Maids, Mistresses, and “Monstrous Doubles”: Gender-Class Kyriarchy in The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism

Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) are both notable for the ways in which the quixotic imagination enables Arabella and Dorcasina to wield unlikely agency within patriarchal households. Lost amid the many critical conversations about the empowerment of female quixotes with respect to their surrounding male characters, however, is the curious power dynamic between socioeconomically privileged quixotes and their female domestic servants. Through a comparative and transatlantic analysis of mimetic violence between female quixotes and their maids, this essay argues for greater consideration of socioeconomic power differentials as an additional sphere of ethical concern in these novels.