"High and Noble Adventures": Reading the Novel in "The Female Quixote"

Abstract

Near end of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, heroine Arabella falls into a dangerous fever, consequence of having thrown herself into Thames to escape-for sake of her immortal Glory-the ravishers she imagines are pursuing her (363). Afraid that she is near death, she desir[es] with great Earnestness Assistance of some worthy to prepare her for this eventuality (366). Though Arabella does recover the Health of her Body, Divine is yet more concerned with Cure of Arabella's Mind (368), warned as he has been by her lover Mr. Glanville of Disorders Romances had occasion'd in her Imagination (367). Indeed, Arabella herself, chastened by her recent illness, charges Divine to instruct, not compliment her, commanding him to discover me to myself (370). lecture that follows, however, is not, ostensibly, one of moral instruction, but rather a lesson in genre, for as Divine repudiates one form of fiction-the romance whose heroic principles have proven so dangerous to Arabella-he elevates another. Declaring that The only Excellence of Falshood ... is its Resemblance to Truth (378), he recommends to Arabella those fictions that truly serve as copies of and thus models of conduct (377).' Divine's advice thus complicates insistent binaries-the oppositions between romance and real life, fiction and truth-that have seemed to inform Female Quixote, and on which its satiric portrayal of its heroine depends. For romance is not only kind of fiction that circulates in this narrative: though Arabella must give up her romances, it is not real life that she must learn to love, but novels. This lesson in genre, echoing and even quoting discussions of novel by Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson, clearly locates Female Quixote within controversy surrounding status of fiction at mid-century associated with Richardson's and Henry Fielding's competing claims to generic novelty. Feminist literary histories of novel in eighteenth century often position women writers as outside of a dominant literary tradition, characterizing their fiction as necessarily marginal, resistant, or silenced. Yet these critical strategies obscure continuing controversy over definitive form of new fiction and participation of women writers in this debate, and risk rendering both genre and gender monolithic and ahistorical. Unhappy with this paradigm for either literary history or feminist criticism, I want to challenge its assumptions by bringing questions of generic change and gender difference to bear upon one another. By placing Female Quixote within controversy over new fiction, and seeing Lennox as representative of peculiar position of women writing after Richardson and Fielding, we can