ELIZA HAYWOOD
1693? - 1756
Biography
-Born Elizabeth Fowler
-Was likely married between 1714-1719
-Had two illegitimate children
-Was linked romantically to Richard
Savage and William Hatchett
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)
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.)
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 waste;
Fair 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.
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.”
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 Defoe’s novel Moll
Flanders accurately portrays
women’s education as
learning accomplishments
such as music, reading,
writing, French, and dancing
(Defoe 54)
http://www.costumes.org/history/18thcent/women/hoey'splates/louisxv.jpg
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 desire—mere
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/wollstonecraft.htm

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).
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
• “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
Summary of Fantomina



http://www.buy.com/prod/fantomina-and-other-works/q/loc/106/36344045.html
A tale of an unnamed young
gentlewoman’s 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.
How was she able to trick one that was so
intimately “acquainted” with her person??


“…she was so admirably
skill’d in the Art of feigning,
that she had the Power of
putting on almost what Face
she pleas’d, 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.html
Haywood’s 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)
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)
Anti-Feminist or Feminist


Many critics have argued that
the punishment of Fantomina
at the
end
ofdefeatist
Haywood’sand anti-feminist view of

This
novella has conformed this
can be contradicted in the notion
book toFantomina
the Eighteenththat
in punishing
Century
gender
bias that the heroine, Haywood
male promiscuity
employs ais literary technique that “While the
acceptable
but female rhetoric that surrounds
disapproving
promiscuity
must be subversive, or inflammatory
oppositional,
punished:
statements ostensibly disarms them, those
are themselves nevertheless
“… ‘in statements
the melancholy
reiteration
of femaleverbatim
defeat at to the reader who is the
conveyed
the hands
of the arbiter
fictionalizing
ultimate
and who absorbs them in any
male libertine’,
Fantomina 30).
case”
(Behrendt
provides only a temporary
respite from the ultimate
persecution necessarily
awaiting the seduced maiden”
(Croskery 25).
What Haywood’s Communicating
“In Fantomina Haywood confirms the antiessentialist construction of femininity
hinted at so consistently throughout her
career, demonstrating, through her most
sexually disruptive female character,
women’s 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)


Haywood’s empowering of Fantomina with reason and
rational action instead of hysterical fits makes her
“…the female equivalent to Haywood’s 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 forc’d to what she wished with equal Ardour,
was what she wanted, and what she had form’d a
Stratagem to obtain, in which she promis’d herself
Success” (Demaria 719).

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
WORKS CITED
1st photo http://www.answers.com/topic/eliza-haywood
• 2nd Photo of R.S http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/cgibin/xphrase.pl?keyword=richard+savage
• 3rd photo of A>P.
http://clatterymachinery.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/alexanderpope-marblehill.jpg

Ballastar, Ros. Seductive Forms: Women’s 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. 170195.

Behrendt, Stephen C. Introduction. Zastrozzi. By Percy Bysshe
Shelley. 1810. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Ontario: Broadview Press
Ltd. 2002.

Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women’s 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.
