[In the following essay, Hoople traces the influence of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote on Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Tenney's Female Quixotism.]

Tabitha Tenney's novel Female Quixotism, which was published in Boston in 1801, is, as Duyckinck says, “one of the numerous literary progeny of Cervantes' immortal satire.”¹ Moreover, in many ways Tenney is closely related to two other early authors whose work reflects the influence of Don Quixote. Although Charlotte Lennox was born in New York in 1720, she moved to England in 1735, where her novel The Female Quixote was published in 1752. In spite of tenuous claims that she was the first American novelist², generally she is regarded as an English writer. Her novel, like the greater Don Quixote and the made-in-U.S.A. Female Quixotism, humorously attacks the negative effects of reading romances. While Modern Chivalry (published in numerous parts between 1792 and 1815), by Hugh Henry Brackenridge³, does not specifically satirize the reading habits of young girls, it does deal topically with a broad range of subjects which Brackenridge subjects to his critical scrutiny.

M. F. Heiser, who traces Don Quixote's American literary offspring, notes that “the flowering of the creative influence of Cervantes in the United States came early, between 1790 and 1815.”⁴ In a similar study Harry Levin observes that “the profoundest tribute to Cervantes is that which other writers have paid him by imitation and emulation.”⁵ Washington Irving's keen interest in Cervantes, an enthusiasm which included extensive early research for a biography of Don Quixote's creator, offers evidence of the popularity of Cervantes during the period of the early Republic. James Russell Lowell, including among Cervantes' imitators such writers as Sterne, Fielding, Smollett, Irving (in Knickerbocker), and Dickens (in Pickwick Papers), indicates that he does not mention his list of imitators “as detracting from their originality, but only as showing the wonderful virility of his.”⁶

Providing a central theme for Lennox and Tenney, Cervantes creates in Don Quixote a character whose derangement springs from excessive study of books. Influenced primarily by Spanish romances such as the works of sixteenth-century author Feliciano de Silva, “whose lucid prose style and involved conceits were as precious to him as pearls”⁷, Quixote revels in fictional tales of chivalry and love. Charlotte Lennox's heroine, Arabella, overindulges in seventeenth-century French romances which, while they have, often, some basis in history, deal with extravagantly improbable exploits of heroism and virtue. Swayed by the English romances, such as Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, of the eighteenth century, Tenney's heroine, Dorcasina becomes obsessed with a diet of straight sentimental fiction. The common factor which Arabella and Dorcasina inherit from Don Quixote is the mental aberration which results from their fictional journey away from mundane but trustworthy reality.

Linked to Cervantes' hero, Don Quixote, by their common separation from reality and their eccentric entrance into an unreal world of imagination, Dorcasina and Arabella share with Quixote another quality: not one is completely devoid of sanity, and all possess under certain circumstances a high degree of humanitarianism and lucidity. Dorcasina's maid Betty and Arabella's “favorite woman” Lucy, like Captain Farrago's Irish servant Teague O'Regan in Modern Chivalry, function as foils to their superiors. However, whereas Betty and Lucy in their usual common-sense responses to their mistresses' aberrations reflect Sancho Panza, Teague possesses qualities of both Don Quixote and Sancho. Lacking the intellect and imaginative powers of Sancho's master, he could hardly be called a composite of the two characters, but he does combine Don Quixote's self-delusions with the rollicking earthiness of Sancho. The three books mirror the conflict between illusion and reality which their literary Spanish forebear discloses, frequently adopting Cervantes' device of developing this conflict through the use of disguises and masquerades. Acting out their dreams within an episodic structure, these quixotic characters and their companions bumble through a strange world of distorted realism and outrageous humor.

A tutelary forerunner of the derangement of Arabella and Dorcasina, Don Quixote's mania springs from an inordinate reading of romances, in his case Renaissance. Even Captain Farrago, whom Brackenridge portrays as a comparatively stable personality, is “in some things whimsical, owing perhaps to his greater knowledge of books than of the world.”⁸ Setting a precedent for Tenney, Cervantes states in his Prologue that one purpose for writing his book “is that of undermining the ill-founded edifice that is constituted by those books of chivalry, so abhorred by many, but admired by many more” (p. 16)⁹. According to Cervantes' novel, Don Quixote becomes so immersed in fantastic books of chivalry that he neglects his hunting and his estate, and even sells much of his land to provide funds for purchasing his beloved books:

In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He had filled his imagination with everything that he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.

(p. 27)

The canon, however, recognizes in Don Quixote the vacillation of his mental faculties: he “could not but be struck by the strange nature of his madness and was astonished at the extremely sensible manner in which the knight talked and answered questions, losing his stirrups, so to speak, only when the subject of chivalry was mentioned” (p. 437).

Attempting to convince Don Quixote that his reading habits are the cause of his separation from reality, just as the people close to Dorcasina will chide her for reading illusion-breeding novels, the canon reasons with his besotted friend:

Is it possible, my good sir, that those disgusting books of chivalry which your grace has read in your idle hours have had such an effect upon you as to turn your head, causing you to believe that you are being carried away under a magic spell and other things of that sort that are as far from being true as truth itself is from falsehood?

Describing his own contact with such “mendacious and frivolous” books, the canon declares that when he reflects “upon their real character”, he flings “the best of them against the wall and would even toss them into the fire, if there happened to be one at hand¹⁰; for they are deserving of the same punishment as cheats and imposters.” Disturbed that “these audacious works even upset the minds of intelligent and wellborn gentlemen like” Don Quixote, he pleads with his friend to “return to the bosom of common sense, and wisely make use of the many gifts with which Heaven has seen fit to endow” him “by applying” his “fertile mind to reading” books that will improve his conscience and reputation (437-38). Later the canon reiterates his tribute to Don Quixote's fundamental intelligence and his grief that such an intellect should yield to the corruptive influences of bad reading: “nor is it any reason why a man like your Grace, so worthy and respected and endowed with so fine a mind, should permit himself to believe that all the mad things described in those nonsensical books of chivalry are true” (p. 441).

Cursing the books of chivalry that have turned his head, Don Quixote's housekeeper declares that “such books as those” should “be consigned to Satan and Barabbas, for they have sent to perdition the finest mind in all La Mancha” (p. 50). Whatever her qualifications for judging character may be, critic Thomas Mann obviously does not completely concur with her evaluation. Nevertheless, he does show reverence for Don Quixote's positive qualities:

Don Quixote is of course a simpleton; that is clear from his mania of knight-errantry. But his obsolete whimsy is also the source of such true nobility, such purity of life, such an aristocratic bearing, such winning and respect-compelling traits, physical and mental, that our laughter over his grotesque and doleful countenance is always mingled with amazed respect. No one can know him and not feel drawn to the high-minded and pathetic man, mad in one single point but in all others a blameless knight.¹¹

A number of critics, like Mann, have wrestled with the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition of Don Quixote's lunacy and nobility. In his Introduction to Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, for example, Maynard Mack discusses the ambiguity attendant upon interpretation of the Quixotic character. Linking Parson Adams and the collision of his dream world with the real world to Don Quixote's impractical, even crackbrained idealism, Mack observes that naïve Adams is, “like his forebear, partly hero and partly dupe.”¹² Tracing the development of criticism on Don Quixote before 1800, Anthony Close notes an increasingly sympathetic approach to Quixote's madness and the stress on his positive human attributes: “Another step in this direction is the widespread, and just, recognition of the qualities of humanity, charity, and goodness in the character of Cervantes's hero.”¹³

Aptly describing Quixote's erratic mental condition “as a checkerboard of lucidity and insanity”, Vladimir Nabokov discusses the “mystery of his dual nature” in which “he appears as a crazy sane man, or an insane one on the verge of sanity; a striped madman, a dark mind with lucid interspaces.”¹⁴ Just as for Don Quixote “reality and illusion are interwoven in the pattern of life”¹⁵, similarly Mrs. Lennox's Arabella experiences a monomania which renders her irrational, but is a fixation only in the realm of romantic love in fiction. Like Don Quixote, who has imbibed Spanish romances of knight-errantry, Arabella has suffered mental aberration from exposure to such seventeenth-century French heroic romances as Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamenes and Clelia¹⁶, yet passage after passage of The Female Quixote describes a beautiful young woman of outstanding intelligence, elegance, and compassion. Recognizing these characteristics, Glanville, Arabella's cousin, who is in love with her, sorrows at her eccentric behavior in banishing him for the offense of declaring his passion for her, but cannot ascribe her actions to rudeness because of “the Elegance of her Manners, in every other respect.” Examining her intelligence, he also concludes that it is not “possible to doubt she had a great Share of Understanding; since her Conversation, singular as some of her Sentiments seemed to him, was far superior to most other Ladies” (p. 37).

Although the victimized Glanville hardly passes for an objective observer, one cannot ignore his testimony completely. Cognizant of Arabella's idiosyncrasies, he thinks to himself: “One would swear this dear Girl's Head is turned … if she had not more Wit than her whole Sex besides” (p. 41). Critic M. F. Heiser supports Glanville's evaluation by noting that Arabella is “like Don Quixote possessed of wit and sense in all but this her one foible.”¹⁷ When Arabella compels Glanville to read her favorite romances, he ponders the incongruity of her devotion to the ideas which have imprisoned the imagination of the woman whom he considers “one of the most accomplished Ladies in the World” (p. 50). Surely this sentiment is reminiscent of the regret which Don Quixote's loyal housekeeper expresses about the corruptive influence of books upon “the finest mind in all La Mancha” (p. 50). Even Glanville's skeptical father, Sir Charles, becomes somewhat convinced of the superiority of Arabella's merits in spite of her strange romantic whimsy. When they do not discuss Romances, he finds her conversation “fine, easy, and entertaining” (p. 65).

Not only does Arabella under normal circumstances function with comparative sanity and display considerable intelligence, but when she is not in the silly romantic throes of self-centeredness and outrageous expectations, she becomes, as Maynadier observes, “a lady of true delicacy, lovable and charming in spite of her illusions.”¹⁸ When Sir Charles, rankled by Arabella's request that he leave the room after he has scolded her about her whimsies of the imagination, complains to his son about her rusticity, Glanville protests that she

has as little of the Rustic as if she had passed all her Life in a Court. Her fine Sense, and the native Elegance of her Manners give an inimitable Grace to her Behaviour; and as much exceed the studied Politeness of other Ladies I have conversed with, as the Beauties of her Person do all I have ever seen.

(p. 64)

She also displays superior personal qualities in contrast to her new acquaintance, Miss Groves, whose conversation, lacking the refinement of Arabella's, is limited to “Fashions, Assemblies, Cards, or Scandal.” Arabella, on the other hand, treats the woman with a civility that reflects “native Elegance and Simplicity of … Manners … accompanied with so much real Benevolence of Heart, such insinuating Tenderness, and Graces so irresistible” that Miss Groves is “quite oppressed with them” (p. 68).

The illness and death of Arabella's father elicits his daughter's compassion and tenderness of character. As he lies dying, she assumes all of the care for him, performing her duties with the utmost solicitude and watching by his bedside throughout each night: “As the Marquis's Indisposition increased, so did her Care and Assiduity: She would not allow any one to give him any thing but herself; bore all the pettish Humours of a sick man with a surprising Sweetness and Patience” (p. 58). Later her response to the terms of her father's will, leaving one-third of his estate to Glanville if Arabella does not marry him, confirms her natural good nature and benevolence. Instead of becoming disturbed by her own loss of property, she expresses pleasure at these conditions and wishes Glanville “Joy of the Estate that was bequeathed to him, with a most inchanting Sweetness” (p. 66). Her immediate reaction to the Marquis's death, however, while it reveals the depth of her love for him, displays such an extravagant degree of bathos and melodrama that one cannot dispute Lennox's satirical intentions. After reviving from her perilous illness, which has prevented her from attending the funeral, she mourns her loss in an inordinate complaint which surely mocks the romantic convention of the complaint, and suggests emotional instability:

Merciless Fate! said she, in the most moving Tone imaginable, Cruel Destiny! that, not contented with having deprived my Infancy of the soft Cares, and tender Indulgences, of a Mother's Fondness, has robbed me of the only Parent I had left, and exposed me, at these early Years, to the Grief of losing him, who was not only my Father, but my Friend, and Protector of my Youth!

Then, pausing a Moment, she renewed her Complaints with a deep Sigh: Dear Relics of the best of Fathers! pursued she, Why was it not permitted me to bathe you with my Tears? Why were those sacred Remains of him, from whom I drew my Life, snatched from my Eyes, ere they had poured their Tribute of Sorrow over them? Ah! pitiless Women! said she to her Attendants, you prevented me from performing the last pious Rites to my dear Father! You, by your cruel Care, hindered me from easing my sad Heart, by paying him the last Duties he could receive from me! Pardon, O dear and sacred Shade of my beloved Father! pardon this unwilling Neglect of thy afflicted Child, who, to the last Moment of her wretched Life, will bewail thy Loss.

(pp. 59-60)

In spite of Glanville's explanations that these complaints are not uncommon for a person who is mourning, his father questions Arabella's basic lucidity, concluding that these “are the strangest complaints” that he has “ever heard, and favour so much of Phrensy” that he fears “her Head is not quite right” (p. 60).

In the midst of Arabella's pathetic expressions of grief, Charlotte Lennox inserts sly humor in her description of Sir Charles who, when he meets Arabella, gazes upon “her with as much Admiration as his Son, though with less Passion” (p. 60). When Glanville chides her for harming herself by the extremity of her grief, Arabella retorts by citing examples of exaggerated mourning in seventeenth-century French literature and thus incurs Sir Charles's disapproval of her indulgence in “such Romances” that “only spoil Youth, and put strange Notions into their Heads” (p. 61). These elements of mockery in the midst of sorrow reveal a modified form of the reaction to the original Don Quixote's death which leads Thomas Mann to remark that “it is easy to give a comic turn to the description of sincere sorrow.” Describing the wholehearted mourning at Don Quixote's passing, Mann nevertheless notes “the grotesque description of ‘the sluices of their swollen eyes when the news that he must die forced a torrent of tears from their eyes and a thousand groans from their hearts.’” Mann reinforces this comic turn by acknowledging the inevitable intrusion of mundane creature needs and desires into the midst of elevated emotions:

“Human nature is human nature”, “life must go on”, and so forth … We are told that during the three days of Don Quixote's agony, though “the whole house was in confusion, yet the niece ate, the housekeeper drank, and Sancho Panza made much of himself; for this business of legacies effaces, or moderates, the grief that is naturally due to the deceased”. A mocking tribute to realism, an unsentimental attitude which may once have caused offence.¹⁹

Like Don Quixote and Arabella, their descendant Tenney's Dorcasina is an ambiguous character who, but for her addiction to novels and their illusory realm, is “in every respect a sensible, judicious, and amiable girl” (Female Quixotism, I, 4), who “had received from nature a good understanding, a lively fancy, an amiable cheerful temper, and a kind and affectionate heart. What a number of valuable qualities were here blended” (I, 7). While Mrs. Tenney lists these “engaging endowments” as a contrast to Dorcasina's negative characteristics—“she was unfortunately of a very romantic turn, had a small degree of obstinacy, and a spice too much of vanity” (I, 7)—the essentially moralizing author stresses repeatedly that in the midst of the heroine's monomania, qualities of intelligence and benevolent humanity shine forth. In spite of her inordinate reading, Dorcasina devotes much time to “the superintendance of” her father's “domestic concerns” (I, 9), and when her first suitor, Lysander, visits the Sheldon family with his father for several weeks, he falls in love with her as each day he discovers “new beauties” and sees “so many proofs of her sweetness of temper, condescension to the servants, and duty and affection to her father” that he finally regards her unusually “well calculated to render a man happy” (I, 20-21). During their conversations “her usual intelligence sparkled in her countenance” (I, 20), a clear indication that though her mind may be distorted, she exhibits a high degree of intellectual perspecuity. Her values, however, become warped to the point that, instead of rejoicing in Lysander's letter of proposal and tribute to her goodness, she is mortified that he has not expressed rapture over her personal and physical charms.

For four years after her rejection of Lysander, Dorcasina lives in comparative seclusion, frightening away suitors by her obsessive dedication to novels. This compulsive distraction notwithstanding, paradoxically she also devotes much time to “attendance upon her father, and acts of piety and charity”, and Tenney describes her as “really pious, but not ostentatious; and the mild, charitable, and liberal complexion of her religion, was one of her greatest ornaments” (I, 27). In fact she becomes so notable for her charitable deeds that the indigent come to her from many miles around with assurance of assistance, “for it was her invariable rule to send none away empty handed; and the poor and weary traveller was sure to find entertainment and refreshment under this hospitable roof” (I, 28). At the end of Female Quixotism in her letter to her friend Harriot Stanly Barry, Dorcasina describes her plan to use her considerable fortune in seeking out “proper objects of charity … and to bestow on them what I have no occasion to use myself” (III, 224)²⁰.

Not only is Dorcasina charitable toward the poor, but like Arabella she is so solicitous of her father that when he becomes ill, she is unable to eat and experiences great distress. When he suffers a relapse after seeing her in O'Connor's arms, she expresses a willingness to lay down her life for her father. When he questions her about her compromising situation, “her pure mind, unused to deceit, disdained even on this occasion to equivocate”, (I, 96). Later Mr. Sheldon laments his daughter's silly infatuation and the injurious effect it has had upon her judgment and values: “Your moral principles have been carefully formed, and your conduct has ever been a model of the purest virtue: what then would have been your distress to have found yourself allied to vice, profligacy and meanness?” (I, 194). After she has finally become convinced of the deceitfulness of her false suitors O'Connor and Philander, she conducts her life with relative sanity for a number of years, devoting her time to family duties and to the happiness of her father (II, 77). When her father is stricken with his final illness, Dorcasina reacts, as Arabella does, with terrified distraction: “She wrung her hands in the deepest distress; hung over her senseless father, in speechless agony; then, turning her eyes to heaven, fervently prayed that he might be restored” (III, 12). While she does not indulge in extravagant complaints after her father's death, she does spring “forward to embrace the breathless corpse”. Like Arabella, she faints, and succumbs to “a universal weakness, which” deprives “her of the melancholy satisfaction of following the remains of her beloved parent to the grave” (III, 15), and renders her incapacitated by severe illness for many months. Although Tenney describes Dorcasina's mourning in its extreme manifestation, the author's terseness in dealing with its effects affords a higher degree of realism and of sincerity, albeit with a hint of gentle mockery, than Lennox's protracted passage setting forth her Arabella's complaints.

In the intervals between her ridiculous infatuations and emotional traumas climaxed by her father's death, Dorcasina seems to attain a balanced perspective between her fictional illusions and the real world about her, although these illusions have so powerful a grasp that a new incident fraught with romantic potential topples the balance in an instant. Thus Tenney as creator shrewdly portrays a character whose derangement, like Quixote's, alternates precariously with lucidity. Dorcasina conducts herself with propriety and becomes “as rational a woman in regard to love and marriage, as she was in every other respect” (II, 191). She impresses Mr. Cumberland with her industriousness, yet it is primarily her romantically unrealistic expectations about courtship that cause her to reject his prosaic advances. Finally, however, shorn of her illusions, she visits her friends Mr. Stanly and Mr. and Mrs. Barry for two weeks, “conducting, during the whole time, and conversing with so much propriety and good sense, unmixed with any of her former extravagance, that they were extremely delighted with her, and thought her a most valuable and agreeable companion” (III, 218). Later, finding herself virtually alone in the world, she expresses to Betty chagrin about her former conduct, embarrassed that she “cannot look back without blushing for” her “follies”. Betty, however, comforts with these observations: “I am sure, ma'am. … I don't know whose conduct will bear reflection, if yours won't; so good, and kind, and charitable, and dutiful as you have always been” (III, 219). Instead of anger at the Stanlys for their masquerades and other deceptions in attempting to rid her of her delusions, she is grateful to them for enlightening her. Thus the blunt statement which Thomas Mann makes about Don Quixote may also apply to Arabella and Dorcasina: “Don Quixote is a bit cracked but not in the least stupid.”²¹

In another clear parallel to Cervantes' immortal Don Quixote, lesser mortals like Arabella, Dorcasina, and Captain Farrago have serving companions who, to a certain extent, are patterned after Sancho Panza, but also, in varying degrees, function as mirrors of their leaders. Heiser refers to Lucy as “akin to, if not as humorous as, the realist Sancho Panza”²², and Maynadier labels her as “a Sancho Panza changed in sex.”²³ Closely aligned with Lucy, Betty is, according to Duyckinck, “a female Sancho Panza”²⁴, whom Alexander Cowie describes as an “extremely realistic Sancho-Panza-ish maid.”²⁵ Although Fred Lewis Pattee sees in the book an acute lack of humor and an unrealistic “treatment of the Sancho Panza character, Betty”²⁶, I tend to agree with Ola Elizabeth Winslow's assessment of Betty “as a more original creation than the mistress”, one that “might even have amused Cervantes in moments.”²⁷ While Carl Van Doren sees in Captain Farrago “a new Don Quixote” and in Teague “a grotesque and witless Sancho Panza”²⁸, Heiser claims that “Captain Farrago is not a Don Quixote”, and although Teague “has Sancho's appetites and is governed by his five senses … the situation is somewhat reversed: the servant is quixotic, and the master a judicial devotee of reason and common sense.”²⁹ To a certain extent each subordinate character contains the complexity and ambiguity that Henry Grattan Doyle, in his Introduction to Don Quixote, perceives in Sancho Panza: “Don Quixote's other self … who represents the earthy ‘when do we eat’ side of our dual nature.”³⁰

The primary characteristic which Lucy and Betty share with Sancho is obedience, though reluctant at times, and ridiculous at others. Forsaking his wife and children, Sancho consents to become Don Quixote's squire. Although his motives are mercenary and questionable—Don Quixote has promised to make him governor of an island—he accepts his duties and his master's idiosyncrasies with a resigned “God's will be done” and modified concessions such as the one he makes after Quixote's disastrous encounter with the windmills: “I believe everything that your Grace says; but straighten yourself up in the saddle a little, for you seem to be slipping down on one side, owing, no doubt, to the shaking-up that you received in your fall” (Don Quixote, p. 64). Sancho's obedience is perhaps suspect when he, like Don Quixote, refuses to pay an innkeeper, “even though it cost him his life” (p. 127), arguing that he will not violate Quixote's avowed code of knight-errantry which precludes payment for lodgings. However, in spite of his vocal disagreements with his master and threats to leave him, Sancho expresses admiration of Quixote's bravery—“in all the days of my life I have never served a more courageous master than your Grace” (p. 76)—and weeps when the Knight proposes to set out alone on a hazardous task. Even in this event Sancho obviously has ulterior reasons for his grief, fearing that he will lose his island. Whatever his motives, Sancho resolves to remain with his master to the very end, even when Quixote strikes his servant as punishment after Sancho ridicules him. In his discussion of Don Quixote's purity of spirit, Thomas Mann finds

it exquisite that Sancho Panza the pot-bellied, with his proverbs, his mother wit, his shrewd peasant judgment of human nature, who has no use for the “idea” that results in beatings, but rather for the skin of liquor—Sancho Panza has feeling for this spirit. He loves his good albeit ridiculous master despite all the hardship that loyalty to him incurs; does not leave him nor stir from his side, but serves him with honest and admiring fealty—even though sometimes he may lie to him at need.³¹

Less rebellious than Sancho or Betty, Lucy obeys passively nearly every order which Arabella issues and accepts almost completely her mistress's every whim. When Arabella attributes the departure of the gardener, Edward, to “some new Design he had formed to obtain her … Lucy who always thought as her Lady did, was of the same Opinion” (The Female Quixote, p. 26), although the other servants more realistically link his withdrawal to his alleged theft of a carp and his fear of detection. Even the docile Lucy, however, deviates from total passivity under extreme circumstances. When, for instance, Arabella commands her to relate her mistress's history, complete with the minutest words, actions, thoughts, gestures, “Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale, Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruptions; the Rise and Falling of my Voice, every Motion of my Eyes”, Lucy in despair perceives the impossibility of the task and retorts, “Lord bless me! Madam … I never, till this Moment, it seems, knew the hundreth, thousandth Part of what was expected from me: I am sure, if I had, I would never have gone to Service; for I might well know I was not fit for such Slavery” (p. 122). Nevertheless, in spite of her mild protests, Lucy serves her mistress with a high degree of obedience, especially in light of Arabella's fantastic behavior and demands, and credulously believes most of her mistress's delusions about men who are perishing from infatuation with her. Believing Arabella's stories about Edward, Lucy sobbingly tells Glanville, “You must know, Sir … that there came a Man here to take away my Lady: A great Man he is, though he worked in the Gardens; for he was in Love with her: And so he would not own who he was” (p. 97). Even when she scolds her mistress after Arabella receives a letter from the conniving Bellmour in which he falsely claims he will die for love of her, Lucy acts under the illusory apprehension that Arabella has placed upon her:

Oh! Madam! cried Lucy … Never was such a sad mournful Letter in the World: I could cry my Eyes out for the poor Gentleman. Pray excuse me, Madam; but, indeed, I can't help saying, You are the most hardheartedest Lady I ever knew in my born Days: Why, to be sure, you don't care, if an hundred fine Gentlemen should die for you, tho' their Spirits were to haunt you every Night!

(p. 175)

According to Heiser, just as Dorcasina, is “a much closer counterpart of Don Quixote than Arabella”³², so Betty is modeled more closely after Sancho Panza than Lucy is. Certainly Heiser's comparison of Betty's situation, in which she “suffers many indignities in the comedy of errors inevitably the result of her mistress' blind singleness of mind”³³, to that of Sancho applies also to Lucy's dilemma. It is true also that Lucy, like Betty and Sancho, initially perceives clearly and literally the actions which surround her. When Lucy reports to Arabella that Mr. Hervey laughed at his own mistake after opening the letter that he thought was Arabella's answer to his, only to discover that she had returned his note unopened, Arabella interprets his laughter as the disturbance of his reason resulting from the shock to his system. When Lucy hears Arabella's fears that Mr. Hervey might die from unrequited love, she begins “to think there was something more, than she imagined, in this Affair” (p. 15).

Betty, however, remains more skeptical about Dorcasina's charms—to a certain extent for good reason, because Dorcasina lacks Arabella's physical beauty—and frequently attempts to reason with her mistress. When Dorcasina entertains romantic notions about Lysander before ever meeting him, Betty suggests realistic moderation: “Perhaps you and the young gentleman wont fall so violently in love with each other as you imagine; and perhaps you never will become his wife” (I, 15-16). Not trusting O'Connor, Betty then also attempts to reason with Dorcasina and suggests that Mr. Sheldon perhaps has justification for turning against the Irishman. While her argument is simplistic—“Well ma'am, isn't it as likely you should be deceived as your father? He is older than you, and ought therefore to know more” (I, 161)—her innate common sense correctly tells her that Dorcasina's impetuosity could lead only to a disastrous union with O'Connor. However, in spite of her arguments with her mistress and her more open rebelliousness in, for example, such incidents as her protest against dressing in Mr. Sheldon's clothes in a mock romantic imitation of O'Connor, Betty, like Sancho and Arabella, in most instances finally declines comment and adheres obediently to the wishes of Dorcasina.

Although all three books stress the down-to-earth realism and the saving common sense of these three subordinates, certain elements undermine this seemingly characteristic quality. Also weak willed and credulous, Lucy absorbs Arabella's illusions and responds to her mistress's foibles accordingly. Doyle makes the observation that “Sancho becomes more and more like his master, his master more and more like his squire—even to quoting proverbs.”³⁴ While Betty is more successful than Lucy in retaining her integrity in the face of her mistress's romantic delusions, she, like Sancho, who shakes “like someone who had had a dose of mercury” and whose teeth chatter “like those of a person who has the quartan fever” (pp. 139-140), quails before what appears supernatural to her, consequently performing with Dorcasina an alternating game of illusion versus reality.

Referring to the “strange and subtle interechoes between the knight and his squire … two heroes, their shadows merging in one and overlapping, forming a certain unity that we must accept”³⁵, Nabokov discusses the alterations that take place in the two characters as Don Quixote progresses. In the beginning Nabokov perceives in Cervantes the intention “to give his lionhearted lunatic a witless coward for squire, in manner of contrapuntal contrast: lofty madness and low stupidity.”³⁶ Tracing Sancho's decline from lucidity to absentmindedness, and from his attempts to cure his master's illusions to his role of enchanter in reinforcing Quixote's delusions about Dulcinea, Nabokov alludes to various commentators' conclusions “that both Don Quixote's madness and Sancho's common sense are mutually infectious, and that while, in the second part of the book, Don Quixote develops a sanchoid strain, Sancho, on the other hand, becomes as mad as his master.” Quoting Salvador de Madariaga, who “sees Sancho as a kind of transposition of Don Quixote in a different key”³⁷, Nabokov notes that master and servant “seem to swap dreams and destinies by the end of the book, for it is Sancho who returns to his village as an ecstatic adventurer, his mind full of splendors, and it is Don Quixote who drily remarks, ‘Drop those fooleries’”. Stressing the link between Sancho's ignorant simplicity and Don Quixote's childishness, in spite of his superior intellect, Nabokov remarks that Sancho, like Betty, “trembles before the unknown and the supernatural, but his shudder is only one step removed from his master's quiver of gallant delight.” Ironically, however, perhaps suggesting the concept of divine madness, Madariaga equates the decline of illusion to a loss of exalted spirit:

While Sancho's spirit rises from reality to illusion, Don Quixote's descends from illusion to reality. And the two curves cross in that saddest of adventures, one of the cruelest in the book, when Sancho enchants Dulcinea, bringing the most noble of knights, for love of the purest illusion, to his knees before the most repulsive of realities: a Dulcinea coarse, uncouth, and reeking of garlic.³⁸

Betty's and Dorcasina's curves cross, also, at one point within the context of romantic illusion, but there is no spirit of exaltation in Betty's ascension into the realm of unreality. When Dorcasina's suitor Mr. Cumberland compliments Betty, the servant's head becomes hopelessly turned: “her ideas were now as wild and extravagant as ever those of her mistress had been” (II, 205). She becomes so transported by the belief in his love for her that she spills the warming coals in Dorcasina's bed, responds insolently to her mistress's reprimand, and concludes with a threat of leaving: “I don't intend to be your drudge much longer” (II, 211). However, when she discovers her error about Mr. Cumberland's affections, she immediately reverts to subservient normalcy, suffering enormous mortification. In sum, her kind of flights from reality are short-lived, instigated by specific incidents rather than springing from a morbidly overactive imagination and resultant long-term mania.

Although Brackenridge's Teague O'Regan, like Betty, is, to a certain extent, modeled after Sancho Panza, particularly in the realm of unrealistic aspirations, he “never”, according to Henri Petter, “assumes the function of the guardian at times attributed to Sancho or to such an American counterpart as Betty, Dorcasina's maid in Mrs. Tenney's Female Quixotism.”³⁹ Instead, Captain Farrago repeatedly and sometimes unsuccessfully attempts to draw Teague into the confines of propriety and rationality. Seeing the bogtrotter as a “representative” of “erratic impulsiveness … often at its most amoral and irresponsible”, Petter notes that “later Teague becomes increasingly a mere representative of the irrational masses.”⁴⁰ This contrast between the Captain and Teague extends to the realm of their verbal expression. As William C. Spengemann says,

The contest between Captain Farrago's educated English and O'Regan's Irish brogue in Modern Chivalry re-enacts the Enlightenment debate between the hierarchical theory of language as a civilized acquisition that separates human beings farther and farther from bestial nature as they rise in society and the more democratic idea of language as a natural gift that unites people of all stations in a classless human bond.⁴¹

Expressing a similar view, M. F. Heiser states that “Teague represents the unenlightened and impetuous many; the Captain represents the rational few” and observes that Teague's “quixotism is incurable, but not more so than that of the democratic populace who are on most occasions eager to elevate him to the eminence he so brashly desires.”⁴² Thus Teague lacks the fundamental obedience of Sancho, Lucy, and Betty, even if he shares with them and their owners their somewhat inconsistent and ambiguous qualities of self-delusion. Teague, though, tends to be more successful than the others in the at least temporary realization of his ambitions, but only because paradoxically he has, if only clumsily, the ability to delude the very irrational masses that he in his own irrationality embodies. Unequipped with the cleverness of a Melvillean confidenceman, he practices self-delusion as he deludes others.

Betty's unattainable Mr. Cumberland, Lucy's gullibleness about her mistress, and Teague's misplaced confidence in his own ability to be a leader of men are all reflections of Sancho's elusive island, which is a facet of his creator's attempt to come to terms with the conflict between illusion and reality. One of the many manifestations of this conflict appears in the significance of names and name changes. Ironically assuring the reader of his intention not to “depart one iota from the truth” (Don Quixote, p. 26), Cervantes attempts to establish the authenticity of his story by referring to differing opinions about his hero's real surname. Whether it was Quijada, Quesada, or Quejana, however, the hero, influenced by visions of knight errantry, settles upon “Don Quixote de la Mancha.” According to the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], “Quijote” in Spanish literally denotes a “cuisse”, or a plate of armor for covering the thigh. Thus not only does the name provide a title implying gentlemanly distinction by alluding to the armor which he wears, but it also offers a suggestion of covering, or veiling, the true identity of the hero. For the object of his infatuation, Aldonza Lorenzo, he selects the romantic and mellifluous “Dulcinea del Toboso.”

In similar fashion, Tenney's heroine, Dorcas, under the influence of her reading of novels, expands her name to the more fanciful and musical “Dorcasina.” At the end of Female Quixotism, however, when disenchantment flings her back into mundane reality, she reverts to the Biblical “Dorcas”, just as Don Quixote proclaims that he is “no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha but Alonso Quijano” (p. 984). Reference to Acts 9:36 reveals an interesting link with Dorcas' creator: “Now there was at Joppa a certain disciple named Tabitha, which by interpretation is called Dorcas: this woman was full of good works and almsdeeds which she did.”⁴³ Even as Dorcasina, the heroine practices charitable deeds; at the end of the book she turns “all that enthusiasm, which love formerly inspired, to acts of benevolence and charity. In the exercise of these heavenly virtues, she became more cheerful, and more resigned” (Female Quixotism, III, 221). The connection between the names “Tabitha” and “Dorcas” seems more than coincidental in light of a biographical account of Mrs. Tenney's later years which she spent, after her husband's death, “consoling herself in charitable works” and “producing exquisite pieces of needlework toward the end of her life.”⁴⁴ Carrying the connection still one step further, there is a reference in the OED to the “Dorcas Society, a ladies' association in a church for the purpose of making and providing clothes for the poor.” Also in the realm of speculation, when the Biblical Dorcas dies, Peter the Apostle prays by her body and resurrects her with his command, “Tabitha, arise” (Acts 9:40). Perhaps Tenney is suggesting that Dorcas, who loses her original identity and sanity when she becomes Dorcasina, experiences a revival into the real world when she once again assumes her Biblical name.

Not only do these victims of self-delusion assume new names to mirror their new identities, but they also don clothing which suggests their quixotic whimsies. Don Quixote wears armor from his great-grandfather's era, and Arabella, copying “the fashion of the divine Mandana and other heroines of romance” (The Female Quixote, p. 389, note 3), dresses in a becoming, but singular way. Reflecting the anachronistic nature of Quixote's wearing apparel, particularly his headpiece, Arabella wears an unfashionable “Headdress … over which she wore a white Sarsenet Hood, somewhat in the Form of a Veil, with which she sometimes wholly covered her fair Face, when she saw herself beheld with too much Attention” (p. 9). Ironically, this veil which she employs to conceal herself from others obscures her true identity from herself. Paradoxically, Arabella appears ravishingly beautiful, if somewhat bizarre, whereas Dorcasina appears merely grotesque as a result of her too slavish attempt to adhere to current high fashion. While her jacket and skirt are proper, her turban looks “like a caricature of a fashionable head dress”, and her hair, which Betty has “papered and pinched”, is “snarled up into two large bunches, above her ears, almost half as big as her head, loaded with powder.” Thus, by arraying herself in what she considers the latest fashion, Dorcasina deludes herself into thinking that she is as “charming … as the goddess of beauty”; instead, her appearance is “so outré” that her friend Harriot can scarcely refrain from “laughing in her face” (II, 133). On another occasion, when Dorcasina is nearly fifty, but looks older than sixty, she covers her hair with powder “to conceal its natural whiteness” and dresses “herself in a delicate muslin robe” in order “to appear upon this occasion, young and airy.” Thus comically she attempts to disguise her age and deceive herself with unbecoming apparel, “so unsuitable to her age and present situation” (III, 32).

An exceptionally keen satire dealing with confusions of identity which result from change in body covering appears in Modern Chivalry when a protesting crowd tars and feathers Teague O'Regan, who is acting as an excise officer. Disguised by his covering, he is captured and exhibited as a curiosity, while naïve members of the American Philosophical Society thoroughly examine him and convey their findings in what they consider a scientific, scholarly report. Characteristically Teague emerges as the catalyst who, through no cleverness on his part, becomes a dupe or victim as he instigates in others distorted perceptions.

Don Quixote, of course, is a victim of his own distorted perceptions. His disastrous bout with the windmills, and his conviction that the Benedictine friars are enchanters who have captured a princess, surely find an echo in Arabella's delusions that infatuated suitors are pursuing her to abduct her. Just as Quixote mistakes the pig-salting Aldonza for a princess with supreme beauty, Arabella imagines that the new gardener, Edward, is a gentleman, “a Person of sublime Quality, who submits to this Disguise only to have an Opportunity of seeing” her daily (p. 23). In like manner Dorcasina, under the influence of her recent reading of Smollett, foolishly concludes that her servant John Brown, by association of his name with Roderick Random's pseudonym, John Brown, “must likewise be a gentleman in disguise” (III, 17). In each case the one who labors under self-deception is the only one who is really deluded. When Teague, however, decides that he is qualified to run for the legislature, he wins support of the crowd who tend “to favour his pretensions”⁴⁵, and who resent Farrago's insistence that their candidate is an ignorant servant, a mere “bog-trotter.”

Offering a key to the self-delusions of these characters, Lennox, in describing Arabella's consternation at the news that Edward has been stealing carp, notes her heroine's “most happy Facility in accommodating every Incident to her own Wishes and Conceptions” (The Female Quixote, p. 25). In a similar observation about Don Quixote, Anthony Close, in discussing the knight's “crazy but life-like world-view”, explains in part this ability to accommodate, since Quixote's

view of the world around him is at least partly congruent with reality, as is shown by the fact that much of his discourse is a defensive apologia designed to paper over the cracks between what is and what he believes should be. He often reveals a disconcerting perspicacity; occasionally he appears to be aware of his own madness or to divine other people's judgements of his motives, before revealing that the appearance was merely an appearance. He continuously adapts to his experience and self-justifyingly rationalises it.⁴⁶

When Quixote arrives at an inn and sees two prostitutes in the doorway, his powers of adaptation, overstimulated by romantic storybooks, easily transform the inn into a stately castle with all the customary appurtenances, and the fallen women into highborn beauteous damsels. As Coleridge remarks, “Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions.”⁴⁷ Dorcasina rationalizes about O'Connor, persistently believing that he is a man of honor and rejecting as lies overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Inspired by self-deception about his own qualifications for the ministry, Teague O'Regan, with “a great deal of what is called Blarney” and affected prayers, manipulates the adaptive imaginations of the Presbyterian clergy, insinuating “himself into their good graces” and convincing them that he is a worthy “candidate for holy orders.”⁴⁸

Intensifying this blurring of imagination and reality is the prevalence of masquerades throughout these quixotic stories. Although the motivations for assuming disguises vary from the malicious drive to gain one's personal ends to the more positive desire to help a deluded character, the overall purpose is, of course, some form of deception. Teague O'Regan obtains entrance into the fashionable circles of Philadelphia and into the hearts of its young ladies by posing as “Major O'Regan.” In fact, so potent is the “Teagueomania” which he inspires “amongst the females … that all idea of excellence, personal, or mental” is “centered in” this ignorant bogtrotter, “and all common lovers” are “neglected, or repulsed on his account.”⁴⁹

This employment of deception appears also in Don Quixote and its transatlantic descendant Female Quixotism. In an attempt to persuade Don Quixote to suspend his adventuring for awhile, Sanson Carrasco, in collusion with the curate and the barber, assumes first a disguise as the Knight of the Mirrors and challenges Quixote to a duel, claiming that his woman, Casildea de Vandalin, is the most beautiful in Spain and that he has already overcome Don Quixote in previous combat. The conditions of the match require the loser to return to his village and remain there for two years. Unexpectedly defeated by Quixote, Carrasco, now masquerading as the Knight of the White Moon, resumes the challenge, this time mingling an evil motive for revenge for his defeat with his original laudable desire to cure Quixote of his knight-errantry and madness. In Female Quixotism Harriot Stanly, with the magnanimous intention of enticing Dorcasina away from the fortune-hunting John Brown, affects the identity of a militia officer, Captain Montague, who seems passionately in love with Dorcasina. Unsuccessful in her endeavor, she even enlists her father, ordinarily a pillar of integrity, who also assumes a disguise in order to abduct the woman before a marriage to Brown can take place. While this scheme ultimately succeeds and the motivation is generous, a trace of cruelty emerges in Harriot's gleeful participation in the venture and her mock amorous farewell to Dorcasina in which she covers her with kisses and concludes “by biting her cheek so hard as to make her scream aloud” (III, 126).

Even crueller are Philander's masquerades, first as Dorcasina's lovesick suitor and later as a jealous woman. In the former role he woos her with ridiculously extravagant epistles for the purpose of mocking her and thus succeeds in winning her warmest sympathy, if not her love. What Heiser says about Harriot's masquerade applies also to Philander's efforts: “Miss Stanly … is the more successful the more she burlesques it, for, ironically, a burlesque of love is Dorcasina's ideal.”⁵⁰ In a scene of low comedy reminiscent of much in Don Quixote, Philander, disguised as a jealous woman, first tears off Dorcasina's hat and pulls her hair, and then turns upon Betty, who is trying to defend her mistress: Betty

was held, cuffed, pulled by the hair, twirled round and round like a top, shaken, and pushed up against the trees, without mercy … the enraged virago would not suffer her to go till she [Philander] had stripped off her upper garments … torn them to rags …, telling her … that, if ever she caught her engaged in the same business again, she would not only divest her of her clothes, but strip off her old wrinkled hide.

(I, 236-37)

Surely this violent mistreatment, as well as the tarring and feathering of Teague O'Regan, is reminiscent of Don Quixote's beating when the muleteers, not without good cause in response to the knight's furious charge against them, proceed

to belabor him so mercilessly that in spite of his armor they milled him like a hopper of wheat … the mule driver by this time had warmed up to the sport and would not stop until he had vented his wrath, and, snatching up the broken pieces of the lance, he began hurling them at the wretched victim as he lay there on the ground.

(Don Quixote, pp. 46-47)

These elements of cruelty which tend to make a sensitive reader squirm uncomfortably rather than laugh heartily, raise the question of tone in these quixotic novels, a quality of satire which consists largely of good fun. Perhaps Daniel Marder provides a key to the problem in his seemingly inconsistent statements about Modern Chivalry. Introducing his discussion of Brackenridge's book, he says, “The satirical mood approaches the geniality of Horace rather than the severity of Juvenal.”⁵¹ Later, however, he notes that “the tone of Brackenridge's satire”, aimed always at social reform, “can never be taken as congenial.”⁵² The dual nature of satirical humor often amuses and disturbs the reader simultaneously, thus fulfilling the author's intention, but blurring the dividing line between Horatian and Juvenalian tone.

James Russell Lowell attests to the Horatian tone of Don Quixote when he speaks of “the optimism of its author” and says, “I can think of no book so thoroughly good-natured and good-humored.”⁵³ Thomas Mann, however, speaks of being, “at odd times … appalled at Cervantes's intemperate cruelty”⁵⁴, and Nabokov devotes an extended discourse to the “cruelty theme” in Don Quixote. Observing that both parts of the book “form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty”, Nabokov concludes that “from that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned”, offering “samples of cheerful physical cruelty in part one” of the book and of the “mental cruelties of part two.”⁵⁵ Referring to the events in Female Quixotism which trigger Dorcasina's romantic delusions, Petter comments that “these situations are increasingly absurd, too, given Dorcasina's aging, and are increasingly cruel.”⁵⁶

Although evidence suggests that no reform takes place in Teague O'Regan, whose fate after his arrival in France and his liberation from his cage by a mob mistaking him for a sans culotte remains uncertain, Don Quixote, and later his heirs Dorcasina and Arabella, undergo radical changes which hint, in varying degrees, of a kind of cruelty or at least a modulation into a minor key. Mortally ill with a fever, Don Quixote discards his assumed name, condemns the stories of knight-errantry that have deranged him, and acknowledges his return to sanity:

The mercy that I speak of … is that which God is showing me at this moment—in spite of my sins, as I have said. My mind now is clear, unencumbered by those misty shadows of ignorance that were cast over it by my bitter and continual reading of those hateful books of chivalry. I see through all the nonsense and fraud contained in them, and my only regret is that my disillusionment has come so late, leaving me no time to make any sort of amends by reading those that are the light of the soul.

(p. 984)

Such critics as Mann and Nabokov, however, do not share this elation. As Mann says, Quixote's mental healing, attended by death, “rejoices us strikingly little, it leaves us cold, and to some extent we regret it … It is the deep dejection of seeing shipwrecked his mission as knight-errant and light-bringer that killed him.” Mann perceives a necessity in Quixote's death: “To make him live after his return to sanity would not do either; that would be to make the husk survive beyond the soul; would be a degradation of the character below its lofty height.”⁵⁷ Nabokov sees Quixote's recantation as “an abrupt surrender, a miserable apostasy, this, when on his deathbed he renounces the glory of the mad romance that made him what he was.”⁵⁸

Arabella and Dorcasina undergo similar though of course not deathbed cures, but the mood of each novel's ending is quite different. Still retaining her youthful beauty, Arabella humbly and joyfully consents to marry Mr. Glanville after an extended dialogue with a learned divine who converts her by appealing to reason. Lacking Arabella's physical charms, the now elderly Dorcasina comes to her senses abruptly when Seymore, in disgrace, informs her that he has wooed her only for her money and ridicules her unattractive old age. After a day of reflection, “her eyes seemed to be opened, and the romantic spell, by which she had been so many years bound, all at once broken” (III, 208). Revolted by her former fancies and behavior, she settles into a solitary existence, practising resignation and alleviating the loneliness by performing charitable deeds. The conclusion of Female Quixotism with Dorcasina's unrealistically swift return to sanity does not echo the sad solemnity of Don Quixote's demise—of course, Tenney's Dorcasina lacks the fascination of his lofty madness—but in its unsentimental realism, it reflects more closely than The Female Quixote the spirit of its Spanish original.

This immortal literary original has afforded a wealth of insights into human nature, a richness of characterization, and a diversified array of events which have reverberated down through the centuries in numerous fictional offspring. Like Don Quixote, the characters struggle with the confusions, embarrassments, attempts to make their lives imitate fictional art, and ambiguities inherent in the conflict between illusion and reality. All of these characters are worthy of redemption; besides their fundamental intelligence, sanity, and decency, they have likable traits that win a portion of the reader's sympathy. They are also delightfully amusing in their aberrations. The complexity of their confusion increases during their encounters with other characters who have, by means of masquerade, invaded their illusory realm and have, in a number of cases, tinged the narratives with disconcerting hues of cruelty. Don Quixote, Arabella, and Dorcasina are assisted on their pilgrimage through irrationality to ultimate sanity by their caring servants and companions who ordinarily exemplify reality and common sense, but who either assume occasional touches of their superiors' distorted perception or act with them contrapuntally, experiencing their own individual separation from reality.

Except for the comparatively happy conclusion of The Female Quixote, which leaves no doubt about the value of sanity, the endings—Teague's disappearance, Dorcasina's lucid but lonely old age, and Don Quixote's death—leave the reader with certain unanswered questions. For instance, does Teague continue to thrive under his self-delusions, in spite of his mishaps, acting as a representative of the irrational mob that he has infected with the contagion of his misconceptions? Do Dorcasina's and Don Quixote's reversion to reality present a positive case for staying firmly in the real world? Is the dividing line between illusion and reality as clear as it seems to be at the end of these books? One point is clear, the English and American quixotic efforts reflect that of Cervantes not only in structure, plot elements, and characterization, but also in the fundamental human questions which they present.

Notes

1. Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature, Vol. I of 2. Philadelphia, Wm. Rutler, 1854; republished Detroit, Mich., Gale Research, Book Tower, 1965, p. 521.

2. See Gustavus Howard Maynadier, The First American Novelist? Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1940.

3. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Claude M. Newlin. New York, American Book C., 1937.

4. M. F. Heiser, “Cervantes in the United States”, Hispanic Review, Vol. XV, Núm. 4, Oct., 1947, 410.

5. Harry Levin, “Don Quixote and Moby Dick”, Cervantes Across the Centuries, ed. Ángel Flores and M. J. Benardete. New York, Dryden Press, 1947, p. 217.

6. James Russell Lowell, “Don Quixote”, The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Vol. VI, Literary and Political Addresses. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1890, pp. 135-36.

7. Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, ed. and trans. Samuel Putnam. New York, Modern Library, 1949, p. 26. Subsequent references to Don Quixote will appear in the text.

8. Brackenridge, p. 6.

9. Samuel Miller in A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, p. 157, discusses Don Quixote: “This performance was expressly intended to pour ridicule on those masses of absurdity and impurity which had so long maintained an influence over the world … It destroyed the reign of chivalry; produced a new modification of public taste; occasioned the death of the old romance; and gave birth to another species of fictitious writing.”

10. Tenney and Lennox have borrowed the idea of book burning from Cervantes. See Don Quixote, p. 50: “I should have advised your Worships of my uncle's nonsensical actions so that you could have done something about it by burning those damnable books of his before things came to such a pass; for he has many that ought to be burned as if they were heretics.”

    “‘I agree with you’, said the curate, ‘and before tomorrow's sun has set there shall be a public auto de fe, and those works shall be condemned to the flames that they may not lead some other who reads them to follow the example of my good friend’.”

    See Tabitha Tenney, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, 3 vols. Boston, George Clark, 1841, Vol. I, p. 182: Mr. Sheldon “was upon the point of committing to the flames every novel within his daughter's reach.” Subsequent references to Female Quixotism will appear in the text.

    See also Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote or the Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970, pp. 55-56: (Subsequent references to this work will appear in the text.) Arabella's father, the Marquis, disturbed by his daughter's strange words, threatens to burn the books that “have turned her Brain”. Left alone, Arabella bewails “the Fate of so many illustrious Heroes and Heroines, who, by an Effect of a more cruel Tyranny than any they had ever experienced before, were going to be cast into the merciless Flames”. The Marquis offers Glanville the opportunity to burn the books himself. Glanville, however, ingratiates himself with Arabella by rescuing the books and restoring them to her.

11. Thomas Mann, “Voyage with Don Quixote”, Essays by Thomas Mann, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1958, p. 335.

12. Maynard Mack, Introduction to Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding, pp. x-xi.

13. Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in ‘Quixote’ Criticism. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977; first pub. 1978, pp. 12-13.

14. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, pp. 13, 16-17. See also Arturo Serrano-Plaja, “Magic” Realism in Cervantes: “Don Quixote” as Seen Through “Tom Sawyer” and “The Idiot”, trans. Robert S. Rudder. (Berkeley, Univ. California Press, 1970), p. 17: “Don Quixote reasons logically about everything except in a certain direction on his compass: the north-north-west of his notions about chivalry.”

15. Nabokov, p. 17.

16. Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamenes; or, the Grand Cyrus. That Excellent Romance, 1690-91, and Clelia, an excellent new Romance, 1678.

17. Heiser, p. 410.

18. Maynadier, p. 43.

19. Mann, p. 368.

20. It appears that Mrs. Tenney herself occupied the remainder of her life after her husband's death in 1816 “consoling herself in charitable works”. See American Authors: 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: The H. W. Wilson Co., 1938, p. 734. See also Duyckinck, p. 523: “Among” Mrs. Tenney's “practical good services to the place of her residence, was the establishment of an old colored servant of her family in a house which became a popular place of entertainment as a rural retreat, with its ‘cakes and ale’, and was known as ‘Dinah's Cottage’”.

21. Mann, p. 344.

22. Heiser, pp. 410-11.

23. Maynadier, p. 42.

24. Duyckinck, p. 522.

25. Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel. New York, American Book, 1951, p. 27.

26. Fred Lewis Pattee, The First Century of American Literature: 1770-1870. D. Appleton, 1945; rpt. New York, Cooper Square, 1966, pp. 93-94: “A hodgepodge of adventure follows. Built after the Don Quixote model, the novel cries aloud for humor, cries aloud for realistic treatment of the Sancho Panza character, Betty, for fights ferocious that will stir the reader to sympathy; but none are vouchsafed by the gentle novelist. The motif borrowed from Mrs. Lennox, who years before had written The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella, is excellent, but nothing else.”

27. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, in Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. III, ed. Edward T. James. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1971, p. 439.

28. Carl Van Doren, The American Novel: 1789-1939. New York, Macmillan, 1940, p. 6.

29. Heiser, p. 414.

30. Henry Grattan Doyle, Introduction, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, Ozell's rev. of trans. of Peter Motteux. New York, Modern Library, 1950, p. xiii.

31. Mann, p. 335.

32. Heiser, p. 412.

33. Ibíd.

34. Doyle, p. xiii.

35. Nabokov, p. 24.

36. Ibíd., p. 20. Acknowledging the link between Quixote and Sancho, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in “Don Quixote”, Lecture VIII, The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. I, collected and ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge. London, William Pickering, 1836; New York, AMS Press, 1967, p. 120, says, “Don Quixote grows at length to be a man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence without the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing the least trait of personal individuality, he becomes a substantial living allegory, or personification of the reason and the moral sense, divested of the judgment and the understanding. Sancho is the converse. He is the common sense without reason or imagination; and Cervantes not only shows the excellence and power of reason in Don Quixote, but in both him and Sancho the mischiefs resulting from a severance of the two main constituents of sound intellectual and moral action. Put him and his master together, and they form a perfect intellect; but they are separated and without cement; and hence each having a need of the other for its own completeness, each has at times a mastery over the other.”

37. Nabokov, pp. 22-23. Nabokov quotes Salvador de Madariaga's discussion in Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1935, pp. 96-97, of the “complicated and delicate parallel” between Don Quixote and Sancho:

    “Both are men endowed with abundant gifts of reason, intellectual in Don Quixote, empirical in Sancho, who at a certain moment become possessed of a self-delusion which unbalances their mind and life. But while in Don Quixote this self-delusion gathers round a nucleus of glory symbolized in Dulcinea, in Sancho it gradually takes form around a kernel of material ambition, symbolized in an island … we shall see a drift of this machine of absurdities, of such a Knight and such a squire, who, one would think, were cast in the same mould; and indeed the madness of the master, without the follies of the man, would not be worth a farthing.

    “For indeed Don Quixote and Sancho are true brothers and their maker planned them after the same pattern.”

38. Ibíd., p. 23. Quotation is from Madariaga, p. 120.

39. Henri Petter, The Early American Novel. Columbus, Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971, p. 127.

40. Ibíd.

41. William C. Spengemann, “Early American Writing and English Literary History”, paper presented at the MLA Convention, New York, December 29, 1983.

42. Heiser, p. 414.

43. King James, Version.

44. See American Authors: 1600-1900, p. 734: Tenney “evidently gave her full attention to the needle instead of the pen, producing exquisite pieces of needlework toward the end of her life”.

45. Brackenridge, p. 15. Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810. New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1982, p. 185, believes that the expression of Brackenridge's purpose is more complex than a simplistic reading of Modern Chivalry seems to indicate. Instead of furthering the author's ideals by repressing Teague's aspirations, Farrago, in his “pretensions and self-interest” that hold Teague back, fears “the democratic impulses that provide new opportunities for O'Regan” (p. 189). This attempt to keep everyone in his own place and to cling to the past “is directly contrary to Brackenridge's principles” of democracy (p. 185).

46. Close, p. 18.

47. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “August 11, 1832: Hesiod.—Virgil.—Genius Metaphysical.—Don Quixote”, Table Talk, in The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1917, p. 197.

48. Brackenridge, p. 38.

49. Ibíd., p. 230.

50. Heiser, p. 413.

51. Daniel Marder, Hugh Henry Brackenridge. New York, Twayne, 1967, p. 86.

52. Ibíd., p. 94. Elliott suggests that Brackenridge's humor is primarily Horatian when he says that the author's “tone is neither strident nor condescending” (p. 175) and that “Brackenridge's own laughter, verbal trickery, and his ironic detachment from his narrator-author soften the social satire” (p. 190). Elliott does indicate, however, that “the satire” in Volume II becomes “more heavy-handed and the tone more Juvenalian than in any passage in the first volume” (p. 191). A satirical work of the magnitude of Modern Chivalry can certainly, without inconsistency, encompass a broad range of seemingly contradictory tones.

53. Lowell, p. 118.

54. Mann, p. 346.

55. Nabokov, pp. 51-52.

56. Petter, p. 300.

57. Mann, pp. 366-67.

58. Nabokov, p. 18.