i've reached the point of sleep deprivation and caffeine intake where i truly believe that my rudimentary understanding of intermediate statistics makes me the absolute smartest human being on earth, while simultaneously a darkness is closing in and my vision is slowly narrowing down to a pinpoint and i don't know how many more steps are left before sudden, painful death but i assume it won't be much longer
The only critic who seems to totally shut down any notion of agency is Helen Thompson, whose purely materialist examination of Fantomina proposes that agency is the product of something which does not exist, and that the actions of both characters in the story are strictly that of biological imperative. Pointing to Charleton’s
The Ephesian Matron as an exemplary materialist text,
23 Thompson suggests that Fantomina is exclusively a story of bodies substituting for bodies, and that it therefore celebrates the transitory and physical natures of lust and love. Her arguments are compelling – for example, she suggests that “Rather than exchanging hyperbolically indifferent objects, Haywood produces a series of whole bodies from what would seem the scant resources of one body, gratifying Beauplasir’s lust while fantastically extending her heroine’s love” and that Fantomina “draws upon the materialist logic of whole bodies to become for [Beauplasir] a succession of different objects,” which conjure up the ideas of multiplicities of identity surrounded around the single feminine form that Beauplasir haplessly fails to recognize as the same time and time again while also arguing that the point of the story is that failure to recognize, that the story’s sexual freedom comes from the anonymous and repeated substitution of one body for itself as opposed to the multiplicity of female identities belonging to said bodies.
24 Even more compelling is that Thompson’s eventual conclusion that the multiple identities of “Fantomina” paired with the same body repeatedly generates a free-associative sexual desire which makes Beauplasir what we’ll call for the sake of emphasis
outrageously horny, although Thompson also concludes that Beauplasir’s enflamed desire is Fantomina’s goal in reproducing and disguising herself repeatedly and – let’s face it – we hardly need her to tell us that.
23. Thompson, Helen. “Plotting Materialism: W. Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron, E. Haywood’s Fantomina, and Feminine Consistency.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 35.2. (2002.) 198. Published in 1659, Charleton’s Ephesian Matron, according to Thompson, demonstrates a materialist, Epicurean philosophy with regard to sex; that is, that one body is as good as any other. The fulfillment of desire is matter on matter, nothing more.24. Ibid., 200 and 202, respectively.