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Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection

1982; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sec.1982.0020

1938-6133

Leland E. Warren,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection LELAND E. WARREN The glory of women is, to make themselves but little talked of: very different from men, who play, with an unabashed countenance, upon the great theatre of the world, all the parts which the passions dispose them to. Women should only act, as one may say, behind the cur­ tains: they cannot appear upon the stage until particular circum­ stances lead them there.1 As a conventional mid-eighteenth-century view of a woman's proper public life, this passage helps us to see the particular madness of the Lady Arabella, Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote. Gorging herself on French romances in bad translations, "she was taught to believe, that Love was the ruling Principle of the World; that every other Passion was subordi­ nate to this; and that it caused all the Happiness and Miseries of Life. Her Glass, which she often consulted, always showed her a Form so extremely lovely, that, not finding herself engaged in such Adventures as were com­ mon to Heroines in the Romances she read, she often complained of the Insensibility of Mankind, upon whom her charms seemed to have so little Influence."2 Curing her is difficult, for she has "such a strange Facility in reconciling every Incident to her own fantastic Ideas that every new Ob­ ject added Strength to the fatal Deception she laboured under" (p. 340). Her conduct then exemplifies an eighteenth-century view of madness. Madmen, Locke wrote, "err as men do that argue right from wrong prin­ ciples. For by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fan­ cies for realities, they make right deductions from them."3 But Arabella's fantasy, if comic, is potentially more dangerous than such commonly cited cases as those of the man who wouldn't urinate for fear he would drown the world or of the man who refused contact with others because he thought himself made of glass.4 For Arabella's fantasy is a shareable one, and the novel's satire on romance could have a point only because its 367 368 / WA R R E N audience could see romance's false vision as contagious. The female mind, the novel implies, will all too easily embrace a fantasy that sub­ verts the role women are expected to play.5 But Arabella's story also outlines the conditions of female life that en­ courage the production of fantasy. A victim of her father's determination to create a paragon who will offset memories of the hopelessly corrupt world that has forced him into a bitter retirement, she is reared in com­ plete isolation. At seventeen, when her story begins, she is beautiful and intelligent, but also mad; for by effectively emptying her life of people and events with which she might have fashioned a self-image, her father has driven her to romances for the materials of such a definition. Con­ vinced that she is a haughty and domineering heroine, Arabella now speaks the fantastic language of romance, establishing a mental dissocia­ tion paralleling the physical dissociation forced upon her by a wellmeaning father. In his effort to keep out all corruption, her father has also excluded the "weight" of reality that, as we shall see, was thought particu­ larly necessary to keep a woman from derangement. Miriam Rossiter Small has lamented the "aura of romanticism" that pre­ vents The Female Quixote from treating "characters, especially people of fashion . . . more incisively."6 Of course, the story does read more like a fable than a novel of manners, but there is evidence that Arabella's situa­ tion, its causes, and her response to it are grounded in social reality. If Arabella must resort to a ready-made fantasy to find a discourse through which she can shape her life, eighteenth-century women were similarly driven toward isolating modes of speaking by being denied access to the language of public affairs. And the confused motives for the maledominated world's forcing women toward inert discourse is reflected in the actions of the various male characters in the novel who, intentionally or not, help maintain Arabella...