Written by Eliza Haywood, Fantomina is one of the most popular works of amatory fiction. Amatory fiction tended to be written by women and very popular with female audiences. They were often political in nature, and they acted as a precursor to the novel and ancestor to romance novels. It was a fiction of erotic intrigue; stories focused on love, usually sexual love and secular. This genre was popular in Britain in the late 17th to early 18th Centuries. They were influenced by Continental Romance tradition and French scandal fiction. Some of these stories are political satires due to parodying popular figures in government and society.
Whereas previous stories had vulnerable women as the “persecuted maiden,” Fantomina is the heroine of this story with ambition and wit. She is thrust into a difficult situation in which she resolves to win over Beauplaisir, the man she desires. However, as it transpires, Beauplaisir is not as smart or as deceptive as she is, because he thinks he is making love to different women every time. He is opportunistic, loose in terms of sex, and free-ranging, whereas she is truly in love with only him. That makes her more moral than he really is.
In regards to the idea of Fantomina being more moral than Beauplaisir, Haywood presents the notion that a woman’s emotions are more engaged than those of a man. She also suggests that men are less moral and more on emotion. Fantomina is still very female. At this time, women were beginning to explore their behaviours and sexuality. Whereas Fantomina is deceptive in presenting herself, Beauplaisir is more morally wrong than she is. Fantomina is rich and autonomous- travelling around to hire houses and disguise herself. She doesn’t have to account what she does to anybody, but when her mother returns, she is stripped of that autonomy and back under the parental thumb. When forced to confess her impending pregnancy to her mother, Fantomina hopes that Beauplaisir will defend her, but he does not do so.
The ending is somewhat downbeat; Fantomina is forced to tell the truth to her mother while in labour and gets sent off to a monastery. From a female perspective, there is a kind of female brutality having a mother punish the daughter. This is violence between two women. Furthermore, the reader tends to feel a sense of injustice, because Beauplaisir is unpunished and only has to support the child if it survives infancy. When considering the ending, the idea of her being forced to pray every day is one way of looking at it, because convents were used as brothels back then. She did not plan what would happen, and she ends up having to face the consequences of her actions. It is a very contemporary way with the youth culture of today; many get into trouble without considering what their actions could do. Fantomina engineers the whole situation herself. Haywood might be giving the moral ending, because she feels she has to show actions have consequences. However, the heroine has sexual freedom and self-autonomy. Fantomina stands as an example of what amatory fiction is; to give female characters an arc and an examination of their emotions and actions.
