26 pages • 52 minutes read
Eliza HaywoodFantomina
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1725A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Convention and Rebellion in 18th-Century England
The Lady’s behavior seems in many ways rebellious, for a woman of her time and social class. She is having sex outside of marriage, and she is deceiving both her lover and the people in her social circle. She also going out of her way—literally, by renting one distant lodging after another—to keep these deceptions separate from her real life. At a certain point, however, the deceptions become her real life because she cannot imagine her life without Beauplaisir. Only her domineering mother’s return from Europe serves to bring her back to her roots.
However, the Lady’s increasingly desperate machinations around Beauplaisir are not so much a rebellion as they are an attempt to master a social game that is rigged against women. At one point in the story, she congratulates herself on having found the perfect solution for keeping a lover’s interest, a challenge at which so many other women have failed:
She made herself, most certainly, extremely happy in the Reflection on the Success of her Stratagems […] She had all the Sweets of Love, but as yet had tasted none of the Gall, and was in a State of Contentment, which might be envy’d by the more Delicate (Paragraph 21).
Yet this supposed solution exhausts her, as much as it contents her. While it means that she continually gets to experience the thrilling beginnings of love, it also means that she is continually rejected, once these beginnings wear off. She must then cast about for a new enticing persona to adopt.
The Lady’s most unconventional behavior is not her pursuit and deception of Beauplaisir, which is only a more extreme version of what many women around her do. This behavior is demonstrated at the beginning of the story, before she has disguised herself but while she is still away from her mother or anyone else “to whom she was oblig’d to be accountable for her Actions” (Paragraph 1). She is seated with her friends at a theatre and finds herself fascinated by “those Women who make sale of their Favours” (Paragraph 1) on the ground floor. Her curiosity about these women marks her as unusual, for a woman of her social class; her other wealthy friends merely look down on those less fortunate than they. She first dresses up as a prostitute not to snare anyone, but simply to satisfy “an Innocent Curiosity” (Paragraph 1). It is only when she encounters Beauplaisir that this curiosity disappears, and she becomes preoccupied solely with holding on to a wealthy, powerful man.
The Contradictions of Traditional Femininity
The Lady’s first encounter with Beauplaisir comes when she is disguised as a prostitute, and it could be fairly said that she gives him mixed signals. While disguised as a prostitute, she is evasive about consummating their relationship. She pretends first that she has an appointment with another client to hold him off; the following evening, she rents a grand set of lodgings, with the idea that this will deter Beauplaisir from taking liberties with her. These lodgings instead merely give Beauplaisir the idea that she is a higher class of prostitute than he had thought. When the Lady is finally unable to fend him off, she is full of shame and anguish. In order both to save face and to instill guilt in Beauplaisir, she makes up a new and more dignified identity: that of Fantomina, a well-born country girl whose circumstances resemble her own. This is in spite of the fact that she has initially been drawn to the role of prostitute for the very reason that she is curious about the more sordid side of life and the character that men take on during intimacy: “[T]he longer she reflected on it, the greater was her Wonder, that Men, some of whom she knew were accounted to have Wit, should have Tastes so very depraved” (Paragraph 1).
While the Lady’s behavior is certainly manipulative, it is also genuinely confused and reflects the conflicting societal rules that she has been raised, as a well-born young woman, to follow. She has been told that sex before marriage brings a woman “Ruin” (Paragraph 29), yet is also told that to make herself attractive to men is one of her central duties in life. She is supposed to be seductive, but is also supposed to have no interest of her own in sex; she is supposed to take a passive, elusive role in courtship, a role that (as we see in the various elaborate guises that she must adopt in order to keep Beauplaisir’s interest) demands great energy and initiative. It is because she has been taught that sex cannot coexist with love and stability outside of marriage—a lesson that Beauplaisir’s behavior unfortunately reinforces—that she must keep turning herself into a distant object of desire, so that she can be repeatedly wooed and won.
When the Lady’s traditional, domineering mother returns from Europe at the end of the story, we can see some of the sources of the Lady’s confusion. The Lady’s mother reveals herself to be a character who cares about status and appearances above all else. Upon learning that the Lady has become pregnant, she determines that she must be married off immediately to “the Cause of [her] Undoing” (Paragraph 29), in order to give her pregnancy social legitimacy. Upon then learning—along with Beauplaisir himself—about the extent of the Lady’s deceptions, she is both shocked and grudgingly impressed by the precocity and skill that these deceptions reveal:
And ‘tis difficult to determine, if Beauplaisir, or the Lady, were most surpris’d at what they heard: he, that he should have been blinded so often by her Artifices; or she, that so young a Creature should have the skill to make use of them (Paragraph 29).
It is not because of the artifices themselves, but because the Lady has been honest with her mother about using these artifices, that she is sent to a monastery.
Romance and Self-Deception
While the Lady is clearly obsessed with Beauplaisir, it is not at all clear that she loves or even likes him very much. The very means by which she keeps him close to her also ensure that she will never be able to fully respect or trust him. She knows him to be entranced by a lie: the lie that she is repeatedly telling him. She is proud of herself for having arrived at what she considers to be a foolproof method for keeping a man’s interest, even while she acknowledges that the man himself might not be especially worthy:
She made herself, most certainly, extremely happy in the Reflection on the Success of her Stratagems; and while the Knowledge of his Inconstancy and Levity of Nature kept her from having that real Tenderness for him she would else have had, she found the Means of gratifying the Inclination she had for his agreeable Person, in as full a Manner as she could wish (Paragraph 21).
While Beauplaisir’s behavior is more straightforward than the Lady’s, he is also less self-aware than she is. Her deception of him is successful partly because he is so resolutely unintrospective. He is not in the habit of looking at others or at himself very closely; he simply follows his whims and assumes rote postures of gallantry, by turns. Were he more self-aware, and perhaps also less willfully blind, he might see his own role more in the different seductions that the Lady sets up for him. He might see how susceptible he is not only to the Lady’s physical charms, but also to the thrill of the chase; this might in turn cause him to realize how his susceptibility is being exploited, and to wonder why it is that all of these different women pursuing him happen to look so much alike.
The Lady and Beauplaisir have their separate motivations for being involved: motivations which are somewhat murky to them both, and which cause a distance between them even during intimacy. Perhaps the closest that they come to an honest relation is during the Lady’s final guise as Incognita, when they are alone together in a darkened room that prevents them from seeing either themselves or one another:
And if there be any true Felicity in an Amour such as theirs, both here enjoy’d it to the full. But not in the Height of all their mutual Raptures, could he prevail on her to satisfy his Curiosity with the Sight of her Face (Paragraph 26).
