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Study Questions on Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina: or, Love in a Maze (1725)

1. The novel starts with this epigraph from a poem by the seventeenth-century

poet Edmund Waller: “In Love the Victors from the Vanquish’d fly. / They fly that

wound, and they pursue that dye”. What expectations do these lines create in the

reader and how does the story match those expectations?

This introduction, that nowadays many readers pass by -due to modern editions-

served as a way to set the mood of the whole story. Eliza Haywood decided to include this

verse before her story for a reason, which we understand throughout the reading. However,

apart from shedding light onto the underlining mood, it also excites us before-hand.

Edmund Waller’s poem is a metaphor between love and war, their similarities

intertwined with their differences; in the first, losing means staying behind and waiting for

someone (the real winner) that has left, while in the latter, staying means you have won the

land and took your counterpart out. One loses and one wins, one leaves and one stays;

same ideas different outcomes.

The idea introduces itself in your mind and makes you imagine the story will revolve

around a complicated love affair, which is not wrong, but also around the outcome of this

love and the eventual loser and winner. Therefore, while reading it I tried to discover what

Haywood wanted me to think, what clues there were to understand who is which; it

controlled my view of the text for a while. Most of the people I debated the text with had

their focus on this same question: “Who wins?” At first I thought none of them did, but now

I am sure it is Beauplaisir. He is the one that can leave whenever he wants, the one that

does not suffer at all. He is even unaware that he is being tricked, so what harm does that

cause him? It only harms Fantomina, who is trapped on an ever-ending loop of enchanting

the same man time after time; losing her grip on reality.

It is a fun game to play while reading: unveiling the result of this game, and even

though the many interpretations pay off and are exciting, I strongly believe the expectation

the poem creates drives the reader away from being able to go between the crevices and

think outside of this small case.

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2. What is the protagonist like at the beginning of the story? Why does she

decide to play the role of prostitute? What does this suggest about the situation of

women at that time? Is it meaningful that the story begins at a theatre?

At the beginning of the story we meet a young unnamed woman who seems very

innocent and naïve, simply enjoying her time at the theater. While being there she shows

extreme curiosity about how some women are gaining the attention of men, which

immediately made me realize that I was reading a story based on the 1700s.

The only thing she has probably learned as a woman is not mathematics, science,

literature or politics, but that life revolves around men. Therefore, I find it quite natural that

the story has its start with the curiosity of our protagonist taking over and trying to imitate

that attitude of the woman that gets the most comments and looks out of men; after all, I

believe her primal motive was to attract/please men the same way as her.

I also find it quite funny, though obviously intended, that this realization of wanting

to role-play comes to her at the theater; the place where people pretend to be someone else

with the objective of pleasing an audience. Moreover, it does fit with the time as this was the

most common place for social relationships to begin, prostitution being no different.

Taking everything from this short beginning into account, the story might be as

fictional as it can get, but because it is inspired by real life events and plausible situations,

it still makes sense for our protagonist to do what she does.

3. What does the name of Beauplaisir suggest about him? Is he really what

his name suggests? Illustrate this with two quotations from the text.

I believe we, Spanish students, have an advantage here, especially the ones between

us that also study French, as we could understand the meaning of the name pretty much on

the go. ‘Beau’ is the male adjective for ‘beautiful’, and ‘Plaisir’ is a noun meaning ‘pleasure’.

As I see it, there are two ways to interpret this name. If I put myself in Fantomina’s

shoes, I would think that loving and caring for this man could be a great experience, that I

would love being with him because of the love and pleasure he brings to my life. Perhaps

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this was also the meaning that Haywood wanted the readers to first think about, so that we,

as Fantomina, would also be deceived. But that is the trick, we are being deceived.

The other meaning, and the one I truly associate with Beauplaisir is more of a ‘guilty

pleasure’, ‘eye candy’ you would say colloquially. He looks so beautiful, so sweet and good

that he has to be bad, after all there is a saying that goes “If something is too good to be true,

then it probably is”.

However, I do think my interpretation is far from the common one, so in terms of the

first one that I stated; he is nowhere near what his name suggests. He is no beautiful

pleasure for Fantomina, Celia, Mrs. Bloomer, or Incognita (even if she thinks so), he is just

another womanizer that instead of admiring and treating the woman before her with due

respect and honesty, just lies and moves on to the next girl without even cutting strings

completely with the previous one.

Fantomina was deceived by this façade for a while; she believed so much that she will

gain happiness from this relationship that she excuses what happened based on her own

expectations of him:

“The more she reflected on the Merits of Beauplaisir, the more she excused herself for
what she had done; and the Prospect of that continued Bliss she expected to share with him,
took from her all Remorse for having engaged in an Affair which promised her so much
Satisfaction, and in which she found not the least Danger of Misfortune. – If he is really (said she,
to herself) the faithful, the constant Lover he has sworn to be, how charming will be our Amour?”
(Fantomina 49)

Even when she sees his real self after being denied to accompany him on a trip

because he is -simply- bored of her, she cannot help but still go after him; she has been

manipulated into loving him:

“From her first finding out that he design’d to leave her behind, she plainly saw it was
for no other Reason, than that being tir’d of her Conversation, he was willing to be at liberty to
pursue new Conquests […]. She resolved to take another Course; and remembering the Height of
Transport she enjoyed when the agreeable Beauplaisir kneel’d at her Feet, imploring her first
Favours, she long’d to prove the same again […]. She loved Beauplaisir, it was only he whose
Solicitations could give her Pleasure; and had she seen the whole Species despairing, dying for
her sake, it might, perhaps, have been of a Satisfaction to her Pride, but none to her more tender
Inclination” (Fantomina 51).

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4. Analyze the scene where the first sexual encounter between Fantomina and

Beauplaisir takes place. How is it presented? Compare your analysis with Tiffany

Potter’s comments on this episode (178).

Both Potter and I agree that the first sexual encounter they shared was a rape,

though I feel like Potter undermines the importance of this rape as a way to say that now

Fantomina is free to fulfill her sexual desires, because with her identity being hidden she

does not have to worry about public shame, as if she should actually be thankful to

Beauplaisir. This analysis, if I interpreted it correctly, scares me.

When reading the pages that describe this rape, we can see bits of text that express

the feelings of Fantomina during these moments:

“She fearful, -confus’d, altogether unprepar’d to resist in such Encounters […] –Shock’d,
however, at the Apprehension of really losing her Honour, she struggled all she could, and was
going to reveal the whole Secret of her Name and Quality, when the Thoughts of the Liberty he
had taken with her, and those he still continued to prosecute prevented her, with representing
the Danger of being expos’d, and the whole Affair made a Theme for publick Ridicule.”
(Fantomina 46)

These few lines make it so obvious to me that the only reason she still goes after

Beauplasir after being raped is not because of sexual freedom but because of being mentally

scarred. Someone took away from her one of the most important things anyone can have;

the freedom to choose, and with women having such few instances of it at the time, taking it

away in that precise moment with so much violence as a rape involves, it had to be

devastating. And I am no psychologist, but the way to deal with this kind of violence seems

to be very common, even nowadays.

There are many women that stay in abusive relationships not because of love (even

though many insist on loving their partners until they are in a court room) but because of

fear. I believe this is what happened to Fantomina, she was tricked into ‘loving’ this man,

into truly believing that she loved him. After that rape, her brain told her that she was now

his, that she belonged with him, but these feelings were rooted in fear. When she realized

that they were never going to be together, she tried to fill that emotional need with sexual

encounters.

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In no moment she is free to do whatever she wants with her sex, if that was the case

she could have procured another man, but she sticks, faithfully, to Beauplaisir because of

the shock and mental damage that the rape had in her.

5. What motivates Fantomina to keep her identity secret? Why does she hide

her name?

Fantomina, even if naïve most of the time, has some moments of clarity when she

does what is best for her. One of these things is keeping her identity a secret from the very

beginning. At first, I believe, the main motivation for not using her name was the same as to

why to use a disguise; to not be recognize and be taken as a real prostitute, as her name

would have revealed she is a modest woman and no men would have approached her.

However, once Beauplaisir has raped her and thus mentally scarring her for life, she

still has a moment of realization of the consequences this can have, and decides to never

reveal herself, due to her honor already being shamed and secrecy being safer for her in

order to not be publicly shamed.

After this, we have to take into account the fact that she is trapped in Beauplaisir’s

hand and all she wants is to be with him -sexually- to fulfill her emotional desires. For that,

she has to keep changing identities and it becomes obvious for her that she can never reveal

her identity nor her real name, as he would realize it was her all along that she had fell for.

6. How does she react when Beauplaisir leaves her “to pursue new Conquests”?

Ros Ballaster points out that at that moment “the story of Fantomina diverges from

the usual trajectory of seduction, betrayal, and hysterical decline of amatory fiction”

(189). To what extent is this so?

Overall, the story of Fantomina fits pretty well with all other works on amatory fiction

and the seduction theme in terms that it has its main three phases; seduction, loss of

chastity and abandonment. This theme was used to showcase how untrustworthy men are,

to criticize masculine authority and to expose the double standard between genders, which

to some extent is what Fantomina does. However, this story goes a little beyond that and

doesn’t just stop at Beauplaisir parting ways from Fantomina.

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When our protagonist learns that her man has gotten bored of her, she does not feel

bad about herself and stays in a corner crying; on the contrary: “Her Design was once more

to engage him, […] and what she had form’d a Stratagem to obtain, in which she promis’d

herself Success.” (Fantomina 51).

At first sight it looks like a story where the woman is not the victim, because even

though she has been rejected, she acts as if it is nothing and continues to pursue him. Here

we have to take into account the idea I previously mentioned of Fantomina being dependent

of Beauplaisir due to being mentally scarred, and when we look at her decision from that

perspective, this amatory fiction work becomes much darker than we first thought of.

Haywood’s Fantomina goes in depth to consequences that men’s actions have over

womanhood, far beyond those of being sad and depressed when the man leaves, because

the outcome of these actions can be seen both externally and internally, as we see our

protagonist go through it right before our eyes. However, it is much harder to perceive the

latter and that is why we have to create a social consciousness with such stories as this one.

7. The protagonist constructs three other identities apart from Fantomina:

Celia, Mrs. Bloomer, and Incognita. In what way does she act differently in each

case? Does Bauplaisir act also in a different way? Illustrate this with examples from

the text and quotations from Potter and Anderson.

Fantomina is tremendously talented, not only at characterizing herself as different

personalities, but also at acting. She is also very clever when choosing her personas,

because they are all very different from each other, for example; when she dresses up as

Celia she is described like:

“The Dress she was in, was a round-ear’d Cap, a short Red Petticoat, and a little Jacket
of Grey Stuff, […] and join’d with a broad Country Dialect, a rude unpolish’d Air, […] with her
Hair and Eye-brows black’d, made it impossible for her to be known […]” (Fantomina 52).

Thanks to the way each of her personas are excellently described, we get to see

exactly what changes. Celia is an innocent servant and as such she dresses more modestly,

has a country accent and behaves like a poor person; accepting money from Beauplaisir and

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following orders as a servant. Mrs. Bloomer is a widow dressed in black, sad and weak; up

to the point of fainting. And Incognita is pure mystery and seduction.

As Anderson very well explains:

“As Fantomina changes characters, she modifies her behaviors to align with his
expectations […]. The result of her actions is that while Beauplaisir seduces the same body night
after night, he is convinced that he has conquered four different women” (Andersona 4).

So not only is Fantomina’s performance excellent; way beyond imaginable, but it is

also interesting to see what effect this has in Beauplaisir. We can see a bit of this in Potter’s

analysis: “Beauplaisir pursues this persona with as much passion as he had Fantomina”

(Potter 180). Therefore we can say that Fantomina’s acting is as good as to renew

Beauplaisir’s excitement. Apart from that, he also interacts differently with each ‘woman’.

Tender and carrying: “Beauplaisir, with a complaisant and tender Air, assur’d her […]”

(Fantomina 55), or imposing and bossy:

“He resented, -he once more entreated, -he said all that Man could do, to prevail on her to
unfold the Mystery; but all his Adjurations were fruitless; and he went out of the House
determin’d never to re-enter it, till she should pay the Price of his Company with the Discovery of
her Face and Circumstances” (Fantomina 67).

Overall, it is quite impressive to see such a character as Fantomina and the

consequences and influence her doings have in Beauplaisir, even though the origin of her

talents is never explained and seems quite impossible, appearing almost fantastic; the story

was very entertaining due to this.

8. How does the narrator explain the reason why Beauplaisir is continually

deceived by the protagonist?

Readers nowadays may think it was obvious that it was Fantomina in all of the

disguises, but this trope of hiding oneself perfectly with almost no big changes was very

common in prose fiction at the time, as we can also see it being implemented in other works

that have been already debated in class, such as The Reform’d Coquet by Mary Davis.

In this particular case, the use of this trope is excused by the narrator because -as it

is stated in page 57- she is so good at acting, modifying her behavior and her voice, that

combining that with the attire itself and how far away the places in which Beauplaisir met

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the different characters were, makes it almost impossible for him to even think that these

women could all be the same person.

To be fair, this excuse makes sense to some extent; today it would be impossible to

carry this plan out, but back in the day, with photography being invented in 1826, this man

would be relying solely on his memory, so it is possible he would just think of it as a little

coincidence that these women looked a bit similar to him.

9. What happens when the protagonist’s mother arrives in town? What is the

mother like?

In the last four pages of this work, we see the story abruptly interrupted by the

arrival of our protagonist’s mother, a very virtuous woman. She has heard rumors of what

her daughter has been up to, none of which come close to reality, but -as her personality

demands- she decides to keep ‘Fantomina’ confined at home, putting a sudden end to any of

her mischievous activities.

What she was not expecting, however, was for her daughter to be pregnant. She

almost did not know about this, if it were not for her insistence to send ‘Fantomina’ to a Ball

and uncovering her clothes to see the belly, and as soon as she finds out she is completely

taken aback and shocked. The mother was very much disappointed in her daughter and

believed she was cursed by Death itself to be this unlucky; that her own child brought

dishonor to the family.

However, still being a decent mother, she called for a doctor and as she was told that

there was no way out of giving birth to the baby, she demanded from ‘Fantomina’ to know

the name of the man that dared do this to her. Beauplaisir, properly fooled by our

protagonist, had no idea who the women giving birth was, but Fantomina, seeing how

angered and out of patience her mother was, at last confessed the full truth. The mother

was completely let down once more and even apologized to Beauplaisir for the doings of her

daughter, not asking for him to marry her, and even though Beauplaisir tried afterwards to

help with the baby, she asked of him not to and sent her daughter to a convent.

From this behavior we can definitely see how traditional and conservative this mother

is, not at all as childish and carless (or free, you could say) as Fantomina. The mother is so

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up-tight that even though it can be seen as Fantomina’s fault for going after him, she does

not ask for any responsibility on his part, even though he was also having sex with whatever

woman before marriage. The double-standards that affected all of society at the time can be

clearly seen in this character, especially as she is the mother figure and imposes herself and

her beliefs on Fantomina through anger, firmness and direct actions, such as that of

sending her to a convent, allowing no room for Fantmonina to reflect on her actions and

decide for herself what to do with her life.

10. Analyze the ending of the story. Focus on the protagonist’s pregnancy

(how she, her mother, and Beauplaisir react to this new, unexpected situation, how

she goes into labor at a ball, if she shows any sign of repentance, etc.) on the

absence of a marriage ending, and on the mother’s decision to send her to a French

convent. Is the protagonist punished at the end? Is she repentant? Would marriage

to Beauplaisir be a better choice?

The thing I found most shocking about the ending was the complicity between the

mother and Beauplaisir. As soon as she finds out what her daughter has done, she puts all

the blame on her, completely excusing him and not demanding for him to marry her, when

in reality, even is he didn’t know her true identity; he still had sex with her.

On the other hand, I am happy that there was no marriage because this is what

Fantomina thought about it: “I should have had, at best, but a cold, insipid, husband-like

Lover in my Arms” (Fantomina 65); if he got bored so fast from his affairs, just imagine from

a wife. Fantomina’s life would have been worse. By this, I am in no way saying that I agree

to sending her to a convent, because alike the rape scene, this is just taking her freedom

away, though I understand the mother was just following conventions and trying to ‘clean’

the name of the family, sad but concordant with the time.

However, even though this is a clear and direct punishment towards Fantomina for

her actions, I don’t think she regrets what she had done. She says she is ashamed and

embarrassed of the situation, but I strongly believe that she would do it again and try for

there to be a different outcome. After all she almost gets away with hiding the existence of

the baby if it weren’t for her water breaking at a ball.

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11. Fantomina is a story of disguise, acting, and deception. According to Ros

Ballaster, disguise allows the protagonist a freedom that was reserved for men at

the time. And, as she makes Bauplaisir think that he is seducing different women,

she manages to re-enact the seduction scene several times but for her own

empowerment (188-9). To what extent is this so? Catherine Craft also thinks that the

protagonist’s masquerade “rather than a submissions to the dominant moral and

social codes, is a resistance to them”, and describes this tale as “a fantasy of female

freedom” (830). Do you agree with her?

I will take the liberty to use this question to summarize my opinion on this, which I

have been stating throughout the previous questions. I believe I made it clear enough that I

strongly disagree on the idea that Fantomina is a story of female empowerment,

transgression or freedom.

Fantomina’s choices are not due to her own will, but based on what Beauplaisir did

to her, which left her severely scarred. She might be a clever character that is indeed going

out of her way to achieve something, but her true motivations are not pure.

Furthermore, I do not believe we can talk about empowerment when the character’s

actions end up being punished, it is true however, that she had the upper hand when

seducing Beauplaisir, but after all, making huge efforts to please a man is as further away

from being empowering as I can fathom.

Finally, as I did with this question, Haywood also took some liberties when it came to

giving Fantomina some range of independence, with family figures being absent until the

very end, which has made some readers mistake what I think is a plot device used to drive

the story forward, with some type of female freedom fantasy.

12. According to John Richetti, “Readers’ range of responses to Fantomina

might look like this: delight in role reversal and in the heroine’s smart and witty

analysis of male sexuality; voyeuristic interest in the amoral hedonism of the

privileged classes; mild arousal over its intense evocations of sexual abandon; a

touch of regret or even anger at the heroine’s sad ending behind French convent

walls” (86). Is your response this or some other?

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I would describe my response to this story as frustrating, because it fills me with

such amounts of impotence comparable to that of what I feel every time I see news of women

being murdered by the men in their lives today. Fantomina is a story of abandonment, but

nor towards one particular woman, but for all of womanhood. Through the protagonist we

get to experience what I assume to be a common theme in the 1700s; society leaving women

aside to feed for themselves in a world that provided no care or even a single thought

towards what it might feel like to be in our position, back then and still now.

In no point throughout my reading did I feel delighted, aroused nor regretful; I felt

frustrated, at the thought that if I were there I would have seen this and helped her

overcome her mental dependence on Beauplaisir, but also because I am aware that if I was

actually there, I probably would have thought the same as everyone else and carry on with

the traditional and conventional believes of the time. After all, being different is hard and

takes a lot of courage to go against the tide.

Finally, when answering these questions I did realize that many critics and even

classmates viewed this story as empowering for Fantomina and this as well makes me more

frustrated towards the women’s right movement and its state right now, because I see never

ending queue of women trying to make every action seem empowering, when it is not.

Sometimes actions that may seem as a choice are only the system manipulating us so that

they can keep on profiting from us, our bodies and our minds.

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Works cited

Anderson, Emily Hodgson, “Performing the Passions in Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina and Miss

Betsy Thoughtless.” The Eighteenth Century, 16.1 (2005): 1-15.

Ballaster, Ros. Seductive Forms. Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. Oxford:

Clarendon, 1992.

Craft, Catherine. “Reworking Male Models: Aphra Behn’s Fair Vow.Breaker, Eliza Haywood’s

Fantomina, and Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote”. Modern Language Review, 86, 4

(1991): 821-838.

Haywood, Eliza. Fantomina: or, Love in Excess. 1725.

Potter, Tiffany. “The Language of feminized Sexuality: Gender and Voice in Eliza Haywood’s

Love in Excess and Fantomina.” Women’s Writing, 10.1 (2003): 169-186.

Richetti, John. The English Novel in History, 1700-1780: Routledge, 1999.

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