Arabella Refuses to Dress Properly: Clothing and Femininity in The Female Quixote

John Raphael Smith, Emma Hart as Bacchante (c. 1782). Via Wikimedia Commons. Emma Hart's striking costume and direct gaze exemplify the later eighteenth century's fascination with performance, self-presentation and the expressive power of dress. Unlike Arabella, however, Hart's theatrical self-fashioning belonged to the worlds of art and spectacle rather than a direct challenge to social convention.

In our previous post, we explored how Charlotte Lennox's heroine interprets reality through the romances she has read. But Arabella's imagination does not remain confined to her mind. It shapes her speech, her behaviour, and perhaps most visibly of all, the way she presents herself to the world.

Arabella’s imagination is not confined to her reading. It appears in how she speaks, how she moves, how she interprets the world, and, strikingly, how she dresses.

Throughout The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox pays close attention to Arabella’s clothes. These descriptions are never merely decorative. Again and again, Arabella appears in garments that are beautiful, expensive, carefully arranged, and socially wrong. She is not shabby. She is not careless. She is not ignorant of splendour. Quite the opposite: she knows exactly how to make an entrance. The problem is that she is dressing for the wrong world.

When Arabella attends church early in the novel, her appearance immediately marks her out as singular. Her dress is elegant, even magnificent, but it is too theatrical for the setting. Her hair is arranged to look artless, though it is anything but. Her veil suggests modesty, yet she uses it almost dramatically, covering her face when she feels herself too closely observed. Nothing here is accidental. Lennox is showing us a young woman who understands visibility as power.

In the world of heroic romance, the heroine is not simply seen. She is beheld. Her appearance has moral and narrative force. Beauty is not private; it acts upon the world. It inspires devotion, awakens jealousy, provokes danger, and establishes rank before anyone has spoken. Arabella has absorbed this logic completely. To her, dress is not fashion in the ordinary social sense. It is a declaration of identity.

This is why her clothing unsettles those around her. It does not merely look old-fashioned. It refuses to obey the codes by which eighteenth-century society disciplines female appearance.

Fashionable dress in Lennox’s world was highly structured, both literally and socially. Hoops, stays, formal silhouettes, powdered hair, carefully managed ornament, and situation-specific dress all helped make women legible within polite society. Clothes marked rank, taste, propriety, marital status, seriousness, frivolity, and availability. To dress correctly was not simply to look attractive. It was to signal that one understood one’s place. Arabella repeatedly fails, or refuses, to do this.

One of the most revealing moments comes when she dresses for a ball. Miss Glanville expects her cousin to appear in the modern taste, but instead finds her in a habit “singular to the last degree”. Arabella wears no hoop. Her rich blue and silver gown falls more freely around her body. It is open around the breast, shaded with lace, fastened with knots of diamonds, and finished with a sweeping train. Her sleeves are short, wide, slashed, and ornamented with diamonds; her hair falls in easy ringlets, arranged with exact care around her face.

The effect is not indecent, but it is emphatically not conventional. To Miss Glanville, this is mortifying because Arabella violates the rules and still looks magnificent. She has not simply dressed badly. She has dressed according to another aesthetic system altogether.

The absence of the hoop is especially important. The hoop created a wide, architectural outline that imposed distance, posture and social form. It made the body fashionable by shaping and disciplining it. Arabella’s refusal of that structure allows the fabric to fall more naturally, giving her a freer, more fluid silhouette. In visual terms, she moves away from the regulated geometry of contemporary fashion and towards the flowing bodies of romance, portraiture, and theatrical imagination. Her dress makes her less socially compliant but more symbolically powerful.

That tension runs through Lennox’s treatment of Arabella’s body. The novel repeatedly shows her being watched, admired, misread, corrected, and judged. She attracts attention, but she also resists the terms on which that attention is offered. Her veil, her loose dress, her unstructured splendour, and her dramatic self-presentation all become ways of controlling how she is seen.

This matters because women in eighteenth-century society were constantly required to manage visibility. Too much display could be vanity. Too little could be rusticity or neglect. Fashion was permitted, but only within recognised limits. Beauty was admired, but it had to be socially disciplined. A woman’s body was expected to communicate modesty, rank, taste, and restraint all at once. Arabella’s appearance disrupts that system.

She is not careless enough to be dismissed as unfashionable, nor obedient enough to be absorbed into polite society. She is too splendid, too theatrical, too self-authorising. Her clothes make visible what her speech also reveals: that she inhabits a world in which female presence carries authority. But Lennox is too subtle to make this simply liberating.

Arabella’s clothing gives her grandeur, but it also exposes her. Her refusal to dress properly makes her fascinating, but also vulnerable to ridicule and correction. The same singularity that allows her to appear as a romance heroine also marks her as someone who does not understand the rules by which others will judge her. That is the novel’s recurring cruelty. Arabella’s difference gives her power, but it also marks her out as a problem.

Miss Glanville understands this instinctively. Her irritation is not only jealousy, though it is certainly that. It is also social alarm. Arabella’s beauty should, by rights, submit to the same rituals of effort and conformity as everyone else’s. Instead, she appears to step outside them. She refuses the labour of belonging and is admired anyway. There is something almost radical in that.

Clothing in The Female Quixote is not a minor comic detail. It is one of the ways Lennox stages the conflict between imagination and society. Arabella’s mind has been shaped by romance, but so has her sense of embodiment. She dresses as though she belongs to a world in which women may be objects of reverence rather than regulation, judgement rather than management, ceremony rather than social convenience. Of course, that world is imaginary. But the real one is not innocent.

The comedy lies in Arabella dressing as though she were a heroine from another age. The sharper point lies in how quickly everyone around her tries to bring her back into line. Her clothes reveal not only her delusion, but the force of the system that seeks to correct it.

Arabella refuses to dress properly because she refuses, for as long as she can, to become fully readable by the world around her. And that refusal is one of the reasons she remains so compelling.

Yet Arabella's refusal to dress properly is only one aspect of a larger resistance. Throughout the novel, her romances provide her with a framework for understanding herself and the world around her. By the end of the story, that framework must be abandoned. The question is not simply whether Arabella is cured, but what her cure costs her.

Next: The Price of Becoming Sensible.

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