Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke

244 Pages·2014·4.59 MB·English

by  Earla Wilputte (auth.)

Passion and Language in
Eighteenth-C entury Literature
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Passion and Language in
Eighteenth-C entury Literature
The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza
Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke
Earla Wilputte
PASSION AND LANGUAGE IN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY LITERATURE
Copyright © Earla Wilputte, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-44204-8
All rights reserved.
An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 originally appeared in the essay
“Eliza Haywood’s Poems on Several Occasions: Aaron Hill, Writing,
and the Sublime,” Eighteenth- Century Women: Studies in their Lives,
Work, and Culture 6 (2011): 79– 102 (AMS Press).
Part of Chapter 5 originally appeared in the essay “Midwife for the
Mind: Delivering the Passions in Aaron Hill’s The Plain Dealer (1724),”
Journal for Eighteenth- Century Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 1– 15.
They are used here in revised form, with permission.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the
United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998,
of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-4 9498-9 ISBN 978-1-137-44205-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137442055
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Wilputte, Earla Arden, 1959–
Passion and language in eighteenth- century literature : the aesthetic
sublime in the work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha
Fowke / by Earla Wilputte.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English literature— 18th century— History and criticism. 2. Emotions
in literature. 3. Haywood, Eliza Fowler, 1693?– 1756— Language.
4. Hill, Aaron, 1685– 1750— Language. 5. Sansom, Martha Fowke,
1689– 1736— Language. I. Title.
PR448.E46W66 2014
820.9'353— dc23 2014007772
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: September 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to my parents,
Ruth and Earle Wilputte,
for all your love and support.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 The Need for a Language for the Passions 1
2 Life’s Progress through the Passions 29
3 “Give Me a Speaking and a Writing Love”:
Passionate Letters 51
4 The Miscellany’s Picture Poems and
Haywood’s Poems on Several Occasions 83
5 The Plain Dealer’s Progress from
the Garrison to the Midwife 115
6 The Dangers of Giving Way to Language 147
Conclusion: Hill’s, Fowke’s, and Haywood’s
Progress through the Passions 187
Notes 197
Bibliography 219
Index 231
Acknowledgments
Writing seems like a very solitary job, but there are so many people
who have helped and supported me in the making of this book.
My thanks to Brigitte Shull and Ryan Jenkins at Palgrave Macmil-
lan for encouraging this project and patiently assisting me along the
way. I am also greatly appreciative of several grants from the St. Fran-
cis Xavier University Council for Research that facilitated my work.
I am deeply grateful to the many scholars, colleagues, and friends
who, over the years, have answered questions (and asked them),
invited me to give talks, listened over coffee, shared databases and
articles, critiqued, read, and made suggestions: Doug al-M aini, Steven
Baldner, Rita Campbell, Jalisa David, Marie Gillis, Adrianna Eyk-
ing, Kathryn R. King, Edward Langille, Jayne Lewis, Paul Marquis,
Juliette Merritt, Michelle Parent, Suzanne Stewart, Natasha Sumner,
Donna Trembinski, and Mat von Milligen. My special gratitude to
Janette Fecteau and Jo-A nne Embree, my intrepid readers, who went
over every word and cheered me on and up.
Finally, and especially, I thank Jamie, Arden, and Logan Powell:
for all your love and support, and your tolerance of my passions. My
“words give way, like quicksand,” but I hope you know how much I
love you.
4
C h a p t e r 1
The Need for a Language
for the Passions
Our Discourse is imperfect, unless it carry with it the marks of
the Motions of our Will: It resembles our Mind (whose Image
it ought to bear) no more than a dead Carkass resembles a
living Body.
— Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking
[W]ords give way, like quicksand, beneath too weighty a pile of
building.
— Aaron Hill to Martha Fowke
T
he ability of discursive language to communicate the passions
begins to be questioned in the early eighteenth century. Are words
“a dead Carkass,” lacking life, soul, and essence, “like quicksand,”
an easily shifting, yielding mass engulfing and entrapping meaning?
Some eighteenth-c entury philosophers thought that, with its gradual
secularization, poetic language had become emasculated and weak,
bereft of its ability to express and incite the passions. Conversely, liter-
ary critics such as John Dennis theorized that “never any one, while he
was wrapt with Enthusiasm or ordinary Passion, wanted either Words
or Harmony.”1 A growing ambivalence over the ability of words to
relate effectively one’s passions, and hence one’s subjectivity, devel-
ops over the eighteenth century, with some believing that literature
too blithely elicits passions from readers and others contending that
language has lost its efficacy. The purpose of this study is to explore
how three authors—A aron Hill, Eliza Haywood, and Martha Fowke,
2 Passion and Language in 18th-Century Literature
making up the nucleus of the London literary group, the Hillarian
circle, from 1720 to 1724— attempt to develop a language for the
passions that clearly conveys the deepest felt emotions. In essence,
these three authors endeavor to transcend human separateness and
bind one soul to another through words.
Hill, Haywood, and Fowke and their personal and professional
relationships with each other within Hill’s literary circle afford an
intriguing and problematic context in which to study the passions
and their communication in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Writers in a variety of forms (periodicals, poetry, letters, plays, essays,
and novels) over a long period of productive years, Hill, Haywood,
and Fowke engage in a progressive and reactionary debate over how
to express and write the passions. Whereas recent criticism notes “a
clear intersection between the perceived crisis in the management of
the passions and the emerging mission of the novel,”2 in the Hillarian
circle we witness intelligent, passionate minds grappling with find-
ing a language for the passions that can imaginatively convey one’s
innermost feelings before the novel’s “agenda” of reforming and
restraining those passions can be effectively put into action.
The Hillarian circle is beginning to attract serious scholarly atten-
tion in the wake of high- quality bibliographical, biographical, and
critical work. Foundational studies on Hill, Fowke, and Haywood
by Christine Gerrard, Phyllis Guskin, Patrick Spedding, and Kathryn
R. King all reference the complex relationships among these three writ-
ers within the larger Hillarian circle and present significant scholarship
to which I am especially indebted. Guskin’s Clio: The Autobiography
of Martha Fowke Sansom, 1689– 1736, the first modern edition of
Clio: or, A Secret History of the Life and Amours of the Late Celebrated
Mrs. S– n— m, provides a detailed examination of Fowke’s life and
her role in the Hillarian coterie; Gerrard’s biography Aaron Hill:
The Muses’ Projector 1685–1 750 devotes two chapters to the making
and the breaking of the Hillarian circle, including the part that the
Fowke– Haywood dispute played in that breakup; Spedding’s A Bib-
liography of Eliza Haywood is indispensable for linking biographical
information with the publishing history of Haywood’s works; and
King has authored several influential articles exploring the literary
and personal relationships of Haywood with the Hillarians, including
“The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–
1725” and “When Eliza Met Aaron: A Story of Sublime Sensation,”
as well as, most recently, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood.
Each of these critical studies dedicates attention to the relationships
and influences, the friendships and shifting alliances among the most