Fantomina

The Lady at the center of this story is mysterious not only to Beauplaisir, but to the reader as well. We know little about her, other than that she is young, wealthy, and beautiful. She has also been “bred for the most Part in the Country” (Paragraph 1), which makes her, despite her wealth and cultivation, naïve and unworldly. It is out of this unworldly curiosity, we are told, that she first pretends to be a prostitute—as well as the fact that she has “no Body in Town, at that Time, to whom she was obliged to be accountable for her Actions” (Paragraph 1). At the beginning of the story, she has no particular love object in mind; she simply wishes to be someone other than herself.

It is only once the Lady and Beauplaisir have their first sexual encounter that the Lady decides that she is in love with him and begins to adopt different disguises with the sole purpose of ensnaring him. At the same time, we are told that this encounter is an occasion of shame for her; the implication is that she was a virgin beforehand. As she is unable to hide either her distress or her virginity from Beauplaisir, she settles on telling him a version of the truth. She tells him that she is not the woman of ill virtue whom he has believed her to be, but is “the Daughter of a Country Gentleman, who was come to Town to buy Cloaths, and that she was call’d Fantomina” (Paragraph 6). While she tells Beauplaisir this story to protect her reputation and to ensure his fidelity to her, we sense that the story serves a private psychological purpose for her as well. This persona allows her to put a literal name to her contradictory feelings and her adventurous, rebellious impulses, in a world that does not allow women to have complicated inner lives and insists on their conforming to limited societal roles.

The Lady’s behavior with Beauplaisir is eccentric and manipulative, so much so that it is easy to overlook the oddity of his own behavior, and the fact that she is only responding to his cues. In adopting one broad disguise after another to keep him interested, she is taking advantage both of his fickleness and restlessness and his strange lack of curiosity and observation. Despite the fact that he is repeatedly intimate with her, he fails to register that she is one woman–a woman with whom he is socially acquainted, moreover—as opposed to several very different women. He notes only that all of these different women strangely resemble one another. We are told that the reason the Lady is so easily able to repeatedly trick him is because she is an exceptionally good actress:

[B]esides the Alteration which the Change of Dress made in her, she was so admirably skill’d in the Art of feigning, that she had the Power of putting on almost what Face she pleas’d, and knew so exactly how to form her Behavior to the Character she represented” (Paragraph 16).

However, another reason the Lady’s repeated ruses might work as well as they do is because they are more conventional than they seem to be at first. The reason why the Lady is such a skilled actress, perhaps, is due not only to innate talent but to her socialization as a woman. Beauplaisir, for his part, is depicted as both highly desirable and—despite his own strange behavior—completely ordinary. Although his behavior is often caddish, he is also not without gallant impulses, which serve to normalize his caddishness. He continues to see the Lady in her different disguises long after he has grown weary of these disguises, and he also, at the end of the story, declares that he will adopt their illegitimate daughter (herself referred to as the Lady).  

While the disguise of Fantomina might be the closest to the Lady superficially, it is perhaps the disguise of Incognita that most resembles her real nature. This disguise is her most elaborate yet—involving the rental of a house and the hiring of two male accomplices—and seems to have been adopted out of a sense of simultaneous desperation and exhaustion. She has realized that all of the ruses that she has employed to keep Beauplaisir interested have failed, and she arrives at the idea of a disguise that is straightforward artifice: a disguise that declares itself as being a disguise. In the letter that she writes to Beauplaisir, she tells him both that she is in love with him and that he will never know her true identity. In its way, this is a confession on her part; however, it is not sufficient for Beauplaisir, who is finally frustrated by all of the secrecy after initially being intrigued by it.

At the story’s end, several external circumstances return the Lady to her old self. Her strict and domineering mother returns from a trip to Europe, and the Lady discovers that she is pregnant and goes into an early labor. She then tells her mother the identity of the baby girl’s father, and a confrontation is forced between Beauplaisir and the Lady. Even at the Lady’s bedside, Beauplaisir must be told that he has known her intimately, a confession which surprises him as much as it does the Lady’s mother:

And ‘tis difficult to determine, if Beauplaisir, or the Lady, were most surpris’d at what they heard; he, that he should have been blinded so often by her Artifices; or she, that so young a Creature should have the Skill to make use of them (Paragraph 29). 

However, this ending—and the Lady’s subsequent exile to a monastery—does not mark the real end of the Lady and Beauplaisir’s relation, or the real revelation of who the Lady is, either. Both of these events have occurred already, during the Lady’s final incarnation as Incognita. The story’s ending merely imposes a public hypocrisy and orderliness on these messy private truths and shows the enduring power of social convention over the individual.