SOURCE: Schmid, Thomas H. “‘My Authority’: Hyper-Mimesis and the Discourse of Hysteria in The Female Quixote.” Rocky Mountain Review 51, no. 1 (1997): 21-35.

In the following essay, Schmid reconsiders previous discussions of hysteria in Lennox's novel.

The purpose of this 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...