Fantomnia

 Fantomnia, shows the struggle of being a woman in the 1700’s and how little men paid attention. In the novel, the protagonist disguises herself as four different women to see how men would interact with each different character. I found this such a clever aspect of the story and ahead of it’s time. I feel as though this part of the story could be used as a social experiment today. The first disguise she used was as a prostitute. She meets Beauplaisir, who she has meant before, but due to the constraints of “proper society” the interactions w/ere very different. Beauplaisir believes that she is a prostitute and when the protagonist meets with him the next night Beauplaisir ends up forcing himself on her after she tries to stop the interaction because she was a virgin and did not want to be “ruined”. By Beauplaisir forcing himself on her it shows what little regard he had for the woman after she told him that she did not want to have sex with him. Later on, the narrator follows Beauplaisir to Bath and works as a maid at the Inn he was staying at. He sees her there and does not recognize her and tries to romance her, while she is the one manipulating him to do what she wants until he tiers of her and leaves. The narrator takes on two more disguises and meets Beauplaisir as both those people, and he does not see that all these women he has been with are the same person. I would say that Eliza Haywood was commenting on how little men pay attention, and more specifically how little men pay attention to women. Haywood never married, but she did have affairs like the protagonist in the novel. She never went as far as to disguise herself, but I do believe that this novel was a loose commentary on her actual life.