Female Quixote Quotes

The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella is an eighteenth century novel that sees its author, the celebrated Charlotte Lennox, detail the largely self-imagined trials and tribulations of its protagonist, the titular Arabella, in a style and voice that is quite reminiscent of Cervantes’. Raised by a disgraced Marquis, who, several years before her birth, had “resolved to quit all Society whatever, and devote the rest of his Life to Solitude and Privacy” (Lennox ?), Lennox’s Arabella is a profoundly isolated and lonely figure: a young noble woman who has grown up “wholly secluded from the World” (?), robbed of the opportunity to ever enjoy any “Conversation but that of a grave and melancholy Father, or her own Attendants” (?).

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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. The text makes it evident that she is both happy and ready to assert these at any given

In conversation with her cousin Mr. Glanville, for instance, Arabella explains that the romances are “shining Examples of Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love; which regulate our Action, form our Manners, and inspire us with a noble Desire of emulating those great, heroic, and virtuous Actions” (48). Arabella’s lexical choices make it abundantly clear that she thinks highly of her books. The abstract nouns “Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love,” for instance, all carry incredibly positive connotations and explicate why it is, exactly, that Arabella invests so much time and effort into mimicking the beliefs and praxes of the heroes and heroines that gallivant about the pages of these novels. It is not questionable ideals and values that she derives from these, but commendable, upstanding ones – Arabella confuses fiction for truth and elevates her novels to a position they ought not to occupy, but it is still difficult to agree with the doctor, who argues