The Influence of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 Between Life and Literature: The Influence of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction Victoria Tomasulo The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1471 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BETWEEN LIFE AND LITERATURE: THE INFLUENCE OF DON QUIXOTE AND MADAME BOVARY ON TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN’S FICTION by VICTORIA TOMASULO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2016 © 2016 VICTORIA TOMASULO All rights reserved ii BETWEEN LIFE AND LITERATURE: THE INFLUENCE OF DON QUIXOTE AND MADAME BOVARY ON TWENTIETH-CENTURY WOMEN’S FICTION by VICTORIA TOMASULO This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Evelyne Ender____________________ ___________ ____________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Dr. Giancarlo Lombardi________________ -__________ _______________________________________ Date Executive Officer Dr. Evelyne Ender_________________________ Dr. Giancarlo Lombardi_____________________ Dr. Monica Calabritto_______________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract Between Life and Literature: The Influence of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction by Victoria Tomasulo Advisor: Evelyne Ender This project demonstrates the influence of two foundational novels in the Western canon, Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, on twentieth-century British, Italian, and Anglo- American women’s fiction. Both novels illustrate the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist literary critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative power of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identities, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. Drawing upon textual and paratextual evidence such as interviews, journal entries, and essays, I argue that novels as groundbreaking as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio (1948), and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) appropriate key motifs from Don Quixote and Madame Bovary to represent a woman writer’s impossible quest for self-representation in a male literary tradition. Emphasizing the formative effect that Don Quixote and Madame Bovary had on the literary imagination of twentieth-century women writers, my study offers a new perspective on the emergence and development of feminist metafiction, a genre which scholars have located within and as an agonistic response to the traditional British canon. iv Acknowledgements Pursuing a PhD is always a quixotic quest. My love for my sons, Jude and Blake, as well as my passion for my topic, inspired me to continue writing and researching even when these seemed like futile activities. I am indebted to Dr. Evelyne Ender for her patience and persistence in helping me realize my vision. While her exacting standards pushed my dissertation in the right direction, her encouragement enabled me overcome my own “anxiety of authorship.” Dr. Giancarlo Lombardi’s insights on the Italian chapters and his enthusiasm about my project have also proved invaluable. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Clare Carroll and Dr. Nancy K. Miller, who worked with me during my oral examinations, and to Dr. Monica Calabritto, for agreeing to be this dissertation’s third reader. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, and The Woman Writer, 1 PART ONE: REIMAGINING DON QUIXOTE, 18 1: ‘Afflicted with a Love of Literature:’ Woolf’s Orlando as a Quixotic Novel, 19 2: Searching for the Body: Kathy Acker’s Postfeminist Quixote, 51 3: Quixotism and Bovarysme in Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio, 82 PART TWO: REIMAGINING EMMA BOVARY, 113 1: The Adulterous Female Reader in Italian and American Women’s Fiction, 114 1. Madame Bovary as Hypotext to Feminist Fiction, 114 2. Resisting Readers of Madame Bovary, 125 1) Alba de Céspedes’s Alessandra Corteggiani, 125 2) Dorothy Bryant’s Ella Price, 144 3. Sexual/Textual Seductions, 154 1) Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing, 154 2) Dacia Maraini’s Marianna Ucrìa, 168 4. Beyond Bovarysme, 179 Conclusion: Reimagining the Female Imaginary, 183 Bibliography, 190 vi INTRODUCTION: DON QUIXOTE, MADAME BOVARY, AND THE WOMAN WRITER …She looked at the paper and looked up; she looked at the sky and looked down. Life? Literature? One to be made into the other? But how monstrously difficult! For—here came a pair of tight scarlet trousers—how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? --Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928) My study situates twentieth-century Italian, British, and Anglo-American women’s fiction in relation to two foundational novels in the Western canon: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, El ingenioso hidalgo de la Mancha (1605; 1615) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). Both books foreground the dangers and pleasures of literary influence. Stylistically innovative, they anticipated concerns that were of import to feminist critics in the seventies and beyond: the transformative potential of the reading encounter, its normative and subversive effects on gendered identity, and the need of individual writers to liberate themselves from the shackles of literary convention. As my analysis will show, groundbreaking novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Elsa Morante’s Menzogna e sortilegio (1948), and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) reflect the formal and thematic influence of one or both of these classics. Don Quixote is widely considered the first modern novel. Its eponymous protagonist, a middle-aged landowner of modest means, is obsessed with books of chivalry. Inspired by the inimitable Amadis de Gaul, he decides to turn himself into a knight in early seventeenth-century Spain, to right all manners of wrong and defend the honor of maidens and other vulnerable subjects. He enlists his poor, illiterate neighbor Sancho Panza in his enterprise, promising to make him the governor of an island, and the two embark on a series of adventures that make them the laughing-stock of their 1 community. Cervantes pokes fun at our tendency to confuse fantasy with reality not only through his book-addicted protagonist---Quixote mistakes an inn for a castle, a barber’s basin for a giant’s helmet, and prostitutes as princesses—but also through his narrative method. In sixteenth-century Spain, the generic category of fiction did not exist: chivalric romances were presented as true stories, with the label “historias” or “crónicas” inserted in the subtitles (Fox 5, 50). The conflation of history and fantasy in the popular imagination led the Spanish to romanticize their colonial enterprise. Several of the conquistadores, including Columbus and Cortés’s men, viewed the New World through the lens of chivalric romances; conversely, the chroniclers of romantic tales took inspiration from the exploits of the conquistadores (Fox 10-11). Cervantes parodies these “historias” throughout the Quixote, imitating their many inconsistencies and errors. Framing the Quixote as the translation of a book written by an Arab historian Cid Hamete Benengali, he exposes the artifice involved in the creation of verisimilitude. Since books in Arabic had been burned in Counter-Reformation Spain, the fiction of the Arab historian appeared outrageous in Cervantes’s time. Women’s literary history has been bound up with Don Quixote since the eighteenth century, when the growing popularity of the novel and the spread of circulating libraries in England facilitated an increase in female literacy. Reacting against this new development, critics of the time constructed the female reader as naïve, impressionable, and incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and fact (Gordon 35). The first quixotic novels penned by women functioned as cautionary tales. Published anonymously in 1752, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella illustrates how a wealthy young woman’s reading of French romances causes 2 her to misread her suitor’s motives and to put herself in potentially dangerous situations. Like Don Quixote, Arabella applies the codes of chivalric literature to her life, with disastrous results: for instance, mistaking the Thames for the Tiber in La Fausse Clélie [The Mock-Clelia 1678], she jumps into the river in an attempt to flee horsemen whom she believes are “ravishers.” The novel’s ending is so conservative that for many years it was believed to have been written by Samuel Johnson: after an edifying conversation with a “pious and learned Doctor,” Arabella realizes her folly and accepts her cousin’s hand in marriage, following her dead father’s wishes. Lennox’s novel inspired a spate of female quixote narratives, most notably American author Tabitha

Load more