Abstract

The story of Don Quixote fascinated English audiences in the eighteenth century, its popularity fueled in part by the period's widespread sensitivity to the instability of rational authority. "Reason," defined by Locke as a universal law that obliged everyone, could not always be clearly distinguished from the arbitrary power of violence, supposedly its opposite. "Success qualifies the Action," as Matthew Prior explains: "If ALEXANDER had lost the Day at Arbella, he had been Consigned by History for a Madman." The so-called Age of Reason thus had no reliable standard of reason. Though ostensibly a prime example of irrational power, Don Quixote, ranting about romance while dangerously waving a lance, could serve also as an emblem of rational arbitrary power, an oxymoron given life by England's fresh experience with the "rational" justifications for the successful Revolution of 1688. Quixotism, as a reminder that reason is a fiction, suggests the arbitrariness and instability of constructs supposedly authorized by reason, including philosophy, history, morality, gender, and government. ;This dissertation discusses the significance of quixotism in the context of early eighteenth-century politics, religion, epistemology, and literature; authors discussed include Locke, Cowley, Sprat, Addison, Steele, Charlotte Lennox, Mandeville, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Sarah Fielding. I argue that the post-Revolution concept of rational authority, which extended through the intellectual as well as the political spheres, was inherently unstable: reason was supposed to be universal when empiricism urged that knowledge could only be partial. Quixotism functioned as a critique of empiricism and a parody of reason, subverting both political authority and its intellectual justifications by pointing out that the two were seldom distinct. Female quixotism, furthermore, turned the "natural" authority of gender into jest; adopting Locke's epistemology and the Whig rhetoric of liberty, women could argue that male supremacy--formerly justified by man's allegedly superior faculties of reason--was the product only of man's superior bodily strength, and hence, an unreasonable effect of force. Eighteenth-century sentimentalism, which managed to bring quixotic figures back into the warmth of human community, did so by focusing on the natural, non-rational, pseudo-empirical universality of the "moral sense."