The Moral Observer

Abstract

Mary Davys is the author in this study who is the exception that proves the rule. While Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, and Eliza Haywood all had connections to natural philosophy one way or another, Mary Davys did not. She knew Cambridge students, but there is no evidence that her acquaintances were or went on to be natural philosophers. Nor is there evidence that Davys read works of natural philosophy, although her novels suggest that she was familiar with natural philosophy from its presence in popular culture. It is precisely because of the nature of this connection to natural philosophy that Mary Davys’s novels concern the final chapter of this book. Davys’s work reveals an ongoing interest in the relationship between knowledge and morality, detachment and integration that occupied so much of natural philosophy during this period. Like Eliza Haywood’s The Tea-Table (1725) discussed in the previous chapter, Davys’s novels investigate how a self can be not only reliably truthful because disengaged but also reliably judgmental because morally correct. Unlike Haywood’s narrative, which explores the issue in terms of the social position of the narrator, Davys’s narratives consistently consider the issue in terms of the nature of the self. In attempting to create a self who is internally morally invested but narratively detached, Davys draws on contemporary, if debated, ideas of the self and develops techniques that underpin literary omniscience.