Essay by Amy Norris
Art by Adela Lynge
In The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity, Eliza Haywood oscillates between public and private space to set up two distinct sites for self-expression, communication, and agency. Within the masquerade—a public space rhetorically predicated on promiscuous acts and obscuring the identity—women have the opportunity to either make themselves available or render themselves invisible. In the private spaces they occupy with men, however—where women are not allowed to consent, and thus the rhetorical act of denying consent is reframed as a secret longing for sexual conduct (Potter, “February 11”)—women are forbidden access to agentic communications of their desires. Hence, displays of agency are inherently shaped by the contrasting constructions of the spaces women occupy. Physical spaces gain meaning because popular culture transposes rhetorical narratives onto them; it projects the “containment and resistance” (Hall 348) of values onto these sites, that in turn police the behavior of those who occupy it. Thus, grounding my analysis in popular culture, rhetorical, and queer theories—as laid out by Stuart Hall, Tiffany Potter, Roxanne Mountford, and Logan Smilges—this paper will explore how Haywood uses rhetorical strategies of visual signalling and gendered interpretation to examine how the established norms of different physical spaces can impact how women operate within them. And, in doing so, I ultimately argue that the masquerade acts as a site where women can exert agency by controlling their significations, whereas the private space is rendered an area where women are silenced.
Bridging theoretical understandings of popular culture and rhetorical space together, I first outline how physical space shapes women’s agency. Hall poses popular culture as a site for “containment and resistance” (348), where cultural industries, like the masquerade, “have the power … to rework and reshape what they represent; and … to impose and implant such definitions … as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture” (353). Hence, cultural industries are sites where values can be enforced, reworked, or resisted. Connecting this to physical space, I draw on Mountford’s exploration of ‘rhetorical space.’ Mountford defines rhetorical space as “the geography of a communicative event,” where “cultural and material arrangement” occurs, and where space is “interpret[ed]” (42). Importantly, rhetorical space is not simply one of verbal communication or persuasion because rhetoric itself is not confined to those boundaries. Here, I employ Smilges’ definition of rhetoric, in which it “is less about the linear exchange of information from a single rhetor to an audience than it is about the production of meaning between and among … people” through “visual, material, and haptic modalities” (8). Thus, rhetorical spaces are physical sites that enable locale-specific verbal, visual, and alternative communication. Reincorporating Hall’s definition, the communication that occurs in these physical spaces is governed by the popular values ascribed to those domains—the dominant “containment/resistance” (348) of meanings and power that come to define a place. In the case of Haywood’s text, the masquerade is a public rhetorical space established on salacious understandings. Known for its emphasis on “performance,” “pleasure,” and “seduction” (Potter 4-5), the masquerade functions as a risqué rhetorical space where women could undertake forms of communication that would otherwise be deemed unacceptable. Therefore, the physical space of the masquerade functions as a prerequisite for certain conduct to occur; that conduct being, for women, agentic displays of desire.
Using visual communication, Haywood illustrates how the rhetorical space of the masquerade allows women to communicate desire, availability, and the lack thereof more easily than in the private space. In articulating these agentic displays of desire and their potentialities for refusal, I turn to Smilges’ concept of “quieting.” Used in the context of queer people and other “sexual minorities,” this term explores how marginalized people “oscillate the intensities of their embodyminded significations across rhetorical media (verbal, visual, embodyminded, etc.) to regulate how they signify … in different spaces” (71). In other words, this explains how people choose to reveal as much or as little as they want—how they either enact a “self-silencing” or a self-expression (70)—to regain some control in different rhetorical spaces. In Smilges’ context, this concept identifies how many queer people control their identifications on dating apps, by centering their bodies and obscuring their faces in photos. I, however, trace a similarity between this modern-day queer desire and eighteenth-century female desire—through their related experiences of sexual oppression that complicate and police their expressions of attraction—to examine how women in the physical space of the masquerade deploy similar strategies to exert agency from the margins.
Haywood posits women’s use of visual communication, particularly that established through costume, as an available means to either signal or quiet themselves at the masquerade. Namely, she establishes this with Dalinda and Dorimenus, who communicate their planned costumes to ensure they recognize one another at the event (76). She illustrates how powerful this visual signification is in communicating desire, by showing how Dorimenus “ran to” who he thought was Dalinda “and caught her in his Arms, (the freedom of that Place allowing that Familiarity)” (76). Though Philecta’s deception skews this scene, Dorimenus’s reaction still illustrates how the masquerade enables the overt expression of availability and desire, due to its containment of salacious values. Haywood repeats a similar story with Briscilla, but inverses it, depicting how the woman “resolved to disappoint [Dorimenus]; and instead of appearing in the Habit she had made him believe, put on the Resemblance” of another costume (108). Though Briscilla is choosing this action as a humorous deception, Haywood is still introducing a notable strategy of refusal; she is normalizing the use of female agency to disrupt a coupling from occurring, and is thus introducing the potential for an intentional quieting. Due to the masquerade’s obfuscation of identity, this option to attend the space but refuse a previous sexual arrangement is conceivable. This is how quieting could be employed by eighteenth-century women to gain agency at the masquerade: by silencing one’s visual signification to disrupt the rhetorical establishment of a sexual encounter. Though it is not enacted, a similar strategic opportunity could conceivably be employed in the garter scene between Lysimena and Dorimenus. The garter, a symbol of their faceless desire and sexual agreement, could just as easily be removed as it could be worn. Dorimenus entreats the mysterious Nun—who is, unbeknownst to him, his wife—to wear the garter on her arm at the next masquerade, as a signal that she will “grant what [he has] now but in vain attempted” (114). Thus, she essentially agrees to use the garter as a symbol for her consent upon their next meeting; a use of visual signification to express sexual agency. While Lysimena does end up following through (123), Haywood is nonetheless setting up a situation where a woman could easily choose to quiet her rhetorical signification and forgo the garter flagging, in order to refuse the sexual encounter. Because Dorimenus does not know her true appearance—a condition which only the masquerade could afford—there is no way to coerce her into following through. Therefore, it is the physical space of the masquerade, the values attributed to it, and the rhetoric it enables that allow women to exert agency in their sexual conduct. Only here could women hide, reveal, quiet, or pronounce themselves to this degree; only here could women have such control over their significations.
The private spaces in Haywood’s text offer no such capacity for agentic communication. In fact, rather than a tool that enables women to use their agency to quiet themselves, the private rhetorical space serves as a confining site that silences them. To elucidate this confinement, Haywood provides Dorimenus’s reading of the women he interacts with in private spaces. She reveals how Dorimenus interprets the private rhetorical space as one where women will always want sexual conduct to occur. Thus, in doing so, Haywood reveals how women’s rhetorical communication can no longer be used as a strategy for refusal when they enter a private space, as the space is coded against it. Haywood first establishes this at Dalinda’s house, where Dorimenus escorts her under the pretext of ensuring her safety. Informed by Dorimenus’ perspective, the text reads, “Dalinda, (for so shall I call the present Victim of [Dorimenus’ eyes’] force) had not Arguments sufficient to confute the Strenuousness of those he urg’d” (71). Despite Dalinda’s story offering the strongest case for consent out of the four presented in The Masqueraders, this quotation still illustrates how her “Arguments” are being read through the lens of desire. This is further exemplified through the scene in Philecta’s bedroom, in which “[Philecta] cou’d not hinder [Dorimenus] from kissing and embracing her,” and where Dorimenus reads her body as “more faintly denying” his “vigorous” sexual pursuits of her (95). Because her arguments are, according to Dorimenus, fading, he reads them as signals of desire. Thus, Haywood once again frames this woman’s desire through terms of denial and submission, rather than through any agentic offerings of consent. Finally, Haywood offers a similar experience in the privacy of the carriage between the disguised Lysimena and Dorimenus, where “all the Repulses she gave him, had no other Effect than to make him prosecute the Liberties he had began with more Eagerness” (112). Her rejections serve as motivating forces, rather than expressions of her resolution. This is due to the popular values ascribed to this space—how “definitions” are “implanted” (Hall 353) onto private space based on dominant patriarchal readings of female desire. In this context, respectable women—even ones who feel and express desire—are not allowed to consent to sexual activity (Potter, “February 11”). Therefore, the private rhetorical space becomes one in which the communication of refusal is read as the communication of desire. Men—the dominant figures in these spaces—are supplied with the power to read women, decipher their feelings, and implant desire onto them. Hence, the tools women are afforded at the masquerade are no longer available in private spaces; consent cannot be signified in any capacity, as refusal is read and justified by men through a desirous lens. Thus, by showing us how Dorimenus constructs the women’s rejections as yearnings, Haywood displays how the private space is one that strips women of the sexual agency they are afforded at the masquerade.
In The Masqueraders, Haywood’s movement between the public and the private reveals how physical space, and the popular rhetorical norms surrounding it, can greatly enable or hinder women’s sexual agency in the eighteenth-century. One space—grounded in identity obfuscation and the allowance of promiscuity—enables a strategic acceptance or resistance, while the other—predicated on men’s readings of women—actively silences women. While this clearly illustrates the difference that physical space can make, the wider implications of this examination reveal that when any space is given the cultural power to police the rhetorical communication that can occur within it, the dominant culture is almost always winning. In Haywood’s text, the patriarchal structure that polices female sexuality and promotes male satisfaction succeeds by forcing women—even in the supposedly liberatory spaces—to manipulate their way through it. The site of the masquerade may offer a bit of room for women to challenge polite, regulatory eighteenth-century society, but ultimately the exertion of women’s agency is more so a testament to their strategic cunning and mechanisms from the margins than an expression of the space’s prioritization of their liberation. Agentic quieting is merely finding a way to survive in a space, rather than gaining the power to flourish in it. Just because they can quiet their significations in order to avoid unwanted situations within the masquerade, does not mean that the system is changing. Notably, as we witness in the oscillation between public and private space, a change in context and a shift in the contained rhetorical values is all that it takes for women to be once again silenced. Therefore, while physical space is something that holds meaning, creates opportunities for both containment and resistance, and enables specific rhetorical communications that would otherwise be impossible to undertake, the existence of a space under an oppressive system is always going to possess underlying—if not blatant—connections to it. Ultimately, as seen through the power of the masquerade, public space that allows for disruption can be beneficial. However, when that space is fundamentally conflated with a private counterpart that dangerously encloses vulnerability, its full benefits cannot be overstated. The masquerade offers women a liberatory space within an oppressive system, but fails to adequately overturn that system altogether. Thus, The Masqueraders documents a site of coping and a desire for change, without truly enacting that change society-wide.
Works Cited
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Potter, Tiffany. “February 11.” UBC, 11 February 2025, Vancouver, Buchanan B, Lecture.
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