ABSTRACT
In spite of the tensions generated by Samuel Richardson's attempt to create an unequivocal, transcendent female subjectivity, the revision of the 'Clarissa Ideal' by women writers in the eighteenth century made possible, to some degree, 'a representation of woman as subject' in fiction (Sobba Green 1991: 79). This work argues that it made possible also an exploration by women of the problematics of feminine identity and the articulation of a specifically female experience of sublime dread. I contend in this and the following chapter that two female writers of the mid-eighteenth-century, Charlotte Lennox and Frances Sheridan, move beyond Richardson's conceptualisation of femininity in interrogating the unstable foundation of a feminine identity brought into being through various eighteenthcentury discourses. This chapter considers The Female Quixote as a Richardsonian novel, analysing its relation to the 'Clarissa Ideal' and exploring in particular its engagement with romance fiction, the law and the role of both of these discourses in producing 'woman as subject'.
