The Charlotte Lennox Page|
The Charlotte Lennox Page |
| This page was inspired by the abysmal dearth of information on Charlotte Lennox on the Internet. Common wisdom has it that everything is on the Internet -- in an effort to sustain common wisdom, I offer this humble resource. To say that it is under construction is probably optimistic. It is, in any case, incomplete; I will try to nudge it towards completion in my (hah!) spare time. |
| Lennox Links Lennox Pictures - So far, I haven't got much. Hopefully, I will make additions this fall. |
Charlotte Ramsay Lennox -Who She Was and Why You Should CareBrief BioLennox was a tough, witty, and observant author in the mid-to-late-1700's. Her writings are of variable quality, always written under the duress of near-starvation. Biographical sources vary on her birth, her father's job, and his time of death. She was born Charlotte Ramsey in Gibralter / colonial New York to a man who was / was not the governor of NY. He died, causing her to sail to England and seek an aunt's gaurdianship OR they sailed together for England, whereupon he died, etc. The aunt, in any event, turned out to be institutionalized for insanity, and Charlotte was thrown upon her own abilities to survive. She married a Scotsman who apparently caused her hassles -- whether for financial, alcoholic, or sexual profligacy is unclear. She had a daughter and son, but the former died and the latter had to flee to America for some reason. Lennox separated from her husband and worked as a dramatist, novelist, translator and governess. She was friends with the leading literary figures of her day, including Samual Johnson, Richardson, and the actor Garrick . This apparently alienated her from most of her fellow women writers, but she was enjoyed (and imitated) by Jane Austen, and Anna Barbauld included her in a collection of famous novelists in 1810. Nonetheless, Lennox died impoverished and alone in 1804. |
| The Female Quixote
Lennox managed (barely) to do what few of her contemporaries could, that is, to survive as a single woman on the profits of her own labors without going into service or prostitution. (Governessing was a kind of half-step above being a servant). Her struggles are sublimated into her best work, The Female Quixote. The provincial heroine, Arabella, takes her French romances a little too seriously and expects the people she encounters to behave like chivalric heroes and heroines. Under this delusion, Arabella runs amok, fleeing imaginary rapists, spurning supposed lovers, and confusing the holy bejeezus out of her servants and family. However, the contrast between Arabella's generosity and adventurousness and the littleness and insipidity of those she is expected to emulate is hardly flattering to the patriarchal order in which both the author and heroine must survive. A wise countess tells Arabella that no decent 18c woman has "adventures". If she is captured by ravishers or pursued by extavagant lovers, her reputation (and thus her life) is irretreivaky ruined. Lennox herself, however, was intimately aware of how adventurous and precarious a decent woman's existence could be. The disparity between societal expectations of women's lives, and the lives they actually led must have been acutelymobvious to her. The novel's conclusion reflects the power of social constraints, in that Arabella is finally cured of her delusions and is basically taught that however fun it may be to order men around, invent her own customs and manners and compel those around her to follow them, or escape the bonds of domestic womanhood, to defy the established order is self-destruction. To suvive in a man's world, a woman must follow the men's rules. |
| The novel is witty, perspicuous and sly in its social criticism, and sometimes outrageous. (For example, Arabella attempts to befriend a prostitute under the belief that the young lady is a damsel in distress). From a feminist perspective, it contains some delicious moments, such as the above example. Arabella's delusions allow her to attempt female solidarity across lines of class and morality. Unfortunately, the women around her are too heavily invested in the existing order to respond, and, like Lennox herself, Arabella is thrown off by her comrades. Arabella also engages in the feminist project of rehabilitating slighted heroines. She passionately defents Cleopatra, for example, whom the males of the novel refer to as "a Whore," and she admires the Amazon queen Thalestris, insisting that physical prowess is not incompatible with physical and mental senesibility. Arabella advocates a matriarchal social order through her belief that male lovers should be perfectly submissive and obsequious. Furthermore, she expects that a woman, in a sufficiently stressful situation, is entitled to take any actions to alleviate that situation, even to the extent of running away from home, thumbing rides from passing carriages, or visiting sick men's chambers. |
| In addition to rewarding feminist scholarship, the novel participates in some of the critical intellectual issues of it time. It examines the purpose and definition of literature, the advantages and disadvantages of the fashion of heightened female "sensibility", the proper nature and scope of woman's education. These are all issues that some of the finest minds of the post-Renaissance era pondered. The entire development of the novel genre was accompanied by a stream of commentary on its potential for moral reform or decay, concern for its effect on the masses of newly literate and leisured women, and its impact on the middle and working classes. The issues of sensibility and education figured prominently in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, who is the patron saint of feminism. Likewise, female education was an abiding concern of George Eliot, whose Dorothea and Romola are, like Arabella, all dressed up (intellectually speaking) with no place to go. Virginia Woolf was also deeply concerned about educational opportunities for women, as testified by her essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. In short, Lennox participated in transgenerational intellectual debates of great importance, and was a significant member of the tradition of British women writers. |
| Lennox and History
Lennox's status is important historically speaking; it is also important to modern women who seek "intellectual mothers." Women nowdays have, of course, a great many opportunities in terms of careers and education. As they pursue these opportunities, they look for role models to follow, and they need some sort of tradition to feel that they are following, extending, reshaping, etc.; otherwise, they are left with the terrifying sense of working in a vacuum -- without precendent or direction. The male traditions in accademia and the job market naturally provide some direction, but must necessaily be lacking in other ways. The British female tradition in literature and thinking can fill this lack, but it is not widely disseminated into the culture. Hence the relevance of Charlotte Lennox and her cohorts in general, and this page in particular. |
| It is worth noting that the female intellectual tradition to which I have been referring is certainly not confined to Britain. It gains coherence in the 18th and 19th centuries there, but it has its roots in the 16c querelle des femmes writings of Christine de Pisan, among others, and may well stretch back to Sappho or farther. |
| The value of this larger tradition is that it provides everyone with a more balanced and
accurate view of history, and that it gives women the options of philosophical and intellectual
perspectives that may be more relevant to their biology, love relationships, family
relationships, and perceptions of the world than male-inscribed points of view. This is not to
say that everything written by women must be more applicable to modern women than anything
written by men -- merely that the awareness of alternate strains of thought is enriching. -Melanie Ulrich Who I Am Created on: 14 July, 1999 Last updated on: 6 July, 2000 |