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Boardman Michael M. Defoe and the Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Brown Homer O. 'The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe.' English Literary History 38 (1971): 562 -90.

Hunter J. Paul. The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in 'Robinson Crusoe.' Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.

Kay Carol. Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988.

McKillop Alan Dugald. Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1956.

Novak Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Richetti John J. Daniel Defoe. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Sill Geoffrey M. Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, 1713–1719. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

Starr George A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Sutherland James. Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971.

-49-

Sex, Lies, and Invisibility: Amatory Fiction from the Restoration to Mid-Century

THE sensational tales of sexual intrigue published by and for English women in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were among the most widely read texts of their day, rivaling best- sellers like Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe in popularity. Today, however, these amatory fictions tend to be virtually invisible in traditional accounts of literary history, briefly noticed as primitive and inconsequential progenitors of «the» novel. While traditional historians may admit that the early realism of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding shares some features with amatory narratives, they nevertheless consistently define the work of the canonical Augustan novelists according to how essentially different it is from that produced by their female contemporaries, how much of an improvement, how completely path-breaking. The very category 'amatory fiction' functions in such schemes as a kind of negative space, insignificant except as it helps to define the privileged category 'novel,' from which it is always excluded.

Any new consideration of amatory fiction, then, must remain suspicious of that very category, which represents less a discrete species with definitive formal characteristics than a constellation of texts that may have little in common except their exclusion from received gender and genre hierarchies. Still, undertakings like this volume necessarily presuppose some sort of taxonomy, and the inclusion of these texts here is important enough to justify a certain amount of categorizing, so long as it is recognized as such. Moreover, despite formal diversity so considerable as to make their unity as a genre arguable, many amatory fictions -50- do share certain thematic concerns, social functions, and historical positions. It is in terms of these common characteristics that they are discussed here.

The amatory fictions of the early eighteenth century were a mixed breed. Their ancestry goes back to the Italian novelles, to Cervantes (particularly his Exemplary Novels, translated by Mappe in 1640), and to French romances of the seventeenth century, especially the work of Gauthier de Costes de la Calprenède (1614– 1663) and Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701). Perhaps the most important single influence was that of the Portuguese Letters, first translated into English by Sir Roger L'Estrange as Five Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier in 1677. After the prodigious success of this supposedly authentic set of letters from a lovesick nun to the man who has abandoned her, many authors, male and female, tried their hand at scandalous writing of various sorts.

But three women- Aphra Behn (c. 1640–1689), Delariviere Manley (c. 1670–1724) and Eliza Haywood (c. 1693–1756) — held undisputed preeminence during the eighteenth century as authors of scandalous fiction. Indeed, the work of this 'fair Triumvirate' (as they were first called in 1732; Janet Todd calls them the 'naughty triumvirate') was so well known that it was routinely equated by their contemporaries with subversive and transgressive female creativity itself, and for the rest of the century women writers struggled to live down the infamous trio's licentious personal and literary styles and to make female authorship more respectable. In an effort to understand 'amatory fiction,' then, we might do worse than to look closely at the works of these three authors, asking why they were so powerful in their time and why their power has been so problematic ever since.

'Love,' Eliza Haywood explains in her Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), 'is… dangerous to the softer Sex; they cannot arm themselves too much against it, and for whatever Delights it affords to the Successful few, it pays a double Portion of Wretchedness to the numerous Unfortunate.' The comment might be seen as epitomizing the assumptions of amatory fiction, where love almost always brings fleeting pleasure to self-centered, fickle men and lasting misery to the women who trust them. In amatory writing's most typical plot, an innocent young girl is seduced by an experienced, older man who promises her everlasting love but abandons her ruthlessly once his physical desires have been sated. Often the perfidious male is married -51- already; usually he is of aristocratic birth; frequently he is the young woman's relative or guardian, a circumstance that makes his behavior even more shocking, puts her in a most defenseless and victimized position, and allows for titillating suggestions of incest.

That women trust men is, in these stories, both their greatest error and their unavoidable fate, since desirable young women must by definition be entirely naive about sexual matters. Like the culture that produced them, amatory works placed young women in a double bind: without sexual experience, they are the natural prey of more experienced male predators; with sexual experience, they are whores. A young woman in Augustan society, after all, could not actually experiment with the other sex and keep her good reputation, not even so far as to hold a private conversation, receive a letter, or be seen in a public place in the company of a man; she had very little means of discovering mysterious and dangerous male ways. But she could read amatory fiction and learn to avoid the fate of the women it depicted.

Warning the innocent is the stated purpose of many, though not all, writers of amatory fiction. The great exception is Aphra Behn, the first member of the 'fair Triumvirate,' whose stories are often virtually amoral, distributing rewards and punishments with very little reference to Christian, poetic, or even secular justice. In her Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–1687), for instance, Behn narrates a series of illicit love affairs involving a small group of young people related by marriage or blood. She includes in a subplot the almost obligatory amatory narrative of seduced and abandoned female innocence, but concentrates most of her attention on the sexual exploits of persons of both sexes who are equally devoid of innocence and without moral scruple, characters with whom she clearly expects the reader to identify. Behn's heroine, Sylvia, still appalls undergraduates with her heartless, roaming sexual desire and her incapacity for guilt, faithfulness, or remorse. Predatory and mercenary, Sylvia always manages to get what she wants, and ends the novel as insouciant and sexually adventurous as she began it. Likewise in The Fair Jilt (1688), the unrestrained sexuality of the corrupt Miranda brings her love, wealth, title, and safety from the law; she is rewarded for years of criminal behavior and sexual aggression with a quiet life in the country and a doting husband. Behn's editor, Montagu Summers, notes with dismay how 'sparingly and little' Miranda's culpable behaviors are punished, and how positively she is portrayed. Behn does include some criticism of Miranda (though, as -52- Summers notes, not much), but she is more interested in depicting Miranda's power than in warning (or convincing) female readers of their powerlessness.

Behn's eighteenth-century followers, however, found it necessary to appeal directly to an ethic of female instruction, and to ensure that evil characters were punished and correct moral lessons drawn. They worked within an increasingly moralistic culture, and their fictions were closely tied to bourgeois values. In Behn and Manley the ideal and most passionate sexual relationship is the extramarital affair, free from the blighting considerations of property; but in Haywood, chronologically the last of the three great Augustan writers of amatory fiction,