Utopian Voyeurism: Androgyny and the Language of the Eyes in Haywood’s Love in Excess

Encountering two reunited lovers near the end of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719–20), the novel’s protagonist Count D’elmont declares, “if any credit ... may be given to the language of the eyes, I am certain yours speak success.” One of the fortunate lovers replies, “Had I a thousand eyes, a thousand tongues, they all would be but insignificant to express the joy!” ¹ The pairing of “eyes” and “tongues” is apt; throughout the novel, eyes offer “explanation[s],” speak their “meaning but too plainly,” and “testif[y]” more clearly than “words” have the “power to do” (224, 111, 196). The novel repeatedly contrasts a deceptive and limiting verbal language with the supposedly more expressive “language of the eyes” (240), a conventional staple of amatory verse and prose in which lovers “speak” to each other through killing looks and dazzling glances. Yet, as Haywood deploys a traditional rhetoric that evokes the languishing lovers of Petrarchan sonnets or Sidney’s Arcadian landscapes, her novel also infuses such rhetoric with a new set of values and motives in relation to gender.

Traditionally, the erotically charged language of the eyes is subversive of social and class norms to the degree that it permits a covert expression of forbidden desires: a male lover’s infatuation with a married woman or a poverty-stricken suitor’s courtship of a woman of wealth and caste. Further, the language of the eyes may at first appear to unsettle gender relations, endowing women with a magnificent and terrible power, albeit often unconscious or involuntary; without knowing it, Petrarch’s Laura, his “sun” among women, can break hearts with a single striking ray from her “begli occhi .”² At the same time, of course, the power imputed to the mistress’s gaze is in many respects illusory. Her lethally dazzling glances remain a function of the lover’s gaze; like the sun, she shines from a distance and on all alike. To dazzle with speaking glances is hardly a matter of choice; instead, it is simply her nature. As we might expect, the potentially subversive trope of the language of the eyes appears firmly grounded in patriarchal relations and norms. In traditional amatory verse, the male poet reads and interprets his beloved’s gaze; he both initiates the nonverbal language of the eyes by soliciting her glances and translates them into verbal language for his readers.

Love in Excess recontextualizes the conventional trope of the lover’s glance, extending its function and significance. Transforming the traditional lovers’ language of the eyes from a series of discrete and dazzling moments, the novel imbues it with the texture of an extended discourse, replete with nuanced meanings. In addition, Haywood deepens the subversive nature and content of the lover’s glance. In her fictive world, verbal language confines women and limits them according to rigid social codes, while the language of the eyes offers a realm of female agency masked as an instinctual bodily response; further, when modified by Haywood’s depiction of courtship and seduction, voyeurism (which traditionally privileges the male gaze over the female object) allows for a reversal of terms whereby the gaze itself exposes androgynous possibilities. Female characters can now claim the gaze, and supposedly powerful men can become objects of it. As Juliette Merritt argues, Haywood repeatedly struggles to move her woman characters into the position of spectator, beyond their relatively passive role as “spectacle” or as the object of the male gaze. Yet, as Merritt makes clear, this attempted repositioning heightens female vulnerabilities to male censure.³

My argument here is that Haywood’s Love in Excess utilizes the language of the eyes to sidestep the dichotomy between spectator and spectacle, eliding the boundaries between the two realms. The language of the eyes epitomizes a rich realm of nonverbal discourse available to both female and male characters; this body language includes not only glances, but also gestures that can be read in visual terms. As women and men engage in the duel of lovers’ glances, they push the limits...