Fantomina

The Lady’s behavior seems in many ways rebellious, for a woman of her time and social class. She is having sex outside of marriage, and she is deceiving both her lover and the people in her social circle. She also going out of her way—literally, by renting one distant lodging after another—to keep these deceptions separate from her real life. At a certain point, however, the deceptions become her real life because she cannot imagine her life without Beauplaisir. Only her domineering mother’s return from Europe serves to bring her back to her roots.

However, the Lady’s increasingly desperate machinations around Beauplaisir are not so much a rebellion as they are an attempt to master a social game that is rigged against women. At one point in the story, she congratulates herself on having found the perfect solution for keeping a lover’s interest, a challenge at which so many other women have failed:

She made herself, most certainly, extremely happy in the Reflection on the Success of her Stratagems […] She had all the Sweets of Love, but as yet had tasted none of the Gall, and was in a State of Contentment, which might be envy’d by the more Delicate (Paragraph 21).