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JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) "I will sign, but it shall be in Flames": Eliza Haywood's Critique of Contract Jennifer Hobgood [OJne of the things that has always impressed me most about the law of contract is a certain deadening power it exercises by reducing parties to the passive. It constrains the lively involvement of signatories by positioning enforcement in such a way that parties find themselves in a passive rela tionship to a document: it is the contract that governs, that 'does' everything, that absorbs all responsibility and deflects all other recourse. Contract reduces life to fairy tale. The four corners of the agreement become parent. Performance is the equivalent of passive obedience to the parent. Passivity is valued as good contract-socialized behavior; activity is caged in retrospective hypotheses about states of mind at the magic moment of contracting. Individuals are judged by the contract unfolding rather than by the actors acting autonomously. Nonperformance is disobedience; disobedi ence is active; activity becomes evil in contrast to the child like passivity of contract conformity. ?Patricia Williams, "On Being the Object of Property" Eliza Haywood's The Mercenary Lover, Or The Unfortunate Heiresses (1726) is a short prose fiction concerned not only with themes of sex and money, as its title implies, but moreover it is a tale deeply troubled by the concept of con tract. The story's climactic moment occurs when the heroine, Althea, discovers the fraudulence of her brother-in-law and Hobgood 73 lover, Clitander. In an attempt to deceive Althea into signing her estate over to him, Clitander presents her with a Deed of Gift instead of the Will and Testament that he had convinced Althea was necessary to protect the inheritance of their unborn, illegitimate child. In the revelatory moment when Althea detects the "Deed," she responds to Clitander's entreaties for her to sign the document: '"Yes/ said she, 1 will sign, but it shall be in Flames. . . at the same Time snatch ing the Parchment from his Hand, she threw it into a great Fire . . . then burning in the Room, where itwas immediate ly consum'd" (142). Because Althea recognizes Clitander's manipulation of contract, and since the contract as an entity resists fraudulence in the tale, one might argue that The Mercenary Lover treats contract with respect, even reverence, and celebrates Althea's agency in suspecting the falsification of contract. While we must certainly appreciate Althea as a proto-feminist character, such an optimistic reading of the text fails to account for several facts: (1) it is at first only coin cidence that leads Althea to suspect the deceptive contract, "Chance, more than suspicion, made her desire to read it first" (141); (2) Clitander poisons Althea shortly afterwards, and thus through murder enacts the terms of the contract without Althea's signature (her estate by default going to his wife upon her death), a crime forwhich he remains unpun ished by law; and (3) only Althea's grotesquely bloated, dying, and autopsied corpse and the extracted "Embrio of at least six Months Growth" the autopsy produces finally expose Clitander's machinations (158). Like The Mercenary Lover, much of Haywood's literary work?from her fictional and dramatic works of the 1720s and 1730s to her periodical essays and later novels into the 1750s?is deeply concerned with the concept of contract and often conveys surprisingly modern critiques of and alterna tives to a masculine society structured by contract.1 An over whelming tension between sex, money, and contract in The Mercenary Lover and throughout Haywood's fiction reflects a remarkable lack of confidence in contract that stands in sharp contrast to the traditional interpretation of the eigh teenth century as a period characterized by the progressive embrace of Lockean social contract liberalism. The complex feminist engagement with masculine contractarianism palpa 74 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies ble in Haywood's work not only complicates the sociopolitical preeminence of liberalism in the British eighteenth century, but also imagines a space of feminocentric desire outside of the contractarian organization of sexual hierarchy. In this essay, Iwill examine the ways in which three of Haywood's early works in particular...

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