The Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina: Performing Femininity through the Masquerade

Abstract

The eighteenth-century in Britain was a time in which women’s attempt to liberate themselves sexually was inevitably punished. It is in this context that Eliza Haywood publishes Fantomina, a novel that reverses the deeply rooted gender roles and patriarchal sexual power relations. The aim of this paper is both to study critically, from a feminist approach, the social construction of the feminine and how Haywood defends female sexuality by dismantling eighteenth-century expectations for women not to resist male fetishistic gaze. The masquerade, the carnivalesque, resistance to male voyeurism, self-display, mimicry and the performativity of gender are essential concepts this dissertation analyses thoroughly. The upper-class protagonist, Fantomina, plans a stratagem to masquerade her identity and to ultimately seduce a man, Beauplaisir, by turning him into the object of her sexual gaze and power. Moreover, this essay proves how Fantomina’s performance of her masquerade, which is cheerful, shares some elements with the carnivalesque, namely its temporality.