Gordon, Scott Paul
“Female Quixotism: Charlotte Lennox and Tabitha Tenney”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 127-142.

Critical consensus views female quixotism as a strategy to subvert patriarchal oppression, enabling heroines to act and speak in ways the dominant culture aims to suppress. This claim, however, registers our critical desires more than it attends to the contours of female quixotic narratives themselves. Charlotte Lennox’s (1729/30?-1804) Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s (1762-1837) Female Quixotism (1801) are profoundly conservative narratives that isolate imaginations that fail to conform to ‘common sense’ as aberrant, in need of discipline: each narrative cures the Quixote so she can finally view the world as those around her have always viewed it. While these novels level a critique at the world that surrounds the Quixote, neither portrays quixotism as a creative reformation or escape from that sordid reality; instead, these texts insist that quixotism disables women from understanding either their own nature or the world around them.