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.
Literary Devices
Irony
While the tone of this story is straightforward and sincere, there is considerable comic irony in the Lady’s predicament, and in her increasingly strenuous efforts to ensnare Beauplaisir. She expends great energy in order to appear distant and mysterious, as when she runs after his carriage so that she can then present herself to him as a grieving widow, preoccupied with her dead husband and her stolen inheritance and as a woman uninterested in romance. Likewise, she woos Beauplaisir from a distance as Incognita, sending him a letter and luring him to the house that she has rented while also telling him that he can never know her name or see her face.
While these stratagems seem absurd, they are only slightly more extreme versions of what many unmarried young women in the Lady’s world must do, in order to win husbands and to survive in a rigid and hypocritical society. The Lady simply does not quite understand how the world around her works, and so her manipulations are more desperate and less fine-tuned than those of her wealthy friends. She is described at the beginning of the story as an innocent from the country, and it is a further irony in the story that it is her unworldliness that leads her into assuming the role of prostitute. Likewise, at the end of the story she is put into a monastery, for the reason that she is deemed by her mother to be disgraced and unfit for the world. The implication is that, as an unconventional woman in an extremely conventional society, she must be shunted into either the one role or the other.
Limited Omniscient Point of View
In this story the author assumes an omniscient point of view, but one with limited access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings. We have access to the Lady’s feelings, but less access to those of Beauplaisir, the man whom she is desperately pursuing. The Lady’s feelings are obsessive, swirling, and claustrophobic; they are centered not so much on Beauplaisir himself as her strategies for holding on to him. She is constantly hatching plans, congratulating herself on the success of these plans and ruing the weakness and helplessness of her gender: “How do some Women (continued she) make their Life a Hell, burning in fruitless Expectations, and dreaming out their Days in Hope and Fears, then wake at last to all the Horror of Despair?” (Paragraph 20).
Beauplaisir’s point of view, meanwhile, is limited to bemused, shrugging reactions to the Lady, in all of her various guises. We do not see what it is that causes him to pull away from the Lady’s different assumed characters; we only see him responding to the Lady’s seductions, or else politely putting her off. Even when he discovers the extent of her deceptions, at the end of the story, his reaction is muted, if decent:
He answered [the Lady’s mother] in Terms perfectly polite; but made no Offer of that which, perhaps, she expected, though I could not, now informed of her Daughter’s proceedings, demand […] He continued to visit there, to enquire after her Health every Day (Paragraph 29).
The effect of this partial point of view is to make both of these characters seem limited, in nearly opposite ways. While the Lady seems to have more imagination and emotional intensity than Beauplaisir, she has channeled her intensity into a stifling, narrow focus. Conversely, while Beauplaisir has a greater access to the world and a wider range of interests than the Lady—at least we assume that he does, since he is described as being a dynamic man of the world—he comes across as emotionally tepid and lacking in empathy.
Neutral Authorial Tone
The author does not pass judgment on her characters in this story; she does not ask us to side with one character or another. The closest that she comes to a commentary on her own story is when she states, at the end of it, “[a]nd thus ended an Intreague, which, considering the Time it lasted, was as full of Variety as any, perhaps, that many Ages has produced” (Paragraph 29). This dry, terse summary stands in sharp contrast with the high emotion and drama that has preceded it.
To the extent that the author comments on the Lady’s—her main character’s—behavior, it is only to observe how out of step she is with the rules of her world. After the Lady has first been intimate with Beauplaisir—an event which sets in motion the events of the rest of the story, as well as, it is implied, the Lady’s downfall—the author notes in an aside:
She had Discernment to foresee, and avoid all those Ills which might attend the Loss of her Reputation, but was wholly blind to those of the Ruin of her Virtue; and having managed her Affairs so as to secure the one, grew perfectly easy with the Remembrance she had forfeited the other (Paragraph 8).
This statement acknowledges that the Lady has made a tactical mistake, in putting her social reputation over her own lost sense of honor and self-respect (equated, here, with her lost virginity). The statement does not, however, assign any blame, either to the Lady or to the social world around her; the ultimate suggestion is that both are somewhat to blame.
