Eliza Haywood's Defense of London's Body Politic

Critics have often commented on Eliza Haywood's tendency "toward soft-core pornography," particularly in her early fictions. This same tendency also situates her fictions within an eighty-year-old polemical tradition about the dangers of democracy. In the context of pornography's historic contributions toward curbing democratic activism within London, it is hardly surprising that the genre made an encore appearance during Walpole's efforts to limit the numbers of those eligible to vote in the City's elections. What is surprising is that pornography did not enter the fray in its usual guise. On the contrary, pamphlets, broadsides, and balladsheets everywhere appear to have been more committed to reclaiming the feminized commons so vilified in late-Stuart pornography by reversing political pornography's paradigm. Haywood's Fantomina (1725) and The City Jilt (1726) both bear the mark of this shift. The narrative structures of both fictions set up the City's democratic body politic to expose the Whig oligarchs' hypocrisy as both Fantomina and Glicera suggest that the democratic body could stand as a force for moral redemption.