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Home > ECF > Vol. 18 > Iss. 3 (2006)

 

Authors

Kelly McGuire

Abstract

Eliza Haywood’s mid-eighteenth-century novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, made its appearance at a time when the gloom and sepulchral melancholy of the Graveyard Poets suffused the literary marketplace. In 1751, the year of the novel’s publication, Gray’s “Elegy” was first published and then reissued no fewer than eight times, thus fostering a culture of mourning that continued to flourish throughout the decade. Haywood’s novel was not exempt from this trend and owes more to its cultural moment than is often acknowledged. Ostensibly written in a more serious vein than her earlier novels and in conformity with the didactic tendencies and “domestic ideology” prevalent in the works of the period, Betsy Thoughtless presents a bizarre co-mingling of the grave and the comic. In the midst of carelessly collecting lovers, a walking blank slate of a young woman loses her most eligible suitor (Mr Trueworth) along the way and settles for a more mundane runner-up (the aptly named Mr Munden). Evidently an unsatisfactory state of affairs, albeit instructive from a didactic standpoint, this romantic impasse is inevitably surmounted only through the intervention of an obliging deus ex machina. The narrative thus relies extensively upon death as an organizing principle; death neatly disposes of cumbersome characters and restores the romance trajectory of the novel, enabling lovers pulled asunder by marriage to reunite as widow and widower. Integral to the narrative economy of this novel as death is, however, it also registers as an excess, as Haywood introduces a character in the form of the amorphous Mrs Blanchfield (yet another admirer of Mr Trueworth), whose sole purpose in the story is to die and to be commemorated by her idol, thus providing an additional exemplum of the hero’s true worth. But this detail is not as superfluous as it might seem, since it affords yet another occasion for the work of mourning that figures so prominently in Haywood’s scripting of female consciousness.