Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox's "The Female Quixote"

Abstract

heightened for eighteenth-century writers, especially aware that their novels were not only given shape by, but were shaping, their form-was not to dissect romance, but to use it to define the novel. Romance meant different things to different novelists, but for none of them was it exact; none of them needed it to be. Romance was what the novel was not: everything we do not understand or are unwilling to imitate. The utility of romance consisted precisely in its vagueness; it was the chaotic negative space outside the novel that determined the outlines of the novel's form. To novelists, and, they hoped, to their readers, the novel was unified, probable, truly representational because romance was none of these. The contrast between them gave the novel its meaning. Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote: or, the Adventures of Arabella (1752) structures its story on the contrast between the novel and romance. Its heroine, Arabella, is a female quixote-a girl so affected by her reading of romances that they seem to have driven her mad. Yet Arabella's excesses of behavior actually reflect what is wrong with romance. She acts the way she does because she believes in romance and is simply acting out its conventions. Through her, The Female Quixote shows that romance is excessive fiction, so excessive that it is nonsensical, ultimately mad. The silly extravagances of romance that Arabella illustrates are meant as a foil for the novel's strengths. More than simply providing a contrast to the novel, romance acts as a displacement of the novel's problems. Lennox does not explicitly define her novel against romance. Instead, she condemns romance as specious fiction, and covers up the fictiveness of her own form, implying by her blindness to it as a form, that it is real and true. Yet Lennox's equation of romance and fiction attests to a tacit recognition that the problems of romance are the problems of fiction, the novel's as well. By deriding romance, construing it as the realm of excess and nonsense, The Female Quixote veils its own excesses, tries to appear stable and controlled. One way to read Arabella's madness is as a danger the novelist wants