Would We Know? Would We Care?

Two books about sex without love

Fantomina by Eliza Haywood and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Eliza Haywood is, without doubt, one of the greatest writers of her time. That time being the one which gave us what we now call ‘the modern novel.’ But Haywood is better than that; she’s one of our brightest producers of prose fiction more generally. Fantomina is not really a novel. It’s too short for that. But hardly is it anything else. Instead, what I’ll tell you about it is, one, that it is fabulously written, a genuinely excellent story — funny, shocking, intriguing — and, two, that it is about one of those questions that most people never ponder, or ponder a little when very adolescent and then give up as absurd.

The idea, essentially, is played on the broadest possible wavelength as a great female deceit — akin to one of the stories from myth. A wronged woman (and aren’t they all wronged, folks?) takes a kind of strange experimental revenge on her brutish lover (a rapist, in our modern language) who is ever deserting her. Their first meeting is one of her coquetry derailed by his violence. It’s terrible. This man is Beauplaisir. And he’s soon off.

But then our heroine has an idea. She will impersonate a new woman every so often, win his affections in her new guise — go as far as to consummate their union — and when he inevitably looks to stray (they are so flighty, aren’t they? cheats), she will reappear in a new disguise, in an entirely new form and persona, win his heart and make him believe there is only her in the world — a total novelty, mysterious and unlike any he has ever met before.

Some of these guises will be incidental — a servant in the house in which he stays, a widowed woman he encounters on the road — and some will be more theatrical. Fantomina is itself a nom de guerre. Another, used by he same woman, is ‘Incognita,’ which might lay it on a little thick.

This is a fantastic story and it’s well told in a way I can’t fully describe. You could read it in half an hour if you end up as rapt as I was.

But there is one question, underlying all of this, that I think requires a little interrogation. If we concede that most people (or even just most men) grow fairly instantly bored by their romantic pursuits and seek diversion and novelty — and I don’t think we can grant this, not at all — another basic assumption emerges.

That there are enough people in this world to make the story plausible who can sleep with the same person quite a lot, in quite a lot of different situations, and never notice the resemblance between their many paramours.

I’ve discussed this and the following solutions have been suggested..

One, that we must remember the time this story was written. People wore a lot of clothes back then, and identity was at least in part a question of the sartorial and sumptuary. People are as they appear, and if they’re never without their outerwear — and even wearing as mask on occasion, as our heroine does — any disguise can be kept up.

I’m not sure I buy it. But perhaps that’s what we need to keep the fiction working.

And the other idea, of course, is that so much of romance is imagined and fantasy that all one partner needs to do to make the other believe something is to suggest it. That all of sex is essentially in the mind and that the mind can be very easily influenced. The human brain is not built for objectivity. It is built for impressions. And those impressions can be messed with very simply, as we all know to our cost in life.

This seems more plausible.

And, of course, it’s possible that Beauplaisir is simply stupid, or so self absorbed as to be essentially incurious. That he takes all of these separate occurrences and encounters either as his own good luck not to be questioned, or as his right. We’ve all met one or two people who live — or hope to live — like that.

What Haywood wanted us to believe, who can say?

Another book vaguely on this subject is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is built around the closet drama of a small part of a birth-starved totalitarian system. In this future state, some women, who are hoped to be fertile, are repeatedly raped in a systematic way by high-ranking officers of the regime, while the barren wives of those officers hold them down.

It’s a poor book, boring in structure and tone, not deserving of the praise it’s received, the awards, the many and varied multimedia adaptations. The book is hopelessly dated, clearly a product of the period ending in the mid 1980s. Some of the characters are interesting. Some of the ideas are intriguing. But not many. It’s all quite banal.

Dystopia is generally a kind of role play, in fiction or in the streets. It’s strangely comforting, imagining the end of the world. Imagining that when the end comes it will prove you right and reveal the hell and horror of the people who don’t think like you. No wonder this book attracts people who like to attend protest marches in costume.

It’s a fantasy, in a way. Not real but what some people want to imagine is real. What is just around the corner but never arriving — a totem, a great terror, a reason to march.

Dismiss these fantasies if you like. I will. But as Eliza Haywood would tell us, play down others people’s fantasies at your peril. They’re more powerful and more dangerous than you’d think.