[In the following essay, Labbie asserts that Arabella's refashioning of narratives and history subverts the didactic nature of the romance novel.]

The effects of Romance and true History are not very different.

—Clare Reeves, The Progress of Romance

Truth and appearances and reality, power … [woman] is—by virtue of her inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry—the living support of all the staging/production of the world. Variously veiled according to the epochs of history.

—Luce Irigaray, “Veiled Lips”

Irigaray's claim regarding the mutability of the performance of “woman” cited in the epigraph above,¹ also calls into question a notion of performative aspects of history and, in so doing, signals key issues at play in a historiographical discussion of Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote (1752).² As I will argue in this essay, Lennox's protagonist, Arabella, exemplifies and enacts a process of mimesis which is in accord with Irigaray's formulation even while she demonstrates that process to be integrally tethered to a concept of history as contingent upon retrospective narratives.³ Arabella's conflation of the historical romances that constitute and color her knowledge of her own contemporary eighteenth-century bourgeois life with “true history” foregrounds the extent to which romance and history are interdependent narrative genres. Blurring genre distinctions, such as they are, she posits a transgressive account of historical reality and challenges a concept of “distinct epochs of history”; as she performs the nobility of antiquity that is appropriated and fetishized by members of the eighteenth-century rising bourgeoisie, she concomitantly forwards a feminist poststructuralist approach to gender constructs. Through the mode of “retro” dress Arabella inscribes and reads “history” and “sexual difference” as semiotic signs of cultural performance, making visible a material gesture that calls attention to her status as a “woman” who is subject to, yet outside of, a specific and singular historical context. This play with temporality is hyperbolically present in The Female Quixote, a text where an intersection between sartorial and historical narratives performs a concept of “retro” history.

Through her appropriation of Old French romances, Arabella enacts those chivalric histories in the context of mideighteenth-century England, a context which has recently become a site for discussions of the creation of gender categories.⁴ This pivotal moment in the history of sex and gender roles is generally understood to be due, partly, to a shift that occurred in the focus of the male scopic gaze. During the mideighteenth century, gender roles and constructs, previously maintained as social categories, became invested with a categorically ontological rigidity. The shift brought with it a new focus on female sartorial ornamentation and a commodification of fashion markers.⁵ In other words, as women's ontological status began to inhabit their social status, making evident a collapse between interiority and exteriority, as well as surface and depth, which continues to be at work today, a perception of women as sites and objects of exchange began to be expressed through increasing commodification and distribution of fashion and its hygienic paraphernalia. Regarding this vestimentary change, Kaja Silverman notes that during the eighteenth century, “the male subject retreated from the limelight, handing on his mantle to the female subject,” and that while male vestiture becomes uniform, “female dress and headpieces reached epic proportions.”⁶ Interestingly, amid this flux and construction of sexed identity, in The Female Quixote, Lennox's literary character Arabella already challenges this shift in the scopic gaze by paradoxically appealing to, and undermining, that gaze.

Attempting to emulate heroines of previous historical ages, whose success was largely dependent upon their actions rather than their appearance, Arabella's cross-historical dress is at once far simpler and more intriguing than the ornamental garb popular among the emerging bourgeoisie.⁷ Significantly, her choice of dress places her in the realm of classical antiquity that was appropriated and evoked as the apex of culture in much Enlightenment scholarship. Lennox's gesture toward the Enlightenment trend to excavate, and perhaps exploit, classical ideals readdresses and critiques that trend. She casts her own glance back toward antiquity as she problematizes and satirizes what emerges as an idealistic nostalgia.

A consideration of “retro” risks exposing a similar nostalgia, and, indeed, looking toward the eighteenth century in order to locate a moment when “retro” is already being enacted and called into question, although its performance might seem to engage in the same antiquating process that seduced some thinkers of the eighteenth century. Yet, the complexity and paradox of Arabella's own “retro” dress and her concept of history rescue our own historiographical study from such repetitive pitfalls. For Silverman, “retro,” the form of dressing that crosses “vestimentary, sexual, and historical boundaries,” is a metaphor for the feminist postmodern project of drawing on the past to resituate that past within a contemporary setting:

[Retro] inserts its wearer into a complex network of cultural and historical references. At the same time, it avoids the pitfalls of a naive referentiality; by putting quotation marks around the garments it revitalizes, it makes clear that the past is available to us only in a textual form, and through the mediation of the present.⁸

Silverman refers to “retro” as a mode of dress rooted in the 1960s, thus aligning it with the development of the “postmodern movement.” However, for a consideration of gender constructs in the eighteenth century as they effect our own historical perception, it is highly significant that Arabella already enacts a “retro” style of dress in The Female Quixote. I suggest, therefore, that “retro” is not merely a postmodern manifestation of the second wave of feminism that revises social and ontological enlightenment symptoms, or residues, but, rather, is already located in Lennox's text.

If the phenomenon of “retro” dressing may be located in the eighteenth century (the historical moment most often cited by theorists and historians as the “origin” of scopophilia), then Silverman's argument assumes new historical implications for women who attempted to evade the commodifying and symptomalizing gaze even as they increasingly found themselves to be objects of its focus. At a time when, as Nancy Armstrong notes, didactic literature was the primary means by which women culled information on proper attitudes, style, and manners, Lennox demonstrates that through literature women may also discover subversive positions within society.⁹ If we may consider “didactic narrative” as attempting to affect history by administering what a woman's desire should be—that is, by advertising—then the literature of the time is already controlling and commodifying female desire in a manner analogous to our contemporary capitalist fashion market. Arabella represents a fictional member of an historical culture who is bombarded by such texts, but one whose reading and whose politics remain innocent of that bourgeois dissemination of social expectations. In fact, if Lennox's own text may be, as it has been, read as a didactic treatise against the over-determined and over-invested reading of romances, then it may also be read as a satire on didactic treatises.

For Arabella, “retro” is the means by which she situates herself outside of the banal eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, and, ironically, attempts to reposition herself as a serious member of the sociopolitical realm. Although her cross-historical dressing is not always taken seriously by characters in the text, often making her the object of ridicule, Arabella's dress nevertheless makes sociopolitical statements about sex and class role expectations. Manifesting a desire to emulate heroines of antiquity, cross-historical dressing enables Arabella simultaneously to be the focus of attention and to subvert that focus. Indeed, her role demands a reconsideration of Silverman's notion of “retro” as an empty, acontextual gesture. Her ingenuous efforts to be taken seriously by everyone she encounters suggest that retro dress is not merely a vestimentary tactic that can be filled with any intention at any moment; rather, it is one that is invested with political participation and cultural ambitions. Arabella's dress is often described as striking precisely because it is more simple than the highly ornamental contemporary styles of eighteenth-century aristocratic culture.

Due to her reading, Arabella's concept of scopic attention assumes different expectations from those described by Lennox as popular in her society. Whereas, for example, Charlotte Glanville jealously competes with Arabella for the attention of Sir George, Arabella expresses a more liberated, even feminist approach to the attention of men. She would rather express herself and her ideas than participate in games that place matrimony and social escalation as the goal of male/female interaction.

In fact, in book 1.4-6, Arabella exhibits a strong sense of sisterhood, innocently supporting the morally questionable Miss Groves. Interested in the history of Miss Groves, Arabella convinces her waiting woman Mrs. Morris to narrate the interior workings of Miss Groves's soul, thus revealing her own perception of history as a narrative of the “thoughts of [one's] soul” as being derivative of personal experience (FQ, 78). Additionally, in book 3.5, “Some curious instructions for relating an history,” Arabella instructs Lucy to tell her history. In response to Arabella's request, Lucy claims that “it is not such simple girls as I can tell histories; it is only fit for clerks and such sort of people, that are very learned” (FQ, 134). Demonstrating an utter lack of concern for a universalist historical account, Arabella, nevertheless, believes that Lucy is “learned enough.” Lucy does not know how to write a history. She is not schooled in the attempt to link the chronicle with any form of singular truth. Therefore, encouraging Lucy to create and communicate a history of her life, Arabella shows her support for historical narratives that transgress any hierarchical structure. Arabella does not think that a divine relation between the subject and truth is necessary in order for an historical narrative to be considered valid. Rather, historical narrative is flexible and not bound to specific, stable, monolithic “Truth.”

Arabella does, however, exhibit a concern with an empirical form of knowledge. Lucy is able to relate Arabella's history because she has witnessed the significant moments of her life. She has experienced the same events that Arabella would want communicated to others in the narrative formation of her public subjectivity. Without disregarding “events,” this concept of history as a narrative process displaces a belief in history as recording a monolithic “Truth,” forwarding an iterable, communicable sense of the past as it might affect the present. Arabella is interested in Miss Groves's history because she wants to understand Miss Groves's present state. She asks Lucy to relate her own history because she wants others to know her. Lucy's contentiousness, however, exhibits a more “enlightened” concept of history than that of Arabella since Arabella's monolithic historical narrative fails to represent the subject precisely because the fragmented subject cannot be reduced to a single narrative. Lucy's hesitancy, though appearing to be an issue of narrative authority based on a hierarchical concept of knowledge, points toward a more sophisticated approach to subjectivity as that which cannot be reduced to a single narrative. In this sense, Arabella's request for Lucy to recite her “history,” similar to the practice of “retro,” posits an ironic distance between origin and citation. Analogous to Arabella's approach to historical narrative, “retro” includes the past while undoing it, and recreating it. This process of citation and iteration maintains a trace of history while reinscribing it into the present, rendering “retro” metaphoric and metonymic for a poststructuralist concept of the eighteenth century as that historical and literary period is construed as the origin and as the negation of its own construction. In Homi Bhabha's terms, Arabella's retro dressing enacts a “metonymy of presence” that undoes the histories she reads in the process of citing them.¹⁰

In book 7.7, “In which the author condescends to be very minute in the description of our heroine's dress,” Lennox provides a detailed account of Arabella's dress, contributing to her text a much needed dimension of materiality to the otherwise general references to “the singularity of Arabella's dress.” Ordering the construction of a dress in the fashion of princess Julia's attire, Arabella enters into a conflict with the dressmaker, who, lacking her repertoire of historical romance, misreads her reference and so cannot imagine princess Julia's dress. Only after an extended discussion of fashion, and the dressmaker's frustrated surrender, is Arabella's command executed by her own workwoman:

“You can never persuade me,” said Arabella, “that any fashion can be more becoming than that of the princess Julia's, who was the most gallant princess upon earth, and knew better than any other how to set off her charms. It may indeed be a little obsolete now,” pursued she, “for the fashion could not but alter a little in the compass of near two thousand years.”

“Two thousand years, madam!” said the woman, in a great surprise: “Lord help us trades-people, if they did not alter a thousand times in as many days! I thought your ladyship was speaking of the last month's taste, which, as I said before, is quite out now.” “—Well,” replied Arabella, “let the present mode be what it will, I insist upon having my clothes made after the pattern of the beautiful daughter of Augustus.”¹¹

(FQ, 303)

The scene reveals the fine lines between conscious and unconscious action that Arabella's dress subverts, as well as the effect of her cross-historical dressing on Lennox's version of eighteenth-century society. Deferring analysis of this passage for the moment, however, it is important first to present the description of Arabella's appearance in order to provide a material foundation for an analysis of the scopic and psychic effects of her appearance on the public. Her adornment renders her performance one that gestures toward the past while recontextualizing that past within the present:

She wore no hoop, and the blue and silver stuff of her robe was only kept by its own richness from hanging close about her. It was quite open round her breast, which was shaded with a rich border of lace; and clasping close to her waist by small knots of diamonds, descended in a sweeping train on the ground. The sleeves were short, wide, and slashed, fastened in different places with diamonds, and her arms were partly hid by half a dozen falls or ruffles. Her hair, which fell in very easy ringlets on her neck, was placed with great care and exactness round her lovely face; and the jewels and ribands, which were all her headdress, were disposed to the greatest advantage. Upon the whole, nothing could be more singularly becoming than her dress; or set off with greater advantage the striking beauties of her person.

(FQ, 303-4)

Challenging the contemporary style and material expectations, Arabella's cross-historical dressing inscribes the past into the present. Her precocity, then, suggests that “retro” and its cultural and historical effects are not merely responding to a concept of gendered identity that arguably originates in the eighteenth century, but also that the very historical space wherein this specific identity is created is also the space wherein it is deconstructed. Further, Lennox's tale, and Arabella's dress, as well as her approach to history (one that reads no difference between “real history” and “fictional history”), posits a historical and material account of history as “retro”;¹² it undoes its own project by appropriating the past and recreating and resituating it into the present.

Reading history as “retro” calls for an approach to history similar to, yet more heterogeneous than, the one proposed by Mary Ann Doane when she claims that “the compulsion to repeat, based on forgetting, is a loss of temporal differentiation, the collapse of the past into the present” (FF, 95). This collapse of the past into the present does not merely erase the past; rather, it reinscribes the past into a present that is replete with history. That is, the past that returns to affect the present, returns, in a sense, from the future, and is real.¹³ Although Arabella's cross-historical dressing does, on one level, attempt to erase the difference between past and present, its effects lend themselves to a theory of history as a reiteration and recreation of, rather than a simple collapse of, temporalities. She draws on fictional history to create her own present, therefore rendering that which has been marginalized as “fictional” history, true for her in the present. By engaging in retro dressing, Arabella enacts the reality of the fiction she lives.

Important to her complex representation of the past within the present is the fragile boundary between Arabella's conscious desire to dress like her heroines and the unconscious effects of that dress. Arguably, Arabella is attempting to uphold her notion of public codes by forming her dress according to her historical models of honor, respect, and authority, yet she remains largely unaware of the impression her dress evokes. “The surprise Arabella's unusual appearance gave to the whole company, was very visible to every one but herself” (FQ, 305). Nevertheless, her performance is highly integral to a reconsideration of the extent to which masquerade is unconscious and mimesis is conscious. At this point, Arabella's actions may be read to interrogate contemporary theory regarding masquerade and mimesis. Despite the complicated, highly conscious procedure by which her dress was finally made, Arabella does not become aware that she is the object of attention until the words “princess Julia” are “echoed at every corner.”

Formulating her revisionary approach to the relationship between femininity and mimesis, Irigaray claims that woman must actively participate in a performance of the role of femininity in order to make visible the investment in that role as a means of “convert[ing] a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it.”¹⁴ Her discussion of mimesis works to expose a secret past that was supposed to remain invisible. In order to find a means of empowerment and to exceed the role of subordination, Irigaray urges that women appropriate the very place of exploitation. For Irigaray, and, for Arabella, the exposure and disruption of modes of feminine exploitation are accomplished through citation and recitation of those very oppressive forces. By making visible the means by which the female subject is exploited, made the pure object of the scopic gaze, and commodified through that gaze, those means of exploitation are disarmed. In Irigaray's view, the performance of femininity must work to “make visible, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible.” By gesturing toward the past as it is represented in her readings, we will see that Arabella takes Irigaray's project one step further: she exposes a past of subordination while enacting a possible past wherein women were not exploited and commodified. Arabella's historical process is integral, then, to an extension of Irigaray's call for subversion through recitation.

The deliberate assumption of the role of femininity enacted by Arabella, therefore, is already invested with her own theory and practice of mimesis. She seeks consciously to fulfill her own desire; and, yet, in order to perform the role described by Irigaray, Arabella must also remain unaware of the effects of her actions. Participating in the play of mimesis even while she remains elsewhere, Arabella intermingles her conscious desire to appear as princess Julia with her unconscious desire to have an effect on the company at the ball. Despite, or because of, the foregrounded artificiality of her “natural” appearance, Arabella is more authentic than the other women of her class, and it is to this social/class anachronicity that they respond when they are taken aback by her self-presentation. The paradox of mimesis, then, as Arabella enacts it, proto-actively rewriting Irigaray's formulation, is that it must be both conscious and unconscious to be effective. Arabella must enact the past within the present, while forgetting the difference between the past and the present if her cross-historical dress is to be authentic and to subtly transgress her social context.

Arabella's engagement with mimesis, enacted through her “retro” performance, foregrounds an ironic distance between a fantasmatic origin of an object and its citation. Yet, central to the irony of her dress, are the effects her masquerade has on the public, which, to a large degree, remain unconscious.¹⁵ This paradox might be rendered more comprehensible by looking to Nietzsche's observation that “wherever dissembling produces a stronger effect when it is unconscious, it becomes unconscious” (quoted in FF, 59). That is, when a conscious act is more effective in the public realm when it is perceived to be unconscious, then the act becomes incorporated into the subject's being to the extent that it assumes presence within the unconscious. Through repeated recitation and iteration of a gesture the construct of that citation—the quotedness of it—becomes “natural” or unconsciously enacted.¹⁶ In order for the effects of her dress to be more effective, to appear more “natural” and more “real” in the public sphere, Arabella must incorporate her conscious desire to emulate her heroines into her seemingly unmediated actions.

Synthesizing conscious and unconscious actions reveals the connections between masquerade and mimesis, two concepts that are often thought of as having goals that are separate and distinct. Masquerade is perceived as an unconscious effect of dressing that enables one to “pass” for a member of a different social, historical, or sexual category. Mimesis, on the other hand, as we have seen here, is defined as that performance of subjectivity which must be assumed consciously. Arabella, incorporating conscious and unconscious effects of both strategies of self-representation, enacts what Diana Fuss, in reference to Frantz Fanon, has called “miming masquerade.”¹⁷ Dressing like her ancient and literary heroines, and yet, appearing to be purely unconscious of the effects of her dress, Arabella's miming masquerade has a double and doubling effect: the mask and the process of masking become a performance that involves the subject in a process of acting in a scene where she plays the part of the subject playing the part of the subject. In other words, Arabella's performance becomes a metaperformance, always distanced from itself so that it may reflect upon its own actions. In this way, the gesture and the act being quoted become intertwined, miring any origin in the constant play and staging of the performance of performance. Similarly, Arabella's investment in appropriating the histories of her heroines enables the past to become real within the present by obfuscating any sense of a difference.

Interrogating the categories of surface and depth, the veil also marks the difference between past and present, truth and illusion, awareness and innocence.¹⁸ However, the veil in Arabella's cross-historical dressing does not merely break down these binary systems; it also demonstrates the way in which, at a crucial moment in history—the mideighteenth century—the scopic gaze that is shifting toward women is already being absorbed, as well as deflected, and reflected back upon itself. The crucial blending of conscious and unconscious in Arabella's cross-historical “retro” dressing demonstrates Lennox's stake in challenging the focus of the gaze even as it is engaged in the process of formation. Lennox's text, therefore, exposes and problematizes the perception of the eighteenth century as the moment when the gaze shifted to posit women as the objects of that gaze, and the moment toward which Silverman's conception of postmodern retro dress as subversive is directed.

In one of the first scenes in the novel (book 1.2), as Arabella enters church on a brief reprieve from her castle, “making use of the permission the marquis sometimes allowed her” to enter the public realm, she blushes, feeling the gaze of Mr. Hervey. The church is an integral space in this tale that criticizes and comments upon the mobility of forms of historical narrative. Due to its overt self-consciously historical presence (the church is always built to represent the temporal other, or that which transcends time), it manifests an architectural parallel to the “retro” character of Arabella's dress. As the church recapitulates and enacts the conventions of ritual and the Law of the Father, it makes its own form significant. This presence of the Law of the Father in the church affects the text on two levels: first, outside of the domestic space of her home, the church is the only space where Arabella has her father's permission “freely” to enter. In this sense, the church serves as an alternate domestic space that is still controlled by her father. Second, the church is ultimately enforced by God—the sovereign father.¹⁹ Therefore, when Arabella enters the church, she enters an alternate private space that is, nevertheless, replete with the ritual and symbolic language of a public and historic culture. Within the church, contemporary issues are addressed within an antiquated setting and in the full disguise of convention and service to the past as it affects the present. Further, Arabella is veiled; she has “taken the veil,”²⁰ wearing her usual dress, which emulates her ancient heroines.

Her dress, though singular, was far from being unbecoming. … Her headdress was only a few knots advantageously disposed, over which she wore a white sarsenet hood, somewhat in the form of a veil, with which she sometimes wholly covered her fair face, when she saw herself beheld with too much attention.

This veil had never appeared to her so necessary before. Mr. Hervey's eager glances threw her into so much confusion, that pulling it over her face as much as she was able, she remained invisible to him all the time they afterwards stayed in the church. This action, by which she would have had him understand that she was displeased with his gazing on her with so little respect, only increased his curiosity to know who she was.

(FQ, 8-9)

Despite Arabella's attempts to make herself invisible, her concealment only augments the focus of the gaze, provoking the desire of the Other to know her identity. In Fuss's words, for the Other gazing at the subordinated woman, the “veil functions as an exotic signifier, invested with all the properties of a sexual fetish” (“IC,” 26). Her veil reveals in the act of concealing, thus placing her as “woman” in the visible realm of the very patriarchal culture that seeks to make her invisible.

As the gaze becomes more intense, Arabella's desire to shield herself also increases. However, despite the narrative commentary claiming that the veil covers her entire face, the language in this scene suggests that the veil is inadequate in completing its duty. “Pulling it over her face as much as she was able” illustrates that regardless of the extent to which her face is covered, she still needs to increase the degree to which she masquerades and performs her miming masquerade. She remains “invisible” only because she feels that her mask unilaterally conceals her self, failing to understand that in the act of concealing, not only does Arabella further attract Mr. Hervey's gaze, but, by tacitly communicating with Mr. Hervey via the veil, she reveals much about her ideals of courtly love and relationships between people within culture. Feeling the violence of Mr. Hervey's gaze, Arabella seeks to prevent the imminent exploitation implied by the symbolization and symptomalization (the process and expression of becoming and making symptomatic) inherent in that gaze. As she pulls down her veil, Arabella enters into the mimetic game by responding to her vulnerability with an act of defiance, communicating her desire both to be respected enough to gain the right to distance from the public (or, to be so visible that others must pretend that she is invisible) and to enter a figural dialogue with Mr. Hervey.

Recalling my earlier discussion of Irigaray, one might say that Arabella is making visible the desire to call attention to invisibility.²¹ Reading Arabella's attempt to mask her face as a mimetic act reveals her desire to be invisible in order to escape the realms of the “perceptible” and the material. In an overdetermined manner, Arabella hyperbolically submits herself to the realm of the perceptible in hopes of becoming so much a part of matter that she is rendered invisible. Arabella, however, is not invisible to those in the public realm; rather, she becomes more visible by calling attention to herself as she actively veils her face. She makes visible the act of becoming invisible and in so doing underscores a necessary connection between mimesis and masquerade.

Arabella's cross-historical dressing calls into question the difference between conscious and unconscious performances in a manner that is parallel to Lennox's presentation of romance and history as interdependent narrative processes. Writing a satire of a woman caught up by the fictional lives of women in historical novels, Lennox recreates such a fictional history as to draw the reader into the text, interrogating the boundaries of history and fiction. The material and the historical are bound up not only by Arabella's retro dressing, but also, theoretically, by a discussion of the veil and history that is illuminated in a context of Doane's psychoanalytic analysis of the femme fatale in film. Presenting history as that which is historical precisely because it refuses to identically repeat itself, to mime itself, Doane posits a concept of history as veiled, and without naming it such, as “retro.” As in Lennox's illustration and Silverman's analysis, Doane argues that change occurs in history through a complex process of citation and recitation. Explicating a relationship between psychoanalysis and history that is integral to the present discussion of Lennox, Doane argues that “for psychoanalysis, the past and present are fully imbricated, locked in a struggle in which ‘forgetting’ is no longer a simple accident, but a defensive weapon aimed against the past”; while historiography, on the contrary, “solidifies its notions about knowledge, power, and ‘objectivity’ by effecting a ‘clean break’ between the past and the present” (FF, 91). Attempting to fuse the two fields she otherwise defines as separate, she continues to argue for a psychoanalytic approach to historiography.

Although Doane's desire to render a psychoanalytic approach to historiography does effectively call for a reconsideration of the perceived differences between the two fields, her support of a “collapse of past and present” cited earlier in this essay simplifies the complex temporal relationship between past and present, and utterly elides the integral role played by the “future” in a psychoanalytic historiography. Merely to collapse these temporalities detracts from the complex dynamic of history in which past, present, and future are identifiable, but flexible: intertwined, yet affecting each other from outside of each other. Even within “retro,” in which the past seems to become one with the present, that past is always being altered through a process of reinscription. To claim that a collapse or, on the other hand, a “clean break” occurs therefore obfuscates the narrative process to which history is subject. What needs to be accounted for is the persistent play of the past within the present, and the return of the repressed inscribing the future within a presence that is always available. This concept of history as retro that Arabella enacts is more aligned with Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the return of the repressed as coming from the future, and the notion, in his words that “we are all the time ‘rewriting history,’ retroactively giving the elements their symbolic weight by including them in new textures” (SOI, 56). In addition to recalling the interdependency of sartorial and historical narrative and performance, these “new textures” contain and represent the past while weaving that past into the present, rendering a new conception of the past. Parallel to the necessary play between the conscious and the unconscious, then, is the dynamic at play between history and theory, past and present. I suggest that, for this reason, “retro” style dress seems an apt metaphor for a process of historiography that is bound to a psychoanalytic perspective.

The material language that considers history a “texture,” a “weaving,” or a form of dress implicitly imbricates an analysis of history and sexual categories as narrative or discursive constructs. The relationship between Arabella's desire to veil her face, her self, and sexuality is demonstrated by a focus on her hair.²² In the veil scene at church, the moment prior to the description of Arabella's headdress and attached veil focuses on the appearance of “artlessness”: “Her fine black hair hung upon her neck in curls, which had so much appearance of being artless, that all but her maid, whose employment it was to give them that form, imagined they were so” (FQ, 9). Arabella's curls are contrived and manipulated until they appear to be natural, suggesting that their naturalness is constructed. The epitome of “femininity,” that which is aesthetically beautiful and delicate, is revealed to be constructed to the extent that the very categories of sex and gender may be read also as constructed within culture. Arabella's “femininity” is a result of manipulation in a process parallel to that which conceives of history as empirically given truth. The ritual enacted by the maid who constructs Arabella's hair in order that it appear “natural” signifies the very ritual that history experiences as it is recorded in language. For history, this means that what is considered a “natural” or “essential” to historical truth is already constructed by the narrative that constitutes history.

Constructions of history and sexuality intersect during the scene in book 9.11, in which the doctor argues with Arabella in favor of historical truth as he attempts to undo what he perceives as Arabella's delusions. Considering the strong satirical nature of Lennox's text, this chapter, cunningly entitled, “Being, in the author's opinion, the best chapter in this history,” and which has been read as the “real voice of the author,” must also be read as satirizing the idea of stable truth.²³ Here, the doctor attempts to argue for real “Truth” and “History” as correlatives of fiction and history. Arabella's concept of history demonstrates an intermingling of the genres of truth and fiction, as well as empirical history and what is understood as narrativized history.²⁴ This of course is not a new observation; however, its place within Lennox's text renders it different from the generalized concept of relativistic history of poststructuralism. Rather than embody a purely relativistic theory, Lennox provides a tale that enables a perception of empirical truth, history, and fiction as overlapping, intertwined, and interdependent genres constantly in the process of being cited and recited. The doctor's argument centers on the premise that the texts Arabella reads as history cannot possibly be historical because they were written at a time that is distant from the moment of the recorded events:

“To prove those narratives to be fictions, madam, is only difficult because the position is almost too evident for proof. Your ladyship knows, I suppose, to what authors these writings are ascribed?”—“To the French wits of the last century,” said Arabella.—“And at what distance, madam, are the facts related in them from the age of the writer?”—“I was never exact in my computation,” replied Arabella; “but I think most of the events happened about two thousand years ago.”—“How then, madam,” resumed the doctor, “could these events be so minutely known to writers so far remote from the time in which they happened?”—“By records, monuments, memoirs, and histories,” answered the lady.

(FQ, 415-16)

The doctor presents the notion that a real history must be written in a documentary, realistic style so that writing and action can coincide, thereby confirming the accurate record of the event. In this view, events need to be empirical by observed and personally witnessed for them to claim the authority of history. The doctor's is an approach which, as Arabella argues, is limited and illusory.²⁵ Her position is an intertextual one, suggesting that writing is produced in relation to other writings (i.e., “records, monuments, memoirs, and histories”). She does not directly challenge the idea about the occurrence of events; rather, she foregrounds the different possible media through which a concept of “contemporaneity” might be discovered, and, in so doing, she reconceives the very notion of “contemporaneity.” As we read, textually we recall events, generating a present replete with a past.

According to the doctor's logic, only narratives that are written from a purely empirical, positivist perspective constitute history. His telos represents history as linear, finite, and eschatological. Revealing the doctor's opinion to be a fictional ideal, Arabella posits a concept of history as self-reflexive and self-disruptive, as a flexible entity that revises itself even as it cites itself. The doctor defines these different approaches to history according to sexual categories. Demonstrating Arabella's control to be within the symbolic realm, Patricia Meyer Spacks notes: “In Arabella's mythology, women absolutely control male destinies … she reverses the social convention that makes women compliant and dependent.”²⁶ Threatened by this power, the doctor's motivation in “curing” Arabella may be perceived as a desire to prevent her from affecting the symbolic “masculine” realm. Pursuing his didactic argument, the doctor claims, “Love, madam, is … the sole business of ladies in romances” (FQ, 421).

Arabella's quixotic vision of a life in which love, honor, and intellect are the guiding principles is challenged by the doctor's empirical perception of a rational life which conforms to the patriarchal system. When the doctor claims that the “tendency of these books [romances] … is to give new fire to the passions of revenge and love,” thus supporting the arguments that women should only read literature that will guide them to be better wives and socialites (i.e., the commodified didactic literature of the bourgeoisie), the subtext of his argument implies that the liberation Arabella finds in her chivalric world is contrary to the moral expectations of eighteenth-century England because it conflicts with rigid, dispassionate contemporary laws (FQ, 420). Patricia Spacks notes the emphasis on the polarities of “masculinity” and “femininity” in this scene, since Arabella demonstrates “feminine” characteristics, but emulates “masculine” values of honor and fame:

The conflict played out by Arabella and the clergyman, between “feminine” emotionalism, fancifulness, and desire, and “masculine” rationality and piety, would recur, with the same gender assignments, most explicitly in the Gothic novel. Indeed, these gender assignments constitute eighteenth-century commonplaces. … Contemporary discourse on the male and female characteristics delineates a socially constructed opposition of qualities.

(DT, 27)

Spacks's focus on the social construction of gender roles addresses the imposed nature of gender difference. By naming Arabella as the “feminine” emotional character in conflict with the rational “masculine” argument of the clergyman, she exposes the limiting nature of gendered and gendering narrative genres and paradigms of thought. Here, the feminine is aligned with a nonsensical, nonlinear approach to history, while the masculine is aligned with a rational, linear approach. But this scheme is, as I have argued, challenged by The Female Quixote.

Considering the confining role of sex categories inherent in definitions of history as linear and empirical or nonlinear and flexible, the reader may see the necessity for a concept of history that is tied to a material account such as the one proposed by this essay. Arabella's sartorial, historical, and exegetical mimesis reveals what Jacques Derrida describes in “The Double Session” as a performance of reading that involves mimesis and veiling: “The book, then, no longer repairs, but rather repeats, the process of spacing, along with what plays, loses, and wins itself in it. This, too, is literally to quote” (D, 235). Arabella's “retro” process of reading and quoting is dangerous to a culture that is attempting to interpolate women as commodified subjects precisely by administering to them didactic literature. Therefore, if Arabella's own form of didactic literature found in her reading of romances leads her to foreground the performance of reading through veiling, mimesis, and a miming masquerade, then she exposes and, in so doing, threatens, the very system by which the doctor's bourgeois culture defines order.

Ironically, serving as Arabella's teacher the doctor can only replace her within the very system of romance that he seeks to dispel. That is, by “proving” to her that her uncritical belief in the authenticity of the romantic histories she reads is not only false, but dangerous, he replaces her within a system wherein she submits to the bourgeois order, but also to the order of romance that he chastises. She marries Glanville and becomes a heroine of her own romance. The doctor's lesson, then, is that reading romances is dangerous to the mind and morality, but living them is crucial to the perpetuation of a certain mideighteenth-century class and order. In this sense, as Arabella's own quixotic performance exhibits, reading involves the subject in a constant process of “retro” engagement with the past, one that calls into question the very notions of past, present, and future that it iterates, interrogates, and inscribes.

Notes

1. Quoted in Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 58; hereafter FF, cited in the text. The full section on “Veiled Lips” may be found in Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 118.

2. I would like to thank Greg Clingham, John Mowitt, Marilyn Mumford, Diana Fuss and the members of her seminar on the “Frontiers of Psychoanalysis,” at the Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory (1995) where discussion helped me to formulate many of these ideas regarding The Female Quixote, introduction by Sandra Shulman (London: Pandora Press, 1986); hereafter FQ, cited in the text.

3. On the history and play of mimesis from Plato to performance studies, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); hereafter D, cited in the text.

4. For discussion of gender constructs in the eighteenth century see, e.g., Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Terry Castle, Masquerade & Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Randolph Trumbach, “Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in Third Sex, Third Gender, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

5. Roland Barthes's texts have been instrumental in semiotic analyses of these fashion markers. See esp. Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lauers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967); Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).

6. For a more extended discussion of the scopic gaze, see Joan Copjec, “The Delirium of Clinical Perfection,” The Oxford Literary Review 8 (1986): 61, 63, and Doane.

7. I say cross-historical dressing rather than historical cross-dressing because the former implies a difference of time and engages dressing that crosses historical epochs, while the latter implies a difference of sex, and implies a cross-dressing the likes of drag, camp, etc. I must acknowledge, however, that in a sense the terms overlap by transgressing boundaries of sex expectations through time. I see gender-crossings and temporal crossings as intersecting and becoming interdependent. To cite difference within gender and time already places the performing subject in a position to disrupt and challenge categorical expectations.

8. Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse,” in Tania Modelski, Studies in Entertainment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 139 and 150-51.

9. See Nancy Armstrong, “The Gender Bind: Women and the Disciplines,” Gender 3 (1988): 1-23, esp. 12-16.

10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 89.

11. I want to call attention here to the shift in class-power roles that emerges in this scene. The dressmaker becomes Arabella's teacher, attempting to impose rules and orders of etiquette expressed by the ornamental dress of the bourgeoisie and reveals her own dependence upon the commodification of fashion that also interpolates her into a capitalist system.

12. I perceive this concept of history as similar to Nietzsche's monumental concept of history. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Abuses of History,” in The Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollindale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). However, it also includes the narrative process that enables the production and dissemination of that history. See Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche for a more extensive theoretical and eloquent retrospective analysis of history and veiling in Nietzsche's oeuvre.

13. Freud discusses the “return of the repressed” in many places, such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Slavoj Zizek takes up Freud vis-à-vis Lacan, reinscribing the return of the repressed as it is narratively rendered a psychological process that is also material in its effects. “Retro” in its simplest form is precisely the past returning to the present as it is necessarily mediated by the future; see Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989); hereafter SOI, cited in the text.

14. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76. The passage I am presenting in somewhat of a bricolaged manner reads: “One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which already means to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it. … To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible,’ of ‘matter’—to ‘ideas,’ in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply reabsorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere” (76).

15. Lennox reveals that mimesis must involve a certain degree of unconscious action and innocent intention or it becomes what Sir George and Charlotte enact, when they try to “capture” Arabella by mocking her style of dress and demeanor, and the scene ends in blood shed (book 7.11-13). In fact, Lennox illustrates the dangers of the cross-historical dressing that does not fuse conscious with unconscious, past with present. When Charlotte Glanville and Sir George decide to dress up as Arabella, hoping to trick her, their dress becomes camp, rather than masquerade or mimesis, suggesting that women can camp, a possibility that is questioned by many Queer theorists.

16. The example of epic theater perhaps not surprisingly has become a “classic” one in discussing this phenomenon of performativity, gesturing, and quoting. See Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostok (London: Verso, 1973).

17. See Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification” (1994); hereafter “IC,” cited in the text. Fuss notes that in recent feminist theory, masquerade is understood in opposition to mimesis. Her analysis of the veil in French-occupied Algeria fuses two apparently different approaches to concealment, rendering a “miming masquerade,” in which the “mimetic act depends not upon excess but equivalency, not upon mimicry's distance from masquerade, but upon its approximation to it” (28). Fuss's analysis of masquerade and mimesis points toward a concept of the two that elides the difference between conscious and unconscious by claiming that their relationship depends on approximation to each other rather than difference from each other. Yet, she maintains the difference between the conscious effects of mimesis and the unconscious effects of masquerade. If the ironic difference and distance between the origin and the citation is to be subsumed beneath a purely convincing presentation of the self as the Other, whether that presentation crosses cultural lines, as in Fanon's text, or historical lines, as it does in Lennox's text, then conscious and unconscious must also be fused.

18. For a more extended discussion of the role of the veil in the surface/depth binary, see Doane on Nietzsche and Derrida in Femmes Fatales.

19. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits, on the Law of the Father, and the Symbolic and Imaginary realms as they might or might not pertain to reified spaces.

20. As Doane notes, “To ‘take the veil’ is to become a nun, to seclude oneself in a convent” (Femmes Fatales, 48).

21. For more on the reification and representation of the invisible in performance studies, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993).

22. The literary trope that foregrounds hair as the locus of artificiality is a pervasive one and one that is especially prominent in literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: most obviously in Pope's “The Rape of the Lock,” whose heroine is also named by a derivative of Arabella (Belinda).

23. Even this consideration of the “real voice of the author” is a precarious one. The chapter has been attributed to Samuel Johnson. Although I have reasons for disagreeing with such attribution of authorship, given ambiguities of authorship, and given my discussion here of conscious/unconscious intent, perhaps the precise “author” is not so important.

24. See Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

25. For more on witnessing and memory, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1993).

26. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27; hereafter DT, cited in the text.