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The Female Quixote Character Analysis

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The Female Quixote and Sense and Sensibility are two novels of the 18th century. In both novels the protagonists are women. In their novels, the two authors talk about the difference between novel and romance and criticize both genres through their female heroines.
Arabella is the heroine of Lennox’s novel the female Quixote. She lost her mother when she was very young and is the only daughter of a Marquis who kept her in her beautiful house for most of her life. She knows nothing about the real world and her ideas about it are based on the books she read. She was raised in an uncommon way and she was given an uncommon education for a woman of the 18th century. She is very well educated and enjoys reading her father’s book, where she finds …show more content…

Lucy Steele, Mrs. Ferras, John Dashwood, they all value money and wealth more importantly than love and family. These characters however are able to get what they want. Throughout the novel the reader cannot like them but at the end, such a dislikable character such as Lucy Steele paradoxically chase what she wanted from the beginning, showing that she does not have honor or dignity. Also Miss Glanville in the Female Quixote gets what she wants. It cannot be considered a real happy ending because Sir George Bellmour does not love her but she gets what she wants, that is him. This is also a message sent from the authors to make the readers realize that even though they may not like them, these people do obtain what they want in real life. The characters who do not get a happy ending at all are the real deceivers, the worst men of the novels: Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility and Sir George Bellmour from The female Quixote. Willoughby deceives Marianne because he seduces her even though he is already engaged, while Sir George tries to seduce Arabella using her interpretation of reality. At the end they do not obtain what they want and end up having an unhappy life. Willoughby will never be happy because he wants both money and love but chooses money upon love, and Sir George is not able to gain Arabella’s affection and

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She carries herself in a most peculiar manner and is prone to spouting similarly peculiar adages and maxims – both traits rendered humorous or, perhaps, more peculiar by way of the conviction with which Arabella showcases them – but one cannot deny that her eccentricities imbue her with a sense of authority and power that no one else in The Female Quixote seems to wield. Arabella adheres to fanciful, unusual moral and social codes, but her adherence to these lends her a great deal of power: because she does not feel the need to adhere to them, she is not bound by societal norms or standards and is therefore free to flout them and liberate herself from them in a way that no other character can. She states, for instance, that “Since Love is not voluntary, I am not obliged to any Person for loving me…” (44). In that it clashes with what society has determined to be the appropriate or “proper” response to learning of another individual’s affections (for you), Arabella’s is a radical statement – but it is also an undeniably liberatory one. Reading French romances might have imbued Arabella’s emotions and opinions with a certain loftiness (that would have likely not existed otherwise), but reading French romances has also led to Arabella’s understanding that her emotions and opinions – lofty as they may be – are valid.

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