LHMP #497 Ingrassia 2014 ‘Queering’ Eliza Haywood

In this article, Ingrassia challenges scholarship that views 18th century novelist Eliza Haywood’s work as depicting only heterosexual relationships and instead points out and discusses many aspects of her fiction that represent a wide spectrum of relations between women that range from the homosocial to the homoerotic. [Note: This article has a lot of literary theory jargon, which I tend to find of less interest, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the discussions of the content of Haywood’s work.]

Just because an author is working within a heteronormative framework doesn’t negate other underlying themes. Analysis that ignores those themes simply because they don’t represent the overt message of the work distorts our understanding of the era and the work. [Note: Another key factor here, though Ingrassia doesn’t state it explicitly, is how bisexual erasure works to cover up sapphic readings. As noted in the introduction to The Lesbian Premodern, there has long been a tendency to categorize a historic person as “lesbian” only in the complete absence of heterosexual relationships, while a historic man may be categorized as homosexual on the basis of any homosexual relations.] Thus same-sex intimacies in works like The British Recluse have been dismissed because they occur in a context where the two women are sharing their past betrayals by the same man. The two women admire each other from the moment they meet, then bond through a sharing of grief. In the end, they become a bonded couple living in “perfect tranquility, happy in the real friendship of each other” and shunning heterosexual relations. The details of their shared life from that point is not presented, only their attachment. This has allowed scholars to dismiss the motif as simply “female friendship,” ignoring the vast scope of experiences such a phrase contains in what Ingrassia calls a “failure of the historical imagination.”

Ingrassia observes that Haywood routinely “critique[s] and resist[s] heteronormative structures” with her characters finding ways to escape or transform those structures to exist outside of gender restrictions. The central relationship of The Rash Resolve presents a woman betrayed in a heterosexual relationship (with the aid of a female accomplice) who finds solace, safety, and emotional intimacy with a rich and beautiful widow.

In other works, Haywood emphasizes intimacies between women without the need for a precipitating event that turns them against heterosexuality. In the mosaic text of The Tea Table the connective tissue is the relations between a group of educated and literary women who support each other’s creative endeavors. In a wildly different context, The Masqueraders details the amorous adventures of a rake, whose female partners take even greater enjoyment in then sharing stories of their experiences with each other.

In The City Jilt two women who are intimate and loyal friends scheme together for financial revenge on one woman’s faithless ex, after which they (temporarily) renounce men and live together for a time until one is compelled by necessity to marry again. There are other examples of female intimacies embedded within otherwise heterosexual frameworks. In The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, the two title characters, engaged since childhood, are oddly indifferent to moving their marriage along, wanting a chance to enjoy the adventures of single life first. For Jenny, this consists of circulating in female spheres: living with two sisters in Bath, sharing gossip with friends (including an anecdote about the madcap adventures of a married woman which includes an “adventure in Covent-Garden—where she went in men’s cloaths—pick’d up a woman of the town, and was severely beaten by her on the discovery of her sex” in a rough acknowledgment of potential same-sex erotics, before the woman returns to her husband for enthusiastic make-up sex. She is background to the main story, but presents an illustration of imaginable possibilities.

This theme—of a secondary character illustrating wider erotic options—also occurs in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless in an episode late in the novel in which Betsy becomes instantly fascinated by Mademoiselle de Roquelair on encountering her in a shop. “There was something in this lady that attracted her in a peculiar manner…delight in hearing her talk…longed to be of the number of her acquaintance.” She attempts such an acquaintance and is rebuffed, but later Roquelair appears at her door, late at night in dishabille, confiding that her lover—Betsy’s brother—has thrown her out and asking for assistance. An imaginative space is opened in which Betsy’s fascination is rewarded by intimate friendship, but instead Roqualair moves in, becomes the mistress of Betsy’s husband, and supplants her. But this conclusion is made possible by Betsy’s flash of desire and attraction.