The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity and The Surprize, or Constancy Rewarded by Eliza Haywood (review)

For me, a new edition of a never-before-available Eliza Haywood novel is like Christmas, and Tiffany Potter’s modern edition offering two novellas, The Masqueraders, parts 1 and 2 (1724–25), and The Surprize (1724), does not disappoint. Building upon recent scholarly work on Haywood, the masquerade, and popular culture in the eighteenth century, this edition persuasively presents a jargon-free argument for how these novellas “function as sites of cultural negotiation and contention” (5). In addition to the two novels, this edition provides material that will certainly stimulate class discussion and inspire ideas for assignments: seven illustrations (albeit some of them frustratingly small) that feature the eighteenth-century masquerade; useful annotations; an appendix of contemporary comments on Haywood and her writings; and another appendix containing several documents from the 1724 masquerade debate.

Neither of these novellas offers characters as compelling as those in Love in Excess (1719–20), nor plots as provocative as Fantomina’s (1725); however, The Masqueraders and The Surprize together present “a much clearer sense of the nuance and variation of Haywood’s first period [of writing], so long dismissed as formulaic and repetitive” (4). The novellas, Potter tells us, are “very nearly opposite in their relationships to conventional morality and ... social codes” (3). In The Masqueraders (referred to as a single text in two parts), the libertine Dorimenus seduces several women who attempt to use masquerade to their own advantage, and all but one of the women suffer for transgressing their socially imposed behavioural boundaries. In The Surprize, despite a beginning that suggests impending ruin for one of its two heroines, both find true love and marry worthy and deserving partners. The first work is salacious and condemns “self-privileging” women (3); the second is sentimental and rewards virtuous women. Potter claims that the happily ending Surprize effectively “undermines binary understandings of a two-phase career of separate moral spheres” for Haywood (16). As treated in the introduction, the sentimental Surprize is an anomaly in Haywood’s early novels; however, one wonders why Love in Excess and The Injur’d Husband, in which the long-suffering heroines wed their reformed lovers, or The Distress’d Orphan, in which Colonel Marathon goes to such lengths to rescue Annilia, would fail to qualify as sentimental and “morally restorative” works (16).

Potter’s adept application of popular culture theory provides a compelling way to read not only these two novellas, but much of Haywood’s work: as popular culture that is resistant to “even as it functions within the framework determined by more conventionally valued understandings of art and culture” (7). Arguing that Haywood’s “fiction and the masquerades it depicts ... function as metaphors for the participation of women in public spheres, sometimes as objects of consumption, but also as agents of consumption and production” (7), Potter draws an informative parallel between the pleasures and the dangers of the masquerade and narrative fiction.

Potter suggests that Haywood deliberately focuses on the masquerade motif to take advantage of and place her works within the developing debate over the masquerade. The introduction’s section on “The Masquerade Debates” of 1724 and the inclusion in the appendix of the Lord Bishop of London’s “Sermon Preached to the Societies for the Reformation of Manners,” a “Description of a Masquerade Ball” from the Weekly Journal, and a poetic dialogue “betwixt a Prude and a Coquet” on the merits and dangers of a masquerade ball provide a lively and fascinating contextualization for Haywood’s novellas. Drawing on many contemporary examples that are bound to encourage further reading, Potter explores how and why the masquerade was such an intriguing symbol for Haywood and her society.

Although the space allotted to the masquerade in the introduction and second appendix may give the impression that it is a major element in both of these novellas, The Surprize does...