SOURCE: Schmid, Thomas H. “‘My Authority’: Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote.” Rocky Mountain Review 51, no. 1 (1997): 21-35.

[In the following essay, Schmid reconsiders previous discussions of hysteria in Lennox's novel.]

The purpose of this paper is to re-open, from a feminist perspective, the question of female “madness” (specifically, “hysteria”) in The Female Quixote, a question that has been largely elided in the current criticism. It has been commonplace to consider Charlotte Lennox's novel as primarily an emplotment of female power in which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, “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” (535). Spacks reads the character of Arabella, the romance-devouring heroine of The Female Quixote, as an active signifier of a female desire for things historically reserved exclusively for men: fame, power and influence, heroic status. It is this desire, in fact, that must be tamed if Arabella is to take her allotted place in a male-centered society that defines woman not as a signifier of desire but as the object of male desire—as the empty space to be filled up by male desire. Arabella must, in other words, learn to trade romance for reality, her plot of female ambition for a plot of feminine submission.¹

While Arabella's quixotic commingling of reality and fiction certainly voices a sanative desire for an authority not granted her by society, it betrays more deeply her entrapment within patriarchal models of authority. Denied a position from which to act, Arabella mimes a romance discourse that aggressively relegates women to passive roles defined by men, especially the role of helpless victim who needs to be rescued prior to being loved. In this sense, Arabella's exaggerated romantic discourse and code of behavior suggest female “hysteria,” an Irigarayan hyper-mimesis of a male economy of desire in which woman serves as the sign of difference and lack. The major premise of Arabella's romantic code is founded on female desirability to men rather than the female ability—or right—to desire independently of men. Arabella herself asserts that power and authority are only given to her by men: “My authority,” she tells Glanville in response to his doubts concerning her influence over Mr. Selvin in book 8, “is founded upon the absolute Power he has given me over him,” and she makes similar statements about her “power” over Glanville himself and Sir George. In addition, Arabella refers such power transactions back to romance conventions she takes for reality: “the Empire of Love,” she says, “is govern'd by Laws of its own” (320).

The authority of romance fictions allows Arabella both to plot her own desirability and to forestall the fulfillment of male desire through her (since such fulfillment would essentially signify the end of her power). But as female Quixote, Arabella ultimately uses romance to mirror herself to herself as the perennial object of male desire; in so doing, she unwittingly participates in a version of female hysteria: what Toril Moi calls the miming of her “own sexuality in a masculine mode” and the “specular representation of herself as a lesser male” (135). What is striking in Arabella's experience, in other words, is not so much the way she views the world from the standpoint of a coherent subject seeking power and influence, as the way she views the world viewing her, and desiring to act upon her. For this reason, as we shall see in the latter half of this essay, Arabella's entire experience and “world view” are predicated on the male gaze, which Arabella both desires and imitates at crucial moments throughout the novel. What I hope to show is that such imitation is a conditioned response for Arabella, an “hysterical” symptom of what society already requires of her: passivity, charm, and a “pure” desirability that cannot itself desire.

In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray argues that woman is caught within the specular logic of patriarchal discourse and desire, forced to experience her own desire only in terms of phallic equivalency: “the expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ” (24). Such a submission to a male-dominated model forces woman to play the role of “a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of male fantasies” in which she can experience pleasure only vicariously, by “proxy” (25). Moreover, this specularization leaves woman no way in which to express her desire adequately, other than through imitating the phallic imaginary. Thus, woman is left “in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily … as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) ‘subject’ to reflect himself, to copy himself” (30). She is defined as the nothing that men see when they gaze upon woman only to perceive the absent phallus, the male marker of sexual and discursive identity.²

To be outside of this structure of desire is, finally and always, to be speechless as well, a fate that Irigaray sees as crucial to defining hysteria. Hysteria is for Irigaray fundamentally a discursive structure, a strategy of speaking (and not speaking) those specifically female desires that in Oedipal structures are relegated to silence. Thus, hysteria exists as a “gestural faculty” which mediates between unspeakable female desire, on the one hand, and the male-centered expression of desire on the other, the only expression available to women. It vacillates between the two extremes of silence and imitation, both of which are inadequate and paralytic:

Hysteria: it speaks in the mode of a paralyzed gestural faculty, of an impossible and also forbidden speech. … It speaks as symptoms of an “it can't speak to or about itself”. … And the drama of hysteria is that it is inserted schizotically between that gestural system, that desire paralyzed and enclosed within its body, and a language that it has learned in the family, in school, in society, which is in no way continuous with—nor, certainly, a metaphor for—the “movements” of its desire. Both mutism and mimicry are then left to hysteria. Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes. And—how could it be otherwise— … it “lies,” it “deceives,” as women have always been reputed to do.

(136-37)

Deception, lying, silence, and imitation: all are linked in Irigaray's conception of hysteria, which she sees as more profoundly a “sufferance of the feminine” than of male pathology, though she suggests that hypothetically—because hysteria involves above all a response to an inarticulable desire for the mother—it is not exclusive to women.

Irigaray's remarks on hysteria obviously provide a feminist corrective to Freud's work on hysteria, particularly Freud's infamous analysis of “Dora,” whose hysterical symptoms include mutism and what Freud, at least, sees as a neurotic pattern of lying and denial occasioned by her unconscious wish to sleep with her father. By reinscribing hysteria within the mother-daughter relationship Irigaray in effect “normalizes” hysteria for women, revealing it as the only means of expressing what Freudian/Lacanian phallocracy minimizes: a maternal relationship, rather than an Oedipal prohibition. Freud himself makes very little, for instance, of the strained relations “Dora” has with her mother, preferring to focus almost solely on the father and the substitute for the father, Herr K. It is small wonder to us, then, that “Dora” abruptly quits her treatment, though Freud himself is mystified by this final example of “hysterical” instability.

I invoke Freud deliberately as a means of suggesting the similarities between both “Dora” and “Arabella” as representations—characters—inscribed within narratives of male phallocratic control. Whatever the actual “Dora” may have felt or believed, what we are faced with in Freud's account of her is a narrative story of “hysterical” female rebellion not unlike Lennox's eighteenth-century fiction of female quixoticism. Both narratives tell stories of female figures who are motherless in some sense, Arabella because her mother dies in childbirth, “Dora” because of her mother's chronic absence, perhaps occasioned by her father's longstanding affair with Frau K. Both texts delineate characters that alternately rebel against and submit to the authority of their fathers, Arabella in both refusing and tolerating Glanville as a suitor, “Dora” in first submitting to psychotherapy at her father's insistence, then quitting therapy despite her father's objections. Both narratives treat female figures who are motivated at least in part by repugnance at the unwanted addresses of men and, most significantly, both texts represent women who mime various behaviors that are seen by those around them as unhealthy: Arabella mimes romance conventions, including a “heroic” suicide attempt at the end of the novel; “Dora” also threatens suicide (a supposedly typical hysterical symptom) and mimes the somatic symptoms of those around her, including her cousin's gastric pains (in fact, when she reports the pains Freud demands to know “whom are you copying now” [191]). In short, each narrative tells a story of a woman inscribed within patriarchal structures she cannot escape and who deals with life at least provisionally through fantasy, denial, imitation, and withdrawal.

While these connections may be historically specious, they do suggest, via Irigaray, a recognizable female “hysteria” that has little to do with traditional views of women as somehow innately “oversensitive,” “overemotional,” and “unstable,” and everything to do with patriarchy's relegation of women to silence, passivity, and lack. Certainly by eighteenth-century medical standards (which were overtly gendered in the ways just listed) Arabella would in fact be considered hysterical, much as Freud's “Dora” is. From classical times, of course, hysteria had been considered a peculiarly female affliction, and the eighteenth century largely subscribed to theories of hysteria that linked physiological uterine complaints with the “nervous” symptoms of hysteria (though largely exploded, even classical theories of the movement of the uterus about the woman's body as the cause of hysteria still found adherents in the eighteenth century [Foucault 143]).

But if hysteria thus remained a feminized complaint, it also was associated with a particular kind of woman: the hyper-sensitive, aristocratic, leisured, and readerly woman of “sensibility”—the woman like Arabella. Working women were believed much less likely to succumb to hysteria than independently wealthy women, a medical consensus probably reflective of a culturally pervasive gender politics that feared the aristocratic woman precisely because of her independence. As Foucault notes, women could be seen as more prone to hysteria than men because of their moral/emotional susceptibility, which was in turn inferred from their greater physical “softness” and penetrability:

The more easily penetrable the internal space [of the body] becomes, the more frequent is hysteria and the more various its aspects; but if the body is firm and resistant, if internal space is dense, organized, and solidly heterogeneous in its different regions, the symptoms of hysteria are rare and its effects will remain simple. Is this not exactly what separates female hysteria from the male variety … ?

(149)

If lack of moral and physical “firmness” creates the conditions for hysteria, then women, the argument ran, must be its most common victims and rich women doubly susceptible. The late seventeenth-century physician Thomas Sydenham argued specifically that “women are more frequently affected with this disease [hysteria] than men, because they have … a more delicate constitution of body, being designed for an easier life and the pleasure of men” (376) and that only women “such as work hard and fare hardly, are quite free from every species” of hysteria (367). Furthermore, since the overactive imagination itself was thought to “provoke nervous ailments” like hysteria, leisured women also were seen as especially at risk because of their greater exposure to “the imaginary desires aroused by novel reading and theatergoing” (Foucault 167).³

Arabella fits all of these categories and definitions exactly, but if she can thus be seen as an eighteenth-century “Dora,” her culturally constructed “hysteria” all the more must be critiqued for its phallocratic assumptions. As we now look at Arabella's story from the standpoint of Irigaray's discussion of female hysteria, we can see the remarkable degree to which Arabella's mimesis of romance aggressively enacts a specularized role already defined for her by men. Ultimately, Arabella is both more and less “hysterical” than the “normal”—especially male—characters around her believe. On the one hand she subverts the slavish feminine norm represented, for instance, by Miss Glanville's coquetry and pursuit of what Arabella contemptuously calls “inconsiderable Actions”—“Dressing, Dancing, listening to Songs” (279)—and therefore is “mad” by virtue of her masculinist nonconformity. On the other hand, she herself indulges a craving for precisely the leisured pursuit considered most “inconsiderable” and “feminine”—the reading of romances—and uses that reading to sponsor a view of herself as the object of deferred male desire and excessive flattery: “the most extravagant Compliments being what she expected from all Men: … provided they did not directly presume to tell her they loved her, no Sort of Flattery or Adulation could displease her” (118; my italics). If, then, as Laurie Langbauer argues, Arabella is the “ideal reader” of romance and hence completely susceptible to “romance's problems—the disorder and rigidity of its form” (30), she is also the “ideal reader” of society's phallocratic injunctions toward women, becoming a hyper-construction of female helplessness, a sign of woman's necessary reduction to hysteria, to “mutism and mimicry.”

Arabella is raised by her father, described as “grave and melancholy,” who, after removing her from all female influence and teaching her to read and write, basically abandons her to the solitude of his isolated castle-retreat (the “language of the family” that Arabella learns is thus the language of silence and solitude). Alone and abandoned, Arabella stumbles upon her mother's capacious stock of romances and begins a course of reading that not only colors her view of reality but also repeats her mother's own act of reading romances in order to “soften a solitude which she found very disagreeable” (7). Arabella, too, we can infer, finds the solitude oppressive, and it is not surprising that she immediately begins fantasizing about the “croud of adorers” her romance reading has taught her to expect by virtue of her physical beauty. Romances and her dressing-glass alike mirror Arabella to herself in a way she finds both satisfying and frustrating, since they set up expectations for adoration and rescue that are never fulfilled:

Her glass, which she often consulted, always showed her a Form so extremely lovely, that, not finding herself engaged in such Adventures as were common to the Heroines in the Romances she read, she often complained of the Insensibility of Mankind, upon whom her Charms seemed to have so little Influence.

(7)

The point of this moment at the novel's very inception is that Arabella has no one—particularly not a sympathetic parent of either sex—to complain to. She is left nothing but mirrors, literal and literary, through which to define her sexuality. In addition, that definition takes shape only in terms of the secondary approbation of her physical beauty by men. Far from being influential, Arabella's character is thus immediately predicated on her lack of influence, a lack that certainly inheres in the Romances she reads, the society of which she is a part, and the social reality that her story comments on, the social reality that Irigaray castigates for its sexism.

That sexism is largely constituted through the male gaze, as we have noted, and The Female Quixote significantly initiates the line of Arabella's admirers with Mr. Hervey, whose prurient gaze understandably alarms Arabella and leads her to veil herself more securely. As several commentators have noted, the threat of men like Hervey is a real one, and Arabella is right when she fears that Hervey, as an “insolent lover,” may harbor a “design to seize her Person” (19). Hervey himself thinks of Arabella as a lovely object to capture and tends to interpret her veil and her protestations as flirting, a covert signal to press his attentions further. Nevertheless, Arabella's own desires are framed in terms of being scopically desired through the male gaze, a gaze she imitates, in fact, in front of the mirror.

In the chapter following her escape from Hervey, Arabella actually imputes the proper gaze—the gaze she wants—to an innocent gardener in a way that bizarrely mimes the way men themselves, according to Irigaray, impute to women a desire for what they lack. Often seeing the gardener go about his work “very aukwardly,” Arabella becomes convinced that he must be

some Person of Quality, who, disguised in the habit of a Gardener, had introduced himself into her Father's Service, in order to have an Opportunity of declaring a Passion to her, which certainly must be very great, since it had forced him to assume an Appearance so unworthy of his noble Extraction.

(22)

As in male specularization, Arabella's “sight” here constructs the other in terms of what it lacks, taking the very absence of signs of nobility as absolute confirmation of nobility and overwhelming desire. Hysterically, however, Arabella's gaze only reinforces her own role as passive object of desire, not active subject. Imitating the motif of disguise from her romances, she more firmly places herself at the focal point of male specularization, as she will throughout the novel. Indeed, several pages after the gardener episode she even grows angry that Glanville, to whom she objects mostly on account of her father's endorsement of him, fails to gaze on her with the expressions proper to romance:

The Tumult of her Thoughts being a little settled, she turned again towards Glanville; whose Countenance expressing nothing of that Confusion and Anxiety common to an Adorer in so critical a Circumstance, her Rage returned with greater Violence than ever.

(32)

Throughout The Female Quixote Arabella uses others as mirrors of her own desirability, her own inability to desire as a fully constituted subject.

Certainly the society in which Arabella moves privileges such a construction of desirability at the cost of female subjectivity, and Arabella's romance discourse merely mimes, hyperbolically, the gender relationships society already sponsors. The male gaze is throughout the novel culturally differentiated from the female gaze in terms of being constitutive and active rather than receptive and passive, as two further examples will help illustrate.

In the journey to Bath in book 7, the “pump-room” itself comprises a sort of sanctioned viewing chamber where male and female sight are specifically differentiated—where women are to “be seen” and men to do the looking. To accommodate male gazing, custom requires that women attend the pump-room in “Undress” or dishabille, and while “undress” refers simply to the informality of the costume it literally suggests nakedness, the opening of the female body to the male gaze. In fact, this is the primary goal of the spa, since every newcomer's “Appearance” is immediately “criticized” and “every new Object affords a delicious Feast of Raillery and Scandal” (262). Though the specular descriptors, “appearance” and “object,” are not at this point specifically gendered, it soon becomes clear that women are the focal point of both male and female ocular examinations, each with competing agendas.

Arabella enters the pump-room, of course, in glaringly old-fashioned dress, including a veil that hides her face from the searching looks of the crowd. Her exotic appearance leads instantly to furious speculation, split neatly along gendered lines, concerning her identity. The women, significantly, gaze on her solely as a ridiculously attired object competing for male attention, while the men, “struck with her Figure,” admire at leisure “the beautiful Turn of her Person, the Grace and Elegance of her Motion.” Only the veil gives the male viewers “great Disturbance,” since it hides what they assume must be “a Face not unworthy” of the body (263); the men could care less about the faded fashion of the rest of her outfit, as long as they are permitted to see plainly the “Figure” and “Motion.” The scene thus deconstructs the satire of Arabella's laughable anachronisms it appears to be on the surface: since what signifies, culturally, is male specularized desire of woman as object, fashion becomes literally meaningless. Moreover, Arabella's imitation of romance costume itself unwittingly serves the very aims of male specularization, giving the male viewers both “nothing” to see—Irigaray's castrated “No Thing” (Speculum 48)—and everything about which to fantasize, to build their own romances: “Some of the wiser Sort took her for a Foreigner; others … supposed her a Scots Lady, covered with her Plaid; and a third Sort … concluded she was a Spanish Nun, that had escaped from a Convent, and had not yet quitted her Veil” (263). As Miss Glanville continually fears, the imitation of romance tends to make Arabella more desirable to men rather than more ridiculous.

Like the pump-room at Bath, Vauxhall Garden, which the company attends in book 9, also represents a socially sanctioned space for viewing, for male gazing and for female display. Here too, Arabella is gazed upon pruriently by a crowd of male admirers who seek to penetrate the mystery of her veil and so “pres[s] around her with so little Respect” that she becomes intensely “embarrass'd” (334). Her discomfort is relieved in this case, however, by the stir surrounding a prostitute who has been dressed as a man by her lover, perhaps to deflect the very gazes women are subjected to. Intoxicated, however, the woman soon is “thrown so much off her guard as to give Occasion to some of the Company to suspect her sex,” and a young rake draws his sword on her in pretended affront, seeking satisfaction in man to “man” combat (334-35). The sight of the sword unhinges “the disguised Fair One” (335), who screams that she is a woman and immediately runs to the protection of her lover, himself so drunk he cannot defend her.

The prostitute's cross-dressing and its consequent discovery are fraught with gendered implications. On the one hand, the masquerade emphasizes the cultural basis of gender differences: a threatened sword fight will quickly reveal the sex of an unknown, since “girls” are not taught swordplay and “boys” are. On the other hand, the scene suggests the opposite conclusion as well, that gender differences are somehow innate and visually discoverable regardless of costume or custom. The narrator does not reveal what, precisely, Lucy does to make the company suspect her, but she is, in fact “seen through” (as the word suspect lexically suggests) before the rake ever draws his sword. The implication is that even dress and actions cannot hide sexual identity—that the woman's lack, to recall Irigaray, can always be visually ascertained. At the same time, culture and custom do reinforce woman's innate inferiority, as the drawn sword reveals. The sword, with all its phallic associations, indeed becomes the appropriate guarantor of male identity and power here: only men can own the sword/phallus, and even if a woman pretends to own the sword/phallus she can never really use it.

Arabella's reaction to the drama of the mock sword challenge, naturally, is to see the “disguised Fair One” as a “real” romantic heroine who needs to be defended, and again, the sexual politics of the moment are complex. Though the rake has now dropped to his knees and begun reciting “Mock-Heroicks” of love to the lady, she remains truly terrified, and Arabella sympathizes, rightly, with her plight. Yet Arabella's sympathy largely derives from Lucy's appearance—her beautiful, dishevelled hair, and her face, which, despite its expression of pale terror, Arabella thinks “really extremely pretty” (335) and proof that her “Quality is not mean” (336). To Arabella, these appearances clearly place the prostitute in the position of desirable and helpless “heroine.” The fact that Glanville sees Lucy only as a prostitute, and therefore as beneath notice, merely ironizes what Arabella already “hysterically” knows: that all “heroines” are metaphorically prostitutes, “nothings” that fulfill men's desires without themselves desiring. Arabella's identification with the prostitute, in other words, is exactly like her identification with romance, since each represents female desirability and helplessness rather than female desire and independence. In fact, Arabella completely ignores Glanville's assertion that Lucy is a prostitute (“Are you mad, Madam … to make all this rout about a Prostitute?”). Since Arabella instinctively knows that all women are objectified by male specularization, prostitution literally has no categorical meaning for her; her only answer to Glanville is another question: “What, Sir … Are you base enough to leave this admirable Creature in the Power of that Man?” (336). Her refusal to acknowledge Glanville's question suggests an implicit female solidarity based on shared victimization and specularization.

For Arabella, then, romance and prostitution tell much the same story of female powerlessness and lack. Her romantic “blindness” in fact deconstructs the line separating conventional romance constructions of female “modesty” from conventional cultural constructions of prostitution's “wantonness,” revealing that each betrays a deeper level of female non-sexuality (which necessarily results from society's male economy of desire).⁴ My argument all along has been concerned with the intersection of romance and female sexuality, and I want to conclude by looking a little more closely at the issue of romance narrative itself and its construction of both the male gaze and female passivity within the novel. As it is depicted in Arabella's imitations and, notably, in Sir George Bellmour's pastiche of romance in book 6, romance narrative is already an hysterical discourse in Irigaray's sense, one that privileges male sight and desire at the expense of female subjectivity.

As David Marshall notes, Sir George Bellmour's chivalric and entirely fictive tale of love, which he tells in order to gain Arabella's sympathy, “virtually takes over the novel for the space of an entire book” (113) and reinforces the novel's privileging of male narrative authority—writing mastership—over female autobiography. We will return to the issue of what Marshall calls The Female Quixote's “almost total rejection of [female] autobiography” (112) momentarily, but I want first to summarize briefly the important preoccupation with male gazing and desire with which Sir George begins his “adventures.”

As Glanville's unscrupulous rival, Sir George is, quite simply, a better and more thorough reader of romance than Glanville, and he understands the importance, in seducing/wooing Arabella, of constructing feminine desirability in terms of the proper male gaze, the gaze of anxious confusion and longing that Glanville fails to direct at the “appropriate” moments. This is most apparent in Sir George's description of his initial inamorata, the milk-maid Dolly Acorn, or “Dorothea,” whom Sir George supposedly spies asleep in the grass beneath a shade tree. Dolly's passivity and somnolence are crucial to Sir George's narrative, since they permit him to gaze indefinitely and searchingly upon Dolly's “charms,” and thus to record the scopic details for later telling. Moreover, such passivity emphasizes Dolly's role as object rather than subject, someone to be gazed upon but who never returns an equally desiring gaze.

Sir George begins by noting the recumbent sleeper's youth, and the “Symmetry” and “Proportion” of her body and neck, which are partially covered. He then goes on to praise the face:

Certain it is, Madam, that, out of this Company, it would be hard to find any thing so perfect, as what I now viewed. Her Complexion was the purest White imaginable, heightened by the inchanting Glow, which dyed her fair Cheeks with a Colour like that of a new-blown Rose.

(213)

The reduction of the body and face to “thing” is notable, as is the description of the white complexion, which suggests not only blankness—a pure white space to be filled in by the gazing male's desires—but also aristocratic lineage, since the face would be tanned were Dolly really only a milk-maid (Arabella in fact makes this inference, as Sir George presumably expects she will). In thus describing Dolly, then, Sir George implicitly connects her with Arabella herself, making her into the beautiful, passive, leisured object of desire with which Arabella identifies through her romances. He even, perhaps unconsciously, connects Dolly and Arabella through the fact of Dolly's obscurity, which is amazing to Sir George given her beauty: “Where, whispered I, where has this Miracle been concealed, that my Eyes were never blessed with the Sight of her before?” (214). Shrewd in his manipulation of sexual politics, Sir George senses Arabella's anxiety, which we saw expressed in chapter 1, over the need to be viewed in order to be admired, loved, and protected.

The visual dynamics of male desire intensify even further in Sir George's relation of Dolly's awakening, when the sight of her eyes completes his erotic progress from “Admiration” to “Love”:

But what Words shall I find to express the Wonder, the Astonishment, and Rapture, which the sight of those bright Stars inspired me with? The Flames which darted from those glorious Orbs, cast such a dazling [sic] Splendor upon a Sight too weak to bear a Radiance so unusual, that, stepping back a few Paces, I contemplated at a Distance, that Brightness, which began already to kindle a consuming Fire in my Soul.

(214)

Significantly, the woman's eyes do not return Sir George's gaze at this point (when Dolly does see Sir George, she runs) and consequently do not themselves desire. Instead, the effect of the eyes is framed in terms of their “brightness”—the light that they reflect back to the male viewer and that in turn gets reflected anew in the viewer's desirous gaze. Indeed, even the “distance” Sir George immediately puts between himself and Dolly serves to improve rather than to weaken his view of her. Again, this reliance on distance and deferral may be seen as endorsing Arabella's own convictions that all women, as heroines, are to be scopically desired, and that distance rather than proximity provides the appropriate focus.

Sir George's romance narrative, ridiculous and ineffective as it ultimately proves, nevertheless establishes a male authority to tell one's own story, an authority that Arabella herself can never claim. Instead, as David Marshall has so convincingly shown, Arabella can only take up a position as a subject of romance, “a character in a prescribed plot that dictates her words and actions” (121). In the specular terms with which we have been concerned, Arabella can only assume the role of a sleeping Dolly Acorn who is visually appropriated and desired by a male hero. Arabella cannot tell her own history as Sir George can, nor is she able to persuade others to tell it for her.

“History” ramifies in various ways in the novel, most obviously constituting the record of “adventures” that proper ladies in the novel shun as signs of promiscuity. Spacks (279) and Craft are correct in noting the subversiveness of Arabella's desire for history, for a record of significance that ordinary life will never give her, but the sad truth of Arabella's predicament is ironically voiced by Lucy, Arabella's confused maidservant. When asked to give a history of Arabella's adventures Lucy can only moan “I can't make a History of Nothing” (305). And nothing is, finally, what is left of Arabella's desire once she marries Glanville and submits to her role within phallocracy. But my argument here has been predicated on the idea that nothing in fact is all Arabella ever has: history for her is sadly always an hysteria that hyper-mimes male discourse, the discourse that ultimately returns her, supposedly, to rational reality. By the end of the novel Arabella is in the same situation as at the beginning, reduced to either “mutism” or “mimicry,” but never owning the full authority of a speaking subject.

As Spacks and others have noted, Arabella's lack of authority is nowhere more pronounced than in her conversion to “reason” by the Johnsonian clergyman in the penultimate chapter. Arabella's surrender to the voice of male rationalism has understandably disturbed feminist readers, but it is nonetheless a grimly fitting ending to the saga of the female hysteric that the novel tells. Indeed, the question-and-answer session that Arabella undergoes with the clergyman resembles nothing so much as Freudian analysis in its attempts to “lead” her to self-discovery. In this sense, Arabella's story resembles the story Freud tells of “Dora” in one final way: Arabella, too, is subjected to the rational arguments of a male authority who attempts to cure her of her delusions. Yet one crucial difference ultimately inheres: “Dora” stops her treatment and walks away from the male voice (Freud's and, indirectly, her father's) attempting to convert her. Freud calls her quitting “an unmistakable act of vengeance” (230) and it forces an improbable ending to Freud's narrative of analytic control, leaving the narrative indeterminate and unsettled—totally unlike the closed narrative of Arabella's conversion. Perhaps there is no valid connection to be made between a fictional narrative of 1752 and a clinical account from turn-of-the-century Vienna. But perhaps there is a dark meaning to these divergent endings to such similar stories: that hysteria is much easier to control in fiction than in real life; and that while fictions end, happily or otherwise, the real-life Doras and Arabellas tend necessarily to go on as female hysterics, living and speaking as the “symptoms,” to recall Irigaray a final time, “of an ‘it can't speak … about itself.’”

Notes

1. Related arguments have been convincingly advanced by Laurie Langbauer, who reads Arabella's story as an example of the novelistic power of romance, a power that the author both desires and seeks to “cast out from her writing” (30); Catherine Craft, who argues that The Female Quixote turns “history” into “herstory” (833), a subversive tale of female power; and Deborah Ross, who points to the sympathetic treatment of Arabella's character, which suggests that Arabella, despite her delusions, is “actually right” (461) about the world. In addition to these, James J. Lynch notes Arabella's sanative impulse to use romance to escape the real evils of marriage or seduction and their “consequent loss of ‘Liberty’ and subjection to another” (57).

2. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray first advances her argument for the centrality of the phallic imaginary in defining discourse. Since, through phallocratic law, the phallus becomes the “master signifier,” women are seen only in terms of what they lack—the phallus—and thereby are excluded from the authority the phallus represents, from “the system of representations” the phallus guarantees (48).

3. In addition to Foucault, see Vieth, especially chapter 8, for a thorough discussion of eighteenth-century medical views of hysteria as a feminized disorder. Dorothy and Roy Porter similarly document the period's assumptions about female susceptibility to hysteria (176-78), as does Lacquer, who focuses primarily on “wandering womb” theories of the etiology of hysteria (108, 110-12).

4. Janet Todd argues that women's writing itself represents a literary “sign of Angellica” (the sign of the prostitute), since a woman's desire to write in the Restoration and eighteenth century was repeatedly associated with sexual wantonness. See especially the introduction and chapter 1 for a complete discussion of the relations between women's writing and sexuality during the period.

Works Cited

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