The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood. George Frisbie Whicher
wound from which he has but then recovered. Naturally the girl rewards him with her hand, and all ends well.[7]
Of the stories in this diversified collection that of Anziana approaches in kind, though not in degree, the tragic pathos of Isabella and the Pot of Basil ("Decameron," IV, 5). The second narrative has all the glamor of adventure in the barbaric East, and the romantic interest that attaches to lovers separated but eternally constant. The histories of Stenoclea and of Tellisinda contain situations of dramatic intensity. But perhaps the story of Violathia is the most worthy of attention on account both of its defects and of its merits. The weakest part of the plot is the husband, who is jealous without cause, and equally without reason suddenly reforms. But the character of Violathia is admirably drawn. Unlike the usual heroine of Haywoodian fiction she is superior to circumstance and does not yield her love to the most complacent adjacent male. As a dutiful wife she resists for a long time the insinuations of Charmillo, but when she decides to fly to her lover, her husband's tardy change of heart cannot alter her feelings. Her character is individual, firm, and palpable. If the story was original with Mrs. Haywood, it shows that her powers of characterization were not slight when she wished to exert them. The influence of the novella and of the Oriental tale produced nothing better.
From other literary forms the makers of fiction freely derived sensational materials and technical hints. Without insisting too closely upon the connection between novel and play, we may well remember that nearly all the early novelists, Defoe excepted, were intimately associated with the theatre. Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Haywood, and later Fielding and Mrs. Lennox were successful in both fields. The women writers especially were familiar with dramatic technique both as actors and playwrights, and turned their stage training to account when they wrote prose fiction. Mrs. Haywood's first novel, "Love in Excess" (1720), showed evidences of her apprenticeship to the theatre. Its three parts may be compared to the three acts of a play; the principal climax falls properly at the end of the second part, and the whole ends in stereotyped theatrical fashion with the marriage of all the surviving couples. The handling of incident, too, is in the fashion of the stage. Mrs. Haywood had sufficient skill to build up a dramatic situation, but she invariably solves it, or rather fails to solve it, by an interruption at the critical moment, so that the reader's interest is continually titillated. Of a situation having in itself the germs of a solution, she apparently had not the remotest conception. When a love scene has been carried far enough, the coming of a servant, the sound of a duel near by, or a seasonable outbreak of fire interrupts it. Such devices were the common stock in trade of minor writers for the theatre. Dramatic hacks who turned to prose fiction found it only a more commodious vehicle for incidents and scenes already familiar to them on the stage. In their hands the novel became simply a looser and more extended series of sensational adventures. Accident, though tempered in various degrees by jealousy, hatred, envy, or love, was the supreme motivating force.
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