Female Quixote Research Articles

Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by Joseph F. Bartolomeo (review)

1032 Reviews how, although references later on referto 'fading' and to 'vanishing'. Mason speaks for many of the contributors: 'Editors like consistency. The danger is that we risk sacrificing something of the interpretative potential of what might seem to be messy, incomplete, or untidy stage directions as we regularize, emend, and supplement these fragments of text' (p. 92). In later sections, Edna Zwick Boris notes that the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy changes meaning if Hamlet knows that Claudius and Polonius are spying on him. John C. Meagher points to directions that establish a lClowne and am other' (Qi) rather than one or two gravediggers, and another in which one 'throwes up a shovel' rather than a skull. As for subsequent productions, Alan R. Young traces the use of full portraits of Claudius and King Hamlet in the closet scene rather than miniatures and Iska Alter measures the effects in Kenneth Branagh's film of intervening (and interrupting) flashbacks. Current writing on Shakespeare often concentrates on theatre history and produc? tion, but this is the firststudy to single out the importance of stage directions in understanding, as well as producing, a play like Hamlet. It is a signal contribution to Shakespeare studies. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Arthur F. Kinney Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. By Joseph F. Bartolomeo. Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 242 pp. ?36. ISBN 0-87413-799-3. The purpose of this book is to examine relations between pairs of eighteenth-century novels, in order to illuminate intertextuality between them, and to show the role of gender in shaping that intertextuality. The choices are interesting: Idalia and Ro? xana; Joseph Andrews and David Simple; Clarissa and The Female Quixote; Roderick Random and Evelina; The Monk and The ltalian?a line-up that runs from amatory fiction in the early eighteenth century, through mid-century moral fiction, to later picaresque and sensibility, ending with Gothic. The author engages a little with that plot of novelists in the market place which has recently reshaped the story of the eighteenth-century novel, though he is initially critical of feminist critics fortreating women novelists separately from their male contemporaries, even as he depends on them for setting an agenda about gender. His sampling technique is welcome in so faras it contributes to a history of the novel in which influences are shown to operate across gender lines. He is alert to how women novelists, particularly Lennox, Burney, and Radcliffe, were cautious about identifying with other women writers, and the analysis of Roxana is a valuable reminder that some women writers were sufnciently successful for men to want to copy them. Where the book disappoints is in its limited interest in those aspects of eighteenthcentury culture that both male and female writers were caught up in, aspects which help make more sense of their fictions. In part this comes from restricting analysis to the novels, with patchy reference to biography, and next to no interest in say drama, or phenomena such as masquerading, which other critics have used to good effect in reading novels of the period. In consequence some generalizations are wholly unsupported?on mercenary marriages, for instance, as discussed in Roxana, we are told too simply that 'Defoe and most of his contemporaries would have rejected them' (p. 48). Both Idalia and Roxana are said to articulate a strong, insistent desire for agency, with no curiosity as to why or how that might be related to anything else in the 1720s. In places this indifference to cultural discourses in fictionleads to major problems with the argument, which turns consistently on a questionable unhistorical MLR, 99.4, 2004 1033 humanism. So Roderick Random's description of Narcissa, though usefully com? pared to the blank Orville in Evelina, is said to abandon realism and to be stylized and unconvincing, regardless of how the hero's description of her uses conventions of a blazon in which stylization is what makes sufficientappeal to an eighteenth-century reader. Terms like 'plausible' or 'obscure' are not justified in relation to eighteenthcentury readers but twenty-first-centuryones. None the less, many of the close...

Crypto-judaism, madness, and the female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in mid-eighteenth century England

Crypto-judaism, madness, and the female Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in mid-eighteenth century England

Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination

Three animated Disney features, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, are shown here to reflect an ambivalence about freedom of imagination that may confuse young female viewers. The essay compares these three "girls' movies" with their fairy-tale sources and connects them to similarly ambivalent female narratives of an earlier time, particularly Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. It further suggests that adults concerned about these movies' effects on children ought to look closely at the relationship among elements of dialogue, plot, and image.

Servants and Their Relationship to the Unconscious

When Hester Thrale wanted to talk about James Boswell’s ‘‘presumptuous task,’’ his blow-by-blow recording of the words, actions, and apercus of another for fashioning into biography, a fictional servant recurred to her imagination (as servants will), one who had had a similar task imposed upon her, as part of her contract of employment. In March 1786 Hester Thrale—Mrs. Piozzi she was now—remembered a book she had read in her childhood, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Arabella its eponymous heroine, and her maidservant Lucy. As she pondered that fictional relationship, James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785) had been out for just a few months. His Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was still but a proposal, not to be published until 1791, though le tout monde knew of his ferreting out of material for it. Hester Piozzi was writing from Rome, where a honeymoon tour, undertaken to remove her from embarrassment and ridicule (a widow in her forties, marrying for love! And her daughters’ music

The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella: concerning a Narrative containing much that is Dramatic, and in which an Audience is expected to be extremely interested (and in which the Footnotes are not the least Part)

The article which follows is an experiment in ‘performative writing’. It is the text—with stage directions—of a research paper presented at the University of Leeds on 14 February 2001. The explicit topic of the paper is Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752), a satirical novel based around the adventures of a heroine who runs her life according to the principles of romantic fiction, with devastating consequences for all around her. Lennox's novel considers the reliability of histories and their authors, the extent to which a woman can defy convention and control the narrative of her life, and the humiliation she risks if she attempts to ‘act’ within the public sphere. The presentation examines these questions, whilst drawing on a variety of theatrical strategies to explore a related set of issues: the authority of the (young, female) academic, the impact of formal and less formal ‘voices’ and the research paper as performance event.

British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670 to 1820 (review)

REVIEWS237 together to provide a fairly coherent general argument about Austen's exposure of the quiet evils of domestic tyranny. Although Seeber might identify the desire for a seamless argument as a monologic one, this more fully developed segment of the book highlights die relative lack of unity in the other parts. A chapter on polyphonic play in Mansfield Park's depiction of Lover's Vows looks decidedly out ofplace in the section on the "other heroine"; chapters as short as three to six pages seem to end abruptly; and quotations threaten to overwhelm the main text at many points. What Seeber wants readers to see is an Austen who is "both conservative and radical at the same time" (p. 14). The vision of a two-sided or multivalent Austen is, however, not one that even Seeber can sustain. While the book highlights the contradictory nature ofAusten's writings, it ultimately enlists dialogism to depict a particular kind of Austen, one who dialogizes in order to criticize, one who deliberately destabilizes and disrupts novelistic techniques in order to call attention to the construction of reality. For those who already perceive Austen as subversive, this study will provide additional support; other readers will no doubt be offended by the disjointed presentation and resist its angle ofvision. Audrey Bilger Claremont McKenna College Devoney Looser. British Women Writers and the Writing ofHistory, 1670 to 1820. BaltimoreJohns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xi + 272pp. US$45.00. ISBN 0-8018-6448-8. This book assesses women's contributions to the writing of history from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Devoney Looser argues that a broad conceptualization of historical discourse will reveal many contributions that are otherwise neglected: "Countless female authored essays, secret histories, conduct books, biographies, memoirs, travel narratives, historical translations, fictional narratives, and poems responded to, participated in, and contributed to the development of history writing during the long eighteenth century" (p. 16). In the course ofdiscussing these writings, Looser gives extended consideration to Lucy Hutchinson 's Memoirs ofthe Life ofColonel Hutchinson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Turkish Embassy Letters," Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote, Catherine Macaulay's The History ofEnglandfrom the Revolution to the Present Time: In a Series ofLetters to a Friend (not her eight-volume History ofEnglandfrom the Accession ofJames I), Hester Lynch Piozzi's Retrospection, and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. In addition to analysing particular texts, Looser surveys more generally the place of history in each writer's intellectual outlook. 238EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION14:2 The view that there is a "characteristic women's relationship to history" is rejected (p. 7); instead of seeking uniformity, Looser analyses her selected writers' varying "political commitments and class affiliations, their perceptions of developing genres and markets, and their ability to manipulate authorial circumstances and reputations" (p. 8). The reception given to each writer is discussed and failures are explained in relation to contemporary market conditions. For example, Looser describes Piozzi's Retrospection as "culled haphazardly from a host of works, most of them accessible to contemporary readers, though some (apparently unknown to Piozzi) were sadly out of fashion" (p. 156). The work's failure, however, results from Piozzi's lack of understanding of her audience: "Piozzi's contributions to historiography in the form of historical anecdotes or 'meditations upon history,' were not recognized as properly historical by a public that increasingly looked to women writers of national history to address other women or children, to turn history into appropriate moral lessons, and to defer to historical authorities" (p. 156). On the other hand,Jane Austen's novelistic success results from her having "positioned her writings in a way that gave them extraordinary posthumous staying power in literary history. To attribute this fact to the universality of her subject matter or to her literary genius is to ignore her professional savvy and ultimate generic good fortune " (p. 203) . The analyses ofreception throughout this book tell us much about the shifting and gendered conceptions ofhistory over the period considered . Furthermore, the book makes a plausible, if not always conclusive, case that our views about the importance of historical texts are the product of the literary marketplace. The shadow of the novel...

"Falling into Fiction": Reading Female Quixotism

"Falling into Fiction": Reading Female Quixotism

Women's Reading in Britain : 1750-1835 : A Dangerous Recreation... by Jacquelyn Pearson (review)

Book Reviews273 Although I lack the competence to evaluate the importance of the scientific materials at hand, I can say that some of Renooz's ideas are appealing, such as the interconnectedness of what are routinely defined as separate disciplines . Allen's approach to these writers has a certain resonance with the ideas ofsuch thinkers as contemporary psychologist, Jean Baker Miller, with her theory ofthe self-in-relation, and the Franco-Antillian critic and novelist, Edouard Glissant, whose Poetics ofRelation looks for a synthesis-genesis of continued connection. Although there are some minor proofreading problems ("Renooz would broach no opposition" should be "Renooz would brook no opposition" 1 1 7), Allen's work shows a meticulous reading. He is clearly taken with his subjects and writes lovingly of their struggles to create an enduring discursive self-in-relation, entering into dialogue with each ofthem in relating their poignant stories. The book should provoke interest in nineteenth-century literary history or women's studies. Margot MillerHood College Pearson, Jacquelyn. Women's Reading in Britain :1750-1835 : A Dangerous Recreation... Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. ISBN: 0-521-58439-6. Pp. 300. In Women's Reading in Britain: 1750-1835, Jacqueline Pearson examines the symbolic nature ofthe reading woman during a period of increasing female literacy. Her analysis of both fictional and historical women readers seeks to ". . . clarif[y] our understanding of women's cultural position in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. . ." while at the same time allowing us to comprehend ". . . better the authors, male as well as female, who wrote with this audience in mind" (iv). As the book's subtitle, "A Dangerous Recreation ," reminds us, reading women were not always viewed favorably in contemporary novels, essays and conduct books or even in the testimonies of women readers themselves. Nevertheless, female literacy and the art of reading were often credited by these same sources as contributing to the creation of the "domestic woman" of the nineteenth century. This persistent ambivalence to the image ofthe reading woman serves as the book's primary focus and reflects cultural transformations in early nineteenth-century Britain which reach beyond the question ofgender and literacy. Through well-documented examples from a wide range of texts, Pearson aptly demonstrates that the contradictory attitudes in this debate resist classification either by gender or political perspective. Women writers may treat the subject of the reading woman with greater skepticism than do their male colleagues. Similarly , both liberal and conservative writers adopt ambiguous stances on the value ofreading novels. As Pearson's argument develops, however, it appears that the contested area is not the act of reading itself, but rather the choice of texts and the circumstances in which reading occurs. The conservative Hannah More's 274Women in French Studies ideal woman is "a reader, but a reader compliant to both domestic ideology and the authority ofthe author" (89). Thus, the ability to read is often associated with the qualities of a good wife and mother. Literacy may even be consider an asset for servants as documented in a 1773 manual where it is noted that a lady's maid should be able to "read well aloud" (186). Concerning the types ofreading appropriate for women, it is not surprising that the novel provokes the most contentious responses. Pearson lays out the parameters of this cultural debate convincingly in a chapter devoted to women and novel reading. By concentrating on four specific texts (Lennox's The Female Quixote, Barrett's The Heroine, Austen's Northanger Abbey, and Green's Scotch Novel Reading), she assists her readers in following the evolution ofthis debate over the almost 100 year time span under study. Similarly, chapters on where and how women should read or the "perils and pleasures" of reading as documented in the memoirs and correspondence of historical women readers offer fascinating insights into both the real and symbolic value of a woman engaged in the act of reading. For example, the "elision oftextuality and sexuality," (ix) a recurrent motifthroughout the book, takes on a new dimension when we discover that the prohibition against reading in bed relates not only to a metaphorical presumption ofsensuality but also to the risk offalling asleep while...

Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (review)

108 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 To construct a picture of "Georgian libertinism" almost entirely out of Fielding's works and twentieth-century criticism of them seems to me profoundly misguided methodology. Robert D. Hume Pennsylvania State University Brian McCrea. Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1998. 242pp. US$39.50. ISBN 0-87413-656-3. Brian McCrea's readings of a set of now-canonical eighteenth-century novels constitute part of a useful collégial dialogue with recent feminist critics. After opening with consideration of Don Quixote and Paradise Lost, McCrea looks at Moll Flanders, Roxana, The Female Quixote, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Clarissa, Evelina, and A Simple Story, frequently disagreeing, politely, with Patricia Meyer Spacks, Margaret Anne Doody, Terry Castle, and Eleanor Ty, among others. He is concerned that feminist readings have unduly totalized "patriarchy" and he seeks to present a more historicized understanding of the vagaries of patriarchy in the eighteenth century, particularly as they affected the novel. He is struck by the fact that many of the characters who seem to represent patriarchal power in novels have troubles and worries of their own that make them weak and incapable of exerting power or unwilling to do so. Having read recent social history about the "demographic crisis" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , he is also struck by the many novelistic plots featuring families in which there is no son to inherit father's estate. In contrast to feminist critics who have stressed patriarchal power as oppressive to daughters (and wives), McCrea finds the impetus of the eighteenth-century novel in "the absence rather than the presence of patriarchal authority" (p. 18). Patriarchs lacking biological sons are tempted to experiment with fictive filiations, as in Burney's Cecilia, where Cecilia Beverley 's uncle famously writes a will making her his heiress, but requiring any future husband who wishes to enjoy her inheritance to take the Beverley name. McCrea has a thorough familiarity with the canonical novels and offers more detailed close reading than many recent critics; his attention to male characters he thinks feminist critics have tended to overlook is valuable, especially his attention to Lord M. in Clarissa, Sir John Belmont in Evelina, and Dorriforth in A Simple Story. For instance, he points out that despite Evelina's obeisance to Sir John in the recognition scene, Sir John is not able to derivejoy from the discovery of his child or even to endure her presence, being "wounded rather than healed by events" (p. 150) and anxious to secure the marriage and acceptance of his "fictive daughter," Polly Green. Evelina McCrea reads as recognizing both biological and fictive kinship, as Evelina honours both her foster-father, Mr Villars, and her biological REVIEWS 109 father, Sir John, and recognizes her fictive sister, Polly. A Simple Story, in contrast, McCrea sees as dedicated to revealing "the cost ofthose 'pious fictions' ofkinship practiced by the eighteenth-century elite" (p. 17 1), as Dorriforth becomes a victim when he has to give up his priestly vocation and his name in order to become Lord Elmwood. Similarly, in The Female Quixote, McCrea looks closely at Glanville to argue that in his "peculiar status ... Lennox complicates any attempt to place a patriarch at the novel's center" (p. 155). He rightly emphasizes Glanville's willingness to enter (partially) into Arabella's "sign system" and Glanville's reservations about older patriarchal duelling codes, generally finding the marriage of Arabella and Glanville more euphoric than recent feminist critics have. Although generally interested in the instability of signs, McCrea here I think misses the richness and subtlety of Lennox's comedy, which poignantly shows us moment after moment when Glanville's language of realistic "common sense" misses truths for which Arabella's romance language has words. For example, when Arabella speaks to the "prostitute" at Vauxhall, a young girl who is being sadistically terrorizedby a naval officer and scoffed at by the crowd, only Arabella can see her fear, her "Woe," and that she is, indeed, an "Unfortunate." That in her marriage to Glanville Arabella will be able to "'use...

New Essays on Samuel Richardson, and: The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, and: Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in "Clarissa", and: Samuel Richardson's New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and "Native" Virtue (review)

Reviewed by: New Essays on Samuel Richardson, and: The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, and: Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in “Clarissa”, and: Samuel Richardson’s New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and “Native” Virtue Janine Barchas Rivero, Albert J., ed. New Essays on Samuel Richardson. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Pp. 232. $26.00 cloth. Fysh, Stephanie. The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson. (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1997). Pp. 156. $29.50 cloth. Frega, Donnalee. Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in “Clarissa.” (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Pp. 177. $24.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Chung, Ewha. Samuel Richardson’s New Nation: Paragons of the Domestic Sphere and “Native” Virtue. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998). Pp. 162. $36.95 cloth. Two common factors unite these diverse books on Samuel Richardson: their expansion of the traditional Richardsonian canon and their lack of engagement with the field’s formerly dominant critical methodologies. Indeed, these two factors may be related, in that the receding tide of Marxist and Deconstructionist theory may be revealing new contours in the landscape of Richardson studies. Three of the four books explore beyond Pamela and Clarissa: they devote significant attention to Richardson’s lesser-known Grandison and to his private correspondence, dare repeatedly to venture into the relatively uncharted realms of Pamela II and The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, and even consider the significance of physical Richardsoniana such as waxworks, fans, and paintings. [End Page 471] New Essays on Samuel Richardson, edited by Albert J. Rivero, represents the best of the new perspective. It is a deep vein of outstanding scholarship which should be mined by anybody with an interest in Richardson. The absence of overarching theoretical frameworks in these essays (Jocelyn Harris’ invocation of theories of the carnivalesque is an exception) places a premium upon precise analysis and argument, and it is a premium that these essays deliver. It also encourages the contributors to look at Richardson from new angles. Three essays present Richardson in a guise other than printer-novelist: Peter Sabor gives an account of the autobiographical revelations and inventions in the correspondence with Johannes Stinstra; Kevin L. Cope probes and problematizes Richardson as an aphorist; and Howard D. Weinbrot positions Richardson as a satirist by investigating the portrait of Elias Brand. In complimenting studies of literary influence, Florian Stuber asserts that Richardson, like Fielding, draws upon Cervantes in his Pamela II, while Joseph F. Bartolomeo reveals how Clarissa, in turn, influences Lennox’s The Female Quixote. Two essays concern Richardson’s mentoring of young female writers: Tom Keymer chronicles the author’s relationship with Jane Collier while John A. Dussinger speculates about Richardson’s contributions to a novel by Anna Meades. A final pair of essays reflect on closure in Grandison: Lois A. Chaber draws eloquently upon the sister arts of landscape and music in her discussion of the novel’s subversive ending, while Rivero posits Clementina’s ultimate association with “unnatural” romance. The volume also highlights what has emerged as a key critical tension in mainstream Richardson studies—the reading of sex and gender issues that animate the novels. John Allen Stevenson and Jocelyn Harris, for example, both focus on the ghastly carcass of Mrs. Sinclair in their discussions of physicality (90, 102). But while Stevenson deploys Sinclair’s death to illustrate a gnostic rejection of sex and the body that unites Lovelace and Clarissa, Harris connects the Sinclair passage to classical and modern literary templates for pornographic sexuality. Similarly, Jerry C. Beasley and Michael F. Suarez illustrate the critical debate over feminism in Richardson. On the one had, anyone who would argue the proto-feminism of Richardson will have to address Beasley’s claims that the author robs his heroines of their radicalism by reintegrating them into patriarchy through marriage (albeit as Christ’s bride in Clarissa). On the other hand, Suarez’s contrary reading of Clarissa asserts that the heroine’s assertion of negative power—“nay-saying” and, ultimately, death—allows her a form of feminist triumph over the “patterns of infantilization” in the novel (69). It is at such points...

Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and the Reception of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote in the Popular Press

(2000). Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson, and the Reception of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote in the Popular Press. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 27-32.

Personal Identity, Narrative, and History: The Female Quixote and Redgauntlet

Personal Identity, Narrative, and History: The Female Quixote and Redgauntlet

The Theater of Politeness in Charlotte Lennox's British-American Novels

Charlotte Lennox's literary life is flanked like book-ends by two novels set in the 1740s, which juxtapose the conduct of British society in the metropolis with that of Britons in Colonial Albany, Schenectady, and New York. Writing in England, where she attained fame (though not, it seems, popularity or fortune) as the author of The Female Quixote and as a member of Dr. Johnson's literary circle, Lennox was one of the few to describe this particular American frontier as it appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century from the woman's perspective on the basis of her own memories of living there (Berg 369). Like her British-American heroines, Lennox was raised in Colonial Albany as the daughter of a lieutenant of the British Independent Company at the fort, sent to an aunt in England as a young girl, and later married to a despotick ne'er-do-well. Harriot Stuart (1750) and Euphemia (1790) have consequently been regarded as at least partly autobiographical and used to flesh out the little we know about Charlotte's life.1

The Space of Romance in Lennox's Female Quixote

The Space of Romance in Lennox's Female Quixote

Passport to Duke

Editor’s Introduction The following text was prepared by Pierre Bourdieu for delivery at a conference on his work held at Duke University, April 21–23, 1995. Entitled “Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,” the conference was sponsored by the Duke Graduate Program in Literature and included such well‐known literary scholars as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson. Bourdieu, of course, was the invited guest of honor, but was uncertain as to whether he should make the effort of attending, particularly since he was recovering from a short period of poor health. As I too had been invited (and seemed more familiar with the American scene), Bourdieu discussed the question with me in Paris.He was rather concerned about wrongheaded, trendy applications of his theories by American literary scholars, who often misunderstand his work because they simply do not know the intellectual landscape to which it relates. Reading such conference paper titles as “Cross‐Dressing for Success: The Scramble for Symbolic Power in Tabitha Sweeney’s Female Quixotism,” Bourdieu confessed his fear of being taken as simply the French intellectual flavor of the month, one whose theory is used simply as grist for the American academy’s industrious mills of literary interpretation.He ultimately decided to send the following text to be read at the conference in his absence. It treats, with polite frankness, his worries about being misinterpreted through importation into the American theoretical field with its peculiar conception of French philosophy; Bourdieu’s paper situates these particular worries within a more general account of “allodoxic”distortions caused by the international travel of theory; but it also tries to prevent further misunderstanding by offering a brief contextualization of his theory and a brief summary of his method of analysis through fields. The translation of Bourdieu’s text was prepared by Loïc Wacquant, and is presented here with only minor adjustments.

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

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

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

"My Authority": Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote Thomas H. Schmid University ofTexas at El Paso The purpose ofthis paper is to re-open, from a feminist perspective, the question of female "madness" (specifically, "hysteria") in The Female Quixote, a 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 power 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, a 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 a female desire for things historically reserved exclusively for men: fame, power and influence, heroic status. It is this desire, in fact, that must be tamed if Arabella is to take her allotted place in a male-centered society that defines woman not as a 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 a plot of feminine submission.1 While Arabella's quixotic commingling of reality and fiction certainly voices a sanative desire for an authority not granted her by society, it betrays more deeply her entrapment within patriarchal models of authority. Denied a position from which to act, Arabella mimes a 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 a male economy of desire in which woman serves as the sign of difference and lack. The major premise of Arabella's romantic code is founded on female desirability to men rather than the female ability—or right— to desire independently of men. Arabella herself asserts that power 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 21 22Rocky Mountain Review refers such power transactions back to romance conventions she takes for reality: "the Empire of Love," she says, "is govern'd by Laws of its own" (320). The authority of romance fictions allows Arabella both to plot her own desirability and to forestall the fulfillment of male desire through her (since such fulfillment would essentially signify the end of her power). But as female Quixote, Arabella ultimately uses romance to mirror herself to herself as the perennial object of male desire ; in so doing, she unwittingly participates in a version of female hysteria: what Toril Moi calls the miming of her "own sexuality in a masculine mode" and the "specular representation of herself as a lesser male" (135). What is striking in Arabella's experience, in other words, is not so much the way she views the world from the standpoint of a coherent subject seeking power and influence, as the way she views the world viewing her, and desiring to act upon her. For this reason, as we shall see in the latter half of this essay, Arabella's entire experience and "world view" are predicated on the male gaze, which Arabella both desires and imitates at crucial moments throughout the novel. What I hope to show is that such imitation is a conditioned response for Arabella, an "hysterical" symptom of what society already requires of her: passivity, charm, and a "pure" desirability that cannot itself desire. In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray argues that woman is caught within the specular logic of patriarchal discourse and desire , forced to experience her own desire only in terms of phallic equivalency: "the expectation that she may at last come to possess...

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

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

Rereading the Patriarchal Text: The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey , and the Trace of the Absent Mother

I n an attempt to create community of women readers, writers, and critics who can construct literary discourse amenable to feminist concerns, Patrocinio Schweickart proposes gender-coded dual reading strategy. When reading certain (not all) male texts, feminists should invoke a dual hermeneutic: negative hermeneutic that discloses [the texts'] complicity with patriarchal ideology, and positive hermeneutic that recuperates the utopian moment ... from which they draw significant portion of their emotional power. By thus bifurcating their responses, claims Schweickart, feminists can practise Judith Fetterley's resistance to the immasculation that normally uses the woman reader

Coming to a Bad End: Sentimentalism, Hermeneutics, and The Female Quixote

Coming to a Bad End: Sentimentalism, Hermeneutics, and The Female Quixote