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Haywood’s re-appropriation of the amatory heroine in Betsy Thoughtless

Hultquist, Aleksondra (University of Iowa, 2006)

Eliza Haywood’s domestic fiction, epitomized by The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), does not reject the modes of her earlier amatory fiction work (such as her 1724 Fantomina), but instead dialectically incorporates it. By considering both Pamela and Betsy Thoughtless in the context of Haywood’s amatory fiction of the 1720s, this paper argues that the struggle to appropriate the narrative of the sexually experienced woman highlights the dialogic complexities of the relationships between amatory and domestic fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. The perseverance of amatory modes of writing in later eighteenth-century domestic novels gestures toward alternate ideological possibilities for female subjectivity through both the exercise of virtue and the exploration of sexual desire.