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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fantomina, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion and Reason
Appearance, Reality, and Social Class
Male Inconstancy vs. Female Constancy
Virtue vs. Reputation
Gender Double Standards
Summary
Analysis
One evening, a high-born, attractive lady goes to the theater, where she sees gentlemen flirting with a prostitute. Surprised that gentlemen have such base preferences, the lady becomes keenly curious to know what prostitutes are like. The lady is young, naïve to danger, and unchaperoned in town—so there is no one around to prevent her from following her whims. She decides to dress up as a prostitute to find out more.
In the early 18th century, when Fantomina was published, a high-born woman like the lady could face severe social repercussions for engaging in overtly sexual behavior like dressing up as a prostitute. Her decision to do so shows her daring, but it also shows that she is ruled by whims and passions rather than caution or reason. Notably, gentlemen of the lady’s class do not face social repercussions for publicly soliciting prostitutes, which shows a sexist double standard governing sexual behavior.
Active
Themes
The next night, the lady dresses up as a prostitute and attends the theater. Men try to buy her and compare her beauty to that of “Lady Such-a-one” (her actual name). A gentleman named Beauplaisir approaches. The lady has met Beauplaisir before, but her rank and reputation for virtue have made him treat her distantly—more distantly than the lady has wished. Beauplaisir notices the resemblance between the “prostitute” and the lady but never thinks they are the same person.
The men and Beauplaisir all notice that the “prostitute” looks just like “Lady Such-a-one.” Yet none of them guess that the two women are the same person. Their failure to guess shows that their stereotypes about how “high-class” women behave prevent them from seeing obvious truths. Here readers learn that the lady has wished for a closer acquaintance with Beauplaisir, which hints that she may be consciously or subconsciously attracted to him.
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Themes
Talking to the lady, Beauplaisir quickly realizes that she is wittier and more polite than he expected. They enjoy each other’s company greatly. When the play ends, Beauplaisir demands that the lady come to a house with him or let him go to hers. The lady almost tells Beauplaisir her real status—but then she comes up with an excuse that will allow her to see him again: she says she already has an appointment to meet a man “who maintain[s]” her. Beauplaisir makes her promise to meet him at the theater the next night.
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Themes
When the lady returns home, she at first thinks how lucky she has been to escape without anyone discovering her identity. Then she begins thinking about Beauplaisir’s attractive conversation. On the assumption that virtue will keep her safe, she resolves to see Beauplaisir again at the theater. In preparation, she rents some lodgings near the theater, thinking that if Beauplaisir demands to go back to her place, it will be easier to defend herself in her own territory.
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The lady and Beauplaisir have an excellent time together at the theater. Afterward, Beauplaisir insists on accompanying her home. The lady—thinking that she has been clever to rent a house to protect her “Virtue” and “Reputation”—takes him there. Beauplaisir demands sex. The lady, too worried about her reputation to admit the truth, simply tells him that she is a virgin who pretended to be a prostitute to get to know him. Beauplaisir, undeterred, rapes her.
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Themes
The lady cries so much that Beauplaisir is baffled, unsure why a woman would pretend to be a prostitute if she didn’t intend to have sex. When he offers her a gold purse, she throws it back at him, asking rhetorically whether his money can make up for her loss of honor. After a moment, softening toward him emotionally, she tells him that only his love can make up for the “Shame” he has inflicted on her. Beauplaisir entreats her, with many declarations of love, to tell him who she is. The lady explains her whim to learn more about prostitutes, but—wanting to prevent Beauplaisir from bragging about sex with her—claims she is a country lady whose name is Fantomina.
Beauplaisir leaves the house in the early morning hours, having promised to visit the lady the following afternoon. The lady then bribes the woman who owns the lodgings to tell Beauplaisir, if he asks, that she is a country lady named Fantomina. Afterward, the lady goes home and tells her aunt, with whom she lives, that she had gone on a river trip to some friends’ country home and was delayed there until the morning. The lady has the intelligence to protect her reputation but not the wisdom to realize how bad it is that she has lost her virtue. She soon ceases to feel shame about her liaison with Beauplaisir and decides to continue it, feeling pleased with how cleverly she has managed to protect her reputation from him.
The lady keeps up an affair with Beauplaisir while maintaining her usual social calendar, and Beauplaisir never suspects that Fantomina and the lady’s real identity are the same person—though it’s possible that Beauplaisir’s enthusiasm for Fantomina lasts longer than it would have otherwise, due to the resemblance between her and the lady. Nevertheless, like most men, he loses interest in a woman soon after having sex with her. When the high-class people begin going to Bath, the lady-as-Fantomina requests to go with Beauplaisir, and he offers an unconvincing excuse for why they can’t go together.
The lady realizes that Beauplaisir has grown tired of her. She pretends not to notice but immediately concocts a plan: remembering how much she enjoyed his first wooing of her, she decides to follow him to Bath and experience the same again—but not with another man, for like most women, she suffers from emotional fidelity and only loves Beauplaisir. She lies to her aunt about visiting a relative and journeys to Bath, where she dresses like a country maid, darkens her hair and eyebrows, and gets a job in the house where Beauplaisir is renting rooms.
When the lady, dressed as a maid, comes to bring Beauplaisir drinking chocolate in the morning, he grabs her leg, asks her questions about her romantic love, and pulls her into his lap. While she blushes and pretends innocent confusion, he becomes extremely aroused and initiates sex. Afterward, he gives her some gold. When she fakes confusion and asks what she needs to do for the money, he laughs and asks her to be around when he returns home at night. Though Beauplaisir has been in Bath less than a month, he quickly grows even more tired of the adoring maid than he was of Fantomina.
The lady quits her job as a maid and comes up with a third scheme to win Beauplaisir’s passion. She buys widow’s mourning clothes, hides her hair under a cap, and affects terrible grief. Then she waits at an inn on Beauplaisir’s likely path between Bath and London. When she sees his carriage driving by, she hails him and tells him that she is wretchedly miserable because her excellent husband has died—but, despite her grief, she needs to fetch a small fortune he left her in London, which her brother-in-law will otherwise steal and carry off to Holland. Unfortunately, she has not been able to rent a carriage. Then she asks whether Beauplaisir whether he will let her ride in his carriage.
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Themes
Beauplaisir allows the “widow” (i.e., the lady) to ride in his carriage. She cries so much that he begins to wonder whether a woman so passionate in sorrow would be as passionate in love. Slowly, he brings the topic of their halting conversation around to love. She begins to talk a great deal, telling him that love makes people behave in ways they thought they never would and that it is a source of tremendous joy. Beauplaisir, deciding the widow does have a passionate nature, begins to flirt with her more and more overtly.
When Beauplaisir and the lady-as-widow come to the Inn where they’ll stay for the night, Beauplaisir begins kissing the widow’s tears. He offers to take on her grief if she will “ease the Burden of his Love.” The lady, thinking her widow-character wouldn’t have sex with Beauplaisir quite so soon, pretends to faint. Beauplaisir carries the widow to the bed and attends to her. She “revives,” and they have sex.
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Themes
How can Beauplaisir fail to notice that he is in fact having sex with the same lady in the person of Fantomina, the maid, and the widow? It is because the lady is an excellent actress, who changes her voice and facial expressions at will. Though Beauplaisir feels as though he has seen the widow before, he isn’t sure where, and when she tells him she has lived all her life in Bristol—where he has never been—he concludes that he must be mistaken.
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Themes
Beauplaisir and the lady-as-widow pass the rest of the journey from Bath to London in “Gratification of wild Desires.” When their journey ends, they promise to see each other again, and Beauplaisir gives the widow an address where she can write to him. The lady rents new lodgings and writes a letter to Beauplaisir from that address as the “Widow Bloomer” asking him to see her as soon as possible Then she writes him a letter—in different handwriting, as Fantomina—complaining that he didn’t write to her the whole time he was in Bath and asking him to come see her.
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Themes
After a day, the lady receives responses to both letters. In Beauplaisir’s letter to the widow, he praises her uniqueness, professes his love, and promises to visit her at five p.m. In his letter to Fantomina, he claims that he forgot the name of her landlady and so couldn’t write to her while he was in Bath. Though he claims that he longs to see her, he tells her he can’t visit her to the next day because some business has unexpectedly come up. The lady says to herself that if she had believed in men like other women do, she would have been miserable. Then she congratulates herself on having outwitted her faithless lover—for whom she cannot feel “real Tenderness” due to his inconstancy but whose “agreeable Person” she enjoys.
At five p.m., Beauplaisir visits the lady-as-widow, for whom he has lost none of his passion. When he visits “Fantomina” the next day, the widow notes the contrast in his demeanor and marvels at how men prefer their newer lovers simply because they are new—after all, Beauplaisir can’t prefer the widow to Fantomina on merit, because they are the same person. Indeed, Beauplaisir is arguably better than most men, because he, unlike some men, doesn’t completely end relations with women he believes are dying of love for him.
As expected, Beauplaisir grows tired of the lady-as-widow, too, and the lady hatches another plan. She hoods herself, goes to a park, and approaches two “necessitous gentlemen” whom she offers to hire in a matter of absolute secrecy. After the men agree, she goes and rents a lavish house. The next day, she brings the men to the house, orders them to dress in servant’s uniforms, and gives them a letter—written in disguised handwriting—to deliver to Beauplaisir. When Beauplaisir reads the letter, he is astonished: signed Incognita, it purports to be from a high-born lady who is passionately in love with him and longs to have an assignation with him—on the condition that she is allowed to conceal her name and cover her face.
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Beauplaisir tries to question the man who delivered the letter about Incognita, but the man refuses to tell him anything. Beauplaisir assumes that he’ll be able to winkle the information from Incognita, since she professes to be passionately in love with him, so he writes her a letter agreeing to meet her under the conditions she has set. When the man returns to the lady with Beauplaisir’s response, she laughs to hear how curious he was about her and applauds her own ingenuity at turning her lover’s inconstancy into a source of constantly renewed passion.
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Themes
In preparation for Beauplaisir’s visit, the lady dresses in a ball gown and masquerade mask. When Beauplaisir arrives, he immediately presses the lady for sex, which she willingly grants. She won’t let him see her face despite his many pleas, however. He claims to love her ardently and asks to spend the night, so they won’t be separated. She agrees but—suspecting him of duplicity—plots how to thwart his attempts to see her face.
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Themes
The lady sends Beauplaisir into a dark room and then joins him. They have sex in the dark. Beauplaisir doesn’t mind, because he expects she won’t go to bed in her mask and assumes he’ll see her face at dawn. When he hears morning noises but sees no light, however, he realizes she has put heavy blinds on the windows. He complains of her behavior, but she—quite sure he’ll stop loving her if he discovers her identity—flees the room. He finds her, masked again, in an outer room and tells her that he can’t have a relationship with a lady who doesn’t trust him. When she still refuses to show her face, he says he won’t visit her until she agrees to share her identity.
The lady assumes that Beauplaisir will visit her again despite his resolution, but if he doesn’t, she plans to invent another scheme to snare him. But after two weeks, the lady’s mother comes home from abroad. Though the mother doesn’t know the true extent of her daughter’s adventures, she has heard enough bad things about her daughter’s behavior that she puts her daughter under considerable restraint. During this time, the lady discovers that she is pregnant—and since her mother controls her behavior, she lacks the freedom to scheme to conceal her pregnancy.
The lady diets, laces her corsets very tight, and wears a very large hoop petticoat to hide her pregnancy. She hopes to conceal the pregnancy until her mother sends her away to the country. Yet at the last court ball before the lady’s departure, she goes into labor. Though no one knows what’s wrong with her, everyone is very worried. Her mother has her carried home and sends for a doctor. The doctor, upon examining the lady, tells her mother that the lady is pregnant and needs a midwife.
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The mother rushes to the lady’s bedside and demands to know who the father of her child is. Though the lady initially refuses to admit anything, the mother refuses to let the lady have any medical help until she talks. Finally, the lady names Beauplaisir. The mother sends messengers to fetch a midwife and Beauplaisir. When Beauplaisir arrives, the mother accuses him of impregnating her daughter. Beauplaisir, utterly baffled, claims he has only ever admired the lady from afar.
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The mother brings Beauplaisir to the lady’s bedside as the lady is giving birth to a baby girl and demands to know whether the lady lied about her baby’s paternity. The lady, overcome with shame, insists that Beauplaisir is the “innocent Cause of [her] Undoing.” When Beauplaisir protests, the lady explains all. Beauplaisir is astonished that the lady has deceived him so many times, while the mother is shocked at her daughter’s blamable adventuresomeness.
After a silence, the mother admits that she originally intended to force Beauplaisir to marry the lady. Yet having heard the lady’s story, the mother now thinks the situation is all the lady’s fault. She only asks that Beauplaisir not tell anyone of her daughter’s guilt. Beauplaisir indeed does not offer to marry the lady—a little to the mother’s surprise—but does offer to raise the baby. Both the lady and her mother refuse that offer. Beauplaisir leaves, utterly confused. Though he attempts to visit the lady afterward, the mother turns him away, fearing his presence will only lead to more sexual sin. Once the lady has recovered, her mother sends her to a French nunnery.
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