Hannah Foster\'s \"The Coquette\" Hannah Webster Foster\'s

Hannah Foster's "The Coquette"

Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is scarcely remembered today, a point that she herself would probably have expected. Few women writing at the end of the 18th century could have expected that their works would prove to have the fame or longevity of those pieces written by their male counterparts. Whether a work endures for long enough to be included in literary canons is to some extent dependent on the quality of that work. But, as the case of the novel under consideration here demonstrates, it is often far more the result of whether the person who wrote the novel was considered by the intellectual elite of the time to be the right kind of person to write the kind of work to be cherished by later generations.

As a woman, Foster was not the "right" kind of person to be a writer, at least not in her own time. But recent reevaluations of her own work (as well as other women who were writing in the United States in the 18th century) has allowed us to have a greater appreciation of the work produced by these early American women writers. Foster's The Coquette seems to us today both a good story - something of a potboiler, it is true, but potboilers are blessed with the great good fortune in a novel of having a compelling plot - as well as a fascinating exploration of the ways in which women could step outside of the customary roles that their sex was supposed to maintain.

Both in her own life, and in the life of her characters, Foster created alternative stories for women to live.

Foster based the events of the novel on the someone she knew: The book has about it as a result not a small dose of the didactic (which was a common element running through a great deal of American literature in this generation) as well as something of the allegorical, for the coquette of the title is made by Foster to stand in for many women in difficult situations.

The "Eliza Wharton" of Foster's subtitle was known to be by many who read the work to be Elizabeth Whitman. Whitman was the daughter of Elnathon Whitman, a minister from Hartford, Connecticut, who was a distant relative of Foster's husband, John Foster, who was also a minister. In writing about the seduction, betrayal and death in childbirth of Elizabeth Whitman, Foster would become the first woman born in America to publish a novel.

The book made waves indeed when it was published, in part because its author was, well, an authoress, but also in part because the lover who had betrayed Whitman and brought her to her death was supposed to have been Pierpont Edwards, who was the son of Jonathan Edwards, the evangelical minister who began the religious rebirth in the United States called the Great Awakening. That a scion of such a religious household should be involved in such low work of course made the book all more the tempting to read.

The Coquette was said to have been, next to the Bible, the most popular reading material of early 19th century New England. A recent commentator tells us that it was "one of the two best-selling American novels of the 18th century." By 1840, it had appeared in some thirty editions! (http://www.bahistory.org/bahfoster.html)

Certainly in its own time the novel was popular in large measure because of the real people whom its readers believed to lie behind the characters. But it must also have been at least to some extent popular then (as it is still appealing to us today) because it allows us a compassionate view of the ways in which women were constrained by their society. The Coquette is a story of powerlessness of women, certainly, but it is more importantly about how women can refuse to accept such powerlessness as their due. Foster's own refusal to accept the social role designated for her as a minister's wife cam in the brief period between 1797 to 1799 when she wrote her two novels. After this, she would devote herself to raising her six children and helping her husband.

She would know little personal freedom as a wife and mother, which is ironic indeed considering the fact that the ideal of freedom runs throughout The Coquette, which is in many ways a condemnation of how men acquired new kinds and degrees of freedom in the New World while women did not.

Eliza Wharton is affronted by the relative lack of new freedom that American women are allotted compared to American men, and it is because of this essential inequality that she refuses to enter into marriage. She sees marriage as not a form of "modest freedom" as her friends insist, a state in which women are allowed certain freedoms because they have made themselves over into being the property of a certain man (Wenska 245).

Rather, Eliza prefers the freedom of remaining unmarried, even though the kind of freedom allotted to unmarried women in the 18th century was a most attenuated sort. The state of being unmarried for a woman was also, as Eliza's fate reminds us, a dangerous one. Eliza is presented to us, in the end, as a cautionary figure: The lesson that we take away is that her fate is a terrible one, as she herself tells us in Letter LXVIII

Your kind endeavours to promote my happiness have been repaid by the inexcusable folly of sacrificing it. The various emotions of shame, and remorse, penitence and regret, which torture and distract my guilty breast, exceed description. Yes, madam, your Eliza has fallen; fallen, indeed! She has become the victim of her own indiscretion, and of the intrigue and artifice of a designing libertine, who is the husband of another! She is polluted, and no more worthy of her parentage! She flies from you, not to conceal her guilt, that she humbly and penitently owns; but to avoid what she has never experienced, and feels herself unable to support, a mother's frown; to escape the heart-rending sight of a parent's grief, occasioned by the crimes of her guilty child! (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/foster/coquette/coquette.html).