Public Sexual Female Self --

¶ … Public Sexual Female Self -- Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" and Eliza Hayward's Fantomina

For 18th century writers like Eliza Hayward and Alexander Pope, sexual desire was not construed as a purely private matter. Although the actual, intimate scenes of Hayward's tale of a young girl's debauchery in Fantomina take place behind closed doors, the girl's ultimate infection by desire is a public, rather than a private incident, as the girl desires to look like a beautiful prostitute she spies at the theater. Alexander Pope's tale of the lovers Abelard and Heloise (Eloisa in his poem "Eloisa to Abelard") initially suggest the possibility that there may be a tension between a heroine's chaste outer appearance and over-heated inner life. However, the classical connotations of most of the language of the poem, such as calling Eloisa's companions in the monastery vestal virgins, and his use of heroic couplets ultimately creates a tone of polemicism and self-dramatization that is just as intensely aware of the reader as Hayward's more prosaic morality tale, despite the poem's stated theme of the frustrations of private, unsanctioned affection. Female sexuality in both author's writings is always a public matter of concern, even when voiced in the woman's own words.

Pope's Eloisa ends the poem counseling others not to obey her example, showing that she is just as aware that she is making a public example of herself, as Hayward is of Fantomina. The tone of Pope's work is seen in the first stanza of the poem:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,

Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,

And ever-musing melancholy reigns;

What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?

Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?

Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?

Although the poem seems to focus Eloisa's interior life at first, the description of the heroine's life of pensive contemplation immediately shifts to a description of her location, in her cell. The reference to Eloisa as a vestal locates the poem in the classical argot favored by Pope (as is the style of heroic couplets), and thus even in this tale of medieval love, Christian morality, and a final confession there is a sense of the epic, not the intimate, in a far, off classical location, rather than as something that is an inner reflection like a lyric poem. Eloisa is being offered as an example to the reader, although the poem is ostensibly in Eloisa's own voice. However, the poem speaks of abstract Platonic concepts through the technique of personification speaking of: "When Love approach'd me under Friendship's name." Eloisa speaks of Love, not of the man she loved, again underlining the instructional and public quality of the address. The title may say her words are "to Abelard" but the content and words used belie this concept of privacy and intimacy. Eloisa uses the words of philosophy, not passion.

Eliza Hayward speaks of a different kind of temptation, not for the intimate relationship of personal love, but of desire, partly sexual but more, at least initially the desire of a woman be socially recognized as beautiful. This desire is brought on not by the private intimacy of sexuality as with Eloisa, but of being in the public sphere of display in Fantomina, which begins with a young, not-so innocent girl becoming corrupted by merely seeing prostitutes in the playhouse. "She was young, a Stranger to the World, and consequently to the Dangers of it; and having no Body in Town, at that Time, to whom she was oblig'd to be accountable for her Actions, did in every Thing as her Inclinations or Humours render'd most agreeable to her" (Hayward 259).

Of course, Eloisa's guardian might dispute this fact and note that even with supervision, a young woman can 'fall' and even in the most chaste of circumstances, desire can exist -- for Eloisa even in a convent, female desire within can and does survive, however guiltily. For Hayward's character, too, there does seem to be some sense that within the young woman's character, there is a weakness beyond that of the average naive girl. Public acclaim is better than obscurity so long as Fantomina is accounted beautiful: "She was naturally vain, and receiv'd no small Pleasure in hearing herself prais'd, tho' in the Person of another, and a suppos'd Prostitute" (Hayward 260). To be seen, even to be seen as immoral, is better than not being seen at all, and not being desired at all.

Both authors do not explicitly say that private enjoyment of the body is what their heroines seek. True, Hayward's language, unlike Pope's, is colloquial and prosaic and bawdier and sexually explicit. But while Pope suggests that private love is what Eloisa originally desired, which then became a social and familial matter when it became sexual, Haywood suggests that social validation in the public realm of the theater is what prompted the heroine's transgressions, not intimacy with a particular or even one man. The author wishes to make clear that vanity is the primary motive -- even though prostitution is a crime of finance, the girl first desires to be seen as a prostitute upon seeing another woman as beautiful and remarked-upon, not as earning her own money. When a man thinks that money is the motive: "He believ'd her a Mistress, but believ'd her to be one of a superior Rank, and began to imagine the Possession of her would be much more Expensive than at first he had expected" the author counsels the reader he is in error to think that money is the girl's real motivation (Hayward 263)

The heroine Fantomina's awakening comes in the theater, which is not just an immoral place like a tavern, but a place specifically devoted to the cultivation of artificial beauty and drama. Of course, Eloisa in contrast resists the confines of society rather than seeks its approval: "Curse on all laws but those which love has made!" But she too is affected by her surroundings, as the loneliness of the convent proves difficult, nor does its isolation does not reflect her inner state, which desires society with her former lover. True Hayward's work eventually turns inward, to the bedroom from the theater, prompting critic Alexander Pettit's observation that "Fantomina....is preeminently an intramural work, based on a series of encounters in private places, hidden from all but the reader's sight" but corruption and awareness first come from the young girl with an impressionable or even a naturally bad character who is let loose in the city, not in the home (Petit 2002, p.2).

Haywood creates...'pornographic places' as geophysical counter-narratives to her parables of sexual temptation," in other words, the social location creates the awareness and existence of desire as well as heroine's sense of her core self (Pettit 2002, p.1). Once society makes both Fantomina and Eloisa sexually aware, this awareness cannot be unmade, and Eloisa thus continues to pine for sexuality and love in the convent. Thus it may seem that, Pope's Eloisa strives to stands aloof from her current surroundings and not to be touched by their influence:

Relentless walls! whose darksome round contains

Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains:

..Though cold like you, unmov'd, and silent grown

I have not yet forgot myself to stone.

But for Pope's Eloisa, true the private sphere of the soul cannot be fully impinged upon by her cold, chaste surroundings -- yet -- and she perceives the stony nature of her outer environment as a threat, much as when the masculine presence of Abelard entered her home, her character and ultimate fate was inexorable altered. However, unlike Haywood's roving, attention-seeking unguarded heroine, Pope stresses that Eloise was innocent before she met Abelard, and he impinged upon her household, essentially brining her into the public sphere by his masculine presence without her parent's knowledge:

Thou know'st how guiltless first I met thy flame,

When Love approach'd me under Friendship's name;

My fancy form'd thee of angelic kind,

Some emanation of th' all-beauteous Mind.

Once this innocence is transgressed, Eloisa continues to burn with heat within, heat that suggests fire and damnation, although Pope does not openly condemn Eloisa as Haywood does Fantomina. Although Haywood has been described essentially as a conservative in her presentation of conventional morality, by suggesting such a hyper-sexualized public sphere, she herself paradoxically causes the reader to see sexuality where it might not otherwise seem to be lurking. The outer sexuality infiltrates the home, and even creates it within an innocent girl. In the message of almost all of the author's works, the house by day can be a scene of debauchery at night if strangers are allowed to enter it, just as it was in the case of Eloise (Pettit 2002, p.1).

Haywood's use of the morality tale directly addresses the viewer, and there is an intense self-consciousness of instruction -- the writer is always sure that she is being 'watched' and carefully steers the reader to react in the correct manner, as she moralizes and chastises Fantomina (Hicks 2). But even in Pope, there is an intense sense of Eloisa's self-dramatization, as she uses herself as a potent warning to others, in a way that oversteps the conventions that she is merely talking to her former lover:

When this rebellious heart shall beat no more;

If ever chance two wand'ring lovers brings