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Spying, Writing, Authority: Eliza Haywood's Bath Intrigues JULIETTE MERRITT In 1755, the year before her death, Eliza Haywood published The Invisible Spy. It was her final piece of spectatorial fiction, a form that had become popular in England following the translation in 1687-94 of Giovanni Paolo Marana's L'Espion turc (1684),' a text to which Haywood herself had turned from time to time throughout her long career. Haywood's own texts frequently feature an invisible or unnoticed observer. The narrator of Haywood's Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) is taken up by Cupid into a cloud where he can observe but cannot be seen, for example, because "Fate . .. had made choice of him to be the Discoverer of Secrets, to which the greater part of the world were wholly Strangers."2 In her Memoirs of a Certain Island, a scandal chronicle, Haywood followed most directly Delariviere Manley's New Atalantis ( 1709) where Astrea (goddess of Justice), Virtue, and Intelligence visit the earth and "pass unknown and unregarded among the crowd of mortals."3 Where the observing eye of Memoirs of a Certain Island gathers material for a scandalous discourse, Haywood's more polite and respectable periodical The Female Spectator (1744-46), has instead a reformist agenda. The Female Spectator, who alerts us to a network of spies which brings her back intelligence, intends to make her readership "acquainted with other People's Affairs" so that they may learn "to regulate their own."4 Whether scandalous or reformist (the distinctions are not always clear), the spectatorial text 183 184 / MERRITT creates its discourse out of the connection between seeing and writing. In Haywood's Bath Intrigues (1725), a relationship among the concepts of spying, authorship, and satire is assumed. In four letters to his friend Will, J.B., at his friend's request, relates a series of sexual escapades he has witnessed while visiting Bath. He is puzzled, however, as to why Will has selected him for an "Intelligence" who has "neither Wit enough to set up for an Author, nor Ill-nature for a Satyrist."5 This essay will examine Haywood's use of this relationship, a use in which J.B.'s doubt regarding his suitability becomes the first gesture towards an interrogation of the observer's discursive authority. In one of her dedications, Haywood claims for herself a "tolerable Share of Discernment."6 The apparent modesty of this profession is somewhat misleading. As one of the leading tropes of rationality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "discernment" was an essential component of judgement and reason. For Haywood to value herself on possessing such an attribute (even a "tolerable Share" of it) is an assertion of her intellectual abilities. "Discernment" is also a visual trope of perception and observation ; to invoke it underlines the importance of visual authority in her writing, and also signals Haywood's desire to colonize the privileged position of the spectator, a position conventionally regarded as male territory. In The Female Spectator Haywood consciously followed Addison and Steele's Spectator in constructing a discursive position based on the discerning spectator.7 Underlying this rhetorical strategy is an unquestioned confidence in the legitimate and unquestioned authority of vision. However , in Bath Intrigues, where the voyeuristic aspects of spectatorship are foregrounded and the ethical uncertainty of the spy's role is emphasized, Haywood interrogates this assumption. She adopts the figure of the observer /writer as her strategy for acquiring the authorial position. But given the notorious reputation of the spy, whose impulses are so often prurient and voyeuristic, there are certain risks in adopting such a persona as the basis for a public voice. As Virginia Swain emphasizes, the philosophical and social repercussions to the seventeenth-century developments in optics included the fact that "the role of the spectator [became] highly ambiguous ." Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "viewing and voyeurism tend to merge": the rethinking of God's design which accompanied the new discoveries, and the new uncertainties surrounding the place of humankind in the natural order which followed from this rethinking, also made sight an instrument of self-doubt. Was the gaze...

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