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The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) is a hybrid novel by Great Arbitress of Passion.(1) Political satire, woman's romance, imaginary voyage, oriental fantasy and semi-pornography, Eovaai incorporates a wild blend of genres to accentuate fragmentation of traditional hierarchic government and to exploit analogy between sexual and party politics. A difficult plot to summarize because of its digressive quality, Adventures of Eovaai is, in fact, a simple story. On his deathbed, Princess Eovaai's father gives her a jewel which will protect her person and her reign from evil. She loses it, is overthrown, and Ijaveo is embroiled in civil war. Eovaai is whisked away to land of Hypotofa by evil magician Ochihatou, who plans to seduce and marry Eovaai in order to gain throne of Ijaveo and extend his power. A magic telescope reveals to Eovaai that Ochihatou is really crooked, deformed, distorted in every Limb and Feature, but also encompassed with a thousand hideous Forms, which sat upon his Shoulders, clung round his Hands, his Legs, and seem'd to dictate all his Words and Gestures (78). Eovaai escapes Ochihatou's palace and meets Hypotofan patriots who educate her about Republicanism. Ochihatou recaptures princess and tries to rape her. Her screams bring a stranger who rescues her, and prime minister dashes his own brains out against a tree. The stranger is discovered to be Prince Adelhu, heir apparent of Hypotofa, who has restored peace to Ijaveo in Eovaai's absence and has fortuitously found princess's lost jewel and restores it to its casement. Adelhu and Eovaai fall in love and marry, uniting their hearts and their kingdoms, to live happily ever after. Eovaai manifests a genuine concern for exposing social and sexual injustices from many perspectives and emphasizing them through use of many genres and editorial intrusions. Haywood's creation of a text that demands to be challenged due to its argumentative machinery and use of overt, provocative genres invites a questioning and a critique of governmental and social authority (with a play on idea of Authority). The Author, Translator, Commentator, Historian, and Cabal who editorialize on Eovaai are continually at odds, and readers are left to formulate their own conclusions on fictional action and, by extension, their real society. The focus of this paper is central core of Haywood's novel: The History of Yximilla, ancient man's Republican speech, and History of Atamadoul. I shall manifest how these three generically different episodes are put together to form mutually interdependent structures. Despite its fascinating format which includes a literal subtext in form of footnotes, deceptively simple tale of Eovaai has been oversimplified by scholars. Criticism has focused, not on its unique narratological form, but on specific themes within novel. Mary Anne Schofield neatly assigns Eovaai to group of Haywood's works examining female tensions between submission and aggression and the question of womanhood as a moral and social issue (Quiet Rebellion 42, 43), but she overlooks narratological tension of story's structure. Jerry Beasley identifies work as an outrageous orientalized fantasy that savagely attacks Robert Walpole as a private man and public figure (225), while he ignores obvious commentary on intersexual conversation. Janet Todd is closest to appreciating significance of Eovaai's structure when she suggests that women writers were searching out how to communicate Truth through narrative. Todd observes that women authors in early eighteenth century insisted in complex or simplistic ways, on fiction's access to psychological and moral truths. With this continuing concern, their conventional insistence on artistic unskillfulness precisely drew attention to their rejection of largely male belief that fiction's reality lay in art itself and not in its intervention in life. …
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