Although Haywood may attack the stereotypes of class distinction and other labels by framing them in terms of her disguises, we nevertheless find her drawing upon stereotypes of gender throughout much of Fantomina. In this passage, these stereotypes manifest in her portrayal of the relationship between man and woman in sexual intercourse as subject and object, respectively. For instance, the notion that one can “hinder” a man implies an agency in him not given to women. Furthermore, Haywood depicts sex as a one-sided experience whereby the woman is “enjoy’d” by the man. Thus, the woman – according to the passage – is nothing but an object of male pleasure subservient to the supremacy of the man in his actions.

Haywood is not alone in her stereotypes: the subject-object relationship between men and women described in this passage can be found in other works published around the same time as Fantomina. For his 1751 art piece “The Four Stages of Cruelty” William Hogarth portrays a violent mob of pitchfork-wielding men standing before the unmoving body of a woman on the ground before them. By orienting the gaze and limbs of the mob in the direction of the unconscious woman, Hogarth quite literally makes her into an object of their attention. Likewise, he presents the mob of men as subjects through the contrast of color and sharply defined contours which draw the eye of the audience towards the shining bald head of their leader and the faces crowded around him. Haywood may have deviated from her critique of stereotypes, but she did so in accordance with the prevailing understanding of gender expressed by many of her contemporaries.

William Hogarth, “Gender and Crime,” Enlightenmens, accessed February 13, 2020, https://enlightenmens.lmc.gatech.edu/items/show/408.

Haywood cleverly prepares the reader here for her argument in the passage by first juxtaposing it with an alleged counterargument. She begins with, “there are Men...” thereby generalizing her male audience as the source of this counterargument without directly calling attention to the opinions of the reader. Haywood then couples her generalization with the hyperbole of “Impossibility” so that later on she need only refute an extremity – that some Men “swear it an Impossibility” – to convince the audience of her point. Haywood may validate the particularity of Fantomina with this passage; nevertheless, the thesis in defense of that particularity is itself non-particular due to the basis it has in the stereotypes posed by Haywood.

The word "I" is arguably the most important word of this passage in context to both the greater Fantomina narrative and eighteenth century understandings of the mind.

When compared to the rest of Fantomina, the passage shown stands out as the only time when Haywood directly calls the attention of the audience to her perspective as narrator. Out of the 87 times that the personal pronoun “I” appears in the text, the only two that refer to the narrator appear here; Beauplaisir and the nameless lady with whom he shares his amour claim the rest through written or oral conversation between themselves and others. By the conventions of English grammar, Haywood therefore designates herself the literal and undisputed subject of this passage only.

When framed in terms of eighteenth-century ideas of the mind, the passage shown also reflects a newfound appreciation for particular human experience in English society that manifested in much more than just amusement fiction. In fact, it manifested in the English court system as early as 1640 through the Habeas Corpus Act: an act which allowed those accused of a crime to demand early justification of their conviction based on a cohesive alignment of otherwise disjointed circumstances.

Like English authorities of the eighteenth century, Haywood felt the need to validate her own series of disjointed and particularized experiences with which she composed Fantomina. She interjects just as Beauplaisir approaches the conclusion of his encounter with the Widow because of the seeming disconnect between his familiarity with her body and lack thereof with her actual identity. In other words, Haywood employs the first-person pronoun "I" so that she can prove the particularity of Fantomina to a contemporary audience that demands it from her.

Parliament of England, “The Habeas Corpus Act of 1640,” Enlightenmens, accessed February 13, 2020, https://enlightenmens.lmc.gatech.edu/items/show/226.

In the context of Fantomina, the word “Disguise” extends beyond physical appearance to include the behavior which the nameless female main character distorts in her presentation of each alter ego. Similar to how Haywood reveals the uncertainty of her own perspective with this passage, she employs the “Disguise” as a vehicle for the nuance and particularity of human experience. Rather than position the identity of the main character relative to class or gender, Haywood renders such labels irrelevant by requiring the reader to determine it only through the complicated experiences which the nameless female character endures in her amour with Beauplaisir.

When Haywood speaks of men and women in this passage, she implicitly refers to Beauplaisir and the nameless female character who together most often engage in the sexual acts expected of an eighteenth-century amour. For Haywood, then, a man who “enjoy’d” a woman in the context of Fantomina most likely derived some form of sexual pleasure from her. This view of sex through the lens of male pleasure reflects the preeminence of sentiment in eighteenth-century discourse on human experience.

One can see the important role sentiment played during the eighteenth century in how it permeated much of the amusement fiction published at the time. Just 21 years after Haywood, Conny Keybers would go on to write his novel “An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews”. Like Beauplaisir of Fantomina, the character of Squire Booby in Shamela demonstrates his clear inability to withhold the “Violence of [his] Passion” when in the presence of a young woman whom he has grown infatuated with. They both reflect the trope of the impassioned aristocrat: a young man of wealth unable to subdue his lesser passions in favor of virtue.

In addition, these men were known to let their sentiments guide them to states of anger, arousal, or both. Given the striking resemblance which the character of Beauplaisir bears to this common trope, Haywood undoubtedly made use of the versatility of “enjoy’d” to serve as a sentimental innuendo for the sexual pleasure men receive from women.

Keyber, Conny, “Excerpt from "An Apology For the Life Of Mrs. Shamela Andrews",” Enlightenmens, accessed February 13, 2020, https://enlightenmens.lmc.gatech.edu/items/show/367.

Paired together with “I”, the word “know” not only indicates the perspective of the narrator, but also communicates to the audience the explicit recognition that such a perspective must be born from experience. One could argue that in the eighteenth century to “know” was to recall an idea born from the sensations that Locke proposed as the foundation of human identity. In fact, the idea of human sensation in general had begun to appear in as early as the seventeenth century. In 1625, famed artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon published his first works on the subject, depicting four sensations through the still portrait of three men interacting in different scenes that each operationalized a sensation. Haywood and many others in the seventeenth century drew their interpretation of the mind from this long-standing body of work on sensation and identity that Locke and Rembrandt contributed to. When Haywood begins with “I know” in this passage, she therefore indicates that the ideas which she will express must be particular to the sensation-derived experiences which define her identity.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, “Sensation: Rembrandt’s First Paintings,” Enlightenmens, accessed February 13, 2020, https://enlightenmens.lmc.gatech.edu/items/show/23.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "captive" as "To captivate, enthrall (the understanding, reason, affections, will, etc.)."