• 영어영문학
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• 제53권2호
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• pp.261-280
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• 2007

This paper attempts to examine how woman's role defined by the public discourse took issue with private desires of an individual woman in Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). Tenney borrows and transforms the ideas of quixotism and picaresque from Don Quixote, which involve an inherent paradox in the post-Revolutionary America. The Republican Ideology emphasized women's crucial role as guardians of family virtue and molders of republican citizens. Therefore, women were not allowed to travel outside of the domestic space as freely as a male picaro could do. In fact, the"adventures"depicted in the novel are constituted of a series of courtship in which Dorcasina, the heroine, unceasingly tries but fails to find a husband fit for her romantic idea about love and marriage formed by novel reading. However, the process shows that a variety of socially disadvantaged groups as well as women were excluded from the public space of the post-Revolutionary America. This half-a-century quest does not end with a conventional happy marriage, but Dorcasina finds herself a disillusioned old maid, resigned to a life of charity. Yet the ending exposes social contradictions inherent in early Republic of America, by showing how an individual woman's life was prescribed and limited by the dominant public discourse.