Eliza Haywood

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ELIZA HAYWOOD
1693? - 1756
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Biography
-Born Elizabeth Fowler -Was likely married
between 1714-1719 -Had two illegitimate children
-Was linked romantically to Richard Savage and
William Hatchett
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Why don't we know more about her life?
This is possibly the result of a request on her
death bed to a particular Person, who was well
acquainted with all the Particulars of it, not to
communicate to any one the least Circumstance
relating to her (Ballaster, Seductive Forms 159)?
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• We do know that Haywood produced over 40 works of
  fiction, four translations, a biography, multiple
  plays, a history of the stage, seven periodicals,
  numerous poems and pamphlets and two collected
  editions of her works.
• (Fowler, A Woman Writing Among Men, 1.)?

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SCANDALS
Alexander Pope wrote about
Haywood in his poem
The Dunciad See in the circle next, Eliza
plac'd Two babes of love close clinging to her
wasteFair as before her works she stands
confess'd, In flow'rs and pearls by bounteous
Kirkall dress'd. The Goddess then "Who best can
send on high The salient
spout, far-streaming to the sky
His be yon Juno of majestic size,
With cow like udders, and with ox-like
eyes. Pope takes the focus off of her writing
and into her personal life by proclaiming her two
children to be illegitimate.
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SCANDALS
Richard Savage also wrote about Haywood in
The Authors of the Town 1725 A Cast off
Dame, who of intrigues can judge, Writes Scandal
in Romance --- A Printer's Drudge! Flush'd with
Success, for Stage-Renown she pants, And melts,
and swells, and pens luxurious Rants.
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Women In The 18th Century

• Eighteenth-Century Women were living in a time of
  great female suppression that demanded limited,
  frivolous education for females and discouraged
  female sexuality.
• Daniel Defoes novel Moll Flanders accurately
  portrays womens education as learning
  accomplishments such as music, reading, writing,
  French, and dancing (Defoe 54)

http//www.costumes.org/history/18thcent/women/hoe
y'splates/louisxv.jpg
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Women of the 18th Century

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Recognized as one of the first feminists,
• Wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which
  spoke against this frivolous education
• that the instruction which women have hitherto
  received has only tended, with the constitution
  of civil society, to render them insignificant
  objects of desiremere propagators of fools!if
  it can be proved that in aiming to accomplish
  them, without cultivating their understandings,
  they are taken out of their spheres of duties,
  and made ridiculous and useless when the
  short-lived bloom of beauty is over
  (Wollstonecraft 173)?

http//www.btinternet.com/glynhughes/squashed/wol
lstonecraft.htm
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• Wollstonecraft went against top thinkers of her
  day like Rousseau, whom Wollstonecraft stated he
  believed that a woman should never for a moment,
  feel herself independent, that she should be
  governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning,
  and made a coquetish slave in order to render her
  a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter
  companion to man (Wollstonecraft 179).

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18th Century Women and the Sexual Double Standard

• Eighteenth-Century women were expected to be
  virtuous or sexually chaste, although the men of
  this time period were not held to this
  expectation
• the conduct expected of women as virgins,
  wives, and widows rested on the assumption that
  sexual desire was proper to the male and
  unbecoming to the female (Brophy 27).

http//www.costumes.org/history/100pages/18thwomn.
htm
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• While a wife must be above reproach, she must
  tolerate, even expect, a much lower order of
  conduct from her husband, both in sexual
  promiscuity and in other masculine prerogatives
  such as drunkenness (Brophy 11).
• If, within a marriage, a woman realized that her
  husband was cheating on her, during this time
  period a woman was to treat her husband with
  patience and gentleness, but if this same
  situation was reversed, death was a fit
  punishment for the woman (Brophy 11).
• It was during this period of female suppression
  that Eliza Haywood wrote Fantomina

http//www.costumes.org/history/100pages/18thwomn.
htm
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Summary of Fantomina

• A tale of an unnamed young gentlewomans
  seduction of the gentleman Beauplaisir
• 4 seductive personas
• Fantomina Prostitute
• Celia Chamber Maid
• Widow Bloomer Woman In Mourning
• The Fair Incognita never allows him to see her
  face
• Her deceptions catch up with her She gets
  pregnant, her mother discovers her affairs, and
  she is sent to a convent.

http//www.buy.com/prod/fantomina-and-other-works/
q/loc/106/36344045.html
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How was she able to trick one that was so
intimately acquainted with her person??

• she was so admirably skilld in the Art of
  feigning, that she had the Power of putting on
  almost what Face she pleasd, and knew so exactly
  how to form her Behaviour to the Character she
  represented, that all the Comedians at both
  Playhouses are infinitely short of her
  performances (Demaria 722).
• In short She was a very good actress!

http//asecsgrad.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.h
tml
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Haywoods structure in Fantomina

• Robert Scholes explains the common structure of
  the novel as the following the sophisticated
  forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated
  practice of sex, much of the art consists of
  delaying climax within the framework of desire in
  order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.
  (175)?
• Haywood contrasts this male model of fiction,
  with a fiction based upon the feminised
  structure of multiple climaxes. (Potter, 175)?

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Fantomina

• A representation of Societal injustices
• - women betrayed into prostitution by
  manipulative men
• - servant girls seduced and ruined by the men
  they work for
• - wronged widows, left for destitution

(www.jahsonic.com/EnglishErotica)?
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Anti-Feminist or Feminist

• Many critics have argued that the punishment of
  Fantomina at the end of Haywoods novella has
  conformed this book to the Eighteenth-Century
  gender bias that male promiscuity is acceptable
  but female promiscuity must be punished
• in the melancholy reiteration of female
  defeat at the hands of the fictionalizing male
  libertine, Fantomina provides only a temporary
  respite from the ultimate persecution necessarily
  awaiting the seduced maiden (Croskery 25).

• This defeatist and anti-feminist view of
  Fantomina can be contradicted in the notion that
  in punishing the heroine, Haywood employs a
  literary technique that While the disapproving
  rhetoric that surrounds oppositional, subversive,
  or inflammatory statements ostensibly disarms
  them, those statements are themselves
  nevertheless conveyed verbatim to the reader who
  is the ultimate arbiter and who absorbs them in
  any case (Behrendt 30).

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What Haywoods Communicating

• In Fantomina Haywood confirms the
  anti-essentialist construction of femininity
  hinted at so consistently throughout her career,
  demonstrating, through her most sexually
  disruptive female character, womens capacity to
  manipulate and control the signs by which her
  social, economic and sexual position as woman is
  perceived and constructed by the public
  majority. (Potter, 176-177)?

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• Haywoods empowering of Fantomina with reason and
  rational action instead of hysterical fits makes
  her the female equivalent to Haywoods male
  rakes, who assume a series of different
  identities to court their mistresses and avert
  the possibility of discovery (Ballaster,
  Preparations to Love 60).
• Her Design was once more to engage him, to hear
  him sigh, to see him languish, to feel the
  strenuous Pressures of his eager Arms, to be
  compelled, to be sweetly forcd to what she
  wished with equal Ardour, was what she wanted,
  and what she had formd a Stratagem to obtain, in
  which she promisd herself Success (Demaria
  719).

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• In a time when women were treated like infidels,
  Fantomina recognizes she has outsmarted
  Beauplaisir and congratulates herself on her
  victory over him But I have outwitted even the
  most Subtle of the deceiving Kind, and while he
  thinks to fool me, is himself the only beguiled
  Person (Demaria 722).

http//www.costumes.org/history/100pages/18THMOVE.
HTM
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WORKS CITED

• 1st photo http//www.answers.com/topic/eliza-haywo
  od
• 2nd Photo of R.S http//www.probertencyclopaedia.c
  om/cgi-bin/xphrase.pl?keywordrichardsavage
• 3rd photo of AgtP. http//clatterymachinery.files.w
  ordpress.com/2007/03/alexander-pope-marblehill.jpg
  
• Ballastar, Ros. Seductive Forms Womens Amatory
  Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford Clarendon
  Press, 1992.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the
  Rights of Woman. The Norton Anthology English
  Literature Vol.D. 8th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.
  New York W. W. Norton Company, Inc. 2006.
  170-195.
• Behrendt, Stephen C. Introduction. Zastrozzi. By
  Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1810. Ed. Stephen C.
  Behrendt. Ontario Broadview Press Ltd. 2002.
• Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Womens Lives and the
  18th-Century English Novel. Tampa University of
  South Florida Press, 1991.
• Croskery, Margaret Case, and Anna C. Patchias.
  Introduction. Fantomina. By Eliza Haywood. 1725.
  Ed. Pettit, Croskery, Patchias. Ontario
  Broadview Press Ltd. 2004.
• Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. Ed. Paul A.
  Scanlon. Ontario Broadview Press Ltd. 2005.