SOURCE: Çaliskan, Sevda. “The Coded Language of Female Quixotism.” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 2 (1995): 23-35.

[In the following essay, Çaliskan considers the subversive humor of Female Quixotism.]

In her witty article titled “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write” (1972), Joanna Russ, the author of the highly provocative The Female Man, makes a list of very familiar situations or story lines which seem very funny when “the sex of the protagonist (and correspondingly the sex of the other characters)” is changed. Here are a few examples of these odd transformations:

• a. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West.
• b. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear.
• c. Alexandra the Great
• d. A young man who unwisely puts success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.
• e. A beautiful, seductive boy whose narcissism and instinctive cunning hide the fact that he has no mind (and, in fact, hardly any sentient consciousness) drives a succession of successful actresses, female movie produceresses, cowgirls, and film directresses wild with desire. They rape him

• (3).

Joanna Russ's point is that “there are very few stories in which women can figure as protagonists” because Western (and Eastern) “culture is male” and the myths this culture produces and the stories these myths give rise to are all conceived and enacted from a male point of view. Since “Our literary myths are for heroes, not heroines” (7), a woman writer, she claims, may either use the only three myths, and the stories built on these myths, available to her (the Abused Child Story, the Love Story, and the Story of How She Went Crazy), or she may use male myths with male protagonists. This second path, however, leads to the falsification of herself and her experience as a woman:

A woman who refuses to write about women ignores the whole experience of the female culture (a very different one from the official, male culture), all her specifically erotic experiences, and a good deal of her own history. She falsifies her position both artistically and humanly: she is an artist creating a world in which persons of her kind cannot be artists, a consciousness central to itself creating a world in which women have no consciousness, a successful person creating a world in which persons like herself cannot be successes. She is a Self trying to pretend that she is a different Self, one for whom her own self is Other.

(10)

According to Joanna Russ, the third and the most sensible alternative is to abandon male culture's myths altogether and to use the lyric mode, which “exists without chronology or causation (whose) principle of connection is associative” and which makes it possible to “(organize) discreet elements (images, events, scenes, passages, words, what-have-you) around an unspoken thematic or emotional center” (author's emphasis), instead of desperately trying to make sense, using the narrative and dramatic modes, which are of no use to a woman writer because they are formed by the principles of voluntary actions, chronology and causation (12). From a feminist point of view, the lyric mode challenges the patriarchal motto “Make something unspeakable and you make it unthinkable.” “The lyric structure … can deal with the unspeakable and unembodyable as its thematic center” (16).

The points raised in this brilliant essay gain a new vitality in Dana A. Heller's The Feminization of Quest Romance: Radical Departures (1990). Heller points to the fact that the mythical-literary quest motif is closely bound to the idea of identity, to self-discovery, which is “an exclusively male attribute” (4):

Women have been blocked from identifying themselves with the active subject of quest-romance because they have internalized an image of themselves as passive objects, framed by the classic structure of the myth, removed from the very symbols and activities the quest traditionally evokes.

(6)

Men, on the other hand, Heller points out, remain heroes even when they fail the quest. They become anti-heroes like Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield: “No matter how futile his gestures for salvation, no matter how demoralizing his initiation, the male hero remains heroic by dint of the mobility and capacity for action granted him by gender” (8).

Like Joanna Russ, Heller also emphasizes the uselessness of myths produced and perpetuated by patriarchal culture for women writers and shows that with the changes in the image, status, and role of women in society in the “feminized” twentieth century, the quest-romance, a genre which used to be exclusively male, also changed and became “feminized,” bringing with it the strong need to redefine the concept of heroism.

However, the transformation of the passive heroine to the active subject of the quest-romance was a slow process: “Rejecting contrived public images in favor of personally enabling patterns, courageous literary protagonists who dared to take their quests out into the world remained largely unheard of until the twentieth century” (13).

For a woman writer, one very effective and safe way of coping with the restrictions imposed on her art is to subvert these myths, rituals, and archetypes through humor. A very common technique of the art of subversion is to change traditionally defined gender roles and expose their arbitraryness and, while appearing to make fun of the characters, actually make the social and cultural institutions that assign these roles objects of ridicule. Joanna Russ's list of plots with changed subjects is a perfect example of this. In reading “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” for instance, “one cannot stop to ask … why killing a large animal will restore Macomber's manhood—(it is) already explained by the myth” (Russ, 12), but in a story that features “a young girl in Minnesota who finds her womanhood by killing a bear” the myth behind the Macomber story, which is its very foundation, is rendered absurd and ridiculed.

Similarly, but in a much subtler way, in early nineteenth century, before it was possible to talk about such issues openly, some women writers chose to mock these myths that were supposed to be universal when they saw their inapplicability to the female psyche. One of the genres in which women could not produce meaningful works without betraying themselves for reasons mentioned above was the adventure romance. A title like Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), for instance, was a contradiction in terms and was bound to be humorous in order to be taken seriously. The book was subtitled The Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, which was meant to remove any shadow of doubt as to the true nature of this work. Since women lacked the freedom of movement and the capacity for action required by the conventions of adventure romance, it was impossible to imagine a female protagonist seriously engaged in any extravagant adventure. The concept of idealism, however impractical it may be, implied by the term “quixotism” itself was also incompatible with the idea of femininity which prevailed at the turn of the century. The kind of idealism that prompts Don Quixote to action was unthinkable in the case of a heroine.

Thus, Female Quixotism was humorous not because it borrowed its name from and was loosely modeled on Cervantes's Don Quixote, which is a satirical romance, and thus positioned itself as the parody of a parody, but because its title implied an incongruity. For historical reasons this work has remained an essentially humorous work, while the original Don Quixote underwent a series of transformations from a comic romance to a serio-comic work, or even a work of tragic dimensions as each age read it differently, and as it continues to inspire both new readings and new imitations.¹

But the immediate predecessor of Tenney's novel was not Cervantes's Don Quixote; it was The Female Quixote: or the Adventures of Arabella by Charlotte Lennox, which was published in England in 1752 and was available in America during Tenney's time. Although both works follow the same pattern, which centers around a young, inexperienced heroine whose perceptions and expectations from life are severely distorted by her reading of romantic stories, as Cathy N. Davidson points out, they differ in their portrayal and treatment of their heroines.² Lennox's Arabella is sane enough at moments when she declares that her preference for reading romances is prompted by the dullness of her life, which is the lot of women in her time:

What room, I pray you, does a lady give for high and noble Adventures, who consumes her Days in Dressing, Dancing, listening to Songs, and ranging the Walks with People as thoughtless as herself? How mean and contemptible a Figure must a Life spent in such idle Amusements make in History? Or rather, Are not such Persons always buried in Oblivion, and can any Pen be found who would condescend to record such inconsiderable Actions?

(279)

The limitations of her life as a woman reduce Arabella's own life story to the familiar pattern of being born, educated, and married, and Arabella is painfully aware of this.

Such moments of recognition make Arabella a different character than Tenney's Dorcasina, whose intense dissatisfaction with her own boring life is not stated but implied through her seemingly foolish thoughts and actions. For this very reason, Tenney's criticism is more powerful and consistent and the book's subversive power is greater than that of The Female Quixote. Unlike Lennox's novel, which is inevitably tainted by the very characteristics it sets out to criticize, and thus gives a confusing message about the heroine, the message of Tenney's novel is cleverly concealed but clear throughout, and it does not create doubts about the writer's attitude towards either the subject or the heroine.³

Of the various subversive strategies Female Quixotism employs, the first is to pretend to satirize its own genre and thus escape the criticisms of “moralists who feared the harmful effect of novel reading on the female character.”⁴ In fact, what Female Quixotism attempts to do is not to mock romance as a genre, nor is it a warning “against the dangers of reading uncritically,” as Miecznikowski asserts (40). As a parody of a parody, it mocks those who mock romance when its hero is a woman.

Thus, its concern is far more serious than its “compiler” proclaims. The dedication “To All Columbian Young Ladies Who Read Novels and Romances,” which begins with “Dear Girls,” and ends with “your Friend and Admirer, the Compiler,” warns them against the dangers of reading novels and romances and expresses the “sincere wish” that they may learn from the example of Dorcas Sheldon and “avoid the disgraces and disasters that so long rendered her despicable and miserable” (I, 3-4). The historical fact that the book was written by a woman but was published anonymously with a preface by a fake compiler who adopts a male persona undermines the seriousness of this intent and gives it an ironic twist.

Miecznikowski's excellent analysis of the distinction among authorship, implied authorship, and narrative persona in Female Quixotism is extremely helpful for understanding Tenney's intention “to invest her implied author's (the compiler's) persona with conventional attitudes toward reading that the novel calls into question” (37). Thus, the ironic distance between herself and the implied author enables Tenney to disclaim responsibility for his views. However, the question of authorship is more complex than this analysis suggests. The implied author does not deny that he has a moralistic purpose in compiling the book, but he does not claim responsibility for the events in it, for he insists that it is “a true picture of real life,” “a biography,” instead of “a mere romance,” a fiction (3-4). He admits to having heard bits and pieces of the story from other sources, but “her whole story,” “the minute account of her adventures, with a generous permission to publish them” comes from Dorcasina herself (I, 3).

Thus, Dorcasina Sheldon is made the writer of her own story in two senses: first, as the female quixote, she imagines things and creates adventures out of ordinary situations; second, as the narrator of her own story to the compiler after she survives her own quixotism. The moral coloring of the story is obviously given to it by the compiler, not by Tenney, who sides with her character in writing the story. This is evident in Tenney's identification with her character by naming her Dorcas, the Greek version of her own name, Tabitha (Acts 9, 36).

So, the claim to truth is not only used to mock the novelistic convention of creating an illusion of reality but also serves to disconnect the real author and the implied author. Female Quixotism is a perfect example of what happens to “her story” when it is framed by “his moral.” As such, it is a story about writing, or rather the dangers of writing one's own story as opposed to reading, which is a passive act.

Superimposing such a narrative on the exclusively masculine “text” of adventure romance provides Tenney with the opportunity to expose the double standards that are at work in her culture. Both Cervantes' and Tenney's characters follow the same pattern: they read books which distort their perception of reality, they begin to live in a world of their own creation, imagining themselves to be different than what they really are. After a series of adventures, they become sane again and understand their foolishness and blame it on the books they read. However, Don Quixote nevertheless becomes an immortal hero and writes his name in golden letters in literary history, while Dorcasina remains a comic character, who is more to be despised than pitied.

This is because the roles cast for men and women in the myth behind these stories are very different. In such stories men are the actors and women are the silent spectators. Therefore, Don Quixote's actions, however impractical and ridiculous they may seem, are nevertheless noble actions; they are not incompatible with the underlying myth, which is powerful even in its absence. Romantic idealism is not a bad thing in itself; alas, times have changed and there is very little room for it in Don Quixote's world. He is not a fool, but pitifully out of date. There is a dominant nostalgic tone in Cervantes' book.

In Dorcasina's case it is very different. One cannot talk about nostalgia in connection with Female Quixotism, because women's past does not offer anything to be nostalgic about. Instead of looking back and glorifying long-lost values using pre-existing myths, it attempts to create its own myth, the myth of the female quixote, which is new because it does not have a history.⁵ What Dorcasina attempts to do is equally incompatible with her times, not because it is out of date, but because it is new. In this sense it is truly revolutionary. She becomes a threat to society when she decides to “act out” the scenarios of the books she reads. In other words, she stops being a silent reader and starts writing her own story, with the role of the protagonist cast for herself.

Unfortunately, unlike Don Quixote, who has a variety of role models to choose from, Dorcasina has very limited choices, all within the boundaries of love and marriage. Dorcasina's father has a big library “furnished with the best histories, ancient and modern; and every novel, good, bad and indifferent, which the bookstores of Philadelphia afforded” (I, 9). While history is her father's favorite reading and novels his amusement, the reverse is true for Dorcasina. Her insatiable appetite for reading novels can be explained by the fact that these are the only books in which a young, impressionable girl could find role models. Since history books rarely feature women center stage, she naturally identifies with the heroines of love stories. These, however, are almost always “distinguished by the elegant form, delicately turned limbs, auburn hair, alabaster skin, heavenly languishing eyes, silken eyelashes, rosy cheeks, acquiline nose, ruby lips, dimpled chin, and azure veins” quite unlike Dorcasina, whose physical appearance is far from striking (I, 8). Just as Quixada determines to become a knight-errant and changes his name to Don Quixote of La Mancha, so does Dorcasina change her “unfashionable and romantic” name Dorcas to Dorcasina to “give it a romantic termination” and launches out into the world as an irresistable romantic heroine ready to make amorous conquests (I, 10). Except once, when she imagines herself as the savior of Southern slaves, her thoughts never waver from the idea of falling violently in love. Don Quixote, on the other hand, sallies forth to “redress all manner of wrongs, exposing himself to continual dangers” with the intention of winning “everlasting honor and renown” (59).

Nevertheless, Dorcasina's attempt to change her position as a reader to that of a “writer” is an important step, and it explains the need to write stories that feature female quixotes. Reading women must have become a threat in both Lennox's and Tenney's times to make it necessary to write cautionary tales. As in Arabella's and Dorcasina's case, the books that women read at the time were largely romantic love stories and sentimental novels, and the majority of these books were written by “scribbling women” for a largely female audience. The popularity and abundance of such books testifies to a need among the female population, but there is another side of the matter. Culturally speaking, these books serve a double purpose. On the one hand, with their representations of passive or victimized women they perpetuate the patriarchal myth that women are weak and fragile and that their only purpose in life is to find good husbands and become wives and mothers; on the other hand, they provide excitement for women who crave for intense emotional experience. Patriarchal culture allows for, and even supports, this as long as women get the patriarchal message. The danger begins when the difference between fact and fiction is blurred and women start to demand from life what writers promise in fiction. A woman who demands more from love and marriage than what reality offers is stepping out of her traditional submissive role and defying male authority. She is “literalizing” everything she has been fed by books of romantic love stories. When seen from this angle, such books even help raise consciousness about the limited role relegated to women in society; but this may not always be a conscious effort on the part of the writer or the reader. As in the case of Dorcasina, it may be a cumulative effect of reading such books that leads to an intense dissatisfaction with life.

This is where moralists begin to talk about the dangers of novel reading for women. This is also when the writing of such books as The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism becomes necessary. But while Lennox seems to partly agree with these moralists, Tenney uses their discourse to negate their argument.

By deliberately refraining from making her protagonist a conscious figure who recognizes and rebels against the seclusion and the limitations of a woman's life in her society, Tenney is able to make a stronger statement about the frustrations of women than her predecessor. This strategy of employing a completely foolish character who is totally blind to the situation allows her to put a stronger emphasis on the objections to her behavior and expose them in a much brighter light. The people who try to “save” Dorcasina appear just as, if not more, foolish than Dorcasina herself. Harriot's disguise as Montague and courting of Dorcasina, and Mr. Stanly's abduction and forced imprisonment of her to prevent her from marrying Brown are no less extravagant or ridiculous than Dorcasina's own actions. In fact, what these “friends” are trying to protect are Dorcasina's family name and family fortune—things that do not really belong to her. While they recognize and fight against several rogues who are after Dorcasina's money, they fail to understand the essential injustice of a system that makes a woman dependent on male authority. If this system did not allow the husband to take full possession of his wife's fortune, there would be no fortune-hunters in the first place. But it is too early for women to talk about such things openly in the 1800's.

However, Tenney does make her point when she refuses to finish her story with the conventional happy ending: an approved marriage. Unlike Arabella, at the end of her story Dorcasina is already an old maid with grey hair, wrinkled skin, missing teeth, and no hopes for marriage. The surface story presents this picture as an irredeemable loss, a pitiful waste; but the subtext, which is cleverly disguised in Dorcasina's lamentations has a different story to tell:

… instead of being a matron, rendering a worthy man happy, surrounded by a train of amiable children, educated in virtuous principles, and formed by our mutual cares and examples to virtuous habits, and of promoting and participating the happiness of the social circle, in which we might be placed, I am now, in the midst of the wide world, solitary, neglected and despised.

(III, 225)

In this picture of an ironic ideal Dorcasina appears not as a unique individual but in her triple role as wife, mother, and a virtuous member of society. Although she mentions happiness twice, it is interesting to note that in neither case is it her own happiness. Women marry to make their husbands and society happy. Besides, as it is demonstrated in the life of Harriot, even “the most aggreeable connection is not unattended with cares and anxieties” (III, 216). Harriot admits, “I have been married a twelvemonth to the man whom of all the world I should have chosen. … Yet, strange to tell, I have suffered more than I ever did before in the whole course of my life” (III, 216). This is why, even after she realizes her foolishness, Dorcasina cannot dispense with her novels. She continues to read “with the same relish, the same enthusiasm as ever, but,” she adds, “instead of expecting to realize scenes and situations so charmingly portrayed, I only regret that such unalloyed felicity is, in this life, unattainable” (III, 225, my emphasis).

The bracketed expression “in this life” secretly points to an afterlife, not in a religious sense, but in the sense of a time yet to come when women will realize that marriage is not essential to happiness and that there is no such thing as a happy marriage unless they take part in it as fulfilled individuals. The picture of married life for a woman as it is portrayed by Dorcasina and confirmed by Harriot must have been too dreary even for the Columbian Young Ladies of the time. By making Dorcasina sound as if she accedes to the premise that marriage, however dull and painful it may be, is the only alternative for a woman, Tenney manages to provoke anger and resentment to such a fate and delivers a different message between the lines.

Reading early women's writing is like deciphering an elaborate coded language. This is particularly so in the case of women humorists, both because humor is traditionally thought to be exclusively male and because women usually use self-deprecating humor not to offend the promulgators of the dominant culture. However, as Nancy Walker and Zita Dresner point out in the introduction to their anthology of women's humor, Redressing the Balance:

… laughing at one's own shortcomings is not only a way of diminishing their importance and potentially overcoming them but is also a technique for cleansing them of pejorative connotations imposed by the dominant culture and, thereby, turning them into strengths … the use of humor by women against women, when it is used to advance ideas that might conflict with those of the male establishment about women's roles and prerogatives, represents a step toward empowerment rather than capitulation.

(xxiii)

Female Quixotism is a perfect example of the subtlety of early women's humor, which disguises itself as the voice of the dominant ideology while it undermines that ideology by delivering metamessages that are inherent in it. Such books as Female Quixotism will take their well-deserved place in the literary canon when these metamessages are carefully decoded.

Notes

1. See the chapter titled “The Fortunes of Don Quixote” in E. C. Riley's Don Quixote, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986).

2. Davidson mentions this only in passing in a biographical note about Tenney in American Women Writers, Vol.4, p.218.

3. For moral confusion in The Female Quixote see Deborah Ross, “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote” in Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, (Summer 1987, 27): 455-73.

4. Ola Elizabeth Winslow, in a biographical note on Tenney in Notable American Women: 1607-1950, says Female Quixotism satirizes its own genre. My understanding is that it only pretends to do so.

5. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe that women writers are “precursors of 20th century modernists, the avant garde of the avant garde,” because they express exuberance rather than anxiety at the breaking down of traditional structures. “Introduction: The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic,” Women's Studies, (1986, 13) pp. 1-10.

Works Cited

American Women Writers. Vol.4. Ed. Lina Mainiero. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Trans. Walter Starkie. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Introduction: The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic.” Women's Studies 13 (1986): 1-10.

Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote: or the Adventures of Arabella. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Miecznikowski, Cynthia J. “The Parodic Mode and the Patriarchal Imperative: Reading the Female Reader(s) in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism.” Early American Literature 25 (1990, 1): 34-45.

Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Vol.3. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Riley, E. C. Don Quixote. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986.

Ross, Deborah. “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 27 (Summer 1987): 455-73.

Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write.” Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972.