Why is it that the real is never as good as it should be?

The Female Quixote holds even today to be an interesting example of social critique. I a not sure that I see Arabella as not having a firm grasp on reality, but instead I think she fits a trope of the unrelenting mythic hero, until the death of her independence, and therefore her power, at the end of the novel. What is striking is that Charlotte Lennox even provides for the removal of most societal norms that would force her hand toward marriage, were she opposed to it. Her guardian wont force her, and she has enough money to live comfortably single should she wish to. It feels as though the ending is Lennox throwing in the towel on her fight to provide a viable female protagonist that her audience can see as surviving and behaving in a socially acceptable manner without a husband. The rather rushed nature of the ending, and the coinciding pressure to publish, might function quite well as a metaphor in this case. Were she to choose for Arabella to not marry, to drag out a courtship or maintain some sort of power over her existence, she might well have felt a need to write to the end of Arabella's life to provide for the extraordinary way that she lived. While single she has the power to defeat robbers, and debate with the men around her, and marriage is likely to take any of that away.
But It occurs to me that the character of Arabella offers up a little more than that. She evokes something of the Shakespearian fool in the novel. She has the ability to operate outside, or at least less restrained, by the societal norms that surround everyone else. From one perspective she might be seen as rebellious, and her readers might agree that one cannot simply view the world however they wish to. From another, however, she seems to represent one of the few people in the novel prepared to do 'the right thing,' versus what makes them appear in the best light. From that perspective, the idea that while the romance may be dead, the characters they offer are a far sight better than one is likely to find in a given circle of people. Perhaps the sudden realization at the end, the loss of the innocence that allowed her to have control over more of the world around her than most other characters in the novel, can be seen as part of the social contract dependent upon the exchange of women. Her refusal to acknowledge that aspect, or even be able to see marriage as that, throws the system into chaos, giving her power, at times, the equivalent of life and death over men. So then I wonder what that acknowledgement might mean in the larger picture?

The Governess and Crowd Control

Reading The Governess, I find I am touched in quite a different way from Richardson's Pamela. Somehow, Fielding has managed to find a morality tale that reads as more real to life, and yet at the same times includes quite a bit of shameless allegorical storytelling as its teaching vehicle. There were even a few bits about how to act as a governess, or one responsible for educating young people, which I found to be quite amusing. Both of the pieces are directed towards the improvement of the reader, but it seems that Fielding wanted to avoid the criticisms that Pamela/Clarissa and Richardson received for their attempt at showing the virtuous path to self improvement. In Pamela, the narrative presided over the moral messages, leaving room for the audience to spread doubt on the virtue of Pamela. The lessons to be spread were left largely implicit until the end, where Richardson attempts to tell the reader exactly how to understand and interpret each character. Fielding, writing a simpler narrative, avoided that with a rather simple rule of grammar that might have saved Richardson all the headaches of criticism against his characters and novels (although may also have cost him not a small fortune in sales). That rule is to put the modifier as close to the object that it modifies as possible, and you will avoid much potentially devastating miscommunication so common to the reader, as opposed to the interrogative prerogative of the listener. In this way, Fielding manages to stop the critical train of thought from ever gathering steam, while Richardson's reader finds enough of time and material to be critical in spite of his attempt to regain that control.
This brings to mind the idea that a person wishing to write literature that promotes proper conduct, should probably consider the potential audience that one is writing for. With Richardson the audience occupies an odd space where the reader is not the focus, but it seems to be expected that the reader will have their own conclusions. His explicit instructions occur too far away from their poignant moments to have any dramatic effect upon the reader. In The Governess Sarah Fielding produces a work that clearly marks the role of the reader, and in part positions them in a position alongside the other girls as they listen to the chosen reader for the day. This produces an odd sensation of reading what someone else is supposed to be reading aloud, and also having to fill in that voice, making the reader both audience and participant in an activity that leaves little room for their own individual input and none at all for their voice to be heard. The state of explicitness regarding the moral lessons for the novel essentially employs the reader while removing them from the process of criticism, which I believe is one of the morals of the Fairy Story -  that we should all listen to our wise mother, or in this case Sarah Fielding.