Fantomina Themes

In Fantomina, passion rules reason. Though Fantomina’s major characters are good at reasoning through logistical problems, they do not use their reason to decide which goals are worth pursuing. Instead, overriding passions—in particular, sexual passions—determine characters’ goals for them, and the characters then use their intelligence to secure those goals, good or bad. The story’s main character, the lady, becomes passionately obsessed with the rakish gentleman Beauplaisir. Though the lady is…

Fantomina suggests that people’s ideas about social class can blind them both to reality. This dynamic is clearest in the failure of rakish gentlemen Beauplaisir to notice that several of his lovers—the faux-prostitute Fantomina, the maid Celia, and the grieving Widow Bloomer—are in fact the same lady. The lady first encounters Beauplaisir while disguised when, curious about the behavior of gentlemen toward prostitutes, she decides to dress up as one. Though several gentlemen who…

In Fantomina, virtue and reputation have little relationship to each other: that is, a sufficiently rich and socially independent woman can keep up a pretense of sexual virtuousness and protect her reputation while engaging in “unvirtuous” behavior. When Fantomina begins, its central character, a beautiful young lady, has both a nominal commitment to virtue and a good reputation. Yet the lady’s behavior quickly makes clear that she doesn’t want to conform to the…

Fantomina depicts a world where women are punished for their own sexuality and for men’s sexuality, whereas men are only held responsible for “dishonoring” high-born women whose sexual virtue is beyond social reproach. Fantomina’s protagonist, a high-born and beautiful young lady, disguises herself as a prostitute first out of curiosity and then to deepen her acquaintance with Beauplaisir, a rakish gentlemen whom she finds attractive. After Beauplaisir gets the lady alone, he…