Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators (review)

In this insightful, tightly unified book, Juliette Merritt analyses one of the most important aspects of Eliza Haywood's narrative style. She points out how often Haywood's authorial position is that of spectator, specifically the creation of visual dominance, and how engaged she is with establishing discursive authority. One of the strengths of this book is the illustration of Haywood's lifelong fascination with women's power to control the gaze. She begins with Haywood's earliest fiction, Love in Excess, and concludes with a chapter that juxtaposes Bath Intrigues (1725), which, as an Augustan Reprint, brought Merritt to Haywood, the Female Spectator, the periodical that Haywood published 1744–46, and The Invisible Spy (1755).

Merritt has a good grasp of Haywood's significance and places Haywood's various fictions about the specular within the historical situation of women, especially writers. Although she is not concerned with Haywood's contributions to ongoing political, social, or even female issues, she makes some contributions to these present-day interests by detailing how commodified spectators were as, for instance, journalists and spies. Merritt draws productively on the theoretical work of Susan Lanser, John Berger, and especially film critics such as Laura Mulvey. Reminding us that women construct themselves to be objects of the gaze, she demonstrates Haywood's lifelong, thematic concern with women's efforts to communicate and control through their potential as spectacle. The failed attempt of Alovisa in Love in Excess and the successful game played by Fantomina are lively case studies. Repeatedly the book arrests with a spirited discussion of a technique, such as Haywood's ability to show that men are objects of female desire, spectacles for analysis of male sexual behaviour and contemporary concepts of masculinity.

The weakest part of the book is the treatment of The Invisible Spy, which is surprising since we are led by Beyond Spectacle's rhetoric to anticipate it eagerly. Anyone who has ever read this fascinating, multi-faceted, almost completely neglected text would look forward to a discussion of its obsession with visual and linguistic authority. The narrator begins an introduction "To the Public," "I have observed that when a new book begins to make any noice in the world, as I am pretty certain this will do, everyone is desirous of becoming acquainted with the author ... . I expect to hear an hundred different names inscribed to the Invisible Spy ... . but whether I am any one of these, or whether I am even a man or a woman, they will find it, after all their conjectures, as difficult to discover as the longitude." Even Ros Ballaster, who has written about Haywood's "ungendered" narrators, has not given this text close attention. This long book (about three hundred pages) is a dazzling demonstration of Haywood's command of the discourses of her time and the political, social, and literary landscape. The breadth of her interests and her opinions about power resonate, sometimes shocking the reader with the vehemence of condemnation based on being an eyewitness: "Sometimes too I amuse myself with turning over the collection of a virtuoso, where I am always filled with the utmost astonishment, as finding sums sufficient to endow an hospital lavish'd in the purchase of wings of butterflies—the shells of fishes."

There are some problems with the use of secondary literature. Just as Merritt does not seem to have mastered The Invisible Spy, she does not know the Haywood criticism quite well enough, and some books are mentioned rather than their insights integrated into the argument. Especially in her discussion of The British Recluse she does little beyond others' work and could have benefited from, for instance, the concept of the text as an isomorphic construction with Cleomira's tale a romance and in that discourse and Belinda's a novel in language and plot. Sometimes these failings remind us of the explosion of criticism that makes mastery an elusive goal, but sometimes real flaws result. For example, Merritt...