The story of this article roughly revolves around a woman named Fantomina and a man named Beauplaisir. The general narrative of the story is that Fantomina, a beautiful and noble woman, is attending the Playhouse. Rather than watching the play, she observes the behavior of the aristocratic males also attending the theatre, watching how they react to the prostitutes in the ‘Pit’ below. The protagonist muses how some men could have such high class and manners, yet act depravedly. So she decided to imitate The behavior of a prostitute showing how popular she would be with men. Then she met Beauplaisir and had sex with him by playing different roles. But Beauplaisir has no deep doubts about it. Eventually, Fantomina became pregnant with his child and refused Beauplaisir’s concern.
But the article has some interesting details. For example, the author writes: “imagining a world of satisfaction to herself in engaging him in the character of such a one, and in observing the surprise he would be in to find himself refused by a woman who he supposedly granted her favors without exception.” With this evidence, we can learn that it reveals her desire to occupy a position of power. She takes pleasure in the idea of undermining Beauplaisir’s sense of control and dominance by turning him down after leading him to expect that she will have sex with him. But there are The clip shows that a protagonist is a traditional person in the beginning, and she wants to protect her purity and virtue. But in the end, it was also guided by the yearning for happiness and freedom to become a different kind of person.
Another example will be “Thus did the lady’s vivacity and wit assist her in all but where it was most needful. She had the discernment to foresee and avoid all the ills which might attend the loss of her reputation. Still, she was wholly blind to those of the ruin of her virtue, and having managed her affairs so as to secure the one, grew perfectly easy with the remembrance she had forfeited the other.” From this quote, we can see that she is remarkably intelligent and calculating, and yet at the same time, she can be very naïve. She readily comes up with a lie that ensures no one will know she has spent the night with Beauplaisir and is able to devise a plan enabling her to continue seeing him in secret. In fact, because the protagonist is so confident that she can successfully have an affair while escaping social consequences, she seems to very quickly recover from any guilt or distress she might have felt when she first had sex with Beauplaisir.
