Fictional Mechanics: Haywood, Reading, and the Passions

This essay argues that Eliza Haywood, in consciously using philosophies of the passions in her later fiction, develops a narrative theory that privileges the role of the reader. Haywood claims that reading and feeling passion are analogous, in that they both depend on passive sensation, and that each gives rise to the other. Haywood thus develops a sophisticated theory of fiction oriented around the productive possibilities of "absorptive" or passive reading, a kind of reading closely associated with female readers of romance and the novel. These claims allow her, in turn, to defend her career-long interest in the passions as essential to the project of fiction itself, and further, to suggest that philosophical theories of the passions are simply participants in a field long defined by fiction.