The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster: Freedom and Women

Introduction: A Forgotten Novel and Its Author

Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is scarcely remembered today — a point that Foster herself would probably have expected. Few women writing at the end of the eighteenth century could have anticipated that their works would achieve the fame or longevity of those produced by their male counterparts. Whether a work endures long enough to be included in the literary canon depends to some extent on its quality. But, as the case of this novel demonstrates, it is far more often the result of whether the person who wrote it was considered by the intellectual elite of the time to be the right kind of person to produce the kind of work that later generations would cherish.

As a woman, Foster was not the "right" kind of person to be a writer — at least not in her own time. Recent reevaluations of her work, as well as that of other women writing in the eighteenth-century United States, have allowed us to develop a greater appreciation of what these early American women writers produced. The Coquette strikes us today as both a compelling story — something of a potboiler, it is true, but potboilers are blessed with the great virtue of a gripping plot — and a fascinating exploration of the ways in which women could step outside the customary roles their sex was expected to maintain.

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

Historical Background and Real-Life Origins

Foster based the events of the novel on the life of someone she knew, and the book carries as a result a notable dose of the didactic — a common element running through much American literature of this generation — as well as something of the allegorical. 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 widely understood by contemporary readers to be Elizabeth Whitman. Whitman was the daughter of Elnathon Whitman, a minister from Hartford, Connecticut, and 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 when it was published, in part because its author was a woman in an era that barely recognized female authorship, but also because the lover who had betrayed Whitman and brought her to her death was believed to be Pierpont Edwards — the son of Jonathan Edwards, the evangelical minister who sparked the religious revival in the United States known as the Great Awakening. That a scion of such a devout household should be implicated in such a scandal made the book all the more tempting to read.

The Novel's Popularity and Social Context

The Coquette was said to have been, next to the Bible, the most popular reading material in early nineteenth-century New England. One recent commentator notes that it was "one of the two best-selling American novels of the 18th century," and by 1840 it had appeared in some thirty editions.

Certainly, in its own time the novel was popular in large measure because of the real people whom readers believed to lie behind its characters. But it must also have been popular — then as now — because it offers a compassionate view of the ways in which women were constrained by their society. The Coquette is a story of women's powerlessness, certainly, but it is more importantly a story 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 came during the brief period between 1797 and 1799, when she wrote her two novels. After this, she devoted herself to raising her six children and supporting her husband. She would know little personal freedom as a wife and mother — an irony indeed, given 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, Freedom, and the Constraints of Marriage

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

Rather, Eliza prefers the freedom of remaining unmarried, even though the kind of freedom available to unmarried women in the eighteenth century was severely attenuated. The state of being unmarried was also, as Eliza's fate reminds us, a dangerous one. Eliza is presented ultimately as a cautionary figure; the lesson the reader takes away is that her fate is a terrible one, as she herself confesses 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!"

And yet, even as we pity Eliza, we do not condemn her. This is the greatest strength of Foster's novel. She shows us the ways in which a society saturated with public discourse about the sacredness of liberty nonetheless constrained the lives of women in terrible ways — and how, when women made choices that harmed no one but themselves, they were punished regardless.

Conclusion: Foster's Radical Legacy

Foster's work is as revolutionary in its own way as much of what men were writing in the late eighteenth century, but her words were of less effect and soon forgotten because they concerned the inalienable rights of women, not men. It was not yet a time in which women themselves were broadly encouraged to believe in their own right to liberty, the pursuit of happiness — or even life itself.

Recent scholarship has begun to restore The Coquette to its rightful place in the American literary tradition. Foster's achievement was not merely to tell a gripping story rooted in a real scandal, but to use that story as a vehicle for a searching critique of the gendered limits of American freedom. That critique remains as relevant today as it was when Foster first put it into print.

Works Cited

Foster, Hannah. The Coquette. 1797.

Wenska, Walter, Jr. "The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom." Early American Literature 11.3 (Winter 1977–78): 243–55.