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The Exceptional Eliza Haywood: Women and Extralegality in Eovaai
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 45, Number 4, Summer 2012
- pp. 565-584
- 10.1353/ecs.2012.0062
- Article
- Additional Information
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Eliza Haywood's The Adventures of Eovaai (1737) has been read as satire and as oriental tale, but rarely as an engagement with political theory. The narrative argues for a revised legal standing for women by echoing colonial mythemes and manipulating pastoral conventions. Eovaai suggests that women will never become rational citizen-subjects without becoming temporally dislocated, passing through a state of nature in order to clear the ground for a more just constitution. The text wavers between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of that passage, for women in the state of exception also depend on a masculinized military power.