Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (Early American Women Writers)
(The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works...)
The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, each reprinted in its entirety, each introduced by Cathy N. Davidson, who places the novel in an historical and literary perspective. Ranging from serious cautionary tales about moral corruption to amusing and trenchant social satire, these books provide today's reader with a unique window into the earliest American popular fiction and way of life.
First published in 1801, Female Quixotism is a boisterous, rollicking anti-romance and literary satire. It takes place in the fictional village of L---, Pennsylvania, where its central character Dorcas Sheldon--who styles herself the romantic "Dorcasina"--sets out on a quixotic quest for the kind of romantic love portrayed in her favorite English novels. Having rejected the prosaic yet honorable advances of her first suitor, "Lysander," Dorcasina narrowly escapes marriage to a series of unscrupulous rogues interested mostly in her considerable fortune. Moving from one misadventure to another, the heroine's journey ends in a lonely old age bereft of romantic illusion.
Female Quixotism was written during a period of self-definition for the fledgling American republic, and offers a telling glimpse of gender, race, and class issues--as volatile then as they are today. Its woman's-eye view of the life and literature of the age provides a tragicomic parody of the limited choices available to women in a society dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal.
Tabitha Gilman Tenney was an American novelist and compiler.
Background
Tenney was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1762. She was the daughter of Samuel Gilman and his second wife, Lydia (Robinson) Giddings (or Giddinge) Gilman. Her father, a descendant of John Gilman who emigrated from England to Hingham, Massachussets, in 1638, was a member of a family that had provided many public servants for New Hampshire. Her mother was an educated and forceful woman, and Tabitha's upbringing was Puritanical, bookish, and secluded. She acquired familiarity with intellectual and gentlewomanly accomplishments, and a code of behavior in which a virtuous common sense predominated.
Career
In 1801 she published the two-volume novel, Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, upon which her claim to remembrance chiefly rests. Sometime prior to this, possibly in 1799 she edited a volume called The Pleasing Instructor, an anthology of selections from poets and classical writers for the education of young women, of which no copy is known to exist. The collection was especially recommended "For Female Academies, Schools, etc. ," and, as the author's aim was "to blend instruction with rational amusement, " she included only those "pieces which tend either to inform the mind, correct the manners, or to regulate the conduct. "
Female Quixotism is a satire on prevailing literary tastes, and a minor declaration of American intellectual independence. It purports to be the biography of a young woman, in other respects charming and lovable, whose mind has become corrupted by a too-constant diet of current novels and romances. Dorcasina Sheldon, like her prototype, the Spanish knight-errant, forms her grandiose conceptions of existence from the literary extravagances of her day, and her tragedy lies in their lack of correspondence to the world of actuality. The analogy to the book's great model is skilfully and not too slavishly handled, the conception is clever and humorous, but the plot falters in execution and is marred by the repetitious narration of absurd and wearisomely similar events in the career of the heroine. Moreover, the book is written as an object lesson to similar misguided females, and, though the moral is a healthy one, it is too much in evidence for a work of art. In the character of the Irish adventurer, who occupies the major portion of volume one, there is excellently portrayed a type of charlatan from whom the United States suffered much in its infancy. The whole is a plea to American girls to accept the responsibilities of normal living and to give over their affectations, their day dreams, and their preoccupation with foreign romantic sentimentality, and it commemorates an interesting phase in the intellectual fashions of the early Republic.
The last twenty years of her life she spent in Exeter, occupied with fine needlework and acts of charity quite after the fashion she had recommended to her erring heroine. Some proverbial examples of her reputation for goodness have been preserved.
She died at Exeter after a brief illness.
Achievements
She was one of the first women novelists in the United States.
