The Columbia History of the British Novel

their Fondness exactly where their Lover leaves it.' Women continue pathetically to love forever, despite male faithfulness and even abuse. Alovisa, for example, in Haywood's Love in Excess, resists the importunities of a hopeful lover even though her husband is openly unfaithful and unkind. 'I Love my Husband still,' she cries, — 60- 'with an unbated Fondness, doat upon him! faithless and cruel as he is, he still is lovely!'

Always, amatory narrators pause over protracted physical and verbal struggles between desiring men and resisting women. Women resist, but faintly; they are implicated in the force men universally use over them. Moreover, women's struggles to escape male advances actually make them more vulnerable in the intimate combat that will inevitably end in male victory, for female resistance always heightens male desire. In this representative passage from Haywood's British Recluse, several of these topoi figure at once:

My Hands were the first Victims of his fiery Pressures, then my Lips, my Neck, my Breast; and perceiving that, quite lost in Ecstasy, I but faintly resisted what he did, far greater Boldnesses ensued-My Soul dissolv'd, its Faculties o'er-power'd-and Reason, Pride, and Shame, and Fear, and every Foe to soft Desire, charm'd to Forgetfulness, my trembling Limbs refus'd to oppose the lovely Tyrant's Will! And, if my faultering Tongue entreated him to desist, or my weak Hands attempted to repulse the encroaching Liberty of his; it serv'd but, as he said, the more to inflame his Wishes.

That this description is placed into the mouth of a woman who will shortly become yet another sexual victim and whose life is blighted by the event, suggests the degree to which the repeated topoi of amatory fiction anesthetized readers to its misogynist assumptions, and implicated them in the patterns of an androcentric universe.

It is a truism of amatory fiction that intelligence ('wit') is antithetical to that all-important female attribute, beauty; the two cannot coexist in one woman. Behn points directly to this convention in The Dumb Virgin, where she creates two sisters, one merely beautiful and the other merely witty, who seem to the man who wants them both to be the separate halves of one supremely desirable woman. Love is typically reduced to sexual desire, and sex itself to acts of force often indistinguishable from rape. Indeed, sex that is not violent is worth remarking: the Duke's passion for Charlot in New Atalantis is extraordinary because 'to heighten it, resistance was not at all necessary.' Sexual compulsion always serves to awaken desire in female characters. The central, abiding, and most sacred relationships, except in anomalous works like Haywood's British Recluse, are neither heterosexual liaisons nor relationships between women, but friendships between men.

Even such a brief catalog of the recurrent topoi of amatory fiction -61- reveals that this writing is built around assumptions that undermine, to varying extents, the ostensible effort to represent female subjectivity. What function could such negative formulae serve for amatory fiction's readers, most of whom were women, that would keep them endlessly coming back for more? Recent work in history and literary theory, as well as recent critical studies of the works themselves, suggest several explanations for the fascination of Augustan society, and particularly of its women, with amatory fiction. These are proffered here, in highly abbreviated form, to indicate the status of current efforts to understand the function of amatory fiction in Augustan England.

We might begin by considering the double function we have already seen these works performing-both informational and sensual. Behn, Manley, Haywood, and their peers were writing for women increasingly cut off from the world outside the domestic circle. That world was, they knew, full of traps laid especially for them; even the smallest error could result in permanent social alienation. Under these circumstances, amatory fiction provided Augustan women with a sense of involvement in the outside world-which, for all its dangers and disappointments, had great advantages over restrictive domesticity-while allowing them to maintain a safe distance from it. Countless innocent heroines go pathetically to their ruin like so many lambs to the slaughter, without the benefit of amatory fiction to guide them; but readers were invited to take a stance Richetti describes as 'sadly wiser but deeply sympathetic,' to assume a pleasantly unfamiliar posture of worldly wisdom and experience vis-U+00EO-vis characters they could identify with but still feel superior toward. This sense of controlled danger must have combined with the exotic eventfulness of the plots and the representation of sexual thrills that many readers would have been unlikely to experience in marriage to make these works supremely attractive, especially to the ladies and would-be ladies who voraciously consumed them.

Amatory works encouraged the notion that to read them was to engage in a rebellious, scandalous activity parallel to the sexual explorations their heroines (but not their readers) were constantly engaged in. They routinely depict romance reading and novel reading as dangerous for women, inevitably connected to (and sometimes even conflated with) sexual experience. When Manley's Duke prepares to seduce Charlot, he gives her salacious reading material first. 'By this dangerous reading, he pretended to shew her, that there were Pleasures her Sex were born for, and which she might consequently long to taste!' — 62-

Like Charlot, Augustan women picking up Love in Excess or The New Atalantis must have felt that they were tasting forbidden fruit.

Another reason for the great popularity of amatory fictions may have been their ability to represent peculiarly female negotiations of shifts occurring in the early eighteenth-century English economy, a man's world becoming newly oriented toward trade, commerce, capital, and profit. Under these conditions, it is perhaps not surprising, as Williamson observes, that amatory fiction's men are predatory and selfish, its women always on the defensive and fearful of abandonment. Furthermore, amatory writing catered to popular interest in the decadent lives of the rich and famous, and presented female heroines as what Beasley calls 'the formal representation of an ideal of order, set against… power-mongering, lasciviousness, and corruption.' In this analysis, amatory fiction served important political functions, building self-consciousness and solidarity among its female readers.

There is yet another argument for the enormous popularity of Augustan amatory fiction, one that also demonstrates the seldomnoted participation of these works in their culture's most pressing public debates. It is neither accidental nor simply predictable that amatory fiction's most common plots are plots of seduction and betrayal, that it so obsessively represents false oaths, failed promises, and broken vows. The compulsiveness with which vows are made and broken in these works demonstrates more than the ostensible lesson that women should not trust men's promises; it goes to the heart of Augustan questions about the status of personal honor and the authority of words in a world where sacred vows to God and king recently had been rendered negotiable and contingent.

The problem of broken vows constituted a significant and prolonged crisis in English culture at the end of the seventeenth century. Before this period, the fact that someone made a statement on oath was understood to guarantee the truth of the statement; the act of taking a vow itself unquestionably guaranteed the fulfillment of a promise. But this understanding of the nature of oaths gave way during the seventeenth century to a new idea satirized in Butler's Hudibras (1663): 'Oaths are but words, and words but wind, / Too feeble implements to bind.' Words were no longer entities with real-life authority and causal functions; oaths and vows, which once had assured performance, were no longer trustworthy. Furthermore, the dissonance between old and new notions concerning the efficacy of oaths could be exploited by those -63- most ready to deploy the new nominalism against the old idealism. 'Oaths,' as Susan Staves notes, 'were regarded as political weapons' at the end of the century.

Shifts in the understanding of the meaning of oaths extended to private relations of trust, including sexual relations and marriage. In the seventeenth century, a promise of marriage was binding, and failure on the part of one of the pair subsequently to marry was grounds for legal action. But amatory fiction depicts a new universe, where a woman who trusts the promises of her suitor does so at her own risk, and earns as much scorn as pity when she finds herself abandoned. Even marriage vows were subject to the new provisionality. It is no coincidence that the first parliamentary divorce was granted in 1698.

The events of the Glorious Revolution constituted what Staves calls 'the most dramatic Restoration crisis of conscience over oath-taking,' and provided the immediate context of the obsessive concerns of amatory fiction. A short review of those events may be in order. In 1688, England's unpopular Roman Catholic king, James II, the legitimate but controversial heir, fled to France in fear of his life, wrongly believing that his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange were advancing with a large army to force him from his throne. By fleeing, James was ousted (or ousted himself) as effectively as if civil war had taken place, and many Englishmen congratulated themselves on the achievement of what came to be known as the 'Glorious (because bloodless) Revolution.'

Bloodless though the revolution may have been, the very significant changes it wrought did not come about