In Eliza Haywood’s Love In Excess, I was particularly
interested with the contrast she makes between loving and liking early on in
Part the Third. Despite his murder of Alovysa, and his self exile, Count cannot
help but dwell over his love for Melliora. To that extent, Haywood nearly
implicates that he is experiencing true love for Melliora, a love which will
never die regardless of circumstance.
The theme of true love is recurrent
throughout the tale, but perhaps most prominently expressed by the narrator (or
Haywood, again are they the same?) on pages 164 and 165 as it navigates through
the differences in liking an individual and loving them as Count does with
Melliora. Here, a major difference between liking and loving is the ability or
not to move onto something else when the lovers are posed with difficulty. She
notes that lovers who to move on with other distractions when “inconvenience”
gets into their relationship are not really lovers. She notes, “Such a sort of
passion may be properly called liking,
but falls widely short of love,” and
continues to describe love as something that “…survives in absence, and
disappointments, it endures, unchilled the wintry blasts of cold indifference
and neglect, and continues its blaze, even in a storm of hatred and
ingratitude, and reason, pride, or a just sensibility of conscious worth, in
vain oppose it” (165). Count was instantly distracted from his marriage to
Alovysa upon meeting Melliora, and was unable to rid himself of his love for
her despite all of the obstacles that came before their marriage to one
another. Count’s difference in feeling is that between liking and loving
someone, and the narrator suggests the bland indifference in settling for the
former.
As the tale unfolds, it may be
implicated that such a love is worth pursuit. After all, “Love creates intolerable torments! unspeakable joys! raises us to
highest heaven of happiness, or sinks us to the lowest hell of misery” (165).
In the end, Count ends up with Melliora, despite the struggles it took to reach
that point. The feelings of joy and compassion still outweighed the difficulties
in pursuit of her, and perhaps this can be taken as a larger theme Haywood was
trying to push forward regarding marriages in the eighteenth century. During
the time when love was largely based on preserving wealth, most marriages were
hardly based on love as much as they were based on land ownership and
aristocratic lineage. In Part the First, Count marries Alovysa in order to preserve
wealth and status—characteristics traditionally encouraged by the culture at
the time when choosing a suitable wife. Yet, his marriage fails miserably as
the feelings of his unhappiness with her overtake him, and the more Alovysa
pressures him to love her (i.e. standing in the way of his letters to Amena)
the more he grows indifferent of her. This relationship is contrasted with his
love for and happiness in pursuit of Melliora. He follows his feelings, marries
the one he loves, and we are presumed to believe that they end up happy.
Accordingly, Haywood is perhaps encouraging marriages based on true love and
compassion in a spouse rather than one based solely on practical choices for
status and wealth.
I very much like how you draw attention to the ways in which love and practicality are in a state of some tension throughout the novel. --Especially as the development of a compassionate marriage as the ideal state is something I had not given much thought to before, though I was dimly aware that, somewhere along the line between Chaucer and Austen, attitudes changed.
ReplyDeleteIt seems appropriate that some of the first examples of a compassionate ideal are found in Haywood, standing at the beginning of a century that would, at its terminus, produce Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley. For the Romantic ideal, with all of its focus on real and spontaneous emotion, seems almost to spring from the shoots that we see growing here in Haywood. After all, "bland indifference," as you put it, is not the stuff of romantic display (even "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" explodes boredom, replacing it with vicarious, sensual experience).
There is an excellent dichotomy set up between Count D'elmont's marriages to Alovysa and Malliora. But beyond a simple comparison between liking and loving, we might also ask another question: is Haywood suggesting that love sometimes grows in the seeking rather than in the having? That is to say, Alovysa offers her love to D'elmont (and "pressures him to love her", in fact, as you rightly observe). The result of this is growing indifference. But for the hand of Melliora, D'elmont must work and wait. One gets the sense that there is an element of "absence makes the heart grow fonder," here. For, is it not through his striving to obtain her hand that D'elmont feelings mature to the point where they can endure? It is easy to dispense with what has been easily won; but those affections which have been the object of long struggle are not so quickly cast aside!
I really like that you draw attention to the like/love differentiation in the novel. Haywood seems to be teaching the audience the difference. I know that many 18th century novels were meant to be instructive, and i feel that Love in Excess is an early experiment in didacticism. I feel that Haywood is teaching her audience what love really is. Alovysa lusted after the Count; the Count was interested in Alovysa's money and social class. Thus, their marriage was superficial, and perhaps the reason why it ended. Haywood may be suggesting that marriages work when the basis is love. It is interesting for me to read earlier 18th century works and compare them with later novels. Jane Austen, for example, balances both economy and love, creating a unity between them and suggesting that lovers look for both.
ReplyDelete