Shades of Sensibility: Circulating Gender and Race in Two Early Nineteenth-Century American Quixotic Novels

Abstract

Discourses of sensibility reflected gendered categories of race and class in independence-era America in two novels with female quixotic protagonists: José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s La Quijotita y su prima (1818-1819, 1832); and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801). As they attempt to apply models of love and courtship learned from the novels they read to their own lives, these American female quixotes embody issues associated with the circulation of gender, sensibility, and race during the birth of their new nations: hierarchy, status, subordination, property, freedom and enslavement, civilization and savagery. Gendered quixotic readers and quixotic reading show that transnational and transatlantic notions of sensibility circulated through novels and novel reading and adapted to national contexts and discourses of race and class.

Keywords

• female quixotism; gender; national identity; tabitha gilman tenney; josé joaquín fernández de lizardi