Amorous Constitutions: Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia

Abstract

Amorous Constitutions:Bodies and the Affect of Amatory Seduction in Eliza Haywood's Lasselia Aleksondra Hultquist In the dedicatory epistle of Eliza Haywood's 1723 novel Lasselia: or, The Self-Abandon'd, the author claims that she is writing detailed scenes of seductive encounters only for the "unthinking Part of the World, [to know] how dangerous it is to give way to Passion."1 And yet the seduced female body is one of the hallmarks of Eliza Haywood's writings. The following passage from Lasselia is an exemplar of the many seduction scenes in Haywood's early amatory works: [In] the strange Disorder of her fluttering Heart, depriving the Blood of its usual Circulation, all her Limbs forgot their Function, and she sunk fainting on the Bank…He threw off his upper Garment…and flinging himself down by her, with a thousand Kisses and Embraces, at once restor'd her to that Sense she had so lately lost…It was in vain she struggled to rise—in vain that she endeavour'd to repel the soft Endearments of his Lips and Arms; her Eyes confess'd the unwilling Transport of her Soul, and told him all he wish'd to ask: nor was he scrupulous of letting her know how well he was acquainted with his Happiness…Trembling and panting, 'twixt Desire and Fear, at last she lay resistless in his Arms,[and] with faultering Accents confesse'd a mutual Ardour; and if he did not obtain the highest Favour she cou'd grant, he had too much to boast of, to fear she cou'd deny him any thing.2 [End Page 105] There is at least one such scene of this kind of seduction in each of Haywood's amatory fictions, the repetition of which has tended, in the past, to be understood as a mark of her poor literary craftsmanship.3 However, recent scholarship argues that such scenes are emotionally significant. Stephen Ahern has reasoned that repetitive affective events in literature, such as seduction, are driven by an overarching imperative: to get at something profound but not quite reachable—hence the need to repeat, to rehearse as if obsessively, and without resolution, scenes of affective contagion.4 Earla Wilputte contends that the stylistic expressions in repetitions of love scenes indicate Haywood's "dissatisfaction with the conventional literary discourse for love."5 Such studies allow that there is more at stake in these scenes than titillation, moral convention, or marketability. Affect provides a vocabulary to read the recurring seduction scene as an important space for knowledge through the amatory constitution. This article argues that the recurring amatory encounter can be better unpacked by using affect theory. By focusing on the body in affective seduction events in Lasselia, I use affect theory to uncover the ontological and phenomenological work accomplished in her description of the amatory constitution. My aim here is to read the affective body in the seduction scene as a site of emotion work that teaches characters how they feel about each other through the experience of love. Focusing on the amatory constitution—that is, the seduced body overcome by love—helps us recognize the significance of the passions in eighteenth-century texts, a significance that I believe Haywood's readers understood implicitly. The amatory form tries to work out those indescribable moments of feeling between desire, seduction, and propriety. The sign of such feeling is the amorous constitution, which implies a body that is not only prone to the affective contagion of physical love and sexual desire, but also what Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard have called a site of creative potentiality.6 The amorous constitution provides important information for characters' accrued knowledge about how they feel. Exploring the meaning of bodies in Haywood's amatory scenes is not a new endeavor. Early feminist critical configurations of women and desire insisted upon the ignorance of physical craving in females, reading the amatory body as a site of desirability as opposed to a craving entity in and of itself. Criticism by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ros Ballaster, and Toni Bowers on the amatory body tends to argue that, in the amatory seduction scene, women want one thing (sex...