The 18th Century Novel Characteristic Features

The picturesque style of novel began in the 16th century as a counterbalance to the chivalric romance. Some of the properties of this form are that it features protagonists from the lower classes, but draws on characters from various social classes.  The primary character is usually duplicitous, both a dupe and a charlatan. Featuring panoramic scenes, it usually had different types of discourse, from philosophical reflection to parodying other traditional forms like the romance or poetry.

American author, Henry Hugh Brackenridge, was the writer of the first novel portraying frontier life in the United States after the Revolutionary War, Modern Chivalry. Set in western Pennsylvania, the novel was lauded for its humor. In England, perhaps the 18th century novel that most directly parallels Don Quixote is Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote . The main character of Arabella reads romance novels like Don Quixote does and tries to fashion her life after them. Yet, Arabella is not as fulfilled as Don Quixote is with his role models because her characters are more inert than Quixote’s.  He can fashion himself after glorious knights.  She struggles to define herself by female characters whose primary goal in life is to preserve their virtue.

The Female Quixote is an important work because it illustrates an awareness of the epic's dependence upon gender.   Women, even if they went mad and aped chivalric tales, had to remain inactive.  The journeys that Don Quixote and all the knights and epic heroes followed were masculine journeys.  Women, on the other hand, had to remain inactive so that they could be the goal or spirit behind the journey.  Ultimately, the picaresque's weakness was its conflicting point of view.

The last form of the novel is the gothic, which adhered to several conventions:  hidden corruption and human anxiety, haunted minds masked by apparently normal outward lives, crazy monks, dilapidated abbeys and superstition.  Gothic conventions became an outlet for exhibiting fears of the conflicting declarations of authority and freedom in American society -- "self-made, self-improved, self-confident men abusing power or undermining the social order."  The gothic novel also had an underlying theme of homosexuality.  British writer Sophia Lee wrote The Recess, which tells the tale of two daughters Mary Queen of Scots had in a secret marriage.  These girls eventually end up in horrible marriages, with one going mad and the other ending up in jail in the Caribbean.  American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly was a perfect example of the gothic novel.  It was widely thought to be an allegory of post-revolutionary American identity crisis.

In France, literature not only portrayed female dissent along with key novels by men as part of a crisis in legitimacy that led to the French Revolution, but it conveyed the “art of love”. There was an emancipation of love and an unprecedented freedom of sexuality in 18th century France.  Eros, artifice and nature played major roles in French novels. Women were immensely influential in 18th century France, as teachers and patrons. But, most significantly, they were recognized as novelists whose works were both highly regarded and enormously popular. Women writers’ 16th and 17th century writings were virtually ignored.  But, in the 18th century, female writers were recognized in all their glory. This “rediscovery” of women’s previously ignored work was thought to be groundbreaking.