Alix Scheetz

ID 1602628

ENGL 341 B1

20 April 2023

Dr Leslie Robertson

Impolite Femininity: Celebrating Lewd Female Authors in Restrictive Eighteenth-Century

Society

“She got over the difficulty at last, however, by proceeding in a manner if possible more

extraordinary than all her former behaviour”.

- Eliza Haywood: Fantomina; or Love in a Maze (641)

This quote in Haywood’s Fantomina (1725) aptly describes a strong female attitude

towards writing in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. In an era where women’s education

was synonymous with “polite femininity” (Keown 79), authors such as Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu, Eliza Haywood, and Aphra Behn were able to publish excellent literary content that

was contradictory to common moral and social codes of the period — this tells us that even

though female gender roles were highly restrictive, there was still a large commercial demand for

‘lewd’ works published by female authorship. In an effort to create a clear depiction of the

culturally dominated social norms, this essay will begin by examining eighteenth-century

opinions and examples of idealized female pedagogy and conduct, then turn to a reading of

female subversion in Aphra Behn’s “To the Fair Clarinda” (1688), Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina;

or, Love in a Maze (1725), and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S.
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to Write a Poem Called The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734), as well as the The Spectator No.

573 (1714); Ultimately, this incongruence between social expectation and literary product

suggests that despite prevailing social norms, eighteenth-century female authors were able to rise

to the academic level of their male counterparts, as well as successfully subvert educational,

sexual, and social expectations.

In order to understand just how much these authors were subverting social norms, we

need to establish a historical framework to work within. This section will discuss the major

components that helped to create and perpetuate the ideal of “polite femininity” in the eighteenth

century, as described by Keown. It is important to note that in this context, she refers to “polite

femininity” as the popular eighteenth-century cultural belief that a “woman's value [is] derived

not from external displays of wealth or beauty, but from her inner virtues” (Keown 82). This

push towards teaching virtues such as modesty, piety, and discipline were in response to the

rapidly burgeoning pressure placed on imperial luxuries (Neumann 932), and although they were

very restrictive, they spurred a monumental shift in women’s education. Due to the increased

access to periodicals and other print culture, “literary taste was becoming a significant indicator

of an accomplished woman, and her talents in this arena were best displayed through acts of

sociable reading and writing” (Keown 84). Even though the positive effect of this new push

towards women’s virtue created an increase in women’s literacy, it’s important to note that there

are “gendered limitations of the politeness paradigm: although it promoted women's education, it

did not expect them to be educated to the same level as men, or to put their education to similar

uses” (Keown 83). Due to this paradigm, coupled with the fact that “if a woman did choose to

publish her poetry, then a veneer of amateurism could prove beneficial” (Keown 92), women

were pigeonholed into “a gendered model of authorship which posits women’s writing as
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evidence of a woman’s virtuous life in direct opposition to the conflation of a woman’s own

sexual intrigues with the amatory adventures presented in her novels” (Prescott 101). However,

by looking at Behn, Haywood, and Montagu’s work, we will see that there are clear, defiant

exceptions to this rule. In the following section, we will examine female authors who boldly

wrote for a living, subverted gender and sexual norms, and responded to the distasteful

stereotypes to which they were subjected.

Now that we have established the precarious social dynamics in the first half of the

century, we begin with Aphra Behn: whose “open treatment of sexuality in her work was

condemned as too ‘coarse’ to be deserving of a broad audience” (Black et al. 196); who openly

declares she was “forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it” (qtd. in Black et al. 196);

and whose poem, “To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman”

(1688), openly celebrates queer love and attraction. We can see that the topic of Behn’s “To the

Fair Clarinda” might be queer from the beginning when Behn addresses her prose to a “Fair

lovely maid” (line 1), and then immediately follows by questioning the status of “maid” as “Too

weak, too feminine for nobler thee” (line 3). It becomes explicitly clear that Behn is referring to

sapphic love when she refers to Clarinda as sent “In pity to our sex” (line 12), where Behn’s use

of “our” confirms the identity of both speaker and subject as female; we can prove this further

when Behn declares that they “might love, and yet be innocent” (line 13) because “thy form”

(line 15) excuses the “crime with [her they] can commit” (line 14); By specifically mentioning

how her subject's physical form allows them to maintain their innocence from any crime, we see

that the crime that Behn is referring to here relates to maintaining one’s penetrative virginity —

this is because two women cannot physically engage in penetrative sex. Behn further subverts

female sexual expectations by bending the lines of sex and gender when she calls her lover a
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“beauteous wonder of a different kind” (line 18) who has a “deluding form” (line 10). When we

look at these lines in conjunction with Behn’s reference to the story of the Greek God

Hermaphroditus (Black et al. 201) — especially since she calls Hermes “the love”, and

Aphrodite “the friend” (line 23) — we can see that Behn’s lover, Clarinda, can be read as a

female hermaphrodite. This reading of Clarinda as hermaphroditic is further proven when Bhen

asks: “For who, that gathers fairest flowers believes/ A snake lies hid beneath the fragrant

leaves” (lines 16-17). Essentially, what Behn is saying here is that because society perceives

them as “Soft Cloris and dear Alexis” (line 19), no one expects Clarinda to have a “manly part”

(line 20), allowing them to “love, and yet be innocent” (line 13). Now in the eighteenth century,

there was a very different understanding of ‘hermaphrodite’ compared to today: whereas we see

the term as an out-of-date reference for an intersex person (“Hermaphrodite”), Lillian Sharrock

argues for the identification of eighteenth-century “lesbian as a female hermaphrodite, whose

hermaphroditic status was justified by the seemingly obsessive interest taken in the alleged size

of her clitoris” (39). So, even with the knowledge that Behn may not have been referencing a

woman with an anatomically correct penis, we can see that she is still celebrating a “visible and

spectacular” (Thompson 392) hermaphroditic — or lesbian— body. Now being that the attitude

towards sapphic love in this era was one of “compassion such as one might feel for a famished,

whimpering creature” (Faderman 26), Behn’s bold references to socially non-abiding romance

display bother her mastery of English, as well as her desire to subvert from sexually and

artistically restrictive norms.

Within the same topic of sexual subversion, we will now turn to Eliza Haywood’s

Fantomina (1725) -- whereas Behn’s poem displayed subversion in a sexually deviant manner,

Haywood’s novella excels in subverting both sexual and cultural restrictions for aristocratic
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women of the era. She does this through the actions of her unnamed protagonist by enacting

multiple plots to manipulate and exert sexual control over a Libertine man named Beauplaisir

(Haywood 632-47). Haywood’s protagonist creates four different identities: an aristocratic

country woman called Fantomina who disguises herself as a prostitute (635); a simple

chambermaid in the vacation town of Bath (637); a grieving widow (638), and lastly, until the

protagonist reveals her pregnancy, she is Incognita, a completely masqueraded character who

frustrates Beauplaisir by exerting complete control over him (643). Haywood successfully

subverts cultural and social restrictions here by portraying a strong, “admirably skilled” (640)

female protagonist driven by sexual desire — in direct opposition to the prescribed “polite

femininity” described by Keown in the previous section. Haywood also subverts gender

expectations through reversing the types of control and agency typically displayed in her genre

of amatory fiction. Instead of following a formula where “an innocent woman becomes the

passive victim of a deceitful, experienced man” (Black et al. 631), Haywood writes the story of a

deceitful man who becomes the passive victim of an (at first) innocent woman (634). Conversely,

one could argue that since Haywood was in itself amatory fiction, her stories were told for a

morally didactic purpose (Black et al. 631) which did not align with the morals of her

protagonist; however, if we look at Fantomina’s conclusion, we see other divergences from other

amatory fiction which tells us otherwise. First, if we look at Beauplaisir’s rape of Fantomina,

which incited the protagonist to fully lean into her manipulative plot (Haywood 636), we see that

Haywood may be offering a didactic lesson — not of the importance to remain innocent and

pure, but instead as a warning to men who take women by force. By suggesting that the

protagonists’ forceful loss of innocence finally gave her the excuse to manipulate a man and

achieve her sensual desires, she is warning men that this is a possible outcome of their sexual
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assault. As well, Haywood subverts from the amatory fiction tendency to include “explicit

didactic commentary from the narrator to emphasize the moral point” (Black et al. 631), and

instead sending her protagonist to a convent1 as ultimate punishment, we see that Haywood does

not bring an “end to the sexual life of [the] literary character” (Black et al. 631) as consistent

with amatory fiction. Instead, Haywood gave her protagonist the opportunity to receive an

ending that did not involve “repentance, death, or abject misery” (Black et al. 631) like many of

her literary peers. Haywood’s active diversion from expectation here, both in her protagonist’s

desire for control and agency, as well as the meek outcome of her actions, suggests that

Haywood, or “Mrs. Novel” as dubbed by Henry Fielding (qtd. in Black et al. 630), had a strong

desire for, and was successful in, subverting expected gender norms.

Finally, before turning over to a discussion on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s

contributions to the act of social subversion in the early eighteenth century, I feel it is important

to mention that there are many works published by Montagu that could be considered relevant to

the topic of this inquiry; however, due to space limitations, I am calling specific attention to

works in which Montagu is responding directly to male peers. By looking at works in which

Montagu is actively engaging with male patriarchal norms, in the male academic sphere, we

create a clear image of her attitude towards social expectations in the most succinct way possible.

It is important to note that both of these texts, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem

Called The Lady’s Dressing Room” (The Reasons) (1734), and The Spectator No. 573 (1714),

are direct responses that adopt a complimentary satirical tone to the source texts. As depicted by

the title, our first text, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem Called The Lady’s

Dressing Room”, is a response to Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732).

1
“Nuns are a common subject in pornographic writing of the period, and in a number of amatory
works of the period, lovers escape from convents” (Black et al. 631).
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Swift’s poem tells the story of Strephon, who, upon walking into his lover's empty chamber,

finds the scene of horrors (lines 11-68) from where she “rose from stinking Ooze” (line 132).

Now, there are multiple satirical readings of Swift’s poem, including one that critiques men for

making assumptions about natural female beale beauty, calling them to appreciate the beauty of

women as “gaudy Tulips raised from Dung” (line 144) — however, we see that Montagu’s

interpretation of the text relied more upon Swift’s treatment of women. In Montagu’s response,

she takes the voice of Strephon’s lover Celia to provide a female interpretation of how this

situation might have actually transpired. Montagu goes on to suggest that the reason why

Strephon describes her dressing room in a way that even “The very Irish shall not come” (line

87) is not because of her “dirty smock, and stinking toes” (line 71), but instead because he is

“sixty odd”2 (line 75), and

Peeps in her bubbies3, and her eyes,

And kisses both, and tries—and tries.

The evening in this hellish play,

Beside his guineas thrown away,

(lines 64-67)

Essentially, in her response, Montagu is declaring that “Dr. S” was induced to write “The Lady’s

Dressing Room” out of his own anger and inability to achieve an erection with a prostitute; this

published response to Swift’s satirical text dominantly asserts the female perspective in an

otherwise one-sided negative portrayal of female beauty. In a similar way, Montague is able to do

this in her response to Addison’s Spectator No. 561 (1714) when she writes from the perspective

of the leader of a “female cabal…, who call themselves the Widow-club” (Addison 233).

2
Otherwise known as elderly (Black et al. 606)
3
Breasts (Black et al. 606)
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Montagu adopts the voice of Addison’s villain in her response, No. 573, entitled “From the

President of the Widow’s Club”, and even plays into the didactic nature of Addison’s satire by

stringing along Mr. Waitfort, even if it's justified as revenge for “designing on [her] fortune”

(Montagu 609). She does this to portray “Mrs. President” (Addison 233) not as someone who

heartlessly “disposed of six husbands” (Addison 233), but instead as someone married off at age

fourteen to a man who “looked upon [her] as a mere child he might breed up after his own

fancy” (Montagu 608); and after going into detail about why she married each of her husbands

(Montagu 608-11), she goes on to say that if Addison were to hear the explanations from the

other widows, “at length [he] would see they have had as little reason as [her]self to lose their

hours in weeping and wailing” (Montagu 611). Essentially, Montagu’s thesis in her response

then, is not to make hasty judgements, but instead consider how men played a part in a widow’s

reputation. Overall then, we see the purpose of Montagu’s writing here is to call attention to the

feminine perspective when responding to gendered accusations, subverting from the quiet, polite

female who is more focused on internal values.

Ultimately, the purpose of this essay is to celebrate the lewd, obscene, and genuine

representations of female opinion and desire in the eighteenth century. It is important that we

shout the names of women like Behn, Haywood, and Montagu, who boldly expressed their

academic prowess and sexual perversion in a century critiqued for its stringent gender

expectations and roles. When we forget to acknowledge these ‘nasty’ women, both as academic

accomplishers, and as contributors to a female narrative, we erase the histories of women who

have always pushed to subvert the misogynistic, patriarchal system.

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Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. “To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman” The

Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century, 2nd ed.,

vol. 3, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, 2012, pp. 603–605.

Black, Joseph, et al. (editor) The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 3:

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century. Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (2nd

Edition). Broadview Press, 2012.

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women

from the Renaissance Century to the Present. Morrow, 1981.

Haywood, Elizabeth. “Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze” The Broadview Anthology of British

Literature. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Broadview Press,

Peterborough, Ontario, 2012, pp. 603–605.

"Hermaphrodite." Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2023,

oed.com/view/Entry/70179?redirectedFrom=fillibuster#eid. Accessed April 20 2023.

Keown, Kathleen. “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry and the Feminine Accomplishment.”

The Review of English Studies, vol. 73, no. 308, Feb. 2022, pp. 78–99. EBSCOhost,

https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1093/res/hgab033.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem Called The

Lady’s Dressing Room” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Restoration and

Eighteenth-Century, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, 2012, pp.

603–605.
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Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. “The Spectator No. 573” The Broadview Anthology of British

Literature. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century, 2nd ed., vol. 3, Broadview Press,

Peterborough, Ontario, 2012, pp. 603–605.

Neumann, Birgit. “The Empire of Things in Eighteenth-Century English Literature:

Consumption of the Foreign and Imperial Self-Fashioning.” English Studies, vol. 93, no.

8, Dec. 2012, pp. 930–49. EBSCOhost,

https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1080/0013838X.2012.721241.

“No. 561. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 1714.” Spectator: A New Edition, Corrected from the

Originals with a Preface, Historical & Biographical, vol. 9, Sept. 1810, pp. 233–37.

EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9h&AN=36937365&site=eds-live&s

cope=site

Prescott, Sarah. Women, Authorship and Literary Culture 1690 - 1740. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd,

2003, Springer Link, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230597082.

Thompson, Courtney E. “Questions of ‘Genre’: Picturing the Hermaphrodite in

Eighteenth-Century France and England.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 3,

Apr. 2016, pp. 391–413. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.24690390&site=ed

s-live&scope=site.

Sharrock, Cath. “Hermaphroditism; or, ‘the Erection of a New Doctrine’: Theories of Female

Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England.” Paragraph, vol. 17, no. 1, 1994, pp. 38–48.

Edinburgh University Press, https://doi.org/10.3366/para.1994.17.1.38. Accessed 2023.