SOURCE: Ross, Deborah. “The Female Quixote: A Realistic Fairy Tale.” In The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel, pp. 94-109. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

[In the following essay, Ross expounds on Lennox's interests in “the relation between philosophy and narrative form.”]

We are handsome, my dear Charlotte, very handsome and the greatest of our Perfections is, that we are entirely insensible of them ourselves.

—Jane Austen¹

Charlotte Lennox's second novel, The Female Quixote (1752), delighted Fielding, Johnson, and even the Bluestockings and signaled the author's acceptance into the London literary scene. As she earned respect as a serious scholar and translator, she came in contact with reigning authorities on fiction and acquired a knack for predicting what a wide range of readers would like. Learned yet light, traditional yet original, The Female Quixote is a deft mixture of elements designed to satisfy her readers' varied tastes. But in addition to a talent for sharp “market analysis,” this novel reveals the author's mature understanding of current literary theories and her serious interest in the relation between philosophy and narrative form.²

The Female Quixote is in a sense a realist manifesto; it exemplifies the principles set forth in Joseph Andrews and Rambler 4 by satirizing the French romance as the antithesis of both realism (as historicity and as verisimilitude) and morality. The novel's anti-romantic philosophy—unlike, for example, that of Candide—is essentially optimistic. Real life, it asserts, is free of adventure and therefore safe, secure, and happy. This was, broadly speaking, Tory philosophy; in 1752, it was a difficult philosophy for a woman, however much a Tory, to expound.³ Although Lennox's second novel far more insistently affirms the status quo than her first, it retains much of Harriot Stuart's potentially subversive message that, for women, whatever is, is not right. This contradiction had not been a serious problem for Delarivière Manley, because in her time Toryism was revolutionary. Nor did it much trouble Johnson, who revered order but did not expect happiness in this life—and who therefore did not write comic novels. But because Lennox did try to fit real life into a comic narrative pattern, she was pulled in opposite directions by principle and fact.

The Female Quixote treats philosophical issues in terms of a formal literary (anti-romantic) thesis; therefore, philosophical complications are most clearly seen here as formal complications. As a narrative form anti-romance is in itself complicated, or double-edged; like the mock-epics of the Augustan satirists, it points out the ironic gap between high style and real life, and both style and life can be targets of satire. Lennox could not wholeheartedly assert that women's real lives were complete, that romantic dreams were unnecessary; and so she did not unequivocally condemn the romance. Of course, in practice romance found its way into the most realistic fiction.

Despite the neat dichotomies of early criticism of the novel, realism was neither new to the eighteenth century nor absolute in its meaning. As we have seen, romance writers centuries before Cervantes set off the realism of their own works by including in them references to the more fantastic romances of earlier generations.⁴ And realistic “modern” novels had a way of becoming romantic after a few years; in 1803, in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen referred to Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison as the antithesis of “horrid” Gothic; but in an 1808 variation on Lennox's theme entitled Female Quixotism, Grandison is the romance that turns the heroine's brain (Small 112). Though romance characteristics were not always recognizable at the time of publication, romance was inevitable—for moralists, who wanted to help young readers perceive their “mixed” real lives with the sharpness and clarity of a fairy tale, and for some realists, who found the plot patterns and themes of French romance strangely relevant to the actual lives of women.

Lennox was both a moralist and a realist; and therefore, despite its anti-romantic premise, The Female Quixote is a romance, and Arabella, the quixote, is a romance heroine. She achieves that status, rather inconsistently, in two main ways: when Lennox uses her to satirize the real world, she gives her the heroine's power and perfection; and when the author punishes her for her egocentric delusions, or “vanity,” she subjects her to the heroine's tragic martyrdom. The many facets of Arabella's character gave a variety of readers something to like about this novel, but her ambiguity, like that of Betsy Thoughtless and Harriot Stuart, must have frustrated those who were trying to gain from it what it seemed to promise: advice on how to live right and be happy. Although Lennox does not resolve the issues she raises here, her formal approach does help to crystallize them, and to point to the real sources of women's frustration and conflict.

The remainder of this chapter will examine the anti-romantic premise of The Female Quixote and the way the novel's romance elements complicate that premise and undermine the didactic purpose.

In an important way, The Female Quixote had to combine romance and anti-romance in one, for it was an imitation of Cervantes, an author well known (in our own time, at least) for his transcendence of categories.⁵ The message about romance in Don Quixote is characteristically complex. Although the hero clearly reads romances the wrong way, all the sympathetic, educated characters in the novel do read them, and only the unsympathetic characters are against them. Cervantes allows the romance plot to support the hero, even as each new adventure makes him more ridiculous, by letting him become in Part II the renowned hero he planned to be in Part I. Lennox has great fun developing the comic possibilities of this paradox. The hero, Arabella's cousin Glanville, is “violent and hasty” enough to be the romantic lover he pretends to be to humor Arabella in volume two; he recalls Dorothea in Don Quixote, who is little less romantic than the Princess Micomicona she counterfeits (FQ 36). Like Cervantes, Lennox enjoys piling up layers of fiction; at one point she has an actress disguised as a princess recite the romance of her life, in which she meets a prince who recites the romance of his life. Lennox also comically exploits the many obstacles to the movement of the romance plot. So modest are the typical hero and heroine that their coming together can be difficult to arrange. First the hero must “struggle with the violence of his passion, till it has cast him into a fever. … Thus he must suffer, rejoicing at the approach of death, which will free him from all his torments, without violating the respect he owes to the divine object of his flame. At length, when he has but a few hours to live, his mistress … conjures him to tell her the cause of his despair. … [H]e acknowledges his passion with the utmost contrition for having offended her. … The lady is touched at his condition, commands him to live, and if necessary, permits him to hope” (319).⁶ Lennox's own hero wins Arabella in much the same way—and Arabella herself must become conveniently ill before she can reform.

In a deeper sense, however, Cervantes was not Lennox's master. Romance may have been fun to play with, but the reigning philosophy of her novel presupposes commitment to a single truth; one must take sides, and here romance is definitely the wrong side.⁷ When Don Quixote loses his delusion, the spell is broken and he dies. When Arabella loses hers, she is cured and can get married and—ironically—live happily ever after. To the narrator of The Female Quixote, the romances Arabella reads lack even the aesthetic merit that in Cervantes saves Amadis of Gaul from the flames; Glanville would rather clean the Augean stables than read—or even lift—Arabella's favorite books (53). The clergyman who ultimately converts Arabella (in a chapter probably written by Johnson) argues that “the only excellence of falsehood … is its resemblance to truth” (418).⁸ By this rule of verisimilitude, Arabella's books are not even good lies. But more important, romances are lies, falsifications of history, and hence morally dangerous as well as aesthetically flawed. “Young people especially,” Clara Reeve would later comment, “imbibed such absurd ideas of historical facts and persons [from French romances], as were very difficult to be rectified” (Progress 1:64-65).

The Johnsonian clergyman admits that books need not be literally true; in fact, they “ought to supply an antidote to example” (420).⁹ But romances lie for no good reason; Arabella may consider them “books from which all useful knowledge may be drawn” (52), but the narrator informs the reader rather that this “study” has prevented the heroine from acquiring “a great proficiency in all useful knowledge” (6-7). In fact, romances are worse than useless, for as the clergyman says, they give “new fire to the passions of revenge and love” instead of helping “reason and piety to suppress” those passions; and we must suppress them, “if we hope to be approved in the sight of the only Being, whose approbation can make us happy” (420). An eighteenth-century Englishman would be hanged for many deeds romances present as heroic, as Glanville's sister Charlotte fears (Langbauer 39). And so the biggest cause of Arabella's remorse at the end of the novel is that she incited Glanville, she believes, to kill a rival for her love.¹⁰

The clergyman does not know—though Lennox no doubt did—that romances are dangerous to Arabella because, in a sense, they are all too true. His most serious objection is that they employ “and then” rather than the supposedly more realistic “hence” narration, and thus “teach young minds to expect strange adventures and sudden vicissitudes, and therefore encourage them often to trust to chance” (419). “Chance,” for most women, was often all they could trust; it would be a romantic delusion indeed if they believed they could control their own destinies. Nevertheless, the plot—or rather the deliberate plotlessness—of The Female Quixote supports the clergyman's contention that life is orderly and consequential because civilization has effectively eliminated the “accidents” of romance. Whereas Betsy Thoughtless and Harriot Stuart were falsely secure, Arabella is falsely apprehensive, even paranoid; she constantly expects rape from the most unlikely quarters and refuses even her cousin a “private conversation” (34). And her delusion sometimes leads her to take the offensive—in effect, to commit crimes—as when she orders her servants to attack her suitor Hervey as an intended “ravisher,” though he has been guilty of no more than ordinary silliness (22).

The only unimaginary dangers Arabella encounters appear to be the direct result of her willful carelessness. Fearing an assault by Edward, a gardener who she believes is a nobleman in disguise, she runs out of her house in the middle of the night and throws herself upon the first man who passes, asking this “generous stranger” for assistance. This “gentleman,” who is “extremely glad at having so beautiful a creature in his power” and anxious “to have her at his own house,” is a serious threat (110). Charlotte Glanville points out the foolishness of Arabella's flight, for “sure nobody would be so mad to attempt such an action” as rape in a woman's own well-guarded house (108), but as Betsy and Harriot could have told Arabella, no one would blame a gentleman for molesting a reckless woman. Thus the heroine illustrates the old crooked axiom that only a woman who wants adventures will have them, and also the corollary: that she somehow deserves them.

Romances have caused Arabella to undervalue not only her personal safety, but also the social hierarchy on which, according to Tory ideology, her safety depends. The fear of being raped in her own home by her gardener is absurd because of the class distance, symbolized by the stairs he would have to climb to get to her—stairs she abandons when she runs from the house and from the protection of her rank. The romance may once have been the literature of aristocracy (McKeon 21, 268), and therefore of political conservatism, but separated from its historical roots it becomes democratic—for it makes everyone an aristocrat. As Don Quixote explains to Sancho, romance subverts the existing order so that it can re-establish the divine distinctions that have been lost to the fallen world; that is why a large part of romance is finding out who one really is.¹¹ But in the Tory view, one can still see vestiges of God's plan in man's class system, and rank is still a meaningful clue to character, though by no means an infallible one. Edward may seem genteel for a gardener, but only because “he had contracted … a great deal of second-hand politeness” when he worked as a servant in London (24). Anyone more clear-sighted than Arabella, we are to believe, would know that Edward is only a servant when he is caught trying to steal carp from her fish pond. The heroine reasons thus: no gentleman would steal, Edward is a gentleman, therefore Edward would not steal. The reader is expected to accept the first premise but to know that the second premise is false: Edward has been caught red-handed. Thus the novel forces the conclusion that Edward is no gentleman.

In supporting the notion of hierarchy, the anti-romantic premise of The Female Quixote also endorses patriarchy; it asserts—despite everything Lennox and her readers knew to the contrary—that father knows best and that the clearest path to personal happiness is obedience to just authority. To illustrate this principle, which a too realistic rendering of female experience would surely expose as false, Lennox resorts to trickery, or romantic coincidence: she makes the man of the heroine's inclination the very man her father wants her to marry.¹² At first sight, Arabella is impressed by Glanville's handsome face and figure, intelligence, good nature, and charm (30, 33). But according to her inverted values, cooperation with her father would be “impropriety,” as the narrator ironically notes: “What lady in romance ever married the man that was chose for her? In those cases the remonstrances of a parent are called persecutions; obstinate resistance, constancy and courage; and an aptitude to dislike the person proposed to them, a noble freedom of mind which disdains to love or hate by the caprice of others” (29). Her “repugnance” (30) arises merely from having to see Glanville as an approved suitor.¹³ Her “heroic disobedience” (30) is made to seem especially foolish because her father is less overtly bullying than Juliet Capulet's or Clarissa Harlowe's (34). He simply expresses the wish that his daughter marry the man of his choice and hopes that her filial affection will incline her to accept. Arabella persists in seeing him as the tyrant of romance, however, and thus she nearly loses her Prince Charming.

The foil to the disobedient heroine—this novel's equivalent of Harriot Loveit in Betsy Thoughtless—is the “celebrated Countess of ———.” When Arabella, after being introduced, asks the Countess to tell of her “adventures,” her new friend is shocked, she explains, because “the word adventures carries in it so free and licentious a sound in the apprehensions of people at this period of time.” Her own life has been adventureless: “I was born and christen'd, had a useful and proper education, receiv'd the addresses of my Lord ———, through the recommendation of my parents, and marry'd him with their consents and my own inclination, and … since we have lived in great harmony together” (365). The Countess has no inclination to interfere with her parents' will—and neither, she says, do most “other women of the same rank, who have a moderate share of sense, prudence and virtue” (365-66). Her message is that good girls should appreciate how lucky they are to be able to live without adventure—that is, without conflict. If Arabella could see that life is no more than it appears to be, she would have nothing to fear—and nothing to wish for—for she would discover that life is too good for romance to be necessary.¹⁴ The Countess asks the young female reader to look kindly on her oppressors, to reexamine the causes of her discontent, to decide that rebellion is quixotic: in other words, absurd, unnecessary, and unchristian.

If the Countess is correct, then why does Lennox remove her from the story before she has had the chance to cure Arabella? The obvious answer is that once Arabella comes to her senses and marries Glanville, “all her adventures are at an end for the future”—and so is the book (152). In fact, it is difficult to imagine who, exactly, would derive profit or pleasure from seeing Arabella settle down into the safe but plotless existence the Countess describes. Chapter headings such as “Contains a turn at court, neither new or surprizing” (5), “A mistake, which produces no great consequences” (14), and “an extraordinary comment upon a behaviour natural enough” (14) make clear that all the adventure, or interest, of this novel is owing entirely to Arabella's, or to Lennox's, imagination.¹⁵ Despite the anti-romantic premise of The Female Quixote, Lennox could not write an “anti-book”; to satirize romance one must also write a romance. And to insult something while making such extensive use of it can begin to seem ungrateful and unmannerly—that is, the values of the satirized form can begin to take over. Romance does take over this novel thoroughly enough to introduce a sour note into its closing major chord—the final chapter in which Arabella is cured and, one supposes, happy.

By making Arabella the center of the narrative, Lennox “heroinizes” her and indirectly endorses her romantic delusions; on some occasions it suits her to endorse them more directly as well. As Don Quixote becomes the hero he believes he is, the Female Quixote entering the ballroom at Bath finds all eyes fixed on her in admiration and envy—unlike Austen's anti-romantic Catherine Morland, whom no one notices until the rooms are nearly empty. Charlotte Glanville, the typical woman of fashion, hopes everyone will laugh at her cousin, dressed outlandishly as Princess Julia. But this spitefulness must be punished, and so Arabella wins the day with her “noble air, the native dignity in her looks, the inexpressible grace which accompanied all her motions, and the consummate loveliness of her form” (305).¹⁶ One wonders in scenes such as these whether Arabella really is deluded; she knows that she is not Princess Julia, but merely someone like her—a perception that is confirmed by consensus. And why cure her if she is not sick?

To satirize the world of fashion, Lennox makes Arabella more than a beautiful object; she also wins applause for her intellect. Though she may read the wrong books, she is better informed than most inhabitants of London and Bath, who do not read at all and who sneer at women who do. The Countess, for example, is said to know “too much for a lady” (374). The greatest ignoramuses in the fashionable world, significantly, are male. Lennox adapts the old fop and the pedant, familiar since the days of Jacobean drama, to a feminist purpose by enlisting them on the losing side of the battle of the sexes. Arabella innocently exposes their folly, and they bitterly resent being “posed by a girl.”¹⁷ In such scenes the heroine gives her readers, and her author, the chance to live vicariously the fantasy of winning in intellectual competition with men.

Arabella's triumphs suggest that, for Lennox, romance had its occasional uses, its areas of superiority to the real world, or at least the world of fashion; they introduce into The Female Quixote an almost Cervantean complexity and enhance its appeal for twentieth-century readers while still permitting the anti-romantic premise, or “reality,” to prevail in the end. But even when Arabella is finally humbled—or humiliated—according to plan, Lennox encourages the reader to sympathize with her in ways that not only complicate but subvert that premise.

Arabella is drawn with a completeness that may well be autobiographical: if Reeve was correct in her opinion that French romances were no longer fashionable when Lennox was writing The Female Quixote (Progress 2:6-7), then the unfashionable young women who read them anyway may well have been the “lunatic fringe” who went on to become women authors.¹⁸ Lennox must have expected her readers to be similarly behind the times—at least passingly familiar with these romances—since she provided no gloss for her many allusions. Of course neither Lennox nor her readers were likely to be literally as eccentric as her creation; but in her triumphs Arabella does seem to win a victory for the would-be heroine in every woman. And so in her defeats, though ostensibly deserved, Lennox makes it possible for the reader to feel regret by treating Arabella's chief error with sympathetic understanding as well as criticism; after all, even the Countess was once a romance enthusiast. The result, as Johnson warned in Rambler 4, is moral ambiguity; the reader begins to “lose the abhorrence of [Arabella's] faults”—if they are faults, and if they are really hers.

By officially labeling Arabella as “faulty,” Lennox leaves herself free to give her realistic traits that, ironically, encourage the reader's sympathy and identification. Among those traits is sexuality—which also conveniently helps to make an anti-romantic point. Like Betsy and Harriot, Arabella is at once both cold and warm—a paradox that here helps to expose the inconsistent morality of French romances, passionate love stories about unnaturally chaste heroines. Arabella's behavior toward men is both too strict (so that Charlotte's “liberties” shock her) and not strict enough (so that Charlotte is shocked in her turn) (99, 203). Romances exacerbate the normal female dilemma by giving Arabella even more inclination and less freedom to admit it than worldly convention allows; hence she is forced to be even more than conventionally wily and manipulative. After sternly forbidding her maid to accept any love-letters from Hervey, Arabella is “not without an apprehension of being too well obeyed” (12); and when Lucy does deliver a letter, “in reality, she was not displeased; yet, being a strict observer of romantic forms, she chid her woman severely for taking it” (14). Hervey interprets Lucy's warning not to give her a letter—“I … beg you will not offer to bribe me”—as what it is in fact: an invitation (13).¹⁹

This forwardness, we are told, is not the result of sexual desire, or as Lennox would be compelled to call it, “vicious inclination.” Because Arabella is sometimes used as a paragon rather than as a target, she must be chaste and her sin must be venial, a form of Betsy's and Harriot's vanity. Yet Lennox provides strong hints of the heroine's sexuality in symbols of considerable subliminal power and moral subtlety. The Marquis's house is a sanctuary of order and safety because, literally and symbolically, it preserves the heroine's virginity—as Arabella is well aware: her euphemism for rape is “[to] be carried away by force from my own house” (102).²⁰ Thus, even according to her own symbolic vocabulary, her “escape” from the house the night of Edward's imaginary attack is also a quest for sexual adventure. The rooms in which the “rape” takes place—Arabella's antechamber, bedchamber, and closet—further develop this symbolism. The scene opens with Lucy and Arabella conferring in the closet, which represents the heroine's most private self. There is a knock at the door of the antechamber (the most public room), and Arabella commands Lucy to go talk to the supposed attackers. As the terrified maid shouts through the locked antechamber door, Arabella “advanced as far as the bed-chamber, longing to know what sort of conference Lucy was holding with her intended ravisher” (104). Her sexual curiosity thus leads her to the bedroom, which lies appropriately between her most private chamber and the outside world.

This scene proves that Arabella does have inclination to suppress, thus silently refuting the Countess's optimistic argument. Because Arabella is by far the more believable character, the novel implies that real women are like heroines, and their lives are like romances—however unromantic the world they live in may be. In fact, that world is the source of the persecutions that make up their “plots.” Arabella's father is a tyrant not only in her disordered fancy, but in “fact,” or deed; perhaps because Lennox's own words were her life, she made him, literally, a “dictator.” When Arabella has indignantly dismissed Glanville from the house, the Marquis orders her to write an apologetic letter inviting him to return. Although the apology clearly is called for, it hurts to watch her father “leading her to his writing-desk [my emphasis],” commanding her to write, and finally telling the “sobbing” heroine what she must say. One is glad to see from the letter that the Marquis finally cannot rob her of her voice, deranged though it may be: “It is not by the power I have over you, that I command you to return, for I disclaim any empire over so unworthy a subject; but since it is my father's pleasure I should invite you back, I must let you know that I repeal your banishment” (43).²¹

The Marquis's wrath is kindled by what he sees as his daughter's “rudeness” (43). Arabella often violates etiquette because her reading has failed to teach her to suppress her feelings. Conversely, her only complaint against Glanville is his self-command. He is reasonably distraught when Arabella flees and cannot be found; but she expects him to “strike his bosom with the vehemence of his grief; and cast his accusing and despairing eyes to heaven, which had permitted such a misfortune to befal” (120). She likes Glanville best when, “a little elevated with wine,” he ignores what Fielding might have called her “violent modesty” and throws himself at her feet, venting his feelings in romantic but sincere hyperbole (FQ 138). The message is supposed to be that real feeling is all around Arabella, if only she could recognize it through the calm expressions of conventional good manners. Yet the novel also conveys the sad fact that, though Glanville may express real love, Arabella can never have that freedom. Emotional intensity and honesty for her are, at best, rudeness—at worst, vice.

Arabella does find true love at the end, but only through self-abasement. After her conversion she not only stops exacting Herculean labors from Glanville but almost begs him to marry her, promising to “endeavour to make myself as worthy as I am able to such a favourable distinction” (423). According to the satiric premise this is no more than justice; the correction of her supposed error should increase her dignity by making her no longer ridiculous. And of course she was ridiculous when she considered “the reputation of her charms sufficient to bring a crowd of adorers to demand her of her father” (7), or required “signs of contrition” and “true repentance” from her admirers (51), or commanded her despairing suitors to live (as Astrée commanded hers to die). Yet somehow Arabella never seems less dignified than at the moment when she first awakens to a sense of her own folly.

For if Arabella's former errors were also her readers' dreams, then her “cure” may be more like the lobotomies that were once routinely performed to improve mental patients' “adjustment” to hospital routine. The analogy suggests an answer to the question raised earlier: who does derive profit or pleasure from the heroine's final awakening? Comparing her favorite books with so-called reality, Arabella tells the clergyman, “I am afraid, sir, … that the difference is not in favour of the present world”; if she is really happy at the end, she must have had this particular observation removed with a scalpel, since neither the clergyman's sermon nor the novel as a whole completely disproves it (420).

Instead of a “crowd,” the isolated heroine is lucky to have even one decent suitor; her father permits her grand style of speech because he rarely listens to her. Her uncle tries to tell her that actual women are not mystic healers: “Why, madam, … you want to carry your power farther than ever any beauty did before you; since you pretend to make people sick and well whenever you please” (161). She does not believe him, for her romances are full of precedents; they are a sort of feminist revision of history in which women are behind every great event—not only as love objects, but as leaders of armies (139-40, 404). But he is right: the “present world” is no place for heroines. Arabella's attempt to swim the Thames as Clelia swam the Tiber nearly leads to her death.

Romance may have set Arabella up for a fall, but it is reality that bruises her, teaching her the old lesson that adventure means suffering. If this is comedy, it is very dark indeed, striking familiar overtones of tragedy. Depending on the degree of the reader's sympathy, the agent of Arabella's deflation may seem less like one of George Meredith's comic imps than like a nemesis; and what is called her vanity may seem more like hubris.

What, then, has happened to the thesis that romance does nothing for young readers but cultivate bad taste in literature, bad manners, and bad morality? The clergyman's objections are serious, yet few of those objections can stand against the impression of Arabella's martyrdom. However positively today's readers may view this ambiguity, it represents failure according to the novel's own expressed moral and critical standards. If a book cannot resolve issues, it cannot advise—and then it is not “useful.”

Like the novels discussed in previous chapters, The Female Quixote criticizes the morality of the real world without permitting women to set up their own ideal code to take its place. The resulting hopelessness is apparent in the sad history of Miss Groves, a fallen woman who as a child was “a great romp,” enjoying “masculine exercises,” in sharp contrast to her “serious, reserved, and pious” foster sisters (80). Her lack of restraint brought the usual punishment for secondary female characters: she was seduced and became pregnant (or as her maid says, “ill”). The child died. When she became pregnant a second time, she was betrayed by her servants and abandoned by her lover, who took the child and spread the word that she was “too easy a conquest” (83-85). When Arabella and the reader meet Miss Groves, she seems to have no choice but to go her high-spirited way along the road to ruin. (She is finally married off to a relative of one of her servants.) Arabella misses the point of this harrowing story, because her romantic delusions make her believe Miss Groves is chaste but misunderstood, like the “unfortunate Cleopatra” of La Calprenède (86). But the female reader learns to fear the consequences of free behavior without forfeiting her awareness that if Miss Groves is bad, her cold, hypocritical lover is much worse.

This story—along with the turbulence of the heroine's own life—contradicts the Countess's claim that women have no real cause for frustration. Therefore, the Countess is not much use as an “antidote” to the various “examples” of women in this novel, including Arabella, who handle their frustration badly. But Miss Groves's experiences do support the Countess's recommendation of conformity, for although it may not be as painless as the Countess says, it is at least preferable to the loss of one's reputation and of one's child. There is a didactic message in this, but hardly a “moral”: conformity is not “right,” but prudent; rebellion is not “wrong,” but insane, or pointlessly self-destructive. This message is not only amoral but inconsistent with the novel's stated optimistic philosophy, and with the implications of its comic form, both of which promise that a woman with her eyes open will be not merely resigned, but happy.

The morality of The Female Quixote is contradictory because the novel contains two worlds: one drawn from romance, and one from reality. Ironically, the morality propounded by the novel's realist philosophy operates only in the world of romance. The novel asks the reader to wake up, to surrender her dreams like Arabella, but once she has done so, she can hardly expect that her father will reward her with a Glanville. Like Betsy Thoughtless and Harriot Stuart, Arabella is ultimately “unmixed” as her romance self floats away to happiness, leaving her realistic self behind with her delusions. Meanwhile, the reader is left on the ground, contemplating her own choice between bad and worse. Even before the romantic denouement, Arabella can be a didactically confusing “mixture,” a romance heroine presented as if she were real. Of course, as we have seen, she is “mixed” in the Johnsonian sense, a sometimes disorienting blend of good and bad qualities. But more damaging to the novel's didactic purpose is the nature of some of the qualities most clearly marked as “good,” for they are the symbolic virtues of traditional heroines of romance and are therefore unavailable to real women.

Lennox knew very well that romance heroines did not make very “useful” moral models; in fact, this is one of the more astute and entertaining satiric points of The Female Quixote. Arabella's desire to be Clelia is doomed to failure by its inherent logical absurdity, because Scudéry's paragons are supposed to be natural and artless, qualities that no amount of deliberate effort can purchase (Clelia 1:32). Arabella can only act Clelia, thus falling into the comic Cervantean paradox of planned spontaneity. So, as Sancho Panza boasts of his charming simplicity, Arabella carefully contrives her “natural look”: “Her fine black hair hung upon her neck in curls, which had so much the appearance of being artless, that all but her maid, whose employment it was to give them that form, imagined they were so” (9).²²

Lennox further shows that this absurdity has serious moral implications. Scudéry's heroine, brave as she is, and well aware of her beauty and merit, nevertheless has a face full of “timerous [sic] modesty” (Clelia 1:19, 33, 35). In a real woman, which Arabella is supposed to be, this modesty would have to be put on; one either knows one's worth or one does not. Arabella can no more pretend ignorance of her beauty and abilities than Don Quixote can will himself mad like Orlando Furioso (though for both quixotes the willed act is ridiculously unnecessary: she is self-ignorant, and he is mad). On one occasion, she orders her maid, Lucy, to narrate the story of her mistress' life; this romance game is supposed to give the heroine a chance to reveal her modesty by asking Lucy “to soften those parts of my history where you have greatest room to flatter, and to conceal, if possible, some of those disorders my beauty has occasioned” (135). But since Lucy does not know her part, Arabella must prompt her “not only to recount all my words and actions … but also all my thoughts, however instantaneous” (135). What she reveals, comically, is not natural modesty but natural egoism.

It seems, then, that one cannot be a romance heroine by working at it. Yet, despite Lennox's awareness of the problem, at important points in the novel she gives Arabella the romance heroine's unconsciousness, making her as “useless” as Clelia. Though ridiculously careful of her hair and clothes in some scenes, Arabella is more usually the antithesis of her vain cousin Charlotte—in much the same way that Clelia contrasts with the worldly Betsys and Harriots who “have such a fancy to look on themselves, that they not only look on themselves with earnestness in all the glasses they find, but in the Rivers and Fountains, and even in the eyes of those which speak to them” (Clelia 1:32). One day Charlotte spends four hours getting dressed “in order, if possible, to eclipse her lovely Cousin.” When she goes to Arabella's chamber shortly before they are to go out, she finds the heroine still undressed. She prepares with “haste and negligence,” but “notwithstanding her indifference, nothing could appear more lovely and genteel” (93). Charlotte is understandably frustrated. What can she do? She might imitate her cousin by becoming careless of her appearance, but would she then be as adorable as Arabella?

The romance heroine's artless beauty is simply the visible manifestation of her soul's innocence. When she contrasts with Charlotte, Arabella is as natural within as without. Her preoccupation with love makes her ridiculous at times, but it does not make her unchaste because, like Clelia (not to mention Pamela and her “daughters”), she does not know what love is or recognize that she has felt it;²³ until just before the denouement, Glanville's faithfulness is “of more consequence to her happiness than she was yet aware of” (143). And she preserves her innocence, or ignorance, for as long as possible through willful self-deception: “As she was unwilling to acknowledge, even to herself, that the grief she felt at this discovery [of Glanville's supposed indifference] proceeded from any affection for her cousin, she imputed it to the shame of seeing herself so basely forsaken and neglected” (189). Like Jane Austen's Emma, she does not discover “the true state of her heart” until a rival appears to stir up “all the passions which attend disappointed love” (FQ 391).

The less-than-innocent reader, of course, has been told all about it; and thus she is in much the same relation to Arabella as Arabella is to Clelia. If she tries to learn about life from The Female Quixote, she becomes a Female Quixote, reading a romance as if it were a true or possible history. For this novel is, in essence, merely a version of the fairy tale Snow White subjected to realistic “displacement”—or in Reeve's phrase, “moderated to probability” (Progress 1:14). Like Charlotte Glanville, the wicked queen in the fairy tale is a slave to her mirror, yet she fails to be as beautiful as Snow White, the “unreflecting” heroine. Charlotte and the queen are punished for their vanity; Arabella and Snow White marry handsome princes. The fairy tale might teach a child not to be vain—but not, as Bruno Bettelheim explains, by offering Snow White as a model and the queen as a warning. The child would rather identify with both the heroine and the villainess, working out her inner struggles through the conflict in the story, coming to terms with her “dark side” (7). In contrast, didactic novels such as The Female Quixote, in which fairy-tale polarization of values is covered over with a layer of realism (a type Bettelheim disapproves), are meant to keep the young reader from wanting to be like any but the best characters. The goal of Johnsonian didacticism is to help the reader to suppress the “dark side.” And if innocence is ideal, then the self-conscious reader has already fallen irredeemably.²⁴

Any didactic intent assumes that learning is possible; the real-life cure for romantic delusion, as Reeve would later say, is “knowledge of the world, and … experience in it” (Progress 1:79-80). But by inviting the reader to learn from Arabella's mistakes, to look into her own heart and acquire self-knowledge superior to the heroine's, Lennox automatically deprives her of the innocence that makes the heroine perfectible; in contrast she may even look like “a monster in [her] own eyes” (Bettelheim 7). Like Charlotte, the reader must regard Arabella at her most perfect in much the same way the children in Saki's “The Story-Teller” regard the “horribly good” Bertha: as the perfect dinner for the big bad wolf.²⁵ For her part, Arabella eagerly befriends other women and praises Charlotte's beauty like the high-minded shepherdesses in L'Astrée, who “knew not what envy or emulation meant” (FQ 89; see d'Urfé 61). But heroines have no need to compete; by definition, they have already won. Charlotte gets her man in the end only because Arabella does not want him; Sir George is practically forced to marry her, and we are told that the marriage will be “common”—that is, loveless and probably unhappy (423). Arabella's uncommon, romantic marriage to Glanville, like Betsy's to Trueworth and Harriot's to Dumont, leaves the ordinary woman, her former friend, jealously looking on.

Nor is Arabella a loyal friend to the author, for in her guise as the innocent heroine of romance she is as far as possible from an autobiographical projection. She even indirectly insults Lennox by asserting that satire is unmannerly (301-2). When Arabella “poses” the fop and the pedant, she does it by accident, naively turning their own affectations against them. The author, however, is obviously “guilty” of a satiric purpose. As in her first novel, Lennox has given Arabella an innocence she could no longer claim for herself; but in this case she is separated from her heroine not only by her sexual experience but by the conscious intellectual designs on which her profession depended. The novel thus suggests an ambivalence about that profession not uncommon among women writers. (Jane Barker, Madame de Genlis, and Hannah More all published the sentiment that women should not write, and especially should not publish.)²⁶ Fanny Burney's heroines, as the next chapter will show, have a similar wistful naïveté—leading to similar didactic problems.

The “unreflecting” Arabella is someone no real woman can identify with; but the self-conscious, egotistical Arabella is “useful”—and not necessarily as a negative example. Apart from her delusions—or, rather, along with them—she also has wit and intelligence; though we are often forced to take those qualities for granted, her uncle does once brag that “if she had been a man, she would have made a great figure in parliament” (348). The remark does not have the same meaning as Mr. Trusty's similar compliment to Betsy Thoughtless; for politicians in this Tory novel are to be respected, not scorned as “Machiavels,” and Arabella's talent is oratory, not intrigue. In this way The Female Quixote suggests that there is an arena in which women can exercise their powers—besides the game of love, which they generally lose. If that arena does not yet exist—Arabella, after all, has no career, though her author does—at least her powers find expression in her delusions: that is, in romance.

Lennox and Cervantes were right to point out the danger of mistaking reality for romance; after all, women of today can still feel the effects of being treated like symbolic objects during the Renaissance. But in a sense reality includes romance, in the same way that it includes imagination; and therefore eighteenth-century readers, as well as fiction writers—including Johnson, as we have seen—found romance difficult to avoid, though they believed they ought to try. By preserving romance—even against their own stated intention—women writers such as Lennox provided an important underground service for their readers and for the novelists who would follow them: for if today's realistic novels are tomorrow's romances, it is also true that tomorrow's reality will be shaped in part by today's dreams. Twenty-five years after Lennox wrote The Female Quixote, Fanny Burney—another of Johnson's protégees—would still be trying to erect philosophical barriers against the rebellious energy of romance; but though Don Quixote was dead and Arabella married, adventure was not yet at an end.

Notes

1. Austen, “Lesley Castle,” MW, 111.

2. Richetti uses this phrase with reference to Haywood (126).

3. This philosophy would eventually evolve into what Marilyn Butler calls “antijacobinism” (see Jane Austen and the War of Ideas), although one must apply such terms with extreme caution (see chapter 5 of this study). Many writers prefer to emphasize the radical, feminist aspects of Lennox's writings, but seen as a whole they present a strong—though not unambiguous—impression of conservatism. Henrietta, for example, depicts the sufferings of an impoverished aristocratic heroine at the hands of various corrupt bourgeois—and the only weapons permitted her are self-humiliation and self-sacrifice.

4. See Staves 193.

5. See articles by M. S. Brownlee and El Saffar in Brownlee, Romance: Generic Transformations from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes; also McKeon ch. 7.

6. The first phrase is omitted in the Pandora edition. See the facsimile of the second edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Gregg Press, 1970), 2:169.

7. Staves notes that most writers of the eighteenth century saw Don Quixote's quest as ridiculous (194-95, 204-5). See Scott on Smollett's Sir Launcelot Greaves, PW [Prose Works] 3:150. Ronald Paulson notes that Whig writers in general showed more sympathy for such eccentric characters; see Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), 60-69. Butler mentions Charles Lucas's The Infernal Quixote as an example of an antijacobin novel (Jane Austen 107-18).

8. … In the facsimile of the 1752 edition (see n. 5 above) the statement is set off by paragraph indentation that has been omitted in the Pandora edition (2:313).

9. See Weinsheimer 11.

10. Cf. Boileau: “Nous la verrons … / Conter pour grands exploits vingt Hommes ruinés, / Blessés, battus pour Elle, et quatre assassinés; / Trop heureux!” (67). (We will see her … / Count as great exploits twenty men ruined, / Wounded, beaten for her sake, and four murdered; / Too fortunate!)

11. E. Auerbach explains that rank and nobility in romance are “personal” rather than inherited, and that often the two types of nobility are set against each other (139).

12. Behn used a similar romantic trick in The Dutch Lover. In Henrietta Lennox makes the same point as The Female Quixote in a different way—by making the heroine's “fall” the result of her mistakenly running away from the home and protection of a thoroughly evil guardian.

13. See Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, 133.

14. See Gilbert and Gubar 22-23, 39. In his review of The Female Quixote, Henry Fielding notes that the restrictions on women's lives make it difficult to write interesting stories about them, so that Lennox's novel must in this way be inferior to Cervantes'—though in other respects he praises it highly (The Covent-Garden Journal 1:280).

15. See Langbauer 30.

16. See Langbauer (32-33) and Warren (368-69) on the question of whether the turn-around was intended.

17. See Langbauer 47. I have quoted the facsimile edition (2:139) here because I think the Pandora edition's emendation of “posed” to “opposed” (298) is a mistake; Lennox seems to have meant “to puzzle, confuse, perplex, nonplus” (OED).

18. See Langbauer 30.

19. See Langbauer 40.

20. Cf. Doody's discussion of house imagery in Clarissa (A Natural Passion ch. 8). For further discussion of space and enclosure, see Gilbert and Gubar 84; and Ellis x-xi, chs. 2 and 3.

21. Both Langbauer (33) and Warren (368) note the importance of the language of romance to Arabella's self-definition; they also discuss whether this or the Johnsonian language she eventually adopts is really her own (Langbauer 41, Warren 374).

22. Cf. Barrett's The Heroine: “I confess I differ from other heroines in one point. They, you may remark, are always unconscious of their charms; whereas I am, I fear, convinced of mine, beyond all hope of retraction” (11).

23. I refer here to Pamela's Daughters, by R. P. Utter and Gwendolyn Needham (NY: Macmillan, 1936).

24. On Snow White, see Gilbert and Gubar 37-38. Also cf. Donald Barthelme's Snow White (NY: Atheneum, 1982), in which the heroine goes to college and becomes self-aware, discontented, and impossible to live with.

25. In The Best of Saki (NY: Viking, 1961), 129-34.

26. See More 1:385; Newton 7-8; C. Johnson 18.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Austen, Jane. The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman. 6 vols. 3d ed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988.

Barrett, Eaton Stannard. [1813] The Heroine. London: Colburn, 1813.

Behn, Aphra. The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Montague Summers. 6 vols. 2d ed. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967.

Boileau, Nicolas. Oevres Complètes. Bruges: Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1966.

Fielding, Henry. [1752] The Covent-Garden Journal. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964.

Johnson, Samuel. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969.

Lennox, Charlotte. [1752] The Female Quixote, ed. Sandra Shulman. London: Pandora, 1986.

More, Hannah. Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education: The Works of Hannah More. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1830, 1:347-466.

Reeve, Clara. [1785] The Progress of Romance. New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930.

Scott, Sir Walter. Prose Works. Edinburgh: Cadell, 1834.

Critical Sources

Auerbach, Erich. “The Knight Sets Forth.” In Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Random House, 1977.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Doody, Margaret. A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979.

Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988.

Langbauer, Laurie. “Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18 (Fall 1984): 29-49.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987.

Newton, Judith Lowder. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981.

Richetti, John J. Popular Fiction before Richardson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Adolescent Idea. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

Staves, Susan. “Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England.” Comparative Literature 24.3 (1972): 193-215.

Warren, Leland. “Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 11 (1982): 367-80.

Weinsheimer, Joel. “Fiction and the Force of Example.” In Uphaus, The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century.