Passion corrupting virtue, libertines destroying happiness, independence misused, seduction, betrayal and death.

This is a summary not of the torrid plots of afternoon soap operas or harlequin romances, but rather of the themes that obsessed America's first novelists, in the years following the American Revolution. Written as our national identity and modern class structure first took shape, America's earliest best-sellers—Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Ormond—were filled with scenes of fortune-hunting rakes and army officers, of young girls in flight from patriarchal homes, of unwed mothers and dying prostitutes.¹ Since popular fiction both reflects and shapes the world that reads it, the new American nation and the new middle class were formed at least in part by these lurid tales.

Historians, however, have rarely examined them. Melodramatic romances seemed to say little about the critical events of the early national period: the emergence of a capitalist class structure, the evolution of class identities, the ideological battle between classical republicanism and the rhetoric of economic and political laissez-faire.² Nor have historians been alone in their compartmentalized vision. The political debates of the new nation held little interest for literary scholars exploring the origins of the American novel.³ But does only the coincidence of chronology connect these two genres? Or can we hear behind fantastical plots about virtue endangered and independence abused echoes of another quite different discourse, that of republican political theory? The vocabulary found in both genres is remarkably similar. In both corruption undermines “independence”; the vicious, nonproductive elegance of the aristocracy threatens “virtue”; reason and restraint serve the common good while passion promotes self-interest and civic disorder. Do the novels of the middle class and the political rhetoric of the middle class address the same social and political dilemmas?

To answer that question requires a radical repositioning of the novel of seduction and of republican political rhetoric. We must learn to read both as central components of the ideology and discourses of the emergent middle class. Sexual and domestic, political and economic discourses wove in and out of one another as that radically new and protean class sought to construct an identity inclusive enough to encompass its divergent, often warring, components. Repositioning the political and the sexual, we will reread the body. No longer will it appear simply as a repository of the erotic and the reproductive, a psychic entity confined to social margins and domestic space. As a physical text written and read within a political context, it assumes new dimensions. A representation of the civic individual, associated with themes of autonomy or aggression, it becomes a legitimate figure in the public arena. To reread the body in this way forces a second critical recognition—that the body's physical integrity constitutes as significant a material vehicle for symbolic representation as the body's evocative sensuality. After all, feminists have long argued that who controls the body is as important a question to ask as what excites the body—and that the first question must be understood in political, not erotic, terms.⁴

Let me rephrase this argument in the analytic language of the historian. Republican ideology cannot be studied in isolation from an analysis of middle-class discourse and identity formation, any more than middle-class discourse and identity can be understood isolated from the ways gender and sexuality were conceptualized and constructed—or gender and sexuality isolated from class and ideology. We cannot fully understand the construction of a new sexual and domestic female in America between the 1780s and the 1830s unless we view it against the constantly changing construction of the male citizen—from the opening shots of the American Revolution, until he emerged as both “the common political man” and “the self-made economic man” of Jacksonian America. The political body is always gendered just as the gendering of the body is always political—and relational.⁵ The genders exist in conceptual opposition and in intimate social interaction. Whig theorists and republican mothers belonged to the same class, read in front of the same fires, often from the same texts.⁶ The fundamental contradictions that characterize the developing civic and class ideologies of these years can be more fully understood if we examine them as shared texts which middle-class women and men understood and used in subtly different ways.

But we must beware of flipping backward through our texts. Too often we have read the class identities and the sexual attitudes of the Enlightenment conditioned by Victorian texts, permitting the dark hues of the later period to color our perceptions of the more ebullient and explorative eighteenth century. Sexual and class identities were more hesitant and ambivalent in the years when both were just taking form. The rigidities of the later period—and its new potentials for subversion and revolt—cannot be projected backward. To understand the women and men of the new class and the new nation we must, rather, trace the way they formed their ideologies out of the heritage of earlier eighteenth-century discourses and in interaction with the material practices of their own time. Affected by radical reworkings of those material practices—the rise of commercial economy and the commercial city, technological innovation, political revolution—they perceived those reworkings with minds conditioned by conceptual systems and values formed in interaction with older material and discursive practices. This heritage of words simultaneously blinded and directed them. As J. G. A. Pocock suggests, “men cannot do what they have no means of saying they have done and what they do must in part be what they can say and conceive that it is.”⁷ To read the texts and discourses of the new class our focus must simultaneously bridge material reality and its representation, link the past, as embedded in language and literary forms, with the present, caught at that moment when language intersects the material to produce perception.

We must also link the voices of the varied speakers—and the silences of the listeners. M. M. Bakhtin argues that a cacophony of social dialects representing different classes, ethnicities, generations, professions—and, I would add, genders—characterizes every heterogeneous society, a cacophony reproduced differently within the consciousness of each individual speaker in that society.⁸ Power runs through this cacophony. The language of the economically and politically dominant will struggle to deny the legitimacy of more marginal social discourses, yet influences flow in both directions. Nor will the marginal ever be silenced. Rather, different social groups and subgroups will continually challenge each other's perceptions, conceptual systems, even the literal meanings of their words. Especially during periods of radical social change, this constant flow of conflicting meanings assumes an almost electrical urgency, like flashes of light refracting through a prism.⁹ In this way, language re-presents social experience.

To elucidate the discordance inherent in the discourses of the new nation and the new class, to trace the complex and inharmonious interaction of the new gender, class, and political identities, let us examine the process by which the new capitalism complicated classical republicanism's linking of “virtue,” “independence,” “liberty,” and “happiness.” Such an examination is complicated by the fact that both American middle-class identity and ideology and republican political discourse in England and America were extremely protean entities. Throughout the eighteenth century, new speakers and new ideological dialects repeatedly transformed classical republicanism. Merchants in London and Philadelphia created the dialect of commercial republicanism; the artisans of London and New York constructed the dialogue of radical republicanism; women across a broad social and economic spectrum rewrote these varied male texts. By the century's end, the lexicon of republicanism had fragmented.¹⁰

To illustrate this point let us examine the transformation of the twin pillars of republican ideology, “virtue” and “independence.”¹¹ Classical republicanism had identified the virtuous citizen as the free man who valued his liberty above all and who devoted himself to serving the common good. His ability to do both depended on an economic independence rooted in unalienated and unalienable property—literally, in the gentry's real estates secured by entail and primogeniture. Classical republicanism counterpoised the “virtuous” landed gentry to the “corrupt” new men of paper and place—the new capitalism's stock jobbers, government bureaucrats, and army officers. These men, the gentry argued, lived in a passionate and venal world driven by fantasy and credit, obsessed with stocks, speculation, and debt. Lacking landed independence, their interests, votes and pens were easily bought.

The man of trade occupied a more ambivalent position within classical-republican discourse. The value of the gentry's land, the source of the gentry's political independence, depended on trade, and hence on the actions of traders and on events occurring in London and in ports around the world. Their independence thus circumscribed by men and processes beyond their control or ken, the gentry responded with nervous suspicion. Trade, they wrote each other, was productive, linked to England's and their own prosperity. But trade also “introduces luxury … and extinguishes virtue.” It depended on credit which hung upon opinion and the passions of hope and fear. It was cathected with desire. It might seduce independent men away from the simple ways of their fathers. It could entrap them in an endless web of debt and ruin.¹²

Creatures of trade and credit, middle-class men defended against this association of themselves with the corrupt world of fantasy and passion by redefining both “virtue” and “independence.” In the commercial-republican lexicon, “independence” was rooted in productive labor and self-reliance. Talent, frugality, and application epitomized the new “virtue” and warded off the indulgences of luxury and indebtedness which the gentry had accused trade of eliciting. Traders were productive members of society, they argued. But were the gentry? Indeed, the new middle class began to take the offensive by reversing the symbols of corruption, proposing that the status of the gentry, like that of the aristocracy (the figure of corruption all republicans defined themselves against) depended on land inherited irrespective of talent or industry, and that the gentry, in common with the aristocracy, occupied political places secured not by productive labor but by family privilege. Challenges to patriarchy followed challenges to landed wealth, though the new bourgeois men spoke for the independence of sons far more than for the rights of wives and daughters. They also altered the meaning of “liberty.” To the gentry it had meant the citizen's right to be actively involved in making and executing decisions in the public realm. The new commercial men, like Locke, saw liberty, rooted in the social contract, as the free man's right to secure his private property from the incursions of a potentially dangerous state. Inverting the gentry's understanding, they now claimed liberty as all men's right, not one class's privilege.¹³

The ways the men of the new middle class constructed the middle-class woman further complicated their inheritance of the political assumptions of the British gentry, not only because middle-class women occupied an ambiguous place within the economy and ideology of their class but, more importantly, because the middle-class men's construction of gender repeatedly contradicted the middle-class men's transformation of the male republican discourse.

To illustrate this point let me return to the word “virtue.” Classical republicanism masculinized and gentrified virtue, rooting it in military service and landholding. In constructing their new class identity, middle-class men fused a republican understanding of civic virtue with more private and moral understandings garnered from evangelical religious texts.¹⁴ In doing so they began to associate the virtue of their class not only with the frugality of middle-class men but also with the sexual propriety of middle-class women. Elite men within the new middle class, urban merchants and their professional coterie, then further complicated the sexually proper woman's relation to virtue by requiring her to embody their class in a second and equally significant way. The elite woman's personal elegance, in clothing and in speech, and her familiarity with things cultural were to represent middle-class men's own economic security and cultural superiority to all other classes. Yet their construction of the elegant woman as the sign of class warred with their earlier association of class with virtuous male frugality, and so a fundamental flaw emerged in middle-class men's symbolic representation of their class.

Shifting definitions of “independence,” the material underpinning of both the gentry's and the middle-class's understanding of “virtue,” further compromised the middle-class woman's symbolic qualifications. Classical republicanism had rooted virtue in the independence created by unalienable land, and thus denied women access to civic virtue. Commercial men had transposed the gentry's landed independence into the independence of productive industry. This shift in the grounding of independence occurred at the very moment when economic change and bourgeois ideology deprived the middle-class woman, and married women of all classes, of the opportunity to labor productively and to support themselves independently. Having required the bourgeois woman to be both elegant and nonproductive, how could the bourgeois man ever trust her virtue or rest securely in the symbols of his class?

These ideological ambiguities and contradictions only multiplied as middle-class men displaced onto middle-class women criticisms the gentry had leveled against them. As the gentry had accused middle-class men of venality and extravagance, so middle-class men, depicting themselves, as we have seen, as hardworking and frugal, harangued middle-class women for alleged extravagances in dress and household management. More seriously, the gentry had denied that commercial men, living in the fantastical, passionate, and unreal world of paper money, stocks, and credit, could achieve civic virtue. How significant, then, that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries middle-class men endlessly accused bourgeois women of being untrustworthy and incapable of virtue because they lived in another fantastical, passionate, and unreal world of paper—the world of the novel and the romance?¹⁵

The proliferation of popular literature, the explosive second paper revolution, gave both middle-class women and men ample opportunity to explore, defend, and re-form these contradictions and displacements. Although bourgeois men had inscribed a male text of class onto bourgeois women, bourgeois women did not always read that text as their men intended. Rather, bourgeois women, increasingly empowered by the printing press and the emergence of a commercial market for popular literature, began to produce their own texts of civic and class identity, texts that differed significantly from male inscriptions.

The novel is a particularly useful genre for historians in search of this discursive interchange. Not only was and is the novel considered a particularly female genre (romantic, fantastical, domestic, sexual, often written by women), more than most other literary and professional genres, but it also captures those dynamic moments of social change when disparate groups, battling for hegemony, form and reform language. “The novelistic word,” Bakhtin tells us, “registers with extreme subtlety the nicest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere. … Each character's speech possesses its own belief system. … It … also refract[s] authorial intentions and consequently … constitute[s] a second language for the author.”¹⁶ The diversity of characters, the novel's reliance upon conflict and change for the development of plot and character, permit both the overt and covert expression of contradictions and conflicts inherent in the ideologies and discourses of the times. The evocative nature of the novel intensifies its ability to enact social conflict. While the hegemonic genres of a culture—sermons, for example, advice books, even political rhetoric—warn against danger and seek to repress ambiguities, the novel (and this was particularly true of the eighteenth-century novel of seduction) plays upon dangerous desires. Its melodramatic trials of a woman's virtue call forth its readers' repressed desires, permitting those desires to be vicariously enjoyed and as vicariously punished. While ultimately affirming the permissible, it makes us familiar with the forbidden. It is the novel, therefore, that most fully represents the conflicts and contradications of its time.

To explore this aspect of the novel, let us examine America's first best-seller, Hannah Foster's The Coquette; or the History of Eliza Wharton. A Novel Founded on Fact, By a Lady of Massachusetts, originally published in 1797 and repeatedly republished through the 1870s.¹⁷ At first reading, The Coquette appears a melodramatic representation of the values of commercial republicanism. Eliza Wharton, a young and virtuous woman, has just ventured into the eighteenth-century marriage market. The daughter of a respected minister who, dependent on a salary, has left her little capital inheritance, Eliza plays the role of a venture capitalist. As such, she confronts the same dilemmas a young merchant faces in the confusing economic markets of the late eighteenth century: how to credit financial and moral worth in a world of words and fancy; whether to trust traditional community wisdom or, depending on her own judgment, to risk all for possible great gains. It is in the language of commercial metaphor that Foster has Eliza present herself to us and evaluate her chances. “Fortune,” Eliza tells her friend and confidante, Lucy Freeman, “has not been very liberal of her gifts to me; but I presume on a large stock in the bank of friendship, which, united with health and innocence, give me some pleasing anticipation of future felicity.” Freeman responds in kind: “I shall be extremely anxious to hear the process and progress of this business” (9, 27).

The plot revolves around the choice Eliza must make between two suitors. One, the Reverend Mr. Boyer, as a minister, represents simultaneously the authoritative voice of social norms and the hard-working, honest, professional middle class. Offering Eliza a life of respectable dignity and service to the community, he is rational, honorable, and prudent. His words harmonize with communal wisdom. The second suitor, Major Sanford, is a rake, corrupt and deceitful. He assumes the airs of the very wealthy and the distinction of a military title—both highly suspect within either classical or commercial-republican ideology. Worse yet, having wasted his fortune, he pretends to a station he has no right to claim. (This is symbolized by his mortgaged estate. An encumbered estate is an anathema to all forms of republicanism, a paper mortgage masking the reality of an empty purse.) He refuses honest employment as beneath the dignity of a “gentleman and a man of pleasure,” preferring to prostitute himself to a marriage of convenience. With double deceit, he holds out to Eliza the temptations of a gay life and marriage although he cannot afford the one and does not intend the other. He compounds his sins by encouraging her resistance to the constraints of domesticity. Asserting her independence, Eliza sets out on her own to evaluate the worth of these two men. Swayed by fancy and ambition, scornful of her family's advice, Eliza judges wrongly and falls.

Read as a celebration of the values of commercial republicanism, this is just the novel we would expect to find written in the New England of the 1790s. But such a reading is too simple. The Coquette painstakingly and persistently complicates what should be clear-cut. First, Eliza is not a heroine like Pamela or Clarissa, virtuous to the core. Rather, as Cathy Davidson argues in her fine study of early American literature, The Revolution and the Word, Eliza fuses talent and virtues with serious moral failings. Even more remarkably, her failings and her fall endear her to her friends within the novel and to her readers outside. Second, the novel persistently leads the reader to resist the prudent marriage and to root for the rake. Third, the moral spokeswomen of the novel end by warning the heroine that male ministerial texts can be as misleading and dangerous as women's romances and novels. Finally, The Coquette is not simply a fiction, but, as Davidson details, a rewriting of an earlier, male-authored historical text, the popular reporting of the scandalous death of Elizabeth Whitman (xi).

Elizabeth Whitman, a respected daughter of New England's professional middle class, related to Jonathan Edwards, cousin of Aaron Burr, daughter of a highly respected Hartford minister, herself a frequently published poet and friend of the Hartford Wits, died, alone, under an assumed name in a Massachusetts inn, having given birth to an illegitimate child. Newspapers and sermons thundered against her criminal sexuality as they speculated about the name of her seducer. The men's reading of the event emphasized women's social and sexual vulnerability: woman's passion, uncontrollable when enflamed by novel and romance reading, easily overcame women's fragile hold on virtue (xi).

Hannah Foster's Coquette offers us a different narrative. Eliza Wharton's downfall, Foster tells us, was not lust but the desire for independence coupled with the wish to rise socially. As such she represented those within the emergent middle class, who, rejecting traditional norms, anxiously embraced individualism, risk, and the new capitalism.

To be appreciated fully, The Coquette must be read as a gendered misprisioning of the political and economic discourses of its time. Just as the capitalist revolution problematizes “independence” and “virtue” as understood within classical republicanism, so The Coquette underscores the ways concepts of female “independence” and “individualism” further complicated the republican lexicon. The book's opening sentence alerts the reader to the significance of this issue. “An unusual sensation possesses my breast,” Eliza writes her friend, Freeman, “a sensation which I once thought could never pervade it on any occasion whatever. It is pleasure, pleasure, my dear Lucy, on leaving my paternal roof. Could you have believed that the darling child of an indulgent and dearly-beloved mother would feel a gleam of joy at leaving her? But it is so” (5). Two events, Eliza continues, have freed her: the death of her father and the death of the man her father had chosen as her husband, another minister, whom she did not love. While both patriarchal figures lived, Eliza had exhibited behavior appropriate to her class and gender. “Both nature and education had instilled into my mind an implicit obedience to the will and desires of my parents. To them, of course, I sacrificed my fancy in the affair, determined that my reason should concur with theirs, and on that to risk my future happiness” (5).

To read these statements in a political context, let us start by juxtaposing Eliza's comment, “determined that my reason should concur with theirs, and on that to risk my future happiness,” to one drawn from that primer of American republican rhetoric, the Declaration of Independence. Here we find “certain inalienable rights” listed, “among these, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Coquette begins by telling us that the heroine, as a virtuous daughter, has resigned her liberty of choice and her pursuit of happiness in deference to parental wishes; she has agreed, that is, to link happiness to the sacrifice, not the assertion, of liberty. This pious sacrifice is then contrasted to the pleasure she now reports experiencing at resuming her lost independence, pleasure, a word that she twice repeats, and that Hannah Foster italicizes. Circumstances reversing her position, Eliza now associates liberty with pleasure—and with her ability to pursue happiness on her own.

The Declaration of Independence tells us that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights. Numerous other republican texts warn Americans that to relinquish them will endanger virtue. But the Declaration also insists that a passion for liberty be balanced by prudence. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” But Eliza's very first sentence signals a subtle shift away from the hegemonical Declaration of Independence, a shift that challenges the traditional relation among pleasure, happiness, and prudence. Eliza has called pleasure an “unusual” emotion, especially when associated with independence and liberty. To most eighteenth-century republicans, it was both an unusual and a dangerous emotion. Popular version of moral philosophy, especially that most common to Puritan New England, pitted pleasure against both happiness and prudence.¹⁸ For them, “happiness” signified contentment with one's place in life, “the attainment of what is considered good.”¹⁹ It was subservient to, indeed rooted in, social norms. “Pleasure,” in contrast, implied delight in the sensations; it hinted at passion—an association reinforced when Eliza represents her pleasure in a physical, indeed, a sensual vocabulary. Pleasure, invoked by her newfound independence, she tells Freeman, “possesses my breast.” It illuminates her with “a gleam of joy.” When independence is absent in this text, so is sensuality. In acquiescing to her parent's will, Eliza tells Freeman, she had “sacrificed my fancy.” “My heart” was not “engaged.” “I never felt the passion of love.” Eliza, in short, has invested her female independence and liberty of choice with desire. And with an equally dangerous emotion—individualism. Pleasure, especially in Eliza's usage, presumes individuals capable of fancying and privileging their own desires, of acting independent of society's approval in order to secure them. Eliza significantly ends her letter by underscoring this note of individualism. “This letter,” she confesses to Lucy, “is all an Egotism” (5-6). What a significant beginning for a novel written in the shadow of the American Revolution!

Throughout the novel, Eliza Wharton will insist that pleasure can legitimately be wedded to a desire for independence and liberty, that marriage without such a “wedding” will destroy happiness.²⁰ Her family and friends will tell her virtue and happiness are tied to prudence and a socially appropriate marriage, that pleasure and fancy will endanger both. Throughout, Eliza will insist on her right as an independent woman to pursue happiness guided by her own standards.

The following interchange between Eliza and the proper and prosperously married Ann Richman schematically presents the conflict. Eliza, rejecting Richman's advice to cut short her newfound liberty and marry the minister, replies: “I hope my friends will never again interpose in my concerns of that nature. A melancholy event has lately extricated me from those shackles which parental authority had imposed on my mind. Let me, then, enjoy that freedom which I so highly prize. Let me have opportunity, unbiased by opinion, to gratify my natural disposition in a participation of those pleasures which youth and innocence afford.” Richman's response warns Eliza against conflating independence and pleasure, a conflation which Richman links to scenes of fashionable dissipation. “Of such pleasures, no one, my dear, would wish to deprive you,” Richman insists, “but beware, Eliza! Though strewed with flowers, when contemplated by your lively imagination, it is, after all, a slippery, thorny path. The round of fashionable dissipation is dangerous. A phantom is often pursued, which leaves its deluded votary the real form of wretchedness” (13).

The disruption of the easy relations between happiness and virtue which Eliza's desire for pleasure and independence affected underscores a second disjuncture which greatly troubled the eighteenth century, that between perception and reality. The eighteenth century desired mimesis and despaired of achieving it. They feared that fancy and passion, tied to individualism and to the twin paper revolutions of credit and printing, would disrupt the ability of words and the imagination to represent material reality. Reality would become a chimera, especially for the innocent and the inexperienced, especially, that is, for women and the young. In the particular dialogue just cited, for example, Eliza insists that female independence is not only legitimate and pleasurable but a real option. The married and thus mature and experienced Richman dismisses Eliza's words as immaterial, “phantoms” obscuring the bodily reality of “slippery, thorny paths,” and the “real form of wretchedness” which female independence, fused with female pleasure, will bring. Eliza alarms rather than persuades the reader by her willful and defiant response: “I despise those contracted ideas which confine virtue to a cell” (13).

Here, then, is the dilemma Foster presents. Independence endangers at the same time as it gives pleasure; domestic restraints destroy pleasure and liberty at the same time as they guarantee virtue and economic security. At all the key points in the novel two critical disjunctures appear. The imagination and the passions threaten to distort perception; virtue, independence, liberty, and happiness are divided against themselves. Eliza would like to unite all. Her virtuous advisers tell her this is no longer possible. Take the correspondence between Eliza and Freeman in which Eliza contrasts social independence (which she depicts in corporeal and fanciful terms) to marriage and public service (which she associates with the loss of economic independence, social liberty—and pleasure). “My sanguine imagination paints, in alluring colors, the charms of youth and freedom, regulated by virtue and innocence,” Eliza writes Freeman, “Of these I wish to partake.” She tells of her fears of the stuffy minister who wants to carry her off to the wilderness of New Hampshire. “I recoil at the thought of immediately forming a connection which must confine me to the duties of domestic life, and make me dependent for happiness, perhaps, too, for subsistence, upon a class of people [the minister's parishioners] who will claim the right to scrutinize every part of my conduct, and, by censuring those foibles which I am conscious of not having prudence to avoid, may render me completely miserable.” She then asserts her right to make her own decision. “You must either quit the subject, or leave me to the exercise of my free will” (29-30). Lucy Freeman, whose role in the novel is to express republican ideals, snaps back. Eliza's words and fancy have obscured Eliza's perceptions of reality.

Freeman's heated response underscores the opposition between pleasure and happiness, women and liberty, female independence and female virtue. “You are indeed very tenacious of your freedom, as you call it; but that is a play on words. A man of Mr. Boyer's honor and sense will never abridge any privileges which virtue can claim” (30-31). Indeed, liberty or “freedom” for women is so inconceivable to Freeman that it exists only “as a play on words.” She replaces “freedom” with female “virtue” which can only claim privileges from a posture of dependence. And privilege, other republican texts tell us, is dangerous, tied to corruption, as in the unearned privileges of birth, which commercial republicanism scorns.²¹

If women's relation to liberty and freedom underscores the complexities and uncertainties of those words, women's relation to economic independence does the same. Indeed The Coquette quite pointedly spells out the ways women's relation to independence limits their right to liberty—and predetermines the boundaries of their happiness. The same characters that tell Eliza that her independence/freedom is a play on words, Freeman, Richman, and the Reverend Mr. Boyer, warn her that middle-class women lack the financial resources to support an independent social role. (Eliza stretches the limits of her mother's income when visiting Freeman in Boston and must compromise her independence by accepting presents [73].) Freeman and Richman warn her not to overstep her class in her ambition to make a fashionable show. A minister is just the right husband for her. “His situation in life,” the prudent Freeman advises,” is … as elevated as you have a right to claim. Forgive my plainness, Eliza. … I know your ambition is to make a distinguished figure in the first class of polished society, to shine in the gay circle of fashionable amusements, and to bear off the palm amidst the votaries of pleasure” (27).

It is Eliza's twin desires for the pleasures of social independence and social eminence that attract her to the rake, Major Sanford. When Mr. Boyer finally rejects Eliza, it is not her loss of chastity that motivates the minister, but her independence coupled with her extravagance in dress and her desire to rise above her father's social station. And, significantly, it is at this point that Boyer enters into a debate about the contested meanings of the word “virtue,” defining it as far more than sexual propriety. In a letter to his friend and colleague, the Reverend Mr. T. Selby, Boyer writes, “I would not be understood to impeach Miss Wharton's virtue; I mean her chastity. Virtue in the common acceptation of the term, as applied to the sex, is confined to that particular, you know. But in my view, this is of little importance, where all other virtues are wanting!” (78).

Boyer's denunciation of Eliza's assertion of social independence unsupported by economic independence is the turning point in the novel. Once the minister has rejected her as an appropriate wife for his class, no other man proposes. Eliza's passion for liberty and social independence has reached imprudent limits. It has propelled her into the classless state of the spinster, with only marginal rights to the economic resources of any man. Her independence has cost her what it at first promised: pleasure, happiness, free access to the world outside the home. It will ultimately cost her her sexual virtue as well. Though warned against the rake by friends and family, she insists on judging him by her own criteria and falls.

Foster's telling of Eliza's story contains significant discontinuities and silences. Foster splits Eliza's fall into two almost unrelated events: her rejection by the Reverend Mr. Boyer, her affair with the rake. Years separate the two. The second, the sexual fall, comes unaccompanied by either pleasure or passion.²² The requisite physical decay, in fact, rather than following from her sexual seduction, precedes it by approximately a year (105, 110). If anything, Eliza's sexual seduction appears the formulaic conclusion demanded by the novel of seduction and needed to connect Hannah Foster's Eliza Wharton with Elizabeth Whitman, the woman who died of childbirth in a Massachusetts inn. We are drawn back to Cathy Davidson's suggestion that Hannah Foster deliberately wrote against an existing male narrative of sex and passion. Can the striking absence of sexual passion be explained, then, by the fact that Foster's Coquette, like Henry James's Daisy Miller, died not from lust but from the imprudent desire for an impossible social independence and the desire to assert her right to control her own body?²³

Three letters that separate the two sections of the novel suggest an even more subversive reading—that Eliza's real seduction and fall occurred a year after Boyer's denunciation and long before her sexual fall with Sanford (101-6). At this point, realizing that no other man will propose, Eliza writes Boyer, acquiescing in his denunciation of her. He was right, she confesses; she had sinned. Indeed his letter of denunciation has led her to repent. She begs him to marry her. Boyer responds that he is pleased she now accepts his reading of her acts, but “Your letter came too late.” He has chosen another, a “virtuous … amiable … accomplished” woman who will serve him better than the fanciful, extravagant, and independent Eliza. The tone of his letter is authoritative, judgmental, and assured (101-4).

It is at this point that Eliza cries out to Freeman: “O my friend, I am undone. … O that I had not written to Mr. Boyer!” She then reaffirms her submission to his text. “I blame not Mr. Boyer. He has acted nobly.” From this submission comes not inner peace but ruin, inner torment, and decline. For a second time in the book, Eliza misappropriates language traditionally used to describe the sexual to discuss the social. She writes Freeman: “I approve his conduct, though it operates my ruin … and what adds an insupportable poignancy to the reflection is self-condemnation. From this inward torture where shall I flee? Where shall I seek that happiness which I have madly trifled away?” Eliza has finally accepted the fragmentation of virtue, independence, and happiness. She has been seduced not by the rake but by the minister's text of individual (especially female) submission to social consensus. It is the relinquishing of her social and intellectual independence, not of her sexual virginity, that constitutes her true fall. It is this fall, not her later sexual seduction, that she reports with all the anguish of a sexual fall and in the appropriate formulaic language—even to a discussion of the decline of her health. “My bloom is decreasing. My health is sensibly impaired,” (105). Without the pleasures of independence and of “the exercise of my free will” Eliza's body wastes away.

It is at this point in Eliza's seduction by Boyer's text that the prudent Freeman, always Boyer's advocate, reverses her position. She chides Eliza on her fall from reason into sentimentality. To Eliza's lamentations, she sensibly responds: “Your truly romantic letter came safe to hand. Indeed, my dear, it would make a very pretty figure in a novel. A bleeding heart, slighted love, and all the et ceteras of romance enter the composition” (107). Eliza, she says, has given her heart to two imprudent texts—the text of religious prudery (Boyer's) and the text of the romance. Freeman recalls her to the better text of independence, reason, and strength, to the text of republicanism. It is that text that will lead her to happiness and virtue. “Where, O Eliza Wharton, … is that strength of mind, that independence of soul, that alacrity and sprightliness of deportment, which formally raised you superior to every adverse occurrence? Why have you resigned these valuable endowments and suffered yourself to become the sport of contending passions?” (107). Ironically, then, Foster does in the end agree with the male sermon and newspaper writers: reading romances led to Eliza's fall. Romances did so, however, not because they taught women sexual passion for men but because they taught women to renounce their own reason and independence. In this way, women lost their happiness. To cure Eliza from the excesses of male texts, Freeman tells her, a mutual friend, Julia, a sprightly, unmarried woman, will come to carry Eliza back to Boston and to her female friends. Freeman, in other words, in virtually her last letter in the novel, denounces the texts middle-class men use to construct gender and privileges the non-textual world of female friendship as a way back to the true text of republicanism.

But Julia comes too late. Eliza has already fallen victim, not to Sanford—he is secondary—but to the authoritative male discourse of her age. She has relinquished her quest to fuse independence and pleasure; she now accepts her community's definition of virtue. But such a definition, because it denies independence to women, brings neither happiness nor pleasure. “I frequent neither … the company [nor] the amusements of the town,” she tells Julia. “Having incurred so much censure by the indulgence of a gay disposition, I am now trying what a recluse and solitary mode of life will produce. … I look around for happiness, and find it not. The world is to me a desart [sic]. And when I have recourse to books, … if novels, they exhibit scenes of pleasure which I have no prospect of realizing!” (135). Pallor, depression, an “emaciated form!” replace Eliza's gay independence (140). Only then, having lost independence, pleasure, and happiness, does Eliza relinquish her virtue as well.

Cathy Davidson reads Hannah Foster's Eliza Wharton as EveryWoman who, during years marked by political and economic revolution, lusted for independence. She sees The Coquette as a subversive novel which encourages the reader, against her reason, to applaud Eliza's desires and mourn her death.²⁴ I embrace Davidson's reading but suggest an additional layering. Eliza Wharton is Everyman as well as Everywoman. Her career underscores the way economic change has transformed the independence of classical republicanism, making it highly individualized and economically risky. No longer securing social order, independence, tied to liberty and freedom, endangers the individual and society. Foster dramatizes the new impotence of family and community against the autonomy of youth and the power of the individual. Familial and community spokesmen have become spokeswomen, the feminized Greek chorus of Richman, Freeman, and Eliza's widowed mother, who, at the end, can only mouth hollow platitudes as Eliza is seduced in her mother's parlor and then disappears into the night.²⁵

Reading in this way we see that Foster has in fact rewritten woman's place within the male texts of nationalism and class. Middle-class men had made middle-class women their alter egos, bearers of criticisms the gentry had directed against middle-class men and against the paper revolution. Middle-class women, not middle-class men, were thus depicted as incapable of civic virtue. Not only does Foster's text suggest that men, not women, are incapable of true virtue, but she also makes Eliza the ego, not the alter ego, of the new nation and the new class. It is Eliza, not Boyer or Sanford, who takes on the challenges the new capitalism thrusts upon the new American republicans. It is she, not they, who assumes tragic proportions. It is in her language that the dilemmas of her age are debated. The principal question of The Coquette is the principal question of the new nation and the new class: how can independence and individual happiness be made compatible with social order? In the end, Foster gives no answer. We are left to hypothesize that, in the late 1790s, Americans had yet to resolve the fundamental inconsistencies between their new capitalist and individualistic economy and the civic humanism they had inherited from their Augustan ancestors. Yet the subversive tone that runs through The Coquette suggests that old paradigms are about to crack open, that the next generation of writers will represent Elizas who do not have to die.

The middle-class construction of gender frustrated this anticipation. Everyman—whether he appears as “the Deerslayer” in Cooper's canonical text, as “the common man” in Jacksonian political rhetoric, as “the self-made man” in laissez-faire economic theory, as Davy Crockett in the scatalogical comic almanacs—a generation later has broken the old paradigms of civic humanism and fused independence and individualism. But not Everywoman. The freedom Foster subversively permits Eliza will recede in the face of the cult of true womanhood's growing hegemony, and a hundred years later Lilly in The House of Mirth, Edith in The Awakening will end, ironically, like Eliza—indeed, like ideal Revolutionary heroes—by giving their lives for their freedom.²⁶

Notes

1. Over seventy novels by American authors were published between the 1790s and 1821 when James Fenimore Cooper's canonical novel, The Spy, became a best-seller, an event traditionally thought to initiate the American novel. During these same years, English novels circulated widely in America as well. Charlotte Temple, the first best-selling novel in America, was first published in 1791 and republished continuously and in large editions in America throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, 104 separate American editions have been traced. See, for example, Susanna Rowson, Charlotte: A Tale of Truth by Mrs. Rowson, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: printed for M. Carey, 1794). Rowson considered herself a British citizen at the time she wrote Charlotte Temple. Hannah W. Foster, the author of The Coquette, came from old New England stock and was married to a New England minister at the time she wrote the novel, which first appeared in 1797 and was repeatedly republished into the 1870s. Page citations to The Coquette are to the most recent edition, edited with an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and are given parenthetically in the text. Charles Brockden Brown, a Philadelphia and New York merchant, was another prolific, widely published, and influential American author. His first American book, Alcuin, appeared in 1798. Six novels quickly followed, beginning with Wieland in 1798 and concluding with Jane Talbot in 1801. Ormond was first published in 1799; Ernest Marchand has edited and provided an introduction to a modern edition (New York and London: Hafner, 1937). For a brilliant analysis of the early American novel see Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For an older survey see Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel (New York: F. Unger, 1958).

2. For classic studies of the revolutionary period which do not cite literary texts, see, for example: Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); and Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Richard Bushman is an exception to this list. See, for example, his essay “American High Style and Vernacular Cultures,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

3. Two important exceptions to this general rule among literary studies are: Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), and Davidson, Revolution.

4. I have long been indebted to the work of Mary Douglas and Victor Turner in my reading of the physical body as a representation of the social body. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), and Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Vintage Books, 1970); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbol and Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969).

5. I am particularly indebted to Elaine Scarry for suggestions leading to this phraseology.

6. Davidson argues that subscription lists of early American publishers and printers as well as other items in early books indicate that women and men read many of the same books (Davidson, Revolution, esp. chaps. 3 and 4). Linda Kerber has been particularly influential in terms of underscoring the use republican male theorists and social commentators made of the mother's role in the new republic. See her Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) and “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985):474-95.

7. J. G. A. Pocock, “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972):122, cited by Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985):466. Indeed, I find one of John Pocock's most interesting contributions to the theoretical armamentarium of the historian to be his insistence that we conceive of and perceive our world using concepts and rhetoric inherited from past eras. This vision is fundamental to my own analytical approach in this essay.

8. See especially M. M. Bakhtin's arguments in “Epic and Novel” and “Discourse and the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

9. See, for example, Bakhtin's comment: “Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already … overlain … by the light of alien words that have already been spoken about it … entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 276).

10. Few issues are as hotly debated among early national historians as the nature and sources of American republican political rhetoric. Two schools oppose each other. The older, led by Bailyn (Intellectual Origins), Wood (Creation of the American Republic), and Pocock (Machiavellian Moment), argues that American republican ideology is deeply rooted in the early eighteenth-century British gentry's transformations of earlier forms of civic humanism, though all emphasize that economic change altered Americans' usage of the gentry's older rhetorical devices. Joyce Appleby (Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s [New York: New York University Press, 1984] and “Republicanism and Ideology”), Linda Kerber (“The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation”), Drew R. McCoy (The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980]), and Isaac Kramnick (“Republican Revisionism Revisited,” American Historical Review 87 [1982]:629-64) offer significant modifications to the Bailyn-Wood-Pocock thesis, stressing the disruptive influence of economic change. They argue that Americans used republican political terms in ways significantly different from the way in which the British gentry did earlier in the century. These new scholars stress the more individualistic and overtly capitalistic perspective of American theorists, as well as underscoring the influence of John Locke and Adam Smith on American republican thinkers. For a recent summary of the controversy see the special issue of the American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985), edited by Joyce Appleby.

11. Isaac Kramnick in “Republican Revisionism Revisited” is particularly interested in the way the meanings the British gentry and American republicans assigned words changed. I find his essay most suggestive.

12. Charles Davenant, The Political and Commercial Works of Dr. Charles D'Avenant, ed. Sir Charles Whetworth, 6 vols. (London, 1771), cited by Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 443. For a lengthy discussion of the gentry's ambivalent attitudes toward trade see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, chap. 13, esp. 441-50. See also Wood, Creation of the American Republic. I wish to thank Toby Ditz for insisting on the ambivalence and contradictions that characterized the gentry's vision of trade and of the trader.

13. Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited.”

14. For the influence of evangelicalism upon American republican thought see Ruth Block, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and “The Gendered Meaning of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” unpublished paper, Organization of American Historians, 1987 convention.

15. This is a central theme in fiction and in advice and sermon literature.

16. Bakhtin, Diologic Imagination, 300. See also Davidson, Revolution, 13 and 44.

17. Davidson has edited the most recent scholarly edition of The Coquette. Her introduction to this edition, as well as chapter 6 in Revolution, offers a highly suggestive analysis of the subversive nature of The Coquette as a female novel. Davidson is less interested in the relation between The Coquette and republican political ideology than she is in Hannah Foster's use of The Coquette to underscore the contradictions inherent in middle-class men's construction of the female role. Thus Davidson uses The Coquette to expand our understanding of women's experiences during the early national period. See, especially, “Introduction” Coquette (xi-xx). In this present essay, I am more interested in using the new middle-class discourse on gender to throw light upon the complexities and contradictions inherent in American republican ideology. Yet while they differ so in focus, I see our approaches as compatible, not contradictory.

18. See, for example, Clyde A. Holbrook, The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards; Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973). For British usage, see Edward A. Bloom and Lillian Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal in the Market Place, on the Hustings, in the Pulpit (Providence: Brown University Press, 1971).

19. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

20. The comments in the Declaration of Independence concerning the purpose of a just government can also be read in relation to Eliza's concerns about the government of marriage and the family. The Declaration follows its initial sentence that states that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights with its definition of a just government. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Only then does the Declaration proceed to a discussion of prudence (referred to above). A subversive reading of The Coquette (and of the Declaration) might suggest the question: if marriage and the family do not promote the liberty and happiness of women, do women have a right to alter or abolish them?

21. Kramnick, “Republican Revisionism Revisited.”

22. The absence of sexual desire from the process of sexual seduction or, indeed, of any mention of sexuality is one of the most striking aspects of this novel. Davidson pointedly remarks on it (Revolution, 149), as do most other readers.

23. Gayle Rubin argues that the most radical political assertion possible occurs when a young woman asserts her right to control the right of access to her body and her sexuality. Gayle Rubin, “Traffic in Women,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. by Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

24. Davidson, Revolution, 144-50.

25. Davidson points to Foster's construction of an impotent maternal figure in Mrs. Wharton. Revolution, 148-49.

26. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (New York: New American Library, 1963). For an analysis of the Davy Crockett popular literature see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (New York: Knopf, 1985), 79-89. Edith Wharton, House of Mirth (New York: Scribners, 1976), and Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories, ed. Nina Baym (New York: Random House, 1981). Linda Kerber in Women of the Republic has already drawn attention to parallels between The Coquette and The House of Mirth.

This essay took form first as a paper at a conference on “American Democracy and Democracy in America: Tocqueville After 150 Years,” University of California, Berkeley, November 1986. I am particularly indebted to the suggestions of Elaine Scarry, Alvia Golden, Toby Ditz, Phyllis Rackin, and Mary Poovey and most especially to those offered by Maureen Quilligan and by the literature graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania who were members of a graduate seminar on Language, Gender, and Power. Maureen Quilligan, assisted by those students, taught me the fundamentals of close reading. She contributed significantly to my analysis of The Coquette.