Equal Performances: An Exploration of Eliza Haywood's Depiction of Hillarian Ideals in Fantomina
Authors:   , Howard Genevieve 
Published: November 2021

<p>My thesis connects Eliza Haywood with the Hillarians, a London-based coterie of young writers and artists headed by Aaron Hill in the first half of the 1720s, and explores the possibility that in Fantomina, Or Love in a Maze (1725), Haywood used tropes of performance from her theatrical career to work out the implications of the Hillarian ideals of progressive conduct on female agency. Haywood’s early novels, including Fantomina, can be connected to the group, and can be shown to encompass its behavioural ideals – a self-consciously progressive model of male-female conduct. My first chapter examines aspects of what Charles Taylor terms the “social imaginary” of the early eighteenth century. John Locke’s theory of personal identity (Part I) redefined the self in terms of consciousness, which meant the self could change. Conduct literature (Part II) defined the behaviour of women as “innate” through the regulation of sexual desire. In Part III, I show women philosophers, writers, and playwrights began to see women’s conduct, like the self, as constructed, and began applying this to relations between the sexes. If conduct was constructed it could change, and women began to work out these ideas and the implications of this change on stage. I show Haywood could have taken this theatrical convention of working philosophical ideas out on stage and adapted it to her fictions, particularly to Fantomina, via the process of novelisation. It is possible that as theatrical tropes crossed over into fiction in novelisation, the use of performance to work out philosophical ideas crossed over too. My second chapter explores Haywood’s participation in manuscript literary culture. Part I positions her in the literary culture of her time, and connects her with the Hillarians, opening a new critical context in which to read her work. Part II connects the composition of her early texts with her coterie, arguing it is possible all her 1719-1725 texts, including Fantomina, were conceived and first read within the group. It explores the impact of this on the context and meaning of Fantomina, and how Haywood could have used genre, particularly the tropes of amatory fiction, to explore the ideas of the Hillarians. Chapters Three and Four draw these strands of manuscript and performance together. Haywood’s association with the Hillarians, as I argue in Chapter Three, likely influenced her authorial agency in Fantomina. In Part I, I argue Haywood possibly had control over the image of the original portrait of her 1725 Secret Histories frontispiece. I then examine her narrative agency (Part II). Shifts in narrative discourse in Fantomina show Haywood used narration techniques adapted from the theatre, and these narrative shifts gave her a public voice: in these shifts, she appears to comment on how relations between the sexes are constructed – a pivotal focus of the Hillarians. Chapter Four explores Haywood’s development of the heroine’s agency in relation to sexual desire. This focus reveals the differing conduct of the heroine and Beauplaisir within the same relationship, as well as the power structure of the relationship – again pivotal focuses of her coterie. Haywood appears to be working out the implications of Hillarian ideals in relation to female agency, particularly sexual consent. I conclude Haywood used masquerade and performance to develop a system of self-knowledge that relied on its expression through emotion, rather than the mind, and that this system can be extended beyond knowledge of the self to knowledge of others – and possibly further.</p>