Written for ENGL 102 Winter 2022

In the 1700s, literature attacked many issues, yet women’s work most prominently challenged the gender order of the time. Women were emerging onto the literary scene. Eliza Haywood was the first woman to make a living off her writing profession and her work Fantomina, published in 1725, is considered an early version of the now popular novel format. She did not accomplish this without challenges; Alexander Pope and Johnathan Swift denounced Haywood’s work. The challenges illustrated in her work were not absent in her own life. As perceptive authors, women confronted and portrayed the rape culture of the period. Eliza Haywood in Fantomina OR Love in a Maze confronts the commodification of women through the desire of men to “possess” while exploring women’s “curiosity” and its consequences.

Haywood portrays the more sexual side of repression, which allowed men to explore desires based on conquest and gain, thereby commodifying women’s lives and bodies. At the outset of the short novel, Haywood establishes the position of the titular character. She is a young woman of high birth, bored with the mundane life she leads. Beauplaisir is the target of her tricks, and once she has him fooled that she is a prostitute, he treats her as a sexual object. She remembers that before her transformation, Beauplaisir would have shown her respect: “But then her quality and reputed virtue kept him from using her with the freedom she now expected he would do” (773). Beauplaisir is “using” her as an object now that he considers her low social status. To him, a prostitute is not a woman but a product for purchase, one which “the possession of…would be much more expensive than at first he had expected” (775). As a lady of status, Beauplaisir would see her as a tool for furthering his social or financial gain, yet, as a prostitute, she is simply a means to an end: pleasure. Beauplasir rapes Fantomina when she tries to preserve her honor. He does not believe that a prostitute should have the ability to resist him because sex, in his eyes, is her only use. His desires lead him to thirst for conquest and constant gain. Haywood makes his mindset clear, illustrating that to Beauplaisir, she is a “possession,” not a relationship. Beauplaisir gets bored and wants something new as a child would with a toy. Haywood plays with this as a way to not only make him look like a fool but to demonstrate the adverse effects on women: “But he varied not so much from his sex as to be able to prolong desire, to any great length after possession” (778). Fantomina, the young woman, changes her identity multiple times by dressing, speaking, and acting differently. She seduces him as a prostitute, yet he tiers of her, as a young maid though he gets bored, a widow, and finally as Incognita, a mystery woman. In this boredom, Haywood truly captures the illogic of men’s desire. She leads Fantomina to a devastating conclusion: “the uncountableness of men’s fancies, who still prefer the last conquest, only because it is the last” (783). Once he has had her, he wants someone new. It does not matter that it is the same body, only that he believes he has possessed another woman. In this way, Beauplaisir has a simple desire from each woman regardless of who she is. If she can not give him sex, she is inconsequential to him. The only women he will not treat this way are those of status for whom he will put on a front of gentlemanliness with an alternate desire to gain from their relationship materially. Haywood’s message that “The most violent passion, if it does not change its object, in time will wither; possession naturally abates the vigor of desire” (786) applies to the mindset of all humans in their constant thirst for gain and success. However, it is the harmful and exploitative desires of Beauplaisir that represent how men, at the time, saw women as a commodity and means to gain personal benefit. The consequences of their affair come crashing down onto Fantomina when she discovers she is with child. As Fantomina’s mother admonishes her for her behavior in the final scene, Beauplaisir receives an apology. Men do not receive consequences for illicit affairs because society operates around their mode of desire. 

Fantomina represents women’s desire with a curiosity that society rejects. Haywood breaks the mold of the period’s literature by showcasing not just men enforcing their desires upon women but exploring what a woman’s desire consists of. The unnamed young woman, a facet that makes her emotions applicable to many, is “A young lady of distinguished birth” (772). Her anonymity is a purposeful way of making her an embodiment of the women of the period. Her high birth, she feels, is repressing her from experiencing the intricacies and adventure of life. Nevertheless, as Haywood clarifies, Fantomina finds that this station was her protection. Her desire is first characterized as she looks upon men interacting with prostitutes: “This excited a curiosity in her to know in what manner these creatures were addressed: – she was young, a stranger to the world, and consequently to the danger of it; and having no body in town, at the time, to whom she was obliged to be accountable for her actions, did in every thing as her inclinations or humors rendered agreeable” (773). She has a curiosity to understand romance and relationships. By leaning into this confused but powerful desire, Fantomina leads herself off the path that she had been on, the one which afforded her preferential treatment based on submitting only to male desire and not to her own. Haywood establishes she is vulnerable, “a stranger to the world,” who is unaware that men’s desire, unlike her own, is not a curiosity but an exploitive need. She follows this curiosity unencumbered as no one who usually would suppress this curiosity is there to hold her accountable. Haywood says of Fantomina’s intentions: “Having at the time no other aim, than the gratification of an innocent curiosity” (773). She had no ends as men do. No material goal. No sexual goal. So how does Fantomina satisfy this curiosity? It is the success of her wit that she enjoys immensely. She finds herself “Imagining a world of satisfaction to herself in engaging him in the character of such as one” (774) as she plans her next trick on Beauplaisir. It is also in freeing herself from the constructs she had always lived because “she found a vast deal of pleasure in conversing with him in this free and unrestrained manner” (774). By taking on the identity of a prostitute, she experiences a new treatment. She is sexualized and objectified, and although this eventually harms her, she feels freed by it, initially. Fantomina enjoys being desired and chases the feeling as long as possible even though it means seducing Beauplaisir as four different women. As a young woman who is sexually and socially inexperienced, Fantomina does not understand her desire; nevertheless, she follows it: “Strange and unaccountable were the whimsies she was possessed of, – wild and incoherent her desires – unfixed and undetermined her resolutions” (774). In descriptions like this, Haywood demonstrates how womens’ desire was not a means to an end. They did not focus on gain or “possession.” Because women had not been allowed to desire, they did not know what they wanted. All Fantomina knows is that she enjoys the feeling of being wanted. Fantomina creates these new personas to control the reasons and ways she is desired because, in her normal life, her status and virtue make her desirable, both of which are not in her control and have nothing to do with who she is. Although Fantomina is exploring her curiosity, she is doing this alongside Beauplaisir, who knows exactly what he wants. As Fantomina, the prostitute, Beauplaisir wants her only for sexual gratification. As he forces himself on her, the difference between his want and her curiosity collide: “He was bold; – he was resolute; she fearful” (775). Here Haywood captures the difference in sexual attitudes between men and women, highlighting that men use and women are forced to be used. In her frolics, “she had the 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” (777). Fantomina does not protect her honor; despite trying to struggle against Beauplaisir, she loses her virginity and continues to sleep with him. While for him, the affair means nothing, she has devalued herself. As a commodity, her virtue made her desirable to a husband and an asset to her family. In losing this, she disgraces herself. Fantomina is enjoying her freedom and feeling immune to the consequences of her actions: “thus did she pride herself as if secure she never should have any reason to repent the present gaiety of her humor” (786). She is taking on the outlook of a man by pursuing her desires with reckless abandon, but as a woman, this will not last. In the end, her pregnancy comes to light when she goes into labor. Her mother laments her “ruin” (789), yet she places no blame upon Beauplaisir because, of course, he would have desire, but she is disgraceful for acknowledging hers. Haywood illustrates that she can not find forgiveness for losing her honor, making herself worthless. This is symbolic of how society repressed women’s curiosity and lust. Those unable to experience desire were trapped by status, yet those able to indulge faced assault and objectification. Women’s mode of desire is not a means to an end – not for material or pleasurable gain. She is sent off to a nunnery in France as punishment, cutting off this curiosity. The punishment is a condemnation of her desire, displaying a realistic versus the idealistic narrative of consequences for women. Fantomina explores women’s lust and their curiosity. As she discovers the limitlessness of desire, men’s brutish intentions are revealed while she suffers the consequences for having any at all. Eliza Haywood challenged the representation of women in a literary profession dominated by unwelcoming men. Her use of scandal to portray a story was considered scandalous, but maybe the harsh truths she demonstrated burned the most. Haywood uses Fantomina to illustrate that women were a commodity no matter class, and this commodification was not in line with their inner desire.