In what ways is Lennox's The Female Quixote demonstrating Bender's concept of "possible" but "verisimilar" with "imaginative or speculative" truth? How does the novel in general demonstrate the methods of scientific discourse and have the ability to spur similar discourse?
"Yet I will not pardon you, added she, without enjoining you with a Penance for the Fault you own you have committed; and this Penance shall be to prove,
First, That these Histories you condemn are Fictions.
Next, That they are absurd.
And Lastly, That they are Criminal" (The Female Quixote 374).
"For against the backdrop of a commitment shared by the two realms to the system of verisimilitude, the novel began to ground science's claim to be non-fiction by becoming increasingly the domain of manifest through probable fictionality. Then, in a doubly paradoxical twist at midcentury, as I propose, the move toward verisimilar yet "possible" fiction that occurred with Lennox, Sterne, and Walpole participated (relationally, not causally) in a turn toward the more imaginative or speculative variant of "truth" advocated by Diderot and Buffon" (Bender 20).
Within Bender's essay, "Enlightenment Fiction and the Scientific Hypothesis," the author is discussion the move within the scientific community toward public discourse and consensus, and the use of hypotheses and induction in order to come up with new concepts. Many were condemned for using hypotheses because they could be considered "fictional," but as actually works of fiction went on to become less objective and more subjective, works of non-fiction even with hypotheses became more commonly accepted. The concept of speculative "truth" that was discussed by many such as Buffon, was one that emphasized finding out the "how" and never the "why" of something, and this something had to be a physical truth.
Looking at the quote above from The Female Quixote, where Arabella demands that her doctor give her proof for why she should give up her peculiar code of conduct as shown in romances, the reader sees this kind of truth that is laid-out by Buffon. Arabella is asking how these claims the doctor makes can be true, not why he is making them. The doctor, in turn, is able to convince her using inductive methods based in common knowledge of the world and how it works ("physical truth"). This also is a great example of how such "public discourse" could have happened at the time, and how people went about figuring out what was true and what was not.
Also, Lennox's novel as a whole is a great testament to the ways people thought about hypotheses and truth in general, because many of the discussions that have occurred in class deal exactly with this issue of the "how" of events that occur. Many people have argued that Arabella is having a delusion rather than dealing with obsession, or that Arabella is actually just messing with the minds of the people around her. The way these speculations have been approached have been through the "how" rather than the why because it is "possible" that romances could cloud the mind. It is almost as if in 2013 in this class there is a public "scientific" discourse happening, if using the qualifications set-out in the 18th century.
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