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).