Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote and Orthodox Quixotism

Abstract

Chapters 3 through 6 focus on texts that deploy the quixote trope in ways that subvert its orthodox use. But before investigating these texts, I will use this chapter to flesh out my argument about orthodox quixote narratives that reject the practice of quixotism. I focus here on Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella (1752), now the most widely read eighteenth-century female quixote narrative, in part to question the current critical consensus that celebrates Arabella’s quixotism as a strategy to subvert patriarchal oppression. I begin, however, with a series of female quixote narratives written fifty years later: Maria Edgeworth’s Angelina; or, L’Amie Inconnue (1801), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), and Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine: Or, Adventures of Cherubina (1813). These novels differ from one another in many ways. They imagine different audiences (Edgeworth’s text aims at adolescents¹), their female quixotes suffer different fates, one was written for an American readership (Tenney published her novel in Boston), and, most significantly, the early nineteenth-century narratives participate in an Anglo-American culture significantly changed from that in which Lennox’s text appeared.²