2. Diverting Romance : Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote

Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Ara­ bella, published in 1752, coming, as it does, at the historical mo­ ment in England that critics associate with the rise of the novel, demonstrates the way gender underlies our constructions as critics of literary history. In its mockery of quixotism, The Female Quixote engages with what had already become a literary convention . It borrows its informing tension between the novel and romance from Don Quixote but does so with a difference. By shifting the tension to the story of a young woman rather than an old man, it inaugurates within the English novel tradition the inherent relation between heroines and romance. In this chapter, I examine the way that association is crucial to the tradition. Lennox's novel both exposes and acts out the association be­ tween women and romance. Its heroine Arabella, caught between the novel and romance, becomes the focus for the struggle be­ tween genres and comes to exemplify Lennox's own dilemma as a woman writer: the imperative to leave behind the insubstantial world of romance, the only realm in which the woman (writer) is given a place, however illusory. The Female Quixote reveals that the novelistic world it strives to establish through a critique of the emptiness of romance has no real place for woman except in re­ peating her association with romance . The only alternative it can offer her is this revelation, this critique, which exposes the work­ ings of the system of representation and the logic of the tradition, without modifying or changing them, or giving her some other