[In the following essay, Roulston examines the interrelationship between femininity and the romance genre as well as between the novel and the romance.]

In recent years, Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote has received growing critical attention as a work which addresses the complex relationship between femininity and the romance form.¹ Published at a time when the distinction between romance and the novel was still ill-defined, Lennox's novel stages the confrontation between these two literary genres as one which is indelibly bound up with the question of gender representation. In his introduction to Romance and the Novel 1700-1800, Ioan Williams argues that “critics were agreed in distinguishing between the novel and the romance as between realistic and idealistic fiction, though the term ‘romance’ was still used in a more general way” (5-6). If romance is ideal and the novel is real, the mutual exclusivity of the two terms also makes them interdependent, in that the one serves as the negative space of the other. In Lennox's text, the real becomes a privileged masculine space which the feminine can only imitate paradoxically through the ideal form of romance. Romance, however, then takes on a specific narrative agency of its own which challenges the assumptions of realist discourse.

The tension between the literary modes of romance and the novel is already inscribed, to some extent, in the very process of The Female Quixote's composition. Charlotte Lennox published The Female Quixote in 1752, in the wake of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and it is known that she received help and advice from Richardson, the foremost novelist of the period. In a letter from Richardson to Lennox written on 13 January 1752, he appears to be responding to her suggestion that Clarissa itself should be used to effect the cure of Arabella, the deluded heroine of The Female Quixote. Richardson reacts negatively to this possible suggestion, writing:

It is my humble opinion, that you should finish your heroine's cure in your present vols. The method you propose, tho' it might flatter my vanity, yet will be thought a contrivance between the author of Arabella, and the writer of Clarissa, to do credit to the latter.²

Whether Richardson is writing out of false modesty or genuine concern, he suggests that figuring Clarissa as the cure for The Female Quixote would cause the former narrative to supersede and to overshadow the latter. Clarissa would become the solution to and the cure for romance, hence positioning itself as that which should be read not only in place of the French romances, but in place of The Female Quixote itself.

In fact, although Clarissa is not explicitly designated as a conversionary text by the novel, it is nevertheless alluded to by the pious doctor, modelled on Samuel Johnson, who effects Arabella's cure in the final chapter:

Truth is not always injured by Fiction. An admirable Writer of our own Time, has found the Way to convey the most solid Instructions, the noblest Sentiments, and the most exalted Piety, in the pleasing Dress of a Novel.

(377)

Clarissa, the most widely read novel of the mid-eighteenth century, therefore still becomes a reference point by which the operations of Lennox's own text can be examined. Unlike Arabella, who interprets the real through the romance form, thereby distorting it, Richardson offers “truth … in the pleasing Dress of a Novel”. On the one hand, the metaphor of the dress eroticises the act of reading, implying that the naked truth can be laid bare once the dress has been removed. On the other hand, the dress, as a trope for the novel form itself, remains necessary for the deployment of an authentic sentimental landscape, and cannot be removed without violating the “truth” of the novel's content.³ The ambivalence of such a metaphor points to the ambivalent status of fiction itself for the eighteenth-century reader and critic, as precariously oscillating between the polarities of “falsehood” and “truth”, “deception” and “instruction”. Clarissa, as an antidote to romance, is itself equally imbued with the traces of this genre, the “dress” which both veils and unveils the “truth” of the emerging novel form.

Lennox further inscribes this ambivalence by having Clarissa serve as an implicit model within one of Arabella's own adventures. In an early attempted escape, Arabella reasons as follows:

she thought it both just and reasonable to provide for her own Security, by a speedy Flight: The Want of a Precedent, indeed, for an Action of this Nature, held her a few moments in Suspense; for she did not remember to have read of any Heroine that voluntarily left her Father's House, however persecuted she might be.

(35)

As Janet Todd has pointed out⁴, any reader of fiction in Lennox's time would have caught the allusion to Clarissa and Arabella's own negation of it. Clarissa here is being simultaneously invoked and denied, as a narrative which is implicitly being read within the romance paradigm and yet which violates its codes, for a virtuous heroine does not leave her father's house. The heroine of Clarissa therefore performs an act without “precedent” in romance, and hence paradoxically Richardson's novel cannot serve as a model text for Arabella. At the same time, however, Clarissa's dramatic escape marks the moment which borrows most explicitly from the romance form, framed as it is as a fanciful adventure narrative of virtue in distress, with Clarissa succumbing to imaginary fears:

Now behind me, now before me, now on this side, now on that, turned I my affrighted face in the same moment; expecting a furious brother here, armed servants there, an enraged sister screaming and a father armed with terror in his countenance, more dreadful than even the drawn sword which I saw or those I apprehended. I ran as fast as he, yet knew not that I ran.⁵

Indeed, such a passage could equally well have been quoted by Arabella after one of her imaginary adventures, thus repositioning this particular episode of the Richardson text in the space between romance and parody. The specific event from Clarissa invoked by The Female Quixote therefore serves to maintain an ambivalent reading of the former's function as a model anti-romance text.

How, then, does Lennox's own work fit into this ambivalent approach to the role and function of the novel? What part is the “pleasing Dress” and what the “truth” or “moral instruction”? Can the form simply be separated from the content under the auspices of a Johnsonian logic? Indeed, the formal construction of The Female Quixote already appears to have effected the separation between truth and fiction for the reader; on the one hand, there is the fictional romance narrative embodied by Arabella, and on the other the mimetic representation of eighteenth-century society. Arabella's narrative is clearly the metaphoric “dress” or ornamentation which must be removed in order for the novel to attain its significance and legitimation. As Laurie Langbauer has argued in her discussion of the novel:

The utility of romance consisted precisely in its vagueness; it was the chaotic negative space outside the novel that determined the outlines of the novel's form. To novelists, and, they hoped, to their readers, the novel was unified, probable, truly representational because romance was none of these. The contrast between them gave the novel its meaning.⁶

If the emerging novel form depends on romance as the negative confirmation of its own mimetic powers, then Lennox's novel would appear to be literalising the relationship between romance and realism, by explicitly positioning them next to each other.

While romance must ultimately be dismissed as improbable, it is nevertheless the “dress” of romance which makes the narrative take place, giving The Female Quixote not only its meaning but its literary agency. To strip the text of its clothing would be to remove its engagement with literary form as such, and its ability to signify as literature. The novel offers a commentary on and a critique of romance through the careful deployment of the romance form, so that “entertainment” and “instruction”, “fiction” and “truth” remain formally bound together by the narrative process itself. If what the narrative uncovers is the ostensible absurdity of romance, what romance reveals is that there can be no narrative without it. Indeed, in asking Arabella to abandon romance, the pious doctor dismantles both her literary and her social identities, hence effecting the closure of the text. As equally the vehicle for and the product of the romance form, Arabella's literary self is distinct and yet cannot be separated from her “actual” self, as the one determines the actualising of the other.

What this paper seeks to show in the light of these formal paradoxes are the ways in which, through this simultaneous critique and deployment of romance, the question of genre or literary identity becomes profoundly enmeshed with the issue of gender or sexual identity. To quote Langbauer again: “[romance] acts as a lightening rod for the anxieties about gender at the heart of every depiction of the sexes. Romance has traditionally been considered a woman's form”.⁷ In Lennox's novel, romance becomes “gendered” by having male and female protagonists embodying realist and romance forms respectively. The formal struggle for “true” representation is therefore duplicated by the gender struggle between Arabella and the male figures who are seeking to cure or to convert her to a proper feminine model. The question of genre, in this sense, is marked by the question of gender, in terms of who has the authority to legitimise particular modes of representation.

In the mid-eighteenth century, romance, more so than the novel, was considered to have a negative and corrosive effect on the female imagination. In this light, Fielding believed Lennox's Female Quixote to be a more convincing critique of romance than Cervantes's Don Quixote:

as we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentlemen … To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women … in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large Progress in the same Follies.⁸

For Fielding, it is the question of mimetic identification which is paramount; women would identify with Arabella and hence learn from her errors, whereas men would fail to identify with Don Quixote, on account of the improbability of his situation in the “actual” world. The effectiveness of the critique therefore depends on a direct correspondence between art and life, and a naturalising of the relation between women and romance. In this sense, Lennox's novel raises the question of whether romance should be seen to have a specifically feminine identity, as Fielding's comments seem to suggest. For Fielding, Lennox puts romance back in its rightful place by representing it through Arabella who, unlike Don Quixote, becomes a “natural” victim of romance texts. A closer reading of the opening of the novel, however, reveals the careful way in which Arabella's entry into romance comes about as the result of an “unnatural” or artificial context, rather than being naturally or organically determined.

We are first told that Arabella's father, who has lost favour at court, has “resolved to quit all Society whatever, and devote the rest of his Life to Solitude and Privacy” (5). This withdrawal takes place in a castle “in a very remote Province of the Kingdom … and several Miles distant from any Town” (5-6). The distinction between romance and historical realism is already blurred by this deliberately remote and unlocatable context.

The world created by the father, in fact, is emphatically anti-historical and governed by an artifice intended to disguise and to transform its relation to the real. This is brought to the foreground by the father's conversion of his grounds into a wild, natural landscape: “The most laborious Endeavours of Art had been used to make [the grounds] appear like the beautiful Product of Wild, uncultivated Nature” (6). In parallel with the art of the novelist, who uses artifice to reproduce an alternative reality, Arabella's father seeks artificially to re-create an original nature, whose symbolic purpose is to erase the contemporary, historical world by which he has been rejected. In both cases, artifice is used as a means of transforming the real, in order to produce a desired alternative. Arabella, in this sense, is brought into a romance world, in so far as it is one which separates itself from contemporary reality. It is the father who founds the romance architecture of disassociation into which his daughter will be born. The act of romance reading, in turn, becomes an imitation of, as well as an escape from, that original context. The opening chapter, therefore, can be read as a metaphor critiquing the secluded education of daughters in the eighteenth century.

Arabella's deviation from the real caused by her romance reading is therefore problematised by this a priori setting governed by artificial parameters. At the same time, she is educated by a father who “resolved to cultivate so promising a Genius with the utmost Care” (6), so that she

soon became a perfect Mistress of the French and Italian Languages, under the Care of her Father; and it is not to be doubted, but she would have made a great Proficiency in all useful Knowledge, had not her whole Time been taken up by another Study.

(7)

This other study, while eluding the father's care, is nevertheless the result of his ambivalent legacy. To begin with, Arabella's deviation from true knowledge takes place in the father's library, “which was large and well furnished” (6). She is allowed “the Use of his Library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great Store of Romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad Translations” (7). What Arabella discovers in the library, therefore, is not truth but fiction. The library, like the father's garden, is not what it seems; not only is it filled with romances, but ones in “very bad Translations”, rendering useless Arabella's knowledge of French, and hence negating the legitimacy of her father's education.

The opening chapter of the novel, therefore, offers an inverted world, in which the “real” is uncannily contained by the fictional. Each character, in fact, is producing a fictional universe as a way of bypassing the real; the father cultivates his garden while Arabella and her mother read romances. The Marchioness, we are told, reads them “to soften a Solitude which she found very disagreeable” (7). The forced isolation imposed by the father's fantasy of withdrawal reveals a “real” world that is uninhabitable, and which therefore requires the antidote of fiction. It is also the father who, “after [the Marchioness's] death … removed [the romances] from her closet into his library, where Arabella found them” (7). By being moved from a private to a public space—from the mother's closet to the father's library—the romances are made legitimate while simultaneously usurping the authority of the library as a place of knowledge. It is, in part, the context in which Arabella discovers the romances which allows her to “[suppose] Romances were real Pictures of Life” (7).

The inversions of the first chapter put into question the idea that false knowledge can safely be separated and distinguished from true knowledge or romance from realism. The “real picture of life” offered in the opening pages already operates as a questioning of how that “real picture” is constituted. The real has become a space which none of the characters seem desirous of inhabiting, hence Arabella's “dressing up” of the actual world as romance. Arabella, in this sense, follows her mother's legacy, but she also transforms it by literalising the relation between world and text. In her hands romance is transformed from fantasy into conduct manual: “By [romances Arabella] was taught to believe, that Love was the ruling Principle of the World; that every other Passion was subordinate to this; and that it caused all the Happiness and Miseries of Life” (7). By reading the code of courtly love literally, as an exemplum rather than as a literary event, Arabella effectively redefines its function as narrative.

As an ideological tool, the code of courtly love, in turn, allows the female subject to possess political agency through sexual power.⁹ One of the questions posed by the novel, therefore, is what happens when this code of courtly love, which offers an account of the world whereby love can redefine the economic model of circulation and exchange, is taken literally? What happens when the language of romance is read and used as knowledge rather than as fiction? By highlighting these questions, the novel ultimately dramatises the struggle for the appropriation of meaning itself, along gender lines.

When Arabella's father discovers her obsession with romances, his reaction is to try to burn her books. This marks one of the few direct echoes of Don Quixote, and it is significant that Lennox should choose the book-burning episode as the sign of literary continuity. By duplicating the moment when romance is being condemned as literary heresy and symbolically purged by fire, Lennox is both reinscribing the assumed dangers of romance to established authority, and parodying that very threat, for Arabella's books are saved from the fire by her lover Glanville, and therefore remain in circulation. However, while in Don Quixote the priest has a full knowledge of the books he is burning and recognises their value, neither Arabella's father nor Glanville have any knowledge of the texts with which they are dealing. For Glanville they are only the material markers of his love for Arabella, while his ignorance of their content alienates him from her favour, and delays the “actual” romance narrative.

At the same time, the saving of the romances does allow the symbolic continuation of Arabella's romance-based narration. The presence of the romance texts acts as a constant reminder of how the actual romance is to be scripted. Indeed, in accepting the restored romances from Glanville, Arabella inaugurates the relation of courtly love already inscribed within the romances themselves. Glanville assures the Marquis “that nothing could have happened more fortunate for him, than his intended Disposal of his Daughter's Books, since it had proved the Means of restoring him to her Favour” (57). In these lines Glanville has not only appropriated but internalised the romance idiom of being “restored to favour”, thereby already occupying the imaginary position of romance lover. By forcing Glanville to inhabit her romance paradigm, Arabella effectively controls the terms of his courtship.

This paradigm, however, is in direct conflict with the model of control sought by the Marquis, Arabella's father. Glanville's instructions are to engage in a brief courtship, as stated by the Marquis: “I will allow you … but a few Weeks to court her; Gain her Heart as soon as you can, and when you bring me her Consent, your Marriage shall be solemnized immediately” (31). The timeframe offered by the Marquis radically transforms the romance conception of time: phrases such as “a few weeks”, “as soon as you can” and “solemnized immediately” close rather than open up the vital space of courtship. Arabella's heart is to be “gained” by Glanville, the verb “gain” being synonymous with the notion of profit, forcing Arabella into a relation of exchange. Within the Marquis's vision, the idea of consent appears to be superseded by the concept of property.

The conflict defining the novel ultimately lies in Arabella's desire to turn this limited space of courtship and “gain” into an unlimited possibility through the romance form. Within eighteen-century parameters, the time of courtship constitutes the only period of female agency and autonomy, in which the female subject can control social relations. By assuming the role of romance heroine, Arabella “abuses” this time to make herself fundamentally unattainable; the fiction of this unattainability is then maintained through the conventions of romance, leading to control of the narrative action. In this way, Arabella becomes inscribed as author within her own fiction.

From this vantage point, she then places Glanville in a double role, as both reader of romance and actor within it. Each position serves to expand the time of courtship and to transform it into a dominant reality. This reality, in turn, emerges less through the act of reading than through the presence of the romances as material signifiers. More than the contents, Glanville fears, above all, the materiality of the romance texts: “Glanville no sooner saw the Girl return, sinking under the Weight of those voluminous Romances, but he began to tremble at the Apprehension of his Cousin laying her Commands upon him to read them” (49). The literality of the endless reading experience demanded by these romances becomes, in turn, a metaphor for the figuration of courtship as an infinite process. To enter into these narratives is to submit to an alternative time in which the male subject's agency is endlessly deferred. Within such a framework Arabella's heart, precisely, can never be “gained”.

Glanville, in fact, fails this test of re-education:

but, counting the Pages, he was quite terrified at the Number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them: Therefore, glancing them over, he pretended to be deeply engaged in reading, when, in Reality, he was contemplating the surprising Effect these Books had produced in the Mind of his Cousin.

(50)

Glanville here is not reading the romances, but reading Arabella's reading of them. Once again, his fear is that “real” time will be invaded by “narrative” time, precisely usurping the time of courtship, the “few weeks” Glanville has been allowed by the Marquis. The romance narrative therefore separates Glanville from Arabella as both a literal and a figurative stumbling block. While in the same room, sharing the same text which should reflect their mutual experience of romance, the romance narrative marks instead a failed moment of synthesis. Glanville soon reveals he has not been reading, when he mistakenly believes Orontes and Oroondates to be two different people, and having exposed himself as a fraudulent reader, he loses the favour he gained by saving the romances from the fire.

This scene of inauthentic reading, in turn, echoes and transforms a critical scene of reading in Pamela, Richardson's first novel, published in 1741. It is the scene in which Mr B., after several attempts against Pamela, obtains and reads her letters in her presence, and through this reading learns to become a proper lover. Pamela describes the scene as follows: “[He] seemed so moved, that he turned away his face from me; and I blessed this good sign, and began not so much to repent his seeing this mournful part of my story.”¹⁰ In Pamela, the reading experience is presented as both authentic and transparent, as Mr B.'s reading of the letters produces an insight into and an understanding of Pamela's private sufferings. As a result, Pamela can achieve Mr B.'s conversion through the privileged text of her letters, whereas in The Female Quixote it is Arabella who must deny her textual model and be converted back to the positions of Glanville and the Marquis.

The crucial difference between these two scenes is that in contrast to Pamela's “text”, Arabella's is not a reflection of her experience, but rather that of an already scripted textual universe. The fictional quality of Arabella's “reality” and her use of the romance idiom therefore leads only to parodic imitation rather than to conversion. Whereas Mr B. is reading Pamela's actual autobiography, Glanville is being asked to read a fictional text through which Arabella has filtered her own experience. On the one hand, therefore, the notion of an authentic narration is blocked in Lennox's novel by the prescriptive quality of romance itself, but on the other hand Arabella is using the romance paradigm to defer the very thing Pamela is trying to achieve, namely, marriage. This difference in the choice of self-representation underscores, in an important way, the radical departure of Lennox's narrative away from the conventional closure of romance itself, precisely through a parody of the romance form.

In this sense, Arabella's language of courtly love is politicised by means of the act of deferment, in which the moment of closure is strategically made to recede. The possibility of sexuality, therefore, is both ever-present and yet carefully suppressed, coding and monitoring desire through romance markers so that the “sex” of sexuality, in fact, never takes place. Within this model, Arabella is careful to explain to Miss Glanville the dangers of granting “criminal favours”:

criminal Favours, such as allowing Persons to talk to you of love; not forbidding them to write to you; giving them Opportunities of being alone with you for several Moments together; and several other Civilities of the like Nature, which no Man can possibly merit, under many Years Services, Fidelity, and Pains.

(183)

“Criminal favours” are marked as moments of physical closeness or intimacy, which threaten the temporal frame defined by “many Years Services, Fidelity and Pains”. The control of sexuality enables the relation between female beloved and male lover to be transformed into a feudal relation between lord and servant, in which the female beloved never becomes an object of exchange or subject to circulation. The underlying “danger” of romance in Lennox's novel is not so much the threat of sexual corruptibility, as the assumption of female power. As Janet Todd argues, Arabella's “mistake is like the coquette's, the assumption of too great female significance and social power” (152). Arabella redefines the position of the feminine by assuming the female subject's absolute and unquestioned centrality, while male figures revolve around the margins. Their marginal status, in turn, has the ambivalent effect of transforming romance into a profoundly anti-marital narrative on the one hand, and one equally marked by the strictest codes of virtue on the other. Within the logic of romance, love is dangerous and all men are potential ravishers because all women are virtuous. This is how Arabella misreads Mr Hervey, Edward the gardener and even her uncle as being profoundly interested in ravishing her, whilst she reads the sexually active Miss Groves, and a cross-dressed prostitute encountered in a park as virtuous women.

Arabella's misreading comes from the way in which female desire is conceptualised in heroic romance; the source of the romance heroine's identity lies in being able to incite desire without being subject to it, as Janet Todd points out in relation to Arabella: “The heroine she aspires to be is desirable and adored; she is abducted and rescued by men, but she does not actually desire herself”.¹¹ This absence of female desire is at the heart of Lennox's figuration of romance in The Female Quixote. Todd, in turn, suggests that Arabella is a non-desiring heroine because “she already has many of the attributes of the new sentimental heroine”¹², and also that “Arabella has the delicacy, even weakness, of proper femininity, finding it difficult to walk two miles outside the castle and swooning when she stumbles”.¹³ According to Todd, therefore, the representation of Arabella already includes the attributes required of the new sentimental heroine, qualities which will become fully realised once Arabella's conversion has taken place. However, reading the absence of desire from a sentimental perspective elides Lennox's strategic use of the heroic code, in which the absence of desire is not a mark of repression but rather a chosen act of will. It is only by maintaining the position of non-desiring subject that Arabella can claim the freedom of the romance heroine. Therefore, if Arabella resembles the sentimental heroine physically, she remains her intellectual opposite. Even her conversion is effected through rational debate rather than through emotive appeal. Arabella's physical weakness and beauty are presented rather as necessary to confirm a femininity which might otherwise be under threat.

The absence of desire in The Female Quixote, therefore, becomes less a mark of feminine modesty than a way of mapping out a space for the deployment of female authority. By eschewing desire, Arabella eschews relations of exchange altogether, being adored without having to return that adoration. As she claims: “Since Love is not voluntary … I am not obliged to any Person for loving me; for questionless, if he could help it, he would” (44). The question of responsibility, in the sense of “response-ability” to the desiring other, is erased under this fantasy of female autonomy which detaches the female subject from the binding necessity of desire. By holding no relation to the desiring subject, Arabella remains separate from that which she influences: “I must comfort myself … by the Reflection, that, with my own Consent, I contribute nothing to the Misfortune of those who love me” (175). Therefore, while manipulating the social through the language of romance, Arabella simultaneously positions herself beyond the markers of social exchange. Unlike the sentimental heroine, who suppresses her desiring self in order to submit to the patriarchal conception of femininity, Arabella transforms the model of desire itself, from one determined by love to one driven by power. The languages of romance and courtly love therefore become a way of masking the underlying operations of desire-as-power being deployed in the text.

Hence, when Mr Hervey, Arabella's first suitor, falls ill, she imagines his recovery in terms of a fantasy of authorial control rather than one of feminine nurturing: “he will recover, if I command him to do so: When did you hear of a Lover dying through Despair, when his Mistress let him know it was her Pleasure he should live?” (16). Arabella's “pleasure” is neither sentimental nor strictly feminine; it is the pleasure of the commanding subject to whom the commanded object submits. In the same vein, her deployment of romance law is fundamentally arbitrary and absolute, as she explains: “The Empire of Love … like the Empire of Honour, is governed by Laws of its own, which have no Dependence upon, or Relation to any other” (320). By operating within a self-referential frame, the law of romance can produce its own system of signification, just as Arabella endlessly reproduces her particular romance sequence, regardless of social “reality”. On the one hand, it is precisely this denial of social responsibility which the novel is critiquing, but at the same time it highlights the dilemma of occupying a female subject position. Since Arabella is excluded from legitimate structures of power, fantasising a female role with power becomes a critique of contemporary social conditions as much as of Arabella herself.

The language of romance therefore allows the possibility of an alternative “reality”, one which reveals that the struggle for agency is a struggle for language, and for who can control the way in which actions are to be read and interpreted. It is repeatedly language itself rather than the material world which becomes the site of conflict. When Arabella and Glanville hold a debate on the issue of beauty, it is the mode of its representation and not the quality of the represented object which is being contested:

Ah! Cousin, said [Glanville] to Arabella, [Sir George] is mad, to call the finest black eyes in the universe, fair … he must be little acquainted with the Influence of your Eyes, since he can so egregiously mistake their Colour.

And it is very plain, replied Arabella, that you are little acquainted with the sublime Language in which he writes, since you find Fault with an Epithet, which marks the Beauty, not the Colour, of those eyes he praises; for, in fine, Fair is indifferently applied, as well to Black and Brown eyes, as to Light and Blue ones, when they are either really lovely in themselves, or by the Lover's Imagination created so.

(188)

As Arabella reveals, romance epithets play insistently on the figurative quality of language, revealing the arbitrariness of the tie between the sign and its object, and hence disrupting any secure model of referentiality. At the same time, however, this makes the language of romance entirely prescriptive, as it assimilates particularly into its abstract frame as a way of subsuming difference to its own laws. Hence the “lover's imagination” must submit to the codes of romance in order for the beloved to be properly represented, and blue, brown or green eyes must become coded as “fair” in order for beauty to “take place” within romance's rhetorical universe.

The language of romance, therefore, transforms the actual into the figurative, simultaneously closing off access to the actual altogether. As a result, the novel becomes divided along the lines of a rational and an irrational discourse, with Arabella occupying the boundary between the two. She is read by the other characters as oscillating between madness and rationality, the madness being firmly seen as a product of her romance reading. When Arabella speaks the language of romance, Glanville believes that “this dear Girl's Head is turn'd” (41), Sir Charles thinks she is “out of her Senses” (259) and Mr Hervey sees her as “fit for a Mad-house” (157). Once again, in contrast to Pamela, Arabella tells a woman's story which cannot achieve a legitimate status. Her “madness” does not lie in the syntactical breakdown of her language as such, but in its inability to contain its masculine readers within its frames of reference. Therefore, while Pamela's story is written in isolation and then achieves public recognition, Arabella's stories are played out in public, only to have her reduced to the isolated realm of “madness”.

Arabella's madness is defined, as we have seen, in terms of the non-referentiality of the romance idiom, as when she claims that “The Empire of Love … is governed by Laws of its own” (320). Within this definition, the process of her cure effectively means the erasing of romance from the narrative through the return to the novelistic laws of probability. Prior to this narrative closure, however, Arabella encounters two figures who enter her rhetorical universe and participate in her “madness”. These are Sir George Bellmour and the Countess, who both engage with the form in specifically gendered ways, providing two strategic readings of romance; while Sir George appropriates the romance model to attempt Arabella's seduction, the Countess uses it to try to obtain her conversion. Each one seeks to engage Arabella away from romance through participation in the romance form, Sir George in order to betray its codes, and the Countess in order to reject them. Each strategic approach highlights the fact that romance invites a gendered interpretation of its own operations. Neither Sir George nor the Countess can escape their own position as gendered subjects in their engagement with the form.

Sir George, who invents a romance history for himself, chooses to ignore the romance codes of courtship and instead narrates a series of seductions. He can only inhabit the romance form from the perspective of the seducer, in contrast to Arabella's reading of it as an infinite deferral of the moment of seduction. Sir George consequently earns Arabella's dismissal:

and, looking upon myself, as dishonoured by those often prostituted Vows you have offered me, I am to tell you, that I am highly disobliged; and forbid you to appear in my Presence again, till you have resumed those Thoughts, which are worthy your noble Extraction; and are capable of treating me with that Respect, that is my Due.

(251)

Arabella makes use of the very romance codes Sir George has tried carefully to imitate in order to dismantle the ground of his narration. He is left “overwhelmed with shame and Vexation at having conducted the latter Part of his Narration so ill” (252). Sir George's awareness of romance as “story” rather than as “history” places him in a sustained parodic relation to the genre. He never becomes a subject of romance, and his failure to treat Arabella “with that Respect, that is [her] Due” reveals an inability to inhabit the genre from the inside. This misreading on Sir George's part highlights the gendered quality of romance production and consumption. He is unable to tell the story Arabella wants to hear, and it would appear that his gap in communication is the result of the gendered subject positions produced by the romance form itself. While Sir George can enter and exit the romance frame without loss of agency, Arabella can only acknowledge its status as fiction at the price of her own autonomy. In this sense, romance cannot have the same “significance” for Sir George and for Arabella respectively. Arabella inhabits and is inhabited by the language of romance and reads it as truth, whereas Sir George produces this language and reads it as fiction.

Both positions mark strategic ways of claiming particular forms of power which, in the case of Sir George, depends on distancing and detachment. When his narration is completed, Sir Charles and Mr Glanville place a strong emphasis on the fact that Sir George has been speaking as an author, not as a character of romance. Sir Charles exclaims: “Ods-heart! It is pity you are not poor enough to be an Author; you would occupy a Garret in Grub-Street, with great Fame to yourself, and Diversion to the Public” (252). It is critical for the male characters to confirm Sir George's detachment from and mastery over the genre, hence proving he has not been seduced by Arabella's fantasy. By analysing and critiquing Sir George's performance as a performance, they maintain the distinction between romance and realism, thereby keeping Arabella in the marginal realms of fiction and madness.

The Countess's use and appropriation of romance, on the other hand, does not engage with the need for mastery in the same way. When Arabella encounters the Countess, the mode of her narration is not easily determinable; it is neither emphatically parodic like Sir George's language, nor is it an authentic embodiment of romance, like Arabella's. When Arabella greets the Countess in hyperbolic romance terms, we are told that “the Countess who had not forgot the Language of Romance, return'd the Compliment in a Strain as heroick as hers” (325). Rather than being presented in terms of parody, the Countess's language is being placed within a historical frame, the verb “not forgot” suggesting a language which had once been in use but which now belongs to the past. Implicit in the phrasing of this sentence is the invocation both of a shared language and a shared history, one which excludes Sir Charles and Mr Glanville, leaving them “in extreme Confusion” (325). The sharing of the romance idiom between the Countess and Arabella creates an exclusively female space which threatens the parodic safeguard created by Sir George.

The Countess's phrasing serves to historicise romance by treating it as a valid discourse operating within a specific place and time. This translation of a fictional language into a historical one brings Arabella back from the margins of madness and restores her to a legitimate position. At the same time, however, her legitimation can only be fully endorsed once she agrees to put romance, as the Countess herself has done, in the absolute past. The Countess's role, therefore, is to help Arabella forget romance even as she herself returns to it, having “not forgot the Language”. The Countess steps backwards into fiction in order to help Arabella move forwards into history. What remains unspoken, however, is that entering history simultaneously becomes a form of self-erasure for the female subject. When Arabella asks the Countess to relate her “Adventures”, the latter replies:

And when I tell you…that I was born and christen'd, had a useful and proper Education, received the Addresses of my Lord—through the Recommendation of my Parents, and marry'd him with their Consents and my own Inclination, and that since we have liv'd in great Harmony together, I have told you all the material Passages of my Life, which upon Enquiry you will find differ very little from those of other Women of the same Rank, who have a moderate Share of Sense, Prudence and Virtue.

(327)

The Countess here offers Arabella an anti-romance and anti-heroic narrative which legitimates itself under the banner of female universality. Unlike Arabella's “singular” adventures, the Countess provides a blanket female narrative in which difference and individual history are erased. “[T]he material passages” of the Countess's life “differ very little from those of other Women”, revealing that the imperative of an accurate representation of contemporary society is to produce a homogeneous and ordered female history, in which there is literally nothing to tell.

The Countess's life, described in one paragraph, contrasts starkly to Arabella's action-packed adventures of ravishment and near-seductions which do indeed fill an entire book. The ideal model of the Countess, suggests that the eighteenth-century female subject should be without a narratable history, as her history or her-story is always private and hence bound up with a representation of the sexualised body. The space of romance, in turn, is one of the few places where this private female history can be represented, if only as a fiction. However, as the Countess points out to Arabella, it is scandalous to ask a female friend to narrate her adventures, as “[t]he Word Adventure carries in it so free and licentious a Sound in the Apprehensions of People at this Period of Time, that it can hardly with Propriety be apply'd to those few and natural Incidents which compose the History of a Woman of Honour” (327). Once again, by positioning romance in the past, the Countess is trying to naturalise contemporary female experience as uneventful and ultimately unnarratable. “[T]hose few and natural incidents” which make up a virtuous female history are erased precisely by the use of this non-specific phrase. It is for this reason that Miss Groves's maid has a great deal to tell about her mistress, whereas the Countess has little to narrate about herself.

Nevertheless, there remains an undecidable quality as to how we, as readers, are to interpret the Countess's instructions. Her emphatic erasing of female history coincides neither with Lennox's text nor with a persistent, although largely unpublished, tradition of biographies and autobiographies of virtuous women in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ As Elaine Hobby points out, these women were often risking their “femininity” by writing their histories, but they persisted in doing so.¹⁵ The Countess in The Female Quixote, therefore, can be seen as articulating a highly conservative view of virtuous femininity, which relegates women's history to fiction and romance, negating the possibility of a virtuous autobiography. Arabella, in turn, confirms this by romancing her personal history and hence undermining her virtuous identity. While for the Countess, female autobiography must necessarily fall into romance, for Lennox, the fact that Arabella's history has to be artificially manufactured and invented is a further indictment of the position of the feminine as absent signifier, as only having access to a fictionalised historical role. In this sense, Arabella's entry into romance and the fictional realm is the result, and not the cause, of her exclusion from history.

The Countess disappears completely from the narrative after this encounter, having failed to turn Arabella away from romance. She gives way to the pious doctor of the final chapters, who successfully argues Arabella out of her delusion. However, the trace of the Countess remains as a figure in whose footsteps Arabella must ultimately follow. Romance must become a language of the past, “not forgot” and yet dismissed and erased from Arabella's legitimate history. As a contemporary, if potentially ironic model for virtuous femininity, the Countess becomes both Arabella's mentor and the mark of an absence and a loss. Not only does she literally disappear from the narrative, but her literal disappearance is conflated with her figurative disappearance from history, as a subject whose value is measured by her “absent” presence in the world. This self-erasure, in turn, anticipates Arabella's own return to her “proper” female role.

The cause of the Countess's sudden disappearance has been, and will continue to be under debate, with some critics believing that Lennox originally planned to use her as a successful figure of conversion, in the place of the Johnsonian figure.¹⁶ However, whatever the original plan Lennox had in mind, the effect of the Countess's appearance and disappearance serves to highlight the ideological contradictions embedded in the representation of female subjectivity, as both present and absent subject.

The question of presence and absence, in turn, obtains for the representation of Arabella herself. While at the centre of her romance narrative, she also remains uncannily absent, speaking in and through a language which produces a gap between the actual and the created self. Arabella's language is always the language of another, to such a degree that Glanville urges her to: “Speak in your own Language, I beseech you, for I am sure neither [Cleopatra's], nor any one's upon Earth, can excel it” (116). However, Arabella's “own language” is precisely the thing which cannot be recuperated within the parodic structure of the novel. Her reply to Glanville marks her refusal to engage in an authentic or transparent form of self-representation: “I shall make use of the Language of that incomparable Lady, to tell you my Thoughts” (116). In direct contrast to Pamela, Arabella refuses the position of the readable female subject. The reader, as well as the other characters, are repeatedly made to search for the “truth” underneath the parodic surface, a truth which remains endlessly elusive. Lennox deliberately blurs the line between Arabella's moments of rational discourse and her romance persona, such as when she gives a speech on raillery, earning herself the praise of Sir Charles, who tells her: “I protest … you speak like an Orator” (269). Margaret Dalziel has pointed out that this speech representing Arabella's rational, authentic self comes directly from Artamenes; or, The Grand Cyrus by Madeleine de Scudéry, one of the famous French romance texts, which adds a further disguise to, rather than revealing, the heroine's “true” identity.¹⁷

This brings us back to the eighteenth-century premise that literary form and the novel in particular should operate as a disguise under or through which the truth can be discovered. The final chapter of The Female Quixote, masterminded by the pious doctor who effectively secures Arabella's conversion away from romance and towards the real, would appear to conform to the above model, as the dress of romance is stripped to reveal the naked truth of Arabella's folly. The doctor informs her that “Love, Madam, is you know, the Business, the sole Business of Ladies in Romances” (381), causing her to blush which, in turn, “[hinders] him from proceeding as he had intended” (381). Arabella is undressed by the doctor's rhetoric, physically exposed by her blushes and made to acknowledge the impropriety of her desire for romance. It is at this point that she is transformed into a proper sentimental heroine and enters a new realm of submission, “turning to Mr. Glanville, whom she beheld with a Look of mingled Tenderness and Modesty” (383). The shift in Arabella's gaze from controlling to controlled marks her return to an “authentic” or natural feminine position. It also marks the end of the narrative, as Arabella, like the Countess before her, disappears from the text. The question remains as to whether Arabella becomes more readable after her conversion, or whether Lennox is seeking to show that “natural” femininity is as parodic and prescriptive a position as that of the romance heroine. At the close of the narrative, therefore, the question “who is Arabella?” remains effectively unanswered.

The problem of defining female identity, in fact, is at the core of the uneasy relation between romance and history present throughout The Female Quixote. All identity depends upon a certain narratability or access to representation in order to signify as a presence. It is of critical importance to Arabella that her own romance history be narrated and in this sense, that it become a part of history. However, the “fictionality” of romance versus the “reality” of history is highlighted at the very moment when Arabella tries to turn her story into history. Following the romance tradition, Arabella turns to Lucy, her maid, asking her to represent her and to narrate her “adventures”. When Lucy resists, Arabella explains:

you ask me to tell you what you must say; as if it was not necessary you should know as well as myself, and be able, not only to recount all my Words and Actions, even the smallest and most inconsiderable, but also all my Thoughts, however instantaneous.

(121)

The parodic demand made on Lucy to record her mistress's life masks the importance of Arabella's need to be represented and the simultaneous impossibility of her being so. Later, when pressed again by Arabella, Lucy merely says: “why, madam … I can't make a History of nothing” (305). Lucy's exposing of Arabella's adventures as a fiction or an illusion reveals the fallacy of trying to read romance as history. In this sense, Arabella's subject position as romance heroine duplicates the very position she has been seeking to bypass, for Lucy has shown that her narrative has failed to enter the historical realm, signifying only as an absence, a “history of nothing”.

However, this final exposing of the fictional problematises, rather than cancels out, the role of romance in its relation to history. What the novel gradually reveals is the fact that the fictional mode is tied less to romance than to the feminine subject position itself. In other words, it is not the fictionality of romance but the inability for the feminine to signify historically which is the focus of the novel's critique. While Arabella is finally made to recognise romance as a fiction, she is also made to recognise the fictional reality of her desire to signify as a subject. This is highlighted during a conversation with Sir Charles, who “in his Way, express'd much Admiration of her Wit, telling her, if she had been a Man, she would have made a great Figure in Parliament, and that her Speeches might have come perhaps to be printed in time” (311). The use of the conditional tense here signals an ironic authorial presence behind Sir Charles's indirect speech. What Arabella could have been is precisely what she cannot be, except in an imaginary, conditional or fictional context. The ideal of a masculine subject position hinted at by Sir Charles merely confirms Arabella's exclusion from the non-conditional, the actual and the historical realms. The suggestion that “her speeches might have come to be printed in time” also exposes the gendering process of all forms of discourse. While romance and fiction can be legitimately produced by the feminine and hence by Lennox herself, the authoring of political speeches takes place elsewhere. When Sir Charles makes the suggestion that “had [Arabella] been a man”, he is being as parodic in his implications as Lennox is in making Arabella a romance heroine, each of which exposes the difficulties of representing the feminine as legitimate subject. Arabella herself ends up signifying in terms of what she is not, either in a borrowed language or, as Sir Charles suggests, in the guise of a borrowed gender.

The question remaining at the close of Lennox's novel is whether or not Arabella's story has indeed taken place. Is Lennox trying to show that romance is merely the insubstantial negative space of the novel form which must ultimately be denied, or is she using romance as a way of critiquing the truthclaims of realism? In the final chapter, the doctor offers the following summary of the power of romance:

But who can forbear to throw away the Story that gives to one Man the Strength of Thousands; that puts Life or Death in a Smile or a Frown; that recounts Labours and Sufferings to which the Powers of Humanity are utterly unequal; that disfigures the whole Appearance of the World, and represents every Thing in a Form different from that which Experience has shown.

(378-379)

Romance, for the doctor, is undeniably seductive, in that it transforms real relations into ideal ones, offering a fantasy of absolute power. Such a fantasy results in the disfiguration of “the Whole appearance of the World”, and distorts any conception of the real. Implicit in this critique is the doctor's belief that the “Appearance of the World” is otherwise ordered, rational and stable, and that there exists a reality which can be properly apprehended through experience. It is, in turn, precisely this belief in a shared reality which Lennox's novel puts into question, for what Arabella's story reveals is that the real is embedded in a particular ideology of exclusion which denies the possibility of a universal subject position. The distortion produced by romance, in this sense, is the result of realism's disfiguration of the feminine as partial subject.¹⁸ Indeed, although Lennox has her heroine converted, it is not at all certain that Charlotte Lennox, the author, is choosing to participate in her character's destiny.

Notes

1. See in particular Laurie Langbauer, “Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote”, Novel, 18 (Fall 1984), 29-49; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 12-33; and Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction 1660-1800 (London: Virago, 1989).

2. Richardson to Mrs Lennox, 13 January 1752 (Houghton Library), in the appendix to Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 424. Further references will be to this edition.

3. In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, Richardson himself speaks of Clarissa as being “in the humble guise of a novel”, showing that the idea of the novel form as something to be seen through or uncovered, in order to reveal the truth, formed part of a shared critical language. See Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 117.

4. See: Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 153.

5. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), L.94, 380.

6. Langbauer, “Romance Revised”, 29.

7. Ibid., 30-31.

8. Henry Fielding, “The Covent Garden Journal, No. 24, Tuesday, March 24, 1752”, in The Criticism of Henry Fielding, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 193.

9. It is worth noting that at the time of The Female Quixote's publication, the French romances were no longer widely read and therefore did not pose the kind of moral threat implied by Arabella's consumption of them. Janet Todd suggests that “Mademoiselle de Scudéry was no doubt still read when Lennox was writing, but the more recent naughty novels of Manley and the early Haywood may well have been closer to many readers” (The Sign of Angellica, 153).

10. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 276.

11. Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 157.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 158.

14. For a valuable account of this tradition, see Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-88 (London: Virago, 1988).

15. Hobby, in Virtue of Necessity, argues that these texts often included biographies of husbands as a way of making them legitimate, but they still remained dangerous enterprises for the women authors concerned, making it “necessary for women to interpret and present their lives in ways consistent with desired models of femininity” (79).

16. For a discussion of this alternative ending, see the appendix to the Oxford University Press edition by Duncan Isles, pp. 420-428.

17. See Margaret Dalziel's explanatory note, p. 406, n. to p. 267. Laurie Langbauer also picks up on this paradox, suggesting that “[t]he speeches which are to impress us are, if anything, even more artificial—set-pieces modelled on historical writers or moral essays” (“Romance Revised”, 33).

18. In her introduction to the Oxford University Press edition, Margaret Anne Doody articulates this problem in the following way: “an insistence that a novel show nothing beyond what is ‘real’ and ‘probable’ can operate as a subtle censorship, favouring the renewed recognition of and obedience to the powers already in place … (For the powerless to imagine a route to power is indeed “romancing” on their part)” (xviii). Arabella's self-construction as empowered subject through romance can be seen to function, in this sense, as a potential challenge to realism.