power, more (sexual) conquests—will intrigue the reading public. The landlady, in fact, welcomes the opportunity to transform indifferent men into enraptured acolytes. Even if the market for romance, in other words, is saturated, the author can appeal to readers’ fascination with love, which, the landlady underscores, overpowers their cynicism. She, however, makes the romantic narrative amenable to early capitalist logic in the sense that she offers Cleomira’s history as another object to be consumed and discarded—ultimately, a counterproductive exercise that ushers in the novel as a dominant literary form. In the second section, I turn to Belinda’s encounter with Courtal. While Belinda manipulates Courtal and escapes her fiancé, Worthly, her story is not as compelling as Cleomira’s. Belinda’s story does not provide the same intensity as Cleomira’s because it, by definition, elevates the individual who neutralizes the overpowering energies of passionate states that erase the subject.
In the third and final section, I consider Haywood’s novel The Mercenary Lover (1726), for it tries to surmount some of the inherent limitations of this nascent form. The novel, as Lukács notes, “approximates as closely as possible” an organic and homogenous totality and offers “a semblance of organic quality which is revealed again and again as illusory.”16 An individual’s emotional state in the novel does not access an outside world and is not attuned to other beings and larger natural processes; it is enclosed in the “life sphere of the novel.”17 Yet in this novel Haywood posits that if an individual can feign love or emotional depth and inspire this “transcendent Passion,”18 this semblance or simulacrum of love is perhaps as emotionally enriching as the stimulation one experiences from romance. Clitander, “so admirable was he vers’d in the Art of Dissimulation” (128), marries Miranda and seduces her sister, Althea, even though he plots to gain their inheritance through any means necessary, including murder. I argue that Clitander embodies the novel, for his captivating exterior provides no insight into his real emotions or access to physical reality. He is form without content. Yet, Haywood asks, if Althea experiences the same heightened emotional states one would register from romance, does it make a difference that we are further removed from “real” experiences?
In The British Recluse, Haywood specifically considers the difficulties of capturing the readers’ imagination and the inherent limitations of the genres of romance and the novel. In an upscale boarding house that operates as a place of retreat, Belinda overhears former boarders discussing the mysterious recluse, Cleomira. They insist that the landlady concocts the story to attract customers; “my Landlady” in order “to divert her self and amuse us, has formed this Story of a beautiful young Creature” (156). This insistence on Cleomira as a “Story” evidences the characters’ commitment to the reification of everyday life. Despite the landlady’s efforts to intensify their interest and curiosity about her, horizons of intelligibility limit the boarders’ imagining: a woman withdrawn from society can be explained by a set of probable circumstances. One gentleman opines: “To know the Certainty of such an Affair may be a little difficult, but I think it no hard Matter to form a very probable Conjecture. In my Opinion, no Motive, but ill requited Love could induce a Lady (so young and beautiful, as you describe this to be) to such an obstinate and peevish Resignation of all the Pleasures of Life” (155–56). When a young lady interjects with an alternative explanation, “’Tis the Effects of Grief for the Death of some near and dear Relation, a Parent perhaps, or—,” the gentleman cuts her off; he knows that she has not yet experienced romantic love and therefore has no authority to discuss Cleomira’s situation. Even so, the two “readers” of Cleomira’s story bespeak the diminished demand for romances. Haywood seems to delineate the contours of romance: the men reject fantasy and pose as skeptics who know human relations too well to be captivated by even a fresh iteration of common experiences. Indeed, while the gentleman cannot recreate her history in exact detail, he can piece together the vague outline of the story of the recluse. And, of course, he correctly conjectures that Cleomira suffers from unrequited love. How, then, can the lady “novelist,” earning money from her entertainment and thus beholden to the market, enchant an audience conditioned by capitalism to reject recycled material and to consume rapaciously new objects? Why would it be interested in literature that seems stale and repetitive?
A second gentleman introduces another problem for a prospective author—namely, the limited (emotional) capital one has to expend on a particular (love) object: “All kinds of Passion, every Body knows, wear off with Time; and Love, of all others, as ’tis the gentlest and is subsisted only by Delight, of course must die when Delight is at an End” (156). The landlady, at times, appeals to their sense of wonder and, at others, assuages their commercial anxieties by promising that they will consume a new story. She insists that love operates as a venture into which one can pour limitless amounts of capital and expect a fantastic return on investment. She rejoins, “I fancy if you could have persuaded me to have contrived some means for you to have come to the Sight of this Hag, as you call her, she has Eyes, which would have convinced you that there is a Power in Love beyond what now you seem to imagine of that Passion” (156). The landlady promises that a sight of Cleomira’s “Eyes” does not just inspire love, but also discloses a force that transcends human understanding. At the same time, the landlady states that she has been unable to “contriv[e]” an adequate means to gain access to Cleomira; racking her brain to unveil Cleomira’s secret, she desperately searches for some currency that she can exchange for it. Ultimately, she must embellish Belinda’s history—create a novel—as a means to access Cleomira’s story; she in effect collapses the women’s love lives into interchangeable commodities. The landlady, then, submits a novel in lieu of the romance, and in the process the novel erases the competing form, for the economic logic of the exchange destroys what the romance promises, access to transcendent experiences.
Haywood depicts the landlady as the necessary intermediary between Belinda and the recluse. Belinda endeavors to glimpse this woman and even sympathize with her, and the landlady capitalizes on the opportunity to draw out the recluse. The landlady specifically invokes “Credit” as a mechanism to gratify Belinda’s desire; it necessitates a semblance or appearance of reality in order to gain her ends: “As you [Belinda] have so ingeniously contrived the Plot, it must be entirely owing to my want of Ability in carrying it on if it should miscarry; and . . . I go about it with the more Courage because that reserved and indeed too grave Look . . . which you always wear, will, if she consents to see you, give some Credit to my Words” (158). In an almost humorous scene, Belinda assures the landlady that she is not self-fashioning; her “grave look” designates a history of loss and emotional pain. Belinda’s story will serve as currency with which to “buy” Cleomira’s story; and “Credit” here is implicated as well, for the promise of (emotional and narrative) depth beyond Belinda’s “face” never materializes. The proprietor emphasizes that her downcast features tell all and that form and content are interchangeable. Lukács explains this dynamic as a sort of hall of mirrors in which one’s reflection seems to provide depth and substance: “An author’s reflexion consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life, of describing the actual nature of this process and of evaluating and considering its reality.” Yet, he argues, this reflection “in turn becomes an object for reflexion; it is itself only an ideal, only subjective and postulative; it, too, has a certain destiny in a reality which is alien to it; and this destiny, now purely reflexive and contained within the narrator himself, must also be given form.”19 While the novelist creates characters who gain deeper insights or explore psychological interiority, this alleged content is actually the form of the novel itself. The elements of the novel “are so much at the mercy of [its formal] laws” that it is “absolutely devoid of any sensuous valency of existence independent from [these] laws.”20 In Belinda’s case, what looks like content is form, a black hole consisting of the author’s limitless supply of stories—individual self-reflections of her socially constructed space. The landlady invents Belinda’s “novel” to draw out Cleomira, exchanging form for substance and providing the illusion that their histories are interchangeable.
Rather than simply present the obviously grieving Belinda to Cleomira, “the Landlady remained with her Head full of contrivance by what means she should bring about the Performance of her Promise” to introduce the two young women (158). At this point, in fact, the landlady’s almost desperate efforts to unite them addresses the problem of adequation, as though these two women are uncannily alike. Yet The British Recluse repeatedly foregrounds the incommensurability between Belinda and Cleomira. In order to reveal Cleomira, the landlady adds symbolic value—“her head” was “full of contrivance”—to Belinda. Belinda’s tale is not, in short, amenable to the proprietor’s genre—romance—but she can transmute it into currency to gain access to the recluse. The novel, an aestheticized realm like money, gains its value from what Marc Shell succinctly describes as the “generative power of the intellect” and the imagination.21 Paper-based currency and credit, he reminds us, “is virtually all symbolic.”22 The trouble with Belinda, the landlady insists, is that she knows the reasons for—the content of—Belinda’s anguish, and they are just not that compelling: “You may talk after what manner you please . . . but I am too well acquainted with your Circumstances not to know that you can have no real Causes for that Pensiveness, which, to deal freely with you, very much obscures the Lustre of your Charms” (158). That is, Belinda’s history does not seem to provide the same, to use Lukács’s language, “continuum-like infinity”;23 it does not offer something meaningful to probe the depths of human emotions. The landlady acts to compile and embellish Belinda’s narrative—even though it is authentic in the sense that Belinda actually experienced a man’s duplicity, she must fashion her story in such a way as to obfuscate or conceal its meaninglessness.
By augmenting Belinda’s symbolic value, the landlady does in fact enter into the mysteries of Cleomira’s life. In her description of this transaction, Haywood almost belabors the relationship between fiction and money: “The RECLUSE sent for her [the proprietor] to pay her some Money; and as soon as that Affair was dispatched, she began to labour the success of the other [Belinda’s request to meet Cleomira] and was . . . fortunate in her Negotiation” (159). Vague language and pronoun confusion—stock-in-trade literary devices for Haywood—usually underline how two seemingly dissimilar processes or registers are interchangeable. Haywood indeed portrays here the parallel systems of signification of love, money, and fiction, suspended states in which participants’ investment in a symbolic world supersedes their access and attachment to physical reality. The landlady, however, materializes Belinda’s narrative as currency; while seemingly commensurate, Belinda’s history supplants Cleomira’s, and it is complicit in the romance tale’s marginalization. Indeed, after hearing Cleomira’s romance, Belinda advocates that her friend remain socially invisible; although Belinda “had conceived the highest Esteem and Friendship imaginable” for her, “she could not disapprove the justice of her . . . Resolution she had taken of concealing herself” (199). While Belinda is initially enamored with Cleomira, her motives seem darker as she glosses her friend’s history as shameful. Cleomira, as we will see, experiences “wild Desire” (193), while Belinda harnesses it. Belinda expresses an intentionality that Cleomira simply does not possess. Belinda’s intellectual, emotional, and physical life is richer only if we configure consciousness as the capacity to reduce natural states to individual projections. Belinda reduces love to an individuated state and can then manipulate others who share roughly the same (narrow or compressed) conception of what love or any other state entails. Cleomira’s story typifies the romance, whereas Belinda’s history is characterized by mimesis, agency—or the illusion of agency because this empowerment stems from duplicating or learning from others’ experiences—and mass production.
In part, then, Haywood depicts how the alienation of modern life is fundamental to the architecture of the novel. The novel transvalues alienation, and this state serves as its raison d’être; the individual’s journey—a journey to reveal his/her (arbitrary) place in a socially constructed world alienated from physical reality—“is objectivised [internalized or thematized, as McKeon paraphrases] as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they are seekers.”24 Once one satisfies his urges—and this consumption involves material gain (sometimes by emptying others of value) rather than bodily pleasures—the desire—and the individual who inspires that desire—dissolves. In Haywood’s The City Jilt (1726), for example, Melladore, the would-be husband of the impoverished heroine, Glicera, abandons her when her dowry of “hundred thousand Crowns” proves to be an unfounded rumor. He, however, pretends he will marry her in order to gain something for his “investment”: “The real Love he had was to the Wealth of which he expected she would be possess’d; but that being lost, his Passion also vanish’d, and left behind it only that part of Desire which tends to Enjoyment.”25 After he obtains what he wants—sex—Glicera rails at him for his perfidies; Melladore, however, calmly replies with what he believes is an axiomatic relationship between economic and sexual life: “’Tis not in Reason, ’tis not in Nature to retain perpetual Ardours for the same Object—The very word Desire implies an Impossibility of continuing after the Enjoyment of that which first caused its being:—Those Longings, those Impatiences so pleasing to your Sex, cannot but be lost in Possession, for who can wish for what he has already?”26
While many writers—both men and women—portray versions of how desire in a sexual relationship cannot be sustained, the capitalist milieu adds specificity and urgency to this dynamic. Melladore’s gloss and etymological detail of “Desire” suggest that he views the Financial Revolution as the culmination of long-held male sexual attitudes. That is, the new economic practices are merely concocted to explain male gratification and predatory sexuality. His mistake rests on his belief that he “possesses” an object (woman), loses interest, and exhausts her value, but this act can only occur in a novel in which this worldview is operable. Once someone consumes the “biographical form” of a novel—an individual’s projected world—he has no need to reread it; he must consume a new object that, too, does not fill the vacuum created in an era in which aesthetic and economic realms are coextensive.
For Cleomira, desire can never be satiated because it is not indexed to or a manifestation of the individual; she cannot, in other words, locate the appropriate form to express her emotional state: “If (said she) I could have found Words of Force sufficient to have vented any of those various Passions which tormented me, my afflicted Soul, perhaps might have received some little Intervals of Ease; but there were none to express a Condition such as mine!—To love to the highest degree of Tenderness what I ought to have abhorred—To adore what I knew deserved utmost Scorn—To have buried Hope and [have] wild Desire survive . . . was Horror, sure, without a Name!” (193–94). The salient feature of this passage entails Cleomira’s declaration that “wild Desire” continues to animate her. Essentially, Lukács draws a mathematical distinction between the novel and earlier forms of literature. Euclidean geometry defines the novel; the plight of the characters in a novel is “contained within” it as the individual consciousness gives shape and definition to first nature and cannot access the “outside world” or physical reality.27 Topological relations aptly describe Cleomira’s experience; her emotions exceed the boundaries of existing forms. Even Belinda finds “the RECLUSE so far beyond the Landlady’s Description, something so Majestic, and withal so sweet and attractive in her Air—such a Mixture of the most forceful Fire and most enchanting Softness in her Eyes that she became wholly lost in speechless Wonder” (159). In this topological genre, romance, Haywood portrays Lysander as seducing Cleomira on sites unconnected to landed estates. In a peculiar passage, Lysander orders his servant to station himself outside her window and eventually on a “Heap of Rubbish that the Gardener had thrown out” when Cleomira’s mother grows suspicious. On the one hand, Haywood neatly parodies Lysander’s status; instead of ruling atop Mount Olympus, “the Mercury to my Jove,” he summited a pile of refuse (171). On the other, it illustrates the ways in which Cleomira’s history initially rejects the socio-spatial confines of the new genre, the novel. The temporary oasis of bric-a-brac provides fertile ground for love to emerge outside of its increasing commodification.
In her secret history, Cleomira regards literature as incommensurable with her passion. One of her primary impediments in gaining at least the sympathy of her seducer, however, is his rush to conceive of her through romance and thus as an already “dead” form; indeed, when her maid upbraids Lysander for causing her (alleged) death, Lysander stands unmoved: Cleomira and what she represents are empty signifiers (199).28 For Cleomira, however, Lysander exceeds representational practices: “Love was a Passion I had so little Notion of that I considered it no more than as a Fiction and only dressed up by the Poets in such Variety of Shapes to make the Amusement more entertaining” (163). Her point is that fiction cannot provide the template through which to experience the world; these revelations do occur in the novel, a form lost in the wasted exercise of making sense of a construct. Instead, for Cleomira, love exceeds formal constraints. Cleomira insists that Belinda needs to have undergone a similar experience to understand her emotions: “I will not pretend to tell you what my Transports were while I was reading [Lysander’s letter to her]; if, as you confess, you really know the Power of Love, your own Heart will make you comprehend what ’twas mine felt much more than any Words could do” (167). Belinda, as we will see, does not “really know the Power of Love” because she conceptualizes love through a “self-made environment,” fictive and socioeconomic constructs.
Despite (or, better yet, because) she does not transition into marriage, readers should not necessarily disown Cleomira and the genre she embodies, as though we agree with Lysander and Belinda. Cleomira’s “wild Desire surviv[es]”—her attraction for Lysander never dissipates—even when she is abandoned. Her relegation is a product of two interrelated factors: the characters—Belinda included, albeit in a different way—belittle “the Romantic Stuff she has writ” (198), and Haywood describes her as increasingly vulnerable as she inhabits the enclosed spaces of bourgeois London life. As Catherine Ingrassia posits, Haywood’s amatory fiction considers the “dual economies of romance and finance.”29 Both romance and finance, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon explains, “required imagining what the future might hold in the form of a return on investment.”30 While Ingrassia and Dillon do not distinguish between romance and other fictions, in this chapter I have separated the two genres because novelistic epistemologies—like capitalist logic—alienate the “investor” from physical reality. As McKeon explains, the intangible phenomenon of credit entails a “narrative virtualization” in which paper credit and novels elevate the individual in the sense that he recreates the world to revolve around his fantasies.31
Cleomira is adept at thinking through literature as a vehicle to access heightened emotional states. She compares the ways in which authors package love to produce pleasure—“Fiction . . . dressed up by the Poets in such Variety of Shapes to make the Amusement more entertaining” (163)—to Lysander’s letters: “You paint the Woes of Love in so extravagant a Manner, that one had need be more than ordinarily sensible of that Passion, to be able to give any Credit to a Description so far beyond what is commonly conceived of it” (174). She responds to his “extravagance,” in this case, his formal instability. His letters repeatedly express the inadequacy of language to describe his emotional state and the urge to “tear down the envious Walls, and baffle all Impediments which hold you from me” (174). Yet Lysander castigates Cleomira for these very excesses after coitus: “Nor can you blame my Change of Humour, since your own Extravagance has been the Cause: Believe me Cleomira! whatever in our Days of Courtship we profess, the Excess of any Passion is ridiculous to a Man of Sense” (192). Quoting Sir Philip Sydney and Penelope Aubin, Robert Mayer remarks that in the novel “moral utility required that the ‘unnatural Flights and hyperbolical Flourishes’ of romance must be left behind in favour of ‘little histories’ which readers could rely upon as ‘reality, and matter of fact.’”32 Cleomira’s letters, Lysander writes, no longer affect him; her recent epistles, he musingly explains, cannot capture “what really has possessed my Soul at reading some of your former ones” (192). Dismissing romance, Lysander is characterized as unable to experience the intense world that Cleomira and romance offer. Even though he relishes his triumph over Cleomira, he acknowledges that the desire he feels for her is characterized by use and disposal and is categorically different from her “wild Desire” (193), which he cannot experience even if he can recognize it in others.
Over the course of Cleomira’s story, however, Haywood transitions from romance as separate from financial modalities to its being closely aligned with them—and the world of the novel. She introduces the story of Cleomira by noting the ways in which romantic love leads a woman to believe the outrageous tales of her lover: “Of all the Foibles Youth and Inexperience is liable to fall into, there is none, I think, of more dangerous Consequence, than too easily giving Credit to what we hear; it is always the Source of a thousand Inadvertencies, and often leads the way to a numerous Train of destructive Passions” (155). As the 1690s ushered in modern capitalist institutions, like the Bank of England, and changed social relations in England, the financial revolution created new vulnerabilities for the poor and women. As Kathryn King points out, Haywood depicts “the irrational basis of the lust of acquisition crafted by the seeming ‘magic’ of credit, speculation, paper wealth and other mechanisms of the financial revolution.”33 King’s convincing reading of the underdiscussed Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724–25) demonstrates Haywood’s anxieties about financial speculation typified by the South Sea scandal and the Lord Chancellor’s (the Earl of Macclesfield’s) embezzlement of funds for women and orphans. In this prose fiction work, Cleomira is undone because she invests in Lysander; she sustains this investment even after the “bubble” bursts, demonstrating a socially responsible approach to the market (if investors withdraw their money from the market at once, it crashes). Yet women cannot be the only investors who indefinitely uphold the market.34
Women’s emotional investment in their love interest not only assimilates them into the emergent economic system, but also safeguards the community against the predatory and aggressive practices that characterize men’s behavior. Yet the men refuse to reciprocate, and, as a result, Haywood shows how women cope with the socioeconomic repercussions of risky financial ventures, while the men retreat to safe investments; indeed, Lord Bellamy marries Semanthe, an aristocrat with wealth, status, and property. In The British Recluse, he practices zero-risk capitalism because the remnants of a feudal society rescue him from a predatory economic and psycho-sexual worldview. He benefits from a safety net that women slip through. Moreover, while men like Lysander seem sincerely attracted to women at first, the underside of capitalism provides them with the logic to dispense with women. They possess women, empty them of their value, and treat capital in the form of women as an inexhaustible resource.
Lysander is not the only culprit here. Cleomira’s mother forces her to enter a world with downgraded expectations; “bred up in all the Pomp and Pride of Quality,” Cleomira is forced to move to the country after her father dies. Her mother, rather than remaining in court, forces Cleomira to reimagine herself as “the mere Country Gentlewoman” (161, 162). Although her mother secludes her, she allows Cleomira to attend a ball where she meets Lysander. When Lysander pays court to her, her mother responds with increasing punishment. Because she is forbidden to talk with Lysander, he eventually pays a family, the Marvirs, to move in next door to facilitate epistolary conversation with her; the Marvirs soon convince Cleomira to abandon her mother and to choose Mr. Marvir as her guardian (176–77). As Lysander isolates her—an extension of her mother’s seclusion of Cleomira—Cleomira clings to him as a means to escape her socioeconomic condition. And her containment within the bourgeois built and formal spaces (the middle-class Marvirs move her to a house in London) renders her helpless. She risks everything to escape these spaces, even disowning her mother and severing every link to her parents; Lysander, then, offers a lottery ticket, an unlikely way out of her increasingly dismal economic and social future. As Richard Dale explains, early investors were conditioned by the “short-termism” of the time period, including the lottery and gambling, and demographic factors: the “South Sea project, a high-risk venture, aimed at tapping into the riches of the New World, was designed to appeal to the gaming instincts of the age.”35 That is, when her parents and lover render her desperate and displace her into a middle-class world, she succumbs to the economic logic of the times that resembles the romance, an ecstatic release from physical, intellectual, economic, and emotional confinement. Rather than attempt to retrace and reverse Cleomira’s transition from romance heroine to socioeconomic victim, Belinda erases her past and the genre she embodies. Belinda’s economic and ontological security substitutes for the aesthetics of “extravagance.”
Belinda’s narrative may moderate male sexual entitlement, but she does not experience the same rapturous or ecstatic sensations as the recluse. Haywood establishes Belinda not only as financially stable even though her father has recently died (her brother promises her a moderate dowry), but also as signaling a new mode that escapes the romantic ontologies that characterize Cleomira. Belinda recalibrates the power differential in the relationship because she reifies romance forms and manipulates the men—she, for example, conceives of Worthly as ready capital—to achieve her ends. The honorable man is redolent of a mercantilist appreciation of bullion: his upright deportment indeed bespeaks his virtuousness (extrinsic stamp designates the quantity of “gold” contained within). Using Worthly as capital, she attempts to leverage him to gain Courtal, a more desirable man. Despite Belinda’s coldness and liaison with Courtal, Worthly remains attached to her. She can, in short, marry Worthly if her investment in Courtal does not improve her situation. Unlike the economic climate that Dale describes and that portrays Cleomira’s desperate circumstances, Belinda seems like a seasoned investor. In The Advantages of the East-India Trade to England (1720), the anonymous author explains that an individual or a bank increases his/its credit by possessing the ready money to satisfy creditors; if a bank is a reputable or a well-established entity, then it can charge high interest rates: “When there was but little Money, the Credit also was very little . . . so that Credit is always most, when there is most Money to satisfie the same. Paper Money is nothing else but Credit from the increase of which, we are sure that Credit is increas’d.”36 He obliquely refers to the South Sea Bubble, describing the entities involved as trading in stock certificates and increasing the share price to values that vastly overinflated the company’s assets: “We have had late and sad Experience of this [little money]; Bills discounted every day.”37 Belinda moderates an economic and libidinous state that promises unlimited gratification and erases identity; she calculatingly manages her desire to realize gains and leverage risk.
Belinda gains practical experience from reading romances and is adaptable to the role of heroine if the man appeals to her.38 Her story, however, begins in characteristic romance fashion; after her carriage upsets, Sir Thomas Courtal, Baronet, happening to be nearby, restores order and ushers her home. His engaging conversation and courtly manners doom Worthly; she realizes that Courtal provides an unexpected escape from her impending marriage to Worthly. When Courtal begins to seduce her, she demonstrates her manipulation of the romance form: “I had heard and read too much of Men’s Inconstancy, their Flatteries, their thousand Arts to lure weak Woman to Belief and Ruin not to tremble when I thought there was a Possibility he might not be exempted from those little Basenesses of his Sex” (208). She seems to possess a preconceived notion of women like Cleomira, “weak Woman” who have not used romances to guard against men and have been lured “to Belief and Ruin.” Courtal’s “Inconstancy,” “Flatteries,” and “thousand Arts” signal a bygone era of unlimited expenditure for which the participant imagined rapturous rewards; she, however, detaches herself from this formal and economic mode. And Courtal maneuvers another approach; he then opts to liken himself to Worthly to court Belinda: “A Guest, Madam! (said he) of so little Merit as the unhappy Courtal would have small reason to hope a Welcome here, if his Presumption were not authorized by him, who, blessed with the Divine Belinda’s Love, knows the way to obtain Pardon for himself and me” (205). While Lysander represented limitless symbolic value, as Courtal he transvalues himself as bearing the authorized inscription of Worthly. Likening himself to mass-produced species, Courtal enables Belinda’s exploitation.
Belinda immediately recognizes Courtal as an instrument to further her aims. Alone with Belinda, Courtal seems to perform as the faithful friend and servant of Worthly, chiding her for delaying her marriage with him. When she speaks to Courtal, she conveys her passion, economizing language, unlike Lysander/Courtal’s “thousand Arts.” She tries to redirect the conversation, displacing Worthly and praising Courtal: “But I think so much is owing to the vast Merits of Sir Thomas Courtal that there can be no need of any second Name to introduce him anywhere” (205). Ingrassia argues that readerly participation simulated a speculative mindset; Haywood “withdraws from the narrative and forces her reader to supply the details, the ideas, or the consequences of the situation at hand.”39 Belinda’s words and body language, however, unlike Cleomira’s, overdetermine her inner state: “I designed these Words no other than a Compliment, but the Confusion with which I spoke them, gave him too much Reason to believe I had a farther Meaning” (205). Courtal, however, returns to romance systems of signification, exclaiming, “Oh God! (said he) what sweet Enchantment do those Words contain!” (205). A key word for Haywood, as King recognizes, “Enchantment” is used in the pejorative sense to denote the ways in which powerful economic or governmental interests manipulate the imaginative faculties of the British who are ensnared by chimeras of great and imminent wealth.40 Indeed, Courtal characterizes Belinda’s words as “powerful Spells,” which produce “the Violence of a sudden Transport,” and “delusive Hopes” (205). Courtal, in other words, endeavors to represent Belinda as a risky financial venture; she, in this scenario, seduces him into pouring more and more capital into her. As an economic “victim,” Courtal lays the groundwork for gaining whatever he can from his expenditures. Belinda allows him to determine the economic and sexual terms for their relationship, but she is cognizant that economic and formal signifying systems only represent or simulate emotional states—they, unlike Cleomira’s “first nature,” do not immerse the reader in an almost tactile intimacy with intense sensorial or erotic states. Belinda, in fact, chastises Courtal for losing an opportunity to express his love for her, demonstrating an impatience with, in her eyes, Courtal’s wallowing in an outdated modality that does not immediately profit her.
Belinda expresses her love for Courtal and simultaneously reneges on her implicit promises to Worthly and to her deceased father (who blessed the marriage before he died and, in doing so, tried to guarantee that Belinda never experienced the condition of feme sole). Her fears (of being too forward) “now turned to Indignation! I raged to think my Wishes had deceived me! and half despised him for his Insensibility!” (206). As the go-between for Worthly, Courtal loses the ineffable qualities he possessed that likened him to the unchecked fantasies of the stock market. Belinda starts to depict the two men as indistinguishable; by upbraiding Worthly’s methods, she also dethrones Courtal:
I wonder (said I, with an Air which I believe had a good deal of Contempt in it) that Worthly should take the Measures he does—does he think to tease me into Compliance?—and can he imagine that anything he can say, or the Persons he employs, will influence so far as to make me grant what is not consistent with my Inclinations?—I am not disposed to Marry—at least as yet; and if I never should be so, he ought not to expect I should do a Violence to my own Humour to pleasure His. (206)
Belinda’s determination—“I am not disposed to marry”—not only signals to Courtal her unattached status, but also radically reshapes the dynamics of the relationship; if a maid does not aim to be a wife, she occupies a liminal position in eighteenth-century society, challenging the established order. Paradoxically, Courtal opts to redouble his efforts to cast himself as the groveling suitor and her as the unattainable Laura, while remaining attached to Worthly: “Could I, like Worthly, Hope” (206).
Belinda continues to rewrite the romance plot; if the novel entails an “active agent determined to find a new life course,” as Paula Backscheider writes,41 then Belinda’s specific agency manifests in the ways she shapes her world. Courtal’s groveling, for example—he attempts to mimic Worthly—underscores how she manufactures the same subjectivity. This world constrains emotional expression: “You might be mistaken (replied I, briskly) for if I did not love, such a Behaviour would make me hate” (206). Love and hate are interchangeable, and, by extension every emotion in between is flattened or hollowed out. As she “had heard and read too much of Men’s Inconstancy” (208), Belinda knows exactly how to manipulate him through her reduction of intense passionate states into a formal register, gaining power through her spatialization of first nature. Courtal is increasingly disempowered because he remains confident that he can seduce women through romance forms.
Haywood implies that while men seized onto romance as a form uniquely suited to volatile market conditions, when women gain perspective on these conditions, Lysander/Courtal possesses little to recommend him. And when women rebuff him, he is repeatedly exposed as a violent sexual predator. Lysander/Courtal’s appropriation of romance, Haywood suggests, forever diminishes the art form. The novel, however, as the landlady repeatedly asserts, cannot enchant the audience like the romance. Belinda’s tale is much shorter than Cleomira’s, suggesting that it cannot sustain readers’ interest. It even contains two other histories that provide the rough outlines of similar novels and the readership for this new genre.
Belinda narrates another history of an agential woman who rejects Lord Bellamy (the “real” name of Lysander/Courtal) in what amounts to an unfinished schematic for another novel. He aggressively pursues yet another woman, Miranda, by first driving a wedge between her and her beloved and then declaring himself her lover (220). Trying to woo a woman deeply in love with another man, “he writ to her in the most moving and seeming sincere Strain that ever Heart dictated; but after the receipt of the first Letter, the known Character on the Superscription prevented her from reading what the next contained, and she immediately sent it back unopened” (220). His letters, Belinda continues, “had no other Effect on her than what was very different from his Expectations; she hated him still more, shunned him as a Monster, and if, by chance, she saw him at any public Place, . . . her very Countenance discovered the secret Disdainings of her Soul” (221). His repackaged romantic scraps fall on deaf ears, but that does not mean that Haywood dispenses with this genre in favor of the novel. In fact, Bellamy’s artless use of or objectification of the genre shows that in the wrong hands it is indeed cloying, “repetitious and formulaic.”42 Once one quantifies the romance—“the known Character on the Superscription prevented her from reading what the next contained”—it loses its potential to convey heightened states.
In the history of Miranda, Haywood both suggests the novel’s inferiority—Belinda’s narrative must include another history to increase readers’ interests—and provides an example of the novel as an infinitely reproducible history; the names and circumstances may change, but essentially the elements remain the same. Lukács distinguishes the “bad” infinity of the novel from the “continuum-life infinity of the material of the epic”;43 he, in other words, suggests that the material for the novel is limitless because it entirely considers the constructed world of authors’ imaginations and cannot, by definition, reach any eternal truths. By imposing an arbitrary coherence, providing a “beginning” and an “end” of an individual’s psychological state, it is, in a sense, enclosed in a subjective world that, as McKeon points out, “may be endlessly extended” even if it portrays “a broad diversity of personages and a vast range of social experience.”44 Like paper-based money, therefore, novels establish a fictional world that resembles something concrete and vital, but the logic of accumulation—acquiring more money or reading more novels—can only approximate and not access deeper experiences. Symbolic value supplants experiential reality. Belinda, for example, provides ample material depicting her interior life, but this bourgeois subjectivity, Haywood suggests, does not thrill readers of romance.
And Haywood uncharitably depicts the readership for these novels: women do not experience sexual or emotional gratification; they learn how to navigate a bourgeois world. Belinda’s sister discerns the budding relationship between Courtal and Belinda, taxes her with ingratitude when she evinces her passion for Courtal even after his misdeeds—and eventually marries Worthly. As a consumer of the novel—Belinda’s history—she embodies the vicarious investment of consumers eager for the lessons the new genre disseminates. While absorption is usually considered a characteristic of the novelistic, all genres captivate the audience/reader. What is more distinctive about the novel is its portrayal of the individual, autonomous self, through which the reader conceptualizes subjectivities and from whom the reader learns to navigate the world. Belinda’s sister embodies this dynamic; at first, she empathizes with her sister in her affairs, and then she detaches herself from them as she disapproves of her sister’s attachment to Courtal. While Courtal was asked to advance Worthly’s suit, he tries to seduce her, and her sister immediately “reads” the scene to discern Courtal’s true aims: “The Confusion that she perceived in both our Faces made her (as she since told me) guess what sort of Conversation he had entertained me with” (207). She remains in the room to protect Belinda from Courtal. After the men’s duel, she expects Belinda to express sympathy for Worthly; while Belinda attempts to disguise her feelings for Courtal, her sister penetrates through Belinda’s facade: “Some other little Remarks she had made on my late Carriage made her not far from guessing the Truth of my Sentiments, and she took the Liberty of reproaching me with Ingratitude and Inconstancy” (215). She may be a better reader than Belinda—even more adept at deciphering these “Faces”—but her strict policing emphasizes the banality of the bourgeois subjects produced by the novel.
The story concludes with Worthly, miraculously recovered from his wounds, transferring his affections to Belinda’s sister; she “had expressed so tender a Concern for his Misfortunes, and so high an Esteem for his Virtues, that he found it no Difficulty to transmit to her all the affection he had bourne her Sister” (224). Haywood implies that it would be ridiculous for readers to try to experience Cleomira’s emotional life; the romance is not amenable to duplication or emulation. The “Esteem” that Worthly and Belinda’s sister express for each other is not comparable to Cleomira’s emotional state and exposes Belinda’s “love.” The individual is simply a subject who can reflect on experiences and reproduce her story. The names, events, and details may change, but, because they are manufactured and meaningless constructions separate from physical reality, they all tell the same story; these interchangeable constructions—the individual and the novel—are then entirely transferable. The “biographical form” of the novel—the individual is both content, for the novel celebrates the individual as the “separate [and emulatable] being,” and form—depicts a lifeworld that is entirely a projection of that individual consciousness, a “meaningless” world.45 As Lukács insists, “Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that make its life autonomous—even if what it finds can never be a firm possession or the basis of its life, but is an object of search.”46 Belinda’s sister reads her sister’s “novel” and structures her life through this form; she cannot glimpse anything outside of this world. “Second nature” ultimately consumes the subject it seemingly centralizes.
While Haywood registers the limits of the novel and, through the landlady especially, wonders openly whether it can attract the same readership as the romance, in The Mercenary Lover the artist rises to the challenge, insisting that the simulacrum of passion, which is the best the novel can hope to inspire, can substitute for the authentic affect. While the novel cannot inspire deep emotions, perhaps it can provide a surrogate for them. The Mercenary Lover portrays two heiresses, Miranda and Althea, who are mirror images of one another: Miranda, “being of an airy, gay Disposition” (124), does not demonstrate a rich, interior life, and Althea, although reserved, is characterized as experiencing intense emotional states. Clitander, who possesses a paternal estate, marries Miranda to augment his status and wealth. His acquisitive impulse leads him to seduce Althea as well; after ruining her marriage prospects, Clitander, no longer sexually aroused by her, seeks to obtain her estate through deception and, when she finally apprehends his motives, murder.
Clitander seems like an outright villain, but Haywood asks readers to compare Althea’s heightened emotional states and rich erotic life to Miranda’s married life. Miranda shops and visits family and friends, while Althea remains at their shared home relishing the “unrestrain’d Enjoyment” with Clitander (137). Ingrassia, however, observes that Clitander’s “duplicity reveals . . . the unreliability and duplicity of the overarching signifier of his and all Haywood’s texts: man”;47 Clitander indeed manipulates Althea through speech, legal documents, and letters. For me, Haywood’s representation of Clitander underscores her recognition of the weaknesses of the novel and almost immediate compensation for these limitations. If the novel acknowledges that nature is impossible to access, then Clitander’s ability to arouse Althea and simulate love demonstrate his (and the author’s) virtuosity: “So much is the World,” the narrator muses, “and even our selves deceiv’d by Appearances; and how little are we capable of distinguishing the real Felicity for the Shadow of one” (129). Because the “real Felicity” cannot be attained or accessed, the author’s skill lies in approximating the “real” emotion with “the Shadow of one.”
Althea never questions Clitander’s alleged deep attachment to her until just before her demise because greed, ambition, and eventually hatred for Althea animate him and produce the same bodily symptoms as love. Haywood describes him as not only successfully dissembling, but also as embodying an almost numinous presence:
Yet so admirable was he vers’d in the Art of Dissimulation, that tho’ his Soul was full of the most poynant Anxiety, his Countenance was all serene and calm as an unruffled Sky; upon his oilly Tongue the most melting Accents in soft Persuasion hung, and Tenderness unspeakable languished in his Eyes; gay Smiles play’d round his Mouth in dimpl’d Graces, and his whole Air was Harmony and Love: None but the All-seeing Eye of Heaven cou’d penetrate into his Heart, or guess at the Perfidiousness that harbour’d there. (128)
Haywood repeatedly emphasizes Clitander’s skills at extemporization and self-control. He seems to serve as the embodiment of eighteenth-century representational practices and epistemologies: exterior surfaces cannot inform the observer about interior value. Because the link between signifier and signified has been severed, if Clitander can compose his features into “Harmony and Love,” then Althea can still enjoy the “text.” Moreover, Clitander’s “poynant Anxiety” is entirely symptomatic of love, an emotion characterized by “a Pain-mix’d-Pleasure” and “a certain Restlessness of mind” (125).
While Clitander resembles Lysander, Melladore, or Fantomina’s Beauplaisir, he also seems like the logical evolution of Haywood’s experimentations with genre. Melladore states most succinctly the sexual life of men: when they obtain gratification, desire entirely dissipates. For Clitander, greed so nearly resembles love that Althea is unable to distinguish between them. I have described the genre of romance as gesturing at the “outside” world. On the one hand, while love is unrepresentable, the “extravagance” of romance stimulates a tactile immediacy with intense emotional states. On the other, the novel works through emotional states within the construct it creates. Yet as Haywood implies, perhaps a skilled novelist can reconstruct the same emotional states in very different passions, simulating the same rich experiences. The authoress, for example, depicts love and greed as interchangeable desires. Clitander “plotted therefore, how first to satiate this Passion, which, once obtain’d, he thought would be the most effectual Means to gratify the other also; and determin’d to make her guilty before he made her wretched” (129). “This passion”—he “languished to rifle the untasted Lovliness” of Althea (129)—animates the body in the same way as “the other,” his desire to obtain her land. Again vagueness and pronoun confusion serve to link love and greed.
After he satisfies “the Cravings of his lawless Flame[,] . . . the Love of Money now resum’d its Empire in his sordid Soul; and as it was not so much the Possession of Althea’s Person as her Estate, which had induc’d him to take this Pains, so having obtain’d the one, he now began to set his whole Wits at Work to become Master of the other also” (137). Indeed, when Clitander advances his aims by imploring Althea to commit herself to him, even the narrator is unsure if Clitander is thrilled with “real Agonies” or counterfeits them: “If the present Emotions of his Desires did not convulse him with real Agonies, he counterfeited them so well, that a Woman more experienc’d in those Racks of struggling Impatiencies than was Althea, might easily have mistaken them for Natural” (134). Although the narrator repeatedly depicts Althea as innocent and therefore vulnerable to worldly men like Clitander, not even the most cosmopolitan woman could discern Clitander’s machinations. Or if the seasoned women did detect them, she would forego the pleasure of experiencing heightened sensations.
Clitander’s fall from grace occurs when Althea asks him to read a legal document. She is led to believe that it stipulates that on her death her wealth will devolve on her unborn child; Clitander, however, ensures that the will guarantees that he will inherit her property. He, as the embodiment of the novel, has a keen sense of constructed worlds, and he patterns his behavior off of what he reads. Yet when Althea asks him to read the document, he must of course dissemble and spontaneously compose the will; he, in other words, must switch registers from print to orality, a mode closely aligned with authenticity and the past. Clitander’s disposition is a constructed one, and he conditions Althea in the same way. He assumes “the most tender and endearing Air that love cou’d teach him” (136) and is adept at reading others; he “read the State of her Mind in the soft Languishments of her shining Eyes” (131–32). Moreover, even though English laws and the Bible prohibit congress between in-laws, he, acting as a philologist, seizes on ambiguities and other textual inconsistencies to support his arguments, reinterpreting the Bible to “argue that Incest was no Crime” (131). Being “one of those who could easily find arguments to justify inclination,” as Samuel Johnson tartly says of Milton,48 Clitander twists the text to fit his aims. Finally, Clitander conditions Althea through acts of reading, “knowing she was naturally a great Lover of Reading, took Care to Bring her home every Day . . . gay Treaties which insensibly melt down the Soul, and make it fit for amorous Impressions” (130).
Clitander’s inability to escape his textually constructed self leads to Althea’s awakening. While Haywood depicts Clitander as adept at invention, she insists that his confrontation with what he has self-fashioned—the will that encapsulates all his desires—incapacitates him. That is, the text acts as a surrogate for him from which he cannot escape. I posit that this representation serves as another engagement with the new form of the novel. The biographical form of the novel is characterized by an empty and inescapable dialectic: it “appears as . . . a process of becoming,” a becoming that promises an ideal, organic, and “immediate unity of life,” and that ideal is achieved when that individual is produced as “a new and autonomous life.”49 The “contingent world and the problematic individual,” Lukács writes, “are realities which mutually determine one another.”50 I provide Clitander’s collapse in full here because Haywood demonstrates his inability to stray from the written word.
[He] began not to read, but to speak such Words as were suitable to the Instrument for which she had given Orders, what he utter’d being altogether different from the real Contents. The Hesitation of his Accents, and the Confusion which he cou’d not keep from being visible in his Countenance, having created in her Suspicions, to which before her Heart was wholly a Stranger, with the utmost Watchfulness she observ’d his every Look and Motion, and taking Notice that he endeavour’d to conceal some Part of the Writing, and also glancing her Eyes over it, perceiving that his Tongue consulted his own Invention more than the Parchment, she was both convinc’d and shock’d at the Deceit with which he treated her. (142)
Althea grows suspicious because Clitander’s bodily comportment and speech patterns are incongruous with his alleged sincere interior state. Attuned to his deceit, Althea can now expose him. While the narrator revels in his downfall, her depiction of it contains tragic notes as well: “The projecting Demons, who had prompted him to this Villany, now refus’d him their Assistance,—his once ready Wit and Invention now forsook him,—all his Powers abandon’d him,—his Eyes and Tongue forgot their usual Artifice,—Fear, Shame and Horror sat on each unguarded Feature” (142). That is, as Althea develops into a worldly subject, she recognizes the gap between exterior surfaces and intrinsic value, but she loses the role of co-author, enabler—and investor—who experiences a sexual pleasure that resembles the bodily raptures of romance. After he poisons Althea, Clitander is exposed, and Miranda especially torments him, for her knowledge of his villainy puts an end to his schemes. Haywood, however, provides an ambivalent conclusion, for others, too, suffer through their disenchantment with fiction. Clitander visits everyone who possesses some knowledge of his transgressions—apothecaries and neighbors—“and acquainting them with the Knowledge he had of their Suspicions and the Reasons they had for it, told them they ought not to judge by Appearances” (161). In other words, Clitander produces the cynical reader, who should distrust “Appearances” and not indulge in the same fantasies as Althea. While Haywood establishes characters in which the form or appearance of life is so intoxicating that it almost substitutes for actual depth and meaning, Clitander cultivates an ironic and distrustful subject who must always interrogate emotional states. He provides an ambivalent example of the mechanism through which we try to access rich emotional and natural states.