The older I get, the less patience I have with fools.
A great many people besides me get impatient with fools, of course. The surprise to me is that the older I get, the less patience I seem to have with foolish fictional characters too. That's certainly true of Arabella, the title character of Charlotte Lennox's “The Female Quixote”.
Arabella is the daughter of a marquis, a real misanthrope. He has some good reasons for his anger at society, but it places his daughter at a distinct disadvantage; he spends her childhood and young adulthood in the country, far from any social interactions. Arabella doesn't even go to school. So she gets her ideas of how society functions from books, primarily from old French romances. Thus, any young man interested in her who behaves in any manner other than that of the great fictional heroes of the past gets into a lot of trouble with her. For that matter, anyone in her orbit at all tends to find himself in trouble.
There's a young man working in the garden of her father's home, for instance. He's handsome and Arabella finds him attractive, so of course he can't possibly be a working-class youth, but rather a young nobleman hiding from his family because he's in forbidden love with Arabella herself. This would be a mere nuisance if it weren't for the fact that she eventually concludes that he intends to kidnap her. Hoo boy.
She reaches the same conclusion about pretty nearly any decent-looking young man within earshot – that is, if she doesn't conclude that any young man or group of young men approaching anywhere near her is about to carry her off. This goes some way to explaining the work's title, of course. While Don Quixote comes to believe that he's a wandering knight through reading too many knightly romances, Arabella similarly comes to believe, through reading too many French romances, that she is a romantic heroine, and further that the entire world follows the same rules.
Which would be bad enough by itself. It's all the more problematic for her cousin Mr. Glanville, who falls head-over-heels in love with her, but is absolutely forbidden by her to declare his feelings. Why? Because in French romances, no young man may mention one word about love to the object of his affection until and unless he has demonstrated his heroism by rescuing her from kidnapping and/or slaughtering thousands of her father's enemies by himself. What's more, Arabella expects him to announce his despair and imminent death upon her command to never come near her again, which he can only avoid upon her command to him to live. A few dozen chapters go by like this until you have to wonder why Mr. Glanville doesn't just throw up his hands and go looking for someone half-sane.
Well, this is a popular mid-18th century novel, so you can probably guess how it concludes, after Arabella and Glanville go through a few twists and turns, not to mention a few secondary plot lines. It's interesting to note, by the way, that some of those secondary plots include the attempts of various gentlemen to obey the commands of the women they...I was about to say the women they love, but it's more like the women they want. For a story set in a thoroughly patriarchal society, it's a little surprising to see how much control these women have over the conduct of the supposedly dominant males in their lives, at least in part because Glanville, at any rate, wants to spare Arabella as much social ridicule as possible. If anything indicates his actual love for her, it might be that.
Then toward the story's end, Arabella has a five or ten minute conversation with a minister, and he manages to convince her that it's foolish to follow the rules set down in French romances as a guide to life. Good for him, and for her too, but I have to ask: Where the bloody hell was this guy before?
I know, I know, “The Female Quixote,” like Arabella's French romances, is a work of fiction. I told you, I get impatient with fictional fools these days. Apparently, I get impatient with those who invent them, as well.
Benshlomo says, It's hard enough to be patient with real-life nutjobs – do we have to be patient with made-up ones too?
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