SOURCE: “Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences,” in American Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1997, pp. 625-52.

[In the following essay, Brown interprets Eliza's plight in The Coquette in terms of her self-determination, or desire to create her own individual identity. Brown points out that women's role in the social contract of the American republic did not necessarily benefit them or even ensure their rights.]

When Eliza Wharton, the heroine of Hannah Foster's best-selling novel The Coquette, frankly describes her engagement as the sacrifice of her own “fancy in this affair” (5), she is voicing a standard criticism about the constraints on female and filial consent. Far from expressing her own desire, Eliza's consent represents the subordination of personal desire. In “obedience to the will and desires of my parents,” Eliza discloses, she accepted “their choice” of a husband for her, the “esteemed” Reverend Mr. Haly (5). Her consent to this “alliance” signified no “passion of love for Mr. Haly,” only her compliance with her parents' will (5).

Eliza's situation appears to be the typical predicament of eighteenth-century novelistic heroines since Clarissa: woman's subjection to parental, which is to say patriarchal, authority. The scenario of a daughter compelled to follow her parents' will also evokes the republican rhetoric of violated filial rights that figured so urgently and effectively in American revolutionary politics.¹ Stories of compelled consent pervade late-eighteenth-century America, conveying an uncertain—if not antithetical—relation of consent to individual freedom.

In Foster's novel, however, the image of female and filial subjection is both preceded and succeeded by a display of self-determination. At the opening of The Coquette, Eliza announces her “pleasure” “on leaving my paternal roof” (5), a pleasure won by successfully gambling her consent. As Eliza then explains, she has strategically exercised her personal interests even as she followed her parents' wishes. For when she “determined that my reason should concur with theirs,” she did so with a sense of the odds against this accord ever really posing a “risk” to her “future happiness” (5). Seeing, from their “first acquaintance, his declining health,” Eliza “was the more encouraged” to chance the engagement to Haly (5). Her speculation proves successful when both her father and fiancé die before the marriage can take place.

Foster complicates the conventional portrait of consent as a form of female subjection with evidence of the operation of a woman's design in consent. The room for individual maneuvering that Eliza finds in her exercise of consent demonstrates what a woman can do for herself within the limits of her historical condition, a condition defined by gender, class, race, nationality, and geography. Presenting consent in a light potentially more favorable than unfavorable for women's self-determination, Foster underscores agency in consent, even when the consenting agent is at odds with the content of her consent.

For those without access to full social, economic, and political self-determination, the idea that they are agents in consent understandably may seem a mockery of freedom. But what Foster delineates in Eliza's practice of consent is the limits in which consent always operates. Locating agency in consent and, more significantly, locating agency in the consent of the disenfranchised, Foster demonstrates that freedom exists even within the limits that curtail the experience and scope of freedom. Dramatizing the possibilities as well as limits of women's freedom, the portrait of consent in The Coquette recapitulates the meaning of consent developed in liberal political theory and psychology.

Under the concept of consent, society follows from and must fulfill the will of the individuals who compose it. As Locke so influentially reasoned, polities can legitimately exist only on the basis of the consent of the governed, who establish government for their own protection.² For the eighteenth century, and for America in particular, Lockean consent theory justified the establishment of republican governments. Consent theory supplied a story of the origins of society and governments that defined social and political institutions as emanating from, and thus subject to, the persons who constitute them.³ From the sanction of the people comes (or should come) the conditions in which they find themselves. Their freedom consists in being voluntarily bound to their own determinations.⁴ In the act of consenting to government, individuals choose and accept constraints upon themselves. Thus, though individuals in the act of consent freely determine their lives, forming states, contracts, and alliances, they also simultaneously embody cultural authority.⁵

Lockean consent theory foregrounds the individual's response and relation to authority, delineating the psychology of subjects living in liberal societies. Arguing against patriarchal forms of government and power, Locke stressed individual authority, by which he meant an authority that develops by the internalization of parental strictures. The Freudian conception of the superego is thus anticipated in Lockean psychology: the liberal formulation of self presents the self as always under rule.⁶ Thus the sense of the compulsory in consent, customarily identified with parents, can never be eliminated. Because Locke defines consent as a relation to authority, and more specifically as an affirmation of one's relation to authority, consent always includes the acknowledgment, however happy or unhappy, of one's subjection. Put another way, consent is a kind of self-dictation: consent is the subjection to our circumstances that we acknowledge when we are not rebelling from or objecting to them.

That individuals clearly do embody cultural authority, that consent is conventional, has always provoked doubts about and objections to liberal consent doctrine.⁷ The limited citizenship of women in liberal societies, for example, would seem to preclude their consent from denoting any form of self-determination whatsoever. Yet the apparent deficiency in consent that the subjection of women exposes lies not in consent, but in the culture that consent affirms. In the case of subordinated populations such as women, Native Americans, and slaves, consent marks the limits (as well as the possibilities) of self-determination because consent expresses the individual's relation to authority and therefore the different relations of different individuals to authority and to their differing internalizations of authority.

Far from female consent being a contradiction in terms, then, female consent epitomizes individual subjection in a liberal society. Eliza's manipulation of the terms of her subjection—her plot to elude the marital expectations placed upon her—causes her friends to call her “coquettish” (7), a characterization already ascribed to her by the novel's title. By labeling Eliza “the coquette,” Foster draws attention to the guile in Eliza's practice of consent. Eliza's artful use of consent suggests that individuals can appropriate consent for their own purposes. Once released from “those shackles, which parental authority had imposed on … [her] mind,” Eliza is determined to suit herself and “gratify … [her] natural disposition in a participation of those pleasures which youth and innocence afford” (13). Her sense of achieving liberty, however, proves short-lived, as she soon finds herself being urged into another engagement to another unappealing minister. Her evasion of this alliance leads to another unsuccessful implementation of consent: her seduction, impregnation, and ultimate death.

Through the limited effectiveness of Eliza's coquetry, Foster examines the failure of coquetry as a critique and an appropriation of consent. Though coquetry exhibits as it exploits the potential agency of women in consent, Foster's narrative of the coquette's difficulties in pursuing her desires reveals that having agency is not enough. Women as well as men are agents, Foster emphasizes, but gender defines and maintains different spheres of agency. It is in the failure of Eliza's coquetry that the inequality in the compasses of agency becomes most glaring. Featuring agency as a bounded activity, The Coquette depicts the perimeter within which female consent in eighteenth-century America operated. Until that perimeter changes, Foster intimates, consent cannot effectively serve women. To make consent a constructive instrument for women, Foster recommends that women eschew coquetry because it only sustains the limited sphere of their self-determinations.

1. CONSENT AND COQUETRY

What makes coquetry a dubious tactic for women's self-determination is the disparity that it enacts between a woman and her word, or between her different self-representations. Eliza's calculated act of consent differentiates her public word from her private words and desires, creating at least two versions of herself. In doing so, she simply exhibits the potential discrepancy between self-representation and self that consent always comprises. Unfortunately for Eliza, though, a woman's exercise of representational vagaries signifies for her culture not an act of self-determination but a show of deceit and, moreover, an example of a constitutionally feminine deceitful proclivity.

By characterizing Eliza as a coquette, Foster invokes a long-standing identification of women with deception. The imagery and vocabulary of coquetry in late-eighteenth-century America drew on the Enlightenment paradigm of femininity, most vividly delineated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and most vigorously denounced by women's rights advocates such as Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Judith Sargeant Murray, and, I suggest, by novelists such as Foster and Susanna Rowson. Writing the story of a coquette's failure at self-determination, Foster joins in the eighteenth-century feminist project of validating female consent by distancing it from coquetry.⁸

To dissociate female consent from coquetry, feminists sought to revise the characterization of women and consent popularized by Rousseau's writings. While Rousseau's Julie furnished a manifesto for filial choice in marriage and self-determination, his equally influential Emile provided a portrait of female consent as coquetry.⁹ According to Rousseau, “To be a woman means to be coquettish” (365). Coquettishness derives from a law of nature: “that woman is made specially to please man” (358). Pleasing man, according to Rousseau, means sexually provoking him. Woman “ought to constrain him to find his strength and make use of it. The surest art for animating that strength is to make it necessary by resistance” (358). Woman thus feigns resistance, holding man at bay with “the modesty and the shame with which nature armed the weak in order to enslave the strong” (358). Modesty also operates to “constrain” the “unlimited desires” that Rousseau attributes to woman (359).¹⁰ Woman is here imagined as always desiring and her resistance therefore understood as always feigned and, indeed, always provocative. For Rousseau, the truth about a woman can be determined but the woman herself never tells that truth.

Or rather, she does not tell the truth about herself even though the truth is nonetheless always apparent: “According to the true inclinations of their sex, even when they [women] are lying they are not false” (385). For women's words, by definition dissimulations, are invariably belied by bodily signs. “Why do you consult their mouth when it is not the mouth which ought to speak?” Rousseau asks. Instead, “[c]onsult their eyes, their color, their breathing, their fearful manner, their soft resistance. This is the language nature gives them for answering you. The mouth always says no and ought to say so. But the accent it adds to this answer is not always the same, and this accent does not know how to lie” (385). The female body and its operations thus provide a supplementary—and contradictory—language to a woman's verbal articulations. The meaning of woman's body language is of course preordained, as is evident in Rousseau's identification of fear and resistance as (signs of) affirmative responses. Woman is here imagined as a completely legible text, her speech a coquettish denial of—and therefore affirmation of—the truth available to a man beholding her.¹¹

Hence arises Rousseau's skepticism about women's accounts of rape. “Whether the human female shares man's desires or not and wants to satisfy them or not, she repulses him and always defends herself—but not always with the same force or, consequently, with the same success. For the attacker to be victorious, the one who is attacked must permit or arrange it; for does she not have adroit means to force the aggressor to use force?” (359). By this account, women's adroitness compels even violence against themselves. Rousseau locates in woman's natural constitution—that is, in her given coquettishness—the ontological state of not just a false accuser but a provocateur. In this imagination, rape can scarcely be said ever to occur. And indeed, Rousseau then avers that “[r]apes are hardly ever spoken of anymore, since they are so little necessary and men no longer believe in them” (360). The existence of rape must be ratified by the word of men, by their declarations of belief. “If fewer acts of rape are cited in our day,” Rousseau elaborates, “this is surely not because men are more temperate but because they are less credulous, and such a complaint, which previously would have persuaded simple peoples, in our days would succeed only in attracting the laughter of mockers” (360). Rape depends upon the credulity of the men who hear a woman's “complaint.” In this now familiar, frighteningly androcentric construction of rape, rape is an encounter between female speech and male speech, judged and determined by the latter. Small wonder that women may find it, as Rousseau says, “more advantageous to keep quiet” (360).

The point of Rousseau's portrait of women as coquettish (which is to say mendacious) is not simply to discredit women's testimonies but to align female consent with other forms of evidence, namely, with the testimonies of witnesses. His discourse on rape accordingly concludes with his approving citation of a scenario in which the mere possibility of external evidence discounts the woman's word: “In Deuteronomy there is a law by which a girl who had been abused was punished along with her seducer if the offense had been committed in the city. But if it had been committed in the country or in an isolated place, the man alone was punished: ‘For,’ the law says, ‘the girl cried out and was not heard.’ This benign interpretation taught girls not to let themselves be surprised in well-frequented places” (360). By this law, rape occurs only in the country, or in isolated places—where no one else is present to prevent the attack. The narrow and intensely civic-minded assumption behind the law's assignment of culpability to city victims of sexual attacks is that the cries for help uttered in the city will be heard, and attended. If such cries are not heard in circumstances when they could be heard, the law assumes the woman consented and punishes both her and the “seducer” as transgressors.

What Rousseau takes as the benignity of this convoluted law—the provision for women in isolated places beyond the range of witnesses—makes sense from the standpoint of a partisan of witnesses. If the external evidence of witnesses defines female consent, the absence of witnesses means that the crime (the man's crime of rape or the woman's crime of seduction and falsity) cannot be determined. Doubt goes to the victim—this is what Rousseau finds benign in the law. The city victim is punished as a false accuser on the premise that her cries of resistance would have been heard in a populous area, and the attack then prevented. Discounting the silencing effects of the speed, violence, strength, and weapons of the attacker, this premise also places the evidentiary weight on the presence or absence of witnesses. According to Rousseau's characterization of women's words, crying out in no way indicates resistance to rape but indeed confirms consensual participation in sex. If the girl's cries are heard, they should be understood as feigned resistance. Thus an attack within the range of witnesses can never appear against the woman's will. For Rousseau, we have seen, the role of witnesses, of beholders of women, is to corroborate the falsity of women's expressions of resistance. The victim out of the range of witnesses is accorded credibility only because there is no possibility of external testimonies.

Given Rousseau's characterization of women as always desirous and always consenting, we might expect him to convict the country victim along with her city sister as a false accuser. But the distinction between country and city experiences is crucial to upholding the authority of Rousseau's reading of women and coquetry. To consolidate the determinant role of witnesses, and of the physical evidence of the senses upon which they rely, Rousseau has to allow for cases in which the absence of witnesses means his interpretation of woman cannot be imposed. When no one can hear the victim's cries, no one can testify to her falsity.

The Deuteronomy story furnishes Rousseau with a parable of the witness's definitive role in female consent. Whatever evidence enters the witness's sensory orbit functions positively to confirm the consensuality of all female behavior. The witness is thus endowed with an evidentiary authority based on the fact of physical presence, which is to say, based on the fact of his visibility and the sight he reports. Even though the Deuteronomy tale concerns aural evidence and thus the witness's account of what he heard, sound here functions as sight does. The weight given to the victim's proximity to witnesses accords not just credibility but absolute veracity to the witness. By the bare fact of hearing—not by any consideration of what he hears—the witness corroborates what custom and law say about women. His mere presence operates as if he were an eyewitness, as if he sees and thus confirms the coquetry of women.¹²

In Rousseau's theatricalization of female consent, seeing is believing and the scene beheld is de facto one of consent, since woman is defined in advance as always consenting. The role of visibility—of the witness as well as the woman—in verification underscores what is at stake in Rousseau's formulation of femininity: the removal of woman from the uncertain operations and effects of representation. By feminizing Locke's portrait of consent, Rousseau both acknowledges the complexity of self-representation and simplifies it. He makes woman a model of transparency in order to narrow the representational range of consent so that its representational function can be absolutely certain. The incoherence, not to mention injustice, of this fantasy lies in the fact that such transparency expunges the very purpose of consent as self-representation.

Making woman's voice tell against her, Rousseau's formulation of female consent not surprisingly generated a feminist rhetoric of anticoquetry, which attempted to align woman with her words. For eighteenth-century advocates of women's rights, coquetry is an aberration, a negative form of womanhood arising from the inequity of the female situation. “Woman has everything against her,” Catherine Macaulay explains in her Letters on Education (1790), and therefore “she has nothing in her favor but her subtlety and her beauty” (212). The employment of these “to enthral the man” “act in a peculiar manner to corrupting the female mind” (213). A woman thus engaged is a coquette, “whose aim is to subject the whole world to her own humour; but in this vain attempt she commonly sacrifices both her decency and her virtue” (213). Macaulay believes that the harmful effects of the coquette's behavior extend beyond herself: “By the intrigues of women, and their rage for personal power and importance, the whole world has been filled with violence and injury; and their levity and influence have proved so hostile to the existence or permanence of rational manners, that it fully justifies the keeness of Mr. Pope's satire on the sex” (213-14). It is not just Alexander Pope that Macaulay invokes here; her attribution of power to female coquetry closely follows Rousseau. But whereas Rousseau thinks coquetry the natural condition of woman, Macaulay recognizes that coquettes are generated by convention. Because the problem of coquetry derives from social arrangements and inequalities, redress of this problem is to be found in educational and political practices. Macaulay accordingly proposes that “when the sex have been taught wisdom by education, they will be glad to give up indirect influence for rational privileges; and the precarious sovereignty of an hour enjoyed with the meanest and most infamous of the species, for those established rights which, independent of accidental circumstances, may afford protection to the whole sex” (215). Endowed with privileges and rights, women will be protected from the indirection and precariousness of coquetry. With the proper social conditions, women will attain the clarity of representation that Rousseau achieved for them by relying on witnesses whose accounts of women reiterate stipulated formulations of femininity. In calling for new forms of education for women, Macaulay and other late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American feminists sought to equip women with the means of representing themselves in the economic and political spheres, and thus to institute a parity between male and female voices. For this goal, the coquette's sovereignty had to be overthrown.

Wollstonecraft identified this sovereignty with the immorality of monarchical power that she saw embodied in Marie Antoinette, whom she described as “an adept in all the arts of coquetry that debauch the mind” (Historical 29-30). From this association of coquetry with the corrupt economic and sexual practices of monarchy, the coquette emerged in the late eighteenth century as the antitype of republican virtue. Like Marie Antoinette, “a profound dissembler,” the coquette seeks not alliance but tyranny. The young American man in a 1792 moral tale can therefore congratulate “himself that he has escaped from the smiles of a coquette,” from social and sexual wiles that would subordinate him (qtd. in Lewis 698). These “insidious and deluding wiles of the coquette” also come under censure in the advice book for “the Young Ladies of America” that Hannah Foster published the year after The Coquette. “How disgusting must this character appear to persons of sentiment and integrity,” Foster writes (Boarding School 98). What most bothers Foster and her feminist contemporaries about the coquette is her use of deceit—her pretense of consent—to realize her ambition to rule. She dallies with suitors, alternately intimating and revoking her consent to a series of men. In effect the coquette takes on the role of the seducer, engineering courtships to suit her pleasure. Ambiguous in her language and her acts, the coquette obfuscates the self-representational mission of consent. She further undermines consent's purpose as a vehicle of self-representation by detaching it from consequentiality. Her word is not a warranty of what can be expected from her. Coquetry takes the consequentiality out of courtship and consent, leaving uncertain the aftermath of a woman's acts.

It is in light of faulty self-representation that the coquette comes to epitomize for Foster, Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, and other women in the eighteenth century, not female defiance but female debility. Indeed, from a feminist perspective the coquette's evasion of consequentiality epitomizes the state of nonconsensuality in which persons exercise no authority for their acts and therefore have no accountability. From this standpoint Rousseau's pronouncement that “to be a woman means to be coquettish” might stand as an accurate account of woman's nonconsensual condition.

2. CONSENT AND THE SEDUCTION STORY

If Rousseau, in characterizing women as transparent coquettes, provoked feminist anticoquetry, he also, in the textured, layered quality of individuality that he imaged (and sought to eliminate) in the coquette, suggested a novelistic model of female character and consent. Taking a cue from Rousseau, eighteenth-century feminists like Foster and Wollstonecraft found the novel a useful format in which to analyze and reformulate masculinist accounts of femininity. In the novel, the very complications in consent and self-representation that Rousseau tried to eliminate through his elevation of the witness can work to credit rather than invalidate an individual.¹³ Since women's words conspicuously circulated and mattered in the novel, female consent in the novel could just as readily appear to bear and retain consequentiality as it appeared to defy and deny consequentiality in Rousseau's narrative. This is why women in eighteenth-century novels so often suffer so much: they bear the consequences of consent. In these novels' almost obsessive preoccupation with female responses to courtship and seduction, they register both the difficulties and advantages of representational acts that female consent so vividly typifies.¹⁴

The circumstances of female consent, a principle expressly negated in the prevailing law of coverture that defined woman as the property of father or husband, furnish a pattern of the numerous interests operating in self-representation and the often unpredictable directions self-representation can take.¹⁵ Subject to the state (in which they have no voice) and family (to which they must consent), women in the eighteenth century especially relied on the variable paths of representation, on the agility and ingenuity of literary representation. From the literature of women's attempts at self-determination emerge narratives of anxiety about consent as an adequate expression of the individual.

The novel of seduction in particular portrayed both the inadequacy of female representation and measures by which to enforce or contain or empower or overcome that frailty. The seduction novels popular in early America employ the fate of seduced heroines to signify a variety of views on female consent, which in turn disclose different views on consent itself. In these seduction tales consent is regularly depicted as an act leading to invariable consequences. Seduction stories operate on the premise that agency inevitably leaves traces, and they supply those traces. The evidentiary abundance and conviction of the seduction story make it a perfect vehicle for conveying the ideal of self-determination. Foster accordingly finds the seduction tale an effective medium for her project of translating coquetry into consequentiality.

At the center of the seduction scenario is a woman who comes to a destined end. In the predictability of her sad story, the seduction heroine represents an ideal of consent as originary and effective.¹⁶ Her exercise of consent, her affirmative or denial, can be seen to be consequential. In their generative capacity (all sexually active women in seduction stories seem to immediately conceive) women exemplify an inevitable sequential process of consent that consent theory can only fantasize. They produce evidence of consent and by that evidence consent becomes a truly originary act. Even as the political status of women suggests the imaginary—or at least imaginative—character of consent, women's reproductive capacity furnishes a seemingly irrefutable proof of consent (whether voluntary or involuntary).

Compacting the series of events that consent (theoretically) represents, the seduction scenario keeps effects closely connected to causes. The consequences of female desire stay within the compass of the female body. The seduction story's focus on a specific female biological destiny affords a view of consent as the immediate embodiment of personal desire—a spatial and temporal proximity between cause and effect. Generating children thus retells, as it results from, consent. Each generation is a chronicle of previous generations, testifying to prior acts of consent. Everybody is imagined to be the evidence of somebody else's consent. In this definitive portrait of consent, consent perfectly expresses and matches the individual. Not only does consent adequately represent persons but persons represent consent. A society formed on such an ideal standard of consent would be harmonious, composed of persons in complete accord with one another. This is why, as Rousseau's fantasy of a constant consensuality embodied in women indicates, liberal societies have a stake in denying rape or depicting rape as seduction (and thus portraying women as liars and seductresses).

By the seduction story formula in which desire leads to sex that results in pregnancy, and usually death in childbirth, consent creates and destroys bodies. The babies and corpses produced in the wake of consent become the standard proofs that consent has occurred. The feminization of consent that the novel of seduction reflects and conducts thus advances the evidentiary role women play in consent. In this arrangement of the liberal imagination, the reproductive labor of women makes consent material. Yet women also produce testimonies and therefore can complicate the reading of physical evidence. Seduction stories from a feminist point of view could question or rearrange or redefine or even throw out evidence. A novelist like Rowson could challenge the question of whether the conditions for choice and consent really existed in seduction scenarios when she made her fallen heroine Charlotte Temple, a 15-year-old girl who faints before either consenting to or rejecting her lover and who then wakes to find herself with him on a boat bound for America. Foster also questions the conditions of consent by casting the coquette, a figure of sovereignty, in the same hapless position as Charlotte Temple's. Coquettes were by definition false and (often by deed) fallen women, and by syllogism fallen heroines occupied the same position as coquettes did. This syllogism seems more concretely realized by virtue of the lack of female authority in consent. The fallen woman says yes at the wrong time, violating the proper sense of yes by failing to say and mean the prescribed no. She enacts in tragic form the game of the Rousseauian coquette who says no all the time, while meaning yes. Both exercise inadequate sovereignty over their self-representations; their obligatory end as abandoned women serves as an objective correlative for the lost—indeed, always already lost—value of their words and hence their characters.

Different novelistic treatments invite different evaluations of these lost characters. Foster's narrative of Eliza Wharton's history restages the question of female character as an alternating conflict and consensus about consent in the early years of American nationhood. Dedicated to choosing her way and her partners, Eliza appears something of a republican heroine. Her plea, “Let me then enjoy that freedom which I so highly prize” (13), certainly invites this identification, which has become a standard premise of readings of The Coquette (see, e.g., Davidson, Revolution 140-50; Smith-Rosenberg). Eliza's insistence on following her “natural propensity” (7) for enjoyment invokes the natural rights basis for self-determination prevalent in eighteenth-century republican theory. Her characterization of the change in her situation as a movement from subordination to freedom conspicuously echoes the rhetoric of filialism—the rights of each new generation over the claims of hereditary authority embodied in monarchy—that figured so urgently in American revolutionary polemics.

Yet in her unwise exercise and enjoyment of her freedom—she becomes impregnated by a notorious rake—Eliza can also appear more of a cautionary case than an exemplar of freedom. To her friends Eliza seems to have “wrong ideas of freedom, and matrimony” (30), making them worry that she is as “seducible” (38) as she turns out to be. Whether we take Eliza to typify the desirability or undesirability of the independent exercise of consent, both characterizations regard consent as an act producing some form of certainty. Consent in the radical republican ideal ratifies self-determination by representing it; that is, consent expresses and realizes individual desire. In the reactionary view, consent appears self-destructive. From this perspective the seduction story formula, in which desire leads to sex that results in pregnancy and usually death in childbirth, only confirms that consent inevitably leads to bad consequences.¹⁷ Indeed, the reactionary formulaic vision of experience epitomizes the certainty of individual authority and efficacy to which the republican ideal of self-determination aspires.

The sheer familiarity and predictability of the seduction story make it the perfect vehicle for conveying the concepts of—indeed, commitments to—causality and generation embedded in the idea of consent, whatever attitude toward consent a writer may wish to promulgate. Eliza's story is not simply a seduction tale but also a retelling of a well-known story, as Foster's subtitle, The History of Eliza Wharton, A Novel; Founded on Fact, acknowledges. The fact in this case was the 1788 incident of an unmarried woman named Elizabeth Whitman dying at a Massachusetts inn after giving birth to a stillborn child. Before Foster wrote her version of the story, numerous accounts of it circulated in newspapers, sermons, and other novels, notably in what most literary historians identify as the first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: Or, The Triumph of Nature, Founded in Truth (1789). And long after the publication of The Coquette, the Elizabeth Whitman story continued to be retold. The continual retelling of the story by successive generations demonstrates the way in which seduction stories are freighted with particular visions of consent. Between 1875 and 1912, Caroline Dall, Charles Bolton, and Mary Crawford published rebuttals of what they took to be Foster's distortion of Elizabeth Whitman's character. They argued that the young woman was, in fact, secretly married. She was thus telling the truth when she told the innkeeper that she was waiting for her husband to join her. As Dall insisted, there was no “evidence of that coquetry which [Foster's] novel has attached to her name” (17). Instead of a cautionary tale of a seduced and abandoned woman, the Elizabeth Whitman story in these retellings becomes an exemplum of faithful, enduring love. In keeping with this legend, the tombstone of Whitman in Peabody, Massachusetts, became a celebrated tourist attraction for lovers (Davidson, Revolution 149).

Besides extending the life of the Elizabeth Whitman story, these rehabilitations of her character attempt to legitimate her consent. That is, they adhere to all the details of the original affair but imagine a morally acceptable exercise of consent to have propelled the inevitable chain of events that the woman experienced. Purifying the seduction tale, however, alters nothing of the determinant and generative operations of consent. The same consequences follow for the heroine whether she is married or unmarried.

A well-known story, and an old one, The Coquette: Or, The History of Eliza Wharton stages the seduction tale as an examination of the determinism that both republican and reactionary conceptions of consent upheld. Since there is no suspense or mystery in the unfolding of Eliza's history, she can appear at once absolutely self-determining of and utterly subject to her fate. Thus to celebrate or to censure Eliza is to imagine that individual liberty can be uncoupled from the limitations upon that liberty (limitations that in fact define it).¹⁸ The very terms in which the seduction protagonist gets didactically cast—whether victim of insufficient liberty or victim of excessive freedom, whether honorable heroine of filial rights or cautionary figure of filial wrong—register the entanglement of freedom with constraint. The moralizing positions that the novel has provoked rearrange freedom and constraint in a sequential relation wherein one leads to the other. Either freedom becomes constraining or constraint necessitates freedom. Converting the liberal paradox of freedom and determinism into a causal sequence, both narratives aim to identify an accountable agent, to reduce the number of actors or agencies active in consent to one authorizing agent or source. In this fashion both republican and antirepublican readings of Eliza work to foreground and extract the lines of causality assumed to be performative in consent.

The story of consent that The Coquette tells, I am arguing, tracks the competing authorizing agents of consent in Eliza's exercise of consent. Everyone in the novel, from Eliza's family to her friends to her suitors to her seducer to Eliza herself, wants Eliza to consent. They differ only in the consequences to which they wish her to consent. The novel entertains all these interests as it includes alongside Eliza's claims for her “freedom” the omnipresent fears of her “prudish” friends about where the liberty to indulge in her own “pleasure” might lead. The world of The Coquette is thus one of constant scrutiny, by oneself and one's relations, even by comparative strangers—such as Selby, the friend of Eliza's suitor the Reverend Boyer who takes it upon himself to be “alike interested” in Eliza (45), going to social events expressly to observe her. Encompassing the variety of perspectives on Eliza, Foster's novel displays the populousness of consent and the prominent role of witnesses in defining consent. The goal of the interests competing for Eliza's consent is to reduce this crowded state: to make consent represent one voice, one direct line of cause and effect. The difficulty of achieving this univocality is underscored by Foster's choice of the epistolary style for her portrayal of the Elizabeth Whitman story. Foster thus amplifies the various voices speaking, and the differences among and within those voices. The congregation of witnesses with which Foster surrounds Eliza ultimately come under as much scrutiny as Eliza does. As Eliza's coquetry denotes the variability and populousness within the formation of consent, the consequences of her coquetry also point to the problematic role of other persons in consent: the credibility of the witnesses who corroborate consent.

3. COQUETRY AND CONSEQUENCES

When Foster calls Eliza “the coquette,” then, she is drawing attention to the indeterminacy and ineffectuality that coquetry typifies in the feminist republican narrative of consent. In keeping with this view of coquetry as nonconsensuality, Foster portrays Eliza as never quite saying yes or no. She initially declares to her friends and her suitor Boyer her “wish for no other connection than that of friendship” (6), and her distaste for matrimony's “consequences, care and confinement” (66). Nevertheless, almost immediately after her first fiancé's death Eliza is entangled in another courtship. She allows Boyer to write to her, visit her mother, and “expatiate on the subject” of marriage—“provided he will let me take my own time for the consummation” (66). Assuring her friends that she will be a wife “after awhile, when I have sowed all my wild oats” (68), Eliza is “loath to give up either” (53) this marital prospect or the decidedly non-matrimonial interest of the rake Peter Sanford. Eliza's deferral of her consent, “her loathness to bring … [Boyer's] courtship to a period” (78) while she continues to enjoy Sanford's company, finally makes Boyer withdraw his suit and, as he puts it, triumph “over the arts of a finished coquette” (77). Having “repelled the infatuating wiles of a deceitful girl” (78), he celebrates his passage from subjection to this “charmer” to subjection to the “empire” of reason (77). After Boyer's renunciation, Eliza eventually becomes the recently married Sanford's mistress. Pregnant by Sanford, Eliza leaves her home and, like Elizabeth Whitman, delivers a stillborn child in an inn and shortly thereafter dies. Thus the indeterminacy introduced by her procrastination of consent is counteracted by the predictable end to which seduction brings her.

In the seduction that replaces courtship, the coquette comes to suffer the consequences of consent that she evades in her protraction of courtship. The punishment of coquetry is exactly what Sanford plots when he judges “this young lady is a coquette” and accordingly avows to “avenge my sex, by retaliating the mischiefs, she meditates against us” and to “let her beware of the consequences” (18). His self-appointed mission against coquettes will bring the courtship of Eliza to a period, and ultimately bring Eliza to an end. Sanford's campaign against Eliza is novelistically and conventionally destined to succeed from the moment her name is linked to the term coquette. For the point of anticoquetry rhetoric, in either a feminist or patriarchalist agenda, is to bring women to account—to bring the coquette to consequences. In addition to affording him pleasure, Sanford's mission thus brings to its conclusion the unfinished courtship of Eliza: obtaining her consent and subjecting her to its fatal effects. In Foster's portrayal seduction succeeds courtship in order to secure the line of consent and consequentiality to which courtship directs women. Eliza's sin, therefore, appears to be not her illicit relations with Sanford but her coquettish relation with Boyer.¹⁹

In telling the Elizabeth Whitman story as a rake's crusade against a coquette, Foster includes in her novel a feminist indictment of patriarchal determinism. That is, the novel invites us to consider Eliza's fate as fully determined and sealed by the rake who plots her destruction. Even as eighteenth-century feminists vilified the figure of the coquette, they regarded her male counterpart as more vicious and dangerous. “There are quite as many male coquets as female,” Wollstonecraft noted, “and they are far more pernicious pests to society, as their sphere of action is larger, and they are less exposed to the censure of the world” (Thoughts 28). In the world of Eliza Wharton, rakes do get their full due of censure. The moral that Eliza's friends draw from her history is to beware of rakes: “From the melancholy story of Eliza Wharton, let the American fair learn to reject with disdain every insinuation derogatory to their true dignity and honor. Let them despise, and for ever banish the man, who can glory in the seduction of innocence and the ruin of reputation” (168). Yet if the history of the coquette in Foster's treatment provokes an indictment of the rake, the novel does not hold the rake wholly and solely accountable. Eliza accords blame to herself as well as Sanford. In her last conversation with him, she condemns coquetry in both its female and male forms:

May my unhappy story serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destructive consequences of associating with men of your character, of destroying their time, and risking their reputation by the practice of coquetry and its attendant follies! But for these, I might have been honorably connected; and capable, at this moment, of diffusing and receiving happiness! But for your arts, I might have remained a blessing to society, as well as the delight and comfort of my friends!

(159)

It is her own “practice of coquetry” as well as Sanford's arts that ruin Eliza. Eliza furthermore acknowledges her own fault “for disregarding the counsels, warnings and admonitions of my best friends” (159). Censuring all practices of coquetry, however gendered, the novel dramatizes an enmity between society and coquetry. Eliza's sense of her allegiances being caught between her friends on the one hand and male and female coquetry on the other hand reiterates Sanford's own account of his pursuit of Eliza as prompted as much by a desire for “revenge for … [Eliza's friends'] dislike and coldness” (158) as by desire for Eliza.

Both rakes and coquettes set themselves against social conventions by seeking to evade the consequences of courtship. In Foster's novel, however, both come to suffer the repercussions of their behavior. Uttering the standard words of the seduced woman—“I am undone!” (164)—Sanford finds himself in the very poverty that he had schemed to avoid by marrying an heiress instead of Eliza. Just as Eliza's friends wish that Sanford “ought for ever to be banished from human society” (163), he recognizes that he “must become a vagabond in the earth” (165). As long as he lives, Sanford attests, “I must feel the disgraceful, and torturing effects of my guilt in seducing … [Eliza]! … Her friends, could they know the pangs of contrition, and the horror of conscience which attend me, would be amply revenged!” (165).

With the biologically determined exits of coquettes and the socially decreed evictions of rakes, Foster's novel would appear to be making coquetry consequential with a vengeance. Yet as Eliza and Sanford come to their fates, their histories are strikingly revised. Lovelace-like Sanford reconstructs his actions into those of a lover toward his beloved. After ruining Eliza, he wishes he could legitimate their relation. Eliza does attain a form of legitimation through her friends. They rehabilitate, if not sanctify, her character in their memorial inscription on her tombstone:

This humble stone, in memory of Eliza Wharton, is inscribed by her weeping friends, to whom she endeared herself by uncommon tenderness and affection. Endowed with superior acquirements, she was still more distinquished [sic] by humility and benevolence. Let candor throw a veil over her frailties, for great was her charity to others. She sustained the last painful scene, far from every friend; and exhibited an example of calm resignation. Her departure was on the 25th day of July, A.D.———, iin [sic] the 37th year of her age, and the tears of strangers watered her grave.

(169)

The epitaph converts the story of coquetry into the biography of a moral paragon. This posthumous transformation of Eliza, moreover, aligns consent with an image of virtuous and civic-minded women. With the end of the coquette, the character of consent as an expression of community affiliation prevails. Thus, the words on the tombstone recall less the history of Eliza Wharton than the “truly republican” creed of female consent espoused early in the novel by her friend Mrs. Richman (44). Women, Mrs. Richman asserts, have a voice in politics because they are affected by them. As members of the community, subject to its “happy effects” as well as its “evil,” women must be “interested in the welfare and prosperity of our country.” They therefore “claim the right of inquiring into those affairs, which may conduce to, or interfere with the common weal” (44). Mrs. Richman stops short of claiming political equality for women, accepting that “[w]e shall not be called to the senate or the field to assert its privileges” (44). Tracing women's role in the state, her argument relies on the cause and effect consent narrative in which effects signify, or are taken to signify, the intentions of persons. By this logic the present state of subjection to the state marks prior consent; the continued existence of a government manifests the authorization of its subjects. If women are subject to the state's authority, Mrs. Richman reasons, women are not just subjects but also interested agents of the state. Thus, the current state of American women in the eighteenth century can be conceived as the effect of women's participation in a social compact. Republican womanhood retroactively gains authority as Mrs. Richman invokes a consensual origin for communal subjection.

To fortify this vision of consent, The Coquette accomplishes the eighteenth-century feminist goal of disengaging coquetry from female consent. Yet the novel's reconfiguration of consent to signify women's membership in the social contract remarkably refuses to celebrate Eliza's republican-minded friends. Mrs. Richman and Lucy and Julia appear most often as annoying exponents of gender and class proprieties rather than as advocates of the rights of individual women. The disparity between Eliza's desires and her friends' recommendations (a disparity sometimes internalized in her as her own conflicting desires), and between her life and her friends' posthumous account of it, remains at the novel's close. Women's participation in the social compact does not necessarily serve the rights of women, particularly when female members of society only espouse long-standing androcentric views of courtship, marriage, and family.

In Foster's writing of the seduction tale, establishing a substantial form of female consent changes from the expectation that women clarify themselves to society—an expectation that all the contradictions and confusions in both male and female characters' words and actions in this novel prove unreasonable—to a charge to society that it separate consent from the contradictions in which it has operated. Foster accordingly goes further than proscribing and eradicating coquetry to undo the Rousseauian paradigm of female consent. After getting rid of coquetry, she invalidates the witnesses, who in Rousseau's view constitute consent. Witnesses come and go in The Coquette as Foster presents Eliza's history through a succession of observers and correspondents: Lucy, Selby, Boyer, Sanford, Julia. The novel's cast of observers typifies the preeminence of witnesses in the identification of consent.

If Foster gives these witnesses the final word on Eliza, she clearly undermines both their credibility and the validity of their word. Not only do the last words on Eliza revise her character as they reinforce the logic of consent articulated by Mrs. Richman, but they also reiterate, word for word (except for the change in name from Elizabeth Whitman to Eliza Wharton), the inscription on the Whitman gravestone in Peabody, Massachusetts (see Crawford 11-12). In their misrepresentation of Eliza's life, her friends basically plagiarize another's epitaph. If one epitaph can serve any or all fallen women, testimonials to character can simply be generally stipulated. Such stipulation requires the witnessing function of readers who will attest to and perpetuate given accounts of persons or events. In Foster's novel, however, what the reader witnesses in the reappearing epitaph is the inconstancy of Eliza's witnesses, who rewrite her character as easily as they successively pair her with various suitors. They vary as much as Eliza does in dallying with Boyer. Besides inconsistency, these witnesses display in their testimony a prefabricated account of Eliza: they take their description of her from public record and popular lore.

By recycling the already known testimonial from the Whitman grave, Foster demonstrates how a witness's testimony, instead of shedding light on a case, may reflect and replicate social customs and biases—in this case, the standard practice of renouncing female vice by expurgating it. While the feminist repudiation and reformation of coquetry certainly improves upon Rousseau's absolutist dictum that all women are by nature coquettes, Foster recognizes the evidentiary weight that any formula of femininity generates and in particular the authority that the seduction formula holds.

In addition to providing consent with a causal narrative, the seduction story formula produces recognition, a sort of visual impact on the reader. By reprinting the actual Whitman memorial, Foster exposes the evidentiary effect generated by formula. By its sheer familiarity, the seduction tale carries evidentiary weight; it confirms while displaying what is commonly known. The seduction formula thus perfectly serves the promotion of convention, as feminist novelists realized when they used this narrative form to foster new conventions. Marking Eliza's end by remarking the words commemorating another fallen woman, Foster illuminates how the seduction story, and the structure of consent it exemplifies, perpetuates specific standards of gender. It is Foster's own revisionary achievement in The Coquette to use the formula not only to show the different points of view that can be introduced in and through it but to scrutinize the formal and sometimes formalistic operation of all views—in the case of Eliza's witnesses, both male and female, to disqualify the corroborative role of witnesses in seduction and consent.

Along with witnesses The Coquette accordingly calls into question the standing of children as evidence of consent. No epitaph witnesses Eliza's stillborn infant. Indeed, all children disappear in Foster's treatment of consent. All progeny in the book, even the legitimate babies of Sanford and his wife and of the exemplary Mrs. Richman, die. The ubiquitousness of infant mortality assigns to everyone the same consequences that the coquette and her infant warrant. Terminating the generative capacity of consent, Foster places all visions and uses of consent under the aegis of mortality. In Foster's treatment of seduction and consent, the body and its destiny become an inadequate because indiscriminate index of individual agency.²⁰

The effect of this reminder of common subjection to mortality is not to level the competing claims for consent—whether the misogynistic blanket attribution of consensuality to women or the feminist republican claim for women's civic virtue—but to foreground the permeable and impermanent bodies from which consent putatively emanates. Because these bodies, like Eliza's, may internalize or channel the interests of others, consent can never be reduced to one strain of consciousness. It never solely represents the individual or the society, Eliza or her friends. A confluence of voices and interests, consent as Foster delineates it is the ontological state of the liberal individual and the ontological burden of women in the liberal imagination. Thus the life of Elizabeth Whitman has passed from newsprint to novel to ever more commentary, testifying to the materiality of consent that women (still) customarily convey.

For women, this ontological burden includes—indeed demands—their reproductive labors: their production of the evidence of consent. By the liberal logic of seduction stories that I have been unfolding here, pregnancy proves the operation of consent, recognizing it even in its extralegal, extramarital or premarital, exercise. Indeed, as in Rousseau's portrait of consent, nonconsensuality barely seems an option for women when all their pregnancies, whatever the circumstances of insemination, signify consent. Hence the seductions ascribed to rakes and coquettes, and so often recounted in late eighteenth-century American literature, seem to suggest an extending franchise of consent. If women thus gain entitlements in a liberal society, they do so at the price of the suppression of their nonconsensuality. But Foster strikingly refuses to give generation the testifying function it usually has in seduction stories. If all offspring, legitimate or illegitimate, die, no one substantiates female consent. Without children the Lockean tradition of measuring consent by self-projection and self-retrospection halts.

In drawing attention to the mortality of the body, Foster dramatizes the fragility of this form of evidence for female consent. Eliza's removal from Foster's narrative, coincident with her impregnation and the progress of the pregnancy, thus signifies not only Foster's expulsion of coquetry but her refusal to yoke consent merely to physical evidence. Without the standard physical evidence of consent, the witnesses who confirm consent can present only anecdotal evidence: the final testimonial that they offer to Eliza's mother is quite literally anecdotal, the words borrowed from Elizabeth Whitman's epitaph. What the end of The Coquette underscores, then, is not the consequences of Eliza's consent—“Let candor throw a veil over her frailties,” the epitaph counsels (169)—but the task of redefining the testimonials of consent.

Notes

1. Readers could find in novels such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) evidence for if not advocacy of matrimonial republicanism. (For an informative account of matrimonial republicanism and early American women's actual experiences in courtship and marriage, see Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 [1980].) As Jay Fliegelman has noted in his exposition of “the American revolution against patriarchal authority,” American editions of Richardson's novel altered the original title—Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady, Comprehending the Most Important Concerns for Private Life and Particularly shewing, The Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children in Relation to Marriage—by substituting wherein the Arts of a Designing Villain and the Rigours of Paternal Authority, conspired to Complete the Ruin of a Virtuous Daughter for the words following “private life” (Fliegelman, Prodigals 87). Instead of a mutual partner in “the misconduct both of parents and children,” Clarissa now appears the victimized daughter. A similar brief for filial rights against parental tyranny could be found in Julie, wherein the heroine's unacceptable lover declares, “Are not the ties of marriage the most free, as well as the most sacred of all engagements? Yes, every law to lay constraint on them is unjust. Every father, who presumes to form or break them is a tyrant” (qtd. in Fliegelman, Prodigals 131). In this view, parental interference in the daughter's exercise of consent violates not just the daughter but the doctrine of individual liberty.

2. Locke formulated the principle of political consent in his second of the Two Treatises of Government (1690), which he subtitled “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government.”

3. Ever since Hume dismissed the notion of originary social contracts, critics have noted the implausibility of founding moments in which persons consented to governments. Skepticism about consent as the origin of governments points to the mythic character of consent in conveying societies with founding stories. Consent is therefore a hypothetical but useful historical account, according to Hanna Pitkin, because it preserves the role of citizens in making their governments. As Elaine Scarry further elaborates, the fictiveness or “artifactuality” is precisely the point and power of consent. Scarry argues that consent expresses and may institutionalize an imaginative act of individual authority. I follow Scarry's attentiveness to and respect for the representational structure and operation of consent, as well as Pitkin's delineation of consent's necessarily hypothetical character. For Scarry, however, the performance of consent invokes and relies upon the body. But the body, I would point out, is alternately or contradictorily volitional and nonvolitional, certainly an uncertain source of authority. The body, moreover, is a representational as well as material entity, not a set frame of reference. Founding consent in the body enacts once again the myth of individual control that consent sponsors and exemplifies.

4. This understanding of consent as a point where free will and determinacy converge is congruent with Jonathan Edwards's formulation of the consistency of free will with determinism, though Edwards of course saw determinism as the natural system and expression of the deity. Perry Miller thus astutely recognizes in Edwards's exposition of The Freedom of the Will (1754) not a conservative Calvinistic attack on liberalism, but an incorporation of liberalism into Protestant theology (263). For an illuminating study of the influence of Calvinism on Locke's own thought, see Dunn, esp. 203-61.

5. Although consent theory furnishes a justification of revolution, it preserves the principle of cultural authority. So changing cultural authority, say from patriarchalism to republicanism, does not relieve consent of the presence of the conventional; rather, it redefines conventions. Thus the liberal republican principle of self-determination does not dispense with but rather relocates the source of authority for the individual. “The chief problem of the American revolution,” Hannah Arendt observes, “turned out to be the establishment and foundation not of power but authority” (178). Contrary to J. G. A. Pocock's denigration of the significance of Lockean thought in early America, I am arguing, like John Diggins (esp. 347-65), for the persistence of Lockean consent doctrine in structuring all forms of republicanism—conservative, moderate, liberal, radical—that appear in early American political and cultural life. That is, even what Pocock and others (e.g., Bailyn, Wood) have identified as Americans' retrospective appeal to classical republicanism can be read as part of a narrative of liberalism. The adventures of consent, documented in various forms, thus register the tangencies of as well as tensions between liberalism and republicanism. Though I am rejecting Pocock's elevation of an Atlantic republican tradition in early America, the prevalence of the term in early American letters cannot be denied (see note 15, below). In my reading, consent is one of the forms through which republicanism or republicanisms—and other interests—get articulated.

6. For Locke, individual freedom entails the individual's subjection to his own reason and rule. See his discussion of self-denial as the bedrock of child development (Some Thoughts 107). Charles Taylor similarly has noted that Locke's “theory of rational control of the self” and “ideal of rational self-responsibility” shapes and permeates modern psychology (174). This model of self-control is not the panoptical design of socially self-regulating individuals that Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), but a vision of the power of individual agency within social limits. Fliegelman describes the role of social limits upon individuals in late-eighteenth-century America as “soft compulsion,” a compulsion that sometimes generated anxieties about individual agency (Declaring Independence 35-62).

7. The history and bibliography of debate on consent theory are too vast to record here. A useful summary of the persistent issues in the debate can be found in Partridge; the most incisive account of these issues is furnished by Pitkin. Among the most cogent of recent critiques of consent doctrine are the works of Herzog, Walzer, and Pateman.

8. In calling Eliza a coquette, Foster follows the popular press's view of the woman upon whom Foster based her “history of Eliza Wharton,” Elizabeth Whitman. Whether figuring Whitman as a failed social climber or a victim of reading romances, journalists characterized her behavior as coquettish (see Davidson x). The term coquette “has an interestingly ambiguous gender in the eighteenth century.” Derived from coq. the word coquette evokes masculine vanity, the image of “the preening barnyard rooster surrounded by a flock of admiring men. Hence coquetry is unfeminine. The masculine behavior it mimes, however, is generally regarded as foppish when observed in the salon rather than the barnyard, and hence it is strongly tinged with femininity. Thus coquetry can be imagined as doubly androgynous: it is practiced by women in imitation of effeminate men” (Gallagher 210). I would add that the gender ambiguity of coquetry is one form of the uncertain relation between persons and their self-representations that coquetry thematizes.

9. While Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) is one of the great consent documents of the eighteenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were much more familiar with his fiction and educational treatise (see Spurlin 75).

10. While modesty ideally expressed self-control, the very self-denials involved in the practice of self-control could entail a certain dishonesty, as Rousseau's description suggests. Thus false modesty appears very like coquetry, and feminist critics of Rousseau such as Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792]) dissociate women from the exaggerations of both coquetry and modesty.

11. Michael Fried suggests that woman acts at once as an agent in and the object of beholding in Rousseau's Letter to D'Alembert on the Theatre (167-71). Thus Rousseau can be understood as transforming the theatrical paradigm in which woman is the spectacle viewed into a textual paradigm in which woman both reads and is read. I am arguing that Rousseau's account of women in Emile similarly attributes a textuality to women and works to simplify its reading by designating a standard female intention and equipping men with a standard understanding of that intention.

12. Here I see Rousseau reverting from what Fried has characterized as a textual paradigm to a theatrical paradigm in which sight is privileged, though of course also oriented by a cultural account of what seeing women means. My reading of the eyewitness or witness as the corroborator of custom and law follows the stipulatory logic of rape that Frances Ferguson delineates.

13. Ian Watt (in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding [1957]) and subsequent critics have established the novel's integral relation to the project of substantiating individual experience as well as the novel's feminization of that project. For illuminating feminist expositions of that feminization, which eighteenth-century women writers immediately grasped, see Nancy K. Miller's The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (1980) and Claudia L. Johnson's Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995). Alexander Welsh has recently advanced the thesis of the novel's representational purposes in his compelling analysis of the relation of the novel's evidentiary techniques to British legal and cultural formulations of circumstantial evidence in Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (1992).

14. The novelistic obsession with the subject of female consent and chastity emerges from and exemplifies the eighteenth-century feminization of virtue (see, e.g., Lewis), which supplanted the classical republican identification of virtue with manliness (see Pocock 37-50 and Pitkin, Fortune 54, 237, 241). That actual sexual practices did not match sexual and gender ideals is clear from Nancy Cott's informative study of eighteenth-century Massachusetts divorce records. As late eighteenth-century republicanism feminized virtue—in the figures of the “republican mother” and “republican wife” described by Kerber (ch. 9) and Lewis—it also forwarded a misogynistic tradition of blaming women for social ills, inadequacies, and excesses. Carol Kay provocatively argues that the sentimentalization of virtue in republicanism in fact signifies a remasculinization of moral virtue. Whatever the influence or noninfluence of classical republican ideals on eighteenth-century America, the language of republicanism is prominent in early American literature as such scholars as Fliegelman and Davidson, for example, demonstrate. In this essay, I am analyzing the early American novelistic feminization of virtue as both an engine and effect of what might be called the modern republicanism generated by Lockean consent doctrine. Thus the term “republican” recurs in this essay as it does in early American literature, denoting antimonarchical principles. The term can both encompass and exclude the values of (Lockean) liberal individualism—rather than simply standing against it. I therefore find it more useful and accurate to characterize novelistic views of female virtue as falling within a spectrum of republicanism that ranges from radical to reactionary.

15. The legal concept of coverture is detailed in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), which the American legal system closely followed.

16. The idea that consent can ever serve women is an ongoing subject of feminist debates. Some feminist readers of Locke see his generational and familial model of consensuality as a paradigm that potentially includes and encourages the concept of female consent and citizenry (see Butler and Nicholson 133-66). Other feminists, such as Carol Pateman and Catharine MacKinnon (150), have developed provocative critiques of the androcentrism and misogyny of liberal consent theory. Pateman regards consent as a “hypothetical social contract” (The Disorder of Women 73) premised on the actual subordination and repression of women (Sexual Contract 109); she thus renames it “the sexual contract.” From my perspective, in which consent is a hypothetical but functional construct, often identified with a certain hypothesis about female biology, consent represents a desire by men as well as women that could be masculinist or feminist. How persons choose to tell and use the consent story shapes the character of consent. Historically, of course, consent primarily has served masculinist interests though it also has figured prominently in the development of Anglo-American feminism since Wollstonecraft. For the deployments of liberal individualism by Wollstonecraft and twentieth-century anorexics and feminists, see Brown.

17. The sexual determinacy of the seduction story appears also in eighteenth-century medical and popular accounts of pregnancy and childbirth. See Stafford for eighteenth-century beliefs about pregnancy and childbirth as the expression not only of a woman's sexual desire (and pleasure) but of all her desires and feelings (ch. 4).

18. Roberto Unger elegantly describes this paradox of liberal psychology and politics—that individual freedom depends upon, even as it contends with and sometimes against some social constraint—as the antinomy between reason and desire (ch. 1). In my exposition of Lockean liberalism, there is no antithesis between the realms of reason (constraint) and desire (individuality), for they are integral to each other.

19. Davidson also sees Eliza's experience with Boyer as her “ruin” but attributes this ruin to the “negation of female self” that Boyer's sermonizing rejection of Eliza emblematizes (Revolution 146), while Smith-Rosenberg attributes Eliza's downfall to “the desire for independence coupled with the wish to rise socially” that propel her toward the rake Sanford (169). Larzer Ziff has usefully pointed out the integral relation between sexual falls and economic difficulties in early American seduction novels (71-75). Smith-Rosenberg and Ziff read seduction novels as registrations of the anxieties attendant upon liberal economic individualism. While I agree with this general account, I think Foster's portrayal of Eliza invokes economic differences and desires less to develop a socioeconomic analysis than to employ the formula of seduction tales (of which economic difference is a standard convention) in order to illuminate the various and variable interests that consent represents. It is worth noting in this context that Locke views money as sign of universal consent.

20. Foster is not the only novelist of her era to raise questions about the function of pregnancy in seduction narratives. Rowson closes Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1794) with the survival of Charlotte's illegitimate daughter Lucy, who is adopted by Charlotte's parents. Whatever different experience might be imagined for the innocent offspring of a seduced woman is qualified, however, in the sequel Charlotte's Daughter: Or, The Three Orphans (1828), where Rowson follows the life of Lucy Temple up to the point of her engagement to a man who turns out to be her half-brother. The lovers/siblings separate and renounce marriage. A similar situation of a family destroyed by seduction and potential incest appears in William Brown's The Power of Sympathy. This concern with the fate of the family links female consent to the exogamous project of furthering the society—illicit female consent is imagined as generating endogamy and extinction, undoing a patriarchal order. By disallowing life to all offspring, The Coquette removes the threat of incest and the force of the incest threat as a principle of regulating women's consent.

Works Cited

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