Tracing the Oriental Origin of Gothic Fiction in Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai
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This paper reads Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) as a proto-Gothic fiction that terrorizes female desire in its sexual, political, and social form. Written as an Oriental tale, Eovaai shares strikingly similar tropes and sentiments with Gothic fiction, anticipating the rise of “Oriental Gothic” that puts the female body on the cusp of despotic violence. Indeed, Gothic and Oriental romance share similar thematic, narratological, and rhetorical concerns that help update English thoughts on political bodies and gender relations. Specifically, by pretending to be an English translation of a Chinese translation, Eovaai creates a unique spatial and temporal space in which England’s present and Chinese prehistory overlap. Using the Oriental framework, Haywood employs the backdrop of supernaturalism and the politics of gaze to carve out a parasexual space in which female desire, passion, and curiosity are pitted against each other. Eovaai puts sexual and political consciousness at close proximity, tapping into discourses of legitimacy and political authority curiously performed over an illicit desire for the female body. Rather than reading Haywood as an amatory fiction writer whose romance planted the embryonic seeds of domestic realism, I focus on how Haywood, by using Oriental fantasy as a platform to dissect the politics of female passion, was working up a Gothic surge that would become so popular by the mid-eighteenth century. By examining how the Oriental and the Gothic imaginations work in concert to envisage boundaries of the English novel, this paper attempts to offer a more discursive and multivalent approach to the novel’s “rise,” putting translatability and extra-nationality as an expression of English imagination.
Abstract
This paper reads Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) as a proto-Gothic fiction that terrorizes female desire in its sexual, political, and social form. Written as an Oriental tale, Eovaai shares strikingly similar tropes and sentiments with Gothic fiction, anticipating the rise of “Oriental Gothic” that puts the female body on the cusp of despotic violence. Indeed, Gothic and Oriental romance share similar thematic, narratological, and rhetorical concerns that help update English thoughts on political bodies and gender relations. Specifically, by pretending to be an English translation of a Chinese translation, Eovaai creates a unique spatial and temporal space in which England’s present and Chinese prehistory overlap. Using the Oriental framework, Haywood employs the backdrop of supernaturalism and the politics of gaze to carve out a parasexual space in which female desire, passion, and curiosity are pitted against each other. Eovaai puts sexual and political consciousness at close proximity, tapping into discourses of legitimacy and political authority curiously performed over an illicit desire for the female body. Rather than reading Haywood as an amatory fiction writer whose romance planted the embryonic seeds of domestic realism, I focus on how Haywood, by using Oriental fantasy as a platform to dissect the politics of female passion, was working up a Gothic surge that would become so popular by the mid-eighteenth century. By examining how the Oriental and the Gothic imaginations work in concert to envisage boundaries of the English novel, this paper attempts to offer a more discursive and multivalent approach to the novel’s “rise,” putting translatability and extra-nationality as an expression of English imagination.
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