"[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?
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