The Adventures of Eovaai and the Politics of Chinese Exoticism

Abstract

Eliza Haywood’s prose satire, The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), embeds her critique of English politics within an oriental tale purportedly obtained from Chinese scholarship on an ancient Antipodean civilisation. Written as a critique of the political administration of Robert Walpole, Haywood’s appeal to Chinese learning in her narrative of political corruption testifies to the significance of Eastern civilisations in fashioning new forms of civic identity in post-revolutionary Britain. This article focuses on the significance of China in Haywood’s critique of an emergent British colonialism and its attendant narratives of discovery and contact. Reversing the male-centred narratives of territorial expansion in the new world, Haywood’s satire presents a southern continent already mapped by the Chinese, where translation and interpretation take precedence over discovery and occupation. By examining the ways in which Haywood deploys a specific form of exoticism to raise questions over the gendered nature of government, the article demonstrates how an idealised China could be deployed to resist and critique emergent imperial aspirations and their reliance on existing hierarchies of sexual difference.