SOURCE: Nienkamp, Jean, and Andrea Collins. Introduction to Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, by Tabitha Gilman Tenney. 1801. Reprint, pp. xiii-xxviii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Nienkamp and Collins provide an overview of the historical and cultural influences on Tenney's novel as well as a biographical sketch of Tenney that offers insight into her literary achievement.]

When Female Quixotism was first published in 1801, the United States was engaged in building a national identity. All aspects of life—not just the laws inherited from England—were scrutinized for their suitableness for Americans. What literature, entertainment, and fashions were most appropriate for a people who were distinguishing themselves culturally and commercially from their British roots? What extent and kind of education would promote civic responsibility among men who had never previously had a voice in government and women who would be rearing future generations of the citizenry? What, after all of the wartime rhetoric concerning freedom and natural rights, should America do about its slaves? While Female Quixotism addresses all of these concerns, the novel touches on them in the context of its central concern, what books good citizens “should” read.

Particularly at issue was the growing popularity of novels, a genre that troubled the molders of early American society. First, in a nation not too far from its Puritan origins, novels came up against the charge that fiction was immoral because it was tantamount to lying. Readers today usually wouldn't make this observation, because they use other standards of “truth” for judging literature, but the charge carried great moral weight during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many writers of novels of the period, Tabitha Tenney included, tried to avoid this charge by asserting in their titles or prefaces that their books were “true histories.”

Furthermore, people in Federalist America prided themselves on their no-frills practicality, and they often associated entertainments with frivolous European luxuriousness. Many novels were imported or pirated from England, so a patriotic distrust of those works was a natural extension of the boycott of British goods encouraged during the Revolution. Robustly nationalistic works such as Royall Tyler's play, The Contrast (1787), Joel Barlow's poem, The Vision of Columbus (1787), and William Hill Brown's novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), contended that European culture was inappropriate and debilitating for the rigorous necessities of American life.

Particularly important during a time when a majority of the population was quite young was the purported effect of novels on young people. Most of the era's criticism directed against novel reading—criticism in sermons, pamphlets, books, newspapers, and magazines—argued that reading novels impaired the education of the nation's youth. Novels, it was thought, made immoral actions seem more interesting than virtuous ones. By emphasizing romance and adventure, some critics argued, novels gave young people false ideas of life and particularly made women unsuited for and unhappy with the domestic roles for which society destined them. Such are the primary arguments Female Quixotism explicitly offers in its criticism of novel reading.

Many authors of novels written during this period attempted to exempt their works from the criticisms directed at novels by criticizing novel reading—of other kinds of novels, of course. William Hill Brown, in The Power of Sympathy, argued that American women were harmed by reading English novels just as Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) claimed that English women were harmed by reading French romances. Tabitha Gilman Tenney attempted to distinguish Female Quixotism from the romances it criticized in a much more thoroughgoing way. While most of the novels deploring novel reading had sentimental, if not romantic, endings, Female Quixotism was consistently anti-romantic to the very end. Instead of portraying the ultimate marriage of the central characters who go off to live “happily ever after,” instead of concluding with a sentimental death scene in which a woman dies while still young and beautiful with a crowd of relatives, friends, and her true love mourning her, Female Quixotism follows its protagonist, Dorcas Sheldon, to her unmarried old age, to physical deterioration, disillusionment, and ultimate loneliness.

But this ironic denouement is not the only difference between Female Quixotism and its contemporaries. Like Don Quixote, and unlike the sentimental novels written by Tenney's contemporaries, Female Quixotism is a comic, boisterous anti-romance. The novel's cutting wit spares hardly any segment of society: droll servants, earnest merchants, scheming scholars, and self-deluding gentry all get their fair share of ribbing.

Female Quixotism takes place in the isolated village of L———, Pennsylvania, up the Delaware River from Philadelphia. The central character, Dorcas Sheldon, restyles herself “Dorcasina” to accord better with the romantic notions she has acquired from her naive reading of too many romances. These romantic notions occasion a series of misadventures as Dorcasina searches in vain for the passionate love portrayed in her beloved books. After rejecting the honorable advances of her first suitor, “Lysander,” who fails to act or write like the heroes of her favorite novels, Dorcasina has a number of hairsbreadth escapes from unscrupulous men who want to marry her only for her money.

The first of these escapades involves the Irishman O'Connor, portrayed as a rascal who easily captures Dorcasina's heart by imitating the romantic language of novels. O'Connor, having forged letters of introduction to insinuate himself into the Sheldon household, is discovered and run out of town by Dorcasina's father, Mr. Sheldon. Dorcasina becomes convinced of O'Connor's villainy only after she sees him in the pillory on felony charges. Dorcasina shifts her attentions to the wounded Captain Barry, who is recuperating from a war injury in the Sheldon household. But Dorcasina's marriage plans are foiled again. After a nighttime elopement, she discovers her beau is actually the Captain's servant, James. Mr. Sheldon provides a more “suitable” suitor to his now forty-five-year-old daughter in the person of the merchant Mr. Cumberland, but for once Dorcasina's romantic notions serve her well as Mr. Cumberland also turns out to be more interested in money—any woman's money—than in Dorcasina herself.

After Mr. Sheldon dies, Dorcasina's close neighbors and friends the Stanlys assume the responsibility of preventing Dorcasina from marrying foolishly. Throughout the novel, the Stanlys have served as the counterpoint to Dorcasina's misguided education as they keep their daughter Harriot from reading novels and provide her with the social skills Dorcasina lacks. Their first challenge after Mr. Sheldon's death is to stop Dorcasina from marrying her servant, John Brown, whom she romantically and stubbornly insists is a gentleman in disguise. In rollicking scenes featuring cross-dressing and sexual innuendo, Harriot masquerades as the dashing Captain Montague to woo Dorcasina away from Brown. But even Harriot's combined efforts with Scipio, the Sheldons' faithful and resourceful African-American servant, fail. Finally, kidnapped from L———by the Stanlys and kept on an isolated farm to separate her from both Brown and her novels, Dorcasina almost marries a supposed widower, Seymore, before he is imprisoned as a debtor and reveals to Dorcasina that no one would marry her except for her money.

Amidst all of these escapades, Dorcasina is variously kidnapped, molested, and tricked by both disguise and circumstance in her search for true love. Dorcasina ends up alone at fifty, bereft of her attractiveness and romantic delusions—a singular fate indeed for the “heroine” of a novel, although a far from singular fate for such a “middling” American woman as Dorcasina.

Remarkably, Dorcasina's misadventures seem to be the only upheavals in L———, even though the fifty-year period represented in the novel encompasses the Revolutionary War, its economic precursors, and the subsequent politics of nation-building. Few of these momentous changes agitate or inconvenience the lives of the Sheldons and their neighbors. But not all of the developments evolving on the larger national scene are excluded from this isolated setting. Many of the social issues being debated in public arenas directly affected women's domestic lives, so even the microcosmic world of Female Quixotism had to cope with issues of gender, race, and class—issues as volatile then as they are today.

Relations between the sexes during this period were determined by women's economic dependence on men, a dependence completely controlling their lives in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In this pre-industrial age, religious and legal tenets confined most women to domestic duties, either in their own households or (as ill-paid labor) in the homes of others. The low wages and scarcity of suitable work for women continued an economic subjugation that reflected the disadvantageous legal status of women. A woman's legal status at this time depended on her marital status in a system of coverture inherited from British common law. While an unmarried woman—a feme sole—lacked political rights such as the right to vote, a married woman, or feme covert, was even more constrained by her lack of property rights. Wives could not keep the wages they had earned; they could not own property separately from their husbands—or make wills or sign legal documents or even have custody of their own children.

In this context, the absurd comedy of Dorcasina's search for a husband is a novelistic rendering of an ominous reality. The novel suggests that Dorcasina's fate as a single woman might be preferable to the potential misery of her life with an ill-suited husband. Women's single career choice—who and whether to marry—determined their lifelong felicity and their livelihoods. In practice, whether to marry was hardly a matter of choice. Social consensus assumed any marriage was preferable to “spinsterhood,” contrary to Mrs. Stanly's position that the single life is a reasonable and positive choice for women. On the other hand, Tenney—careful to portray no “happily-ever-afters”—provides that even the suitable and loving marriage of Dorcasina's neighbor, Harriot Stanly, is punctuated with misfortunes.

Female Quixotism depicts romance novels as pernicious precisely because they incapacitate women for making critical choices about marriage. Dorcasina is educated at home by her father, who allows her to read novels that “fill the heads of artless young girls” with “airy delusions and visionary dreams,” “sometimes to their utter ruin,” instead of having the benefit of a mother's guidance, which “would have pointed out to her the plain rational path of life” (3). Mrs. Stanly, on the other hand, sends Harriot to Philadelphia for her education, admonishing Harriot's governess not to allow the child to read novels.

Tenney's case against novel reading seems to concur with that of many advocates of education for women. No doubt, Tenney would have agreed with educators like Benjamin Rush and even Judith Sargent Murray, who argued that women must be trained in subjects that would allow them to conduct the primary education of their children (both male and female) and to converse intelligently in polite society. This attitude was far from universal, as the narrator of Female Quixotism suggests in the condemnation of those “enemies to female improvement” who “thought a woman had no business with any book but the bible, or perhaps the art of cookery; believing that every thing beyond these served only to disqualify her for the duties of domestic life” (13). On the contrary, Female Quixotism portrays no necessary conflict between learning for women and the fulfillment of domestic duties.

Women are not the only socially disadvantaged group limned in Female Quixotism. The novel offers a depiction of the ambiguous social relations between African-Americans and the ruling white elite during the period when the northern states began the gradual emancipation of their slaves. Representative of the changing status of African Americans in the North, Scipio is bought as a young boy by Mr. Sheldon, but he appears to be a free servant late in the novel, when he anticipates having to seek a new position if Dorcasina marries John Brown. Dorcasina's diatribe against slavery early in the novel illustrates the strong feelings raised by the institution from the beginning of the Republic, and it suggests the leading role women played in abolitionism.

A change in the legal status of African-Americans does not, however, bring about an immediate change in the racial attitudes of Anglo-Americans. Female Quixotism suggests both the older stereotypes white Americans held and a newer sympathy toward African-Americans. Scipio is an African-American version of the age-old “wise fool” character in literature, a character not unlike the fool in Shakespeare's plays. Although typified as an “African wag” who is frequently described in terms relative to other “persons of his complexion” (210, 238), Scipio is one of the most fully and sympathetically drawn characters in a novel in which many of the servants' antics are pure buffoonery. Furthermore, ambiguous attitudes about race relations emerge in Dorcasina's behavior: Dorcasina pontificates at length about the evils of slavery, but she is scandalized by her own inadvertent “familiarity” one evening with Scipio, “when, with her snowy arms, she encircled Scipio's ebony neck” (58).

Sentiments toward characters of other nationalities are not so ambiguous. Concomitant with the nationalistic fervor gripping the United States after the Revolution was the rejection of anything or anyone foreign. The two nationalities coming in for much of the negative critique in the novel are the Irish and the French. The stereotype of the “Irish rogue”—represented in Book I by O'Connor and the “shrewd Irish servant” who tries to rape Dorcasina—was carried over to the new nation from eighteenth century British novels and culture. Strong anti-French sentiment arose in the United States after the perceived hellish excesses in the name of republicanism during the Reign of Terror. French influence is thus attributed to the moral depravity of Seymore and Mr. M. of the village of L———in Book II. In general, the novel advocates a morally based isolationism to protect America from corrupting European influences.

In addition to the depiction of gender, ethnic, and international relations, Female Quixotism offers a rich portrayal of class structure in the United States at this period. Dorcasina's whole search for romantic love is premised on her status as a wealthy woman: to Dorcasina, marriage is not a necessity of economic survival, because she is of the landed class. But hers is not the only social level portrayed. Class distinctions are evident in the obviously hierarchical relationship between the wealthy Dorcasina and her maid Betty. Even finer detail, though, is achieved in the episode in which Mr. Cumberland courts Dorcasina, while Betty believes he is actually courting her. The distinctions between the landed elite, the nouveau riche merchant class, and the lower-class servants provide the source for an abundance of misunderstanding and farcical humor. Later in the novel, when Dorcasina plans to marry John Brown, the kitchen antics of the servants and the friendly guidance of Mrs. Stanly take on a new, urgent tone, as all attempt to restore the threatened social order in the Sheldon household. Tenney brings these issues alive without pretending any panacea is available in this comedic, but realistic, world.

Female Quixotism responded not only to its post-Revolutionary American social setting, but also, parodically, to a literary culture that spanned the Atlantic. Tenney's familiar and sometimes irreverent use of English literature reflects both her support for the reading of literature by women and her critique of naive reading of romance novels. In Female Quixotism, Tenney makes direct references to Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54) and Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748); and she quotes other writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Sterne. Given such evidence of Tenney's broad reading and literary interests, it is not surprising to find extensive parodic allusions in her work to other novels popular at the time—even as she condemns many of them for giving women false expectations of life.

The title Female Quixotism suggests immediately that Tenney places her novel in the context of Cervantes's Don Quixote. The pair consisting of Dorcasina and Betty is one of the more lively echoes of Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza among the many literary offshoots of Don Quixote. The dependence of the plot on Dorcasina's “novel-mania” is the most striking parallel with Don Quixote, but Dorcasina also exhibits the latter's moments of intelligence and bravery. Each of these novels, too, portrays its protagonists in their growing decrepitude: compare Dorcasina's being “deprived of all the flesh her bones were ever clothed with; and her skin … sallow and full of wrinkles … her front teeth … all gone” (233) with Don Quixote having “little flesh on his bones and a face that was lean and gaunt.”¹

Likewise, Dorcasina's servant Betty is equally a counterpart to Sancho Panza in her superstitions and her propensity for taking the physical abuse stemming from Dorcasina's adventures. Like Sancho Panza, Betty is initially the voice of reason and common sense against Dorcasina's quixotic delusions. But Betty's realism gradually becomes tainted with Dorcasina's illusionary world to the point that Betty imagines romantic possibilities between herself and first Mr. Cumberland (an aspiring man of a higher social class) and then John Brown (a man young enough to be her son). Just as Sancho Panza seems eventually to trade places with Don Quixote in clinging to romantic dreams, Betty attempts to recreate the hope after Dorcasina's disillusionment: “‘Oh, never worry about that now, ma'am; you may yet get a good husband, and live as happy as the days are long’” (321).

While Female Quixotism is structured episodically, like Don Quixote and the popular picaresque novels of the mid-eighteenth century, the similarity between individual episodes is limited by the fact that the protagonist in Female Quixotism is a woman: respectable women at this time did not have the kind of footloose mobility characteristic of the picaresque hero. One situation common in the picaresque novel is the use of masquerade by a friend in order to lead the protagonist away from his or her delusions. In Don Quixote, Sanson Carrasco dresses up as the Knight of the Mirrors and then the Knight of the Moon, in order to defeat Don Quixote in battle and require that the old “knight” return to his native village. In Female Quixotism, Harriot dresses as Captain Montague to woo Dorcasina away from her imminent marriage to John Brown, and Harriot collaborates with her father's protective abduction of Dorcasina when milder measures fail. In both Don Quixote and Female Quixotism, the friends' motives are not purely altruistic: Carrasco, as the Knight of the Moon, wants revenge for being defeated by Quixote as the Knight of the Mirrors; and Harriot expects to be amused by her deception.

Other situations in Female Quixotism parody those common to many eighteenth-century British novels, which were popular in America and available in cheaply pirated or imported editions. The masquerades and cross-dressing practiced with great earnestness in Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Roderick Random are spoofed in the high-jinks of Philander, Betty, Harriot, Seymore, and the barber Puff. The contrived abduction scenes are likewise evocative of other novels, but self-consciously so:

The very same accident had formerly happened to Harriot Byron [of Sir Charles Grandison], though she was, to be sure, rescued in a different manner; and Dorcasina's satisfaction would have been complete, had O'Connor chanced to have been her deliverer.

(139)

The contrived nature of the abduction scenes in Female Quixotism reduces to an absurdity the abductions in The Female Quixote, Pamela, and Joseph Andrews. Similarly, Dorcasina's mistaken elopement with James undermines the seriousness of such scenes in Clarissa and Tom Jones.

The fact that Female Quixotism parodies the literary milieu in which it was conceived does not belittle the original twists Tenney gives to each situation, or the broad humor with which she delineates them. Suggesting that the summerhouse scene between Dorcasina and Scipio, O'Connor and Miss Violet is Shakespearian in its use of multiple mistaken identities and twisted romances does not preclude appreciation of its farcical humor and sly hints of miscegenation. On a grimmer note, nothing in all of Pamela's or Clarissa's fainting fits or Sophia Western's night-time peregrinations over England conveys the dread of Harriot's first night-time walk as Captain Montague, or the real threat and disgrace of Dorcasina's attempted rape and its consequences.

A final question about literary influences might be an obvious one, of how much Tenney owes to Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, a similar parody published half a century earlier. Certainly, many of the situations are the same: like Lennox's heroine Arabella, Dorcasina lost her mother at an early age and was raised and educated by her father in a secluded setting. They each have a faithful female servant and confidante, although Betty is a much more lively and Panza-like foil to the vagaries of her mistress than Arabella's Lucy. They both have genuine, suitable suitors, as well as impostors who are after their wealth; both imagine potential lovers in servants (not to mention almost all men they meet); and both adopt peculiar modes of dress that serve as visible signs of their mental peculiarities. Finally, the understanding of each is “corrupted” through the reading of literature foreign to their own countries: Arabella is obsessed with the French heroic romances of the previous century, while Dorcasina pictures herself the heroine of books like Sir Charles Grandison and Roderick Random. Thus, they both serve as nationalistic warnings as well as anti-romance warnings.

Otherwise, Tenney has created a very different female Quixote, based on a more thorough anti-romanticism. Lennox, although her basic tenet is to criticize romance reading, creates a romantic heroine who is “conventionally young, well-born, lovely, intelligent, and virtuous” and who ends up marrying her original suitor, Glanville, and living happily ever after, “united … in every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind.”² Tenney, in contrast, more realistically portrays Dorcasina as being “a middling kind of person, like the greater part of her countrywomen” (4). The novel follows Dorcasina over a time period of fifty years, during which time her delusions become increasingly absurd and pathetic. Instead of the conventional marriage and happy ending, Dorcasina finds herself a disillusioned old maid, resigned to a life of charity and novel reading. Thus the parodic and hence didactic nature of Tenney's novel is much more consistent than that of Lennox's.

Moreover, Arabella undergoes relatively few adventures and spends a disproportionate amount of time lecturing her cousins (and anyone else she meets) on the romantic precedents for her behavior and expectations. As we have already seen, Tenney sketches most of Dorcasina's life and skips from adventure to adventure. In doing so, she follows the example of Henry Fielding:

When any extraordinary Scene presents itself, (as we trust will be often the Case) we shall spare no Pains nor Paper to open it at large to our Reader; but if whole Years should pass without producing any thing worthy of his Notice, we shall not be afraid of a Chasm in our History; but shall hasten on to Matters of Consequence, and leave such Periods of Time totally unobserved.³

This selective focus is one of the reasons why Tenney's narrative is a much more rollicking, funny tale than Lennox's. Dorcasina's escapades engage the reader in a way that Arabella's monologues cannot possibly. So while Tenney may have derived her original conception from Lennox's The Female Quixote, which was available in America (although there is no external evidence Tenney read it), in transmuting her material Tenney creates a portrait of “female quixotism” having all the vitality and slapdash humor of a new nation attempting to find a cultural identity.

Female Quixotism thus provides a window on both the social and literary worlds of the late eighteenth century in America. Popular and timely in its own day, the novel offers today's readers a new perspective on eighteenth century literature and on many of our own social issues. Just as Female Quixotism served as an anti-romance for its readership in the early nineteenth century, today it can serve to de-romanticize our notions of the early American republic, which was not only peopled by larger-than-life heroes such as Washington and Jefferson, but by women of all classes and other disadvantaged groups trying to live the best life they could—and vying among themselves in their efforts.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

What we need for a discovery of the life of Tabitha Gilman Tenney is a faithful confidante, one of whose functions is to relate the history of her companion to all sympathetic inquirers, like Arabella expects of Lucy in The Female Quixote:

To recount all my Words and Actions, even the smallest and most inconsiderable, but also my Thoughts, however instantaneous; relate exactly every Change of my Countenance; number all my Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale, Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruptions; the Rise and Falling of my Voice; every Motion of my Eyes; and every Gesture which I have used for these Ten Years past; nor omit the smallest Circumstance that relates to me.⁴

Instead, we have only the formulaic mentions of Samuel Tenney's “highly accomplished” wife; the brief, gossipy details afforded by diarist Patty Rogers and memoirist Elizabeth Dow Leonard; and the imprecise and didactic fables of writers like Evert A. Duyckinck, who claims “her father died in her infancy, and she was left to the sole care of her pious and sensible mother,”⁵ even though her father lived until Tabitha was sixteen and had six younger brothers and sisters.⁶ Piecing together these sources still leaves a tantalizingly incomplete picture of “a woman,” as Elizabeth Dow Leonard says, “who had written a book, punctuated and printed it.”⁷

Tabitha Gilman was born on April 7, 1762, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Samuel Gilman and his second wife, Lydia (Robinson) Giddings Gilman, the eldest of their seven children.⁸ According to surviving reports, Tabitha seems to have had the strong maternal role model her novel's heroine lacks. Her mother, “an educated and forceful woman,” is said to have raised Tabitha in a “Puritanical, bookish, and secluded” manner.⁹ Duyckinck credits Tabitha's interest in literature as providing her with “a facility and correctness of language which gave her noticeable freedom and elegance in conversation,” so perhaps “Tabby” Gilman's upbringing was not entirely secluded.¹⁰

Certainly, in 1785, she was “courted” by Dr. Samuel Tenney, who had served as a surgeon in the Revolutionary War. This is noted by Martha (“Patty”) Rogers, another resident of Exeter whose diary for that year has been preserved. Rogers's antipathy to Tabby Gilman—“a person pecularly [sic] 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 disgusted”—perhaps stems from the fact that Dr. Tenney seems to have been courting Patty Rogers at the same time he courted Tabitha Gilman. Samuel Tenney walked Rogers home from church, gave her romance novels to read, and took “liberties” with her at her own house.¹¹ If Tabitha's life bore any similarity to Patty's—an assumption that may not be as safe as it sounds, since Patty seems to have been known as a girl with “too much sensibility” in contrast to the sober Tabitha—then her young adulthood was probably filled with work at the home, frequent visits to friends, meetings on Sundays, and assemblies on Thursday nights.

Tabitha married Samuel Tenney in 1788, when she was 26 and he 40 years old, trading the invisibility of a young single woman for the social and legal invisibility of a wife. We have few facts about Tabitha after her marriage: she evidently published a reader for young women, The New Pleasing Instructor, in 1799; she accompanied her husband to Washington on his election to the Senate in 1800; and she published Female Quixotism in 1801. This sketchy outline can again be supplemented through anecdotal information from various sources. What a shame it is that we don't have the letters she wrote from Washington, which Duyckinck says “are specimens of her talent at graphic description, as well as illustrative of the fashion and manners of the times.”¹²

One window we do have into Tenney's “public” life (that is, after her books were published anonymously) is provided by Elizabeth Dow Leonard. Leonard's reverence for the “real live authoress” does not survive her lively sarcasm, however, and the picture Leonard offers of Tenney verges on the comical:

She was the lawful wife of Judge Tenney, a brawny, raw-boned and awkward but very good man, with more law in his pocket than in his head. Tabitha affected the dignified and the delicate and sentimental, also the statuesque. Her motions were slow and solemn as of one “who lived apart and reasoned high,” and her speech the words of an oracle. “You talk as slowly as Tabby Tenney” was an Exeter proverb.¹³

The reserved nature that was probably the result of Tenney's “Puritan, bookish, and secluded” upbringing, then, is seen by Leonard as an affectation. She supports this accusation with a wonderful “description” of Tenney's reaction to George Washington's death:

She had a valuable mirror in her hand when she received the terrible news of G. W.'s fate. She walked leisurely across the room, laid the mirror safely down, placed herself in a proper attitude, adjusted her garments like Caesar when he fell, and then fainted away, and so paid her patriotic tribute to the great man's memory and did not sacrifice her looking glass, as a less sensible and discreet woman would have done.¹⁴

Tenney evidently maintained an extremely proper social front, behind which it is difficult to discern her real feelings. This socially proper reverence for Washington is again reflected in an existing fragment of a letter by Tenney, which appears to be addressed to a younger woman: “You must not broach any of your tory sentiments, for the memory of Washington is greatly venerated here.”¹⁵

Dr. Tenney was at Washington for three terms as a congressman, during which time he opposed on every single vote the election of Jefferson as president. He also voted for the continuation of the Alien and Sedition Act, used to suppress political dissent during the Federalist era. The Tenneys had no children, although they did have in their household during some part of their marriage Anne Gilman, a distant younger cousin of Tabitha's and the daughter of a close friend of Samuel's. After Samuel Tenney's death on February 6, 1816, Tabitha returned to Exeter and is said to have applied herself to needlework. She does not seem to have written for publication after Female Quixotism. She died in Exeter on May 2, 1837.

Notes

1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Samuel Putnam (1604; New York: The Modern Library-Random House, 1949) 25.

2. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel (1752; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970) xiii, 383.

3. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (1749; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975) 76.

4. Lennox 121-122.

5. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, ed. M. Laird Simons, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Rutter, 1877) I: 521.

6. C. H. Bell, History of the Town of Exeter (Boston, 1888) 383; Martha Jane Tenney, The Tenney Family (Boston: American Printing and Engraving, 1891) 57. Arthur Gilman, author of The Gilman Family, does not even say that much about her, but gives almost a full page to her husband, even quoting a letter from him to a different Gilman.

7. Elizabeth Dow Leonard, A Few Reminiscences of My Exeter Life, ed. Edward C. Echols (Exeter, N. H.: Two By Four Press, 1972) 47.

8. Arthur Gilman, The Gilman Family, (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1869). The Gilman genealogy is confused on the point of how many elder half-siblings she had. On p. 70, it says that Samuel Gilman had 2 children by his first wife, Tabitha Gilman; on pp. 96-97 it names 6 children born prior to his marriage to Lydia.

9. Jessica Hill Bridenbaugh, “Tabitha Gilman Tenney,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson et al. 22 vol. (New York: Scribners, 1928-37) 18: 374.

10. Duyckinck I: 521.

11. Martha “Patty” Rogers, diary for 1785, The American Antiquarian Society, Worchester. Entries of note include the June 20th reference to “Miss T—G-m—”; Rogers begins to give Samuel Tenney the pseudonym “Philammon” on April 21; reference to Philammon courting Miss Gilman, July 13; liberties referred to August 4 and September 21 (the same day he “absolutely denied … courting Tabby”). Samuel Tenney must have been quite a gallant at the time: when Patty asked him about Tabitha, he replied “I like her as well as the rest of you girls and no better.” See also Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986) 191-92. The diary had long been of interest to the staff of the American Antiquarian Society, but Cathy Davidson was the first to connect its references to “Miss T—G-m—” and “Tabby” with the author of Female Quixotism.

12. Duyckinck I: 521.

13. Leonard 47.

14. Leonard 48.

15. Tabitha Gilman Tenney, letter fragment, date and recipient unknown, Boston Public Library.