The Coquette or, The History of Eliza Wharton is an epistolary novel by Hannah Webster Foster. It was published anonymously in 1797, and did not appear under the author's real name until 1856, 16 years after Foster's death. It was one of the best-selling novels of its time and was reprinted eight times between 1824 and 1828.[1] A fictionalized account of the much-publicized death of a socially elite Connecticut woman after giving birth to a stillborn, illegitimate child at a roadside tavern, Foster's novel highlights the social conditions that lead to the downfall of an otherwise well-educated and socially adept woman.
Eliza Wharton— the protagonist of the novel who, following the death of her fiancé is pursued by two men: Reverend J. Boyer and Major Peter Sanford. Her free spirit and lack of commitment to the male sex bestow her the term "coquette." Her coquettish nature eventually leads to her demise.
Rev. J. Boyer — the first of Eliza's suitors. He is a safe and modest man who wishes to have Eliza's hand in marriage, yet his predictable nature is not appealing enough. Ultimately, Eliza's lack of sincerity and commitment causes him to end his pursuit of her.
Major Peter Sanford — the second of Eliza's suitors. He is a womanizer who provides excitement for Eliza yet shows no signs of future commitment. However, he eventually marries another woman; this does not prevent Eliza from further continuing her relationship with him.
Lucy Freeman — Eliza's best friend, from whom she often seeks advice. Lucy's disapproval of Eliza's decisions is evident in her letters. During the novel, she gets married; thus, her name is changed to Lucy Sumner.
Charles Deighton-Sanford's primary confidant. Sanford expresses his thoughts in his letters to Charles.
Mr. T. Selby — Reverend Boyer's primary confidant. He expresses his blatant disapproval of Eliza in his responses.
Nancy Sanford— Major Peter Sanford's wife. Although not as attractive as Eliza, her wealth compensates. She is briefly mentioned in Major Sanford's letters.
Gen. and Mrs. Richman — Relatives of Eliza (Mrs. Richman is Eliza's cousin). The couple provides her with a place to stay upon the loss of her fiancé. While they truly look out for her best interests, their advice is often overlooked.
Julia Granby — a free-spirit and one of Eliza's closest friends. She comes to comfort Eliza during her time of despair.
Mrs. Wharton — Eliza's widowed mother. Coping with the loss of her husband, she is happy when Eliza returns home but distressed to see her in such a disdainful state.
Plot summary
The story is about Eliza Wharton, the daughter of a clergyman. At the beginning of the novel she has just been released from an unwanted marriage by the death of her betrothed, the Rev. Haly, also a clergyman, whom Eliza nursed during his final days in her own home. After this experience, she decides she wants friendship and independence. After a short period of time living with friends, she is courted by two men. One, Boyer, is a respected but rather boring clergyman, whom all of her friends and her mother recommend she accept in marriage. The other, Sanford, is an aristocratic libertine, who has no intention to marry but determines not to let another man have Eliza. Because of her indecision and her apparent preference for the libertine Sanford, Boyer eventually gives up on her, deciding that she will not make a suitable wife. Sanford also disappears from her life and marries another woman, Nancy, for her fortune. Eliza eventually decides that she really loved Boyer and wants him back. Unfortunately for Eliza, Boyer has already decided to marry Maria Selby, a relation of Boyer's friend. Sanford later reappears married, but is able to seduce the depressed Eliza. They have a hidden affair for some time until, overcome by guilt and unwilling to face her family and friends, Eliza arranges to escape from her home. Like the real-life Elizabeth Whitman, she dies due to childbirth complications and is buried by strangers. Mrs. Wharton (Eliza's mother) and all of Eliza's friends are deeply saddened by her death. Sanford, too, is devastated by her death. In a letter to his friend, Charles Deighton, he expresses his regret at his wretched behavior.
Written in epistolary form, this novel allows the reader to directly engage with the events central to the plot by entering the minds of the characters. The letters serve as windows into the thoughts of the writers, creating an intimate connection. The reader also benefits from an unbiased perspective, since it is the culmination of different character's input that creates the story. The epistolary form is also an intriguing way to captivate an audience. Reading letters addressed to others has a feeling akin to eavesdropping; it exposes thoughts otherwise not publicly known.
Sources
Foster's tale was loosely based on the biography of Elizabeth Whitman (1752–88), whose death at 37 in a roadside tavern after giving birth to a stillborn child was widely publicized in the New England papers nine years before the novel's publication. Like her fictional counterpart, Whitman was accomplished, vivacious, and widely admired. She is known to have been engaged to the Rev. Joseph Howe (prototype for Foster's Rev. Hale), and then later to the Rev. Joseph Buckminster (fictionalized as Rev. Boyer), but she married neither. Whitman attracted the attention of the poet Joel Barlow (1754–1812), who wrote flirtatious letters to Whitman while also courting another woman, Ruth Baldwin, whom he eventually married.
Whitman, under the name "Mrs. Walker," died at the Bell Tavern in Danvers, Massachusetts, after giving birth to a stillborn baby. Biographers are still not certain of the identity of her lover, who is referred to only as "Fidelio" in her letters.[3] Her death notices, published in a variety of New England newspapers in 1788, quickly provoked moral lectures for young women. Whitman's life was turned into a moral allegory,[3] ministers and journalists blaming her demise on her reading of romance novels,[4] which gave her improper ideas and turned her into a coquette. Foster responded with The Coquette, which offered a more sympathetic portrayal of Whitman and the restrictions placed on middle-class women in early American society.
The title page to The Coquette announces the tale as "A Novel Founded on Fact," testifying both to the novel's basis on newspaper accounts of Whitman's death, as well as the prevailing suspicion of novelistic fiction in the early Republic as potentially corrupting, especially to the female mind.[5] However, the novel can be argued to dignify Elizabeth's character by playing down the sensationalism of the many newspaper accounts of her death, which Cathy N. Davidson has argued were "the stuff of good rumor, of gossip, of sentimental novels."[3]
Elizabeth Whitman's grave
Elizabeth Whitman's grave, after her widely publicized death, became a tourist attraction in Peabody, Massachusetts where it still remains. The original tombstone has been chipped away by tourists seeking souvenirs. To the right of the remnants of this stone is a replication of the tombstone described in Foster's novel on which the inscription reads:
This humble stone, in memory of ELIZABETH WHITMAN, Is inscribed by her weeping friends, To whom she endeared herself By uncommon tenderness and affection. Endowed with superior genius and accomplishments, She was still more distinguished by humility and benevolence. Let Candour throw a veil over her frailties, For great was her charity to others. She lived an example of calm resignation, And sustained the last painful scene, Far from every friend. Her departure was on the 25th of July, A.D. 1788. In the 37th year of her age; The tears of strangers watered her grave.
The new tombstone was erected in attempts to revive the community's interest in the tale of Elizabeth Whitman and Foster's novel. It is now included on the Literacy Trail of Massachusetts. With the growing popularity of Foster's novel, the true Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Eliza Wharton became melded into one and are barely differentiable by most readers today.[6]
Interpretation and criticism
The Coquette received a revival of critical attention during the late twentieth century. It is often praised for its intelligent portrayal of the contrast between individualism vs. social conformity and passion vs. reason. It has also been studied for its relationship to political ideologies of the early American republic and its portrayal of the emerging middle class.
Foster's tale has been read on the one hand as a "novel for providing a subversive message about the ways in which the lives of women even of the elite are subject to narrow cultural constraints" and, on the other hand, as an instructive novel that "comes down on the side of the ideology of Republican motherhood and the women's sphere, a sphere that celebrated those women who with appropriate sentiment and rationality accepted their "place" in the world.[7] Foster's epistolary narrative allows for the development of multiple points of view and for a variety of readings. Rather than being presented as a one-sided coquette, the development of Eliza's character through her letter writing allows for a reading of Eliza as both "victim" and "transgressor" of society's norms.[1]
Cathy N. Davidson argues that The Coquette is not merely a novel about the evils of sin and seduction, but rather "a remarkably detailed assessment of the marital possibilities facing late-eighteenth-century women of the middle or upper-middle classes."[8] Davidson notes the centrality of Foster's novel in "countering received ideas on women's circumscribed power and authority," positioning The Coquette as "an important voice in the debate on women's role in the Republic."[9] In her exploration of the early American novel, Davidson uses the contradictions between Foster's novel and the moral accounts of Elizabeth Whitman's death to explore the emergence of the early American sentimental novel:
Eliza Wharton sins and dies. Her death can convey the conservative moral that many critics of the time demanded. Yet the circumstances of that death seem designed to tease the reader into thought. It is in precisely these interstices—the distjunctions between the conventional and the radical readings of the plot – that the early American sentimental novel flourishes. It is in the irresolution of Eliza Wharton's dilemma that the novel, as a genre, differentiates itself from the tract stories of Elizabeth Whitman in which the novel is grounded and which it ultimately transcends.[10]
In Redefining the Political Novel, Sharon M. Harris responds to Cathy Davidson's work by arguing that The Coquette can be understood as a political novel; she writes, "By recognizing and satirizing, first, the political systems that create women's social realisms and, second, the language used to convey those systems to the broader culture, Foster exposes the sexist bases of the new nation's political ideologies."[11]
Countering Davidson and Harris, Thomas Joudrey has argued that the novel fortifies obedience to a patriarchal conception of marriage. In its sustained denigration of fancy and passion, The Coquette "deprives the imagined readers not merely of actualized resistance but also of the very mental capacities that perceive injury and formulate alternatives to their oppression."[12]
One aspect of The Coquette that has garnered significant critical attention is the role of female friendship within the text. In Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature, Ivy Schweitzer discusses the "affective failures" of Eliza Wharton's female friends[13] and argues that while Eliza can be understood as "the champion of an inclusive, even feminist 'civic republicanism,'" her friends belong to "the female 'chorus' [that] presages the more rigid separation of the sexes and women's exile from the social to the domestic sphere ushered in by liberalism."[14] Claire C. Pettengill reads female friendship within The Coquette in terms of sisterhood, which she argues "[involved] a kind of support network that helped a woman establish her identity in opposition to both social and parental authority in an era where both were increasingly challenged."[15] At the same time, Pettengill insists that the "emotional-disciplinary circuit that reinforces sisterhood is not operating at full (theoretical) capacity."[16] That is, even though Eliza discusses her life with her friends, they do not fully reciprocate; instead, they respond primarily by criticizing her actions and warning her against further wrongdoing.[16] Pettengill ultimately arrives at the conclusion that "The novel's bifurcated view of sisterhood, then, reveals some of the ways in which the new nation's uneasiness over changing economic and social relations, in particular the tension between individual and group interests, spelled itself out in terms of the function of women."[17]
Other critical studies of The Coquette include Dorothy Z. Baker's work, which argues that "Eliza's struggle to control her life begins with the struggle to control language, the language of society that dictates her identity and conscribes her life."[18] Additionally, C. Leiren Mower makes the case that Eliza "reworks Lockean theories of labor and ownership as a means of authorizing proprietary control over her body's commerce in the social marketplace. Instead of accepting her social and legal status as another's personal property, Eliza publicly performs her dissent as visible evidence of the legitimacy of her proprietary claims."[19]
In 1798, Foster published her second novel, The Boarding School, which was never reprinted and not nearly as popular as The Coquette.
Adaptations
A poem titled The Coquette, borrowing heavily from Webster Foster's work, was printed in 1798 in The Humming Bird, the first known magazine published by a woman editor in the United States.[20]
↑ Jarenski, Shelly (2004). "The Voice of the Preceptress: Female Education in and as the Seduction Novel". The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 37 (1): 59–68. doi:10.2307/1315378. JSTOR1315378.
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1797.
Hannah Webster Foster was an American novelist.
Eliza Lynn Linton was the first female salaried journalist in Britain and the author of over 20 novels. Despite her path-breaking role as an independent woman, many of her essays took a strong anti-feminist slant.
Sula is a 1973 novel by American author Toni Morrison, her first novel to be published after The Bluest Eye (1970).
The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature (1789) is an 18th-century American sentimental novel written in epistolary form by William Hill Brown and is widely considered to be the first American novel. The Power of Sympathy was Brown's first novel. The characters' struggles illustrate the dangers of seduction and the pitfalls of giving in to one's passions, while advocating the moral education of women and the use of rational thinking as ways to prevent the consequences of such actions.
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th- and 19th-century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is an epistolary novel first published in 1740 by the English writer Samuel Richardson. Considered one of the first true English novels, it serves as Richardson's version of conduct literature about marriage.
Mary Eliza Fullerton was an Australian writer.
Ann Eliza Bleecker was an American poet and correspondent. Following a New York upbringing, Bleecker married John James Bleecker, a New Rochelle lawyer, in 1769. He encouraged her writings, and helped her publish a periodical containing her works.
Eliza Fenwick was a Cornish author, whose works include Secresy; or The Ruin on the Rock (1795) and several children's books. She was born in Cornwall, married an alcoholic, and had two children by him. She left him and eventually went to live with her children in Barbados, where she ran a school with her daughter.
Elizabeth Singer Rowe was an English poet, essayist and fiction writer called "the ornament of her sex and age" and the "Heavenly Singer". She was among 18th-century England's most widely read authors. She wrote mainly religious poetry, but her best-known work, Friendship in Death (1728), is a Jansenist miscellany of imaginary letters from the dead to the living. Despite a posthumous reputation as a pious, bereaved recluse, Rowe corresponded widely and was involved in local concerns at Frome in her native Somerset. She remained popular into the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic and in translation. Though little read today, scholars have called her stylistically and thematically radical for her time.
Phebe Gibbes was an 18th-century English novelist and early feminist. She authored twenty-two books between 1764 and 1790, and is best known for the novels The History of Mr. Francis Clive (1764), The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). She received recent attention with the scholarly publication of Hartly House Calcutta (1789) in 2007.
Harriet Vaughan Cheney was an American-Canadian novelist. She wrote a number of historical romances, among them A Peep at the Pilgrims in Sixteen Thirty-Six and The Rivals of Acadia, as well as religious works for children.
The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, or The Boarding School is a novel written by Hannah Webster Foster which was published in 1798.
Elizabeth Kortright Monroe Hay was an American socialite who acted as unofficial First Lady during her father James Monroe's presidency, as her mother's health kept her away from many White House duties. She was married to prominent attorney George Hay.
The seduction novel is a literary genre which was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A seduction novel presents the story of a virtuous, but helpless woman who is seduced by a man that will eventually betray her. "Inevitably, she yields herself to him; inevitably, she dies." Her failure to adhere to the commonly accepted standard of sexual behaviour leads to her "self-destruction and death".
Lucinda; or, The Mountain Mourner is an epistolary novel by P. D. Manvill (1764–1849), first published in 1807. A bestseller at the time, it was widely distributed and went through numerous editions.
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References
Baker, Dorothy Z. (1996), "'Detested be the Epithet!': Definition, Maxim, and the Language of Social Dicta in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette", Essays in Literature, 23: 58–68.
Davidson, Cathy N. (2004), "Privileging the Feme Covert: The Sociology of Sentimental Fiction", Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.185–232, ISBN0-19-514823-1 .
Harris, Sharon M. (1995), "Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette: Critiquing Franklin's America", in Harris, Sharon M. (ed.), "Redefining the Political Novel" American Women Writers, 1797-1901, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ISBN978-0-87049-869-5 .
Mower, C. Leiren (2002), "Bodies in Labor: Sole Proprietorship and the Labor of Conduct in The Coquette", American Literature, 74 (2): 315–344, doi:10.1215/00029831-74-2-315, S2CID162796137 .
Mulford, Carla (1996), "Introduction", The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, New York: Penguin, pp.ix–li, ISBN978-0-14-043468-2 .
Pettengill, Claire C. (1992), "Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and The Boarding School", Early American Literature, 27 (3): 185–203.
Schweitzer, Ivy (2006), "Hannah Webster Foster's Coquette: Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage", Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ISBN978-0-8078-5778-6 .
Wolfer, Jessica, and Dean DeCuir. "Characters of The Coquette." Bleckblog: | Musings of a Community College English Teacher. Ed. Terra Potts, Erica Scott, and Skyler Cantrell. 11 May 2006. Web. 21 Nov. 2010. <http://bleckblog.org/lit/coquette>.
Karen A. Weyler. "Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval." Legacy 26.1 (2009): 1-25. Print.
Further reading
Bontatibus, Donna R. The Seduction Novel of the Early Nation: A Call for Socio-Political Reform. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999.
Finseth, Ian. "'A Melancholy tale:' Rhetoric, Fiction, and Passion in The Coquette." Studies in the Novel 33.2 (2001): 125-159.
Hamilton, Kristie. "'An Assault on the Will:' Republican Virtue and the City in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette.Early American Literature 24 (1989): 135–51.
Korobkin, Laura H. "Can Your Volatile Daughter Ever Acquire Your Wisdom?' Luxury and False Ideas in The Coquette." Early American Literature 41.1 (2006): 79-107.
Martin, Terence. "Social Institutions in the Early American Novel." American Quarterly 9.1 (1957): 72–84.
Wenska, Walter P., Jr. "The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom." Early American Literature 12 (1978): 243–55.
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