The Imaginist: Lennox’s The Female Quixote

Abstract

Although not a coquette, Arabella, the heroine of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, craves an empire of women, especially with regard to men’s hearts. Even more important to her story is her capacity to imagine and enact stories in which she herself is the centre of attention. Her fantasy of an unconditional subjection of men and a world where women wield absolute power can be explained with recourse to Lacan’s notion of desire. Arabella’s notions are the opposite of the power relations that obtain in eighteenth-century society: she desires and in her imagination she appropriates for women what men have; that is to say, power. Such power is defined in psychoanalysis as the phallus, ‘the signifier of that which is worthy of desire’, but it is important to bear in mind that the signifier of desire is not the same as the cause of desire, which remains beyond signification. Object (a), the real cause of desire, is unspeakable, while the phallus, ‘the name of desire’, is pronounceable.¹ In Arabella’s story, the name of desire is the empire of women, while the cause of desire is her mother. Her mother died when Arabella was born, thus her absence represents a lack for Arabella; ‘Insofar as desire is always correlated with lack, the phallus is the signifier of lack.’² Thus, Arabella’s fantasy of female power, her phallus so to speak, is in fact the signifier of the lack that she unconsciously experiences. Although her mother is not signified — she is only a trace in the narrative — she seems to exert a power from beyond the grave.