I enjoyed this one but I confess being a bit surprised and disappointed. While I hadn’t read it before, a friend had and then chose to do a short story to follow the amatory fashion. Hers had a happy ending; Fantomina does not. I read through her many disguises and his continual defection waiting for the big reveal moment. I had actually had to pause in reading it for some reason or another and I plotted out their married life, how they could make it work given how inconstant he was. I guessed that probably he would suspend his belief and they would continue on as before only married and what a scandal it might cause if she were always known to be out of town while he carried on with a “different” woman every other week. When I was able to return to reading the text and she became pregnant I was a bit disappointed but accepted it as a traditional way to catch the commitment-phobic swain into a lasting commitment, though it really would be the worst way to do so. In retrospect it’s actually pretty funny that instead she is exposed as the seducer and he is freed of all reason to marry her. It doesn’t make her ruin any less at his hands as, while she certainly did tempt it beyond which she could – at the time – have expected to escape, she refused his attempts at going that last step, only consenting when it seemed there was no other option, if she consented at all. Granted, after that first time she was the pursuer and went to great lengths to resume their affair and if she had just stopped after that once she could’ve escaped mostly unharmed. Her conscience doesn’t seem overly great as she continually dupes people and him in particular so she could’ve married some unsuspecting man and acted the virgin. Depending on who you’re reading Catherin of Aragon did it so she would even have royal precedent.Instead she goes through her disguises and is really quite remarkable. If her mother hadn’t come back to town, just how far would she have gone? Would she ever have tried to get him into marriage? She might have been successful if she went through her actual identity even though at first he paid her little attention. More than once it mentioned how he admired her actual identity. Though she did it all supposedly out of love for him, maybe she would’ve enjoyed going into acting instead of submitting to her mother and going to live in a French convent. Is there a sequal to Fantomina? Maybe she could fall for the groundskeeper and start another affair over there…
I also came to this short story with the notion that it was the precursor of Harlequinn romances, further bolstering up my belief that there must be a happy ending. Now I’m questioning if I really did hear that somewhere or if I just guessed given how it would’ve been “trashy” literature at the time and Harlequinns are very trashy today. Also, by trashy I don’t mean that they are any less valid but they’re entertaining in a very different way than reading a Jane Austen novel. There might be a link in that people would read Amatory fiction and then decide how it should have ended but that tendancy might just be a result of Disney.
In short, I found Fantomina very interesting though short and not the happiest of endings. It reminded me a lot of some of the plays we read for Restoration Drama and I’m looking forward to hearing about the woman who wrote it tomorrow.
Miriam Jones Said:
on October 20, 2009 at 4:02 am
Trashy, too, in the sense that amatory fiction was considered actually dangerous for women and girls to read.
Interesting connection to Restoration drama.
english20 Said:
on October 23, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Yes, critics (being males, of course) deemed amatory fiction to fill the minds of young women with the wrong idea of society and their place in it. I also liked how you pointed out it being a kind of precursor to harlequin romance of the Restoration era.
By the way, your idea for a sequel to Fantomina is intriguing, but I don’t think Haywood would have penned a follow-up to the novel.
Ha, just kidding! But it makes for an interesting thought.