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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
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).
A preliminary note about method is in order at this point, for to articulate moral objection in a critique of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris is to risk "following John Bull's example"--which is what Duncan Wu accuses "those who base their opinion of Hazlitt on a prior moral judgment" of doing ("Sexual," 201). In the June, 1823, issues of John Bull, a Tory periodical edited by Theodore Hook and published by Edward Shackell (who also published the Literary Register that had ridiculed Hazlitt's obsession with "his landlord's daughter" a full year before Liber Amoris appeared [Wu, "Defence," 22-23]), the "heroine of the Liber Amoris"--namely, Walker--was described, "from all the reports we are able to collect, [as] 'a very pretty innocent girl, of 17 or 18 years of age'" (188). John Bull's description of the "virtuous female calumniated" by the "cockney lecturer on Shakespeare" as "no better than 'a tradesman's daughter'" (198) emphasizes cliches of class and gender that continue to inform the sensationalistic kind of reportage with which today's newspapers and tabloids so often, and perversely, eroticize the female victims of assault or murder (Davey, 133-34).
To avoid the risk of "following John Bull's example," the least we can do is to specify that this reading take a feminist approach, rather than an ostensibly chivalrous one. We can also acknowledge the perhaps inevitable complicity between textual and corporeal exploitations whereby one can broach the question of prostitution. Discussing the double standard applied to the high and low pleasures of the imagination, Bradford Mudge remarks, "the lady is still a whore, the artist still a pimp, the viewer [here, the reader] still a john" (236). In light of the connections established by Mudge between the discourses of prostitution and pornography in the British literature of the period studied here, a feminist reading of Liber Amoris--particularly one that focuses on its traffic with prostitution--must ultimately remain wary of its particular vulnerability to prurient misreading; as Susanne Kappeler reflects with grim irony, "conjoining feminism and pornography enhances the appeal of pornography" (19).
Tricks of the Trade
Hazlitt's relation to the English literary canon has been a matter for debate since his own time. "One of the very greatest masters of English prose," laments Paulin, "Hazlitt is almost never read or cited or studied" (1); conversely, in a recent biography of Hazlitt, A. C. Grayling declares, "his reputation ... has never ceased to grow" (ix). Whereas Paulin leaves open to interpretation why "Hazlitt is so tenuously lodged in the cultural memory at present" (13), Grayling specifies that Hazlitt's problems with cultural capital involve what Patrick Holland has called the essayist's "libidinal libertinism" (qtd. in McCutcheon, "Liber Amoris").
For Grayling,...
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