Less is More: Haywood’s Fantomina and Women’s Compensation for Roles of Lover and Writer
“Seduction narratives … precisely dramatize such an uneasy relationship toward their readership within the tale of love. Interpretation of the ‘signs’ of love and their truthfulness or duplicity becomes a field of conflict in these female-authored texts, a conflict that is recognized throughout as deeply implicated in the struggle for political and literary authority between the two genders.”
—Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740
Throughout Fantomina, the “young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit” metamorphoses from low to high social status and from costumes scantily covering her physical body to complete coverage and shrouding of her body in mystery. From the prostitute Fantomina, to the country servant Celia, the widow Bloomer, and, finally, the writer Incognita, she dramatizes the constant transformation women undergo while moving between roles of lover and writer.
Intrigue and mystery surrounded the life of Haywood herself: “The circumstances of Haywood’s life, the history of the early eighteenth-century novel, the bias against didactic and popular literature, and Haywood’s complicated experiments with genre also help explain her near-erasure and her subsequent recovery” (Broadview 1). Her birthday and lineage are disputed, as are the fathers of her two children, and she cited her unhappy marriage as the reason she had to earn her living as a writer “at a time when female authorship was widely considered to be the literary equivalent of prostitution” (Broadview 1).
Prostitution imagery—words like money, power, counterfeit, greedy kisses, and business—abounds in Fantomina. The more mysterious the disguise—the more physical coverage of the female figure—the more sustained is Beauplasir’s (French for “good pleasure”) interest, intrigue and attention, and, therefore, the greater the “young Lady’s” worth. The prostitute costume earns her one night, maybe two; the servant costume, a couple weeks; in the widow costume, covered by a habit, she cultivates more respectful, sustained seduction. Finally, she is able to win against his advances as Incognitia, the writer whose face is covered and whose servants–like her, actors–assist in her dramatization.
“Your Love alone can compensate for the Shame,” she tells him after his first “triumph.” But her “Charms … soon lost their Poignancy” and thus her worth, the price he would pay through his time and devotion, diminished. She receives monetary compensation and attention, though never love.
The purported inability of males to “prolong desire,” coupled against her sex’s “valuable” virtue, “Constancy,” expose her to Beauplaisir’s “kindling Breath of tender Sighs to light into a Blaze” her “seeds of fire, not yet extinguish’d.” She wonders: “How do some Women … make their Life a Hell, burning in fruitless expectations.” If she “cast off her sex’s Modesty, she had not also thrown off another Virtue equally valuable … Constancy,” then Modesty is her armor against his fiery, passionate advances (a term which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, meant both “an approach made towards a person with the aim of closer acquaintance or understanding; an amorous overture or approach” and “an anticipatory payment” at this time). Clothed by only her constancy, she is exposed and vulnerable–until she becomes a writer. By donning the costume of the writer, with only her intellect exposed, she increases her worth by showing herself to be “obliging and witty” (his words).
Haywood makes no moral recommendations to females as to how much they should clothe, or disguise, themselves to either earn a husband or avoid being pregnant out of wedlock or losing their virtue, as do other novels of her time, i.e., Richardson’s Pamela: “It was [her] melding of the moral and the erotic that made [Haywood] suspect” to Pope, Johnson and those who “perceived the decline [in value] of literary culture” (Broadview 17). “Fantomina escapes the traditional ending of either Restoration comedy (marriage) or the ‘persecuted maiden’ story (typically, death or disgrace). … Her future remains undetermined” (Broadview 24). While the drama of Fantomina and of Haywood’s personal life as a woman writer during, as stated above, “a time when female authorship was widely considered to be the literary equivalent of prostitution,” do not make moral judgments or pronouncements, the “fruits” of their actions are, like “the Young Lady” herself, consistent. Fantomina ends with the character mysteriously disappearing to a monastery, her fate unknown; Haywood, too, vanished into obscurity–for a time–and now, post her 1970’s feminist unearthing, she is perhaps reclaiming her original value–popularity–which, like the genre of novel itself, derived its appeal from the concept of “novelty.” While early detractors saw Haywood’s novelty as an assault on literature, the mystery that hitherto concealed Haywood from popular knowledge lend to our rekindled interest, intrigue, and attention.
