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.