Fantomina

While the tone of this story is straightforward and sincere, there is considerable comic irony in the Lady’s predicament, and in her increasingly strenuous efforts to ensnare Beauplaisir. She expends great energy in order to appear distant and mysterious, as when she runs after his carriage so that she can then present herself to him as a grieving widow, preoccupied with her dead husband and her stolen inheritance and as a woman uninterested in romance. Likewise, she woos Beauplaisir from a distance as Incognita, sending him a letter and luring him to the house that she has rented while also telling him that he can never know her name or see her face.

While these stratagems seem absurd, they are only slightly more extreme versions of what many unmarried young women in the Lady’s world must do, in order to win husbands and to survive in a rigid and hypocritical society. The Lady simply does not quite understand how the world around her works, and so her manipulations are more desperate and less fine-tuned than those of her wealthy friends. She is described at the beginning of the story as an innocent from the country, and it is a further irony in the story that it is her unworldliness that leads her into assuming the role of prostitute.