Many critics have argued that the punishment of Fantomina at the end of Haywood’s novella has conformed this book to the Eighteenth-Century gender bias that male promiscuity is acceptable but female promiscuity must be punished: “… ‘in the melancholy reiteration of female defeat at the hands of the fictionalizing male libertine’, Fantomina provides only a temporary respite from the ultimate persecution necessarily awaiting the seduced maiden” (Croskery 25). This defeatist and anti-feminist view of Fantomina can be contradicted in the notion that in punishing the heroine, Haywood employs a literary technique that “While the disapproving rhetoric that surrounds oppositional, subversive, or inflammatory statements ostensibly disarms them, those statements are themselves nevertheless conveyed verbatim to the reader who is the ultimate arbiter and who absorbs them in any case” (Behrendt 30). In other words, Haywood places the radical idea of an intelligent, sexually aware female who is in control of her own situation into the psyches of her readers which could not be easily erased from their minds. However, Haywood places the proper moral ideals at the end of the novel in order to protect herself as an author within her male dominated society.
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