The plot of Oroonoko is quickly told. The hero is an African prince, grandson and heir of the aged King of Coramantien, handsome, noble, and brave as a lion in battle. He falls in love with Imoinda, and she with him; they are secretly betrothed. But Imoinda is sent the royal veil by Oroonoko’s grandfather and is forced to become one of his many wives. Through the intrigues of his friend Aboan, who romances Onahal, one of the king’s cast‐off concubines, Oroonoko gains access to the harem and he and Imoinda consummate their love. When this is discovered, Imoinda is sold into slavery, though all are told that she is dead. Oroonoko gets this news when he is inland in command of the army and with courage continues to fight, defeating his foe and taking the survivors as slaves; their leader Jamoan becomes Oroonoko’s prized companion. Returning to Coromantien, Oroonoko is decoyed aboard a European ship, whose captain flatters him and plies him with liquor, and on awakening Oroonoko discovers himself in chains, a slave on the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas.
On arrival at the English colony of Surinam, Oroonoko is bought by Trefry, the agent of the Governor‐General Lord Willoughby, who does not put him to work in the fields. Oroonoko soon discovers that a beautiful and chaste female slave on the same plantation is none other than his Imoinda. Oroonoko then tries to negotiate his return with his wife to Africa, while the Deputy Governor, Byam, meditates how he can be properly dealt with. As time passes, Imoinda becomes pregnant, and Oroonoko becomes desperate to arrange for their freedom so that his son will not be born into slavery. The narrator of the tale is meanwhile assigned to befriend Oroonoko, to keep him busy and to spy on him. The outnumbered white settlers fear a revolt of the African slaves led by an experienced commander whom they recognize as their king. Realizing at length, that his negotiations with the settlers are leading nowhere, Oroonoko leads a revolt of the slaves against their English owners. The English are too cowardly to fight, but the slaves are persuaded to abandon Oroonoko and return for a promise of amnesty. Alone, Oroonoko is tricked by Trefry and Byam into surrendering, then savagely beaten, after which he vows revenge. He plans to kill Imoinda with her consent (so that she will not be dishonored after his death), then to kill Byam, and finally himself, but after killing Imoinda he is recaptured and, in the absence of his partisans like Trefry and the narrator, Byam has Oroonoko savagely executed by being dismembered while alive.
Oroonoko is a good place to begin the study of eighteenth‐century fiction because it exemplifies so perfectly what fiction before the novel was like. The first thing the reader will notice is that it claims on the title page not to be fiction at all, but rather a “True History,” and the narrator’s insistence on the truth of the story takes up the first two paragraphs:
Aphra Behn made the very same truth‐claim, almost verbatim, in the initiation phase of another narrative she published the same year as Oroonoko, The Fair Jilt: “I do not pretend here to entertain you with a feign’d Story, or any thing piec’d together with Romantic Accidents, but every Circumstance, to a Tittle, is Truth. To a great part of the Main, I my self was an Eyewitness.” In fact all of The Fair Jilt is pure invention except for its climactic incident, a botched public execution in Antwerp that was reported in the London Gazette for May 1666. And Aphra Behn may in fact have been present at that time; she was then in the Low Countries employed as a spy in the service of King Charles II.
Similarly in Oroonoko, the title character is invented, along with his history in Africa, but five historical figures populate the part of his tale set in the English colony of Surinam. The actual Governor‐General of the English colonies in the Caribbean during the early 1660s, Francis Lord Willoughby of Parham, who is mentioned but never appears in person in the narrative, was stationed in Barbados, and there are ample records of the two English colonists who admire Oroonoko (John Trefry and George Marten), and of the two who betray and execute him (William Byam and James Banister).
And what of the sixth historical figure, the first‐person narrator “eye‐witness” Aphra Behn, who claims to have known Oroonoko, both within the novel itself and in her Epistle Dedicatory to Lord Maitland? Though the occasional scholar has been sceptical – because so much of the local color in Oroonoko could have been picked up from other travel literature – most are convinced that Behn had indeed been there.
The consensus is that she was christened “Eaffrey Johnson” in 1640 near Canterbury in Kent, and there is evidence that she crossed the Atlantic to Surinam in 1663, staying for some months. She may indeed have been living with her mother and sisters at St. John’s Hill, a plantation whose owner, Sir Robert Harley, was not in residence, and where we have a record in 1664 of “ladies” being present. But Behn was, as Mae West said, no lady, and in fact we have no firm idea of why she came to Surinam or what Aphra’s status may have been there. The wildly implausible explanation given in Oroonoko is that her father (Bartholomew Johnson, a mere barber) had been appointed by Lord Willoughby to be his lieutenant‐general over England’s Caribbean colonies but died on the voyage to the New World. (In real life it had been Lord Willoughby who died at sea, in 1666.) Aphra is probably the “Astrea” mentioned in William Byam’s March 1664 letter as leaving the colony for England via Barbados, followed by her “Celadon,” an aspiring but impecunious suitor, William Scot. (“Astraea” was later to be Behn’s pen name, taken from the heroine of the 1607 pastoral romance by Honoré D’Urfé.) Behn claims in Oroonoko to have presented the “King’s Theatre” (the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden) with exotic feathers brought from Surinam, feathers that costumed the heroine of The Indian‐Queen, a popular heroic drama by Sir Robert Howard and John Dryden. But she could not have returned in time for that play’s opening in January 1664, though these feathers may have graced the stage for a revival later in the decade.
Much of the rest of Behn’s life has similar lacunae that have to be filled in by scholarly speculation. Her early years, which coincided with the English Civil War and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, are a complete blank, but we know she had been educated well beyond what would have been typical for her social class and her sex, perhaps by having been informally adopted by the aristocratic Culpeper family of Kent, for whom her mother was a wet‐nurse. This might account for the extreme royalist sympathies and Tory politics evident in all her writings. She returned from Surinam in 1664, and signed herself “Behn” from 1666. The name suggests marriage to someone of German or Dutch extraction, but we know nothing of husband or marriage except that it must have been short lived, as no husband is in evidence during her later career. In July of 1666 she was employed in the Netherlands as a spy by Charles II’s government, which was at war with the Dutch, but payment for her services must have been lax as she was threatened in 1668 with imprisonment for debt in Antwerp, and she sent frantic letters of appeal for relief to Charles’s court. She returned to London and began to write for the stage; in 1670, her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was a success. Behn followed that up with eighteen other dramas, primarily romantic comedies; the most frequently revived was The Rover (1677). Behn’s dramatic works were called sexually indecent, even in her lifetime, but they were typical of the comedies of her time. What was unique was the sex of the author, who was, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, the first woman to live by her pen.
After Behn’s opening truth‐claim for the story, she delays the launch again in order, she says, to tell us how African slaves are brought to Surinam, but she gets to that point by a highly circuitous path. The colonists, she tells us, live with the native Guyanans “in perfect Amity, without daring to command ‘em, but on the contrary, caress ‘em with all the brotherly and friendly Affection in the World.” The word “daring” is in some tension with “brotherly and friendly Affection,” and Behn spells that tension out a few paragraphs later: “these People … being, on all Occasions, very useful to us, we find it absolutely necessary to caress ‘em as Friends, and not to treat ‘em as Slaves; nor dare we do other, their Numbers so far surpassing ours in that Continent.” In other words, the English would happily have enslaved the Guyanans had they been able safely to do so. Behn’s digression on Guyana wanders through descriptions of the fauna and flora of Surinam, and the dress of the native Guyanans, before going into their character, which “represented to me an absolute Idea of the first State of Innocence, before Man knew how to sin.” And at this point Behn tells a little story about their innocence that thematizes the issue of truth and deception, so important in the main story of Oroonoko:
These prelapsarian innocents, without vice or cunning, nevertheless “take Slaves in War,” and as we discover shortly, so does Oroonoko as a war‐chieftain in Africa. Slavery seems to be universal and not an evil peculiar to European culture. More on this later.
As Lennard Davis and Brian Corman have suggested, the somewhat inchoate genre‐system for narrative literature in the late seventeenth century had three important slots, for history, novel, and romance, which differed in their degree of verisimilitude, if not truth. The playwright Congreve’s first publication was a comic novel titled Incognita (1692), and in his preface, Congreve characterized the romance as “composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of Hero’s, Heroins, Kings and Queens, Mortals of the first Rank,” with “lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances”; novels, on the other hand, “delight us with Accidents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unprecedented, such which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us.”
Oroonoko seems to be a blend of all three genres, although its tragic structure most resembles that of Restoration heroic drama. Many of the minor episodes in the story, the behavior of the exotic animals and the indigenous people of Surinam appear much as they do in the factual travel literature of the time; indeed, Behn may have refreshed her memories of South America by reading George Warren’s Impartial Description of Surinam (1667) or John Ogilby’s America (1671).
The segment of the narrative set in Coramantien (Koromantyn, a port on the Gold Coast of Africa, now Ghana) is pure romance, set in an exotic warlike society like the ancient Persia and Rome imagined in the popular contemporary romances by Mlle. de Scudéry (Artamène and Clélie respectively). The amorous intrigue, especially the double bank‐shot by which Aboan seduces the former beauty Onahal in order to provide his friend with access to Imoinda, is very typical of that literature, and the improbable coincidence by which Oroonoko and Imoinda are sold as slaves in the very same Caribbean colony, each not knowing that the other is even alive, recalls the chance reunion of the lovers in the much older romances from ancient Alexandria, like Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (see Chapter 1). The hero’s imperviousness to pain – he endures being dismembered while calmly smoking a pipe of tobacco – is on this same fabulous level, though the popular romances usually ended with the lovers living happily ever after.
On the other side, the line of action set in Surinam has considerable verisimilitude: African slaves were being imported to the Caribbean to work plantations there because the indigenous people vastly outnumbered the colonists, and could not be forced to work at agricultural tasks since they could easily escape into the uncultivated hinterland. (Even the African slaves, an ocean away from their homelands, often succeeded in running away from their owners and in setting up their own “maroon” societies on the fringes of the European settlements.) And slave rebellions occurred with great frequency in the Caribbean and on the continents of North and South America beginning as early as 1605; they were punished with extreme ferocity. Behn also portrays the political chaos that prevails in the colony, in which Byam, the lieutenant governor, has official authority, but is unable to effectively use that authority and meet in battle the challenge of Oroonoko’s rebellion, partly because of the cowardice of most of the white settlers, partly because his authority is challenged by other colonists like Trefry and Marten. The narrator gives pride of place to Oroonoko’s tragedy, but makes us aware also of the tragic consequences for England of this political chaos, including the loss of Surinam to the Dutch in 1667 in the second Anglo‐Dutch war.
The first‐person narrator of Oroonoko is first and foremost Oroonoko’s friend and his eulogist. She says proleptically soon after his arrival in Surinam that: “his Misfortune was, to fall in an obscure World, that afforded only a Female Pen to celebrate his Fame.” And she concludes her tale with a similar expression of modesty: “Thus Dy’d this Great Man; worthy of a better Fate, and a more sublime Wit than mine to write his Praise, yet, I hope, the Reputation of my Pen is considerable enough to make his Glorious Name to survive to all Ages.” She claims to have written the section of Oroonoko’s history set in Coramantien “from the Mouth of … the Hero himself” and the Surinam section from her own observations. Even so, she writes herself into a few corners: for example, the king’s decision to transport Imoinda and Onahal into slavery abroad is said to have been “put in Execution … with so much Secrecy that none … knew any thing of their Absence, or their Destiny”; if so, this is something Oroonoko cannot have told her, and even Imoinda cannot know anything about the decision to keep her fate a secret.
But of course the narrator’s role in the story is more ambiguous than that of a mere chronicler. Oroonoko attempts to negotiate his freedom from the day he awakens on the slave ship, but there comes a point where the tension between his royal nature and his slave status becomes a genuine instability as he anticipates the birth of his child by Imoinda. It is at this point that the narrator becomes an agent for the English settlers who fear the prospect of a rebellion.
Since the narrator has no power to do the one thing Oroonoko most desires, to return him and Imoinda to Africa, her mission to give Oroonoko “all the Satisfaction I possibly cou’d” means deceiving him about the colonists’ intentions, just as the captain of the slave ship had done, and just as the English governor Byam would consistently do. And the first time the narrator slips out of her role for a moment and tells Oroonoko the truth – that displaying his dissatisfaction might result in his being put in chains – she finds she has to spend the rest of that day soothing his resentment. She remains his best friend in Surinam (he calls her “his Great Mistress”), but she is also an agent set to spy on his intentions, and her actual loyalties at any given moment are never certain. Whenever she uses the word “we,” the reader is well advised to think carefully about whether she means “Oroonoko and I” or “the English colonists and I” because her references switch rapidly between the two.
Once the narrator’s waiting game is over, the rebellion and its sadistic aftermath quickly follow, but though the narrator tells the story as though she were there, she is physically absent from the colony during the entire action. And this is something we find out only after the narration of Oroonoko’s surrender and its fatal consequences.
As before, the incoherent juxtaposition of conflicting motives and sentiments is striking: on the one hand, she is overcome by the terror that Oroonoko will descend upon the English houses and cut everyone’s throat, so she flees the settlement with the rest of the women; but on the other hand, she declares that, had she stayed, she could have controlled somehow the retribution that Byam takes in whipping Oroonoko “like a common slave.” When Oroonoko is executed, too, a few days later, the narrator has taken herself away from Parham, “about three Days Journy down the River,” because she fears that she might “fall into Fits of dangerous Illness upon any extraordinary Melancholy.”
The section of the novel that falls between Oroonoko’s discovery that his bride Imoinda is pregnant with “the last of his race” and his decision on that account to attempt a slave revolt consists of a series of three episodes in which the narrator relates “the diversions we entertain’d him with, or rather he us.” The episodes are fairly lengthy – about 4500 words, or roughly one sixth of the tale; the first narrates two successful tiger‐hunts, the second narrates Oroonoko’s disastrous attempt to fish for an electric eel, and the third recounts a visit to a tribe of Guyanan natives up the river from the English settlements. And when they are done, Behn says that “it was thus, for some time we diverted him,” drawing a circle as it were around these digressions in order to resume the plot.
The two tiger‐hunting episodes are, like some of the African episodes, designed to show the prowess, bravery, and endurance of Oroonoko. In the first, there is no intention to perform a brave act: Oroonoko has sought and found a tiger cub1 he means to present to the English ladies when its mother returns and attacks; the ladies flee at the approach of the tiger, but Oroonoko quickly kills it with a sword borrowed from Henry Marten, getting pierced by the tiger’s claws as it dies. In the second, Oroonoko is actively hunting, with bow and arrows, another tiger, one that has been killing the colonists’ sheep and oxen and has apparently been unsuccessfully pursued by the English for some time, and he dispatches it easily with two accurate shots.
What readers may find most peculiar about these narratives are the pronouns Behn uses for the tigers, which vary inconsistently between feminine and masculine. In the first episode the tiger is “the dam,” or mother to the cub Oroonoko plans to steal, but she is “bearing a buttock of a cow, which he had torn off with his mighty paw.” Later the tiger “quit her prey,” after which Oroonoko runs his sword “quite through his breast down to his very heart.” The second tiger is consistently a “she” while it is alive and a “he” when it is dead. Oroonoko “going softly to one side of her … he shot her in the eye [which] made her caper …. [B]eing seconded by another arrow, he fell dead upon the prey. Caesar cut him open with a knife.” Jacqueline Pearson has argued that for Behn nature is gendered as female and culture as male, so that the second “tiger is female when strong and aggressive … and male when powerless and defeated.”2 Gendering nature and culture as male and female is a fairly standard trope, but it’s not clear why a dead tiger is cultural rather than natural, and in any case even the alive/dead reading doesn’t work for the first tiger, “who was laid in her blood on the ground.” Thus far the bisexual tigers – who were emended by editors to make them both consistently female from the third edition onward – are a puzzle no one has successfully solved.
The episode of the “numb‐eel” seems more clearly thematic. Oronooko goes out fishing for the eel, laughing at the very idea that a man could be hurt by a mere fish, and gets the shock of his life: he is shocked unconscious while standing in the river and is only saved from drowning by natives in a boat, who pick up both him and the eel that is still attached to his pole and line. The episode displaces to the natural world what happens to Oroonoko in his contacts with European culture: he is overweeningly self‐confident about his abilities and therefore vulnerable to an attack he fails to foresee, like that of the sea‐captain who makes him drunk in the port of Coromantien; and it may foreshadow the broken promises after the failure of Oroonoko’s rebellion. Most obviously, though, it reflects his relationship with the narrator, who together with other colonists, have successfully kept Oroonoko “numb,” or insensible, to his real status as a slave by entertaining him with these diversions.
The last of the three episodes, the voyage eight days upriver to native Guyanan towns, concludes the digressions with a crowning success on Oroonoko’s part. The narrator cites “disputes” with a particular tribe of natives which cause the colonists a great deal of fear. But after a number of meetings with the tribe, “Oroonoko begot so good an understanding between the Indians and the English, that there were no more fears or heartburnings during our stay.” Thematically, this is primarily a meeting between the natives, who represent nature, and are entirely unclothed,3 and the cultured Europeans together with the African prince. The narrator speculates about the natives that, owing to their ignorance and simplicity, “it were not difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant religion among them, and to impose any notions or fictions upon them,” thus raising again the theme of European duplicity, the power to enslave non‐Europeans with their lies. Proleptically, this episode predicts an aspect of the story’s catastrophe. The narrator notices that among the natives “some wanted their noses, some their lips …, and others their ears.” Among Europeans we would suspect either disease or criminal penalties,4 but the explanation Behn gives is that the war‐captains of this tribe of natives compete with one another for the leadership of their army, showing their courage by self‐mutilation. This is, she says, “a sort of courage too brutal to be applauded by our black hero.” But in fact the conclusion of Oroonoko involves an episode of self‐mutilation where the hero shows his contempt for the slaves who have surrendered by cutting a piece of flesh from his throat and throwing it at them, then attempting to disembowel himself.
It often surprises many readers that Oroonoko is by no means an abolitionist text, finding slavery an outrage against the natural freedom of man. On the contrary, to Behn slavery is a universal feature of societies, civilized or otherwise; even the “noble savages who are native to Guyana” – and Behn describes them as prelapsarian beings, more innocent than Adam and Eve in the Garden – take prisoners of war as slaves. Nevertheless, commercial slavery, having forever to serve not one’s captor but a mere purchaser, is something that does seem unnatural to her, or at least to Oroonoko himself:
To the reader, given the narrator’s heroic presentation of the “royal slave,” the implicit argument of Oroonoko would be anti‐slavery. But abolitionist opinion would develop during the eighteenth century, not through Tories like Behn posing a paradox of noble savages debased by chattel slavery, but through Whig and radical dissenters, often Quakers and Unitarians, who believed in the brotherhood of man. British abolitionism culminated first in the 1807 prohibition of the slave trade and the subsequent abolition of slavery itself throughout the British Empire in 1833.
In addition to its links to romance and factual travel literature, Oroonoko can be seen as a historical allegory of the martyrdom of Charles I. The conflict she portrays in Oroonoko – disunity between Royalists and Parliamentarians leading to the savage execution of a noble prince – was analogous in Behn’s eyes to the English Civil War, culminating in the decapitation of Charles I. But there was also a second historical allegory, one that was “ripped from the headlines.” As a Tory, Behn saw the current monarch, James II, as a “royal slave” whose tense standoff with Parliament had reached a tipping point with the birth of a son and heir by his Catholic second wife Mary of Modena. Did Behn expect the Dutch to take over England, in the person of William III, hereditary Stadtholder of Holland, James II’s son‐in‐law and nephew, just as they had taken over Surinam in 1667? Did she publish Oroonoko in 1688 partly as a warning against a similar regicidal ending to the revolution that was brewing?
If this is what she indeed expected, she was right about the Dutch victory and takeover but wrong about the regicide. James abandoned London after the battle of Reading, then departed for France just before Christmas of 1688. A good deal of blood was subsequently spilled in battles between Jacobite and Williamite forces in Scotland and Ireland, but in England the takeover by William was nearly bloodless. Behn lived long enough to hear about the coronation of William and Mary; she died in London on April 16, 1689.
In a more minor way, there is perhaps yet another transfer of history to fiction in Oroonoko in the African romance plot that brings Imoinda to Surinam. The story of a bride wooed and won by a prince who finds he cannot marry her because she has been claimed by his grandfather for himself might remind us of a similar story set in Spain in 1559. Don Carlos of Spain was set to marry Elizabeth of Valois when she was claimed by his father (not grandfather), King Philip II. Similarly Aboan and Onahal, the prince’s friend and the king’s former lover correspond to the Marquis of Posa and the Countess of Eboli. Behn was probably not attempting to adapt the actual historical events of more than a century earlier, but rather the tragedy of Don Carlos written by her dramatist friend Thomas Otway and staged in 1676. To the extent that we become aware of these transpositions of past history and current events into Oroonoko, they make Behn’s narrative seem both less factual – we are less likely to believe that Oroonoko and Imoinda actually existed – and less fictional.5 This is one sign among many that the novel has not yet been born.
Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, or Love in a Maze (1725) runs to around 12,000 words, much too short to be considered a novel, but it is an excellent representative of “amatory fiction,” one of the most significant prose genres in the decades before Richardson’s Pamela, and one that clearly derives from the romance tradition of Honoré D’Urfé and Madeleine de Scudéry discussed in Chapter 1. Love in Excess, Haywood’s considerably longer but not necessarily more complex text in the same genre, was one of the best sellers of 1719 – the other being Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Partly because of Fantomina’s brevity, it has recently become one of the early texts by women that are most often assigned in courses on the eighteenth‐century novel. And partly because of its ethical complexity – it presents transgressive behavior on the part of both male and female characters without clumsy moralizing, and it lends itself to discussion from the perspectives of cultural studies and contemporary gender theory – it has recently generated a great deal of critical commentary.
The nameless heroine, identified initially as “a young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit,” sitting in a box at the theatre, sees the young gentlemen of London paying their addresses to courtesans in the pit, is first outraged, but then becomes curious about what it would be like to be the object of that sort of desire. Accordingly, she dresses the next night as a prostitute, muffled in a hood, and enjoys their interest and flattery until she espies a man she knows from her life in the beau monde, “the accomplished Beauplaisir,” joining those bidding for her favors. Attracted to him, she wants to meet with him privately, but has no place prepared for that purpose, so calling herself Fantomina, she puts him off with various excuses until the following night. By the next night, she has rented a furnished apartment, hired servants, and prepared a supper for them after the theatre. Once installed there in amorous conversation with Beauplaisir, Fantomina discovers that she is in over her head: her desires and his expectations from her self‐presentation as a prostitute are leading them too swiftly to a conclusion that she does not in fact want, at least not then, but which she seems to have no power to stop.
What follows in the fifth paragraph of Fantomina, and how to define or describe what follows, has divided readers. In my own classroom experience, male and female readers often differ: most but not all women readers view it as a description of date rape, while men reading the passage often see it as far more ambiguous, and this division is mirrored in the scholarly literature on Fantomina.
The ambiguity of the passage stems from the instability of the focalization of the narrative, which alternates between Fantomina and Beauplaisir. The passage – “He began to explain … let her know, he would not be denied” – begins with Beauplaisir speaking, but after he refers to “the Freedoms she allow’d,” we switch to Fantomina thinking as she listens: “It was in vain; she would have retracted the Encouragement she had given.” And “would have” suggests that she does not in fact “retract.” Instead, she attempts to “delay, till the next Meeting” but that too is “in vain”: “she had now gone too far to retreat.” The deictic “now” suggests that we are reading free indirect discourse, many decades before its controlled use by Burney and Austen, and each internal thought suggests Fantomina’s ambivalence about the encounter. We see her as she sees herself: “fearful, – confused, altogether unprepared to resist in such Encounters”; and even the token resistance she thinks of putting up is tempered by her own desire, by “the extreme Liking she had to him.” As the brink of “really losing her Honour” approaches, she tells him part of the truth – that she is a virgin who dressed as a courtesan to provoke his desire – and she thinks about telling him exactly who and what she is, a young lady of distinguished birth, someone of Beauplaisir’s own class. But she doesn’t do that: when it comes to the point, she is less afraid of “losing her Honour” than of having “the whole Affair made a Theme for publick Ridicule” – and over the brink they go. Would anything have changed if she had? At the crucial point Haywood withdraws from Fantomina’s thoughts and considers Beauplaisir’s from some distance, saying that “‘tis probable” that knowing all this would have made no difference, would not have “curb’d the wild Exuberance of his luxurious Wishes” or would not have, as Haywood euphemistically puts it, “made him … change the Form of his Addresses.”
While Margaret Croskery and Ros Ballaster read what happens in this sequence as rape pure and simple, Jonathan Kramnick has interpreted this passage through the philosophy of John Locke and contemporary ideas about the psychology of consent (as in the political “consent of the governed,” which is given tacitly, for the most part). He argues that the ambiguity of this section of Haywood’s narrative “is inextricable from the ways in which the novel wants us to understand agency. Either the young lady’s behavior has been misunderstood by Beauplaisir and she was never consenting at all, or she had consented up to a point in time and now attempts to draw back, or she is unable to separate her internal volition from the external world it inhabits and wants what she doesn’t want. Haywood seems to suggest all three at once and to show, thereby, the difficulty of pinpointing this particular kind of volition in the abstract.”6
But the narrative does not brood about Fantomina’s loss of honour. Instead, Fantomina suggests that her injury can be compensated, not by money – Beauplaisir’s first impulse, given who he thinks Fantomina is, is to take out his purse – but by Beauplaisir’s future behavior: if he is “sincere and constant” to her, all will be well. They embark upon a love affair, to the satisfaction of both, until Beauplaisir, like the Restoration rake he is, begins to tire of his conquest: “The rifled Charms of Fantomina soon lost their Poinancy, and grew tastless and insipid,” we are told, and when the season for going to Bath approaches, he makes his excuses to go without her.
But Fantomina does not accept this rejection. Having masqueraded as a courtesan to win Beauplaisir, Fantomina now masquerades as Celia, a country girl of the working classes, and dressed in the appropriate “round‐ear’d Cap, a short red Petticoat, and a little Jacket of Grey Stuff,” and sporting a broad countrified accent, she seeks employment on her arrival in Bath in the very building where Beauplaisir is lodging. And Beauplaisir pursues Celia with the same ardor he had pursued Fantomina, and the love affair continues to the satisfaction of both parties, for another month, until Beauplaisir again becomes sated with his “new” conquest.
By this point, Fantomina is already anticipating Beauplaisir’s behavior, and she quits her job as a servant to prepare her next disguise. This time she dresses as the young widow of a Bristol merchant, in full mourning, and stations herself at an inn outside Bath where Beauplaisir’s carriage will stop on its way back to London, so that she can address him to help her in her distress. Ever courteous to beautiful women, Beauplaisir offers to assist her, and another “new” affair between them begins. On their arrival in London, Fantomina takes a different apartment to receive Beauplaisir as Mrs. Bloomer. She also writes to Beauplaisir as Fantomina, and is annoyed to find that he puts off meeting with until a later day because of unspecified “business,” and even more so when she discovers that his ardency and physical pleasure with her seems considerably less with her as Fantomina than that with which he had bedded the Widow Bloomer the previous night. Nevertheless, she has what she desires for the present, though yet again she is prepared for the waning of Beauplaisir’s affection and desire.
The final masquerade is as Incognita, the ultimate mystery woman who offers herself to Beauplaisir provided he come to her house – yet a third set of lodgings – and that he never see her face nor inquire after her name. The ruse succeeds, and, by wearing a mask at dinner and by making love in the dark and leaving him before dawn, she takes advantage of her novelty and frustrates Beauplaisir’s desire to find out more than she is willing to show.
As Incognita, she is enjoying Beauplaisir’s intense ardor, and is planning to drop the Fantomina and Bloomer personas (who receive only “insipid caresses” whenever Beauplaisir visits them), when she discovers that she is pregnant. Her mother arriving in London at this time, Fantomina no longer has the freedom of action she had before, and all of her plots are unraveled. Summoned by the mother, Beauplaisir has had no idea that he has been sleeping for months with a genteel lady of fashion, whom he recognizes from the royal court, and to whom he might well have paid his addresses as to a future wife. He offers to make amends by providing for the child he has begotten, but the mother dismisses this offer, and any further attentions to her daughter, whom she sends for her delivery “to a Monastery in France, the Abbess of which had been her particular Friend.”
Fantomina became an attractive text for third‐wave feminists today because of its embrace of both female agency and the performative nature of desire and sexuality. The heroine wants to gaze as well as be gazed at, candidly desires sexual satisfaction and though herself faithful to her only lover, energetically performs a series of characters – courtesan, servant‐girl, bourgeoise widow, and lady of fashion – in order to keep exciting the desire of the fickle Beauplaisir. As she says to herself toward the end of the narrative – and it is the most explicit piece of moralizing, if one can call it that, in the novella: “[T]he most violent Passion, if it does not change its Object, in Time will wither: Possession naturally abates the Vigour of Desire, and I should have had, at best, but a cold, insipid, husband‐like Lover in my Arms; but by these Arts of passing on him as a new Mistress whenever the Ardour, which alone makes Love a Blessing, begins to diminish, for the former one, I have him always raving, wild, impatient, longing, dying.”
And its denouement is sufficiently ambiguous: Fantomina goes off to have her baby in “a Monastery in France,” and although defenders of female agency, like Mary Ann Schofield, read this ending as a hint that in France, with its own aristocratic court, Fantomina will only find a larger and even more elaborate sphere of action to pursue her transgressive desires, other readers, like Alexander Pettit, take Fantomina’s mother as Haywood’s moral raisonneur and the prescribed voyage to France as the mother’s final gesture washing her hands of her guilty daughter. The truth may lie somewhere in between: the denouement may be Haywood’s admission that anatomy is indeed destiny, limiting the freedom of action of women who might wish to emulate the Restoration rake, but Fantomina’s masquerades suggest a way of rekindling marital desire for eighteenth‐century belles who have grudgingly agreed, like Congreve’s Millamant, to “dwindle into a wife.”
Once primarily known as a minor author satirized by Alexander Pope in Book II of the Dunciad, where she holds two love‐children and participates in the pissing contest, Eliza Haywood is now considered one of the major female writers of the eighteenth century. Like Aphra Behn, Haywood lived by her pen, continued to write fiction into the 1750s, moving from amatory narratives like Love in Excess and Fantomina to political satire – her 1736 Adventures of Eovaai was a spoof on Robert Walpole – and to parody in her Anti‐Pamela, or Feign’d Innocence Detected (1741), one of the many comic ripostes to Richardson’s Pamela. But Haywood learned a great deal about plot construction and the deployment of an omniscient narrator from Richardson and Fielding, respectively, and her late novel, Betsy Thoughtless (1751), a comic novel of education, something like a female Tom Jones, is probably her most accomplished work.