The Masquerade of Domesticity: Envisioning Female Agency in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

Abstract

The Masquerade of Domesticity: Envisioning Female Agency in Betsy Thoughtless Hajeong Park (Korea University) Eliza Haywood, witnessing a change of popular taste after the 1740s, found her amatory fictions unfit to convey moral lessons, and tried to rewrite them in the new moralistic dress of the style and language. In her later work The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood turned to the masquerade practice she had adopted in “Fantomina,” and incorporated within the overtly didactic narrative her earlier amatory narratives. Capitalizing on the new dress of domestic fiction, Haywood hides the subversive energy of early amorous narratives―her vision of female agency and empowerment in a patriarchal structure. This paper examines how Haywood redeems herself as a moral authority by presenting herself as a reformed coquette and by transforming her early amatory work into respectable fiction and how she attempts to write a feminist version of the domestic narrative through the imitation of the feminine proper. For Haywood, the patriarchal notion of female virtue is not necessarily the positive quality of a heroine, but rather a costume put on to be seen. Since female honor depends on the patriarchal recognition, she suggests, that it is manipulable. Beneath the surface of the conventional ending with a marriage, Haywood envisions women’s inviolable right to autonomy and the significance of female alliance.