a few thoughts on ballaster and Haywood (Feb. 1)

I'm a few days late with this, and I’m still not sure what I think...
Ballaster says that the "amatory" writings of authors such as Haywood and Behn were countered by "pious and didactic love fiction" (33) by other female authors in the same period, and that the virtuous heroines of authors such as Austen later in the century were a reaction to the infamously erotic writings of Haywood and co. She (he?) says that Haywood's novels are written for an "exclusively female audience" and that they are always concerned with "competition between men and women for control of the means of seduction" (40). Ballaster also says that "romantic fiction entails 'a reversal of the common view of history allowing the usually marginalized female sphere to dominate,'" (34) and that "by dehistoricizing and mythologizing the public sphere, the romantic fiction writer provides the female reader with a sense of feminine power and agency in a world usually closed to her participation" (35).

So now I'm not sure what I think of the novel. I initially thought of Love in Excess as cheap escapism with characters that are too simplistic for me to feel much interest in what happens to them. But maybe my impression of the novel as little better than a soap opera isn't entirely fair. I've always thought that much love literature was intended to make women resign themselves to their second-class status, and that all the talk about love and women's beauty was a consolation prize after they were denied real power. But Ballaster points out that Haywood's novels "present their female readers with a thoroughly melancholy view of the world of heterosexual romance. Male desire is, with rare exceptions, short-lived and end-directed, constituting a series of metonymical displacements of woman for woman in search of an impossible and unattainable ideal. Female desire is masochistic, self-destructive and hysterical" (175). Ballaster also says that Haywood "rejected" the idea of empowering female characters by allowing them the freedom and agency of male characters. The fact that the female characters who pursue what they want are punished, while the passive Melliora is "better" is one of the things I disliked in the novel, but perhaps this aspect of Haywood's writing is intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. And given the worsening economic conditions for women in the eighteenth century as described by Spencer, it's easy to see how love was a primary interest for women who had little other hopes of bettering their lives. Maybe finding a false "sense of feminine power and agency" (35) in romances was the best they could hope for. Ballaster quotes Haywood, who says that she writes of love because women are "'depriv'd of those advantages of education which the other sex enjoy,'" but to understand love "'requires no Aids of learning, no general Conversation, no Application'" (168). Haywood's acknowledgment that she had few other options makes me think that maybe it isn't fair for me to dismiss her so easily. But then, didn't Austen write under similar circumstances, and still manage to create much more detailed and engaging characters?

Someone else mentioned Rousseau in her blog. I thought of Rousseau too, specifically a passage in A Discourse on Inequality, in which he distinguishes the "physical" and the "moral" in love, saying "the physical is that general desire which propels one sex to unite with the other; the moral is that which shapes this desire and fixes it exclusively on one particular object." He continues, "Now it is easy to see that the moral part of love is an artificial sentiment, born of usage in society, and cultivated by women with much skill and care in order to establish their empire over men, and so make dominant the sex that ought to obey." This is interesting because Ballaster mentions that Haywood's heroines focus their attentions on a single love object, but also distinguishes her novels by their interest in the physical, and suggests that later female novelists' careful moral purity is a step backwards, preventing women from expressing their desires. But if you believe Rousseau, prioritizing the moral is a source of power for women. On the other hand, I still think the idea of love is used to manipulate women much more than men.