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At the time of its publication, a woman's sexual desire was thought to be muted, even nonexistent. Sexual pursuits of any kind were thought to be a man's game, left for a woman to indulge or deny. The novel and its author so obviously challenges the standing ideas of what desire looks like and who it can come from. The main protagonist disguises herself as four different women in her efforts to understand how a man may interact with each individual persona. She is intrigued by the men at the theater and the attention they pay to the prostitutes there, decides to pretend being a prostitute herself. Disguised, she especially enjoys talking with Beauplaisir, whom she has encountered before, though previously constrained by her social status's formalities. He, not recognizing her, and believing her favors to be for sale, asks to meet her. She demurs and puts him off until the next evening.... The story explores a variety of themes, almost none of which come without literary dispute and controversy. The protagonist's game of disguise touches on everything from gender roles, to identity, to sexual desire.
This collection of early works by Eliza Haywood includes the well-known novella Fantomina (1725) along with three other short, highly engaging Haywood works: The Tea-Table (1725), Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), and Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730). In these writings, Haywood arouses the vicarious experience of erotic love while exploring the ethical and social issues evoked by sexual passion. This Broadview edition includes an introduction that focuses on Haywood’s life and career and on the status of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century. Also included are appendices of contextual materials from the period comprising writings by Haywood on female conduct, eighteenth-century pornography (from Venus in the Cloister), and a source text (Nahum Tate’s A Present for the Ladies).
Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most important responses to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Anti-Pamela comments on Richardson’s representations of work, virtue, and gender, while also questioning the generic expectations of the novel that Pamela establishes, and it provides a vivid portrayal of the material realities of life for a woman in eighteenth-century London. Fielding’s Shamela punctures both the figure Richardson established for himself as an author and Pamela’s preoccupation with virtue. This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical materials, including writings from the period on sexuality, women’s work, Pamela and the print trade, and education and conduct.
Theories of sight and spectatorship captivated many writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century and, in turn, helped to define both sexual politics and gender identity. Eliza Haywood was thoroughly engaged in the social, philosophical, and political issues of her time, and she wrote prolifically about them, producing over seventy-five works of literature - plays, novels, and pamphlets - during her lifetime. Examining a number of works from this prodigious canon, Juliette Merritt focuses on Haywood's consideration of the myriad issues surrounding sight and seeing and argues that Haywood explored strategies to undermine the conventional male spectator/female spectacle structure of looking. Combining close readings of Haywood's work with twentieth-century debates among feminist and psychoanalytic theorists concerning the visual dynamics of identity and gender formation, Merritt explores insights into how the gaze operates socially, epistemologically, and ontologically in Haywood's writing, ultimately concluding that Haywood's own strategy as an author involved appropriating the spectator position as a means of exercising female power. Beyond Spectacle will cement Haywood's deservedly prominent place in the canon of eighteenth-century fiction and position her as a writer whose work speaks not only to female agency, but to eighteenth-century writers, gender relations, and power politics as well.
Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Wuppertal (Fachbereich Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften), course: British Literature, language: English, abstract: Looking at the representation of Eliza Haywood in the works of literary scholars reveals an ambivalent positioning. Whereas some authors regard Haywood's works as central cornerstones of either the genre of the novel or women's writing in general (or both), others hardly mention her and if so, Eliza Haywood is presented more as a public figure in the early eighteenth century or for the arguments she had with contemporary writers like Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope (cf. Probyn 229f.) than as a competitive writer. A similar phenomenon can be noticed in the way in which her novel Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze is included. Again, some authors make Fantomina and the female protagonist the center of their studies (especially in cases where the main focus is on the role of women), others consider it not even worth mentioning, even when selecting works by Haywood for a special edition (cf. Backscheider). All this leads to the conclusion that Fantomina (or Haywood in general) is especially relevant for writers dealing with the role of women in literature, either as writers or as protagonists within the actual works. The concept of gender as the distinction between male and female entities is one which has been developed in the 20th century and is at the same time especially a matter of English language. Many other languages express gender with the same word they use for genre (cf. Skinner 53) or for sex1. However, gender roles have also been an issue in literature before before the term's introduction. In this paper, I will first discuss whether the rise of the novel and Eliza Haywood as a writer have been promotive elements to gender issues in literature. Secondly, I will use some selected elements of Fantomina to examine gender-related questions in the plot and finally, I will use the conclusion to point out the gender roles represented in Fantomina with respect to the time it was written in.
Though strikingly varied in narrative format and purpose, ranging as they do from the erotic and sensational to the sentimental and pious, they offer a distinct fictional approach to the moral and social issues of the age from a female standpoint.