From “Woman as Thing” to a “Subject-In-Process”: The Dynamics of Courtly Love in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)

Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic analysis of “courtly love” concludes that the courtly image Knight’s subservience to his Lady actually masks reality male domination; however, own seems complicit in same problematic. Whereas love provides a semblance agency woman, assuming partner as subject from whose vantage relationship is theorized, strips woman any subjectivity or by rendering her an absolute object, radical Otherness, monster, and automaton. While Žižek painstakingly represents male-subject victim-agent being director masochistic performance, female rendered perpetrator-object who despite enacting terms contract termed inhuman hence sadist. This lack complex theorization renders evil reinforces conventional representation femininity evil. Besides, declaring impasse feminism for its tendency deny women ‘femininity’, Žižek, while bemoaning inescapability asymmetrical ends up reifying it. writes off vacuum, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) interesting alternative theorizing via protagonist, Arabella. A suitable framework understanding Arabella’s investment conventions can be found Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical model allows reconceiving subject. developing on scholarship explores novel’s negotiation gendered eighteenth-century English society, I argue delusional immersion romances signifies proximity semiotic chora given preoedipal maternal severance. As such, preference “feminine” form romance, reflective subversive force semiotic, defiance rational, masculine, novelistic discourse symbolic.