Rereading Prose Fiction: Lyric Convention in Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood

Rereading Prose Fiction: Lyric Convention in Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood G. Gabrielle Starr Prose fiction," the default substitute for the complexities involved in the use of"novel" or "romance," is a convenientterm for speaking ofRestoration or early eighteenth-century narratives; as a descriptive category, however, it is more misleading than historically precise. This is especially clear when one considers that most theories of the novel's development in Britain do not accountfor, oreven mention, the mixture ofprose and poetry which constitutes much "prose" romance.1 In both British and continental traditions, romance is metrical in its beginning, changing slowly into a more varied and flexible form. Works such as Honoré D'Urfé's L'Astrée, Philip Sidney's Arcadia, and Mary Wroth's Urania combine prose narrat1 Critics whose work is not limited to British fiction have been more aware of this issue. In The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), Mikhail Bakhtin argues that Menippean satire, a mixed form, is one of the most important precursors to the novel. He also explores the relation between lyric and novel in Eugene Onegin. (See especially "Epic and Novel" and "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" in The Dialogic Imagination.) Friedrich Schlegel argues for the interrelation of the novel and lyric in Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Emst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), focusing on the contributions of the novel to the aesthetic ideal and episteme of romanticism. Although he sees drama at the origin of the novel, he "can scarcely visualize a novel but as a mixture of storytelling, song, and other forms" (p. 102). Margaret Anne Doody, also working within a wider scope ofliterary history, makes some mention ofthe presence oflyric in the novel in The True Story ofthe Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), but does not pursue the connection. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 1, October 1999 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION ives with lyric forms that range from madrigal to lament, epithalamium, or sonnet. Lyrics, however, are not found only in pastoral romance. Even its heroic counterparts contain songs which erstwhile lovers seem unable to do without.2 As metrical romance begins to die, lyrics remain as a ghost in the prose, used by writers from Gascoigne forward to provide a glimpse of interior life.3 In the Arcadia, for example, poems are used to reveal the hidden, both as secrets and emotions: as Sidney put it, poems are "the badges of the passions" in his romance, the formal externalization of the stuff beneath the skin.4 Later fiction does not leave this practice behind. As writers such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood sought ways to accomplish the affective requirements of their narratives, the substantial affinity between the province of the lyric and the demands of their writing led them to the use of lyric conventions . In Love in Excess (1719) Haywood reinterprets the metaphysical tradition of amatory poetry, especially that ofDonne, to create her own figures of emotional excess. Behn works within the tradition of pastoral lyric as filtered through romance and her own poetry in Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87), using lyric to make the representation of emotion not merely descriptive, but affective as well. These uses of lyric form a distinct counter-tradition to the concurrent wane of the lyric mode in Augustan poetry, moving from Behn's contemporaries through the age of Pope.5 There are twin traditions in this period: the absorption of lyric into the emerging novel and its near-renunciation (or re2 This practice is less frequent in heroic than in pastoral romance. Still, see, for example, Vasco Lobeira, Amadis ofGaul, trans. Robert Southey, 3 vols (1872): book 1 contains both Belterebus's song "made in his passion" (1:298) and Leonoreta singing "the song which Amadis ... made for [her] love" (2:15). 3 According to R.S. White, this begins with The Adventures ofMaster FJ. (1573), "Functions of Poems and Songs in Elizabethan Romance and Romantic Comedy," English Studies 68 (1987), 393. The French practice goes back to 1215 and Jean Renart's Guillaume de Dole...