SOURCE: Harris, Sharon M. “Lost Boundaries: The Use of the Carnivalesque in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism.” In Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman, pp. 213-28. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Harris argues that Tenney's employment of the carnivalesque in Female Quixotism exposes the limitations of the purportedly democratic government of the United States during the early years of the new nation.]

When Tabitha Gilman Tenney's novel Female Quixotism was published in 1801, it joined a national voice of lament over the dangers of novel reading. The typical antinovel argument was that the genre's romantic allurements would lead women away from the realities of their domestic responsibilities. In Female Quixotism, however, Tenney used a comic, anti-romantic stance in relation to novel reading to demonstrate the failed sense of democracy in the new republic. No element of the citizenry escapes her comic examination; as the editors of the recent Oxford edition of Female Quixotism note, “The novel's cutting wit spares hardly any segment of society: droll servants, earnest merchants, scheming scholars, and self-deluding gentry all get their fair share of ribbing.”¹ The argument I am presenting examines Tenney's novelistic use of the carnivalesque as a means of exposing the realities of the new nation's social order, especially as it oppressed and segregated its citizens by race, class, and gender. But I also want to address the bifurcated argument embedded in this text, an argument that both exposes the failed sense of democracy in the new republic and simultaneously perpetuates the dominant culture's encoding of racial and ethnic difference.

The concept of the carnivalesque was made available to critical studies by Mikhail Bakhtin. The historical significance of carnival is that it has always been linked to moments of social or political crisis. Thus, it is not surprising that carnivalesque images reemerge in post-Revolutionary U.S. literatures as the nation begins to define not only its role in international affairs but equally the roles of its various citizens. In denoting the carnivalesque as a mode aligned with “the peculiar culture of the marketplace and of folk laughter with all its wealth of manifestations,” Bakhtin outlines three distinct forms these manifestations take: first, ritual spectacles, such as carnival pageants and comic marketplace shows; second, parodies, both oral and written, either in the vernacular or with an invocation of classical standards; third, the use of curses and oaths as a means of explicitly challenging classical language standards.² Most prevalent in medieval and Renaissance literatures, the carnivalesque exposes the “two-world condition” of those cultures: officialdom and a world outside that officialdom, that is, a world of the people. It is important to note that, while carnival resembles the spectacle, it is different in one important way. As Bakhtin reminds us, “carnival … does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. … Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it. … During carnival time life is subject only to its laws” (7). Freedom is embraced and all hierarchies are suspended; in its way, then, carnival is intended to constitute a true democratic moment.

Central to an understanding of the carnivalesque is its engagement with grotesque imagery, and Tabitha Tenney's main character in Female Quixotism may certainly, within her culture, be defined as a grotesque. She immerses herself in novel reading, deludes herself about a series of doomed romances, and at the novel's conclusion opts for spinsterhood and contrition. She may be wiser, but she is still single, and for women, in the new nation's emphasis on republican motherhood, that is a form of grotesque. Yet it is crucial to our understanding of how Tabitha Tenney employs the carnivalesque to recognize an important point, emphasized by Bakhtin but too often overlooked in subsequent analyses, namely, the historically evolving nature of the carnival-grotesque form. In the era of Molière and Swift, this form functioned “to consecrate inventive freedom, … to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths.” In the late eighteenth century, however, a radical change took place. It began as a German literary controversy over the character of Harlequin but soon became “a wider problem of [aesthetic] principle: could manifestations such as the grotesque, which did not respond to the demands of the sublime, be considered art?” What evolved was a movement away from the broader concepts of Rabelais and Cervantes to what Bakhtin terms “the new subjective grotesque”; he cites Tristram Shandy as the “first important example” of this evolution (34-36).

Tabitha Tenney was well aware of the changes in the carnival-grotesque and contributed to its transformation. In the late eighteenth century the carnival-grotesque became not a festival of all the people but rather “a private ‘chamber’ character. It became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation” (Bakhtin, 37). In the years leading up to publication of Female Quixotism, the United States, under Federalist rule, pursued an extreme isolationist ideology; the carnivalesque not only fit Tenney's artistic needs but also engaged her political inclinations, as will be outlined in detail below. What is critical in this transformation of the genre is that the “principle of laughter which permeates the grotesque” (especially in relation to the bodily life) lost its regenerative power; the grotesque becomes an object of fear to be relayed by the author and assumed by the reader. One example of this change is the mask: originally, the mask was “connected with the joy of change and reincarnation”; it celebrated difference rather than uniformity. In the late eighteenth century, however, the mask was “stripped of its original richness and acquire[d] other meanings alien to its primitive nature” (37-40). It became an instrument of deceit and secretiveness. The carnival-grotesque evolved into a nocturnal event, evoking themes of darkness rather than embracing the symbolic implications of sunrise and morning as the original carnival had.

This latter sense of the carnivalesque is explored by Julia Kristeva. “Carnivalesque discourse,” she observes, “breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, identity between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law.”³ As Mary Russo has argued, we must embrace the carnivalesque with caution, since it can be employed as a panacea by a dominant culture rather than as a truly liberating vehicle.⁴ Yet it is a tool of authorities only when the carnival is a ritual sanctioned by them. In Female Quixotism, it is precisely when Dorcasina Sheldon, the “private ‘chamber’ character,” stops reading and breaks with officialdom (literally, with her father's house) that Tenney depicts her as secretly engaging in the carnivalesque as a means of moving from the role of the subjected to that of the subject, of reinscribing her world on her own terms. It is in the episodes that occur outside Mr. Sheldon's house that Tenney interjects the issues of gender, race, and class, leading the reader into a recognition of how limited the so-called democratic reforms of the eighteenth century had actually been.

In Revolution and the Word, Cathy N. Davidson recognizes Female Quixotism as a picaresque novel. Typically, Davidson notes, the picaresque's loose narrative form “allows a central character … to wander the margins of an emerging American landscape [and] to survey it in all its incipient diversity,” but since women's mobility was severely restricted in the early federal period, the female picara cannot meet these narrative criteria. Davidson asserts, therefore, that Dorcasina's story does not challenge the status quo until the novel's conclusion, when she questions the nature of matrimony.⁵ I would argue, however, that the status quo for Anglo American women is challenged throughout the novel; first, because the picaresque is itself a carnivalization of the novel's form, and second, because Dorcasina takes many “journeys” outside her domicile. Granted, these journeys may be only to an isolated grove or to a nearby town, but distance itself is insignificant in relation to the alternative experiences she encounters. In these journeys, the upper-class Dorcasina engages in relationships with members of every class of U.S. society, including her own Anglo American household servants, African American servants whose domain lies within the Sheldon estate but not within the household itself, an Irish rogue, an enterprising prostitute, schoolteachers, and a barber. It seems to me far more radical to assert that this diversity lies within one's own neighborhood than to assume an audience will translate so-called “foreign” experiences to a sense of the American polis.

In some respects, Female Quixotism foreshadows feminist and postmodern challenges to Enlightenment philosophies, especially the Enlightenment privileging of reason and science. In an era deemed the “Age of Reason,” Tabitha Tenney's employment of the carnivalesque challenges cultural definitions of rationality itself, not only by depicting the chaos that surrounds the aristocratic Sheldon domicile but equally by exposing the class biases internalized in the celebration of “reason,” as defined by the dominant culture. In the United States at the turn of the century, the voice of rationality was always deemed that of the white male aristocrat. Mr. Sheldon personifies this voice and Dorcasina's first love, Lysander, represents its perpetuation in the next generation of young, privileged males: “His person was noble and commanding … and his address manly and pleasing. … His ideas of domestic happiness were just and rational” (7). Tenney depicts Lysander as the ideal of absolute patriarchy. The gendering of reason by Enlightenment philosophies is also satirized by Tenney. In contrast to Lysander, Tenney presents an alternative voice of reason in that of the Anglo American servant Betty, Dorcasina's life-long companion. Throughout the novel, Betty's intellectual, reasoning abilities are not aligned with issues of philosophy or overt politics but rather with her power to penetrate beneath the actions and the masks of propriety displayed by various characters in the novel; it is neither Dorcasina nor Mr. Sheldon but rather Betty who discerns individuals' “unmasked” natures and their degrees of reliability. It is Betty's voice, far more than Mr. Sheldon's, that Dorcasina needs to hear in order to escape her repeated cycle of misapplied love that results in emotional abuse and trauma. While the comic spirit of the carnival prevails, the pathos of Dorcasina's repeated traumatic experience suggests the very real consequences of the gendering of reason and the marginalization of women, even in their own homes and their own country.

Mr. Sheldon is never fully aware of his daughter's beliefs and not aware at all of her adventures, while Betty not only knows of Dorcasina's experiences but also attempts to guide her away from self-defeating actions into a better sense of social reality. Tenney pushes the boundaries of rationality further, however, when she exposes the class-based consequences of Betty's knowledge. The prevailing ideology of the Age of Reason held that rational thought and action will lead to the best possible political and social orders; yet in spite of her wisdom and social astuteness, Betty's social class does not allow her to conquer prevailing misconceptions. The automatic devaluation of any expression by a person of her class is rendered both through her employers' lack of adherence to her cautionary voice and, more explicitly, through a physical (bodily) suppression of Betty herself. In episode after episode, when Betty cautions her against a particular action, Dorcasina pursues her own desires—to her detriment, surely, but it is almost always Betty who must endure physical abuse for Dorcasina's foolish actions. This abuse is rendered most explicitly when Dorcasina insists that Betty dress in Mr. Sheldon's clothing and pretend to be Dorcasina's lover. Betty has barely begun her impersonation when “she was interrupted … by the sudden appearance of Scipio, the gardener, Patrick, the boy, a white servant, and two or three labourers from the field,” all of whom chase her about the grounds, believing that she is “some evil minded person” who intended to steal Mr. Sheldon's belongings (99). The episode ends when Dorcasina herself appears and exposes Betty's identity, but Betty is left as the mortified object of her peers' mirth, and she is seen at the end of the scene “sinking with shame and vexation” (99). In other, similar episodes, Betty is repeatedly abandoned by Dorcasina in moments of physical combat that Dorcasina's actions have created: several times Betty is beaten; in one episode her upper garments are stripped off of her; and in another, the servant of Dorcasina's latest lover “laid violent hands upon [Betty], pulled her hair, shook her, pinched her, and mauled her” (132). While there is always supposed to be a comic element to such scenes in the novel, the carnivalesque nature of these scenes exposes real consequences for the servant class due to antics perpetuated by the upper-class. Dorcasina may be humiliated when she loses lover after lover, but it is Betty whose body is mauled and appropriated for her mistress's use.

These episodes lead us to one of the most significant aspects of Tenney's engagement with the carnivalesque in Female Quixotism. In an era of denial and suppression of female sexuality, the carnivalesque by its very nature allows for its exploration. It is on this avenue of sexual exploration, too, that class and race distinctions are momentarily lost. The carnival is the time for cross-dressing and masquerading, and Female Quixotism is rife with instances of both activities, which allow Tenney to explore themes of sexuality that are banned in the father's house and by the father's law. The scenes that allow the issue of sexuality to be raised most often depend upon the eighteenth century's shift from open, daylight carnival celebrations to dark, surreptitious couplings, and this shadow culture, as it were, allows Tenney to explore racial and class “crossings” as well. In one instance, Dorcasina finds herself in the summer house and in the arms of Scipio, the African American gardener, whose own partner, the African American servant Miss Violet, is at the same moment being embraced by Dorcasina's white Irish lover, Patrick O'Connor. Both couples are quite delighted in their sexual explorations—until their true identities are exposed and their recognition of racial difference forces them to consider the false strictures of their usual “intercourse.”

In another instance of masquerade, a prostitute presents herself as Dorcasina and rather than the expected narrative suggestion that no one could mistake a prostitute for an upper-class white woman, the women are easily mistaken for each other by people in the neighborhood. Other scenes of cross-dressing titillate the reader with images of women loving other women, not in the culturally sanctioned mode of female loving that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has described, but in overt sexual play.⁶ For instance, Dorcasina insists that Betty dress as Patrick O'Connor and imitate his sexual play with her, and later the very proper Miss Harriot Stanly dresses as a young officer, Captain Montague, and secretly takes on the part of Dorcasina's lover. This cross-dressing episode is especially significant for its exposure of women's sexual desires and equally so for its breaches of gender stereotypes. Harriot dresses as a captain, and one of Dorcasina's later lovers is also a captain, who has his servant masquerade as himself; the servant/captain is accepted by Dorcasina as her lover; the cycle of this episode is completed when Harriot later marries the captain whom the servant was imitating. If the reader becomes lost in this chain of masqueradings, that is precisely the point. The failure of language to distinguish the cyclical recasting of characters here exposes the false bases of social hierarchies and of gender stereotypes.

What the carnivalesque allows Tabitha Tenney to do, ultimately, is twofold: to expose the gender biases and prejudices still rampant in a nation that depicts itself as the ideal of democracy, and to address the suppression of (white) female desire. This is decidedly the late-eighteenth-century version of the carnivalesque, however, for the ending of this novel does not depict radical social or political change; in many ways Dorcasina is left in the dark, as it were, in the final chapter of Female Quixotism. Although she chooses to remain single and, importantly, to reclaim her nonromanticized name, Dorcas, she is left at the novel's conclusion a self-described isolate: “I am now, in the midst of the wide world, solitary, neglected, and despised” (324). She is, by her culture's standards, a grotesque. As a single woman, her experiences cannot lead her to the regenerative power once linked to carnival participation. No social freedom has been attained; all of officialdom's laws remain intact. Dorcas Sheldon thus represents the woman who has turned from romantic visions to reason, but her fate is not that of her male compatriots who make the same journey. Like Betty, she is not elevated to the realm of philosopher or statesman. Yet Tenney's conclusion emphasizes the fact that Dorcas has gained two important features: self-knowledge and an ability to inscribe herself as subject. These features are rendered through carnivalesque discourse as Kristeva defined it, acting as a social and political protest through its damning indictment of the American republic's falsified representations of equality.

The challenges to the Anglo American woman's pattern of marital servitude should not be ignored or belittled. Such challenges were necessary steps in the prelude to the women's rights movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor should we ignore the fact that Dorcas Sheldon's carnivalesque conversion is dependent upon hierarchical structures and acts of racial and ethnic oppression. While Betty manifests the figure of the wise woman throughout the novel, and we see Dorcasina transformed from the fool into the isolate-sage, no such status or transformation is afforded the African American characters in the novel.

The carnivalesque is a means of disrupting the symbolic order, the production and representation of reality according to the Law of the Father. Tenney's narrative achieves that disruption and exposes “reality” as an ideology that must be perpetuated in order to sustain the realm (here, quite literally, the house) of the Father. While Female Quixotism succeeds in its disruptive practices in relation to the central white female character, it in fact reinscribes the dominant ideology in terms of class and race and does so especially with women characters. What appears to be a “feminization” in fact aids in the perpetuation of patriarchal hierarchies by dividing women (rather than articulating difference), by creating class and race conflicts, and thereby limiting resistance to the real source of domination, patriarchy itself. That Tabitha Tenney cannot fully write Dorcasina into a “happy ending” suggests her recognition of this dilemma.

Tzvetan Todorov's study of the colonization of the Americas emphasizes the significance of predetermined conceptualizations in the colonizer's interpretation and representation of the “Other.”⁷ This process is not, of course, limited to fifteenth-century cultural encodings of race. For all that Dorcasina is willing to experience the world anew, to discover “new worlds” for herself, her prior conceptualizations of class and race privilege are never abandoned. As she seeks to de-colonize herself from the control of her father and from patriarchal conventions, she does so through a process that re-colonizes all non-white, non-upperclass individuals. That Betty and Miss Violet are most forcefully re-colonized suggests the privileged woman's preconception of “other” women as dangerous. Mary-Louise Pratt has exposed the processes by which “frontier” propaganda literature acts as a “normalizing force … [that] serves, in part, to mediate the shock of contact on the frontier.”⁸ For Dorcasina, the novels she has been reading are the normalizing force through which she (mis)represents to herself her adventures in the grove-frontier. Every experience she has outside her father's house is read through her preconceived expectations formed from novel reading. Thus, ironically, while Tenney presents novel reading as dangerous, she elides the normalizing force not only of the texts Dorcasina reads but of her own imaginative text as well. The power of preconceptualization is evident in its subsequent and multifold misrepresentations in Female Quixotism. On the one hand, preconceived ideas lead Dorcasina to misinterpret her own demeaning experiences as romances while, on the other hand, it allows her to continue to read herself into a position of privilege, what Edward Said terms “positional superiority,” over white servants and all people of color in spite of her own repeated foolish actions and subsequent humiliations. Indeed, the recovery of her sense of self against the normalizing forces surrounding gender in a patriarchal society is dependent upon her learned conceptions of race and class.

An examination of the masquerade, an integral feature in the production of the carnival, exposes Tenney's disruption of the patriarchal symbolic order as a disruption accessible only to the upper-class white woman. Unlike Bakhtin and Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is able to see beyond the phallocentric discourse of psychoanalysis and in that process exposes the vast plain of female desire behind “the masquerade of femininity.” And desire with no adequate means of expression drives, shall we say, Dorcasina's life. As Irigaray observes, “The masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire, to participate in man's desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. In the masquerade, they submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain ‘on the market’ in spite of everything. But they are there as objects for sexual enjoyment, not as those who enjoy.”⁹ Ultimately, the masquerade (like the dominant culture itself) cannot posit viable difference, and Tenney's apparent discomfort is exposed at a crucial point in the narrative, the summer-house escapade.

The scene in the summer house is an example of the bifurcated argument Tenney presents. Early in the text, Tenney has Dorcasina mouth an antislavery position that reflects the changing attitudes in the northern United States. Although Dorcasina desperately desires marriage to Lysander, she laments that “what gives me the greatest pain, is, that I shall be obliged to live in Virginia, be served by slaves, and be supported by the sweat, toil, and blood of that unfortunate and miserable part of mankind. … Slavery and happiness are, in my opinion, totally incompatible; ‘disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, slavery, thou art a bitter pill’” (8). As noted above, Tenney challenges many cultural assumptions about race and gender in the summer-house scene, yet her representations of African Americans, especially of African American women, are often complicit in those assumptions. As Dana Nelson has pointed out, in this era the dominant culture racially encoded the African in specific ways that helped to perpetuate and justify a slave society.¹⁰ To unpack the complexities of this encoding is to understand its cultural tenacity as well. Africans were depicted as at the bottom of the human evolutionary chain, indeed as only partially human (the “founding fathers” registered Africans as only three-fifths human). Thus Africans were represented as “primitive” in all facets of their lives—emotional development, social institutions, religious practices—and this primitivism was joined with the assertion that Africans were sexually uninhibited. It is important, too, to realize that, in this “Age of Reason,” reason itself was absolutely linked with written discursive abilities; therefore, the African's oral rather than written traditions were deemed evidence of an inability to reason. Further, reason was equated with selfhood and since, as the perverted syllogistic reasoning unfolded, Africans could not reason, they were not therefore individuals and could not have status as self or exert agency. It is not difficult to comprehend the necessity of such reasoning in order to perpetuate the extraordinary system of abuse against African Americans inherent in slavery. While Tabitha Tenney exposes the presence of African Americans in U.S. society, something that few of her contemporary novelists acknowledged, she perpetuates a discourse of racial difference that elides the necessity of addressing change in the characterizations of Scipio and Miss Violet and, indeed, that erases their presence from the end of the novel.

Tenney's depiction of Scipio as a careful and talented servant/gardener is diminished by her depiction of Miss Violet as the stereotypic lazy and promiscuous person of color. The latter characterization, however, also reveals the Anglo American woman's fear of disruptions to assumed race and class superiority. The rendering of that fear through the female figure (literally and representatively) further reveals and complicates her text's embodiment (em/“body”/ment) of cultural difference.

As in any good carnival, all characters in the novel play the fool at some point. It is when the masks are removed and the carnival ends that we note Tenney's process of differentiation. During the scene in the summer house, Scipio is comically rendered, but his depiction is less characterization than simply a tool necessary to forward the narrative transformation of Dorcasina Sheldon. Scipio has fallen asleep; when Dorcasina enters the darkened summer house, she assumes he is her Irish lover, O'Connor, and is able to realize her desire for physical contact before he awakens: “[Dorcasina] approached him softly, sat down by his side, and, putting one arm round his neck and resting her cheek against his, resolved to enjoy the sweet satisfaction which this situation afforded her, till her should of himself awake. This liberty, in his waking hours, her modesty would have prevented her from taking; but, with a heart thrilling with transport, she blessed the accident, which, without wounding her delicacy, afforded her such ravishing delight” (53). The comedy of the scene is dependent upon the reader's shock at the contact between a white woman and a black man, as Tenney explicitly records their racial difference: “with her snowy arms, she encircled Scipio's ebony neck” (59). Tenney also makes explicit Dorcasina's shame at such contact when she discovers the truth: “Mortified and disappointed beyond measure, she crept into the house, and got to bed undiscovered: where, between her own personal chagrin, and distress for her lover, she lay the whole night in sleepless agitation. … Her delicate mind could hardly bear to reflect on her familiarity with her father's servant” (54-55).

When Scipio awoke and discovered O'Connor sneaking into the summer house, he immediately darted forth and cuffed the intruder several times; that is, he performed his legitimate duty of protecting the grounds from intruders. In Tenney's description of Miss Violet, however, we are exposed to an extended representation of uninhibited sexuality and “primitiveness” that encapsulates the racial coding of those white men whose inscriptions of white women's lives Dorcasina is supposed to reject in order to effect her own transformation from fool to sage. When O'Connor sees Miss Violet enter the garden and head for the summer house, he assumes it is Dorcasina. A reader's initial reaction is probably that this failure to distinguish identity is intended to expose race biases in the same manner that biases surrounding class and female sexuality were exposed through the confusion of identity between Dorcasina and the prostitute. However, we are told that “O'Connor, seeing a person in white advancing towards him, thought, naturally enough, that it could be no other than his mistress” (53, emphasis added). The racial coding here is evident: whiteness signifies sexual purity, the primary trait of womanhood in True Woman ideology, which was identified solely with white women and indeed, as Sidonie Smith has observed, was dependent upon “keeping black women in their place.”¹¹ Tenney's purpose in this construction has less to do, at this point, with Miss Violet than it does with the exposure of O'Connor as a fool. (As will be noted more fully below, all of the Irish characters in this novel are as unredeemed as are the African American characters.)

A careful examination of the encounter of Miss Violet and O'Connor, however, will reveal how deeply internalized are Tenney's concepts of racial difference. When O'Connor met Miss Violet and mistakenly assumed she was Dorcasina, “he dropped on one knee, and poured forth a torrent of words in the usual style, blessing his supposed angelic mistress, for her goodness and condescension, in thus favouring him with an interview. Miss Violet was at first struck with astonishment, and could not divine the meaning of those fine compliments; but, perceiving by his manner and address, that it was a gentleman who thus humbled himself before her, and having a spice of the coquette in her disposition, she had not objection to obtaining a new lover; but, being totally at a loss what to reply to such a profusion of compliments, delivered in a style so new to her, she very prudently remained silent” (53). This passage exemplifies the racial encoding of the era. In spite of Tenney's previous satirization of Dorcasina as a foolish and easily duped woman, she is depicted here as “angelic” in contrast with Miss Violet's sexual indiscrimination (“a spice of the coquette”). Further, the failure of language is predominant. Because, as an African American, Miss Violet is assumed to have no reasoning ability, she cannot “divine the meaning” of O'Connor's compliments; his words constitute “a style so new to her” that she is rendered silent.

It is not enough that Miss Violet be rendered mute; her sexuality is explored and implicated in this scene again and again. We are told, for example, that after Scipio tosses O'Connor out of the garden, Miss Violet does not lament the loss of her new admirer. She simply excuses her behavior to Scipio so she may regain his attention, because she “could as easily change a white lover for a black, as receive the addresses of a new one” (53). Thus while Dorcasina is in her room, giving “herself up to sighs, tears and lamentations” (55) over her mistaken liaison with Scipio, Miss Violet is depicted as promiscuity personified. Indeed, as the figure of willful sexual discovery in the garden, Miss Violet becomes the body onto which the blame for Eve's indiscretions is transferred. Since Eve was the figure most often cited by religious and civil leaders in this period as the reason that women were to be subjected to men, it is a significant transformation: the blame for womankind's fate is now placed on the black woman while the white woman is exonerated through her shame and repentance.

Tenney's intent that we note this sexual and racial difference between Dorcasina Sheldon and Miss Violet is made even more pointed by her use of the masquerade to break the silence about female desire in a positive manner, through her characterization of Dorcasina's young white contemporary, Harriot Stanly. Whereas Miss Violet becomes the racially stereotyped figure of sexual promiscuity, Miss Stanly becomes the female figure in control of her sexuality, who can use it to her benefit and who is rewarded (to some extent) with marriage at the novel's conclusion.

Dorcasina's lack of a mother's influence is designated in the opening pages of Female Quixotism as the cause of her near-fatal attraction to novels: “At the age of three years, this child had the misfortune to lose an excellent mother, whose advice would have pointed out to her the plain rational path of life; and prevented her imagination from being filled with the airy delusions and visionary dreams of love and raptures, darts, fire and flames, with which the indiscreet writers of that fascinating kind of books, denominated Novels, fill the heads of artless young girls, to their great injury, and sometimes to their utter ruin” (4-5). In contrast, Harriot is not an “artless” young woman. Not only did she have an attentive mother but—an act that also reveals the very grave failure of the Mr. Sheldons of the world—she was afforded a proper female education that guided her away from Dorcasina's failings. Tenney's introduction of issues of desire into the characterization of a young woman is to be commended. Through masquerade, Harriot can express sexual longings under the guise of teaching Dorcasina a lesson about the folly of romanticizing relationships. Harriot's “play” goes far beyond mere titillation, and it recalls Irigaray's notion that the masquerade is necessary because, for women to “recuperate some element of desire, [they must] participate in man's desire, but at the price of renouncing their own.” Thus, in order to express desire, Harriot must masquerade as a male. Dressed as a captain, she may take on aggressive (masculine) sexual behavior; notably, she directs her amorous acts toward another female: “She then threw her arms round Dorcasina's neck, and almost stopped her breath with kisses, and concluded by biting her cheek so hard as to make her scream aloud” (278). Significantly, this scene occurs at night, observing the transformation of the carnival in the late eighteenth century to a nocturnal event. When Harriot later marries a real-life captain, we might be tempted to see this alliance as both a comic moment, a (masked) captain marrying another captain, and as a regenerative one; but whereas Tenney is unable to inscribe racial difference, she is able to challenge the idea that heterosexual couplings are any more transformative than was the embrace between the masked Harriot and the duped Dorcasina. When Dorcasina visits Harriot (now Mrs. Barry) at the novel's end, the novel shifts from carnival time back to “real” time. After having observed Harriot's married life for a few days, Dorcasina addresses her friend:

“I find that, in my ideas of matrimony, I have been totally wrong. I imagined that, in a happy union, all was transport, joy, and felicity; but in you I find a demonstration that the most agreeable connection is not unattended with cares and anxieties.” “Indeed, Miss Sheldon,” replied Mrs. Barry, “your observation is just. I have been married a twelvemonth, to the man whom of all the world I should have chosen. He is everything I wish him to be; and in the connection I have enjoyed great felicity. Yet, strange to tell, I have suffered more than I ever did before, in the whole course of my life.”

(320-21)

Thus Tabitha Tenney exposes the disenfranchised status even of upper-class white women in the new republic. In important ways, Tenney critiques the gendered nature of existence in the new democracy and condemns the nation's failure to properly educate and employ its female members.

Yet at the same time, she exposes her own ironic alliance with class and racial prejudices. Her contemporary Thomas Jefferson also struggled with such issues, ultimately arguing in Notes on the State of Virginia for the creation of laws supporting a combination of slave emancipation and “distant colonization.” Similarly, Tenney casts Betty as the privileged Dorcas's supportive and wise but naturally (read: by class) inferior servant-friend, and she follows Jefferson's ideal to its “logical” conclusion by removing the African American characters from the last portion of the novel: that act of removal/erasure is, of course, the very real effect of “distant colonization.” As Dana Nelson observes, the failure of Jefferson's text to accomplish “‘rational management’ of the issue of slavery is a signpost to the Enlightenment philosophers' profound inability to master the incongruity between slave system and legal contract, between arbitrary power and ‘natural’ authority.”¹² Similarly, for Tenney, her inability to create a narrative that fully allows the disruption of the social order intended through the depiction of carnival or to rationally manage the reining in of carnival by the privileged class (as Mary Russo cautioned) leads to her own text's failed conclusion. Tenney cannot write into her own text a full vision of democracy.

That she is (perhaps unwittingly) aligned with Jeffersonian ideologies concerning race is particularly ironic, since Tenney's political alliances were distinctly opposed to Jefferson's in most ways. As noted above, all the Irish characters in this novel are as unredeemed as the African American characters. Tenney's political views are rendered through her depiction of immigrants in the novel, most notably in the characterization of the disreputable and dangerous Irishman Patrick O'Connor, who wants to marry Dorcasina only to have access to her wealth and privilege. In the years during which Tabitha Tenney wrote Female Quixotism, her spouse, Samuel Tenney, was a Federalist senator in Washington, D.C., representing their home state of New Hampshire. During the volatile election of 1800, the extraordinary power of the Federalists was diminished under charges of unconstitutional use of their powers and, most notably, of the intentional suppression of political dissent. Of special concern to the party was “foreign subversion.” In 1798 alone, the Federalists enacted the Naturalization Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act. These enactments are of special significance in relation to Female Quixotism. The Federalist position was bluntly clarified by Harrison Gray Otis, who cautioned that the United States should not “invite hordes of Wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly parts of the world, to come here with a view to distract our tranquility.”¹³

Two famous New England trials of 1799 may also have influenced Tenney's class and ethnic characterizations, those of David Brown and Luther Baldwin. Both men were working-class individuals who dared to criticize the Federalist government. Opposed to the centralized government established by the new constitution, Brown asserted that the only goal of government was to steal from its citizens and to claim the new nation's western lands for the Federalist leaders' personal wealth. Brown was tried under the newly established Sedition Act, found guilty, fined ＄480, and sentenced to eighteen months in jail. Since it was impossible for a working-class individual to pay such a fine, the sentence inevitably resulted in continued imprisonment for speaking against the government. It was only after the Federalists were defeated in the election of 1800 that Brown was freed. A satiric comment against President John Adams by Luther Baldwin (rendered orally, unlike Brown's pamphleteering) also resulted in a conviction for sedition, with fines and imprisonment. The Jeffersonians picked up Baldwin's case and used it to expose what they saw as the Federalists' abuse of power and antidemocratic actions.

It is precisely such nationalistic and classist attitudes that pervade Tenney's depictions of the characters surrounding Dorcasina. At the point in the novel in which O'Connor appears, we are told of the power of her father's word: “It had always been her pleasure to conform, in every instance, to the wishes of her parent, whose mild commands had ever been to her a law” (48). And the law of the father, as with the Federalists, is isolationist. When Dorcasina persists in her love of O'Connor, the Irishman, over Lysander, an American and her father's preferred mate for his daughter, Mr. Sheldon admonishes her, “Alas, my dear! I grieve to see you thus infatuated. Will you persist in giving less credit to one of your own countrymen, whose character for probity is well known and acknowledged, than to a foreigner, whom nobody knows, and who has nothing to recommend him but his own bare assertions?” (76).

That Tenney aligns nationalism with patriarchal values is evident when Dorcasina finally accepts her father's views and rejects the “foreigner”: her father's reward is expressed explicitly in terms that return her to the father's house, “Thank you, my dear, you are now again my daughter” (95). That is, she is given the only means of “enfranchisement” available to women: the protection of the “fathers.” This is the issue that Tenney cannot reconcile in Female Quixotism. She seeks to challenge the erasure of difference in the new republic, but she depends upon difference—and acceptance of difference—in order to effect what changes do occur in Dorcasina Sheldon's struggle for subjectivity.

It is in the juxtaposition of Dorcasina, Miss Violet, and Harriot Stanly that Tenney most overtly reveals her own complicity with certain elements of patriarchy. If she characterizes Dorcas at the end of the novel as rejecting the limited role of the True Woman in turn-of-the-century America, Tenney maintains most heartily the encoding of racial difference. In fact, there is a necessary hierarchy of women in her vision. Harriot may not have a perfect life, but she does have significant status as conveyed by the title of “Mrs.” Dorcas, in comparison, “found herself alone, as it were, on the earth. The pleasing delusion which she had all her life fondly cherished, of experiencing the sweets of connubial love, had now entirely vanished, and she became pensive, silent and melancholy” (322). She has rejected her former ways and turned from romance to realism, but she is self-condemning: “I have not charms sufficient to engage the heart of any man” (322). Her transformation is, at best, one of repentance. Yet Dorcas Sheldon's ostensible transformation at the novel's conclusion is, in turn, dependent upon a contrast not only with Harriot but also with Miss Violet. Whereas the African American woman has been depicted as indiscriminately gliding from man to man and is ultimately silenced by her status, and thereby easily erased from the text itself, Dorcas Sheldon has risen above the dominant culture's expectations of her as a woman. Because she remains single, she may be considered a grotesque by her culture, but she can still claim a certain status in the community because of her wealth. She uses her money for “acts of benevolence and charity” (323), thus gaining the status of Good Woman if not of Married Woman. It is Miss Violet who is cast as the inherently and unredeemed grotesque figure through the negative depiction of her sexuality and ultimately through her textual elision. What began as a novel notable for its exposure of the diverse nature of difference in eighteenth-century U.S. culture descends into an unresolved fracturing of narrative perspective. Ironically, when the carnival ends and Tenney seeks narrative closure, she cannot put all the pieces back together again. She cannot manage to fully liberate Dorcas from patriarchal strictures precisely because the decolonization process meant to be effected by the instigation of carnival has been predicated upon a return to colonialist measures.

Notes

1. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins, introduction to Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, ed. Nienkamp and Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xiv-xv. Subsequent references to Female Quixotism will be given in the text.

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 4-5. Subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

3. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 36.

4. Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 213-29.

5. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132, 188.

6. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53-76.

7. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

8. Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 121.

9. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133-34.

10. Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

11. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 39. Barbara Welter's important essay casts its dates as 1820 to 1860 (see “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 [Summer 1966]: 57-70); texts such as The Coquette (1797) and Female Quixotism (1801) suggest that the ideology emerged in the late eighteenth century.

12. Nelson, 18.

13. Quoted in Gary B. Nash, et al., eds., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 1: 254.