A Diagnosis for Fantomina: Is it Love or Monomania?
"TRAYTOR! (cry'd she,) as soon as she had read them, 'tis thus our fond, silly, believing Sex are serv'd when they put Faith in Man: So had I been deceiv'd and cheated, had I like the rest believ'd, and sat down mourning in Absence, and vainly waiting recover'd Tendernesses. -- How do some Women (continued she) make their Life a Hell, burning in fruitless Expectations, and dreaming out their Days in Hopes and Fears, then wake at last to all the Horror of Despair? -- But I have outwitted even the most Subtle of the deceiving Kind, and while he thinks to fool me, is himself only the beguiled Person. . . .
INDEFATIGABLE in the Pursuit of whatsoever her Humour was bent upon, she had no sooner left her new-engag'd Emisssties, than she went in search of a House for the compleating of her Project." -- Fantomina, pages 59 and 62
"The self will only be convinced of its own worth by the faultless devotion of another. Jealous monomaniacs hold themselves and their victims to impossibly high standards. The severity with which the jaloux berates the alleged infidel explodes with the violence of a religious inquisition. Aggressive jealousy can be a great cover up for the self's actual loss of control. While a majority of forsaken individuals bear their fate stoically, monomaniacal lovers devise rigid strategies to trump their relationship's breakdown and make it look like somebody else's failure or weakness. These strategies, themselves powerful idée fixes, are terrific diversions against the intolerable act of waiting, of not knowing. A full-time operation, they involve setting up multiple tricks and traps to contain or confront the fugitive, great focal points that will end up deflecting energy from the self onto the other. Born out of anxiety, the acts of stalking or trailing, eavesdropping, or spying, end up alleviating restlessness and grant a sense of mission or purpose. So this detective work gives birth to an alternative world, an ordered universe that is structured and nourished by the very doubts that had undermined it. The dread of not knowing makes way for the desire to know something for sure." -- Zuylen, Monomania, PDF page 11
Whether or not Fantomina was actually in love with Beauplaisir has been a central argument in the analysis of her extreme motives in that text. The alternative, of course, is that she was obsessed. Obsessed with what, though? With Beauplaisir himself? Or was she addicted to the feeling of being desirous, new, and exciting? I would argue that it's a combination of the two. She was obsessed with feeling desirous to Beauplaisir specifically, chiefly because he was such a conquest. Time and time again, Fantomina proved the transience of male affection, and how little control she actually had over his "love." Thus, she devised several "tricks and traps" to bolster her own feelings of control and allure, in part in retaliation to the discovery of Beauplaisir's infidelity. In this case, the "impossibly high standards" that she holds herself and Beauplaisir to stem from her naive assumption that Beauplaisir would have had any lasting relationship with her under her initial guise of Fantomina. In that setting, social hierarchies and reputation were everything, and Beauplaisir would have been all too aware of the impractiability of continuing a relationship with an unheard of, mysterious girl in society, especially one who masqueraded [ if she wasn't lying about that, of course ] as a prostitute, the lowest of the low. Her disguises and traps became more and more intricate in proportion to how much she felt control slipping from her.
Zuylen's description of monomania and the jealous lover immediately evoked the tale of Fantomina, and helpfully so: Fantomina could not be considered a love story by any means, so this definition of a fixation "in an otherwise sound mind" helps to pardon Fantomina's extreme behavior, and give credibility to Haywood.
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