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.
Character Analysis
The Lady
The Lady is the main character of this story, who expresses herself through many different characters. She pretends first to be a nameless prostitute; then Fantomina, a well-born country girl whose circumstances slightly resemble her own; then Celia, a humble country maid; then the Widow Boomer, a recent and unfairly disinherited widow; and finally, a mysterious noblewoman known only as Incognita. The amount of energy and artfulness that she puts into these creations suggests both a rich imaginative life and great reserves of shrewdness and resourcefulness. At the same time, these gifts do not serve her well, but only make her increasingly desperate and stranded. This is because she has applied her gifts entirely in the service of snaring Beauplaisir, a fickle nobleman.
While we ourselves know that the Lady is only one woman, as opposed to many women, we also see her through the credulous eyes of Beauplaisir. We see the Widow Boomer as being a different character from Fantomina, and both of these characters as being different from Incognita. This is in part because it seems almost physically impossible that one woman could be in so many different places at once; at one point in this story, she is meeting Beauplaisir as both Fantomina and the Widow Boomer, having just taken leave of him as Incognita. However, it is also perhaps because we are accustomed to seeing women—especially young and beautiful women, like the Lady—through the eyes of men.
The Lady’s initial impulse to don a disguise, however, is not centered around Beauplaisir at all. She wishes only to be in the skin of a prostitute for an evening, in what is described as an innocent “Whim” (Paragraph 1). It is this sense of adventurousness and independence—more than her trickery of Beauplaisir—that is truly subversive in her social world, in which women are seen only in relation to men. It is perhaps partly because her own unconventionality frightens her that she subsequently latches on to Beauplaisir to the extent that she does. While she is put into a monastery at the end of the story, there is a sense in which she has constricted herself long before this, by taking on the very limited role of a woman in love.
Beauplaisir
Beauplaisir is the other main character in this story, and his role is both an active and a passive one. He is the pursuer, but is also the love object; he is repeatedly manipulated by the Lady into pursuing her. It is the Lady who is taking the true active role in their involvement—writing him letters and sometimes even literally chasing after him—but she disguises her aggressiveness with traditional feminine postures of coyness and passivity. This in turn allows Beauplaisir to believe that he is the seducer, a role to which he seems addicted. The moment that it becomes evident that he has won over his latest love object—which we of course know to be only the Lady’s latest incarnation—he loses interest, becomes restless, and must be manipulated again.
In this behavior, he is strangely predictable and dull, even while he is depicted as a charming, dashing man of the world. He is also, quite clearly, not very observant; he fails to realize that the Lady is one person even after repeated intimate encounters with her. Yet the Lady’s passionate pursuit of him is still not surprising to us; we understand that his attraction for her resides not only in his greater social power, but in the very fickleness of his attention. The fact that the Lady cannot count on his faithfulness makes his faithfulness a valuable quantity; were he instantly faithful and devoted, she would no doubt rapidly tire of him. An irony in this story is that, while the Lady is depicted as the faithful, constant one, she is of course anything but constant: She is always changing personas. Conversely, while Beauplaisir is depicted as attractively flighty and restless, he is in fact a limited, credulous character (moreover, he is, in fact, being faithful to one woman, even if he doesn’t realize it).
Beauplaisir is not, however, a villainous character; he is only a somewhat spoiled one. He is gallant enough to pretend that he is interested in the Lady’s different personas even after he has tired of them. While he refuses to marry the Lady at the end of the story, and therefore to save her from being put into a monastery, he does offer to adopt their baby daughter. These latent decent impulses reveal his ordinariness and the degree to which he is in all ways a creature of convention.
The Lady’s Mother
The Lady’s mother serves to tie up the loose ends in the story and to impose social decorum on a messy private affair. She appears at the very end of the story, once the Lady’s relation with Beauplaisir has already unraveled. Upon learning that the Lady has become pregnant by Beauplaisir, she forces a confrontation between the two of them, learns the full extent of the Lady’s deceptions, and puts her daughter into a monastery. While she has been shocked by the Lady’s pregnancy out of wedlock, she is more shocked to learn about the Lady’s unusual behavior; it is the revelation of this behavior that causes her to withdraw her demand for Beauplaisir’s marriage proposal. She seems to understand that there is no way that Beauplaisir will be able to make an honest woman out of her daughter.
The Lady’s mother is presented as a forceful, domineering character, as well as a conventional one. She cares about propriety and appearances above all—to the point of siding with Beauplaisir against her own daughter—and she succeeds in containing and managing an embarrassing, potentially socially ruinous situation. At the same time, her presence in the story is oddly superfluous and ceremonial. She does not know any of the particularities of the story that she is trying to manage, so she can only tidy it up and try to put a decent face on it. It is the confrontation between Beauplaisir and the Lady as Incognita that marks the real climax of the story, insofar as Incognita is the most extreme—and the most revealing—of the Lady’s transformations; once she has adopted this role, she is unable to go any farther with her role-playing.
Even so, it is the Lady’s mother who gets the last word in the story, simply by appearing at the end of it. Moreover, her obsession with appearances is perhaps more of a common link with her daughter than she realizes. The Lady’s repeated adopting of different feminine disguises, in the service of snaring a wealthy and powerful man, is finally quite conventional, dutiful behavior, even if she has carried it to a rebellious extreme.
