Fantomina Beauplaisir Quotes

Booth suggests that "At this point, [Fantomina] still has a great deal of desire for Beauplaisir, but she also does not want to lose at the game she herself has created." (23). Stuck in a predicament of betrayal by Beauplaisir to both Fantomina and Ms. Bloomer but reluctant to come clean to him because of her true desires for him, Fantomina resolves to create a fourth disguise in the character of Incognita to conquer his inconstancy: "She got over the Difficulty at last, however, by preceding in a Manner, if possible, more extraordinary than all her former Behavior" (797). Fantomina writes a letter to Beauplaisir as Incognita praising him as an honorable and well-suited man, a move she knows will spark his own interest in sexual desires. For the duration of their meeting, she covers her face completely up until it comes time for the call of their desires to be answered upon which she completely darkens the room, satisfies both her own and Beauplaisir's desires, and still remains to keep her identity concealed. She has mastered the game by meeting him with no disguise during sex but a lack of light.

Craft agrees that " Curiosity and its satisfaction are the central issues of this final metamorphosis" as Beauplaisir's curiosity and desire are sparked and ultimately pull him to action in a way that parallels Fantomina's curiosity in their first encounter (63). The difference is that this time Beauplaisir winds up the victim.
For our author, the choice of Incognita places Fantomina and her identity behind no disguise but a physical, tangible mask. This move gives Incognita power over Beauplaisir as that is a new realm of femininity that he is not only unfamiliar too but one that puts Incognita in a position of outright dominance purely because she knows more than he does by knowing her own identity. Incognita is the culmination of female dominance and unrestrained female desire that Haywood works her character up to throughout the story. This interaction directly connects the protagonists masquerade or control over her own identity as a means to gain sexual gratification and dominance over her male suitor. It assigns "women a proper role — to exist fully revealed in the ‘field of the visible'" where before such desires were conflicting with one's Virtue and were not to be thought about much less physically acted upon (63).
Upon the completion of this final masquerade, Fantomina continues to write and meet Beauplaisir as both Fantomina and Ms. Bloomer even though with each encounter he is less and less interested and she herself is almost removed to quit the whole charade. It is at this point that her mother arrives back from an international trip to find her daughter totally unsupervised and acting in a manner that severely disagrees with the mother's expectations of her daughter's behavior: "though it was not in the power of any person in the world to inform her of the truth of what she had been guilty of . . . she heard enough to make her keep her afterwards in a Restraint, little agreeable to her humor, and the Liberties to which she had been accustomed" (28). The return of Fantomina's mother is included to remind both the reader and our lead character what was expected of her by society and the way in which she was raised and how far morally she had drifted from that. Soon after the arrival of her mother, Fantomina finds herself pregnant and realizes that ultimately her actions and their consequences will impossible to keep secret. Beauplaisir is confronted about the pregnancy and understandably bewildered but, for the most part, his role in the story is complete. She had successfully achieved the sexual gratification her initial curiosity had so innocently wondered about and she had wound up in a dominance of sort over the situation and over Beauplaisir. Booth acknowledges that "Haywood is simply too aware of her audience to end in favor of a promiscuous woman" (26). She, as an author, recognized that in order for the daring story of Fantomina to be accepted in the society the woman ultimately could not come out winning, seemingly leaving the reader with a "moral of the story" ending.
Where Haywood's authoritative genius comes in is in the fact that although Fantomina is pregnant and once again under the power of a disappointed mother, she is never remorseful.

In fact, Croskery points out that in sending her daughter to a monastery, "[the mother] relinquishes the personal control that the narrator has just informed the reader is the only thing capable of containing the heroine" (91). It seems as if Fantomina is realizing that without the direct control of her mother it is likely that she will easily be able to escape the confines of a monastery in the same way she escaped the authority of her aunt in London. So while she is punished, our main characters lack of remorse and ultimate hint of future disobedience, the strong-willed and independent female protagonist is restored in a way that wouldn't have lost Haywood her readership in the 18th

century.
So what for many appeared to be a simple piece of amatory fiction in the work of Fantomina turned out to be a direct questioning of the expectations of women in the 18th century in comparison to what was expected and acceptable for men in the time. Our young heroine may have drifted from her "distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit," but she found in herself a character who paved the way for feminists to start conversations about the fact that women, like men, have desires and can be capable of thought and power. Haywood calls into question the ideal female identity and dissects it layer by layer, disguise by disguise, to reveal a new perspective of what female identity could be if it were to be unrestrained by virtue and the expectations set in place by society. Her ability to communicate these radical ideas to a male-dominated society as a female author speaks volumes to her creative and intellectual abilities and ultimately went on to pave the way for early feminists pushing both men and women of the 18th century to reevaluate what it truly means to be a woman of virtue.