Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)

The first reading for this class will be Eliza Haywood's fiction of amorous intrigue, Fantomina, first published in 1724. At the height of her career, Haywood was--along with Daniel Defoe--one of the best-selling authors in England. She was well-known as a writer of "romance" "novels," the nature of which we'll discuss in class. The text of Fantomina is available on our Blackboard site, accompanied by a useful introductory essay by John Richetti. You may also want to see what's available on Haywood in the Literature Resource Center (login required), or read a brief biography. "Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," a website put together by students at the University of Michigan, also gives an interactive overview of female authorship during the century, starting with Haywood.

As you read, consider some of the following questions:

1. What different roles does Fantomina take, and how do they seem to relate to or build upon each other? Why do you think she takes these roles, as opposed to any others? What forms of agency or power does each character have or seem to have in the text? Why does she change her name with her identities; do we even know her “real” name?
2. One of the repeated images in this text is experimentation. Where does this occur? What does “experiment” mean to you? In this text? What ideas in the text seem related to experimentation, and why? Look these words up in the OED, or in Johnson’s eighteenth-century Dictionary of the English Language. What useful historical senses do they have?
3. Of what class is Fantomina? Beauplaisir? How is class explored in the text? Keep in mind that possession is often associated with class division, as are labor and work.
4. What role does masquerade play in this text? How does it seem to function? Note that a “masquerade” is also an event, a form of leisure entertainment particular to the eighteenth century.
5. What is the role of the embedded letters (another level of discourse) in Fantomina?
6. What tone does the narrator seem to take towards Fantomina? Towards the events that unfold?
7. When does Fantomina’s mother show up in the text, and what effect does that have? Where is she throughout? Where is Fantomina’s father?
8. Under what circumstances does Fantomina go into labor, and what effect does that have? What is the sex of her child, and why?
9. How does the fiction end? Does the text seem to encourage us to “read” the ending in a particular way, or are there complications, questions? After reading the ending, go back to the beginning—do you learn anything new about the opening?
10. Where, ultimately, does power—class-based, gendered, and so on—seem to reside in the text? How does the action of the plot and/or the narrator’s take on the events she retells confirm or complicate that location of power?
11. Haywood’s fictions were immensely popular in the early 18th century; she and Daniel Defoe were the two bestsellers of the period. What do you think might have made her work so interesting to early modern readers?