"My Authority": Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote

"My Authority": Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote Thomas H. Schmid University ofTexas at El Paso The purpose ofthis paper is to re-open, from a feminist perspective, the question of female "madness" (specifically, "hysteria") in The Female Quixote, a question that has been largely elided in the current criticism. It has been commonplace to consider Charlotte Lennox's novel as primarily an emplotment of female power in which, as Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, "a young woman with no opportunities for action and with little companionship imagines, on the basis of her reading of romance, a world in which she can claim enormous significance" (535). Spacks reads the character of Arabella, the romance-devouring heroine of The Female Quixote, as an active signifier of a female desire for things historically reserved exclusively for men: fame, power and influence, heroic status. It is this desire, in fact, that must be tamed if Arabella is to take her allotted place in a male-centered society that defines woman not as a signifier of desire but as the object of male desire—as the empty space to be filled up by male desire. Arabella must, in other words, learn to trade romance for reality, her plot of female ambition for a plot of feminine submission.1 While Arabella's quixotic commingling of reality and fiction certainly voices a sanative desire for an authority not granted her by society, it betrays more deeply her entrapment within patriarchal models of authority. Denied a position from which to act, Arabella mimes a romance discourse that aggressively relegates women to passive roles defined by men, especially the role of helpless victim who needs to be rescued prior to being loved. In this sense, Arabella's exaggerated romantic discourse and code of behavior suggest female "hysteria," an Irigarayan hyper-mimesis of a male economy of desire in which woman serves as the sign of difference and lack. The major premise of Arabella's romantic code is founded on female desirability to men rather than the female ability—or right— to desire independently of men. Arabella herself asserts that power and authority are only given to her by men: "My authority," she tells Glanville in response to his doubts concerning her influence over Mr. Selvin in book 8, "is founded upon the absolute Power he has given me over him," and she makes similar statements about her "power" over Glanville himself and Sir George. In addition, Arabella 21 22Rocky Mountain Review refers such power transactions back to romance conventions she takes for reality: "the Empire of Love," she says, "is govern'd by Laws of its own" (320). The authority of romance fictions allows Arabella both to plot her own desirability and to forestall the fulfillment of male desire through her (since such fulfillment would essentially signify the end of her power). But as female Quixote, Arabella ultimately uses romance to mirror herself to herself as the perennial object of male desire ; in so doing, she unwittingly participates in a version of female hysteria: what Toril Moi calls the miming of her "own sexuality in a masculine mode" and the "specular representation of herself as a lesser male" (135). What is striking in Arabella's experience, in other words, is not so much the way she views the world from the standpoint of a coherent subject seeking power and influence, as the way she views the world viewing her, and desiring to act upon her. For this reason, as we shall see in the latter half of this essay, Arabella's entire experience and "world view" are predicated on the male gaze, which Arabella both desires and imitates at crucial moments throughout the novel. What I hope to show is that such imitation is a conditioned response for Arabella, an "hysterical" symptom of what society already requires of her: passivity, charm, and a "pure" desirability that cannot itself desire. In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray argues that woman is caught within the specular logic of patriarchal discourse and desire , forced to experience her own desire only in terms of phallic equivalency: "the expectation that she may at last come to possess...