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And Its Critical Potentialities in Charlotte Lennox's the Female Quixotic “Stranger-ness” and Its Critical Potentialities in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 91 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol. 19, No. 1 (2011) Quixotic “Stranger-ness” and Its Critical Potentialities in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote* Bonghee Oh (Kyung Hee University) I In attempting to describe discontinuities in what he calls the episteme of Western culture, Michel Foucault asserts that Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, whose hero believes what he reads in books to be true, is “the first modern work of literature” (48). One of three reasons he gives is that in that text, “language breaks off its old kinship with things” (49).1 Likewise, in tracing the historical origin of fiction, Hans Robert Jauss sees the same text as “a founding text of the modern era” because it “attests to the complete separation of fiction and reality” (9).2 Whether these views on Don Quixote are agreed on or contested, what matters is that both of them draw attention to the separation between fiction and reality, implying that * This essay is a shortened and reorganized version of material that initially appeared in a chapter of my doctoral dissertation entitled Homelessness and Stranger-ness as Critical Potentialities in Early British Novels. 1 For the other two reasons Foucault gives, see The Order of Things, 46-50. 2 The other reason Jauss pinpoints is that Don Quixote “shows the medieval ontologizing solution to be a fiction—the delusion of a leftover hero” (9). See Question and Answer 92 Bonghee Oh the relationship between the two became problematic around the beginning of the modern age to such a degree that one’s inability to distinguish the one from the other came to be considered a particular kind of madness. This kind of madness became more associated with women than with men, as Don Quixote enjoyed a wide popularity in England “during the eighteenth century especially” (Staves 193). In comparing Cervantes’s text with Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote in his review of the latter published in The Covent-Garden Journal No. 24, for example, Henry Fielding favorably comments that the subversion of one’s head “by reading Romances” is “more easy to be granted in the Case of a young lady than of an old Gentleman” (qtd. in Williams 193). Here, Fielding touches upon the connection between the question of genre and the question of gender. The question of genre and its link to the question of gender has achieved centrality in critical approaches to Lennox’s text, since feminist theories began to draw new attention to early British novels by eighteenth-century women writers around the late 1970s. While some scholars argue that Lennox satirizes the romance genre, or rather, satirizes and simultaneously rescues it, others suggest that it is not so much romance as the novel that she criticizes. Most of them, however, bring into high relief the seemingly naturalized relation between romance and femininity, whether they problematize the naturalization itself or stress romance’s “profound appeal to women” (Spacks, “Subtle Sophistry” 533). This association of romance with femininity has aroused controversy about how to read Arabella’s cure, with which The Female Quixote ends. If Arabella’s romances “are sites of female power” (Pawl 151), and if “female power can exist only as a delusion” (Langbauer 46), then her cure should be read not only as her renunciation of romance but her disavowal of female power. According to this reading, the subversive power Arabella Quixotic “Stranger-ness” and Its Critical Potentialities in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 93 enjoys while sticking to the law of romances becomes defused, although a few scholars suggest that Arabella’s ostensibly submissive transformation is “a masquerade to hide Lennox’s subversive desire” (Park 44). Recently, however, some critics have tended to shift the main emphasis of the analysis from the question of genre and its connection to the question of gender. Instead, they focus on the political or social aspects of The Female Quixote in a way that tends to marginalize genre and gender questions. For example, disagreeing with critics occupied with the question of genre, Ruth Mack argues that Lennox’s concern is with “how literary texts participate in England’s definition of itself as a modern society” (195). She finds Lennox’s question to be: “how can one claim to understand—or even to see—the relationship between one’s own perspective and a perspective defined as different from one’s own?” (195). Mack’s approach asks us to consider the difference between Arabella and the people around her in terms of the relation between a society outside England and England’s own, and calls attention to Arabella as a kind of “stranger within” embodying other cultures. By disregarding the question of genre and its link to the question of gender, however, Mack fails to consider what implications Arabella’s quixotic “stranger-ness” has in the context of genre and gender questions. The terms “stranger” and “stranger-ness” may remind some readers of Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves, an influential work in our contemporary discussions of “the stranger.” In tracing the notion of the stranger in the history of Western thought in this text, Kristeva reflects on “our ability to accept new modalities of otherness” (2). Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Unheimliche, i.e., the uncanny, she argues that the stranger is nowhere else but “within us,” which hints that this stranger is nothing but the 94 Bonghee Oh unconscious (Strangers 191). According to this logic, we are all strangers both to others and to ourselves; therefore, there are no strangers. This gesture of universalizing “strangeness”—the term Kristeva uses to refer to our being strangers to ourselves—leads to her suggestion of a political model for a cosmopolitanism. She founds this model on cosmopolitan ideas proposed by Enlightenment thinkers like Montesquieu and Kant, the core idea of which, according to her reading, is “a rejection of unified society for the sake of a coordinated diversity” (Strangers 133). In her critical engagement with Kristeva’s study on the stranger, Sara Ahmed introduces the term “strangerness.” According to Ahmed, Kristeva overlooks “how strangerness is already unevenly distributed,” even though she distributes “strangerness to everyone” (“Skin” 96, original emphasis). Kristeva asks “foreigners to recognize and respect the strangeness of those who welcome them” as well as vice versa (Nations 31). It is at this point that Ahmed warns us against Kristeva’s universalizing of “strangerness,” to use Ahmed’s term, because “some others are recognized as stranger than others” (“Skin” 99). Curiously enough, Ahmed does not give any specific explanation of her use of the term “strangerness” in her comments on Kristeva’s notion of “strangeness.” One possible explanation may be found in Ahmed’s suggestion that “we must refuse to take for granted the stranger’s status as a figure” (Strange 3). According to Ahmed, “it is the processes of expelling or welcoming the one who is recognized as a stranger that produce the figure of the stranger in the first place” (Strange 4, original emphasis). But this point is already implied in Kristeva’s notion of “strangeness” and also in her notion of “abjection,” which means an act of ejecting “what disturbs identity” (Powers 4). Ahmed’s insight rather lies in her argument that Quixotic “Stranger-ness” and Its Critical Potentialities in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 95 taking for granted the stranger’s figurability functions to conceal “the social and material relations which overdetermine” strangers’ existence—the function that she terms “stranger fetishism,” based on the Marxist model of commodity fetishism (Strange 5). In this context, her use of the term “strangerness” can be read as her effort to question stranger fetishism and to highlight social and material relations whereby some are recognized as stranger than others. Ahmed’s position appears to become problematic, however, when she dissents from those who view strangers, in her words, as “internal rather than external to identity” because this remark hints that she considers them external to it (Strange 6). The notion of “strangers within us” does not suggest that strangers are internal rather than external to identity, but that they are at once internal and external to it. As Ahmed notes, those who universalize “strangeness” as the very thing that “we” hold in common are prone to fall into stranger fetishism. To dismiss their insights regarding one’s uncanny strangeness to oneself, however, would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If Ahmed’s position calls attention to social relationships concealed by stranger fetishism and to the political implications of the uneven distribution of “strangerness,” then the notion of “strangers within us” helps us to explore alternative ways to encounter strangers without reifying or marginalizing them as such. Although both Kristeva’s and Ahmed’s insights underlie this essay, neither Kristeva’s term “strangeness” nor Ahmed’s term “strangerness” is preferred here. The reason is that the former is heavily charged with psychoanalytic resonances, whereas the latter implies the uneven distribution of “strangerness” and therefore requires the presence of at least two strangers. Instead, the term “stranger-ness” is used to refer to Arabella’s being (recognized as) a 96 Bonghee Oh stranger who embodies other cultures or perspectives and to her singular way to see things. It is significant in exploring the gender-related implications of Arabella’s stranger-ness that, unlike her contemporary male writers who utilized the figure of Don Quixote, Lennox changed his sex and presented a female Quixote to her contemporary world. Arabella is not only a quixotic figure but a woman.
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