[In the following essay, Spacks considers Samuel Johnson's response to the themes of truth, fiction, and desire in Lennox's novel.]

“Truth is … not often welcome for its own sake,” Samuel Johnson wrote in Rambler no. 96; “it is generally unpleasing because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice.”¹ In the story Johnson constructs, the personified figure of Falsehood wins popular approval “because she took the shape that was most engaging, and always suffered herself to be dressed and painted by Desire.” Trying to please the people, Truth arrays herself the same way. “The Muses wove in the loom of Pallas, a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers; with this they invested Truth, and named her Fiction. She now went out again to conquer with more success; for when she demanded entrance of the Passions, they often mistook her for Falsehood, and delivered up their charge; but when she had once taken possession, she was soon disrobed by Reason, and shone out, in her original form, with native effulgence and resistless dignity” (The Rambler, 4:152).

Truth and fiction differ most crucially, this story implies, in their relation to desire. Truth, dressed—like Falsehood—by Desire, becomes Fiction. The statement encapsulates Johnson's ambivalent attitudes toward desire and fiction alike, attitudes both elucidated and complicated by reflecting on Johnson's relation to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, an antiromance published in 1752.²

Johnson thought highly of The Female Quixote, which he reviewed favorably in The Gentleman's Magazine (Fielding also praised it, in the Covent Garden Journal). He thought at least as highly of its author. In the last year of his life, he reported having dined with Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, and Fanny Burney. “Three such women are not to be found,” he exults: “I know not where I could find a fourth, except Mrs. Lennox, who is superiour to them all.”³ He had known her for thirty-five years; in 1750 he organized an all-night celebration honoring the publication of her first novel. Lennox, in turn, felt for him something approaching reverence.

The plot of The Female Quixote lends itself to easy summary. Arabella, whose mother dies at her birth, is reared by her devoted father, a disillusioned marquis who has retired to splendid isolation. He fails to supervise her reading. Deprived of all contact with society, the girl gets her ideas about reality from the romances she loves. When a suitor approved by her father presents himself, she cannot accept him because he does not match the pattern of romance heroes. Predictable mishaps ensue as Arabella interprets experience and judges people by the standards of romance. After she suffers a severe illness caused by her leap into a river to escape imaginary ravishers, however, an authoritative clergyman compels her to understand that romances provide inadequate guides to life. She thereupon marries her original suitor, who has remained faithful despite bouts of irritation over Arabella's absurdities.

The point seems clear: foolish girls suffer from unwise reading, but they, like Jane Austen's Catherine Morland, must learn that “human nature, at least in the midland counties of England,” hardly resembles character as described in romantic fiction.⁴ The plot's construction chastens Arabella's foolish desire.

How should we designate this desire? To say that the young woman wants romance fails to account for the poignance of her characterization. Like Don Quixote's yearning for a different world, Arabella's wish to live by the rules of romance criticizes the standards of her society especially as they restrict female possibility.

“There is nothing at so great a Distance from true and heroick Virtue,” Arabella observes, “as that Indifference which obliges some People to be pleas'd with all Things or nothing” (Lennox, p. 311). Such indifference, she elaborates, “is generally the inseparable Companion of a weak and imperfect Judgement.” Strength of desire, in other words, testifies to strength of intellect. Arabella herself, who deplores the “luke-warmness of Soul, which sends forth but feeble Desires” (p. 311) and believes love “the ruling Principle of the World” (p. 7), feels intensely about everything. Her feelings precede any specific object for them. They declare the warmth of her soul and the psychic impoverishment of her circumstances.

When men besides her father appear in her life, Arabella interprets their conduct through the medium of her faith in love as ruling principle. Every male Arabella sees becomes a potential ravisher, rescuer, or lover. She distributes men among these categories more or less arbitrarily, providing for herself a varied repertoire of responding roles. Her fantasies insist upon her force. In her mythology, women absolutely control male destinies. The man who presumes to love becomes totally vulnerable to the will of the beloved. At her order or at the sight of her displeasure he must gladly die; if she commands him to live he will overcome any disease to do so. Arabella sees herself as the cause of every apparent expression or action in every man around her—gardeners, fops, highwaymen—and as the possessor of life-and-death power over men.

Is this novel all about the absurdity of romances? Of course. On the other hand, if the text mocks far-fetched fictions it also emphasizes their profound appeal to women, not because of female gullibility but because of the psychic need for alternatives to a socially defined state of meaningless and powerless activity. Romances tell the truth of female desire. As Arabella puts it: “What room, I pray you, does a Lady give for high and noble Adventures, who consumes her Days in Dressing, Dancing, listening to Songs, and ranging the Walks with People as thoughtless as herself? How mean and contemptible a Figure must a Life spent in such idle Amusements make in History? Or rather, Are not such Persons always buried in Oblivion, and can any Pen be found who would condescend to record such inconsiderable Actions?” (Lennox, p. 279). Ordinary women have no place in history; ordinary life leaves no space for “high and noble Adventures.” Arabella's desire for such adventures, however ludicrous its manifestations, testifies to her determination to create significance.

Yet this would-be heroine must learn to accept the ordinary, to welcome the fate of domesticity—with the ambiguous help of Dr. Johnson.

A long tradition has it that Johnson wrote chapter 11 of book 9, the chapter entitled “Being, in the Author's Opinion, the best Chapter in this History.” It contains the words of the wise clergyman who converts Arabella to normality. John Mitford, in 1843, first made the claim for Johnson's authorship, basing it largely on internal evidence. Miriam Small, Lennox's most authoritative modern biographer, accepts the argument, as does W. J. Bate; Carey McIntosh concurs.⁵ On the other hand, Duncan Isles, after considering all the evidence, concludes, “On the whole, it would seem best to regard the chapter, with all its faults, as wholly Mrs. Lennox's until definite evidence to the contrary is found.”⁶

But it hardly matters whether Johnson actually wrote the crucial chapter. As Isles puts it: “We can assume that Mrs. Lennox had discussed at least the conclusion with [Johnson]. She obviously had him in mind when she created Arabella's eventual saviour, ‘the pious and learned Doctor…’, and was heavily influenced by his ideas and phraseology in the penultimate chapter” (Lennox, p. 421). If not literally, at least metaphorically, Dr. Johnson articulates the view of the world that persuades Arabella to abandon her dream of creating meaning, interest, and power beyond the domestic sphere.

The good doctor, however, is not the only figure available to offer sage advice. In the preceding book of The Female Quixote, Arabella meets a wise countess, herself a reformed reader of romances, who wishes to cure the girl of her delusions. Arabella asks the older woman to narrate her adventures; the countess explains that good women don't have adventures. “The Word Adventures carries in it so free and licentious a Sound in the Apprehensions of People at this Period of Time, that it can hardly with Propriety be apply'd to those few and natural Incidents which compose the History of a woman of Honour” (Lennox, p. 372). She goes on to insist that by Christian standards, the heroes of romance prove “impious and base.” Arabella feels shaken but unconvinced. “Heroism, romantick Heroism, was deeply rooted in her Heart; it was her habit of thinking, a Principle imbib'd from Education” (p. 329).

For imaginative writers who elaborated the dangers of romance reading for young women, the notion of “heroism” often proves crucial. I am thinking not only of The Female Quixote and Northanger Abbey (which begins “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine”), but of a novel Austen greatly admired, Eaton Barrett's The Heroine, or The Adventures of Cherubina (1813). Girls' fantasies of heroism provide material for mockery but also register the boredom of a well-reared female's life. Conduct books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries confirm the suspicion that young women had virtually nothing to do. Needlework, for instance, possessed value not for its product but for its illusory provision of meaningful occupation. Arabella's resistance to the countess's arguments suggests the urgency of her belief in heroism—rooted in her heart and in her mind, allowing her to imagine that men and women alike can act nobly. She cannot afford to relinquish such imagining.

Yet shortly after her interview with the countess, she does exactly that. The countess disappears, called away to an ill mother, to leave room for the voice of male authority. Enter, literally or metaphorically, Dr. Johnson.

Weakened by illness, Arabella wishes more than ever to be good. She begs the doctor to assist her in self-knowledge, mentioning specifically the problem of desire: “If … you have observ'd in me any dangerous Tenets, corrupt Passions, or criminal Desires, I conjure you discover me to myself” (Lennox, p. 370). Her interlocutor thereupon offers two powerful arguments that achieve what the countess could not. He demonstrates the fictionality of the books Arabella has accepted as guides to life, and he argues that they “give new Fire to the Passions of Revenge and Love” (p. 380). Elaborating his Johnsonian case against the dominance of love in romance, he reduces Arabella to blushes. She declares, “my Heart yields to the Force of Truth” (p. 381) and promptly marries, having given up, for the sake of “Truth,” her tenets, passions, and desires. The doctor has discovered her to herself as a false construction.

Let me now propose a new summary of the plot. A young woman with no opportunities for action and with little companionship imagines, on the basis of her reading of romance, a world in which she can claim enormous significance and power. She uses this fantasy as a way of testing those she meets. No one shares her convictions, although her faithful servant becomes sufficiently confused to accept them from time to time. Some people try to manipulate her for their own purposes; some simply laugh at her; her would-be lover grits his teeth and hopes she'll come to her senses, his noninterference and his continuing concern proving him more acceptable than others. A good woman attempts to help reconcile her to actuality but cannot exert sufficient authority to change the girl's mind. Finally a powerful male moralist rebukes her for her indulgence of her imagination and, implicitly, of her sexual fantasies. She knuckles under. The claims of fiction and of passion yield to those of truth and rationality: her marriage unites not only “Fortunes, Equipages, Titles, and Expence,” but also “every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind” (Lennox, p. 383). Affection of mind rather than body: the phrase calls attention to Arabella's successful repression of desire, her great achievement.

Peter Brooks has recently restated the essential connection between fiction and desire.⁷ In a chapter called “Narrative Desire,” he argues that plot is “perhaps best conceived as an activity, a structuring operation elicited in the reader trying to make sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession. … We can, then, conceive of the reading of plots as a form of desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text” (Brooks, p. 37). My dissimilar summaries of The Female Quixote's plot call attention to the fact that the shapes of readers' desires, and therefore of their interpretations, may differ. The account of a misguided and foolish girl restored to sanity by male authority corresponds to traditional readings of the novel, to the interpretations of such early admirers as Johnson and Richardson, and probably to Lennox's conscious intention. The second summary, about a young woman who relies on romance as a means for self-assertion but who eventually finds herself forced into self-suppression and social compliance, registers a kind of awareness encouraged by feminist thought. Both versions derive from data supplied by the text, although each suppresses certain elements. (The traditional reading ignores the power of such passages as the one about Arabella's wish to make a figure in history; the feminist reading neglects the weight of the multiplied episodes in which Arabella appears manifestly ridiculous, as well as the danger she creates for herself and others.)⁸ The differences between them reflect different hopes and expectations, different modes of activity, different forms of desire that readers may bring to a single text.

The title of this essay derives from a phrase in the dedication of The Female Quixote to the earl of Middlesex. The dedication's opening sentences read, “Such is the Power of Interest over almost every Mind, that no one is long without Arguments to prove any Position which is ardently wished to be true, or to justify any Measures which are dictated by Inclination. By this subtil Sophistry of Desire, I have been persuaded to hope, that this Book may, without Impropriety, be inscribed to Your Lordship” (Lennox, p. 3). Although “The Author” signs the dedication, Dr. Johnson (according to Boswell) wrote it. In his opening sentences, he aligns the fiction maker with her central character on the basis of their self-deluding desire, but he also suggests that “almost every Mind” will demonstrate comparable weakness. The desire attributed to “The Author” is for “Support and Protection” to compensate for possible “public Censure” or “Neglect.” The woman Johnson here impersonates and the woman Lennox imagines share the same problem: the impropriety for a female of assuming or even fantasizing a place in the public eye. Sophistry, as Johnson would define it in his Dictionary, means “Fallacious ratiocination.”⁹ Desire's false reasoning, Johnson suggests, makes Lennox ask a man to support and protect her despite her presumptuous act of publishing; she imagines the same sophistry in different form as luring Arabella to demand that men accord her dominion and enable her life of “adventures.”

In the weekly papers of The Rambler published during the three years preceding the novel's appearance, Johnson frequently reflected on desire. (To desire, the Dictionary would explain, means simply “To wish; to long for.”) The Rambler's first issue specified “the desire of good” as one of “the two great movers of the human mind” (the other being “the fear of evil”; The Rambler, 3:6). Like Pope's account of passion in the Essay on Man, Johnson's presentation of desire stresses its function as a primary source of human energy, but also (in subsequent meditations) as a locus of danger because of the power it implies. Phrases like “the vehemence of desire” recur (no. 7, 3:34; no. 185, 5:207). We find also “the violence of desire” (no. 31, 3:171), “the exuberance of desire” (which the “instructors of mankind” try to lop; no. 66, 3:349), “the tyranny of … desire” (no. 73, 4:22), and “the instantaneous violence of desire” (no. 77, 4:43). To moderate desire becomes the moralist's central endeavor, the good man's primary effort.

The trouble with desire, from Johnson's point of view, is that we want the wrong things and want them too much. The phrase “desire of the good” condenses multiple possibilities. Almost everyone considers money, for instance, a great good; the wish for it “may be considered as universal and transcendental” (The Rambler, no. 131, 4:335). Equally universal, in Johnson's view, is “the desire which every man feels of importance and esteem” (no. 101, 4:175). But one need not specify particular objects of desire to emphasize how frequently people want the wrong things. “It is very common,” Johnson observes, “for us to desire most what we are least qualified to obtain” (no. 61, 3:324). The richer a man gets, the more he wants: “a thousand wishes croud in upon him importunate to be satisfied, and vanity and ambition open prospects to desire, which still grow wilder, and they are more contemplated” (no. 38, 3:208). Human conflict stems from desire's importunities: “The hostility perpetually exercised between one man and another, is caused by the desire of many for that which only few can possess” (no. 183, 5:196).

But the propensity to choose arbitrary or meretricious objects of desire may be less dangerous than desire's tendency to become ever more violent, vehement, exuberant. One must resist indulgence. Hard enough, we know, for Johnson to forgo excesses of food and drink—how much harder to withstand the temptation of psychic indulgence. “The desires of mankind are much more numerous than their attainments, and the capacity of imagination much larger than actual enjoyment” (The Rambler, no. 104, 4:191). That crucial association of desire with imagination elucidates Johnson's anxiety. Desire's power derives from the dangerous prevalence of imagination; it depends on the human tendency to project into the future. To resist the power of the imagined future, to deny desire, almost exceeds human capacity.

Yet the effort to resist must be made, almost regardless of desire's object. As “imagination” and “reason” battle in Johnson's psychomachy, so too do “desire” and “virtue.” Consider three typical Johnsonian formulations of the antithesis. “Nature will indeed always operate, human desires will be always ranging; but these motions, though very powerful, are not resistless; nature may be regulated, and desires governed” (The Rambler, no. 151, 5:42). Again: “The greater part of mankind are corrupt in every condition, and differ in high and in low stations, only as they have more or fewer opportunities of gratifying their desires, or as they are more or less restrained by human censures” (no. 172, 5:146). And finally: “To enumerate the various motives to deceit and injury, would be to count all the desires that prevail among the sons of men; since there is no ambition however petty, no wish however absurd, that by indulgence will not be enabled to overpower the influence of virtue” (no. 175, 5:162). These sentences suggest varying degrees of pessimism about the possibility of withstanding desire, but all imply the necessity of struggle toward restraint, regulation, government. And all hint that desire belongs to the realm of nature (“Nature will indeed always operate, human desires will be always ranging”), its government to that of culture.

The quotations and summaries of Johnson offered thus far fail to acknowledge sexual desire, which thinkers since Freud have generally assumed as fundamental, and they never mention women. Johnson's consistent use of the masculine pronoun and of “man” as generic noun excludes the female. From time to time The Rambler hints that men may desire women; the frequent association of desire with “appetite” or “passion” of course has sexual overtones. But in only two instances that I have noted do women—very young women—figure as potential agents of desire.

In a paper entitled “The mischiefs of total idleness,” the Rambler observes,

For my part, whenever chance brings within my observation a knot of misses busy at their needles, I consider myself as in the school of virtue; and … look upon their operations with as much satisfaction as their governess, because I regard them as providing a security against the most dangerous ensnarers of the soul, by enabling themselves to exclude idleness from their solitary moments, and with idleness her attendant train of passions, fancies, and chimeras, fears, sorrows and desires. Ovid and Cervantes will inform them that love has no power but over those whom he catches unemployed.

[No. 85, 4:86]

Men resist the “ensnarers of the soul” by efforts at self-regulation and self-government; women—or at least girls—must be assigned tasks to keep their imaginations under control lest they succumb to “love”: not the ground but the danger of desire.

The character in The Rambler who most forcefully resists the injunction to moderate desire is an imagined fifteen-year-old girl. “My aunt … says, you are a philosopher,” she writes, “and will teach me to moderate my desires, and look upon the world with indifference. But, dear sir, I do not wish, nor intend to moderate my desires, nor can I think it proper to look upon the world with indifference, till the world looks with indifference on me” (The Rambler, no. 191, 5:234). The narcissism of this response belongs typically to desire, in Johnson's view: desire, or selfish want, implies the possibility of assigning excessive value to the self. The girl's association of desire with the world's admiration marks her as female, one who uses her beauty—one might say, her desirability—as means to success. She refuses to moderate her desires because at her time of life she has the best opportunity to gratify them. A sexual transaction appears imminent.

Every woman is at heart a rake: Pope was not the only eighteenth-century writer who believed so. When he thinks of male desire, Johnson thinks of yearnings for wealth and power; the idea of female desire allows him to admit the presence of sexuality—the most obvious form of female vulnerability. When the clergyman in The Female Quixote alludes to “love,” Arabella, blushing, relinquishes her faith in her own significance, Johnson's treatment of female desire in The Rambler corresponds to the moralism of the wise doctor in Lennox's novel.

The terms of Johnson's double view of desire by now have emerged: he values desire as a principle of energy, fears it as a form of misdirected imagination, of disorder. As for fiction, he values it inasmuch as it conveys truth, fears its potential for inculcating falsehood—another form of disorder. The association with falsehood, of course, dominates the clergyman's references to fictionality, although he acknowledges in passing the opposed possibility. “Truth is not always injured by Fiction,” he observes (Lennox, p. 377). Arabella herself, on the other hand, declares her unmixed contempt for fiction. “He that writes without Intention to be credited,” she believes, “must write to little Purpose. … The great End of History, is to shew how much human Nature can endure or perform. When we hear a Story in common Life that raises our Wonder or Compassion, the first Confutation stills our Emotions, and however we were touched before, we then chase it from the Memory with Contempt as a Trifle, or with Indignation as an Imposture” (pp. 376-77). If romances are fiction—in other words, false—they cannot guide her life; if they are conducive to love, they should not guide her.

I shall return to Arabella's attitude toward fiction; let me first consider Johnson's more fully. It hardly needs demonstrating that Johnson believed in literature's moral function. As he put it in The Rambler on the relation between authors' writings and their lives, “He, by whose writings the heart is rectified, the appetites counter-acted, and the passions repressed, may be considered as not unprofitable to the great republick of humanity” (The Rambler, no. 77, 4:41). This account of didactic possibilities hints literature's enmity to desire, since the writings evoked discipline desire's close relations, the heart, the appetites, and the passions. As for romance, Johnson leaves little doubt about his disapproval or the grounds for it.

While the judgement is yet uninformed and unable to compare the draughts of fiction with their originals, we are delighted with improbable adventures, impracticable virtues, and inimitable characters: But, in proportion as we have more opportunities of acquainting ourselves with living nature, we are sooner disgusted with copies in which there appears no resemblance. We first discard absurdity and impossibility, then exact greater and greater degrees of probability, but at last become cold and insensible to the charms of falshood [sic], however specious, and from the imitations of truth, which are never perfect, transfer our affection to truth itself.

[The Rambler, no. 151, 5:39-40]

This account of literary responses occurs in a larger narrative about the inevitable stages of mental and psychological development; it provides a gloss for Arabella's career, a compelling justification for her “conversion.” The first-person plural pronoun and the declarative statements help to establish Johnson's most positive mode, in which he asserts the inevitability of moral progress. A reformed romance reader who has lost his taste for fiction, he generalizes his shifting enthusiasms into a universal. “We” move from romance to realistic fiction to history, from falsehood to truth: moral imperative disguises itself as statement of fact.

Johnson couches this moral narrative in a faintly erotic key. We “become cold and insensible to the charms of falsehood,” we “transfer our affection to truth”: desire remains at issue, as in the allegorical fable about Falsehood and Truth. But the allegory seems to narrate an earlier stage of human progress. In it, Fiction appeals by its resemblance to Falsehood; in his later account Johnson imagines fiction as more powerful through its imitation of truth.

Neither of these essays fully defines Johnson's attitudes toward fiction; the two together suggest the shape of a continuing conflict about the moral value of a literary mode ambiguously poised between truth and falsehood. The conflict centers on desire. Fiction has the power to take possession of its readers, as a seductive woman might. “But if the power of example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will, care ought to be taken that, when the choice is unrestrained, the best examples only should be exhibited; and that which is likely to operate so strongly, should not be mischievous or uncertain in its effects” (The Rambler, no. 4, 3:22). That sentence rings with anxiety about the ways in which forces other than the will may dominate the mind and the imagination. The violence with which fictional examples operate on the memory corresponds to desire's violence. And desire's sophistry, which can delude us because we so much want to believe, finds gratification in fiction, which also endangers the gullible through their propensity for belief.

Both desire and fiction, in Johnson's implicit view, threaten women more severely than they do men because women—especially unmarried women—have fewer resources for resistance and fewer engrossing alternatives to frivolity. The protagonist of The Female Quixote, victim alike of desire and of fiction, appears to exemplify the dangers Johnson feared for women. Moreover, this novel, a fable of the world turned upside down, embodies the kind of threat to order and subordination that Johnson vividly feared. After one of Arabella's passionate speeches, her lover's father expresses “much Admiration of her Wit, telling her, if she had been a Man, she would have made a great Figure in Parliament, and that her Speeches might have come perhaps to be printed in time” (Lennox, p. 311). This possibility, even couched in the subjunctive, epitomizes the revolutionary potential of Arabella's fantasies. Johnson's voice, literal or ventriloquized, provides the force to refute such potential.

That male voice—the utterance of the wise doctor—articulates one side of the intersecting sophistries of desire (or, to put it in more modern terms, the structures of wish fulfillment) that create this novel. Male desire defines the ideal woman in terms first hinted at by the dedication: dependent, self-effacing, needy, grateful. The blushing young woman bowled over by the force of male logic belongs to the same dream. Arabella has always been beautiful; once she succumbs to the doctor's verbal power, she proves herself satisfactory also in every other respect. Her acceptance of male wisdom, her rejection of her own imagined selfhood, her willingness to dwindle into a wife—all mark her as a woman who can fulfill male desire in the terms the novel has outlined.

The woman who can fill such a role, the plot suggests, must herself have no active desire. Yet that plot, in its development if not in its resolution, iterates the force of female desire—which strikingly resembles various forms of male desire chronicled in The Rambler. Arabella, although demonstrating no wish for money, concerns herself obsessively with honor and fame. Early in The Female Quixote, she describes the romances she loves as books “which give us the most shining Examples of Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love; which regulate our Actions, form our Manners, and inspire us with a noble Desire of emulating those great, heroic, and virtuous Actions, which made those Persons so glorious in their Age, and so worthy Imitation in ours” (Lennox, p. 48). The “noble Desire” to which she alludes dictates her subsequent actions. Just before she leaps into the river to escape anticipated assault, she urges her female companions to join her.

'Tis now, my fair Companions, said she, with a solemn Accent, that the Destinies have furnish'd you with an Opportunity of displaying in a Manner truly Heroick, the Sublimity of your Virtue, and the Grandeur of your Courage to the World.

The Action we have it in our Power to perform will immortalize our Fame, and raise us to a Pitch of Glory equal to that of the renown'd Clelia herself.

Like her, we may expect Statues erected to our Honour: Like her, be propos'd as Patterns to Heroines in ensuing Ages: … And the Admiration and Esteem of all Ages to come, will be the Recompence of our noble Daring.

[Lennox, pp. 362-63]

This fuller delineation of her “noble Desire” emphasizes her need for a response from “the World” for her heroism, virtue, and courage. She wishes, without relinquishing her femininity—indeed, by virtue of her redefined femininity—to inhabit the public sphere.

Principled desire, we may call it, and principled desire of a traditionally masculine sort. Arabella's appeal to her friends recalls Sarpedon's injunctions rather than Clarissa's transformation of his words, in The Rape of the Lock, into a conventionally feminine mode, with “good Sense” and “good Humour” as operative terms. Arabella desires heroic rather than social virtue; the Countess's appeal to social convention unsettles but does not dissuade her. And this “female Quixote” cannot be dismissed as merely narcissistic, or merely silly; indeed, her rigorous principles enable her to offer penetrating criticism of social follies. She yields to the clergyman's arguments only because he persuades her that his principles are more rigorous than her own.

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.” Despite her folly, she represents something important; and never more so than in her fashion of taking seriously words on a page. Johnson himself had eloquently described the mental action of identification with figures evoked by a text. “All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realises the event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves” (The Rambler, no. 60, 3:318-19). Although they raise the possibility of the “fictitious,” these words refer specifically to biography; but the process of identification Johnson evokes of course applies equally well to the experience of reading fiction.

The romances that delude Arabella provide her with enabling fictions to express the truth of her desires. Performing the act of imagination that Johnson declared inevitable in reading about human experience, she identifies with personages whose heroism and glory supply her with images of possibility; for her, romance is history dressed by desire.¹⁰ “Truth … is generally unpleasing because contrary to our wishes.” Wishes, however, possess their own truth; The Female Quixote tells its story.

Not, however, to Dr. Johnson, or to the moralist who stands in for him, that moralist horrified by Arabella's story. Desire involves true feelings, but it implies false reasoning—“sophistry.” That conjunction lies at the heart of Johnson's anxiety about fiction, which, dressed by desire, arouses feeling and threatens rationality. Arabella, heroine of a didactic novel, responds readily to a wise man's naming of her experience. She thinks she has read truth; the moralist names it fiction. She believes herself motivated by desire for virtue and fame; the clergyman names her desire as directed toward love and revenge. Accepting conventional names, she accepts her conventional fate. Control of language implies control of action: the novel demonstrates what Johnson had long asserted.

But it also embodies what he fears. Even The Female Quixote—for that matter, even Clarissa, Johnson's type of the ethically sound novel—exemplifies truth dressed by desire, thus unpredictable in its effects. As Arabella's desire responds to that expressed in the romances, creating (Johnson would say) its own sophistries, so every reader brings his or her own desire to the text, reiterating in unexpected ways the desire of the novel. The clergyman hears a story of a foolish girl, her mind o'erthrown by fiction; he reforms her. I read a story of a social critic able to show wisdom in folly, and of her ultimate defeat. Johnson's understanding of fiction as the union of truth and desire implies the uncontrollability of texts—like that of desire itself, a source of danger and of appeal.

Notes

1. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vols. 3-5 of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1969), 4:149; all further references to this edition will be cited in the text.

2. Charlotte Lennox, The female Quixote, or, The adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel, chronology and appendix by Duncan Isles (London, 1970); all further references to this work will be cited in the text.

3. James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. and enlarged by L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934), 4:275.

4. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 5 vols., (Oxford, 1933), 3:199.

5. Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters (New Haven, Conn., 1935); W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1977); Carey McIntosh, The Choice of Life: Samuel Johnson and the World of Fiction (New Haven, Conn., 1973).

6. Duncan Isles, in Lennox, p. 421.

7. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984).

8. Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1967); see p. 275 for a penetrating account of Arabella's destructiveness.

9. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 3d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1766).

10. I owe this point to Gordon Turnbull. I am grateful to him and to Margery Sabin and Aubrey Williams for attentive and helpful readings of this essay in an earlier form.