F is for Fantomina…and Facebook Stalker?

Yes, Eliza Haywood lived in the time before electric lights, (hence the limited believability in Beauplaisir’s being deceived), let alone the Internet, but wouldn’t our desperate little heroine here think she’d died and gone to heaven in the world of facebook? All of her correspondences from different identities – imagine the wall-to-wall conversations that those would lend themselves to! And all of her super-stalker abilities as she traces his whereabouts and travel routes and times – how much easier would it have been for her? And can’t you picture Beauplaisir’s profile page? Single; Male; Interested in Women;Looking for Random Play or Whatever He Can Get. Beauplaisir is gullible and horny. Really though, it makes me wonder how many other women Beau is having his way with…even Fantomina can’t be everywhere at all times and if he can screw around with all of her various personas, who’s to say that there aren’t a few more on the side. It seems unwise for her to place all of her eggs in one man basket…

Actually, eggs make a nice segue at this point in my entry, as I am fascinated by the effect that the presence of Fantomina’s mother hen, as well as her own nesting situation, has upon the end of the story. I was surprised at the ending, actually. I was hoping that she would come to him in her true identity at last, and he, being charmed by her on account of the wealth she could bring to him, would agree to get hitched. Then she could, and would, continue to dress up and allow him to keep mistresses, such being herself, until old age succeeded in cooling his blood as much as satisfaction had been wont to do in his yough. But, alas, Haywood would not have it that way.

Although it made me sad that Fantomina’s power ended so abruptly and with such seeming permanence, I was intrigued by the role that maternity had to play in it. It is the coming of her domineering mother, coupled with the state of motherhood in which she finally finds herself that causes Fantomina to be thoroughly ‘undone’ and ties her down to a single identity for Beau. I suppose the ending is a good way for her adventures to end without an agonizingly preachy moral of double standards. What really undeniably sets women apart from men of course is that child-bearing ability, and so I suppose it is fair that that is what ‘weakens’ her, or at least removes her from a level playing field with Beau. Also, there is such a struggle for Fantomina/Celia/Mrs. Bloomer/Incognita/a “Lady of birth, beauty, wit and spirit” to keep up a barrier between her inside and outside identities, her private actions and her public reputation, that her amourous affairs become nothing but an exercise in crafting new, deceptive beings. So, it is upon reflection rather fitting that, just as her sexual ‘undoing’ is an act which affects more than merely the outside reputation for which she fears, her discovery spawns (excuse pun) from the transition of love’s seed sown within her to the outside world, in a literal creation of a new being.

So then, like the introductory material posits, Fantomina’s move to a nunnery is perhaps not the defeat it seems at first glance. I mean, the genre of scandalous nun fiction they mention is enough to convince me, but really, in a convent the whole idea is to forfeit any personal identity and take on another; this is right up her alley! Now I’m dying for a kinky convent sequel…I imagine Darel could do it justice if he chose…

Now, (and soon I will shut up…), why the title “Love in A Maze?” I think that Beauplaisir is looking for exactly that, to be able to explore a myriad of new directions, preferablywith many dead ends, and soaking up whatever he encounters on the way. But this maze, although he is being blindly led (as though with some aromatic hunk of cheese in a laboratory) has all paths leading to Fantomina; wherever he goes, she is still with him. Sounds like some circle of hell, really.  Is there any connection between the etymology of “maze” and “amaze”?  With the inverse relationship this story plots between the wonder needed for arousal and the apathy of sexual satisfaction, it seems as though the only way to keep up any level of alluring amazement is to put one’s profligate rodent love thorough a tangle of maze-like snares.

(Okay, what a wonder are dictionaries. So, “maze” can be a verb, as well as a noun, meaning to bewilder or confuse – indeed the only way to amaze)

October 8, 2007. Uncategorized.