Reading Female Readers: The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism

These two novels offer clues to the idea of the reader and to the understanding of the nature of the reading act in the eighteenth-century context. Because they take the fiction they read as models of the world, both protagonists violate emerging rules for reading fiction. The results of such rule breaking, however, are quite different in each case. While Lennox’s Arabella is certainly whimsical and regarded as nearly mad by many other characters in the novel, she is also fascinating and powerful; she is frequently able to control her suitors’ behavior—getting them to collude in her fantasies— because they fear alienating her. Tenney’s Dorcas (or Dorcasina, as she calls herself) rarely exercises such power; she is more often taken advantage of by her suitors. And while Arabella is ultimately reformed so that she can marry the man she loves, Dorcasina ends her story alone.The two novels thus present somewhat different pictures of the effects of novel-reading. In Lennox’s novel, the female reader, though deluded, is not entirely removed from the world around her and can be recuperated into social life in the end. In Tenney’s novel, by contrast, such recuperation and reintegration has become impossible. This difference implies an underlying difference in the responses to the theory of reading at work in each novel. While the major elements of the theory remain constant, each novel depicts one particular element as more dominant than others. In turn, that shift in emphasis can be seen as connected to the political contexts of each novel: the quixotic female reader serves as a figure for political instability, and the threat posed by her quixotic reading becomes more or less dangerous depending on the contemporary political climate and on the authorial audience. Ultimately, the political context of each novel shapes how the communities depicted within the novel as well as authorial readers are expected to respond to a mad reader