Haywood’s “A Wife To Be Lett”: You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t…

…do what your pimp husband tells you to do, that is.

I think it’s a bit too optimistic to say that the women in Eliza Haywood’s A Wife To Be Lett (1723) satisfactorily “push outward against patristic boundaries” (Fields 264) as Polly Stevens Fields suggests they do in her article “Manly Vigour and Women’s Wit: Dialoguing Gender in the Plays of Eliza Haywood.” Fields sees Susanna’s temporary revenge on her husband, Celemena’s decision to marry Gaylove against her father’s wishes, and Amadea’s disguising herself as a man to follow Beaumont as “indicative of their resistance against the system” (263), but I found that the play as a whole did not leave me with this hopeful impression. Fields does refer a little bit to the play’s “dark view” (262), but she says that Haywood “maintains her interest in that moment of realization” (264) when women rise up against it. I wonder at interpreting Haywood’s intent this way, especially because of the end of her Prologue:

“To the Worthy, and the Wise, be kind,
Their Cupid is not, like Vulgar’s, blind:
Justly they weigh your Charms, and sweetly pay
Your soft Submission, with permitted Sway.”

I read these as pretty bleak opening words, as Haywood saying that no matter how worthy and wise a husband she secures, and no matter how submissive she may be, a wife will only ever be allowed agency, and can never really possess any of her own. No marriage, then, even one initially grounded in love, can escape an imbalance of power.

I preferred Earla A. Wilputte’s article "Wife Pandering in Three Eighteenth-Century Plays," which clearly argues that Haywood depicts the lot of a wife pessimistically. Wilputte says that although the romantic pairing of the Celemena-Gaylove subplot does result in an example of marriage based on love at the end of the play, it is outweighed by the bleakness of Susanna’s predicament. The "good wife’s power to reform a delinquent husband while heroically retaining her own virtue" (Wilputte 454) is ultimately unsatisfying. Wilputte says, quite rightly I think, that the Susanna conclusion is underplayed and sentimental, and therefore doesn’t seem realistic. This implausibility only serves to emphasize the true powerlessness of women and wives.

Lines like Toywell's "I can stop your mouth" (Haywood 29) as he attempts to rape Susanna and Graspall's "you had best consent quietly to what I desire, or I shall make you" (47) as he attempts to sell her to Beaumont are explicitly disturbing, while Haywood’s use of mercantile and legal diction serves to emphasize the theme of marriage as a transaction.

Haywood gives us a world where no woman is able to have true selfhood, but must resign herself to effacement of identity in marriage. Even Celemena discovers that her power to command her lover Gaylove is limited and dependent on her ability to bargain for her future--"That is not sufficient, Madam; I must have an immediate Security... before I undertake any thing" (66). Hardly such stuff as her romance novels are made on. Haywood seems resigned to the fact that “women are losers in the marriage market regardless of their partners” (Wilputte 454), and must therefore be wary of any union.

... Another rake with the name "Beau-something"... Beauclair, Beaumine, Beaumont. This doesn't bode well for me personally, as my boyfriend's name is Beauchamp. I hope a future of putting up with hedonistic carousing and wenching doesn't lie ahead of me.