SOURCE: Rothstein, Eric. “Woman, Women, and The Female Quixote.” In Augustan Subjects, edited by Albert J. Rivero, pp. 249-75. Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Rothstein views Lennox's novel as a struggle for autonomy by both Lennox and her character Arabella.]

THE ISSUE OF GENDER

Readers of Henry Fielding's Covent-Garden Journal of 24 March 1752 (no. 24) found the greatest British Cervantean, author of Don Quixote in England and The History of … Joseph Andrews. … Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, enthusiastic about “a Book called, THE FEMALE QUIXOTE, … an Imitation of the famous Romance of Cervantes.” He went so far as to compare Charlotte Lennox's novel to Cervantes', listing some “Parts in which the two Authors appear to me upon an Equality” and five “Particulars, in which, I think, our Countrywoman hath excelled the Spanish Writer.” These five ensue from Lennox's deftness with verisimilitude, formal control, and ability to awaken sympathy. In four “Particulars,” “the Imitation falls short” of Cervantes, whom Fielding had once called “inimitable.”¹ Yet, whereas the British woman wins her points wholly from skill, the Spanish man depends in large part on luck. Cervantes came first in time and had the good fortune of timeliness: the Spanish were “universally” given to the “vicious Folly” of romantic posturing while “the Humour of Romance … [is] not at present greatly in fashion in this Kingdom.” As to the greater excellence of characters and adventures in Don Quixote, those “may possibly be rather owing to that Advantage, which the Actions of Men give to the Writer beyond those of Women, than to any Superiority of Genius.”

Even if Fielding leapt to hyperbole out of zeal for a fellow Cervantean, for his two sisters' friend, or for the purse of Andrew Millar (his own as well as The Female Quixote's publisher),² his eulogy goes beyond the dreams of almost any author. Until recently, other critics have rarely seconded it. The Female Quixote long passed as a pleasant, readable, minor novel with “undoubted weaknesses” of repetition and prolixity, and in portrayal of major characters and plot management at the end. Backward-looking too, it was, for Lennox lacked “sympathy with the changing views which were to lead to the publication, only two years after The Female Quixote, of Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen … and which were to lead later writers … to stress the ennobling influence of romances.”³ So “completely ridiculous” are the romances to Lennox, Margaret Dalziel writes, that the heroine Arabella can reject them without her or the reader's feeling “a sense of loss” (xv).

As of the 1980s, though, the tenor of criticism did a volte-face. Bringing Lennox into greater repute, for example, current critics have altered her presumed relation to Cervantes. An enthralled imagination is perhaps Lennox's target as well as Cervantes', but however one values a threadbare hidalgo's nostalgia, a woman's nostalgia or utopianism, say these critics, rebukes society. On this reading, eighteenth-century culture so swaddles, laces, and binds women's estate as to make them enslave themselves to imaginary freedom, the Harlequin paperbacks and soap operas of the day. “The prose romance was virtually the only extensive genre which women had successfully practised,” Margaret Doody notes. Arabella's “mode of survival in adolescence is to make a fantasy of her own that will not subordinate her to her father's story” of his own fantasizing ego. By reading about powerful women, she both strengthens herself and “conceals from herself the sad truth” known to Lennox, “that she is a pawn in the game of property.”⁴ As romance waned during the eighteenth century, Doody's Lennox herself suffered a bitter “farewell to the literature that had nourished her and her imagination and her hopes” (xx). Perhaps in this way, of course, Lennox best imitated the person Cervantes, himself being revalued when The Female Quixote appeared. The then-new Cervantes—so Smollett wrote in 1755—“had a turn for chivalry: … his temper was altogether heroic, and all his actions were, without doubt, influenced by the most romantic notions of honour.”⁵

The exemplary critics I have cited, Dalziel and Doody, speak to Lennox's situation as a woman author. Doody does so explicitly, with late twentieth-century acumen about culturally trapped women. Her reading of 1989 sounds a note like that, for instance, of the brilliant, near-contemporaneous film Thelma and Louise (1991). Its two heroines learn to act and feel freely (good); but (bad), doing so reentraps them in the macho formulae and violence by which (male) American culture defines “freedom.” So the violent formulae that “free” Lennox's Arabella ventriloquize seventeenth-century French male values.⁶ Love and honor, refinements of spirit, in fact leave “the haughty Beauty … a calm Spectatress of the Ruin and Desolation, Bloodshed and Misery, incited by herself” (381).

I do not know of any other midcentury novel that might be said to display the male culture's impoverished stock of models for being both free and moral, but Gray's Eton College Ode (1747), published five years earlier than The Female Quixote, may help with this point. After all, “a Feme Covert … is often compared to an Infant, both being persons disabled in the law”; indeed, she is more disabled. Gray's schoolboys enact harmless or mimic forms of the terrors with which the real, adult world swarms. The boys' games give them innocent practice in competitive violence; constraint just sweetens liberty (ll. 33-34); Etonian book-learning preserves real-world ignorance; but then, ignorance is bliss. Hardly more knowing than the Eton boys, Doody's Arabella shelters herself in the mimic forms of romance. Perhaps a motherless girl with “a grave and melancholy Father” (7) intuits the cruelty of the real world, something Lennox and the Old Boy of Gray's ode grasp all too well. What Gray's speaker wishes he could do, Doody's Arabella still can: she bechilds herself so as to remain a figure of power in competitions with fixed rules. By doing so, she seizes on the best, though ephemeral, version of her real position. Yet this reading raises problems. Did Lennox really want to help stereotype women as willful children? The Female Quixote shows other women as adult as men.

Dalziel's unisex reading, of course, dates from a time when scholars saw a great troupe of eighteenth-century authors as dry, wry, and universalizing; gender disappears. Still, one can imagine Lennox accommodating it by denial. In “emphasiz[ing] the folly of the girl's delusion,” Dalziel's Lennox puts herself in line with “male creators of female Quixotes” (Doody xxiv). Feminism comes into play for us, so to speak, by not coming into play for Lennox. That is, through patronizing the pampered, fanciful aristocrat of her tale, this Lennox can enjoy a masculine power, in interludes of fiction, that real life was bound to deny her. No wonder she chose to imitate a great male wit, Cervantes, and at the same time translate another, in Voltaire's just-published Siècle de Louis XIV. She was next to undertake translating Shakespeare's sources and commenting on his use of them. Doody's bitter irony or Dalziel's implied male identification and disgust with (female) romance—one could imagine either in keeping with the actual Charlotte Lennox in 1752. She was madly writing to support her (heroically named) Alexander, the brutal, shiftless husband whom she married in 1747, when she was about eighteen, Arabella's age. As to biographical supposition and gender, just as to what simply following Cervantes ca. 1750 might mean, either way of reading The Female Quixote is historically plausible. We can be sure that Lennox drew in detail on her readers' preconceptions, for the hermeneutic circle, if I may use that name, is basic to the plot of The Female Quixote. From the contexts that have been adduced, however, we do not know clearly what those preconceptions were.

A different kind of reading develops, however, if one enlarges the perspective of gender so as to take The Female Quixote as a performance by a female author, a fiction by a woman which stands over against Arabella's sold-fashioned, male-valued romances. Such a reading makes use of those sketched above, without being a via media between them. It expands, I propose, on three rule-of-thumb ratios of proportion or analogy. These analogies involve relational rather than oppositional terms:

1. As “man” traditionally stood to “woman,” “novel” really stands to “romance”: the latter is a deficient or more primitive version of the former. The novel promises the true, the good, and the beautiful—verisimilitude, moral understanding, and aesthetic form—while the romance presents a deficient version of each. Lennox gives precisely this triply disabling argument vis-à-vis romance to the Countess and the learned divine, who rectify Arabella's delusions toward the end of The Female Quixote. Her novel, The Female Quixote itself, as Fielding's praise asserts, has the corresponding three virtues of verisimilitude, ability to awaken sympathy (Hume's and Smith's moral starting point, as I shall remark below), and formal control. These are vaunted “masculine” virtues, familiar to the point of numbness; male rationality, moral principle, and form, higher values all, stand against the lower: female fancy, feeling, and ornamental façades.
2. As Don Quixote is to an old Spanish romance, so The Female Quixote is to Don Quixote. The former text imitates the latter by emulating and improving it, and does so in the direction indicated by the first of my ratios. For prima facie evidence of the emulative comparison between Lennox's novel and Cervantes', I again refer one to Fielding's terms of praise. Fielding's own reworking of Pamela in Joseph Andrews, or Pope's of Horace, suggests that the relation I hypothesize between Lennox and Cervantes would be in keeping with well-known eighteenth-century practice. I propose that Lennox does with Cervantes, then, what Arabella must learn to do with the romances: winnow and transmute what can be used from what had better be at best enjoyed.
3. One can understand biological humans as autonomous individuals or as tokens of social constructs (such as “woman” and “man”). The former is to the latter as emulative imitation is to servile imitation, or as art is to “the rules.” That is, autonomy differentiates a person from a type, and proves itself in practice, not by some apriorism. In practice, an actual woman, Lennox, can rework a man's text, as well as an actual man, Cervantes, can rework romances. When one sees ratios 2 and 3 enacted in The Female Quixote, one must reevaluate the traditional gender abstractions of ratio 1.

My hypothesis depends on arguments I will offer below for the first two ratios, but on others' scholarship for the third. The work of Thomas Laqueur and Londa Schiebinger has proven, I believe, that although men and women had different social experiences, as The Female Quixote presumes, the sexes did not significantly differ, ca. 1750, in any other way that novels could register. In the old one-sex theory, women and men were graduated along the same sexual gauge, just as servant and master, weakling and muscleman, or Kallikaks and Bachs are graduated along the gauges of rank, strength, and creative mind, respectively. We do not now have a two-strength or a two-mind theory; Europeans did not then have a two-sex theory. The division is less fact or style of thought than artifact. Shortly before Lennox's time, educated Europeans gave up a two-heat theory—in which hot and cold were discrete, miscible basics—in favor of the one-heat theory we now hold. Shortly after Lennox's time, people moved toward a two-sex theory, for which “the political, economic, and cultural transformations of the eighteenth century created the context.” When “the articulation of radical differences between the sexes” became “culturally imperative,”⁷ one had the fixing of what had been fluid, a separation of domains between sexes set apart by secular, scientific “fact.”⁸

At the time of The Female Quixote, a sharp division between the sexes, separate and unequal opposites, had not replaced the old hierarchical, relational system. But the old system was getting feeble. For decades it had met with hostility and suspicion, on grounds that not nature but habit and male realpolitik had kept females below males. More doubt had arisen that the corporeal signs of sex actually signified the roles and inner capacities of gender. For plants and animals, the reigning taxonomy of Linnaeus took sexual morphology as key, but only for convenience's sake: “His sexual system was confessedly artificial … for practical use.”⁹ If women and men were of the same sex, though different in the degree to which the sexual organs were external, and if this difference did not ipso facto signal any more general difference, then feminism for Lennox, or any other midcentury woman, would be what one would now call “liberal,” a feminism that decries the invention of “difference.” In convincing a wide audience of Arabella's true equality with her lover Glanville, Lennox could best help herself by exhibiting her own equality with the male authors whom her novel directly and indirectly invokes. If the status quo postulated men's greater rational agency, then one saps its basis in showing women to be equal agents with men. Though romance plots reorder social roles, in Lennox's actual post-Cartesian, post-Lockean world, claims for women's equality would be most cogent in addressing capacities of mind. Her own novel-long achievement thus stands in for the adult being-in-the-world that Arabella lives after the novel is over.

LENNOX AND CERVANTES

No male eighteenth-century British author of repute published close imitations of long older texts. Roderick Random, The Castle of Indolence, and The Vanity of Human Wishes, works near midcentury, differ vastly from their advertised forebears, Gil Blas, The Faerie Queene, and Juvenal's Tenth Satire. If Lennox had begun to look into her Shakespeare project, she would, of course, have found a similar adapter's autonomy, in a particular eighteenth-century idol.¹⁰ Why should one presume she would try something less with Cervantes? When the deductive hierarchy of the one-sex system came into doubt, after all, women's and men's writing practice ought logically to have converged. The same criteria of value fit Lennox and Cervantes in Fielding's review of The Female Quixote. His weighing of their novels admits their rivalry, maybe in the terms he would have applied to himself, for Fielding had earlier triumphed by reworking Cervantes' style.

Joseph Andrews parses the Don's romance readings into no fewer than three types of ennobling text. In ascending order, they are: Pamela (modern class elevation), Adams's beloved classics (ancient elevation of the great-souled), and the Bible (timeless spiritual elevation). Each text type of course claims to bring the other two under its purview, hence the heroic and religious pretensions of Pamela, concern with status and (pagan) religion in the Greek poets, and the breadth of the Bible. As Fielding's hero, Joseph, grows up, he must retranslate each text type—Pamela, the classics, and the Bible—into the conditions of his own life, just as his biblical namesake had to translate dream narratives into real time. His modes of chastity, heroism, and piety need to transmute his originals'. He has a double reminder that they must, from the encumbering literalism of his “sister” Pamela and his quasi-father, Adams. Fielding, meanwhile, models for us a translator's wicked, nonliteral wit. Of course he plays with Pamela and with (mock-)epic, but also with the Bible, as he adapts Potiphar's wife to Lady Booby, the coat of many colors to livery, and the sojourn in Egypt to abduction by gypsies. Comedy recomposes the biblical Joseph's rapid vicissitudes and his familial misrecognition and regathering. The forms of romance itself, embedded as interpolations within Don Quixote and its French successors,¹¹ find their way into the main narrative of Joseph Andrews, while in turn its interpolated tales—Leonora, Wilson, and Paul and Leonard—exemplify antiromances.

If The Female Quixote is not Cervantes refrito, it should have its own mode of approximating what Fielding did. First, for Lennox, real life differs from romance by being consequential. That is a formal point for the novel, an ethical and cognitive point for Arabella. Unlike Cervantes, who just lets Don Quixote addle himself and recover, Lennox at both ends of her novel mortices Arabella's hovering, utopian, and bookish world into the real one. Arabella's mother, the romances' source, marries as a prospective “agreeable Companion” (6), but in reality to “soften [her] Solitude” (7), she must augment her husband, a cashiered exile from court, with equally cashiered, foreign tales. Doubly wedded to male fantasies, the Marquis's and the romancers', she repeats via fiction the hollow elevation in status that she had gained as a new marchioness, “greatly inferior to [her husband] in Quality” (6). Arabella too, missing a mother and a life of her own, has a status thinned of meaning in the actual and romance worlds. For Lennox, her healing must logically undo her malady.

To replace the romances as a mode of fiction, then, the female emulator of Cervantes stands in loco matris, a living woman who discloses the world through a verisimilar, sympathetic, formally controlled novel. To replace the romances as a mode of understanding, Arabella's life prompts her to reassess timeless spirit, ancient “greatness,” and modern status. Those timeless and spiritual qualities of reason and religion, for instance, have their ersatz version in the pandects of exemplary romance, and their arbitrary version in Quixote's “sudden and easy transition from madness to sanity” through a revelation in his sleep (DQ 2.4.21, 843). They find a truer voice in Lennox's “good Divine,” whose arguments at the end of book 9 bring “the Force of Truth” (381) home to Arabella. Although Anna Barbauld protested that Lennox should have shamed Arabella into good sense, after the fashion of Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules (Doody xxx), Lennox declines grand siècle misogyny for a more generous solution, just used by Fielding in Amelia (pub. December 1751) to reclaim his soldierly hero, Booth. Like his near namesake, Boethius, Booth fortunately learns in prison to hear a divinus ex machina. People are not passion-stoked engines, he discovers through a book of sermons he finds. So Arabella, confined to her chamber, fortunately hears reason from a Doctor of Divinity. She too grasps the role of the passions, so freed and so fatal in the anfractuosities of romance. Like Booth, Arabella of her own volition stops serving Fortuna's absolute behest.

Pseudo-ancient examples of the great soul—those in Boyle et al.—find their nemesis in the Countess, a rational female reader of romances, at the end of book 8. “Inferior to very few [men] in Sense, Learning, and Judgment,” she shows Arabella “that what was Virtue in those Days, is Vice in ours,” trying to pry “Ideas of Glory, Virtue, Courage, Generosity, and Honour, from the false Representations of them in the Actions of … imaginary Heroes” (322, 329). Lennox underlines this point, as Cervantes had not, by making the outdated romances foreign and badly translated. The disasters of book 9, including Glanville's duel with Sir George Bellmour and Arabella's near drowning in imitation of “the renown'd Clelia herself” (363), confirm the truth of the Countess's maxim, which for Arabella requires proof within history.¹² By contrast, after that history, the good divine's similar truths derive from reason, and so carry rational conviction. They also bring The Female Quixote full circle: the journey that starts with the Marquis's exile and the Marchioness's death now ends with three near-deaths. Arabella and Sir George are “given over by the Physicians” and “in great Danger,” respectively (365), and Glanville can be prosecuted for murder if Sir George dies. The border between life and death is the province of the good divine, just as the border between public life and public “death,” exile, had been that of Arabella's father. The Marquis has bequeathed his own border position—not really court, not really country—to Arabella, immuring her, where what she learns—music, dancing, languages, history-reading—lacks any institutional matrix, which he finds inimical. The divine, dedicated to the institution of the church, properly ends the fantasies that Arabella's father had fed, now that romance, which we had freely enjoyed in its fantastic, gelded form, exhibits its violent reality. He himself, in some sense, replaces it.

Finally, as to status, the Marchioness's books by their presence testify to the barrenness of rising through an unequal marriage. The real-life marriage of the Marchioness's daughter, once freed from those books, must also address status. To some extent, the pairing of the Countess and good divine does this at the end of the novel, for the woman is of high degree and the man of lower: Arabella's new spiritual parents, living in the world with an even tenor and caring for others, symbolically reverse her old, lonely, and too imitable biological parents. More generally, the pairing speaks to The Female Quixote's concern with “status inconsistency,” most often by the detour of Arabella's imaginings.¹³ For example, Arabella casts her would-be suitor Harvey, who is well below her “quality,” as her “insolent Lover” (the servants cast him as a highwayman; 19). Edward the gardener, trying to poach (like Harvey) on his betters, turns into a disguised “Person of sublime Quality” (23). Jockeys grow to “Persons of great Distinction” (84). The headstrong, weak-brained Miss Groves in truth rises from merchant's daughter to duke's stepdaughter. She has the status of being at once a mother and no mother, and, to top off her status inconsistency, the clandestine wife to the brother of “a Country Gentleman” wedded to a former servant (70-71, 76). But Arabella (not Lennox) also invests her with inner turmoil—the status of a certain kind of subjectivity—and with romance antecedents. Of course, Arabella herself, whose allegiance to French courtly system leads her to work de haut en bas, reproduces status inconsistency not only by being blind to others' status but also by her own mixture of wisdom and folly, cogency and inflation, learning and myth, compassion and bloody-mindedness. Mocked and admired therefore, she seems to confirm Patty Blount's reported jibe, “Most Women have no Characters at all,” if not its nastier Virgilian version, “varium et mutabile semper femina,” with which Dr. Harrison unpleasantly chivvies the learned Mrs. Atkinson in Fielding's just-published Amelia (409-10).¹⁴

In fact, The Female Quixote tends to replace equivocal social status with equivocal gender, an easy substitution within a one-sex theory, where “man” is to “woman” as “master” to “servant.” Miss Groves is mannish, but so is Thalestris, whose sword could have diced Orontes, “though, questionless, he was one of the most valiant Men in the World,” and yet who was, like Miss Groves, “a perfect Beauty” (125). Though Sir Charles, Glanville's father, scorns men “that would be commanded by a Woman” (205), he swallows, like Arabella, Sir George Bellmour's fantastic saga of his own submission to a “charming and dangerous” damsel in milkmaid's disguise (209-19). In both romances and real life, one may find “a Lady disguis'd in a Man's Habit,” though she will be a fine lady in the romance and a whore in real life. But then, as the unnamed gentleman cries, Arabella's “fair and glorious” Cleopatra “was a Whore” (335, 105). More broadly, the perennial courtship pattern of romance favors such ambiguity, since in the brief, illusory space of love suits, woman seems to be master or mistress with man as her cavaliere servente. The temporary suspension of the usual gender relations tallies with the temporal suspension of the real world in the mind's errancy, the reading of romance.

With Pamela in mind, Joseph Andrews had teased the issues of social and sexual status. That of sexual status informs Joseph's virginity, for example, and that of social status, Lady Booby's attacks on it. Fielding keeps Joseph and Fanny's status about equal but has it shift through events that neither controls, and he makes their marriage least possible when their status is most nearly equal, as brother and sister. While the lovers' social status shifts, all other characters maintain their status. In The Female Quixote, Lennox reverses this pattern. She plays the lovers' consistent real status against the shifting status (often as imagined) of others. By contrast to the absolute fixity of being and fluidity of status in Arabella's romances and, as to the latter, in the real world of The Female Quixote, Lennox makes Arabella and Glanville as equal as they can be without violating “the Levitical degrees” of consanguinity, “the farthest of which is that between uncle and niece”—that is, Glanville's father and Arabella.¹⁵ Arabella and Glanville are close in age, he “passionately in Love with his charming Cousin” (30), and, unlike Arabella's father, he lives in the world.

Because the disparity that had spoiled her parents' marriage is gone, she and he are eventually united not only in “Fortunes, Equipages, Titles, and Expence” but also “in every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind” (383). Through most of the novel, Glanville has had to be ready to humor and flatter Arabella, as he would an eccentric child. Her adulthood at the end puts the two on a par. That is, within the world of the novel, she becomes the analogue of her “mothers” outside and within the novel, Lennox and the Countess (who has married happily on her parents' recommendation and her own wishes; 327). All along, Arabella has enjoyed those two great eighteenth-century political virtues, liberty and property. Financially independent, she has moral freedom to boot, since she knows her father will not “force her Consent.” He intends “only to use Persuasions to effect what he desire[s],” and her guardian Sir Charles cannot legally use “Compulsion,” even if Glanville would—and he says he would not—consent to it (27, 42, 64). If one set out to imagine the eighteenth-century woman most oblivious to women's subordination in her own time, one would arrive at young Arabella. The ideal allows Lennox to redefine status as something inner, by no means mobile solely through the usual feminine levers of physical beauty and virtue.

Social equality has its parallel in sexual equality. Glanville never behaves like any of the male analogues Lennox supplies, including Arabella's father the Marquis, her suitor Harvey, Miss Groves's Mr. L———, or Sir George. Her marriage, to be taken as neither the rule nor fantasy, presumably ends in the comparative egalitarianism that gained ground among the upper social strata during this very part of the eighteenth century. In addition, Lennox as woman writer, a public figure, will not limit women to domesticity, where they never enjoy full partnership in the social contract and civil society. She omits children, household management, and other signs of gender segregation in making Arabella and Glanville a couple “united” in objects of public show—“Fortunes, Equipages, Titles, and Expence”—as well as private virtue.¹⁶ Neither the Countess nor the divine mentions women's duties to Arabella. Indeed, no woman in The Female Quixote, except servants, devotes herself to them. By the same token, among men only the good divine has a public role; the Marquis surrenders his, one may recall, at the start of the novel. Nor do the men, if one takes the Doctor as a new form of the Countess, show to advantage over the women in learning or morality. Though within bodies sexed by animal heat, minds, for Lennox, apparently have no sex.

Religion and reason, greatness of soul, and status—Lennox reworks these Cervantean themes. In doing so, she gives form to her novel, a virtue foreign to romances and, Fielding thought, to Don Quixote: Lennox's novel, he wrote, “is a regular Story, which, tho' possibly it is not pursued with that Epic Regularity which would give it the Name of an Action, comes much closer to that Perfection than the loose unconnected Adventures in Don Quixote, of which you may traverse the Order as you please, without any Injury to the Whole” (1:281). I have argued that such “Perfection” had a special value for a woman novelist in the mid-eighteenth century. It countered the one-sex system's traditional placing of women closer to matter and further from form than men, a placing that would be reinforced by a linkage of women to the piecemeal sprawl of French romances. To improve on a great male author, Cervantes, was better yet. For Lennox, then, her visible creation of structure in her novel has symbolic, probative force. She had to convert into form the formal energy she found within romances, courtly forms in clusters like crystals in igneous rock. Thus she mocks but redeploys romance conventions, including Glanville's heroic winning of Arabella rather than trying to possess her as a patriarchal hand-me-down. In turn, Arabella gives Glanville her hand with the three kinds of tender sentiments mapped on the Carte de Tendre in Scudéry's Clélie: love from Obligations, Inclination, and Esteem (383). The Female Quixote, unlike Clélie, joins these conventions within a single narrative line without subplots. Unlike the romancers or Cervantes, Lennox also nicely integrates the three interpolated stories into a central narrative: Miss Groves's blundering life (70-76), Sir George's romance of his life and loves (209-52), and the tale of “Cynecia” (340-49) parody Arabella's reading, depict betrayals within the narrative, and have treacherous narrators.

Lennox, as I have suggested, plots the beginning and end of The Female Quixote with great care, and carefully too works out Arabella's slow entrance into the world after her reclusive father's death. Such care shows throughout. Book 1, beginning with a kind of serious double death (the Marquis's disgrace, the Marchioness's real death), ends with plans for a comic multiple death (the burning of “many illustrious Heroes and Heroines” [55]), imitating Arabella's equation of life and fancy. Book 1 also takes its rhythm from its three lovers for Arabella, one of them aspiring above his station (Harvey), one raised by Arabella's imagination (Edward the gardener), and the third her equal and cousin (Glanville), introduced just after the middle of the book—chapter 8 of thirteen in all. Book 2 begins with a serious freeing of Arabella, her father's death (58), and it ends with a comic freeing, her “rescue” from a man of low degree by Glanville (107), who in the first chapter of the book rescued her romances. The middle chapters of the book, 5 and 6 of eleven in all, present the story of Miss Groves, whose willfulness, pride, reckless love (first for a man of low degree, a writing-master, after her father's death), clandestine affairs, shifts in rank, and episodic biography exhibit a real-life analogue of romances. Book 3 frames the coming of Sir George Bellmour (chap. 4)—a first comic, then potentially serious, blocking character—by comic and more serious illness: Arabella's in chapter 1 and Glanville's in the last chapter, 8. Without my rehearsing the whole novel in this way, one can infer how Lennox impresses form on her matter. The authorship of romances keeps broadening, too, in the expressions of different personal wills. From Arabella's simple match-ups of romance givens to the givens of life at the beginning, one passes to her own and Glanville's initiated action, to new romances invented by Sir George in books 6 and 9, and by Arabella in book 7 (when she amazes the haut monde at Bath in “a Robe after the same Model as the Princess Julia's” [269]), and perhaps to the antiromance of the Countess's life in book 8. The French wits' and Cervantes' privilege of authenticity disappears, replaced by Lennox's new order of form and forms.

Lennox, if I am right, is not only writing a novel, she is also performing as a person, a woman, and a model. She exhibits her autonomy in adapting Cervantes; translations, like hers of Voltaire, are choices, not signs of an unoriginal mind. For her, as it was to be for Kant, autonomy belongs to adulthood: “The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men,” Kant wrote, “have … first made their domestic livestock dumb” so as to frighten “the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex)” from “taking the step to maturity. … Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of [a person's] natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity.”¹⁷ Though Kant's text postdates Lennox's, she might have shared in a strain of thought that he too shared, for example with Bishop Butler, that “to explain the phenomena of morality … we must suppose the self to be capable of giving itself authoritative direction that is not determined by wants and demands arising from our existence as needy and dependent beings.”¹⁸ A belief that moral as well as rational behavior has roots in autonomy would explain her stressing that romances, whose “livestock” is all codes, dogmas, and “rules and formulas,” violate both moral law and verisimilitude, whatever their specious beauties may be.

Appropriately, autonomy is a crucial, paradoxical theme in Don Quixote. It works at four levels: the knights-errant of fable, the Don and Sancho, Cid Hamet Benengeli the historian, and Cervantes the satiric romancer. At its center is the Don, who encodes the world and himself into the alternative world of romance; like his lineal, bourgeois descendants Bouvard and Pécuchet, he adopts “rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the” misuse of his gifts. He will “conform in all points to the practice of those itinerant heroes, whose exploits he had read,” emulating them until he is effectually “seated, by his own single valour, on the throne of Trebisond” (DQ 1.1.1; 30). The Female Quixote replaces Cervantes with Lennox, Cid Hamet (tacitly) with Cervantes, the Don with Arabella, and the knights-errant with French-romance figures who depict rigid laws and hierarchy. In the 1600s, these figures had mirrored the universe of Bourbon absolutism, pleasing their readers into a discipline of pure virtue that, naturally, served to fix a status quo of power.¹⁹ I propose, therefore, that Lennox's agenda differs from Cervantes'. She can hardly be attacking the literary form “romance,” as a foot soldier behind Cervantes, if Fielding was right that “the Humour of Romance” was “not at present greatly in fashion in this Kingdom.” The escapism and male discipline that romances stand for, though, were exactly what British society allotted to women: deluded Arabella is the reductio ad absurdum of a certain sort of propriety.

Arabella's adulthood is to be that of British civil society. But even there, in the world of social formulas, one has an exchange of despotisms: a tyrannical lady takes away her suitor's liberty till marriage, when he in turn takes away hers (35). The real-world courtship/marriage pattern of adulthood, with its exchanged domination, belongs to the same universe as does Arabella's bondage to romance. By contrast, in the ideal of British civil society, liberty is a right that continues to inhere in every person. Because it promotes “our Alliance with all human nature,” it occasions the moral virtues of “Tenderness and Sympathy” (381), those traditionally female virtues that the ethical tradition of Hume and Smith made central to all moral action. One can only suppose that Lennox meant to replace the fancied world of the romances, real only in its realpolitik of the will, with a feminized ideal toward which one could really look. If Cervantes warmed to some romance ideals, though mocking their tales as unfit for a real man, Lennox accepts neither those ideals nor their practice. Her stake in the empirical is, of course, that of any novelist and up-to-date eighteenth-century thinker. In addition, it is that of a woman who insists things be looked at in and of themselves rather than in accord with old rules and inferences. Arabella needs a cure; so does the society with which her seemingly adversarial romances truly collude.

AN ABC FOR THE FEMALE QUIXOTE

Arabella, an orphaned and now nubile aristocratic heiress, wants and demands romances just because of her need and dependence, traditionally marked female. Her heroic power and the coherence in her world are flattering illusions fixed in a paradox: the “view that women, those designated culturally as having the greatest capacity for self-denial, are incapable of self-denial,” since “woman are slaves to their bodies; men are free by virtue of their capacity for reason.”²⁰ Romances work by fiat and fate, disguising slavery to the body (fancy) as impersonal truth in the world. That law takes the place of reason just as the equally fantastic codes of mores take the place of morality. Men produce romances and women read them, one might argue, so that those incapable of self-denial through autonomy can be induced to a version of self-denial and so settle into their cultural place. As long as the plot and genre of The Female Quixote allow romances to be amusing and powerless, just like women in patriarchs' eyes, Arabella can and does leave both probable and moral thought to male adults. She lavishes her faculties on the proxies for adult male thought, on the handed-down paradigms of romance plots, and on the nice distinctions of romance punctilio, with its “rules and formulas.” However, when “on the Brink of that State, in which all Distinctions but that of Goodness are destroy'd (370), she must grow up. Her adult self deposes the lifelong despots of childhood will and of the French wits' fake, alien past. Lennox, scrapping romances for novels, and striving with other people's novels through her own, does the same as to truth and morality alike.

To read The Female Quixote this way is to resist making it mimic the romances. In elaborating on its aims of education, I will propose for mnemonic purposes an ABC: 1) Analogy, 2) Berger's thesis that human dignity replaces honor as a modern ideal, and 3) Childhood. Each of them bears on Arabella's childhood reading of romance, in which “her fundamental misreadings of likeness” (Marshall 124) lead her to a mistaken code of honor. Each of them also carries over into The Female Quixote, where the romance versions of this ABC joust with their true counterparts. Arabella thus escapes a deductive form of quixotism, male honor in male valor, of which the French romances, female honor mediated by male valor, are the female-quixotic counterpart.

ANALOGY

Typically, eighteenth-century novels moved in a zone between coercion and chaos, a zone marked by analogy. Analogy is a fallible mode of reasoning that entails nothing. In the empirical world, nevertheless, it permits one to know or do whatever one can know or can do. In novels, it links the protagonist's Bildung with that of the reader, and both the protagonists' and the readers' process of inquiry into the world with the novel's occupation of ordering that world.²¹ Analogy has dangers inherent in its uncertainty: one may overread for too many meanings or overdetermine for too few. If one takes analogues as entailments, the way Arabella does in reading life and romances, one will be locked into false systems. Not least among these systems for The Female Quixote is the system of sex and gender, in which physical differences betoken mental and spiritual ones. In French romances, similarly, a code of appearances signifies spiritual truths, sometimes directly and sometimes (for the disguised) by opposites. Knowing how to use analogies in life includes three competences: one has to deal with the provisional and probable rather than the certain; one has to gauge the categories and degree of likeness between the decided case and the open one; and one has to assess the comparative status of the cases. That is, should one reason from X to Y? revise one's view of X because of Y? take X and Y as instances of a more general rule? take either X or Y as a parodic or deficient form of the other? pool X and Y so as to draw inferences from them jointly? and so forth. These questions become more acute the more one is unsure of what scale to use, when one is told to give up the apriorism of closed systems and to “discover … regularity in the phenomena themselves, as the form of their immanent connection.” Ernst Cassirer, perhaps straying from this empiricism in describing it, finds in it a “new methodological order” that runs through “all eighteenth century thought.”²²

The skills of analogy underlie the possibility of autonomy, since one can choose well only if one can use experience to weigh cause and effect, right and wrong (on either utilitarian or Kantian grounds), and prospective pleasure and pain. Arabella, who misuses analogy, is heteronomous, run by romances, but two principles in her misuse of analogy allow Lennox to set up the conditions for her cure. First, her inheriting the misuse shows her (unlike Don Quixote) open to learning. She is the child of her mother, who, dependent on the Marquis's will and legally one flesh with him, had repaired in her own way to fantasies of glory for them both. In the Marchioness's courtly romances, high-mettled, virtuous court favorites suffer reversals but may still end well. The Marquis, for his part, has glorified himself with a translatio imperii upon his estate, “laid out in a Manner peculiar to his Taste: The most laborious Endeavours of Art had been used to make it appear like the beautiful Product of wild, uncultivated Nature” (6). But her parents are now dead, and what Arabella has learned, she can unlearn.

Second, Arabella misuses analogy in principled ways. One who ignores analogy, by contrast, surely is less corrigible, for a shallow intentionality springs from the quirks of will. Lennox illustrates the point with the story of Miss Groves, whose mindless pride, wantonness, and sprees with men and money have left her prey to the wills of others (70-76). Breaking all boundaries, Miss Groves ends up otherwise bounded, not free. Her anarchy is even worse than the safe heteronomy of conventional Miss Glanville. Arabella, however paradoxical and flamboyant her chivalric heteronomy, has idiosyncratic principles, unlike her analogues, the Misses Groves and Glanville. From this one can infer that she has, somewhere, an individuable self, the basis for autonomy; she is not just one of those supposedly lovable zanies whose vogue has run from Lennox's time to, alas, our own. As Arabella's romances pass from a priori rules to analogical, immanent data about herself, Lennox can fix her identity in a choice-making, homeostatic self. Arabella's self then can redefine romance rather than vice versa. She takes on a form of the full, free subjectivity that the ideal of autonomy requires. By the end of the novel, then, the value of autonomy should be sensed by us through our own proper analogies. First, it has been the end of Arabella's Bildung; second, it has been a continuous trait that Lennox's way of writing displays; and third, it is the positive value that individuates these women.

BERGER'S THESIS

The autonomous person, in my hypothesis, uses analogy rather than doctrine to connect form(s) and truth(s), the realms one might for convenience call the aesthetic and the cognitive. Virtue(s) and truth(s), the ethical and the cognitive, find a connection in Peter Berger's argument that “honor” has become obsolescent except “as ideological leftovers in the consciousness of obsolete classes, such as military officers or ethnic grandmothers,” or, one might add, the convergence of the two as projected into present and future by adolescents' street gangs.²³ Berger associates honor with a hierarchical society, in which “the etiquette of everyday life consists of ongoing transactions of honor” (HM 86). Not only does Don Quixote display the obsolescence “of the knight-errant in an age in which chivalry has become an empty rhetoric,” it also unmasks “the folly of any identification of self with ‘archetypal patterns of behaviour’” (HM 87). Quixote's “enchanters,” Berger shrewdly notes, have the task of what Max Weber's translators were to call disenchantment, Entzauberung. “Collective prototypes” of action turn out to be “illusion, follies, and dreams,” leaving only the individual with her or his bare self, human dignity, and rights. Dignity, as Berger's term of art, “pertains to the self as such, to the individual regardless of his position in society,” and replaces an honor linked to institutional stations (HM 89-90). Institutions, accordingly, have changed their own roles. From the self's dwelling they become the self's repressor or oppressor, as novels paradigmatically typify them, for “the rise of the modern novel [is] the literary form most fully reflecting the new subjectivism” (HM 93). Whereas the system of honor was defined top-down by degrees of difference among position-holders on rungs of the social ladder, dignity defines itself by analogues, using a sort of case-law of equal rights or keeping up with the Joneses. Here again is Cassirer's new “immanent connection.” Within The Female Quixote, the romance of “human dignity” appears in Arabella's rerankings. This is inflationary—too much scrip chases too few goods.

Though the comedy of The Female Quixote allows for little of “the new subjectivism,” the rest of Berger's thesis applies quite pointedly to Lennox's novel. One may begin with gender issues, where honor ranks man above woman, but case-law looks at specific persons. Given Arabella's legacy from two parents enslaved to imagination, one may query the bond between romances, those repositories of old-fashioned honor, and women's fantasies, at least in eighteenth-century society as Lennox viewed it. In our society, television foams with soap operas; supermarkets peddle bodice-busters. Further back, one had the fairy epic romances, such as A. S. Byatt's fictional Victorian, Christabel LaMotte, longs to write, thus to reconcile “women's two natures,” those of “enchantresses and demons or innocent angels.”²⁴ How foreign all this is to The Female Quixote, with its one-sex idea of women and men! And how foreign to the hugely wealthy, upper-aristocratic, beautiful, and gifted Arabella, to whom nature and fortune have been lavish. Arabella does allude to two romances by a woman, Madeleine de Scudéry, who first authorized her books by having them issued under the name of her brother Georges. The man, Arabella believes, not the woman, wrote them (267).²⁵ The other four romances she mentions are indisputably by men, La Calprenède and Boyle. While most of the women in The Female Quixote know no more of romances than do most of the men, Sir George “had actually employed himself some Weeks in giving a new Version of the Grand Cyrus,” a romance that Lennox may have known was by a woman (129).

For Lennox, clearly, anyone fleshly, leisured, and frivolous, woman or man, might well sport in the seas of romance. To judge by what is common to Sir George and Arabella, a chief merit of romances was that they allowed stylish, stylized play to sex and violence. Romances also deck the pleasures of pedantry with the flowers of fashion, such as one can see in Arabella's harangues; in Bath, Lennox reassigns these two romance traits to a pair of men, not women: the fop and the pedant, Tinsel and Selvin, whose names nearly anagrammatize each other. Seemingly based in “learning” and the court, romances lend Arabella a false institutional matrix for the true one that she lacks. Romances, however, as she describes them, use learning and court manners to set forth a child's view of the world. It is egocentric: authorized by her parental legacy of spirit as well as matter, Arabella controls the world with a self-confirming system of grandeur and persecution. Like her father, she is grand enough to be exposed to persecution and persecuted enough to elicit her grandeur. The romance view of the world is also simple. Though “Human Beings cannot penetrate Intentions, nor regulate their Conduct but by exterior Appearances” (371), Arabella knows the easy calculus of opposites by which one must measure what one does know, through good and bad, noble and base, brave and craven, true and false, open and masked, kind and cruel, lover and ravisher. All these pure opposites appear in Arabella's romances. None of them, pure, appears in Lennox's novel.

Lennox herself (1729?-1804) did live to see childhood, romance, and black-and-white thinking creep back into fashion. “To think of the works of Scudéry and La Calprenède as the product of a golden age, when writers took care to present a pure and elevated idea of life, … became a platitude of late eighteenth-century conservative criticism” (Williams 14). Victorians oft dreamt of Camelot and nourished nursery nostalgia, looking backward. In the 1750s, though, the “studies” of “reading Ladies” were no longer “the French and Spanish Romances, and the writings of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manly, and Mrs. Heywood,” for “Romances at this time were quite out of fashion, and the press groaned under the weight of Novels.”²⁶ British fiction reached adulthood by no longer thinking like a child in a romance, or like a child of French romancers. In this sense, Arabella's maturing as a person coincides with the maturing of Lennox's literary genre. Adults lost interest in French romances, one might also note, at about the time that the genre of children's books emerged, from the 1730s on. As childhood became distinctive in the eighteenth century, Bildung became better articulable in novels, and novels gained demarcation from romances.

To treat French romances as a transitional stage, childhood, is to see how they act out Berger's thesis, creating a transition between the Great Chain of Honor and the rights of dignity. In the name of Honor, they replace an old, rigorous status system, from which honor derives, with its outward signs in manners. Having thus located the status ideal in material behavior, romances encourage a further step beyond their own position, towards empirical reality. As McKeon says, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, “the progressive attack on aristocratic honor made allusive and suggestive use of the empiricist attack on ‘romance’” and what Allestree called its “multitude of ridiculous Punctilio's” (154-55). Another part of a status ideal, greatness of soul, becomes internal in the French romances. Chanson de geste action moves inward, in gloire, tendresse, conscience, and similar elements of sensibility, of which fiction makes us voyeurs. Novels, being “realistic,” can do this better than romances. Again, once the romance promotes the will and isolates within an esoteric, précieux code the values that used to be rooted in general social practice, it makes those values precarious, arbitrary, questionable. The novel, with its stress on the psyche, regrounds values at the cost of changing and individualizing them. Here a key is the process Cassirer notes, in which the a priori evaluative code yields to study of “immanent connections” within psyches.

Various sorts of egalitarian merit and access appear. Though these carry risks for women, they carry greater gains. If women are to be equal to men, an ideal of human dignity serves better than a status system within a one-sex scale. If a woman writer is to look as rational as a man, she needs to make arguments that employ accepted rational standards—empiricism, probability, and shared knowledge of the heart. To write and to read novels in the eighteenth century is almost always to embrace just such standards, and to practice them. A successful practitioner can demand admission to the public sphere on the basis of Cassirer's “regularity in the phenomena themselves,” not an apriorism about the nature of animal heat. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the mésalliance between Arabella's parents returns, inverted, at the end of the novel in the alliance between the female aristocrat, the Countess (who disappears, 330, because of a mother's illness), and the male commoner, the good divine, in curing her. Human dignity, not rank, asserts itself in these quasi-parents, both of whom act from human, not blood, relationship to Arabella.

CHILDHOOD

If an autonomous person, discovering truth, uses the forms of analogical reading, she brings together the cognitive and the aesthetic. If Berger is right, some of what McKeon calls questions of truth and questions of virtue—the cognitive and the ethical—intertwine. What about the third pairing, the ethical and the aesthetic? Only that third pairing, in which cognitive issues are at most secondary, could redeem the romance as Lennox portrays it. For her, romances do not embody cognitive truths. The Female Quixote does not show romances as transcribing life into an overblown literary analogue, the way Northanger Abbey shows the Gothic novel as a lurid transcription of the county and Bath society among which both Radcliffe and Austen lived. General Tilney is Montoni's kissing-cousin; Glanville is not Juba's.²⁷ Naturally, even for Lennox, some parallels between romances and life exist. If they did not, nothing would feed Arabella's delusions. Arabella herself, though, accepts that “the World is quite different to what it was” in antiquity (45). As a result, cognitive parallels oftener mislead than enlighten. Romances also misinform, as Arabella's gush of genuine learning, some true and most false, shows. A search for exemplary truth in romances looks equally unpromising. Several characters, including dim Miss Glanville (127-28), dispute Arabella's claims for the merits of romance, because it stokes one's concupiscent and irascible passions—“These Books,” the good divine laments, “soften the Heart to Love, and harden it to Murder” (380). If romances are to novels as children are to the adults they become, however, romances need not transcribe life. They can simply attune us to its workings.

For each of the British midcentury novelistic virtues that Fielding praises in The Female Quixote—form, verisimilitude, and appeal to sympathy—French romances provide the childlike ground that The Female Quixote grows from and outgrows. Let me start with sympathy. Arabella overflows with it for her romance figures, whose ideals and vicissitudes she transfers to her own life: here is the limit-case of sympathy, feeling with others so fully that different people become, as much as is possible, the same in feeling. Her moral identity mingles with what she imagines theirs to be, so that for her, in the recent (1750) words of Lennox's admirer Johnson, “the power of example is so great as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and to produce effects almost without the intervention of the will” (Rambler 4). One sort of such rapt, involuntary action is sense perception. Sense perception provides the model for the moral sense beloved of a Scots philosophical line and still philosophically tenable today.²⁸ Arabella's sensibility allows her to feel the sympathy central to the ethics of these Scots moralists and to the good divine of The Female Quixote, who speaks of “that Compassion”—the Latinate form of “sympathy”—“which is implanted in us” (381). Quite conceivably Charlotte Ramsay Lennox, with her many Scots connections, familial and social, knew the moral-sense tradition. Whether or not she did, Arabella's quick, sympathetic sensibility, the very quality that lets her mislead herself with romances, testifies to a capacity for ethical response and understanding. When her romances indulge her narcissistic, preethical form of response, they also sharpen those qualities of spirit that allow “Disinterestedness” and altruistic “Greatness of Soul” (229). Inclinations that bring Arabella under the sway of romance bring her out of it too. At another level, what endears Arabella to other characters in The Female Quixote and to us readers is their and our capacity for sympathy, as Fielding says.

Verisimilitude is what romances supposedly lack. For anyone but Arabella, brought up away from the world and attended with the privileges of rank, Rambler 4 then would hold true: “In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men that the reader was in very little danger of making any application to himself,” even a reader among “the young, the ignorant, and the idle” who read fiction. One might respond, though, that the French romances do try to be verisimilar in one way: if the verum is an ideal of ethical “transaction and sentiment.” The romances' elaborate rules of love and honor similarly idealize the byzantine etiquette of the court.²⁹ Lennox, I proposed earlier, draws on this idealization to present a really possible, feminized ideal. By blessing Arabella with the traits of a romance heroine—rank, beauty, grace, and men who are not her masters—Lennox tries to stress her deserts and her human dignity. These include a presence so compelling that one respects her despite her delusions, and a mind strong enough to store much learning and to correct its own follies. Arabella's life tells us that if the world treats women as fully human, fully adult, they will be just that. Their strengths will appear not in adventures, as the French romances suppose, but in the ordinary course of British life: Arabella's disappearance from the mock-romance text marks the end of her being something of ours, a female quixote and novelistic cynosure, and the start of her emergence as somebody who is one of us, of us who do not (women or men) live by high adventure. From the immured girl who models herself on others, she passes into the world as a female model for others, a person united with another in love, virtue, and every “laudable Affection of the Mind” (383).

The Female Quixote alters the punctilio of the French romances into the signs of refined manners, already becoming a staple of novels and plays by midcentury. Such manners display the traditionally feminine traits of “delicacy” and “sensibility.” Ready as Arabella is to catalogue the doings of everyone from Aspasia to Zenodorus, she and the others often keep mum when it comes to the present. Thus, she will not do Glanville “so great a Diskindness, as to explain myself” (166); Sir Charles, two chapters later, “unwilling to tell [Glanville] the Truth, … evaded his Question in such a manner, that Mr. Glanville could not help making some Observation upon it,” while Arabella “appeared so reserved and uneasy, that it was impossible for him to speak to her upon that Subject” (171). The characters embroil themselves in the sort of hints, occlusions, and pretenses from which novels by Burney or Mackenzie, say, are woven. One passage can stand for many:

Arabella was greatly confused at this Question, which she thought she had no Reason to expect; it being not possible for her to tell him she was offended, that he was not in absolute Despair for her Absence, without, at the same time, confessing she looked upon him in the Light of a Lover, whose Expressions of a violent Passion would not have displeased her: Therefore, to disengage herself from the Perplexity his Question threw her into, she was obliged to offer some Violence to her Ingenuousness; and, contrary to her real Belief, tax him again with a Design of betraying her into the Power of the Unknown [Gentleman].

(113)

Romances train one for the social adroitness such maneuvers demand, just as they hone one's sympathy. No wonder Lennox remarks on novels' borrowing from them (130). When Arabella moves from their gloire, amour, and always imminent rapine to the ethical realm of British society, where politeness has to do with one's relationship to others rather than to oneself, her “mad” comportment is no sillier than the sanity of Selvin and Tinsel. Without the pressure of romances on the brain, her skills will presumably be like those of the Countess, who “herself had when very young, been deep read in Romances” (323).

Form, in romances, is episodic: although they pretend to be history, they present time in chronicle, one thing after another, rather than as causally complex history. Such an arrangement can be redeployed in novels. For instance, episodic form fits with a child's sense of time, in which the immediate dazzles and everything else stays penumbral. By contrast, certainly after Locke's Essay, the personal identity of a responsible adult was bound to long spans of time, through memory and reflexive consciousness. The child's and the adult's faculties, both, are workaholics in Arabella's psychic economy. Lennox counterpoints these two kinds of time, the child's immediacy and the adult's saturation with past and future, quite deftly. For its ends, her novel needs the feel of a romance but the form of an early Bildungsroman, that is, the form of a life. Therefore The Female Quixote locates Arabella doubly, in both kinds of time. It plays a consistent ground-bass of romance, the spoken-about that always reverts to a sameness running through nominally different, immediate exploits. It also plays a melody that alters with alterations in the lived, Arabella's circumstances. This sameness, personal identity, exists in continuity. Yet again, it has its own rhythm, which gives The Female Quixote a controlled, distinctive form.

The romances, then, have a proper use for Arabella, as a starting point for autonomy, just as Cervantes has that proper use for Lennox. That is why, whereas Quixote labors under the threat of turning into a fiction himself, in forged texts (e.g., DQ 2.4.19), the true Arabella casts off both her parental and her society's fictions. Such a reading, in which the temporal distance between the romances and Cervantes turns into the distance between Arabella's childhood and her nubile adulthood, and between Lennox's reading and her writing, can preserve the skepticism about romance that Margaret Dalziel exemplifies, but without losing the analytic and political edge of feminism, for which I cited Margaret Doody. The Female Quixote that results, within an eighteenth-century single-sex feminism, brings triumphant conclusions for two women writers: Arabella, who adapts romance, and Lennox, who adapts Cervantes. Neither woman, the one who grows to reason within the novel or the one who deploys it in inventing that novel, turns out to be a child of a larger growth. Neither feme covert, the noble wife of Glanville, the commoner who put food on the Lennox table, shows that she ought to be disabled in law. I cannot help thinking, however, that of the two, Charlotte Lennox was the greater heroine.

Notes

1. Preface to Don Quixote in England, The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., new ed. (London, 1775), 3:256. The review of Lennox is in The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen (1915; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 1:279-82.

2. Martin C. Battestin, with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London & New York: Routledge, 1989), 542-43.

3. A sample appraisal is that of Margaret Dalziel, introducing the Oxford English Novels edition of The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel, chronology and appendix by Duncan Isles (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); passages cited are from Dalziel xviii, xvi. Page references in the text will be to this edition, which is identical in pagination to the World's Classics reissue cited in note 4.

4. Doody's introduction prefaces the World's Classics reissue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) of the edition cited in note 3; quotations are from pp. xvi, xx-xxi. In “Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote” (Essays in Literature 14 [1987]: 55-63), James J. Lynch cites a twentieth-century analogue to this reading, the contemporary paperback romances studied by Janice Radway; for romance readers, including Arabella, utopian fantasy allows both escape and the acting-out of fears that result from real-world female roles.

5. Tobias Smollett, “The Life of Cervantes,” prefacing Smollett's translation of Don Quixote (1755), rpt. as The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, intro. Carlos Fuentes (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986). References to Don Quixote will cite this translation, so close in time to The Female Quixote, in the form “DQ vol., book, chap.; page.” Stuart M. Tave traces the eighteenth-century fortunes of Quixote in The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

6. Laurie Langbauer offers another comparison to a form of being marked at once by exclusion and a parodic parasitism on the norm, that of madness. From Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's early work of contemporary feminism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), she thus adapts “one kind of feminist reading” which treats romance as “the worst offender” in imposing male desires on women. So understood, “Lennox would be the madwoman trapped in this male form.” Her parody of romance and her educating Arabella out of it become “a symbol of Lennox's own struggle as a writer” (Laurie Langbauer, “Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote,” Novel 18 [1984]: 41). The parodic structure, then, fits with Luce Irigaray's notion of self-extricating “mimicry” for women and Henry Louis Gates's “signifying” for still another group that has been bechilded or taken as irrational and erratic—blacks. Arabella's own conduct fits “an eighteenth-century view of madness” with Lockean ancestry, as Leland E. Warren says (“Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 [1982]: 367-68). “Adolescent females show particularly well the dangers of solitude” in “the madness of giving [oneself] up to private fantasy,” he writes (373), though here one may recall the learned astronomer in Rasselas, which was written by one of Lennox's chief mentors.

   As to a tie between Lennox and Arabella, David Marshall discusses The Female Quixote's association between writing and gender boundaries, in “Writing Masters and ‘Masculine Exercises’ in The Female Quixote,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 (1993): 105-35. Marshall calls attention to “Arabella's attraction to and identification with women involved with cross-dressing, sexual and gender transgression, and the masculine province in which male writers are masters” (110). He also, rightly, points out that by being entrapped herself in romance, Arabella “depends on laws, rules, and precedents that prescribe her actions,” giving her life a plot that she herself cannot write: “since the plot of her life has been prescribed, she does not appear to be capable of authoring her own life, of mastering her own story” (121). Marshall and Langbauer, whom he cites (115), cast more doubt than I do on Lennox's own control over her narrative.

7. Baron and Feme. A Treatise of the Common Law concerning Husbands and Wives (London, 1700), 4. Outside the law, men disabled women by the comparison, as witness Lord Chesterfield's famous sneer to his adolescent son (Letters, 5 September 1748): “Women, then, are only children of a larger growth. … A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child.”

8. Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Laqueur and Catherine Gallagher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; originally published in Representations 14 [Spring 1986]), 35. Laqueur has developed his argument fully in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Also see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially 160-244.

   The late twentieth-century figure who has argued most profoundly for sexual difference, Luce Irigaray, has pointed out that “equal rights or their approximation may be a necessary condition for the larger question of sexual difference to be raised at all.” Irigaray's political program endorses ideals that include those I ascribe to Lennox, including women's emergence from “pseudo-childhood” (Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine [London: Routledge, 1991], 13, 150; see Whitford, ed., The Irigaray Reader [London: Routledge, 1991], 183, 208-9). If so, it is not only anachronistic to blame Lennox for speaking as a woman by showing a woman's power to think as (a) man, it is also at odds with the historical and logical needs of the position that Lennox would be blamed for not adopting. Here Patricia Meyer Spacks seems to me right in noting that “Arabella's consistent commitment to principle and her contempt for meretricious social enticements make her potentially more threatening to a male-dominated order of things than seventeen-year-old fictional heroines customarily appear. She claims male prerogatives, welcomes male responsibility—and declares both ‘female’” (“The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and The Female Quixote,” MP [Modern Philology] [1988]: 541).

9. David Knight, Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man (London: Burnett, 1981), 77-78. For reasons why Linnaeus chose these distinguishing marks, see Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 11-74.

10. Given Lennox's work on Shakespeare, Deborah Ross asks, does the opening of The Female Quixote echo The Tempest? “Arabella's father has been tricked out of favor at court and has retired to a remote castle where, his wife dying, he must bring up his daughter alone.” This makes “any extraordinary behavior more or less plausible, like the magic we allow on Prospero's island” (“Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote,” SEL 27 [1987]: 458). If so, one has a model of Lennox's borrowing, since Arabella's father, unlike Miranda's, remains dispossessed of all real authority till death, while Arabella herself, unlike Miranda, teaches herself the world and chooses the course of her own life. The father who insists “upon directing your Choice in the most important Business of your Life” is dead; she will inherit two-thirds of his “immense Riches” whether or not she marries Glanville; and she needs no guardian's consent to marry whom she will (42, 6, 64-65).

11. Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 275-79, traces The Female Quixote to one of these, Marivaux's Pharsamon ou les Folies romanesques. The argument I am making about Lennox's relation to Cervantes holds just as well for her relation to any predecessor, including Marivaux.

12. What the “great soul” means in Amelia is shown through the character of Colonel Bath, a man who—I cite the last sentence of the last chapter before that of Booth's conversion—“with all the other Principles of Honour … made no more of cutting the Throat of a Man upon any of his Punctilio's than a Butcher doth of killing Sheep” (Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin [Middletown Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983], 510). One might note that Booth's conversion has not led to claims that Fielding failed as a novelist or that he might have had to call on someone else to help with Dr. Harrison's wisdom. Lennox has been accused of both, the latter on the scantiest of evidence (422). Her stylistic skill in producing Mr. Rambler's mode for the good divine, as a compliment to her friend Johnson, has led to the denouement of The Female Quixote's being assigned not to her, the rational woman, but to a man.

13. I take the term, of course, from Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), where it applies, 273-94, to Don Quixote, among other books. My own account of Don Quixote tries to describe it from a mid-eighteenth-century perspective, as Lennox's source, rather than in the light of modern scholarship and techniques of reading; my historical terminology, however, follows McKeon and others in preferring “status” to “class.” Just as the two-sex theory emerged so as to create “opposite sexes” with a primary base in biology rather than social roles (or “gender”), so at about the same time theories of class replaced the older hierarchy of status with something new, based primarily on economic production. These changes appeared well after 1750. They had uses in explaining, legitimating, and exploring the world; since they did not, however, spring into life from the mere force of biology and industrial economics, or of sudden epistemic rupture, how they affected people's actual lives remains to be appraised.

14. Martha (“Patty”) Blount quoted in Alexander Pope, Moral Epistle II, To a Lady, Of the Characters of Women (1735), l. 2. Virgil, Aeneid IV, ll. 569-70.

15. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols., 11th ed. (London, 1791), 1:435. See the discussion in Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 18-24. Since, as Trumbach points out, cousin marriage came up among aristocrats only in cases of female inheritance, by presenting it Lennox underscores Arabella's financial independence.

16. On egalitarian marriage among the British elite, see Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family, 71-72. More generally, Pieter Spierenburg briefly sums up evidence “that conjugal life among the European elite was transformed” (The Broken Spell: A Cultural and Anthropological History of Preindustrial Europe [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 241, 244-46). Obviously, like most late-twentieth-century marriages, eighteenth-century marriages still did not square with late-twentieth-century, Anglo-American intellectual-class ideals. On domesticity and the partial exclusion of women from the social contract, see Keith Tester, Civil Society (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), 133-36.

17. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), in Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 41.

18. J. B. Schneewind, “The Use of Autonomy in Ethical Theory,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 66.

19. Through romances, one can specify Arabella's “will to power—that drive so dangerous to the eighteenth-century social structure, so appealing to the ‘raised consciousness’ of today” (Ross, “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote,” 464). The courtly will to power that infects her rationality arose from “strategy in face of the possible gain or loss of status in the incessant competition” for prestige within a “figuration of people.” At court, one had to gauge “a constant, precisely calculated adjustment of behaviour towards everyone. … And as an individual's stock was equal to his social existence, the nuances of behaviour by which people reciprocally expressed their opinion on it took on extraordinary importance” (Norbert Elias, The Court Society [1969], trans. Edmund Jephcott [New York: Pantheon, 1983], 91, 93). One gains power by accepting maximal constraints.

20. George Levine, “By Knowledge Possessed: Darwin, Nature, and Victorian Narrative,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 367. The first portion of Levine's article, 363-75, also discusses the intertwining of moral and epistemological truths through disinterestedness (self-denial), mostly in the nineteenth century, but with glances back to Bacon and Locke.

21. I have elaborated on the uses of analogy in Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); see in particular 11-17.

22. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (1951; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 8-9.

23. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973), 83; abbreviated HM in further parenthetical references. Though The Homeless Mind is coauthored, Peter Berger wrote the section on the obsolescence of the concept of honor, 83-96, first published as an article in 1970.

24. A. S. Byatt, Possession. A Romance (New York: Random House, 1990), 404.

25. In arguing for the importance of women romance writers, Margaret Doody remarks that “anyone interested in prose fiction would … certainly have been aware … that the author of Artamène and Clélie was female” (The Female Quixote [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], xvii). I am unconvinced of this. The translator's Preface to Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1691), the novelist Eliza Haywood's The Tea-Table (1725), and the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu's Dialogues of the Dead (1760) credit Georges, not Madeleine; see Novel and Romance 1700-1800, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 25-26, 84, 225-26. Unlike Arabella, Lennox herself may have known otherwise: Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, which she was translating, credits Madeleine de Scudéry, not Georges, with these works. But on my reading of the novel, Lennox would hardly have wished to tell or remind them that Scudéry was a woman. As to readership, historically, as Doody says, “the French romances had seemed to offer a literary world common to men and women” (xvi). But, one needs to add, novels offered the same to Lennox: late in 1751, she discussed The Female Quixote with three fellow novelists, Jane Collier, Sarah Fielding (who wrote the first British children's novel), and Samuel Richardson (420).

26. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols. (1785; rpt. New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 1:138, 2:7.

27. For Austen's procedures, see Eric Rothstein, “The Lessons of Northanger Abbey,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43 (1974): 14-30. As Howard Weinbrot shows elsewhere in this volume, analogical reading problems recur throughout the century. When Pope and Belinda cocreate The Rape of the Lock, Pope takes the Homeric paradigms as bearing on issues of lineage and noblesse oblige, while Belinda acts as though she must renew the Iliad's literal violence over the raptus of half of a couple.

    I should acknowledge my own debts to Weinbrot's historiography. My emphasis on Arabella's need for a current British model of liberty rather than the models of domination she borrows from the French past fits with the increasing British nationalism that Weinbrot makes clear in his magisterial Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). My own ideas on “emulation” have been greatly influenced by Weinbrot's work on this topic; for a recent version, see Britannia's Issue, 78-113.

28. Arthur C. Danto takes it as “an analytical convenience” but notes that “a great many philosophers of merit have believed [it] to exist” (The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art [Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981], 95-99). Rapt, involuntary action underlies what Joel Weinsheimer calls “exemplary history,” as opposed to “critical history.” The contrast between these two kinds of history is central to Arabella's cure. “Critical history,” Weinsheimer writes (Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], 88-89), “must describe Don Quixote as mad … because otherwise his story would demonstrate that in fact credibility has no necessary reference to probability.” A passional, exemplary history, however, focuses on effect, so that “whether the narrative is factual or fabulous matters not at all.” Weinsheimer cites Arabella's dialogue with the good divine in The Female Quixote (376-77), showing that at the end of the novel she subscribes to “critical history,” literal truth value, as a precondition for exemplary history. In terms of my analysis, the crucial moral point hangs on a subsidiary empirical one: subscribing to “critical” reason allows her to heed the Doctor's censure of romance morality. Earlier, she had been unable to accept the same censure from the Countess (The Female Quixote, 329). Arabella's hybrid view of critical and exemplary histories tallies with that in Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, which Weinsheimer (72-102) skillfully discusses; to amplify my comments above on The Female Quixote, autonomy, and “translator's problems,” see especially pages 93 and 95, where Weinsheimer remarks on Bolingbroke's use of “imitative translation” to define the hermeneutics of exemplary history. Though Bolingbroke wrote the Letters in 1735, they were first published in 1752 by Millar at virtually the same time as he brought out The Female Quixote—both books appear in the Gentleman's Magazine March 1752 book list, 22:145, 146.

29. Since Sir George ridicules Dryden for having stolen “the most shining Characters and Incidents in his Plays” from French romances, one should consider Dryden's defense of his heroic mode as “the representation of Nature … wrought up to an higher pitch,” like a statue larger than life. “Moral Truth is the Mistress of the Poet,” he insists; “Poesie must resemble Natural Truth, but it must be Ethical” (“An Essay of Dramatick Poesie,” in Works, vol. 17, ed. Samuel Holt Monk, A. E. Wallace Maurer, et al. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971], 74-75; preface to The Indian Emperour, in Works, vol. 9, ed. John Loftis and Vinton Dearing [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966], 12). One can gauge the popularity of romance with both sexes in the mid-eighteenth century by looking at not only the long prose versions but also the theatrical repertoire. In Le Siècle de Louis XIV, which Lennox was translating at the same time she was writing The Female Quixote, Voltaire actually attributes the decline of French romances to the theatre's doing the same things better and more briefly: “On a vu dans les bonnes tragédies … beaucoup plus de sentiments qu'on n'en trouve dans ces énormes volumes; ces sentiments y sont bien mieux exprimés, et la connaissance du coeur humain beaucoup plus approfondie” (ed. René Groos, 2 vols. [Paris: Garnier, 1930], 2:284). Keeping that in mind, one might note that between September 1751 and publication of The Female Quixote in March 1752, the London theaters staged eleven tragedies from the years 1680 to 1720, the years directly following Dryden's heyday: Congreve's The Mourning Bride, Lee's Theodosius, Otway's The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd, Southerne's Oroonoko, John Hughes's The Siege of Damascus, Rowe's Tamerlane, The Fair Penitent, Lady Jane Gray, and Jane Shore, and Edmund Smith's Phaedra and Hippolitus. With this repertory on the boards, it is no wonder that romance was remembered well enough that it could return into fashion, praised for its moral purity.