18th century novel Fantomina has a sexually curious, identity-switching heroine
- Written by Nicola Parsons, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Sydney
Eliza Haywood was a bestselling 18th century author closely associated with the then-emerging genre of the novel. Little is known of her life beyond her writing. She is best known for her novella Fantomina; or Love in a Maze, a story of female desire and assumed identities that partly subverts the sexual politics at this time.
Likely born Elizabeth Fowler in the late 17th century, she was married before 1713, when she debuted on stage as Eliza Haywood. By 1719, she was living as a single woman in London. In letters, Haywood described her marriage as unfortunate and herself as the sole support of two children, suggesting that she had been unexpectedly widowed or perhaps abandoned by her husband.
Writing was her main source of income, aside from short periods on the stage. Haywood wrote across a wide range of genres, including The Female Spectator, the first periodical written by a woman for female readers, political fiction, domestic novels, plays, criticism and translations.
She also ran a pamphlet shop in London’s Covent Garden in the 1740s, where she sold her own work and that of others, sometimes under her own imprint. Because Haywood was exceptionally prolific, scholars continue to grapple with the complexity and nuance of her career.
First published in 1725, Fantomina follows an unnamed lady of quality visiting London under the nominal supervision of her aunt. Her wealth and status grant her substantial freedom. The novel opens at the playhouse where the heroine, seated in an expensive box, becomes intrigued by the attention sex workers receive from fashionable men.
Significantly, the heroine, who remains unnamed, is drawn not to the prospect of seduction, but to the unsupervised conversations that unfold between men and women outside the bounds of polite society. Acting on her curiosity, she returns the following evening attired as a sex worker. She quickly attracts the attention of a crowd of men, including Beauplaisir (whose name suggests “man of pleasure” or “good pleasure”).
Both she and he come from the same elite world. Their interactions have been marked by a polite restraint that, while proper, is ultimately unsatisfying. Beauplaisir does not recognise her, disguised and out of her usual context. She welcomes the opportunity to speak with him on new terms and is thrilled by the free and unrestrained conversation that unfolds.
At the conclusion of the play, the intensity and persistence of Beauplaisir’s desire take her by surprise. She extricates herself only by pretending to be the mistress of another man expecting her return that evening and promises to meet Beauplaisir again the following night.
Alone in her lodgings, she initially feels exhilaration over her successful ruse and relief over her safe escape, but these feelings soon give way to more complex emotions.
Strange and unaccountable were the whimsies she was possessed of, – wild and incoherent her desires, – unfixed and undetermined her resolutions but that of seeing Beauplaisir in the manner she had lately done.
These first stirrings of desire are incoherent yet sufficiently powerful to unsettle her discretion and encourage further adventures.
Taking further precautions to protect her identity – including renting lodgings near the theatre so they might retire there after the play – she meets him for a second time. During the performance, he is attentive and tender; afterward, they adjourn to her rooms for supper.
Beauplaisir’s desire remains resolute, and the heroine finds herself in an increasingly perilous situation. The lady is “tearful – confused, altogether unprepared to resist in such Encounters, and rendered more so by the extreme Liking she had to him”. She struggles in vain and, inevitably, is undone.
The episode raises pressing questions about consent, that Haywood seems to have no interest in settling. Instead, Fantomina stresses confusion and the sometimes-vexed relation between internal desires and external expectations.
New personas
The young lady’s visible distress after the sexual encounter confounds Beauplaisir, undermining her assumed identity as a town mistress. She explains herself by inventing a new persona named Fantomina, the daughter of a country gentleman who, while visiting London, grew curious about how men treat their mistresses.
As Fantomina, she continues the affair with Beauplaisir for a short time. Then the lack of novelty causes his desire to wane. He announces plans to spend a season in Bath, effectively ending their liaison.
Fantomina decides to disguise herself again and follow him, this time as serving maid named Celia. Darkening her hair and eyebrows, she adopts a West Country dialect.
The heroine’s new persona raises pressing questions about how class and social status shape assumptions of sexual availability and expectations of sexual violence. Hired as a chambermaid in the very lodgings where Beauplaisir is staying, she is relieved to find only one other guest, a disabled gentleman, so she need fear no “amorous violence, but where she wished to find it”.
Fantomina title page, 1725.
Wikimedia Commons
In this way, the novella reworks the binary of feminine passivity and masculine activity that typically governed 18th-century courtship. The heroine’s invention also allows her to overcome the decline of passion that familiarity is said to bring.
Instead of meeting “a cold, insipid, husband-like Lover”, her serial disguises ensure Beauplaisir remains “always raving, wild, impatient, longing, dying”. More significantly, her disguises allow her to experiment with different identities, expanding her experience beyond the narrow, surveilled, vantage point of a young lady of quality.
The heroine assumes one final identity – a masked woman known to Beauplaisir only as Incognita – before her mother’s sudden arrival. A woman of stern virtue, her mother closely monitors her daughter and allows her few liberties.
More troubling to the heroine than her unexpected confinement is the discovery that she is pregnant, which she tries to hide by eating little, tightly lacing her corset, and wearing fashionable hoop petticoats that conceal her midsection.
A lack of moralism
The novella’s denouement begins when she goes into labour during a ball at court. Back at their lodgings, a physician is summoned and determines her ailment requires a midwife not medicine. Her mother refuses to call one until she names the man responsible for her condition.
Beauplaisir, once summoned, is bewildered. When the heroine reveals her deceptions, her mother absolves Beauplaisir and places full blame on her daughter, exiling her to a French convent.
The novella’s conclusion is brief but ambiguous. The heroine’s dispatch to a convent has been variously interpreted: as a moral reassertion of patriarchal control; as a gesture towards the intellectual and educational possibilities of convent life; or, more subversively, as a nod to the eroticised depictions of convents in 18th-century fiction, suggesting her exile may enable continued sexual agency and transgression.
Crucially, the narrative resists the moralistic ending a reader might expect and instead leaves room for these multiple possibilities. But the final word of Fantomina affirms the heroine’s, and by extension, the author’s, inventiveness.
Our narrator describes the tale as “full of Variety as any, perhaps that many ages had produced.” Rather than condemning the young lady, the narrative reframes her actions as pleasurable diversion, perhaps even something to be revelled in.
Authors: Nicola Parsons, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Sydney 
