Confessions of a heroine addict: Women's parodic romance, 1750--1820

Parodic works by women are often unrecognized or misread because women writers' parodic strategies have not always been similar enough to those of their male counterparts to warrant inclusion of them in histories and/or theories of the form. This study aims at filling a gap in current criticism by beginning to sketch a women's parodic literary tradition in English through a close reading of five eighteenth-century parodic novels written by women. This study both explores the ways in which women's writing participated in and was affected by developing period definitions of parody and interrogates inadequacies in current parody theory arising from a central focus on works by male writers.;In my introductory chapter, I provide a theoretical context for the chapters which follow by positing some major areas of inadequacy in current theory while also outlining the ways in which parody is, in fact, a peculiarly amenable form for women's writing. In my second chapter, I discuss Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) as a parodic blend of scandalous picaresque, courtship novel, and Bildungsroman which makes it an ideal work through which to consider gender bias and distinctions between "parody," "pastiche," and "imitation." In Chapter Three, I discuss Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) as an example of a combination of an "overt" text and "covert" text structure which critics have argued as typical of women's literature, and I explore the interaction of this posited structure with various formulations of parody as "double-voiced" or "double-coded." In Chapter Four, I consider theories of parody as a simultaneously inclusive/exclusive communication process in relation to Jean Marishall's The History of Miss Clarinda Cathcart (1766) and discuss how Marishall's parodic strategies serve a heavily class-inflected narrative that pits scenes of open class warfare against the portrait of an ideal, universalized women's community offered by the novel's heroine. Chapter Five contextualizes Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), an important precursor of the New England local colorists, as a parody which makes formal changes in response to what Tenney sees as a typically English excess in Lennox's story and in accordance with principles of a developing literary nationalism in the American early Federalist era. In Chapter Six, I focus on Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) and the difference between "parody" and "burlesque." From Joseph Addison to M. H. Abrams, the definitions of "parody" and "burlesque" have involved a system of literary hierarchy that poses problems for women writers, problems upon which Northanger Abbey comments in directly addressing the issue of gender and literary status. In my concluding chapter, I address the five novels as a set of works linked by commonalities of parodic strategy and treat more comprehensively parodic themes and character types shared by the group as a whole.