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The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox's the Female Quixote

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The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox's the Female Quixote Chapter 3 The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote “The great issue for most students of the eighteenth-century novel”, writes John Richetti (1996b: 2), “is why expectations for prose fiction seem to have shifted so clearly during the middle of the century, and why by the end of the century something called the novel very clearly exists in the minds of readers and writers”. The story of the ‘rise’ of the English novel has been written, questioned, and revised time and again, even before Ian Watt coined the phrase and tied it to the fictions by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Many scholars have since contributed to a more inclusive and multi-facetted image of the origins of the modern English novel (especially influentially e.g. McKeon [1987], Armstrong [1987]; see also Blewett [2000]). In particular, there has been a growing interest in the formation of ‘the novel’ as a rhetorical process: “the emergence of a new kind of quite distinct fictional narrative, which defines itself, sometimes aggressively and polemically, by a process of rejection, modification, and transformation of previous forms of social storytelling” (Richetti 1996b: 2), has been described as a project of self-fashioning, an assertion of difference and superiority to other kinds of medial entertainment (see William Warner [1998]) or to older traditions of narrative such as the romance (see Langbauer [1990]). My study continues and expands the conversation about ‘the novel’ as a self- defining cultural phenomenon by focussing on the way in which the emerging genre reflects on and shapes reading as a multi-facetted practice. The work I have selected as my starting point, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella (published 1752), employs the quixotic plot in order to integrate debates about the purposes and effects of reading into a representation that not only entails but explicitly foregrounds the “rejection, modification, and transformation of previous forms” (Richetti 1996b) on many levels. While Don Quijote was an important model and point of reference for many novelists in early- and mid-eighteenth-century England,1 Lennox’s work is the most elaborate mid-century representation centring on a quixotic figure as a reader. Books have a formative and troublesome effect on Lennox’s protagonist 1 Particularly prominent examples of explicit and extended adaptation include Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (already signalled in the long title The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote) from 1742 and The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) by Tobias Smollett, who also translated Cervantes’s text into English (1755). DOI 10.1515/9783110399844-005, © 2020 Dorothee Birke, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 56 Chapter 3: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote Arabella, a young woman who has spent her childhood in an isolated castle with little company and who lacks experience with other people. Although she has enjoyed the advantages of a good private education in subjects such as music, dancing, and languages, her most important teachers have been the authors of French romances from the previous century, which she has inherited from her (long dead) mother. From these books, Arabella draws “all her Notions and Expectations”, in particular the belief “that Love was the ruling Principle of the World; that every other Passion was subordinate to this; and that it caused all the Happiness and Miseries of life” (FQ 7). Lennox thus transposes the picaresque “adventures” of the Spanish original to the domestic sphere. As with Cervantes’s protagonist, the influence of books goes beyond instal- ling a general frame of mind. The effects of reading manifest themselves in a multitude of particulars, as Arabella takes the romance heroines as models for her own conduct in a very literal way. She dresses like them, copies peculiarities of their language, and expects all men and women she meets to behave like the characters she has encountered in her reading. In short, her knowledge of social norms and particularly of the relations between the sexes stems from her books. The conflicts that result from Arabella’s quixotic reading, accordingly, pertain to her encounters with the larger social world, in particular with men, whom she invariably sees as suitors and potential “ravishers”. Not only does Arabella expose herself to ridicule, but she is also in danger of sabotaging her own future: her self-image as a romance heroine stands in the way of finding a suitable husband. While the typical plot in the works she likes to read revolves around romance, it also prescribes that the heroine must reject all concrete advances of her lover. Although the ideal candidate, Arabella’s cousin Glanville, is introduced early in the novel, it is open until the end of the book whether she will finally accept him or whether he will eventually give up all hope of success. Before the two can marry, “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind” (FQ 368) must be effected with the help of the “doctor”, a clergyman who manages to convince her that she has misread the romances. There are two obvious paths one can take in order to gauge the contribution of this representation of a reading dysfunction to the larger history of the emer- gence of the novel. One is to see the work as an anti-novel which channels contemporary anxieties about the increasingly popular medial practice of reading fiction. The other is to see it, conversely, as advocating the novel as a new type of narrative by parodying and thus devaluing an older type, the romance. In the following sections, I argue that neither of these views does full justice to the complex ways in which the status, purposes, and effects of reading are negotiated in the novel. Ultimately, in my view, The Female Quixote does cham- pion the reading of fiction as a significant cultural practice. However, it does not Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750 57 do so by means of a simple juxtaposition of good and bad reading material or of serious and silly, male or female readers but by dramatizing and working through anxieties about fictional reading in general. For this argument, I draw on the readings especially of feminist critics, who have teased out the ambivalences of the novel in order to show that neither the heroine nor the romances she likes to read are as foolish as they might appear at first sight. Their findings serve as a basis for my own venture: to describe how the novel explores and relates views on reading as a cognitive process, an embodied act, social behaviour, and an institutionalized practice. The Female Quixote takes up and complicates stereo- typical ways of thinking about reading (in particular, the ridiculous figure of the silly woman reader) and thus contributes to enlarging the cultural niche the novel genre was beginning to claim for itself in the first half of the eighteenth century. Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750 Any discussion of the text’s reflections on the formation of the novel as a genre is obviously complicated by the fact highlighted by the quotation given at the beginning of this chapter: that ‘the novel’–at all times a genre that has been difficult to define – was not yet a completely established term or concept in the middle of the eighteenth century.2 “Romance”, “history”, and “novel” were all used to designate prose fiction, sometimes in ways that highlight contrasts between different kinds of texts, sometimes synonymously. At the same time, as McKeon notes, “alongside this confusion we can perceive a growing impulse to make the dyad ‘romance/history’ stand for an all-but-absolute dichotomy be- tween opposed ways of knowing the world” (McKeon 2002: 25), manifested in different modes of writing. Langbauer (1990: 16–17), too, describes how these modes of writing were, in the course of the eighteenth century, increasingly distinguished by means of the dyad ‘romance/novel’–typically in terms that were already delineated by William Congreve in the Preface to Incognita (1692). He juxtaposes romances, “where lofty Language, miraculous Contingencies and impossible Performances, elevate and surprize the Reader into a giddy Delight”, 2 See also e.g. John Paul Hunter (1996: 9–10). McKeon (2002: 25) contends that “it is […] around the middle of the eighteenth century that ‘the novel’ becomes the dominant and standard term”, but his observation that “seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers often use the terms ‘romance’, ‘history’ and ‘novel’ with an evident interchangeability that must bewilder and frustrate all modern expectations” (ibid.) still applies to works in the 1750s – The Female Quixote as well as Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay No. 4 (1750), which, as I will show, is an important foil to Lennox’s view on fictional narrative. 58 Chapter 3: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote with novels, which “represent to us Intrigues in practice, delight us with Acci- dents and odd Events, but not such as are wholly unusual or unpresidented [sic], such which not being so distant from our Belief bring also the pleasure nearer us” (Congreve 1922: 5). This dyad has often been used to promote the special cultural status of ‘the novel’–whether in prefaces by writers like Defoe and Richardson, who emphasize the ‘factuality’ and contemporaneity of their narratives, or in literary-historical accounts, most notably (again) Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, which is mainly concerned with emphasizing the differences between earlier forms of fictional writing and the novel form.
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