Praised as the Great Arbitress of Passion, (1) Eliza Haywood garnered fame for unabashed portrayal of the drama of human sexuality (Sterling 21). One of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century, entered the literary scene with wildly popular amatory novels (2) that highlight the passions of both sexes. Haywood's writing, however, seemed undergo a significant transition from early scandal fiction the domestic novels produced in the latter half of the century. This shift in style reflects a changing literary market that favored more moralistic fiction that rested on newly emergent ideas of femininity. The History of Miss Thoughtless, published in 1751, ostensibly reveals the protagonist's moral conversion (3) and thus seems promote values in keeping with the conduct book literature of the time with its focus on the chaste domestic heroine and with its obvious sexual double standards. However, the text also questions divisions of gender and explores contrasting ideas of female sexuality, illustrating that women are not merely docile recipients of men's natural urges (Booth 14). Thus, the novel reflects the era's changing notions of sex and gender as it captures the existing tensions between two competing theories of female sexuality: the age-old view of women according Galenic theory, which marked them as anatomically inverted men with comparable and even heightened sexual appetites, and the emerging myth of the naturally chaste woman that became central the domestic novel as popularized by Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa. (4) The unswerving virtue of these ideal women, however, did not come naturally all fictional heroines. In The Rise of the Woman Novelist, Jane Spencer writes that Betsy Thoughtless and novels like it brought about a crucial shift in the novel's presentation of women, from the stasis of perfection or villainy the dynamics of character change, initiating the tradition of the reformed heroine, whose foibles and mistaken view of place in the world are corrected so that may earn happiness (141). (5) While the novel tries assure us that Betsy's flaws do not extend sexuality, that is, indeed, chaste and modest from beginning end, does, in the course of narrative, give up a very important aspect of sexuality, namely the ability take pleasure in own body. In turn, this leads a changed conception of herself and own self-worth. The opening pages of the novel tell the reader that if he has the patience go thro' the following pages, [he] will see into the secret springs which set this fair machine in motion, and produced many actions which were ascribed, by the ill-judging and malicious world, causes very different from the real ones (Haywood 32). Despite the perhaps Cartesian allusion the essential nature of the self beneath the mechanistic surface, identity in this novel is, indeed, neither stable nor independent but contingent on the discourse of the judging and malicious world. Lorna Beth Ellis claims that Haywood's novel is the earliest example of the bildungsroman, a narrative centered on a figure actively involved in his or own development and able to learn from experience and through (285). (6) However, this development and the self-reflection on which it is contingent trace a negative rather than positive arc for the heroine, whose Bildung forces grow down, as Ellis aptly puts it: she must give up those aspects of independence that lead away from patriarchal norms, and must find ways reconcile view of herself with others' expectations of her (281). The pleasure gains from own body is one such aspect of independence that must be given up; experience of self, both imaginative and physical, must be violently reconfigured in this process of assimilation. In effect, the heroine is forced into a fiction of femininity that disallows the pleasure formerly could take in herself, what had been an integral part of sexual experience. …