Mourning and Material Culture in Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless

Abstract

Winner, Eighteenth-Century Fiction Graduate Essay Prize 2005 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.1 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.2 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 [End Page 281] novels and in conformity with the didactic tendencies and "domestic ideology"3 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.4 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 amor phous 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. If Betsy Thoughtless is first and foremost a novel about the development of a female mind and its triumph over a consumerist environment, the representation of material things that are not quite so uncomplicatedly tied up in the growth of consciousness must inevitably introduce some interpretative difficulties.For the work of mourning, [End Page 282] as Haywood presents it, brings death firmly within the purview of the eighteenth-century marketplace.5 It has long been recognized that "commodity culture also cultivates melancholia,"6 but the role of mourning as a catalyst for consumption has attracted significantly less attention. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton urges the English to "work harder and control consumption,"7 while the physician George Cheyne, in his treatise The English Malady (1733), explicitly acknowledges the deep-seated connections between melancholy and consumption, which he regards as an inevitable by-product of economic prosperity.8 Unlike Burton, Cheyne prescribes a treatment for the nervous disorder without necessarily denigrating the economic factors that play a central role in the production of the disease. As an apologist of sorts for a consumption-induced melancholia, Cheyne anticipates the arguments elaborated by David Hume [End Page 283] and Adam Smith for the paradoxical benefits of luxury. But Haywood uniquely appears to question the typical understanding according to which melancholia is tied up with commodity culture, and by opposing melancholia to the practice of mourning, she reveals the latter category to be more properly aligned with the material culture of her day. Several characters in the narrative appear to advocate grieving less by producing more, but Haywood endeavours to retrieve melancholia from its associations with luxury and rampant consumerism by esteeming a melancholic reflection that dwells upon the past as preferable to the vapid sensibility that easily jettisons memory in order...