Melting Female Bodies in Love and Excess

Reading Love in Excess, one thing becomes painfully obvious: there is a whole lot of scheming in this book! Disguises, mistaken identities, anonymous letters, spying, devious plans, and that messy love web that we tried to map out at the end of class last week all point to the difficulty of procuring and maintaining true love in Love in Excess. The messy webs of deceit caught my attention during my initial read and reminded me of Les Liaisons dangereuses (though the epistolary form of that novel may also have something to do with the connection to Love in Excess in my mind). I originally thought that this might be a common theme in Romances, but the reading from Ballaster had some interesting quotes that have led me to think of this question in a different way.

Exploring the completely negative depictions of Haywood in contemporary literary works, Ballaster writes, "Although comic, both Savage's and Pope's representations of the female body as borderless (melting) and engulfing (swelling) reveal a certain paranoid anxiety about the power of the woman to disrupt masculine authority and autonomy" (163-164). I wish Ballaster would have continued with this thought, in particular the idea that the female body is both "borderless" and "engulfing," as I think it could be very fruitful. This is a rather monstrous description of the female body, declaring it not so much as powerful, but more of as a monstrosity and a problematic body.

This idea of a swelling and melting female body could be something powerful, but I am not convinced that Haywood accomplishes that or would even be interested in doing so. In Love in Excess, female bodies are not only borderless but are also undefined and vague. Women's bodies are indistinct from one another as each body melts into another. D'elmont has sex with Melantha, thinking she is Melliora, his "true love." However, despite the closeness of the activity, he is unable to distinguish between the two women. Despite his love, admiration, and/or infatuation, the body of any female would suffice as long as D'elmont thinks it is Melliora.

This undefined female body continues throughout the narrative, from the mistaking of the author of love letters to the disguises and masquerades as other characters. These women have unstatic, fluid subjectives, which though a very modern convention, appear to remove the female characters from both their bodies and identity into a nonexistence. It is only the women who use masquerade in Love in Excess. While men are certainly as guilty as deceiving others as the women, they nonetheless stay true to their own identities. What is most troublesome is not that the women are masquerading, but rather that they can so easily masquerade as one another. When Violetta's disguises herself as Fidelio, she is creating a completely new person and identity; she gives life to another subject and lives that life through her own body. However, when Melantha pretends to be Melliora, Camilla pretends to be Violetta, or Ciamara pretends to be Camilla, there is no new identity created. Rather, these women are infiltrating already existing bodies and subjectives, implying that the original woman is so nondescript and unimportant that her uniqueness or existence go without notice and thus can easily be manipulated and copied.

Ballaster writes, "Haywood glimpses a means of empowering the female within amatory conflict, of making her a weaver and dilator of her own amatory plot, through the elaboration of a familiar concept-metaphor of the early eighteenth century, that of the masquerade"(179). Yes, the ability for the female body to melt into another upsets the male's ability to know but I am not convinced that the way Haywood conveys this fluidity is a positive representation of the feminine subjectivity. It is only in disguising their bodies that the women are able to assert some sort of control over the men. This certainly conveys the limited amount of space that women were able to assert any sort of control but the denial of self and the ease of representation of another makes me nervous.

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For my own assistance in remembering other points I may want to further explore, below are some quotes from Ballaster that I found interesting and/or helpful.

"...every point at which the heroine attempts to become an agent in her own history... results in further disaster" (174).
Yes, we certainly see this, especially in Alovisa.

love letters pg 62

Does the book show more women letters than men? D'Almont's letter stopped by Alovisa-an instance of impotence?

"In other words, female authorship here signifies naturalness; male authorship signifies artifice. The letters, depending on the sex of the author are either fact or fiction."

"inscribed in these fictions is a gendered struggle over interpretation. Again and again, a dramatic conflict between men and women over the 'meaning' of the amatory sign is enacted. In other words, a competition between men and women for control of the means of seduction becomes the central theme of these love stories" (40).

"...Pope's poem seeks to check the proliferation of corrupted and improper writings from the woman writer--to stem the flow of romance--the publication of another romance by Haywood, once again signed with her name, and registering no response to the enclosing strategies of her male detractor, becomes the most effective symbol of his impotence" (166).

Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess: The Punishing of "Bad" Women

There certainly is an excess of “love,” (or, at least lust) in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. The tangled web of romances is even more remarkable when one looks at the center of the web to see one man: the somehow clueless but romantically dangerous Count D’elmont. Though the narrator continually assures the reader that D’elmont exudes this charm without meaning to do so, his web has been cast to catch women; some will die, some will be devoured, and only the chaste Melliora, who does all she can to avoid the web, will survive.

The young Amena is the first woman to become tangled in D’elmont’s dangerous web. Initially an innocent bystander of Alovisa’s plot, she fails to follow the role expected of her as a young woman and behaves rashly. Once she receives D’elmont’s attention, she does not work hard to hide her feelings for him: “Amena (little versed in the art of dissimulation, so necessary to her sex,) could not conceal the pleasure she took in his addresses and without even a seeming reluctancy had given him a promise of meeting him the next day in the Tuilleries” (46). She is too enthusiastic, too exuberant, to come out unscathed from this affair. She allows herself to be manipulated by D’elmont and her servant, gives in to her sexual desires, and finds herself a ruined woman. She is the fly that is devoured by D’elmont. His first catch, he finds her a sport rather than a true love, and her imprisonment in the monastery is quickly forgotten.

Alovisa is too cunning of a woman to survive. It is her desire for D’elmont that sets the story in motion as she confesses her love in anonymous love letters. Her mischievous hand transgresses social norms of the good, subservient, well-behaved housewife and D’elmont soon begins to loath her. She is chastised by various characters, and even the narrator, for her jealousy, even though she is in the right to suspect D’elmont’s attention is elsewhere. Alovisa’s aggressive and unfeminine nature is so completely out of line of the ideal eighteenth century gentlewoman that she receives the harshest punishment yet: death by her own husband’s sword. What an end for a woman who desired her husband’s love so much but, instead of his loving embrace, is run through with such a cold and phallic object.

Ciamara is another doomed woman as she is even more sexually aggressive than Alovisa. The dark and conniving Italian, her desire is purely sexual and thus completely anti-feminine. She is a woman full of tricks and as such is characterized as completely removed from a real and sincere subjectivity. D’elmont’s meetings with Ciamara are wrought with foolery. She purposely drops her jewel so to procure a meeting with the Count. She pretends to be Camilla in her first attempt to seduce D’elmont. When D’elmont comes to see her a second time, she plays the role of a coquette and is “loose as wanton fancy could invent; she was lying on the couch when he entered, and affecting to seem as if she was not presently sensible of his being there” (223). Despite her fakeries, she is entirely invested in her body. She teases D’elmont’s devotion to Milliora, as she taunts, “And are you that dull, cold Platonist, which can prefer the visionary pleasures of an absent mistress, to the warm transports of the substantial present?” before exposing her naked body (224). Again, this aggression in a woman is dangerous and she flies directly into D’elmont’s web, dying by her own hand.

Only one of D’elmont’s women avoids a harsh ending. Even Violetta, though chaste and loyal, dies because of her devotion to the Count. Only Milliora, who takes measures against the lusty D’elmont, survives to marry the man at the end of the novel. Milliora, like the other women, is in love with D’elmont but she, unlike the unfortunate others, does not attempt to entangle herself in D’elmont’s web. She speaks against love, avoids being alone with him, and fills up her lock to prevent the near rape she endured the previous night. After Alovisa’s death, Milliora flees to the safety of the monastery rather than elope with D’elmont. She is not a jealous woman, which is seen in Violetta’s death scene. In her chastity and silent devotion, she does not overstep the boundaries of her gender and is rewarded at the end of the novel with a wedding and, the reader can presume, happiness.

Love in Excess does appear remarkable in the sexually charged language as well as the bevy of females who express their desire for men (something, Haywood reminds the reader in the novel, that was not allowed), but the women who do transgress societal codes for proper gender behavior are punished severely. Yet, should we take Haywood’s portrayal of Count D’elmont sincerely? He is clueless, unfaithful, and a would-be rapist. Was this man worthy of the mistakes these poor women made, was he worth their transgressions? No, but if such gender norms were not in placed to begin with, the difficulties and complexities that come with such romantic schemes would never have placed them in harm’s way.