Arabella, The Female Quixote: Beauty in Mediation

No. 486: Saturday, May 2nd, 2015

This slice was originally written for a French publication, simply although the novel information technology concerns was twice translated into French in the xviiith century, it is unknown in France today. Trevor Merrill kindly translated my text into English, and having tweaked information technology a flake, I offering it here equally a modify of footstep from GA-DH material—and a plug for my choice as the near delightful novel ever.

Charlotte Lennox's novels are all of respectable quality, only even Euphemia, composed toward the end of her life from memories of her youth spent in America, is far from equaling her second effort, The Female Quixote; or The Adventures of Arabella (1752) composed when Lennox, whose year of birth is shrouded in mystery, was in her mid-twenties. (Lennox'southward younger gimmicky Fanny Burney also did her best work before the age of thirty.) That The Female person Quixote was reprinted by Oxford's World Classics in 1989 and by Penguin in 2007 owes less to its unique qualities than to a focus on gender that makes piddling distinction between outset- and third-rate "women's fiction."

In the introduction to the Oxford Edition, Margaret Doody sets forth the thesis that the French pastoral and historical romances of the 17th century, notably the interminable novels of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, translations of which were popular in England with both sexes, were particularly attractive to women because they empowered them as equals to men. This equality held not just in the realm of authorship, but within a chivalrous universe where women's authority, derived from the tradition of ladylike love, was effectively superior to that of men.

In contrast, the new realism that appears in the mid-eighteenth century English language novel with Richardson and emerges in the woman's novel with Eliza Haywood'southward The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), submits women to the authorisation of the patriarchy. For Doody the female novelist and reader of Lennox's era had thus to choose between an outdated fantastic paradise and a modernistic realistic Hell. Just this jaundiced view forgets that the female person Bildungsroman that Haywood inaugurated lives on in the eternally pop novels of Jane Austen, who has no difficulty convincing her reader that, despite women's formally inferior condition, married couples can indeed experience 18-carat mutual happiness—as, at the end of The Female Quixote, practise Arabella and her faithful Glanville.

The Female person Quixote will disconcert the reader who expects a gender-bended version of Cervantes' archetype. What Lennox found in the quixotic formula was the secret of creating a uniquely delightful heroine whose folly paradoxically serves to guarantee the extraordinary attractiveness that author and characters unanimously aspect to her, including even her jealous cousin (and Glanville's sis) Charlotte—who shares the author's first name.

The amuse of Lennox's novel is in the offset place verbal. In the works of Scudéry and others that attend Arabella's imagination, a magic spell is cast by the exotic sonorities of the names of legendary warriors and princesses: Oroondates , Philidaspes, Mandana, Cleomedon, Artemisa, Artamenes, Melisintha… an effect amusingly increased past the era's typographical conventions, which the modernistic editions have wisely chosen to maintain, co-ordinate to which all Nouns are capitalized and all proper nouns are in Italics.

Whereas Quixote'southward illusions tend to middle on objects that demand heroic activeness: armies to defeat, giants to slay, damsels to protect…, Arabella's are almost entirely passive, the fantasies of an orphan heiress of 18 who dreams of giving herself, after long trials, to the equivalent of an Alexander or an Artaban. It is only in the ninth and final Part of the novel that, taking equally her model Clelia, who jumped into the Tiber "to preserve herself from Violation past the impious Sextus ," Arabella leaps into the Thames and tries to swim beyond it, an human activity which, by putting her life in danger, leads to the denouement in which she is obliged to renounce her "madness." Up to that point, Arabella had suffered only psychologically from her illusions, which had led her to ascribe to the men around her incongruously heroic roles and obligations dictated by the chivalric laws that govern her novels. Whereas Quixote's effect on those around him is to create an ambiguity between the everyday globe and the globe of chivalry, encouraging Sancho and others to accept part in his game partly in mimetic sympathy and partly in mockery (equally the Duke and Duchess do, sometimes with cruel sense of humour, in the second part), Arabella's illusions remain wholly her own, although several of the men she attracts attempt to sense of humour her extravagant demands.

If Quixote'southward fantasies at once attract and repel united states of america, Arabella'south story encourages us to focus our fantasies on her. Unlike Sir George, who is attracted as much past her fortune every bit by her person, and who pretends to share her "madness" the amend to seduce her, her cousin and fiancé Glanville plays along with her simply because he adores her. His unshakable devotion despite all he endures for her sake seems to provide the states with ever-new proofs of her worthiness. This paradox is accentuated in Sir George's shrewd answer (V, 4) to Glanville'southward accusation that he is cultivating Arabella's whims to make sport of her: "You lot do Lady Bella a much greater Injury than I do . . . by supposing she can ever be an Object of Ridicule and Contempt." George, because he loves Arabella less purely than Glanville, sees her with enough objectivity to sympathise that she actually needs no defense force, for "the Singularity of her Manners is far less disagreeable than the lighter Follies of nearly of her Sexual practice." George, in sum, finds Arabella's eccentricities every bit charming as nosotros practise.

Not for nothing does Lennox constantly insist on her heroine'south physical and moral perfections, on the dazzler of her confront, body, and voice, on the grace that marks her every movement and gesture, on the finesse of her intelligence and wit, on the tenderness of her heart despite her obligatory "cruelty" toward her suitors—a tenderness that Glanville witnesses at the outset in her caring treatment of her male parent when he falls off his equus caballus in I, 10 and during his last disease, in II, 1. Nor are Arabella'southward improvident demands dictated past personal pride or vanity. She would oblige her admirers to alive in a world where all women deserve the same deference as herself, but where she alone realizes this—and seems to us worthy of it.

Cervantes created the mod novel past demonstrating that in order to generate narrative interest in our disenchanted world, the novelist must utilize to it the heroic formulae of medieval romance. Since these formulae vest to a world that cannot be inhabited by the novel'south protagonist, his actions are determined by what René Girard calls in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel  "external mediation"—for the Don, that of Amadis of Gaul—which surrounds these actions with a sacred aura. Even those who do not share the hero's madness are tempted past the possibility of inhabiting this mediation-enchanted universe without having to pay the toll. But Arabella'due south mimetic behavior exercises on the reader a much more direct seduction. Whereas information technology is the Don's second-manus illusions alone that influence us to see sheep as soldiers and a peasant daughter as a princess, Arabella'due south hyperbolic exigencies are guaranteed by the beauty (and wealth) that make her the well-nigh objectively desirable person in the novel.

The power of the narrative premise of a Quixote embodied in a cute adult female is such that Lennox can about do goose egg to jeopardize her dominance over us, even in the near dubious episodes—the one, for instance, in which Arabella strangely imagines that Sir Charles, her fiancé Glanville's father and her uncle (by marriage), is himself in honey with her. This "psychoanalytic" turn is unsettling; Arabella seems to have become like Molière'due south Bélise, seeing lovers everywhere. But that, admitting without dotty intent, Sir Charles is touched past Arabella's beauty is never in doubt. In their very first encounter, Charles contemplates Arabella "with every bit much Admiration equally his Son, though with less Passion" (Ii, 3), and he later calls her "the finest Woman I ever saw in my Life" (VIII, 1). Nor are the other characters to whom Arabella ascribes fanciful qualities—the best case being Edward, the gardener's assistant, who gets himself beaten so banished for having stolen carp from the chateau'due south pond, and whom she persists in taking for a "man of quality" who has disguised himself as a retainer with the intent of carrying her off—in any manner transfigured by her fantasies. Arabella's madness, rather than calculation to the attractiveness of those she submits to the laws of her Scuderian world, only enhances her ain.

That, unlike Quixote's illusions, Arabella'due south are never contagious inside the world of the novel but makes the contagion in the reader'south mind all the stronger. In the novel's concluding book, Sir George comes up with a g stratagem to steal Arabella abroad from Glanville. Having hired an actress to play the role of Cynecia , Princess of Gaul, he arranges to put her in Arabella's path, then has her complain of the adultery of her lover Ariamenes, who has shamefully deserted her. Next, observing Glanville in the vicinity, the "princess" pretends that he is Ariamenes, a lie Arabella would notice it unpardonably discourteous to disbelieve. Although we know that this must be a ruse hatched by Sir George, and that such extreme measures must eventually lead to a fatal confrontation of Arabella's illusions with reality, nosotros relish for the moment the fantasy that the false princess is a existent i—that Arabella has finally by some miracle been allowed to inhabit the fairytale world where she feels then much at home.

The novel'south virtually delicious moment is Book VI, almost entirely devoted to the autobiographical narrative of Sir George, who declares himself the scion of a previously unknown line of "kings of Kent." George, who hopes to win Arabella'due south eye by pretending to truly participate in her imaginary world, claims to have courted, after a pretty milkmaid, 2 illustrious princesses, the first of whom, Sydimiris, he meets but later on having waged a near victorious solo battle against five hundred (!) soldiers of her brother, Prince Marcomire. Sir George tells his story to a public that includes Glanville, Sir Charles, and Charlotte as well as Arabella, and the savor of the ironic reflections that Charles directs at the storyteller comes from the fact that, apart from our heroine, nobody is expected to believe a single word. Arabella'due south credulity adds an air of enchantment to what is later all a wholly plausible chat amongst wealthy and cultivated people in which one of them amuses himself by pastiching the gallant novels of the previous century, with which Sir George shows himself to be enviably familiar.

Our fascination for Arabella is nourished by the paradox that makes us appreciate Sir George's effort to remember upwards a story that will delight her even equally we come to understand that no narrative of this kind could have a chance of touching her. For George cannot accost even the most chaste and discreet words of love to Arabella without violating the accented allegiance he owes to the princesses whose honey he claims to have won. Accordingly, George's tale elicits from her not adoration but increasingly critical reproaches culminating in a severe condemnation. When he attempts to exculpate himself past asserting that he only gave up searching for Philonice subsequently years of unsparing effort, Arabella scornfully condemns him for the lack of delicacy that has allowed him to remain living after such a blow.

What Sir George'due south narrative teaches united states of america is that Arabella is impermeable to seduction. Her "external mediators," the princesses of Mlle de Scudéry, protect her from all temptation past "bad desire." And given her own desirability, Arabella'southward quixotic organization is conspicuously of applied value. It both obliges a true lover to evidence his affection by persevering with very fiddling encouragement, and protects her against temptation by a liaison or a jerky wedlock. We might even interpret—equally does Professor Doody later on a fashion—Arabella's mistaken suspicions of masculine desire, such as those with regard to Sir Charles or Edward, as symptoms of a submerged libido that might otherwise run a risk endangering her virtue. Conversely, when she realizes that she feels, in spite of herself, a growing tenderness for Glanville, we are certain that it is an authentic affection that responds to the real dear of her skilful cousin.

But the value of Arabella's "madness" is not just negative. By freeing her from the "internal mediation" of the world that surrounds her, it liberates in her an originality that in a afterwards age might have made her a queen of manufacture. Rather than following the manner of the day, Arabella adapts her modes of dress from what she imagines to be the styles of the eras in which her novels take place. Equally early as the second chapter, the writer points out the "Singularity" of her dress in which "all the Beauties of her Neck and Shape were set off to the greatest Reward." (Here and elsewhere, Lennox makes information technology articulate that Arabella is non merely beautiful merely sexy.) After, when in 7, 7, a dressmaker acknowledges that she is incapable of imagining the advent of the dress worn by Julia, Emperor Augustus' daughter, Arabella has the dress fabricated to guild by her servants co-ordinate to her own specifications.

Rather than lament with Professor Doody Arabella's loss of "agency" when at the novel's conclusion she renounces her illusions and accepts Glanville's hand in marriage, nosotros have no reason to believe that she has resigned either her independence of mind or her creativity. One could even go so far as to imagine, in accord with the Girardian notion of novelistic "conversion," that in abandoning her illusions even as she understands how they contributed to her unique personal distinction, Arabella would authorize at the terminate of the novel to become a novelist herself—no uncertainty by writing works closer to those of Cervantes than of Mademoiselle de Scudéry.

And despite the inevitably artificial nature of the heroine's "cure" in the novel's penultimate affiliate under the influence of a doctor of the church, whose lessons closely resemble the ideas of the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson, we have no reason not to believe fully in the authenticity of the love shared by the couple that she forms with her long-suffering cousin. Sir George, the deceiver deceived, courted Charlotte Glanville, who had concealed herself beneath Arabella'south veil… but let usa leave to Charlotte Lennox the honour of terminal her novel:

Sir George, entangled in his own Artifices, saw himself under a Necessity of confirming the Promises he had made to Miss Glanville during his Fit of Penitence, and was accordingly married to that young Lady, at the aforementioned time that Mr. Glanville and Arabella were united.

We choose, reader, to express this Circumstance, though the same, in different Words, too to avoid Repetition, as to intimate that the beginning mentioned Pair were indeed only married in the common Acceptation of the Give-and-take, that is, they were privileged to join Fortunes, Equipages, Titles, and Expense; while Mr. Glanville and Arabella were united, also in these, as in every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind.

This uniquely delightful tale, total of the verve of youth, places Charlotte Lennox among the truthful masters—or mistresses—of her art. More than any other novel I know, The Female Quixote makes me wish that its heroine could descend like Galatea from its pages to grace our gray reality.