Disability and the Disenfranchised in Eliza Haywood’s The Rash Resolve

Eliza Haywood’s early novels, such as The Rash Resolve (1723), largely conflate sentimental and erotic literature; this style, termed amatory fiction, is well-suited to both racy narratives and social critique. Haywood uses tangible symbols, such as the female body, the deformed body, and the male body, to illuminate unfair and oppressive cultural and social systems. In The Rash Resolve, the bodies in the text reveal, motivate, and at times even constitute character and the direction of the narrative. Haywood uses common cultural understands to construct narrative events through characters’ corporeal realities; by casting bodies and physicality in a central role in The Rash Resolve, Haywood creates ambiguous, if not subversive, commentary in regard to social status, courtship, and economics