SOURCE: Davidson, Cathy N. “The Picaresque and the Margins of Political Discourse: The Female Picaresque.” In Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, pp. 179-92. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

[In the following excerpt, Davidson examines the female picaresque novel and its appropriation of a literary form which celebrates male social mobility, claiming that Tenney's employment of the picaresque and her marginalized status as an author expose the restrictions of women of the period.]

A woman on horseback, presents her form to advantage; but much more at the spinning wheel.

—Modern Chivalry

[The] circumscription of the female character within the domestic sphere constitutes a defining feature of sentimental fiction. In contrast, the picaresque novel defines itself by its own mobilities—formalistic and on the level of plot and characters, too. The picaresque hero can comment upon slavery, class disturbances, party politics, and different immigrant groups precisely because his travels carry him into encounters with diverse segments of the population and across those dividing lines that mark out the contours of the society. His journey is also the reader's journey and his freedom the reader's freedom. Whenever a particular episode might become too constraining and threatens to fix the action in, say, prison or matrimony, the logic of the plot still requires that the novel move on, and freedom (the protagonist's and the reader's) is regularly retained through evasive action. Furthermore, such exercises in independence, unlike comparable ventures on the part of female characters in the sentimental novel, are sanctioned in the plot. So if the picaresque explicitly celebrates an essentially male freedom, then just where do women come in—as characters, authors, and readers? Can Modern Chivalry, for example, prefatorially addressed explicitly to the male reader (“If you are about to chuse a wife, and expect beauty, you must give up family and fortune; or if you attain these, you must at least want good temper, health, or some other advantage” [p. 31]) even be read by women, and, if not, then what kind of chivalry is it? One might claim that just as the sentimental novel examines women's issues, why could not the picaresque form fairly be written only for men? But I would argue that, in a patriarchical society in which resources (income, books, status, freedom, and the rest) are inequably divided, what is sauce for the gander rarely serves the goose as well.

As the quotation from Modern Chivalry with which this section began illustrates, merely reversing the terms of an argument by no means reverses its underlying assumptions. The woman on horseback is still subordinated to her more typical position behind a spinning wheel. Both postures, moreover, are appropriated as service to a proper master. Why ride a horse? To get from hither to yon or to show one's form to advantage? In short, Brackenridge's surveyed woman is precisely the antithesis of his surveying hero. When she is not invisible in the text or entirely omitted from the narration, she exists adjunctive to his good, his ends. Therefore, to create a female picaresque novel in which a woman on horseback traverses, assesses, and describes town and countryside almost necessarily, given the culture in which it is read, devolves into self-parody. The female simply does not have the same freedoms—to journey, to judge, to have her judgments heeded—as does the male, and that is a fact of picaresque fiction almost as much as it is a fact of sentimental fiction.

Not surprisingly, in those novels in which a woman comes closest to enacting the role of the standard male picaro, she does so only in male dress. Both the Martinette-goes-to-war sequence in Ormond and the whole of Herman Mann's The Female Review allow a woman male freedom: first, because all of her companions think of her as him; second, because that deception itself serves a larger redeeming cause, patriotism, the good of her country. A feminized picaresque fiction, consequently, requires both justification and narrative deception. While the reader is in on the ruse, the characters the picara meets are not, and most of the interest of the book derives from a continual but covert textual dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, of male and female, of power and powerlessness. For once the picara's true (i.e., female) identity is revealed, her power no longer exists. In short, her very role in the fiction is specious and surreptitious, is conditional upon its being asserted in ways that challenge neither the status quo nor the double standard. Personal power without political power can provide a momentary fantasy but is no solution to the larger dilemma of female disenfranchisement within the polis.

Since the crossdressed picara retains her power only as long as its inauthentic basis is not revealed either literally or figuratively, the novels often flirt, almost pornographically, with the threat of exposure.¹ For example, in The Female Review (and, remember, most of the subscribers to the novel were men of substance) Deborah Sampson at one point suffers not only a head wound, but also a wound to her right thigh, just (we are specifically told) below her groin. To reveal the second injury would reveal her sex, so much so that the wound can be seen as an obvious stand-in for the hidden sex. She allows a doctor to remove the one bullet, but she herself secretly extracts the other one with a penknife (and, it might also be added, with obvious Freudian implications). Her sex, however, does not go entirely undiscovered. Later, lying unconscious with yellow fever, a doctor feels for her heartbeat to find if she is still alive and finds also something else. Breasts prove the woman, but a woman's wiles soon bring the doctor to promise silence, and Deborah is off again, this time westward, to travels on the frontier, encounters with Indians, and to still more narrow escapes from women who find this “blooming soldier” irresistible. A curious amalgam of stereotypically masculine and feminine attributes, the young soldier, as a kind of Revolutionary Michael Jackson, enchants most of the females s/he meets. What do women want? Deborah Sampson knows. But it is not so clear that Herman Mann, the author, does. Although the novel recounts several incidents of her exemplary courage (and courage in the exploitative masculine model: She must kill an Indian in self-defense before she is truly “manly”), Sampson's chief occupation is to keep men from uncovering her hidden femininity while simultaneously preventing women from falling in love with her covering masculinity. The title page, too, hints equally of patriotism (“she performed the duties of every department, into which she was called, with punctual exactness, fidelity and honor”) and prurience (she “preserved her chastity inviolate, by the most artful concealment of her sex”).

Yet the doctors, colonels, merchants, majors, and captains (as well as Miss Hannah Wright, Miss Alice Leavens, Miss Hannah Orne, and the other misses whose names were included in the volume) apparently saw themselves as supporting through their subscriptions a purely pious tale. In contrast to the lists bound with all other early American novels, the one found in The Female Review is unusual in that it contains no pseudonyms such as “A Friend to the Publication” or “A Young Lady of Massachusetts,” phrasings obviously intended to hide the patron's true identity.² But consistent with its transvestite plot, The Female Review crossdresses generically too. Nowhere announcing itself as a novel, this fiction masks its own fictionality by passing itself off as a proper history of the Revolution.

Another novel of crossdressing, also set during the Revolution, further underscores the inherent contradictions between female, on the one hand, and picaresque, on the other. The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or Constancy Rewarded: An American Novel was one of the best-selling novels of the early national period. Originally published in brief installments from June of 1789 to January of 1790 in the American monthly periodical, Gentleman and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, the novel also went through eight editions in English between 1794 (its original date of book publication) and 1802, was translated into German for the Pennsylvania market, was reprinted again in 1821 and 1831, and was then published in a plagiarized edition, under the title History of Lorenzo and Virginia; or, Virtue Rewarded, by one T. H. Cauldwell, D.D., in 1834. It was available in a pirated paperbound edition that sold for a quarter and in a handsome, calfbound duodecimo that sold for over a dollar. Despite its popularity, however (or perhaps because of it), the book has baffled contemporary critics. It is surprisingly brief (some copies are only twenty-five or so pages long) and extremely episodic (as if with each installment, the author had mostly forgotten what he or she had written last month). A number of critics have even insisted that the book is so discontinuous, its plot so ludicrous, its rhetoric so preposterous, and its moral so muddled that it must surely have been originally intended as a parody of the sentimental or picaresque forms, for “it is impossible to take [it] … seriously.”³

Yet apparently the original readers of The History of Constantius and Pulchera did just that. Nothing in the twenty-one copies of the novel that I have inspected suggests that they were read any differently than, say, romantic novels such as The Coquette or Charlotte. Most are signed in the usual fashion and using the usual formula, “Elizabeth Smith, her Book.” Others, however, are signed several times, sometimes by members of the same family, sometimes (judging by the dates and inscriptions) by different generations of the same family, sometimes shared among friends or relatives with different family names. Most striking for my purposes, however, in one copy of the cheap, poorly printed edition pirated by Edward Gray in 1801, there is clear evidence of a reader who not only saw nothing funny in the work but who obviously valued it and drew connections between it and her own view of the world. As noted in chapter 4, she embellished the book itself with fine handmade covers and a delicate drawing of flower buds, and, at crucial points in the text, supplied her own poetic and philosophical gloss on the events of the nebulous plot.

Why, we must ask, is the book virtually unreadable today or readable only as a parody of itself? Robert Darnton addresses essentially the same question when he sorts through Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mailbag and finds dozens of fan letters addressed to “l'Ami Jean-Jacques” from readers enraptured by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse—“six volumes of sentiment unrelieved by any episodes of violence, explicit sex, or anything much in the way of plot”; in short, by today's standards, an unreadable book. Yet this unreadable book, with its overinflated prose and its overheated didacticism, went through a minimum of seventy editions before 1800, as many editions as any other novel in any country by that date.⁴ Perhaps we read differently today than we did in 1800.

In 1800, many Americans—and there is no way of knowing just how many—read The History of Constantius and Pulchera, and what they read, starting with the frontispiece with its evocation of Romeo and Juliet, was a sentimental story of star-crossed lovers conjoined with a female picaresque adventure tale. At first the sentimental predominates. The first appearance of the heroine is standard romance: “In the suburbs of the city of Philadelphia, in the soft season of the year, about one o'clock, on a moon shining morning, on the terrace of a high building, forty feet from the ground, appeared a most beautiful lady of the age of sixteen—she was clad in a long white vest, her hair of a beautiful chestnut colour, hanging carelessly over her shoulders, every mark of greatness was visible in her countenance, which was overcast with a solemn gloom, and now and then, the unwilling tear unnoticed, rolled down her cheek.”⁵ Yet in the novel's preface, explicitly addressed to the “Daughters of Columbia,” prospective readers are promised “novelty” that will be “like a new Planet in the solar System” of “the Ladies' Libraries.” They are also assured that the novel will not arouse “party spirit” and the “many emotions” of the divided “political world” but, rather, will focus on women's concerns and is designed for the “Amusement of the Fair Sex.” That statement, in itself, is, of course, a political statement, one that recognizes women's exclusion from or indifference to official party politics. The book opposes the world of men's politics to the world of the lady's library—different planets in the same (or, perhaps, not the same at all) universe.

Although, to say the least, much shorter than La Nouvelle Héloïse, The History of Constantius and Pulchera mimics the strained language of feeling that Rousseau deploys throughout his six-volume novel: “O transcendently propitious heaven! thrice bountiful, inexhaustible, magnificent Providence! inexpressible, benevolent, and superlatively beneficent fates! The most exalted language is more than infinitely too inexpressive to give an idea of the grateful sensations which occupy my breast” (p. 94). Just as recent authors run up against the limitations of language in one way, early novelists did so in another way. Pulchera, still disguised as Lieutenant Valorus, has just tested her lover's constancy and his exclamations follow upon her revealing her true identity. No words—not even these words—can capture his joy. But notice that his effusive language would normally be her language. Pulchera is in control. She contrives the meeting, the test, the revelation. Constantius's role is essentially passive, responsive, in a word, “feminine.” The novel focuses on Pulchera's prowess and adventures, and Constantius, consistent with the passive connotations of his name, is finally reduced, rhetorically, to the role traditionally occupied by a woman, that of the grateful heroine overwhelmed by good fortune and the capable attentions of another. One almost expects the fellow to swoon.

The narrative transvestism or emotional role reversal, however, does not overtly challenge the status quo, and that consideration may well explain the “secret” to the novel's success. The heroine rushes from harrowing adventure to even more harrowing adventure, but she does so “innocently” because, ostensibly, she proceeds in opposition to her own more proper desires. The novel essentially grafts the typical picaresque adventure story (such as Fortune's Foot-ball) onto a sentimental novel through the ingenious device of captivity (a device to be explored at greater length in a subsequent section on the female Gothic novel). Because Pulchera is repeatedly abducted and thus, by definition, deprived of volition in the matter, she cannot really be held responsible for breaking virtually every imaginable restriction placed upon the eighteenth-century American woman. She is, happily, forced into her different unlikely roles as picara, world traveler, crossdressing soldier, prizemaster on a brigantine captured by pirates, and sole woman stranded with a group of men on a remote desert island. In her assumed role as Valorus, she is constantly thrown into the company of disreputable men and, just as constantly, she overpowers or outwits or otherwise triumphs over them all. She is transformed, onomastically and metaphorically, from Pulchera—suggesting a typically feminine beauty, pulchritude—to Valorus, a hero. As Lillie Deming Loshe has noted, there is a certain “cheerfulness” in the way the narration lurches from one unlikely and outlandish adventure to another, with Pulchera/Valorus thoroughly enjoying her successes in situations no eighteenth-century woman had any business even fantasizing.⁶ And then her exhilarating trials all end in the domesticity she would have entered on page 1 except for the intervention of her parents (who, of course, had wanted to marry her to a designing French aristocrat). She has her adventures and her Constantius, too. He is, indeed, a final triumph and also an appropriate reward (playing the role of the traditional heroine again) for all of her other earlier triumphs.

It is, in short, a wonderful fantasy. Pulchera/Valorus violates all of the restrictions placed upon eighteenth-century women, but still ends up, thanks to her unflagging ingenuity and overall capability, safe at home again and at last in possession of her constant American lover. No wonder the novel was a best-seller! This American heroine saw the world, proved her mastery of it by triumphing over a whole host of designing men, and then returned home to an America that had won its independence (her own story of independence, like Deborah Sampson's, is set during the Revolutionary War) to enter into a marriage which, mercifully, is left undescribed at the novel's end. Like all good escapist literature, The History of Constantius and Pulchera allows the reader a temporary reprieve from her own situation but never requires her to question its governing assumptions. Catharsis arises precisely from the novel's lack of realism—signaled by its exuberant rhetoric—which allows the reader freely to imagine freedom without in any way having to pay the personal or public price that any effort to realize that freedom necessarily entails.

Another factor probably contributed to the popularity of this curious little tale. It is among the shortest, sparest, and simplest of early American novels. Even when the vocabulary is at its most florid (“transcendently … propitious … bountiful … inexhaustible … benevolent … superlatively”), the “words of three, four, and five syllables” are those that are found in Dilworth's, Perry's, and Webster's spelling books. In effect, rote vocabulary lessons have become enlivened into plot and words have gained significance by being incorporated into story. What to us seems like a highly erratic, episodic, and undeveloped plot may, therefore, have seemed almost like magic to an inexperienced reader making her way from her speller to a novel in which those long lists of words memorized in the schoolroom suddenly transported a girl very much like herself about the globe and through a whole series of adventures while Constantius waited mostly at home. The novel is simple in its disjunctive vocabulary and it is simple, too, in its disjunctive story, calling upon the reader's ready imagination to fill in the lacunae in the notably undelineated plot. In what is almost a child's ordering (“this happened and then this happened and then this happened …”), impetus and excitement derive not from the narrative skills of the author but from the reader being able to recreate a tale of utter implausibility and to participate thereby in the global derring-do of a sixteen-year-old girl from the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Only in crossdressing or captivity do a few women characters find something of the same full freedom that the picaresque regularly grants to its male protagonists. Moreover, that freedom, it must be emphasized, is conditional and temporary, and definitely not for domestic consumption. Clearly, “Mrs. Constantius” (née Pulchera), back in “the suburbs of Philadelphia,” may wistfully recall her life as Valorus, ship's mate and soldier, but she will not swashbuckle through the marketplace. As Arabella, the satirized heroine in British novelist Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), aptly observes, when a woman “at last condescends to reward [a man] with her Hand … all her Adventures are at an End for the Future.”⁷ Returned to female dress and mien again, Deborah and Pulchera presumably live happily ever after. But such an ending does not elicit the imagination of the author, and both the “happiness” and the “after” can be appropriately left to the readers who will all have their own experiences on that same score.

Tabitha Gilman Tenney, in Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), portrays a protagonist whose adventures are hardly as extravagant as those of Pulchera or Deborah Sampson. Perhaps Dorcasina's wildest act is to dress up her previous name, which was the more mundane Dorcas. In this novel the picara never strays more than thirty miles from her place of nativity. Her adventures are mostly in reading and are all emphatically and stereotypically female. A devotee of romances, she reads to imagine herself the object of male adoration. Theoretically, she need imagine no further than that essentially passive state. Love should conquer all, which means she need conquer nothing—not enemy soldiers, not pirates, not even the more difficult nonfictional books in her father's library. Tenney's genius is to tie the form that most emphasizes freedom from society back to limitation (read: female limitation) and society (read: patriarchal society). The protagonist's “romantic opinions” and “extravagant [albeit mental] adventures” only circumscribe the fixity of her place.

An intelligent woman, an heiress of a thousand pounds a year (rightly designated in the novel as “a great fortune”), Dorcasina renders herself pathetic not just by her novel reading, but by her willingness to believe in the whole fantasy of love perpetrated in the novels she reads. She takes “happy ever after” at face value and sets out to discover the man who will render her so. She is consequently victimized by both her own delusions and by men who calculatingly exploit those delusions and see in her only a windfall profit to be easily won by passionately declaiming a few romantic phrases plagiarized from those same novels in which her delusions are grounded. She reads too trustingly, both the books and the men she meets. Just as The History of Constantius and Pulchera was a kind of elementary how-to-read-a-novel novel, Female Quixotism is a more subtle how-not-to-read-a-novel novel. Tenney allegorizes the reading process and turns it upon itself; one must be a resisting reader, a critical reader, a reader able to read other readings of the fiction, able to read the context in which the text is read.

Dorcasina emblemizes the passive consumer who presents no critical opposition to the texts she reads. She reads her life the same way—postulating a gentleman behind an uncouth, illiterate servant (she has just finished Roderick Random), seeing true love in the faces of false men whose dissembling is motivated by the materialistic consideration of her fortune. She is saved from the most calculating of these men only by his fortuitous arrest for outstanding debts. Mr. Seymore, a dubious schoolmaster of uncertain past, intends to rise in the world through a fortunate match despite the fact that he is already married. His plan was to wed Dorcasina and then to have the middle-aged woman incarcerated in an insane asylum so that he could enjoy her cash unencumbered by her company. Bilked of the real prize at the last moment, his revenge is to tell his ostensible prize just where she stands in his regard: “Ridiculous vanity, at your age, with those grey locks, to set out to make conquests! I … assure you that any man would be distracted to think of marrying you except for your money.”⁸ The veil is lifted, and Dorcasina sadly recognizes the delusions under which she has long labored. Even sadder, she realizes that it did not have to end that way: “Had my education been properly directed … I believe I might have made acquirements, which would have enabled me to bear a part, perhaps to shine, when thrown among people of general information” (2:212).

An emphasis on female education begins even with the novel's epigraph: “Felix Quem Faciunt Aliena Pericula Cautum. In plain English—Learn to be wise by others harm, / and you shall do full well.” As in many early works, the Latin quotation is translated into “plain English” for those who do not have the benefit of a classical education—for, more specifically, the “Columbian Young Ladies, who Read Novels and Romances” and to whom the volume is dedicated. This epigraph, along with the novel's preface, reiterates the eighteenth-century assumption that narrative directly addresses questions on the conduct of life. By reading of Dorcasina's delusions and consequent suffering, the reader should “learn to be wise” and “do full well” in her own personal existence. The key, then, is not for women to stop reading—but for women to read the right kinds of books, the right kinds of novels even, not the novels Dorcasina reads but the novel in which she reads them. It is all a matter of choice, and Tenney, moreover, makes clear the grounds of her protagonist's unfortunate propensity to mislead her fancy with bad fiction. Had Dorcasina's mother lived, we are told, the daughter's education would have been well regulated, sensible. Instead, her father has indulged his own appetite for bad novels and nourished his daughter's. In the process, the widower has also insured that his only child will remain at his side, a devoted daughter who is also his housekeeper and companion.

The importance of female reading, Tenney insists, is all the greater given the intellectual climate of the time in which any female reading was seen as suspect. After Dorcasina rejects her first suitor because he does not, in his speech or letters, sound like Werther or Harrington, no more male attention disturbs her novelistic retreat for many years. “Notwithstanding the temptation of her money, and her agreeable person,” most men who knew of Dorcasina's love of novels avoided her, “wisely forseeing the inconveniences which would result from having a wife whose mind was fraught with ideas of life and manners so widely different from what they appear on trial.” The author seems to endorse such prudent reservations but not the baser doubts of men put off simply by Dorcasina's love of books: “Others there were, who understood only that she spent much time in books, without any knowledge of the kind which pleased her. It was sufficient to keep them at a distance, to know that she read at all. Those enemies to female improvement, thought a woman had no business with any book but the bible, or perhaps the art of cookery; believing that everything beyond these served only to disqualify her for the duties of domestic life” (1:17). This double-edged focus makes Female Quixotism more than a satire of one silly woman who reads too many equally silly books. The novel is also a larger different satire on a whole society in which a deficient educational system and dubious sexual politics render women devoid of judgment by deeming judgment, in a woman, a superfluous quality.

One early incident in the novel effectively epitomizes the dual focus of its pervasive satire. When the father attempts to marry his daughter to the only son of his best friend, Dorcasina anticipates “a sensible pain at quitting my dear and affectionate father, and this delightful spot where I have passed all my life, and to which I feel the strongest attachment. But what gives me the greatest pain,” she continues, “is that I shall be obliged to live in Virginia, be served by slaves, and be supported by the sweat, toil and blood of that unfortunate and miserable part of mankind” (1:9-10). Her condemnation of slavery continues for another page and a half. She is articulate, moral, intelligent; she denounces slavery in all of its forms and goes considerably beyond her father's reservations on the matter, for while he believes slavery is evil, he also insists it is an “inherited” evil now so entrenched as to be, perhaps, beyond cure. That prognosis is not good enough for Dorcasina. She refuses to accept “inheritance” as any adequate justification for perpetrating an immoral system, and the author obviously concurs with her judgment. But note the impossibly romantic solution Dorcasina devises for what she rightly sees as America's most serious problem. She will marry the Virginian (whom she styles Lysander) with the express purpose of convincing him, through his ardent love for her, that he has no choice—no wish—but to free his slaves. Love, she fondly imagines, should conquer all, even social injustice, and even on the largest social level: “Wrapt in the glow of enthusiasm,” she envisions “his neighbors imitating his example, and others imitating them, till the spirit of justice and humanity should extend to the utmost limits of the United States, and all the blacks be emancipated from bondage, from New-Hampshire even to Georgia” (1:11). With such effusions from her protagonist, Tenney brilliantly captures the excesses of sentimental rhetoric. Yet the excess of romantic posturing that renders this solution ridiculous is surely no less suspect than the excess of social hypocrisy and injustice that requires it. Dorcasina, however, is not so naive as not to know that the first decisive action toward her envisioned emancipation of the slaves must be taken by her husband. She might be his prime mover but his will still be the prime move. In short, Dorcasina grotesquely mirrors the status quo even as she questions it. But by subjugating all of her opinions to a notion of romanticism and domestic love, she would be, at one and the same time, both a secret revolutionary and a standard feme covert. Yet, one well might ask, what other alternatives has she? The only political solution Dorcasina can envision is a hopelessly romantic one—perhaps because hopeless romanticism decently obscures the fact that the very position from which she plans to act, the subservient domestic helpmeet, is itself a form of slavery.

The picaro adventures on the margins of social possibility; the picara either ends up ensconced in domesticity or, like Dorcasina, never really leaves it, which makes the female picaresque a fictional form fundamentally divided against itself. We have, on the one hand, extravagant escapist fantasies typically dependent upon a woman's cross-dressing (the male picaresque in drag) and, on the other, a woman's picaresque adventures as a mostly imagined escape that both counterbalances and weighs the public and private constraints under which her fantasy labors. Dorcasina is no Don Quixote, for the simple reason that even if he challenges only windmills, he still traverses the landscape he misreads and validates that misreading by his various misadventures. The carnivalesque elements in Don Quixote, borrowed largely from Rabelais, thus serve to question the official cultural and political hierarchies, in some ways to reverse them completely—which is precisely what also happens in Modern Chivalry or Mr. Penrose, Seaman when convention is turned topsy-turvy.⁹ But in Female Quixotism, Dorcasina's excursions in her quixotic mental world do not trouble the status quo. Only after she awakens to see the “real” world does she begin to question such fundamental matters as the nature of matrimony or the nature of men. “I begin to think all men are alike,” Dorcasina confides to her faithful womanservant, Betty, after she has been released from her romantic notions of life, “false, perfidious, and deceitful; and there is no confidence to be put in any of them” (2:201).

When Dorcasina finally sees how the rest of the world views her and how, using that view, Seymore intended also to use her and her money, she seeks refuge with her friend Harriot Stanly, now married to the same Captain Barry who earlier pretended to woo Dorcasina out of some twisted desire to show her what the “real” world was like. Coming to this domestic refuge, however, Dorcasina is surprised to encounter not the wedded bliss which she had expected (and which she feared might contrast too painfully to her own lonely state) but sadness and disharmony. Dreams and delusions still. As the protagonist confesses to her now married friend, she had formerly thought that “in a happy union, all was transport, joy, and felicity; but in you I find a demonstration that the most agreeable connection is not unattended with cares and anxieties.” The new Mrs. Barry must concur in that evaluation: “I have been married a twelvemonth, to the man whom of all the world I should have chosen. He is everything I wish him to be; and in the connection I have enjoyed great felicity. Yet, strange to tell, I have suffered more than I ever did before, in the whole course of my life” (2:207). As Dorcasina notes, the once “sprightly Harriot Stanly” has been “metamorphosed, by one year's matrimony, into a serious moralizer” (2:207) and a diminished version of her former self. This second realization parallels the first as a liberation from fantasy. “The spell is now broken,” Dorcasina can proclaim, referring equally to the fictions of her novels and the fictions of her society, which were not, after all, that different from one another.

Almost triumphantly, Dorcasina takes control of her life and of the final words of the text. Only the end of the novel is in the first person. Her concluding letter to Harriot announces that she will spend the rest of her days in assisting others less fortunate than herself, in sewing, and in reading novels. She also informs Harriot, who has never read even one novel, that “I [still] read them with the same relish, the same enthusiasm as ever; but, instead of expecting to realize scenes and situations so charmingly portrayed, I only regret that such unallayed felicity is, in this life, unattainable” (2:212). Her life has allegorized her reading, just as the lives of those who do not read novels allegorizes the bleakness of a life without any imaginative escape (i.e., romantic fantasy or picaresque adventures). Given those alternatives, Dorcasina chooses fiction.

In a perceptive analysis of the romance as a genre and, more specifically, of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, Laurie Langbauer has recently argued that Lennox's book “associates the dangers of romance with sins of women, and through this association clinches its derision of the form. Romance's faults—lack of restraint, irrationality, and silliness—are also women's faults.” As Langbauer also notes, this same connection was early drawn by Henry Fielding who, in a review of Lennox's novel, observed that he preferred The Female Quixote to Don Quixote precisely because it was more plausible that a woman, not a man, would be ruled by romances:

As we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentleman. … To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women … in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large progress in the same Follies.¹⁰

Fielding's logic is as circular as it is androcentric. Women read silly books because women are silly or vice versa (it really does not matter). Cervantes missed the point in his classic; no man, surely, would really succumb to fiction's influence as “most young Women” are wont to do. In contrast, Tenney denies Dorcasina Everywoman status. Every woman who reads Female Quixotism is encouraged to see herself as different from what Dorcasina was, and, indeed, Dorcasina becomes different too. Furthermore, Tenney refuses to hang both the satire and the blame, as Fielding conveniently does, on the ostensible folly of women. Why, she wants to know, are women so susceptible to the fantasies of romance they encounter in novels? Maybe it is because the world outside of novels holds so little else for a capable, intelligent woman.

Female Quixotism runs counter to the male picaresque, to the sentimental romances affirming a patriarchal status quo, and also to another trend already under way in 1801 and one that became increasingly popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century despite (or, perhaps, concomitant with) the highly restrictive legal and social conditions of women. I refer to the fad for female adventures starring women in their plots and almost always in their titles—The Female Fishers, The Female Marine, The Female Robinson Crusoe, The Female Spy. A Domestic Tale, The Female Wanderer, The Female Spy; or, The Child of the Brigade—even The Female Land Pirate. In contrast to these female picaresque fantasies, Tabitha Tenney's book provides a hard core of realism—and it does not paint a very pretty picture of women's lives. Dorcasina retreats to fiction at the end of her life because, first, her education has been so elementary that she simply cannot read anything more challenging than popular fiction, and, second, because fiction itself is finally far more satisfactory than anything she has found in the world at large. She prefers, not unreasonably, a happy fantasy life to an unhappy actual one.

I would here add a brief epilogue—an appropriately marginal allegory on the marginality of women's lives—to this discussion of the politics of the female picaresque. Although a best-selling novelist (and one of the best early American novelists), Tabitha Tenney remains virtually unknown as an individual. In the History of Exeter, her husband, Dr. Samuel Tenney, is accorded almost two pages of fulsome comment: “He was a man of fine presence, and of much dignity. His domestic and social relations were of the happiest character. He was universally esteemed and respected, and in his death, his townsmen felt that they had met with no ordinary loss.” The novelist, in contrast, receives four lines: “Dr. Tenney's wife was Tabitha, daughter of Samuel Gilman, a highly accomplished lady. She was the author of two or more published works, the chief of which was Female Quixotism which had much popularity in its time, and went through several editions.” The Tenney family history contains the same prescription—“wife of,” “daughter of,” “a highly accomplished lady”—and, ironically, so, too, does the history of the Gilman family. There are letters reproduced in the Gilman volume from Dr. Samuel Tenney to Tabitha's father, but they do not mention the daughter. In contrast, I know of only one letter by Tabitha, but it, too, is about Samuel Tenney. On October 25, 1823, she wrote the Honorable William Plumer who was seeking information for his proposed biography of Dr. Tenney. “It would certainly be most gratifying,” the wife observes, “to see some account of my late husband appear in the way which you propose.” The letter reveals virtually nothing of Tabitha's own life or thoughts, but, then again, Mr. Plumer was not interested in those. The historical record here affirms the vision of women that Tenney criticized. Woman's place is as daughter or wife or mother; she passes unnoticed in the written record, except, of course, in novels.¹¹

In only two sources have I found any record of Tabitha Gilman Tenney that goes beyond the usual and formulaic “highly accomplished lady” encountered in practically all dictionary entries on the author. One account is an amusingly idiosyncratic personal memoir, A Few Reminiscences of My Exeter Life, by Elizabeth Dow Leonard. Writing in 1878, Leonard particularly remembers the earlier “authoress” because novelists then “did not grow as now, plenty [sic] as blackberries, but were as hard to find as a real phoenix or one-horned unicorn.” Novelty, however, did not assure esteem or even notice. As Leonard confesses: “I blush to say, with all my pride in the rich achievements of my native village, I never read [Female Quixotism.] … Those who did read it pronounced it superlatively silly, and [Tabitha Tenney] tried in after years to recall it without success.” I have not uncovered elsewhere any evidence to corroborate this report of authorial regret, but, valid or not, Leonard's account constitutes a sad postscript to the long neglect of one of America's first best-selling novelists.¹²

The only other information on Tenney appears in the private record, not the public. I refer to a diary by Patty Rogers, which has never been published, a marvelously detailed account of the reading and romances of an eighteenth-century American young woman. The diarist, an expansive young woman who was apparently well known in the town of Exeter for both her volubility and her love of fiction, was one of Tabitha Gilman's contemporaries. The two, however, apparently, did not much care for one another. Patty found Tabby too reserved, but then, as Patty directly and indirectly records, others, including her beau (the preceptor, William Woodbridge), found Patty too excitable. This opinion may also have been shared by Patty's second suitor (or would-be seducer: the issue is unclear), a former doctor in the Revolutionary army, the thirty-seven year old Samuel Tenney who had apparently returned to Exeter with the dual intentions of marrying and entering politics.

The diary records in intimate detail Patty Rogers's love for novels, how her various suitors “seduce” her with fiction, the way Woodbridge (she styles him Portius in her diary) eventually forsakes her for a girl of more sense and less “sensibility” (“He said some persons had too much sensibility!”). She also describes how Dr. Tenney, her father's friend, begins to ply her with billets, poetry, and, above all, novels. On one occasion, he gallants both her and Tabby Gilman home. At another time (she has now renamed him Philamon) he takes “liberties” with her in a carriage and later he takes “liberties” (the same ones? different?) on her doorstep (“You treated me ill,” she reprimands him, “as if you thot me a bad girl—Nobody else treats me so ill”). And all the while he also publicly courts Tabitha Gilman, a sober, serious, quiet young woman, a year younger than Patty and, the latter records, “a person peculiarly disagreeable to me—not from any injury she ever did me, but there is a Certain something, in her manner, with which I am ever difficulted.” The older doctor, a former soldier in the Revolutionary War, denies that he favors Tabby and regularly flirts with Patty, who just as regularly sets down their exchanges in her diary, interweaving the sentimental plot of her small life with the plots of the various novels she reads (History of the Human Heart, Ganganelli, A Sentimental Journey, etc.). Of course, the ambitious doctor presently marries the more sensible Tabby, and, since Patty's diary ends here, we learn no more from her of her rival.¹³

With the arrival of the husband on the scene, the official record takes over. He was elected to Congress for three terms, and the couple lived, during his term of office, in Washington, D.C. They had no children. In 1801, a year after moving to Washington, Tabitha wrote Female Quixotism, a novel in which there is little mention of the world of masculine politics but which does feature Dorcasina Sheldon, a young woman who in personality, in voice and style, and in her passion for novels remarkably resembles Patty Rogers. In 1816, after Samuel's death, Mrs. Tenney returned to Exeter where Patty Rogers, yet unwed and now renowned for her sewing, her piety, and her charitable works, still resided. In her later years, Tabitha Tenney stopped writing, took up sewing, and she, too, was esteemed for the originality and intricacy of her needlework. There is no more to tell, and even this inconclusive account exists only in fragments, suggesting other stories that operate equally on levels of history and fiction: Is Female Quixotism a satire against the writer's old rival? Or did the author, married, thirty-nine years old, and childless when she published her novel, recognize a bond between herself and Patty that she may not have been willing to acknowledge in 1785 when Dr. Tenney played each woman's virtues off against the other's shortcomings? For even though Patty does seem to provide the inspiration for Dorcasina in Female Quixotism, we should also remember that the biblical name Dorcas is simply the Greek version of the Aramaic Tabitha (as we are specifically told in Acts 9:36), and, moreover, that biblical reference to the good, charitable Dorcas/Tabitha of Joppa whom Peter raised from the dead applies equally to the older character and the older author.¹⁴

The politics implicit in this possible conjoining of writer and rival transcends the fractious and almost exclusively masculine debate on what shape the new nation should take. It is the same politics that can be observed in the life, letters, and literary legacy of Tabitha and Patty. One imagines the two old women—Tabitha died in 1837 at the age of seventy-five and Patty in 1840 at seventy-nine—living on in Exeter, both esteemed by the community, each engaged in charitable works and spinning tales of her youth in the early years of the Republic while she also plied her needle. It is a world of women's lives as far removed from the world of Modern Chivalry or The Algerine Captive as from The Female Review or The Female Land Pirate but not that different from the final days of one Dorcasina Sheldon, who emerges, when viewed from the end of both her original and her author, as a most representative female picaresque hero.

Notes

1. Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1981), p. 381, notes rightly that Mann's exploitation of Sampson's sexual identity is analogous to the Richardsonian prurience over a woman's virginity.

2. The Female Review: Or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (Dedham, Mass.: Nathaniel & Benjamin Heaton, 1797), frontmatter.

3. Percy H. Boynton, Literature and American Life (Boston: Ginn, 1936), pp. 195-96; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1948), p. 30; and Petter, Early American Novel, p. 290. Special thanks to Jack B. Moore for sending me a copy of his unpublished essay, “Our Literary Heritage: A Justly Neglected Masterpiece,” which documents the magazine publishing history of this bizarre novel.

4. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 242.

5. The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or Constancy Rewarded: An American Novel (Boston: [no pub.], 1794), p. 1. Future references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

6. Loshe, in Henri Petter's The Early American Novel, (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971) calls Constantius and Pulchera a “cheerful and animated tale” with a “cheerful conglomeration of improbabilities” (p. 64).

7. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 138.

8. Tabitha Tenney, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, 2 vols. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1801), 2: 201. All future references to this edition of the novel will be cited parenthetically within the text.

9. Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic Versus the Picaresque (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 74-75.

10. Laurie Langbauer, “Romance Revisited: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote,” Novel, 18 (1984), 39. The Fielding review was recently republished in Henry Fielding, “The Covent Garden Journal, No. 24, March 24, 1752,” in The Criticism of Henry Fielding, ed. Ian Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 193. For a fuller discussion of Lennox, see also Gustavus Howard Maynadier, The First American Novelist? (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940); and Philippe Sejourne, The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox: First Novelist of Colonial America (Aix-en-Provence: Publications des Annales de la Faculté des lettres, 1967). And, for a comparison of Lennox and Tenney, see Sally Allen McNall, Who Is in the House? A Psychological Study of Two Centuries of Women's Fiction in America, 1795 to the Present (New York: Elsevier, 1981), esp. pp. 15-18.

11. Charles H. Bell, History of [the Town of] Exeter, New Hampshire (1888; repr. Bowie, Md.: Catholic Heritage Press [Heritage Books], 1979), pp. 382-84; Arthur Gilman, The Gilman Family (Albany, N. Y.: Joel Munsell, 1869), pp. 97-98; and Mary Jane Tenney, The Tenney Family, or the Descendants of Thomas Tenney of Rowley, Massachusetts, 1638-1890 (Boston: American Printing and Engraving Co., 1891), p. 57. The letter from Tabitha Gilman Tenney to the Honorable William Plumer (October 25, 1823) is reprinted courtesy of the Plumer Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, N.H. My special thanks to Dr. Sally Hoople for sending me a photocopy of this letter.

12. Elizabeth Dow Leonard, A Few Reminiscences of My Exeter Life, ed. Edward C. Echols (Exeter, NH: 2 X 4 Press, 1972), pp. 46-48. Leonard also relates an amusing anecdote about how, when Washington's death was announced in Exeter, “many ladies thought it was necessary to faint, Mrs. Tenney among the number. She had a valuable mirror in her hand when she received the terrible news of [Washington's] fate. She walked leisurely across the room, laid the mirror safely down, placed herself in a proper attitude … and then fainted away” (p. 48). Certainly this anecdote corroborates the rather sober, sensible Tabby Gilman portrayed by Patty Rogers in her diary. Sally Hoople, in her fine doctoral dissertation, Tabitha Tenney: “Female Quixotism,” Fordham Univ., 1984, p. 291, also quotes from one other source, a letter in the Duyckinck Collection, Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, which notes that Tenney was “perhaps more remarkable for her domestic qualifications than for her literary performances,” another sad commentary on one of the best of the early novelists.

13. Diary of Patty Rogers, Manuscript Department, AAS. See especially the entries for 1785 on January 9 and 10, May 29, June 20, August 1, 2, and 4, and September 14 and 21.

14. Hoople, Tabitha Tenney, p. 112.