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

Ms. Potter's timely edition of these Haywood novels nicely reinforces the current trend in Haywood studies of seeing both continuities and complexities in her career. The new Haywood story, promoted by Paula Backscheider and other scholars, does not bifurcate her career into early scandal and later morality. In fact, according to Ms. Potter's introduction these texts were selected because they are "very nearly opposite to one another in their relationships to conventional morality and the social codes of the early eighteenth century" and juxtaposing them "undermines binary understandings of a two-phase career of separate moral spheres." The Surprize originally appeared in 1724, between parts I (1724) and II (1725) of The Masqueraders. The two Masquerader novels are salacious and libertine and The Surprize is more moralistic and sentimental; thus, "re-publishing these two novels together offers the opportunity for a much clearer sense of the nuance and variation of Haywood's first period, so long dismissed as formulaic and repetitive."

The novels offer a serious engagement with gender and culture, and often challenge narrative conventions. The plot of Masqueraders is well positioned within eighteenth-century debates concerning the relationship between reason and passion. The narrator wonders why "that Passion which had prompted [Philecta] to take so much [sic] pains to engage him … did not in spite of her burst out, disclose the God, and show its force above the faint Controul of Reason." As in many of Haywood's scandalous novels, the reader is invited to identify with the passionate feelings of the characters even when they are destructive: Dalinda and Philecta's friendship is destroyed and Philecta is "undone" by a pregnancy she can no longer hide. As Ms. Potter notes in her introduction, "for most of the characters in Haywood's novels … the freedom of the masquerade is actually a mirage, a temptation that pulls them deeper into the desert of sexual risk and the suffering that nearly always follows illicit, even if temporarily empowering, masquerade adventures."

Part II of The Masqueraders is characterized by the repetition one finds in much popular fiction like Haywood's, but, as Ms. Potter points out, some of it might be termed, in the words of Linda Hutcheon and Jill Sanders, "repetition without replication." She also suggests that in both parts of Masqueraders, "Haywood puts the popular cultural product of the masquerade to work in an informative parallel to narrative fiction as the latest product of popular culture. Like the masquerade, Haywood's early novels function as sites of cultural negotiation and contention, balancing the demands of profit, morality, fashion, and pleasure in a way that is informed by the same conventional notions of performance, class, and gender that her work also interrogates."

The Surprize, or Constancy Rewarded, is dedicated to Richard Steele, indicating Haywood's hope that he would approve it as "something less unworthy of your Patronage, than the Trifles I have hitherto been capable of producing" since they are "composed of Characters full of Honour and Generosity." The masquerade in this story reveals the true self, which is honorable, and Haywood's narrator ends with a moral about marriage that her other masquerade stories contradict: "Thus was Constancy on all sides Rewarded; and by the continu'd Tenderness they had for each other after Marriage, gave a Proof, that Possession does not always extinguish Desire, and surpriz'd the World with an Example, which I am afraid more will Admire than Imitate."

Haywood's playfulness and emphasis on plot are evident in these short fictions, but so also is her capacity to observe and comment on her society, along with her interest in the role of the novel as an instrument of instruction and entertainment. Ms. Potter rounds out her edition with a brief useful appendix, which includes "Documents from the Masquerade Debate" and a set of complementary illustrations. Her footnotes are intelligent and helpful. At the...