"My Authority": Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in "The Female Quixote"

Abstract

The purpose of this paper to re-open, from feminist perspective, the question of female madness (specifically, hysteria) in The Female Quixote, question that has been largely elided in the current criticism. It has been commonplace to consider Charlotte Lennox's novel as primarily an emplotment of female in which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, a young woman with no opportunities for action and with little companionship imagines, on the basis of her reading of romance, world in which she can claim enormous significance (535). Spacks reads the character of Arabella, the romance-devouring heroine of The Female Quixote, as an active signifier of female desire for things historically reserved exclusively for men: fame, and influence, heroic status. It this desire, in fact, that must be tamed if Arabella to take her allotted place in male-centered society that defines woman not as signifier of desire but as the object of male desire-as the empty space to be filled up by male desire. Arabella must, in other words, learn to trade romance for reality, her plot of female ambition for plot of feminine submission.1 While Arabella's quixotic commingling of reality and fiction certainly voices sanative desire for an authority not granted her by society, it betrays more deeply her entrapment within patriarchal models of authority. Denied position from which to act, Arabella mimes romance discourse that aggressively relegates women to passive roles defined by men, especially the role of helpless victim who needs to be rescued prior to being loved. In this sense, Arabella's exaggerated romantic discourse and code of behavior suggest female hysteria, an Irigarayan hyper-mimesis of male economy of desire in which woman serves as the sign of difference and lack. The major premise of Arabella's romantic code founded on female desirability to men rather than the female ability-or rightto desire independently of men. Arabella herself asserts that and authority are only given to her by men: My authority, she tells Glanville in response to his doubts concerning her influence over Mr. Selvin in book 8, is founded upon the absolute Power he has given me over him, and she makes similar statements about her power over Glanville himself and Sir George. In addition, Arabella