Week 5: Obsession

From Introduction to Monomania: "The self will only be convinced of its own worth by the faultless devotion of another." and "Catching the beloved in an act of betrayal affords a...type of mastery"

In The Female Quixote, Arabella acts both of these ideas noted above.  She uses her Romantic novel background to justify a complete and utter devotion by Glansville as the only proof he loves her.  Yet, this show of love must be in a specific way. Namely, Glansville must not say he loves her, but must pine away until he falls deathly ill from keeping declarations of love to himself.  In convincing Glansville to follow her rather hard to understand rules, Arabella receives a confirmation of the superiority of her beliefs, and, therefore, her own correctness in social interaction.
I felt like the second quote fit, but I can't find a specific instance that clarifies why it seems like Arabella becomes a master when Glanville commits some perceived grievance against her.  Is it that she enacts a type of mastery over him here, or is it that the mastery comes from outside either party?  If so, what exactly would that be? Human nature (to disappoint/betray)?

From Mar, Oatley, Djikic, Mullen: "...readers and viewers select entertainment media that will promote or maintain positive moods, or those that will help reduce or circumvent negative moods." and "Anthropomorphisation probably supports the ability to see fictional characters as if they were real, with real human psychologies, perhaps allowing these characters to provide social comfort in ways similar to real peers."

I thought these sentences interesting as they seemed to reflect Arabella's character how our class was talking about her last week.  She used her romance novels to provide support for her arguments with other characters, as well as to confirm her own beliefs (of Ravishers or Robbers or any number of unpleasant situations which could befall her person).  However, we also talked about the fact that she was extremely secluded from normal human interaction.  So, that last quote could help to explain what was going on in her childhood that made these romances so real for her.  She used them as a social comfort.  How does that assumption, then, work with the way her absorption was abruptly disposed of at the end of the novel?

26 September; Absorption

"[Modern fiction's] province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in desarts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles." (Johnson, emphasis added, 1750).

In the novel The Female Quixote, (1752) we get both a modern fiction as well as a sample of these historical romances.  Lennox writes the modern fiction about Arabella, but Arabella imagines her life and experiences her life as clips from the French Romances she reads and has read since she was a small child.  Last week, we talked about curiosity and how it differs from wonder, as well as how the experiences of each changed over time.  In her insistence on living within her romantic world's rules, Arabella becomes something of a curiosity for the men she meets, and rather ridiculed as a sort of monstrosity (madwoman) by the women she meets.  Arabella, on the other hand, looks at the world through a lens of wonder.  She creates fantasies for herself, and about her life.  These fantasies then become reality for her.

She lets herself get taken in by the stories of romance, unlike Johnson's claim that, "In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any application to himself".  We see Arabella taking these former romances quite seriously, to the point of calling them histories.  The comedy of the book comes from the reader's awareness of Arabella's fantasies as outside the reality in which she lives.  The reader participates in making Arabella a curiosity, yet are we supposed to get swept up in the wonder she lives in as Mr. Glanville starts to do in some passages?  Does he fully enter into the fantastical world Arabella lives in, or does he just learn how to pretend? Is this pretending a form of that wonder, since he claims to do so out of Love?

19 September, 2012: Curiosity

As I started reading the Daston piece, “Wonders and the Order of Nature”, I found the Descartes idea of “wonder as the first of the passions...useful in small doses to stimulate scientific inquiry” (304) particularly in line with my thoughts on Fantomina.  Fantomina, or the lady who acted Fantomina, was originally simply curious as to what it would be like to be a prostitute.  Where she got into trouble was in her insistence on continuing to explore past the point where she could stay safely within her station/life.  In other words, she used a small dose to stimulate her inquiry, but then kept adding to it, leading her down her own path of destruction.

                I used ‘curious’ where Descartes used ‘wonder’.  In the Daston article, she articulates the history of each term.  Wonder, then, may be used by Descartes in a similar way Haywood would have understood Curiosity.  One thing that seemed to be especially relevant was the connection of curiosity to desire or lust.  We can see that quite strongly in Fantomina.  Her curiosity led her to explore, but her desire, then, to have what her experiment had shown her possible overtook her better judgment.  I am curious/wondering, then, how Fantomina the novel means to explore, if at all, the ideas behind scientific inquiry?  That is, after all, how Fantomina’s tricks and deception started.

                In this case, I don’t think we can just take the evidence that Fantomina ended up alone in a convent with a ruined reputation and no lover for her life as a full commentary on the outcome of scientific exploration.  There was not much procedurally wrong with her original experiment.  She dressed, acted, and spoke in the ways of a prostitute, yet had sense enough to know when to cut off her interaction for that night.  Her mistake was in leaving an opening for the next night.  This made it hard for her to stop the charade.  Yet, is this a mistake/flaw in the scientific way she went about it, or a flaw in her character with her experiment simply the vehicle through which we see her flaws?  

12 September, 2012

I feel like I’m not quite sure what to do with this, so here goes.

The thing that struck me as I was reading Robinson Crusoe was the almost detached consciousness of the style.  Though the novel is written as a first person narrative, it could also read as an almost scientific journal of observations and events.  For example, Crusoe “consulted several things in [his] situation, which [he] found would be proper for [him]: first...secondly...thirdly...fourthly...” (89-90).  This is an extremely linear, logical way of laying out not only action and event, but thought as well.  Though Crusoe the character has no scientific background, he observes and decides like a scientist might. 

When I approached the secondary readings, I felt as if the novel made a little more sense. Ian Watt wrote that "realitst" view of the phenomenon of the original novels (of which Defoe was a writer) as “tend[ing] to differ from the more flattering pictures of humanity presented by many established ethical, social, and literary codes...because they were the product of a more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life than had ever been attempted before.” (11).  This made a lot of sense with the detachment I had noticed while reading. 

I’m not entirely convinced that the novel was objective, though, or even that it was trying to be.  Watt seems to concur with that in his denouncement of the realist's claim that the novel was objective.  Firstly, it was written in the first person, as a journal.  A truly objective voice would be outside the action – a mere observer.  Secondly, though Crusoe goes into much detail about certain of his endeavors, such as the circumferance and width of the fence he constructs around his dwelling, there are numerous places where he states that he’s going to skip over this next part, as it is repetitive of the previous.  An objective view includes each detail, not judging which is important or trivial.  I guess I’m exploring the objectivity of the novel, as well as Crusoe himself.