My thesis aims to explore the conflict between bourgeois and romance ideologies in Charlotte Lennox¡¦s The Female Quixote in terms of women¡¦s reading, power, and marriage in the eighteenth century. In chapter one, I focus on Arabella¡¦s access to romantic fantasies, offering an overview of women¡¦s position and reading in bourgeois society. Through examining the society¡¦s attitude to and concerns with reading, we can see that in the bourgeois ideal women are voiceless and restrained within the domestic domain, the one that offers no opportunities for the significance that romance heroines enjoy. Also, both women¡¦s motives to read and the society¡¦s eagerness to prohibit it reflect the economical and capitalistic sides of the bourgeoisie. Then, Arabella¡¦s exclusive reading of romance makes her totally subject to it; the canonized romances become the female tradition for Arabella. By comparing the quasi-classicism of romance to the contemporaneity of novel, the discrepancy between Arabella and the outside world is clearly shown. She endeavors to yearn for significance in the prosaic reality which offers no opportunity. Consequently, chapter two examines Arabella¡¦s power on two levels. Arabella, trying to mediate the gap, constructs her romantic counter-reality with the help of the power of imagination. Arabella manipulates her surroundings to make them meet the requirements of the romantic world, which appears to be an autonomous domain governed by love, excluding the laws, morality, and secularity of the reality. Furthermore, in the love-ruled realm the power structure of bourgeois society seems to be reversed. Women have power over their submissive and constant suitors. The typical images of both genders are reversed. However, heroines¡¦ possession of power is at the expense of rejecting and denying female sexuality and desire. Therefore the autonomy and the reversal of power structure proposed by romance are actually illusive; the power only exists by sacrificing female subjectivity. In chapter three I will probe into the double-edged role marriage plays. The marriage between Arabella and Glanville can be seen as the compromise between romance and bourgeois ideologies. With the help of her manipulation of the reality, Arabella¡¦s marriage does exemplify the romantic ideal. Glanville is romantically presented as a hero performing countless actions to win his lover. Their marriage is depicted as an amatory union, which is the essential ending in romances wherein love is sanctified. On the other hand, the marriage ending also satisfies the concerns of middle-class society, wherein marriage is considered as a trade and bears an economic mission rather than connecting two lovers. Hence the marriage plot functions as a happy ending that settles the two confronting ideologies.

The cult of sensibility in the eighteenth century celebrates delicate emotional responses. Such susceptibility to emotion, however, has to rely on somatic representations such as sighs, tears, convulsion, and faints. So, paradoxically, interiority is known to others only by outer bodily signs, signs that could just as easily reflect an affectation of sensibility as sensibility proper. The attempt to control the slippage in the reference between interiority and appearance becomes an anxious cultural feature of eighteenth-century men and, especially, women, of the higher classes. If sensibility requires such careful control and practice, its assumed spontaneity becomes a fiction. The performing body of sensibility turns into a screen that veils one¡¦s true interiority rather than a transparent reflection of it. The performing body is theatricalized¡X placed on the stage as a spectacle, examined by spectators. Sensibility falls prey to insincere, artificial, and affected performances. Emotional representations are constantly facing inroads of theatricality. When emotional expressions are rendered formulaic and reproducible, they lose their naturalness. Moreover, sensibility requires witnesses, spectators who can vouch for its authenticity (but never validate it beyond all doubt). Sensibility cannot proclaim itself because such proclamation would violate sensibility¡¦s principle of sheer sincerity and spontaneity. Theatricality, as an abstracted concept of theater, points both to the formulaic performances and to the model of spectator and spectacle in the theater. Sensibility is closely related to theatricality in these terms. This thesis aims to reveal the dynamics of the interplay between theatricality and sensibility in two eighteenth-century British novels. Both novels present a young heroine making her debut in the world after spending her formative years in seclusion with a male guardian. The Introduction reviews the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. Chapter One discusses the theoretical and contextual relations between theatricality and sensibility. Chapter Two deals with Charlotte Lennox¡¦s novel The Female Quixote (1752), and how the heroine¡¦s sensibility is ridiculed as a form of self-theatricalization. Lennox gives the clash between sensibility and ridicule a generic dimension by blaming romance for the heroine¡¦s delusions. Chapter Three examines Frances Burney¡¦s epistolary novel Evelina (1778) and argues that the heroine¡¦s sensibility is both sealed and revealed in Burney¡¦s epistolary form since it enables Evelina to switch between being both spectator and spectacle. The conclusion briefly sums up the previous chapters and points out how, more generally, interpretations of literature can benefit from a recognition of the dynamics of theatricality and sensibility.

This study takes a structuralist approach to the development of the novel, arguing that eighteenth-century writers build progressive narrative by rendering abstract, then conflating, literary theories of gendered time that originate in the Renaissance with seventeenth-century scientific theories of motion. I argue that writers from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century generate and regulate progress-as-product in their narratives through gendered constructions of time that corresponded to the generation and regulation of economic, political, and social progress brought about by developing capitalism.