Friday, June 12, 2009

Song for Fantomina

If anyone ever makes Eliza Haywood's novel into a movie, I fully expect that this song will be somewhere in the soundtrack. Fantomina, in a little blurb from wikipedia (because I'm too lazy to write one myself):

Fantomina; or Love in a Maze (1724) is a short story about a woman who assumes the roles of a prostitute, a maid, a widow, and a Lady in order to repeatedly seduce a man named Beauplaisir. Schofield points out that, “Not only does she satisfy her own sexual inclinations, she smugly believes that ‘while he thinks to fool me, [he] is himself the only beguiled Person’” (50).

Eliza Haywood (via amazon, further showing how I use sources that I would laugh at my students for using):

Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) (born Elizabeth Fowler) was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

I feel like this is a really obvious comparison (almost embarrassingly so), but at the same time realize that the number of people who have actually read Fantomina is pretty low. Whenever I hear it I think about the book. . . Jackie knows the book better than I do but I don't know if she knows the song.

Also, does anyone know how to simply post a song without doing it via youtube? I'm sure there's a website out there that has the same embedding capabilities but only for audio?

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