Liber Amoris and the lineaments of Hazlitt's desire.(Sarah Hazlitt)

 
    If soon she be not made a wife, 
    Her honour's singed, and then for life, 
    She's--what I dare not name. 
    --John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (2611) 

At four o'clock on Wednesday, July 17, 1822, Sarah Hazlitt called on 10 George Street, where her husband William stayed during the couple's divorce proceedings in Edinburgh. Although the court would not issue the Divorce Decree until August 2 (Houck, 119), Sarah Hazlitt's role in the divorce had finished that Wednesday, and while she drank tea and William dined, the newly-unweds had a remarkable conversation, which Sarah Hazlitt recorded in her journal. William wanted a divorce so he could be free to marry Sarah Walker--the daughter of the family that managed the lodging-house where William had lived in London since August 1820. So it may have been inevitable that William's talk turned to this other Sarah, with whom he was obsessed. But what's remarkable about this conversation is how candidly she reports him speaking of the Walker family's conduct--and of his own:

 
   He said that the mother [Mrs. Walker, his London landlady] was the 
   most disgusting, vulgar old wretch that could be and corrupted her 
   children's minds by her bawdy indecent conversation. Though he had 
   never heard an improper or indelicate word from the girl [Sarah] yet 
   it had often struck him, that they had never objected to the girls of 
   the town coming up to him continually, and that Sarah would often 
   send them up when her mother had said he was not at home, for which 
   they praised her and said she was a nice girl. I told him it showed 
   what the house and the people were well enough. (247) 

Sarah Hazlitt seems to have been too smart a woman not to make that last remark without ironically including her husband among "the people" in that "house." A woman candid enough to discuss her own extramarital "intrigues" (245), Sarah Hazlitt also told William that she thought Sarah Walker" as thin and bony as the scrag end of a neck of mutton" (247). This unromantic image may have been a common figure of speech at the time, but Sarah Hazlitt may also have alluded to "the only love letter from Hazlitt to his first wife that has survived" (Sikes et al. qtd. in Hazlitt, Letters, 103). In January of 1808, William wrote to Sarah (then Miss Stoddart): "I never love you so well as when I think of sitting down with you to dinner over a boiled scrag-end of mutton and hot potatoes" (104). Sarah Hazlitt does not record whether she intended (or William recognized) the allusion, but it's tempting to read her remark as a coda to their marriage on its last day.

As a way to introduce a discussion of Liber Amoris, the libelous mortification of Sarah Walker that William Hazlitt published in 1823, this salacious crumb from Sarah Hazlitt's diary lends irony to the sexist vein in Romantic ideology (Ross, 1) through which generations of reviewers, critics, and biographers have tended, for the most part, to take the word of a self-confessed john on the character of Walker. If Walker was even remotely the "religious" woman (Liber Amoris, 161) Hazlitt said she was, a parade of prostitutes through the family household--as much as the volatility of Hazlitt's obsession--might have given her pause to think twice about his marriage proposal.

In "Sexual Politics and Literary History," Sonia Hofkosh observes that "[w]e do not have the girl's story," whether the story is Walker's, or that of the Keswick villager whom Hazlitt assaulted in 1803. This historical silence "provides the pattern for the displacement of sexual politics from the discourse of literary history generally" (132). Hofkosh supplements the silence of these two girls with a reading of Sarah Hazlitt's journal, not to speak for the others but to provide "another side to a familiar story" (133). However, like all the historical documents considered here, Sarah Hazlitt's journal is a compromised text, mediated for our reading by an editor who has been meticulously criticized for perpetrating textual errors (see Jones, "Hazlitt's Journal"). In this context, Sarah Hazlitt's diary reminds us of the tension between representation and the real, fiction and history--the tension "between desire and fulfillment, between perpetration and recollection" that Jacques Derrida calls "the logic of the hymen ... the consummation of differends" ("Double Session," 212).

This logic or "law of the hymen" (242) between literature and truth governs the legacy of critical responses to Liber Amoris and propels this essay to identify Hazlitt's traffic with prostitution not as a marginal, unmentionable detail in his portrait of the artist as an abject stalker, but as a "dangerous supplement" (Derrida, Grammatology, 151) that conditions three related problematics: Hazlitt's vexed relationship to the English literary canon and market; his self-censoring composition of Liber Amoris; and the aforementioned Romantic ideology whereby the critical reception of Liber Amoris has tended, with a few notable exceptions, to accept Hazlitt's whorish characterization of Walker--thus consigning her to a purgatorial defamation that began with the "book of love" aptly synopsized by Tom Paulin as "emotional pornography" (45).