Abstract
“THUS have I attempted to trace nature in all her mazy windings, and shew life’s progress thro’ the passions, from the cradle to the grave,” remarks the narrator on the closing pages of Haywood’s Life’s Progress through the Passions: or, The Adventures of Natur a (1748).1 Although written 24 years after she left the Hillarian circle, this novel is a good place to begin an examination of Haywood’s desire to find a language for the passions. It offers a hybridized language, as Haywood incorporates various discourses (philosophical, scientific, moral, and didactic) and genres like the parable, pornography, and the progress story to present how difficult it is to clearly delineate the passions’ influence over us and to assess their merit in making us who we are. Written in a deliberately objective and dispassionate language of scientific observation, Life’s Progress demonstrates through its absence of emotional tropes just how necessary it is to evoke sympathy rather than rely on intellectual knowledge for a real comprehension of others’ lives.2
[T]o judge of the various Passions of the human Mind, and to distinguish those imperceptible Degrees by which they become Masters of the Heart, and attain the Dominion over Reason.
—Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator
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Notes
Carol Stewart, The Rash Resolve and Life’s Progress (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), xvii, reads LP as “a narrative showing that conventional morality, most particularly in the form of marriage, always ends badly.” While I agree that one of Haywood’s themes in her oeuvre is that “conventional morality” often restricts or manipulates natural behavior to fit a preconceived form, the focus of my study on Life’s Progress is Hay-wood’s exposure of the flaws in conventional discourses on the passions.
William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1992), 2.7.139–66.
John Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 182–83.
Eliza Haywood, Three Novellas: The Distress’d Orphan, The City Jilt and The Double Marriage, ed. Earla A. Wilputte (East Lansing: U of Michigan P, 1995), 72.
Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 77.
Kathleen Lubey, “Eliza Haywood’s Amatory Aesthetic,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.3 (2006), 321.
Eliza Haywood, dedication “To the Right Honourable the Earl of Suffolk and Bindon,” in Lasselia: or, The Self-Abandon’d, The Injur’d Husband and Lasselia, ed. Jerry C. Beasley (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1999), 105.
Thomas Sprat, “The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge,” in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-ich, 1969), 27.
Thomas Willis, Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive Man, trans. S. Pordage (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971 [1683]), 43.
John Wilmot, “A Satire against Reason and Mankind,” in Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), lines 64–65; 175–78; 373–76.
Sir Richard Blackmore, preface to Creation. A Philosophical Poem. Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of a God (London: 1712, xxxv–xxxvi.
Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard,” in The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, 6 vols., 2nd ed. rev. (London: Methuen, 1954), vol. 2, lines 213–14; 209; 316.
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© 2014 Earla Wilputte
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Wilputte, E. (2014). Life’s Progress through the Passions. In: Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442055_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442055_2
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