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Within the pages of Eliza Haywood's novels, masquerade is often used by female characters as a means by which to gain control or power. More specifically, Haywood's female characters often misrepresent themselves as a means by which to achieve sexual power and even to obtain sexual gratification. Haywood also explores the theme of women's uses of deception and even disguise as methods by which to skirt the confines of a male dominated society and as modes devoted to escaping the boundaries they inflict upon themselves in trying to maintain their virtue.

This thesis traces the career of the prolific eighteenth-century author Eliza Haywood through narratological analysis of some of her key works. It contributes to the new wave of Haywood criticism that is moving away from the thematic, gender based focus that has dominated discussion of her oeuvre since her critical rediscovery in the 1980s. My narratological method demonstrates how understanding at a formal and thematic level is enhanced by the employment of theoretical narrative paradigms. Narratology is interested in the relationship between the events of a narrative (story) and how these events are presented (text). I utilize the narratological terminology of Gérard Genette because it is narrative discourse, rather than the mere events of a story, that provides the basis for a meaningful discussion concerning matters of presentation. Making the topic of narrative discourse central to the study requires analysis of voice, point of view, speech, and temporality, as it covers the ways in which the story is told. Throughout her career, Haywood manipulates these narrative features so as to create inventive texts that adapt to the changing trends of the literary marketplace. Key topics of discussion include Haywood s continuous but developing use both of the embedded narrative and anachronies; the differing levels of intrusion created by her narrators employment of metanarrative commentary; and her progressive use of metalepsis: from her inclusion of simple scene changes in her earlier work, to her emphatic use of explicit diegetic interruptions in her later work that mirror those utilised by Henry Fielding. The thesis follows a chronological structure and is historically and bibliographically informed. This approach enables the thesis to provide extended comparison of Haywood s narrative choices with those of her main forebears and contemporaries, especially Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Fielding.

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Gardens in Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or a History of a Young Lady provide a place for the characters to gain knowledge; but without preparation to receive this knowledge - if restrained behind the veil of decorum - they come to harm, rather than constructive awareness. A fine line exists between innocence and experience in these works. The ways in which the characters negotiate this line illustrates the complexities involved in the eighteenth-century understanding of virtue and how society attempted to mediate this issue. This negotiation can be seen largely in specific garden scenes in these two novels. In Clarissa, Clarissa's flight with Lovelace early in the novel demonstrates this negotiation; while in Betsy Thoughtless, this demonstration lies in the garden scene at the end with Betsy and Trueworth. Richardson and Haywood present alternate endings for a virtuous heroine tempted by sex and trapped by domestic politics. The different fates of Clarissa Harlowe and Betsy Thoughtless result from not only the difference between tragedy and comedy, but from the differing views of temptation. I wish to investigate the possible didactic messages behind these alternate endings. In investigating the two treatments of the temptation of the virtuous heroine, I hope to provide new material by asserting the importance of flight from the garden as representative of the fallen woman in Richardson's novel, and the triumphantly virtuous in Haywood's. Clarissa's fall out of the garden proves a previous sin punished, while Betsy's flight from the garden proves her virtue. Since both Clarissa and Betsy Thoughtless, and their authors, are seen as groundbreaking, an abundance of scholarship is available. However, little has been done in connecting the two garden scenes to definitions of temptation. Furthermore, though connections between Milton's Satan and Richardson's Lovelace have been drawn and re-drawn, little critical attention has been devoted to the way in which the Paradise Lost expulsion from the garden may mirror the important flights from the gardens that both Clarissa and Betsy experience.

Through four novelists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-Haywood, Defoe, Austen, and Chopin-this work examines the way the mother's importance evolves throughout literature. In Haywood's works, motherhood is seen as a dominant force in her child's life, but not a dominant force in society. Defoe approaches motherhood in a dramatically different way; for him, motherhood is secondary to financial security, and this opinion is reflected in the lives and actions of his characters. In spite of the absence of a maternal influence, Austen's characters do not experience true hardship in the way that Haywood's and Defoe's do. However, their lives are adversely affected by this absence. Chopin's protagonist has never experienced a maternal influence, and this absence has dramatically affected her life. She is unsure about what she wants from life, and this knowledge, along with her realization of society's restrictions upon her, ultimately leads to her suicide.

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Through her texts depicting amorous adventures, Eliza Haywood engages with critical, contemporary discussions about power relations and consent in both social and legal constructs. Her texts resist the boundary between the private domain of interpersonal relationships and the public domain of political relations. Rather, her fiction engages in a wide-reaching discourse that explores the interrelations between power, agency, consent, and education, and lays bare the ways in which societal roles and expectations are reinforced in damaging ways. This thesis aims to prove that Haywood’s repetition of central motifs—including the continued tension between resisting and yielding to sexual pressure or temptation, and the line between seduction and rape—serves to question how these behaviours become normalized and naturalized. Through analyzing three categories of relationships—women and their fathers or guardians, women and their lovers, and women with other women—this thesis unpacks how women’s agency is stifled by parental relationships, transferred to male lovers, and finally empowered by female intimacy.

The Long Eighteenth Century was a period in which change was constant and proceeding the Restoration Era; this sense of change continued throughout the era. Charles II created an era in which women were allowed on the theatre stage, and his mistresses accompanied him to court; Charles II set the stage for the proto-feminist ideas of the eighteenth century that would manifest themselves in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. These novels showcase the enlightenment of women and some of their male contemporaries and the beginning struggles of female agency. The eighteenth century was a time in which the separate sphere mentality grew ever stronger within the patriarchal society, and yet, women began to question their subservient place in this society—although this struggle would continue to intensify throughout the nineteenth century and eventually come to fruition in the late nineteenth century.

This dissertation focuses on mid-eighteenth-century British periodicals and their claims to educate middle-ranked women in natural philosophy, modern history, and vernacular literature. I argue that articles published in female-penned periodicals are comparable to articles in male-penned periodicals and therefore allowed women to pursue an informal education through reading. I propose that female periodicals also illustrate how women formed counterpublics of learning through correspondence that rivaled the conversations that took place in the male-dominated public spheres, such as in coffee houses and meeting halls. As formal classical education was reserved for elite men, women learned through reading books and periodicals, and through conversation. Given the cost of books, periodicals became the main source for informal learning for middle-ranked women. I call attention to the periodical form that allowed women to complete feasibly short lessons between their daily domestic duties and amusements. Female-penned periodicals encouraged women to diversify their interests by deploying literary depictions of the moral pitfalls of women’s focus on the beautification of the body. Driven by the financial and social rise of the merchant class, middling-ranked women with small dowries sought to gain advantage in the marriage market by distinguishing themselves as suitable wives for merchant or even gentry husbands. Periodicals thus made an economic as well as a moral case for their single female readers to balance fashionable amusements with intellectual pursuits. By examining not only how mid-century female-penned periodicals defined themselves in relation to male-penned periodicals but also the impact of broader changes in formalized education, my thesis uncovers an important and under-discussed aspect of the rise of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain. I show how female-penned periodicals encouraged women's involvement in discussions about the development of the modern disciplines of education. My thesis is organized chronologically and follows the work of three notable periodical editors and authors with chapters on Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46), Frances Brooke's The Old Maid (1755-56), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760-61). The purpose of my thesis is not only to chart the changes in representations of women's learning over time, but also to reveal how Haywood, Brooke, and Lennox propose that women share their proto-disciplinary knowledge beyond their counterpublics in order to encourage intellectual discussions between like-minded males and females in the public spheres.