Mourning and Material Culture in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
Kelly McGuire, University of Western Ontario
Volume 18, no. 3, Spring 2006
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Eliza Haywood’s mid-eighteenth-century novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, made its appearance at a time when the gloom and sepulchral melancholy of the Graveyard Poets suffused the literary marketplace. In 1751, the year of the novel’s publication, Gray’s “Elegy” was first published and then reissued no fewer than eight times, thus fostering a culture of mourning that continued to flourish throughout the decade. Haywood’s novel was not exempt from this trend and owes more to its cultural moment than is often acknowledged. Ostensibly written in a more serious vein than her earlier novels and in conformity with the didactic tendencies and “domestic ideology” prevalent in the works of the period, Betsy Thoughtless presents a bizarre co-mingling of the grave and the comic. … The narrative … relies extensively upon death as an organizing principle; death neatly disposes of cumbersome characters and restores the romance trajectory of the novel, enabling lovers pulled asunder by marriage to reunite as widow and widower. Integral to the narrative economy of this novel as death is, however, it also registers as an excess, as Haywood introduces a character in the form of the amorphous Mrs Blanchfield (yet another admirer of Mr Trueworth), whose sole purpose in the story is to die and to be commemorated by her idol, thus providing an additional exemplum of the hero’s true worth. But this detail is not as superfluous as it might seem, since it affords yet another occasion for the work of mourning that figures so prominently in Haywood’s scripting of female consciousness.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Haywood” include:
Discours libertin et argument national dans le triptyque (Haywood, Crébillon-fils et Kimber) des heureux orphelins
by BEATRIJS VANACKER (24.4, Summer 2012)
Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan
by SHARON HARROW (ECF 22.2, Winter 2010)
Utopian Voyeurism: Androgyny and the Language of the Eyes in Haywood’s Love in Excess
by ELIZABETH GARGANO (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
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