The Price of Becoming Sensible: Arabella's Cure in The Female Quixote

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Lady in Milton's Comus (1785). Via Wikimedia Commons. Wright depicts Milton's heroine at a moment of moral trial and reflection. Like Arabella at the end of The Female Quixote, she stands between the worlds of enchantment and reality, gaining wisdom while leaving something of wonder behind.

In our previous post, we explored how Arabella's appearance challenges the conventions of eighteenth-century society. Yet her clothes are only the most visible expression of a deeper difference. By the end of The Female Quixote, it is not merely her dress that must change, but her entire way of understanding the world.

By the end of The Female Quixote, Arabella has finally been cured. At least, that is how the novel is usually described.

For most of the book, Charlotte Lennox's heroine interprets the world through the extravagant conventions of seventeenth-century French romance. She expects heroic devotion, impossible constancy, noble suffering, jealous rivals, and perilous adventures. The modern world repeatedly disappoints these expectations, and much of the novel's comedy arises from the resulting misunderstandings.

The ending appears to resolve this tension. Through a lengthy conversation with a learned doctor, Arabella is persuaded that her beloved romances have distorted her judgement. She abandons her misconceptions, recognises the errors into which they have led her, and accepts a more realistic understanding of the world. Soon afterwards, she marries the man who has long loved her. Order is restored. Sense triumphs over delusion. The story concludes.

Or does it? Modern readers often find themselves strangely perturbed by this ending. Not because Arabella remains unconvinced, but because her cure seems to cost her something valuable. Throughout the novel, Arabella's ideas are absurd. Lennox leaves no doubt about that. Yet those ideas also provide her with a remarkable degree of independence. They allow her to judge rather than merely be judged. They encourage her to impose moral demands upon the men around her. They enable her to reject expectations that other women accept without question.

Indeed, one of the novel's most striking features is the confidence with which Arabella moves through the world. She may misunderstand it, but she is never intimidated by it. She challenges assumptions. She interrogates motives. She refuses to defer automatically to social authority. Again and again, supposedly sensible characters find themselves bewildered by her reasoning, not because she lacks intelligence, but because she applies a different set of principles from theirs.

Her romances furnish her with a framework through which she can interpret experience and assert herself within it. The doctor dismantles that framework. The conversation itself is fascinating. Rather than relying on ridicule, coercion or simple contradiction, the doctor proceeds through argument. He invites Arabella to examine the assumptions underlying the romances she admires and gradually persuades her that they are inconsistent with reason, history and ordinary human experience.

In one sense, this is an Enlightenment victory. Rational inquiry overcomes error. Critical thinking dispels illusion. Experience triumphs over inherited fantasy.

Yet something curious happens as the conversation unfolds. The doctor is not merely correcting factual mistakes. He is persuading Arabella to surrender an entire way of understanding herself. Her romances have taught her that women deserve extraordinary devotion. They have taught her that love should be constant, honourable and self-sacrificing. They have taught her that personal conduct should aspire to ideals rather than convenience. These expectations may be exaggerated, but they are not wholly contemptible.

What the doctor offers in their place is not simply truth. It is accommodation. Arabella is asked to exchange heroic standards for ordinary ones. From a practical standpoint, this is undoubtedly sensible. Human beings are not romance heroes. Society cannot function according to the laws of heroic fiction. Yet the novel never entirely dispels the suspicion that reality itself emerges from the comparison looking somewhat lacking. This ambiguity can feel troubling.

The romances imprison Arabella within fantasy, but they also elevate her conception of human possibility. The modern world frees her from illusion, but it asks her to accept lower expectations. The choice is not simply between falsehood and truth. It is also, to some extent, a choice between aspiration and limitation. That tension becomes especially visible when we consider the position of women in eighteenth-century society. The world awaiting Arabella after her cure is less dramatic, but it is also far less accommodating to female autonomy.

As a romance heroine, she can challenge almost anyone. As a sensible young woman, her options become dramatically narrower. Lennox was too intelligent a novelist not to recognise this. The ending does not read like a simple celebration of conformity. Rather, it carries the faint melancholy of a farewell. Arabella's errors must be corrected, but the imaginative freedom that accompanies them cannot be preserved intact. The novel recognises that maturity involves loss as well as gain.

This is one reason The Female Quixote continues to reward rereading. At first glance, it appears to be a comedy about a woman who mistakes fiction for reality. On closer inspection, it becomes a meditation on what happens when reality proves unequal to fiction's promises. The learned doctor is right. Arabella's romances are misleading. They distort history, exaggerate human behaviour and encourage impossible expectations. Yet the novel asks whether the opposite danger also exists: whether excessive realism may leave us with a world that is sensible, orderly yet somehow less expansive and meaningful than the one we have left behind.

By the final page, Arabella has become wiser. Whether she has become happier is a more complicated question. And it is in that uncertainty that much of the novel's enduring power resides.

Volume I is published in paperback and ebook editions by P-Wave Classics.

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