Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
This novel essentially the story of revenge enacted by a woman scorned. Glicera is just a nice young woman like any other until the villainy of male expectations of privilege destroy her. After that, the story turns into a kind of 18th century genteel British version of a Korean revenge thriller:
“She now found that she had a greater Stock of Resentment in her Soul, than, till it was rouz'd by this Treatment, she could have believed; sooner would she have sent a Dagger to his Heart, than any way subjected herself to a second Insult”
The Challenge
This metaphor-laden narrative also engages figurative language in the letters which populate—but do not entirely comprise—the structure of the storytelling. A letter from Glicera to the object of her revenge lays down the gauntlet, metaphorically:
“tell me at once what 'tis I must expect:—No longer seek by silence to skreen thy Perfidy, but boldly own the Fiends that lurk within thee”
Rebellion Upon the Seas of Madness
Indeed, it is through the power of metaphorical imagery that Glicera reveals depths of her emotional trauma. She has been wronged and deeply injured in a way that slashes right through the very core of her being. Her outlook toward men and love is forever corrupted and she paints this effect in terms recalling a subversion of her own humanity and logic:
“Ah! what a dreadful Revolution has thy Ingratitude caused within my Breast—my Thoughts before serene as an unruffled Sea, now toss'd and hurried by tumultuous Passions, o'erwhelm my Reason, and drive me into Madness”
Multiple Metaphors
Sometimes the author’s predilection for purplish prose dependent upon the imagery of the figurative seems as though it may have gotten away from her. Every once in a while a reader comes across one of her patented long, complex sentences (Faulkner has nothing over Haywood) that must be judged either an absolute work of art or an example of a writer in need of a more severe editor. Keep in mind this is only a fragment of the sentence in question:
“A very Angel of a Man with a Bob-wig, a Hat uncock'd and flapping o'er his Eyes like Obadiah in the Play, no Sword, and a dirty Pair of Gloves, would be detestable in a Woman's Eyes.
Melladore as a Metaphor
Over the course of the passionate events of the novel which transform Glicera from everyday niceness to calculating vengeance machine, the object of her plans for destruction becomes himself a metaphor. In her eyes, at least, Melladore transforms from mere man into broad-based metaphor for the unholy malevolence of his entire sex. He is the rakish male as Evil Manhood:
“The Memory of her Wrongs, however, left her not a Moment, and by degrees settled so implacable a hatred in her Nature; not only to Melladore, but to that whole undoing Sex, that she never rejoic'd so much as when she heard of the Misfortunes of any of them”
