50 pages • 1 hour read
The Female Quixote
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Symbols & Motifs
Romance Novels
Romance novels are a motif in The Female Quixote. Despite Arabella’s father’s best efforts, she discovers the world of French romance novels after her mother’s death. There is a forbidden quality about these worlds, which portray heroic heroes and pure princesses. They operate according to rules and ideals that are agreed upon by everyone in them. The good are rewarded for their good deeds while the evil are punished for their evil deeds, creating a simple system of moral values. For a little girl who has lost her mother and cannot comprehend her grief, these organizational principles are a compelling version of reality. The romance novels, therefore, represent a young girl’s attempt to rework the world around her into something that makes more sense, where loss and violence are not senseless and chaotic but the product of meaningful action.
As such, these romance novels provide escapism for Arabella. She seeks out her novels at difficult moments, taking comfort in the order and sense that they provide for her. Similarly, she uses the principles of romance novels in her attempts to interpret the world around her. When confronted with an issue or a challenge, Arabella filters the idea through these novels’ principles. She cites antecedents and examples of what people in somewhat similar situations might have done, much to the consternation of those who have not read the novels. With this, the romance novels also symbolize a young woman’s attempt to process the strangeness of the world around her.
The centrality of romance novels to Arabella’s life also represents a threat. Since her version of reality is built around the principles of romance novels, anyone who understands these principles can use them against her. Sir George attempts this, using tricks he has learned from his superficial reading to manipulate her. At first, he succeeds, but when he tries anything too elaborate, he reveals how little he really knows. At the end of the novel, Sir George hires an actress to pose as a princess to convince Arabella that Mr. Glanville is someone else. He shifts the principles of the romance novels into real life, giving them physical shape and form, which ends disastrously. Not only does he nearly cause Arabella’s death, but he creates a situation in which Mr. Glanville challenges him to a duel. The attempt to misuse the romantic novels reflects Sir George’s nefarious character, dragging the tropes and ideals of the novels into the real world and immediately being punished for doing so.
Clothing
Clothing plays an important role in The Female Quixote, a motif that unites characters who seemingly have nothing in common. In her home, Arabella’s style is rarely questioned, but when she visits Bath, she enters into high society for the first time. This entrance comes with expectations, and Miss Glanville flits beside her, trying to make her conform. To Miss Glanville, clothes have an important symbolic value that Arabella does not understand. By being able to conform to current fashions and trends, women such as herself—who have little agency in the patriarchal society—can express their value. In a society that limits female expression, clothing provides a means of expression that Miss Glanville subconsciously tries to weaponize against her cousin.
Arabella feels none of this. Since she has been separated from society for so long, she feels only beholden to her love of antiquity. When the dressmaker visits her, she requests a dress that is both very revealing and very old. To Arabella, this design is the perfect expression of classical respectability. To her society’s eye, the dress is scandalous. Arabella dresses as she imagines the characters in her novels might dress, as these are the examples for her to follow. While Miss Glanville wants to embarrass Arabella by having her turn up to a ball in her strange dress or her veil, the situation makes her envious of Arabella’s ability to project a personality all of her own. Miss Glanville does not just envy Arabella’s beauty but her iconoclastic refusal to be bound by the expectations of society. Arabella’s clothing choices become a symbol of radical self-expression, one that Miss Glanville envies.
Miss Glanville’s envy is apparent when she tries to pose as Arabella to deceive Sir George. She dons Arabella’s veil, taking on the symbol of Arabella’s individualism that she has mocked for so long. In an ironic twist, this veil is such a symbol of self-expression that Mr. Glanville cannot recognize his own sister. When he sees a woman wearing such a unique item of clothing, he immediately assumes that it is Arabella and becomes incensed with Sir George for attempting to seduce her once again. The veil is a powerful symbol, so much so that it nearly causes a man’s death. Even those who are related to Arabella or claim to be in love with her are so enraptured by her clothing that they cannot look beyond the veil and see who is really underneath.
Rural and Urban Spaces
After her father is dismissed from the royal court, Arabella is cloistered away in the country. For him, rural spaces represent his rejection of a society he does not recognize or respect. For Arabella, growing up and consuming romance novels, rural spaces are more in tune with the pastoral ideal she sees represented in the texts. As such, the isolated rural setting mirrors the world she reads about in her novels, fueling her delusion that the rest of the world resembles these novels. To her, the rural world is the real world, and everything else stands in opposition to it.
At first, other people come to the rural space. They treat Arabella as a country girl, someone who is foolish because they have no experience of the city. This patronizing attitude shows how little they respect Arabella. By conflating her delusion and the countryside, characters such as Mr. Hervey show their inability to comprehend Arabella as a person. They reduce everything to the rural-urban divide, reflecting their desire for simple answers to complicated questions.
Over the course of the novel, Arabella visits increasingly urban spaces. At Sir Charles’s suggestion, she accompanies her family to Bath and then London. At first, Arabella is mocked by urban high society. Later, she is appreciated and envied by the people of Bath for how she stands out and refuses to conform to their expectations. She is a rural outsider, shaming the urban population for conforming to the same dull rules and fashions. When she reaches London, however, Arabella cannot feel at home. The smog-filled city poisons her body, and she must exit the urban space, retreating to the semiurban Richmond as a compromise. The urban space of London represents the cutting edge of modernity, which is a threat to her delusion on a physical level. London offends Arabella’s tastes, functioning as a physical embodiment of everything she dislikes.
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