Davys, Mary | Natasha Sajé (essay date 1996)
Natasha Sajé (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: "'The Assurance to Write, the Vanity of Expecting to be Read': Deception and Reform in Mary Davys's The Reform'd Coquet." in Essays in Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Fall, 1996, pp. 165-77.
[In the following essay, Saje analyzes the theme of the "coquette" and the historical dilemma of the marriageable female in Davys' life and novel, The Reform'd Coquet.]
Since its coinage in mid seventeenth-century France, "coquette" labels a woman who gains power over others by manipulative verbal and body language, a skill referred to as her "art."1 Etymologically, the word "coquette" comes from "cock," a male animal which controls its hens and is known for feisty aggression; the word, however, refers to a woman, whose passivity and subordination have long been assumed. The coquette figure appears in literature at the moment when the novel as we know it was being invented, also the moment when...
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