Eliza Haywood's most successful novel, Love in Excess; or The Fatal Inquiry centers on the amorous adventures of two brothers, with a neighboring baronet and his sister drawn in during the second volume as an added complication. The eldest brother, Count d'Elmont, returns to Paris after two years spent in a military career and is immediately besieged by various young women. Unattracted by marriage, he sets out to seduce Amena Sanseverin, thus provoking the jealousy of Alovisa who has already sent him a series of anonymous billets-doux. Amena then sends word to the count that she has been forbidden to see him and that night he steals into the garden, releases her from her room, and together they go off to the Tuileries, where he soon demands proof of her affection.

Twas now this inconsiderate Lady found herself in the greatest strait she had ever yet been in; all Nature seemed to favour his Design. The Pleasantness of the Place, the silence of the Night, the sweetness of the Air, perfum'd with a thousand various Odours wafted by gentle Breezes from adjacent Gardens compleated the most delightful Scene that ever was, to offer up a Sacrifice to Love…. The heat of the Weather, and the Confinement having hindred her from Dressing that Day, She had only a thin silk Night Gown on, which flying open as he caught her in his Arms, he found her panting heart beat measures of consent, her heaving Breast swell to be press'd by his, and every Pulse confess a wish to yield; her Spirits all dissolv'd sunk in a Lethargy of Love.¹¹

Haywood carefully establishes the varying degrees of moral culpability in the scene. Amena is characterized as a victim rather than aggressor, and in this novel's code of values is thus labeled as no more than "inconsiderate." She does not initiate action and so becomes "sacrificial" prey to her own dangerous passions, the advances of d'Elmont, and the atmosphere of the garden. The steps to her downfall are charted along a path of her psychological responses to his physical presence. As the count grows more aggressive, her resistance is "dissolv'd", reason and control yield to a lethargic passivity, and it is only the interruption of a servant in the "moment betwixt her and Ruine" (1:29) that keeps her virtue intact.

Overcome with remorse, d'Elmont resolves to escort her home: "'Tis better for you, Madam,' said he, 'whatsoever has happened to be found in your own Garden, than in any place with me'" (1:30). The suspicion that Haywood is playing here with an allusion to Edenic innocence and its loss is strengthened when the two lovers return to find the garden door locked. The serpent in this case is Alovisa, who has engineered her rival's downfall by informing M. Sanseverin of the illicit meeting. The significance of Amena's passivity and the reason for her brief appearance in the narrative now becomes clear: she is intended as a positive counter to the portrait of a vicious and unnatural woman. And Alovisa is unnatural precisely because she has adopted the masculine role of aggressor, especially in sexual terms.

She is, however, permitted a brief interlude of satisfaction in the possession of d'Elmont in marriage, but jealousy soon subverts the victory of wills: d'Elmont falls in love with his ward Melliora. The process of his restoration to a positive character begins here as he extricates himself from his unnatural wife and realigns with "true femininity." The presentation of Melliora thus replicates in all its essential details the relationship with the archetypal victim, Amena. Following a tempestuous scene with his wife,

he flung out of the Room in spite of all her endeavours to hinder him, and going hastily through a Gallery which had a large Window that looked into the Garden, he perceived Melliora lying on a green Bank, in a Melancholy yet charming Posture…. he in a Moment lost all the Rage of Temper he had been in, and his whole Soul was taken up with softness. (2:24)

Haywood marshals her images carefully. Melliora's "Posture" is, of course, more than "Melancholy yet charming"; it is the passive and susceptible pose of woman offered up on a green bank in the natural profusion of the garden. The window replaces the former barrier of a door, and, again, only the interruption of a servant saves the hapless victim.

When the family retires into the country for the summer the characters are similarly "typed." The roles of male aggressor, accomplice, victim, and virago initially assumed by d'Elmont, Anaret, Amena, and Alovisa are now taken up by d'Elmont, Baron d'Espernay, Melliora, and Melantha. The subplot of the love between d'Elmont's brother, the Chevalier Brillain, and Alovisa's sister, Ansellina, provides an additional complication, and by the end of the second volume the resolution of passion has acquired the complexity of a Jacobean tragedy. Alovisa is dead, the baron has been stabbed by the chevalier, Melantha is unhappily married, and the count has set off to travel in order to overcome his grief at Melliora's retirement to a convent.

The third volume introduces new characters and scenes through which d'Elmont, chastened by sorrow, moves without pleasure. "He prefer'd a solitary Walk, a lonely Shade, or the Bank of some purling Stream, where he undisturb'd might contemplate on his Belov'd Melliora" (3:5). The lovesick wanderer, a prominent figure in amatory novels,¹² permits the conflation of developing self-awareness with a singular appreciation of nature. The hero seeks out those images which reinforce his separateness and thus initiates a healing process which will end with achieved wholeness. After a few fortunate deaths to dispose of unnecessary characters, d'Elmont is finally rewarded with Melliora, while her brother Frankville is granted matrimonial bliss with Camilla. The novel's restoration of order has been predictably equated with the reassertion of conventional sexual mores.

The vicarious thrill to Haywood's readers clearly centers on a passionate encounter in exotic surroundings with all nature vibrating to the forces of love. As her career progresses, these settings become increasingly farfetched, and Haywood lavishes a wealth of imaginative detail on the evocation of sexuality. Love in Excess (1719) is set in the relatively familiar grounds of France, The British Recluse (1722) in London, Idalia (1723) ranges further afield to Venice, while Philidore and Placentia (1727) reflects the vogue for travel literature in its movement between England, a desert island, and Persia. In each of these novels, amorous passion is given precedence over the defensive maneuvers for preservation which had been the stock-in-trade of the French roman heroique.¹³ The formula was clearly a commercial success: Love in Excess, with Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, was one of the three most popular works before Pamela.¹⁴ Haywood was enough of a hack writer that having once struck upon the winning combination, she rarely deviated from it. And it is clear from the recurrence of certain motifs that she recognized sexuality as the chief source of her novels' appeal. In refining her techniques for provoking the desired reader response, she ultimately consolidated a kind of rubric of erotica—certain scenes in which setting, dialogue, and characterization would support an implicit model of human behavior. Chief among these is the garden seduction: a ritual enactment in which all features contribute to the pervasive sexuality. We note, then, that the hero alone is granted mobility and the right to exercise control, which in turn effects a virtual equation of female figure with setting—"all Nature seemed to favour his Design" we are told in Love in Excess. The entrance of the male into the enclosed garden is thus not merely the prelude to seduction, but also a symbolic enactment of it, a thinly veiled assertion of that power which these scenes endorse. Woman, like nature, may initially resist man's ordering hand, but the impulse to yield to his pressure is finally irresistible.¹⁵ Only some fortuitous interruption can finally save the Haywood heroine from her "natural" inclination to surrender….

Notes

…¹¹ Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess: or The Fatal Enquiry, A Novel (London: 1719-1720), 1:28-29. All further references to this work will appear in parentheses in the text. The association between a lapse from self-control, the dangers of imagination, and the atmosphere of the garden appears again in Haywood's Philidore and Placentia. See William H. McBurney, ed. Four before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 162.

¹² See, for example, M. D. Manley's Memoirs of Europe, 2:9.

¹³ See English Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641-1782 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

¹⁴ William H. McBurney, "Mrs. Penelope Aubin and the Early Eighteenth-Century English Novel," Huntington Library Quarterly 20 (1957): 250.

¹⁵ See Carole Fabricant, "Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses: The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 8, ed. Roseann Runte (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 109-35. In her incisive analysis of the complementary responses to women and landscape in Augustan poetry, Fabricant reveals the "profound interconnections between aesthetic, economic, and sexual forms of possession" (117)….