"Women Love to Have Their Own Way": Delusion, Volition, and "Freaks" of Sight in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism

Abstract

Without denying the conservatism of Female Quixotism on such themes as class and nationality, this essay attends to contradictory impulses in the text that work against retrenchment and mark this novel as relatively progressive on matters of gender. Female Quixotism can easily be read as an indictment of sentimental novels and their reputed deleterious effects on female readers or, in a more progressive vein, as a counter to that attack. Tenney addresses not simply the isolation of women who read sentimental fiction but that of all educated women. In this essay, I read Dorcasina as a comic figure who nonetheless registers sober truths about the affective and social options that women faced in late eighteenth-century America. Do the delusions of Tenney's heroine enable intentionality and permit some degree of control over one's story? A lack of such control is precisely what early American seduction novels obsessively and simultaneously mourned and exhorted to the (female) reading public.