Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton's The Ephesian Matron , E. Haywood's Fantomina , and Feminine Consistency

Abstract

In this essay I draw connections between the seventeenth-century natural philosopher Walter Charleton's materialism and the romance writer Eliza Haywood's novella Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze. Such an alignment of theory and genre is richly sanctioned by Richard Kroll's account of the contingent epistemology governing Restoration and early eighteenth-century knowledge claims. 1 Most suggestive for the present essay is Kroll's claim that "the Restoration habitually treats literary genre less as a question of some fixed ontological or epistemological hierarchy than as a heuristic device, an experimental space within [which]to test wider discursive issues." 2 However, Kroll's remarkable study of materialism and literate culture from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century does not, as Kroll states, "fully discuss the role and place of women in the neo-Epicurean revival." 3 By taking as one instance of that "role and place" the imagined activation of materialist bodies in Charleton and Haywood's narratives, my essay attempts to consider the stakes of this confluence of materialism and romance for a feminist history of the novel and of sexual difference.

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