Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Juliette Merritt’s analysis of Eliza Haywood’s use of spectacle to
demonstrate female power and powerlessness is a useful and detailed
reading of Haywood’s work within the spectrum of 18th-century amatory
fiction. Merritt successfully demonstrates how looking at Haywood’s
career uncovers the importance of women’s writing in the period, and
the risk of being seen associated with that career.

Merritt explores the power of viewing the other and the self in
Haywood’s fiction by analyzing several of her texts through different
lenses. In Chapter 1, she explores “the failure of female curiosity in
Love in Excess,” which focuses on the character of Alovisa and charts
her downfall through her attempt to cast a female gaze on D’Elmont. In
Chapter 2, she focuses on masquerade and the multiplicity associated
with male and female love in Haywood’s Fantomina. In Chapter 3, she
discuses The British Recluse and concludes that “Haywood’s
preoccupation with scenarios of seeing and being seen, and her awareness
of the connection between agency and sight, bespeaks her view ... that
acquiring the position of ‘Looker-on’ is fundamental to the exercise
of power.”

Chapter 4 contrasts the private rhetoric in Chapter 3 with the
disarming of a definition between private identity and public authorial
persona in its discussion of The Invisible Spy and Bath Intrigues.
Merritt sums up “the spectator / spectacle dichotomy” by concluding
that Haywood’s message focuses on the need for women to master the
visible field for their own purposes of power.

The value of Beyond Spectacle lies in its ability to make the reader
attend to the techniques Haywood employs in her construction and
questioning of femininity in the wake of visual culture. Merritt’s
focus “on Haywood’s preoccupation with structures of sight and
seeing” is an apt one that can be applied to more than just
Haywood’s 18th-century writing.