SOURCE: “Beyond ‘A Play about Words’: Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette,” in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 71-151.

[In the following excerpt, Stern explores the connection between women's imagination and freedom in The Coquette, concluding that women lacked true freedom in the American republic of the time.]

SPECTACLE

Lucy's programmatic diatribe [in Foster's The Coquette] on the heroine's failure of resolution is followed in the same letter by perhaps the most fascinating and certainly the least explored passage in Foster's novel. Mrs. Sumner proceeds to unfold at Eliza's request an extraordinary disquisition on the moral inadequacy of Boston's “public and private places of resort” (113), the popular amusements at which she has been a spectator. It is here that the forms of play operating at the margins of Foster's representation come into view as cultural analogues to the heroine's “wayward” and “eccentric” female imagination.

The crucial connection between women's fancy and freedom that Lucy reprobates throughout The Coquette takes material shape in the forms of late-eighteenth-century mass entertainment she catalogs for the heroine. Sermonizing passionately, Lucy inveighs against the theater's unseemly exhibition of private woes and the circus's indecent exposure of female bodies. This harangue unwittingly evokes singular parallels to Eliza's own experience: not only have her romantic difficulties made her into a local curiosity, but, even more painfully, she has been scrutinized and commodified by the gaze of a community that includes both Lucy herself and her husband-to-be Mr. Sumner.¹ Lucy writes, “My swain interests himself very much in your affairs. You will possibly think him impertinent; but I give his curiosity a softer name” (31). Eliza indeed resents the intrusive gaze of the chorus. “I hope my friends will never again interpose in my concerns of that nature” (13), she declares at the opening of the novel, and she takes offense at the prospect that Boyer's peers will “claim the right of scrutinizing every part of [her] conduct” (29).

Yet Eliza has orchestrated the community's speculation largely to her own advantage, and in that regard she is not entirely without agency, at least for the first half of Foster's book. She characterizes her participation in the drama of courtship as “my part of the farce, for such it might prove after all” (28); and writing to Lucy of the performative quality of her interactions with the minister, she remarks, “I have just received a letter from Mr. Boyer, in the usual style. He expects the superlative happiness of kissing my hand next week. O dear! I believe I must begin to fix my phiz. Let me run to the glass and try if I can make up one that will look madamish” (61, first emphasis mine). For all their bravado, however, the heroine's witty, theatrical self-characterizations constitute another way in which she articulates her protest against a wearying social dynamic that she cannot ultimately escape. By describing her meetings with Boyer in the humorous terms of satiric comedy, she strives to expose the folly of such a union to the partisan chorus.

Eliza expresses more passion and animation in this letter to Lucy in which she projects the imaginary tableau of making-up before the mirror, performing her femininity as masquerade,² than she does in describing any of her encounters with the minister. The heroine's capricious notion of fixing her “phiz” to “look madamish” gives dramatic expression to her awareness that she would have to enact a fiction of genteel submission in order to satisfy Boyer's romantic expectations. To embody such a fantasy would indeed be to fix her future, in the sense of hardening, arresting, or canceling her prospects for freedom. In the face of pressure to accept the minister's hand and be done with the business of courtship, such theatrical fancies dispatched to her female correspondents give humorous voice to the gravity of Eliza's dilemma, at the same time enabling her to imagine her own defiance of the tyranny of the marriage market. Scripted exclusively for the eyes of the women who read her letters, such fictive tableaux afford the heroine the liberty to construct, if only in ephemeral fancy, a moment of cathartic opposition. That the spectacle of the heroine's mugging before an imaginary looking glass should be the very scene she translates into an epistolary plea for fellow feeling makes perfect sense, for what Eliza seeks is nothing less than a sympathetic reflection of her decidedly unconventional vision of marriage, the prospect that her beloved friend could mirror her point of view.

Rather than affirm the heroine's ambivalence and partake of her amusement in a romantic scenario that leaves Eliza “strongly tempted … to laugh” (66), however, the community actively campaigns for her to accept the minister's hand. Despite her whimsical wishes, in expecting the chorus both to take pleasure in her humor and to decode it for the social protest it contains, Eliza sadly miscalculates the allegiances of her friends. I have established that in The Coquette fancy is a political category that threatens the values of the republican community. Lucy affirms this conclusion in her description of her own horror over viewing “griefs [that are] imaginary” on the theatrical stage (113). In the same letter, she trivializes the significance of Eliza's melancholy by locating its source in her “imagination” (112), denying the possibility that the heroine's despair might express a cultural problem: the unmarried woman's lack of access in republican America to a meaningful venue for the expression of liberty.

Lucy's outrage over a Boston production of Romeo and Juliet replays in intriguing ways her disapproval of Eliza's imaginative “indulgence of melancholy” (112). As the tirade against the performance begins to slip loose from its referent and to point toward other forms of dramatizing and fanciful excess—namely, Eliza's behavior in the face of romantic failure—Foster suggests the extent to which theatricality is particularly provocative as a mode of political expression in early national culture.³ The object of Mrs. Sumner's indignation is the very Shakespearian tragedy that, according to Kenneth Silverman, was “the single most popular play in the colonial theater from 1763-74.”⁴ Given the historical period in which The Coquette is set,⁵ a more conventionally mimetic rendering would have Lucy patronizing the best-attended production of the 1790s, American novelist Royall Tyler's comedy of manners, The Contrast.⁶ In the history of the eighteenth-century American theater, performances of Romeo and Juliet are most often associated with the final epoch of English domination of the colonies, although the annals of the Boston stage record that the play continues to be put on there throughout the Federalist period.⁷ But the politics of genre prove more significant to Foster's representation than do the poetics of realism.⁸ Including Lucy in the audience of a drama identified with the pre-Revolutionary past links the heroine's most intimate friend with the morbidity and backward-looking orientation of the chorus. The plot of Romeo and Juliet also constitutes a Shakespearian analogue for the post-Revolutionary context of Foster's story. Dramatizing what happens when anxiety about parties and socially unsanctioned sexual unions explodes into its most gothic manifestation,⁹ the story of Romeo and Juliet could also serve as a rough précis for Eliza Wharton's ultimate fate in The Coquette.

At some level identifying without in any way acknowledging the singular parallels between (fictive) life and (doubly fictive) art, Lucy writes to Eliza about her disturbing experience as a spectator witnessing the theatrical representation of “imaginary grief”:

Last evening I attended a tragedy; but I will never attend another. I have not yet been able to erase the gloom which it impressed upon my mind. It was Romeo and Juliet. Distressing enough to sensibility this! Are there not real woes (if not in our own families, at least among our own friends, and neighbors) sufficient to exercise our sympathy and pity, without introducing fictious ones into our very diversions? How can that be a diversion, which racks the soul with grief, even though that grief be imaginary.

(112-13)

Lucy's antitheatrical diatribe recapitulates her hostile attitude toward Eliza's “imaginary woes.” At the same time, her feverish reaction to the distressing nature of dramatic spectacle suggests some basic recognition, however disclaimed, that “our very diversions,” whether humorous epistolary salvos or tragic dramas on the public stage, serve as arenas for articulating collective conflicts, what Jane Tompkins calls the “doing of cultural work.”¹⁰

While the manifest narrative of outrage would suggest otherwise, Lucy's speech in fact affirms by omission Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that tragic drama provides the body politic with a forum for catharsis; in refusing to witness the spectacle of tragedy, citizens like Lucy turn away from the exercise of civic virtue at the level of imagination. Even Edmund Burke, whose conservative politics would appeal to a Federalist of Lucy's stripes, argues for the civic value of the theater. He writes that, “indeed, theater is a better school of moral sentiments than churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged.”¹¹ Lucy is utterly unwilling to acknowledge the seriousness of Eliza's emotional extremity, to understand what she terms “the real woes … among our friends and neighbors,” much less to valorize the essentially political implications of the heroine's situation. In similar fashion, she refuses to take on ever again the “imaginary grief” of Shakespearian tragedy. We must read her outraged letter as a narrative symptom, indicating that the play, rather than thrusting unpleasant but “fictitious” woes squarely into her face, actually reflects Eliza's plight, the reality of which Lucy is invested in denying. To see such familiar distress performed as a diversion suggests that such a subject might be legitimate and worthy of the community's consideration and reprises the unpleasant fact that theater and politics in the new republic are profoundly intertwined.

In her narrative of theatergoing as traumatic assault on sensibility, Lucy's capacity for authentic fellow feeling is exposed as both shallow and narrow; her powers of sympathy extend no further than to those of the chorus able to mirror her irreproachable comportment. The matron's moralistic harangue is particularly interesting, in light of Fliegelman's insight that “American virtue was … rooted in the consumer end of theatricality, in a concept related to impersonation, but whose threat to the stability of self had positive rather than destructive moral consequences: the operations of sympathy and identification, the experience of being moved. Those operations that permitted one, in Pope's popular phrase, ‘to feel another's Woe,’ were routinely described in the eighteenth century with reference to what happens to a spectator in a theater.”¹² According to Fliegelman, the late-eighteenth-century American playhouse is an arena in which virtue, classically understood by republican theorists as a specifically disinterested quality,¹³ becomes increasingly aligned with sympathy. In this description of what we might call “early national affective politics,” Fliegelman points to a marked shift away from classical republican notions of dispassionate communality and toward a protodemocratic ethos of collective absorption and shared fellow feeling, the affect toward which Charlotte Temple reaches.¹⁴

Lucy's horror over being forced through fictive operations of identification to experience another's woe is emblematic of the discomfort with the expression of feeling we are tracing here. The matron's disavowal of tragedy is entirely consistent with her role as spokeswoman for a community whose emotional practices are virulently antidemocratic. Displaced into her antitheatrical tirade, her abiding failure of compassion for Eliza's plight offers an ironic commentary on Rousseau's warning (counter to Aristotelion theory) that the false emotions conjured up in the playhouse actually deaden the spectator's capacity for feeling the real sorrows of a neighbor by “substituting a simulacrum of sympathy for actual human interaction.”¹⁵ Lucy gives lip service to the Rousseauvian formulation that “people think they come together in the theater, and it is there that they are isolated … they go to forget their friends, neighbors, and relations in order to concern themselves with fables, in order to cry for the misfortunes of the dead, or to laugh at the expense of the living.”¹⁶ But her outraged reprobation of dramatic spectacle, actually expressed in the tones of melodrama, remains thoroughly disconnected from any sympathetic impulses of humanity she might in fact practice in the novel. Indeed, Lucy's histrionic claim that tragic drama proves nothing less than an indulgent diversion, mere entertainment that mutes one's ability to feel for one's friends, utterly fails to translate into a heightened sensitivity toward Eliza's pain. Rousseau's tract against spectacles, which emphasizes both the dangerous theatricality of everyday relations and the way in which imaginative drama only magnifies and reflects this crisis of sympathy, eerily prognosticates the matron's hard-hearted attitude toward Eliza Wharton's woes, her indictment of the heroine's feelings as the self-dramatizations of a coquette. Lucy's behavior underscores the very lack of humanity that Rousseau locates in the relation between the dramatic actor and his or her audience—the failure of sympathy antitheatricality means to combat—and points to the dangerous insincerity inherent in republican social relations.¹⁷

That Lucy's manifesto against tragic drama constitutes a politically inflected discourse on the limits of sympathy comes into sharper focus when compared with an another repudiation of the theater, found in an earlier epistolary novel of seduction. In its evocative linguistic detail, the following passage in all likelihood functioned as the source for Lucy's tirade: “Yet, for my own part, I loved not tragedies; though she did, for the sake of the instruction, the warning, and the example generally given in them. I had too much feeling, I said. There was enough in the world to make our hearts sad without carrying grief into our diversions, and making the distresses of others our own.”¹⁸ Foster herself provides the cues for making the link to this passage from Richardson's Clarissa, which appears in a letter written by Lovelace to his friend Belford. Traces of her imaginative involvement with Richardson's book are inscribed throughout The Coquette. For example, by creating a scene between the heroine and Mrs. Richman that takes Clarissa as a proof text against the evils of seduction, Foster engages in no less than a metanarrative commentary on her own procedures and formal strategies. In an early letter to Lucy, Eliza records a conversation with her hostess about the inappropriateness of Major Sanford as a suitor. When Mrs. Richman calls Sanford a “seducer,” the heroine exclaims,

I hope, madam, you do not think me an object of seduction! I do not think you are seducible; nor was Richardson's Clarissa, till she made herself the victim, by her own indiscretion. Pardon me Eliza, this is a second Lovelace. I am alarmed by his artful intrusions. His insinuating attention to you are [sic] characteristic of the man. Come, I presume you are not interested to keep his secrets, if you know them. Will you give me a little sketch of his conversation? Most willingly, said I; and, accordingly, related the whole. When I had concluded, she shook her head, and replied, beware, my friend, of his arts. You own heart is too sincere to suspect treachery and dissimulation in another; but suffer not your ear to be charmed by the syren voice of flattery; nor your eye to be caught by the phantom of gaiety and pleasure.

(38)

Mrs. Richman's elision of the fact that Clarissa is not seduced but raped by Lovelace while she is under the influence of drugs is not inconsistent with moralizing readings of the novel made by Americans in the late eighteenth century, including no less than John Adams himself, who asserts in an 1804 letter that “Democracy is Lovelace and the people are Clarissa.”

What is interesting in Mrs. Richman's attitude is the utter lack of compassion for Richardson's virtuous heroine, who more typically had the eighteenth-century audience dissolving into extremities of sympathetic identification. Affected readers include characters who receive letters within the novel—figures like the libertine's confidant Belford, who takes up the heroine's cause against Lovelace, on being so moved by her plight—and extend to the villain himself. Actual members of the reading public go so far as to correspond with Richardson, imploring him to change Clarissa's fate. Set against this background, Mrs. Richman's cruel indictment of Clarissa, her failure of readerly fellow feeling, constitutes a foreboding prolepsis of the chorus's ultimate view of Eliza.¹⁹ In an extraordinary moment, through the correspondence of The Coquette's most vocal proponent of female virtue, Foster ventriloquizes the theories of a libertine whose compulsion to test the limits of his own capacity for compassion leads him to drug and rape the only woman who commands his love—a gesture that surely complicates, if not explodes, the didactic reading of her book. Until the point of the rape, the libertine is repeatedly undone—rendered ineffectual—by the heroine's sentimental displays. It is only when the immobilized Clarissa, having been drugged into unconsciousness, ceases to embody a dramatic tableau that the villain can set aside his sympathy. The libertine becomes transformed into a rapist precisely at the moment in which he disavows all compassion for his victim.²⁰

The intertextual echoes between these two passages suggest that it is not Major Sanford (who is afforded minimal vocal representation) but in fact Lucy Freeman Sumner and her minions in the feminized community who speak the lethal language of seduction in The Coquette. Thus, like the narrator of Charlotte Temple, the majority also practices a form of verbal seduction on its (internal) audience, exercising tyranny in the name of republican virtue just as the purportedly democratic narrator of Rowson's book reveals her slyly despotic nature.²¹ Although Mrs. Richman warns Eliza against the powers of the libertine's eloquence, she misapprehends the fact that the most dangerous wielders of words in the novel are her own female peers. In far more subtle and unwitting form, and to an entirely different political end, the ominous practices of the feminized chorus begin to resemble—in their effects—those of the corrupted La Rue, Charlotte Temple's most destructive seducer. It is Mrs. Richman herself who ultimately convinces Eliza to embark on the action that she had only contemplated and that proves fatal to her equanimity: the writing of a letter to Boyer, in which the heroine invents an eccentric desire, with no real object but freedom, and in which she relocates and reinvests her amorphous longings in the very figure who would withhold such liberty, the minister himself (100).

The chorus projects onto and channels through Eliza social yearnings that are properly their own; without such prodding, it is unlikely that Eliza would have written Boyer the repentant letter seeking a romantic reunion. This is not to minimize her ongoing ambivalence, which registers itself unmistakably in the formal structure of a message penned to Lucy immediately before she addresses the parson. Giving vivid expression to the power of Eliza's mixed feelings, the associative logic of her ruminations records her hesitation and reluctance even in the flush of regret for having let Boyer slip away: after ending a paragraph on the subject of her desire for his esteem, she wonders, “what has become of Major Sanford! Has he too forsaken me? Is it possible for him willfully to neglect me? I will not entertain so injurious a suspicion” (100). To rescript her feelings for the minister is automatically to reassert an investment in Sanford as well, who in the heroine's emotional economy enacts the logic of the supplement to Boyer. These figures, rather than serving as the manichean rivals that the community constructs them to be, actually constitute two sides of a patriarchal coin from which the heroine can find no escape.

In that regard, Eliza's proposal of marriage to Boyer constitutes a fascinating study in double-voicedness. Despite the fact that its contents would seem to have been authorized by the chorus, the form of the heroine's extraordinary offer embodies a subtle but powerful protest against being dictated to by the community. The epistle is marked by the disavowal and duality that largely inflect the heroine's earlier locutions: commandeering her lines from a masculine romantic script, Eliza continues to speak in two registers, even while the community would try to vocalize for her. By deploying her own offer of marriage in a remarkable moment of epistolary outspokenness, the heroine usurps what according to the elocutionary conventions of the period should rightly be the minister's demonstration of desire.

Protestations of repentance notwithstanding, Eliza reveals in this gesture a continued unwillingness to forsake her pursuit of the expressive freedom that republican culture affords to men. In that regard, the minister's engagement to another woman at the time of the heroine's proposal must be seen as incidental to his rejection of her; whether or not Boyer is entangled otherwise, he cannot abide a wife who would presume to speak for him. What leaves Eliza bereft is not the loss of the minister, per se, but the forfeiture of the vital link he represents to a female community whose powers of sympathy prove increasingly inelastic in the face of opposition to their collective will. Thus isolated, the heroine plunges into melancholic despair, a form of social death figured by the absence of the lengthy and ebullient letters she characteristically has written to her friends. This collapse, from which she never recovers, precedes by almost a year her sexual capitulation to Sanford and suggests that neither the minister not the libertine is in fact the agent of her undoing.

Rather, Eliza's tragedy is a homosocial problem; more specifically, the women doing the cultural work of the feminized clergy in The Coquette pose the gravest danger to its outspoken heroine. Lucy's most ominous act of patriarchal ventriloquism unfolds in the only supportive letter she writes to Eliza after Boyer's final rejection, dispatched immediately prior to the epistle in which we can locate the heroine's sexual fall. In this missive, Lucy strikes at the heart of her friend's wish for freedom by recalling Mrs. Wharton's Aristotelian notions of an interrelated social order in which knowing one's place also means inhabiting it contentedly. She writes, “Slight not the opinion of the world. We are dependent beings; and while the smallest trace of virtuous sensibility remain, we must feel the force of that dependence, in a greater or lesser degree.” Then, in a moment reminiscent of her Lovelacian speech about the theater, Lucy continues, “No female, whose mind is uncorrupted, can be indifferent to reputation. It is an inestimable jewel, the loss of which can never be repaired. While retained, it affords conscious peace to our own minds, and ensures the esteem and respect of all around us” (133).

While articulating the conventional sentiments of eighteenth-century conduct literature, this speech is also organized by metaphors that can be traced to the seventeenth-century English theatrical tradition; one certain source is the language of Iago, the most notorious false friend in the Shakespearian corpus, whose ideas about the importance of preserving female reputation prove the catalyst for Othello's homicidal madness. Iago's speech to Othello on the subject of his reputation is especially pertinent here: “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, / Is the immediate jewel of their souls. / Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; / 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; / But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed.”²² It is particularly ironic that the character in Foster's novel most hostile to tragic drama should borrow the words of a Shakespearian villain to discipline the heroine into conformity.

However reprobated by the spokeswoman of the community, the theater in The Coquette is a figurative site that registers decidedly undidactic identifications between the chorus and the libertine. It also functions as a public space in which the heroine's own drama is recast and displayed. But, if the dramatic stage bears a transgressive symbolic weight in the novel, the circus evokes even more powerfully subversive associations to the heroine's quest for freedom. In the second section of her disquisition on popular amusement, Lucy renders another rabid judgment, this time on the indecent spectacle of other women's moving bodies, rather than on the unwelcome experience of being bodily moved: “The circus is a place of fashionable resort of late, but not agreeable to me. I think it inconsistent with the delicacy of a lady, even to witness the indecorums, which are practiced there; especially, when the performers of equestrian feats are of our own sex. To see a woman depart so far from the female character, as to assume the masculine habit and attitudes; and appear entirely indifferent, even to the externals of modesty, is truly disgusting, and ought not to be countenanced by our attendance, much less by our approbation” (113). Lucy's initial claims in this passage are in fact historically accurate: notable figures in the early national community do indeed patronize the circus. Both George Washington and John Adams attend performances in the 1790s; Washington makes at least two recorded appearances at Ricketts's Circus, in Philadelphia, in 1793 and 1797, including a visit on April 22, 1793, coincidentally the day on which he declares the Neutrality Act that allows American ships to carry tonnage for either England or France.

Washington's celebration of “neutrality” at this early point in the 1790s is both emblematic and—against the background of the national movement toward a two-party system at the end of the century—ultimately ironic, as well as suggestive for our reading of The Coquette. The first President is renowned for remaining impartial; more than any American of the post-Revolutionary period, he embodies the “disinterested” classical republican. But as the growing partisan divide becomes more rancorous, Washington can no longer continue uninvolved. By the end of his second term, when the Federalists have stopped speaking exclusively for the nation—when the opposition has become a de facto party—the President has to declare his allegiance openly. Washington's inability to maintain neutrality in the sphere of international relations has suggestive resonance for Eliza's domestic situation, where she too eventually capitulates to the demands of the majority.²³

Theatrical entertainments appealing to Americans of different classes offer venues for heterogeneous political expression in the early republic, and the late-eighteenth-century circus proves no exception: the pantomime of Ricketts' program in 1796, for example, is a “dramatic and patriotic entertainment based on Washington's suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.”²⁴ This presentation enacts the failure of an unruly cohort of Pennsylvania democrats whose attempts to defy the orders of the federal government are defeated when a military brigade on horseback, led by President Washington himself, rides into Pennsylvania and faces down the insurgents. Of all the episodes of political dissent in the early national period available for spectacular translation to the center ring, the Whiskey Rebellion proves particularly felicitous: it features both the military and the equestrian fanfare that were to become hallmarks of the American circus, which come together in the person of George Washington astride his horse. Given the first President's renown as the foremost rider in the early republic—Thomas Jefferson characterizes his fellow Virginian as “the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback”²⁵—the pantomime of the Whiskey Rebellion operates as a fictive showcase for the Federalist hegemony, enacted through the virtuosity of Washington's body.²⁶ As I hope to suggest, equestrianism in The Coquette becomes a figure for a certain kind of political command, and in that regard Washington functions symbolically: his masterful horsemanship reflects at the level of metaphor the President's unique ability to balance the nation's complex affairs and internal divisions and instabilities.

If the pantomime of the Whiskey Rebellion marks Ricketts's dramatic affirmation of Federalist policies, his employment of female equestrians gives shape to decidedly other ideological valences. As Lucy's outrage over the women riders suggests, female equestrians in late-eighteenth-century America to some extent share the transgressive cultural status of actresses. Faye E. Dudden observes, “All the theatre's [sic] promises were limited by the fact that women's presence in the play or at the playhouse took place under a moral cloud. Ever since their initial appearance on the English-speaking stage in the Restoration, actresses were associated with sexual immorality. The women who made their living performing on the stage worked in uncomfortable proximity to the ‘public women’—slang for prostitutes—who crowded the third tier.”²⁷ Circus equestriennes might very well evoke such associations between theatrical women and sexual pollution, but such an assessment of female performers is by no means universal in the early republic.

That only three women in the 1790s are known to have executed feats on horseback in America suggests that, rather than the vulgar commonplace Lucy implies, acrobatic woman riders are in fact a rarity and, as such, must stir Foster's own imagination in powerful ways. Only two of these three, the famous Mrs. Spinacuta of Ricketts's Circus and a Miss Vanice (Venice) of Lailson's Circus, actually appear in Boston.²⁸ In its August 31, 1796, edition, the Columbian Centinel [sic] reviews Lailson's opening performance and remarks that “[t]he horses had been nearly twenty days on their passage from Europe and suffering from the wounds incident to a sea passage their docility would have gained additional credit to a more healthy and disciplined troop. Miss Venice [found] her horse extremely restive from his wounds and insects [and] he started before she had regained her appropriate balance, and she fell but recovered her situation with a grace and spirit which interested every spectator and commanded the most animated applause.”²⁹ Rather than expostulate on the indecent comportment of a female body on graphic display, this newspaper extols Miss Venice for the equanimity she exhibits on recovering from her fall; the reaction of the audience, reported in the review, suggests that it is her performance of poised refinement, rather than any exhibition of sexual titillation, that earns applause.

This sort of spectatorship calls up Adam Smith's most powerful and compelling metaphors for the experience of sympathy. At the opening of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith specifically conjures a circus tableau in order to elaborate his thesis about the workings of fellow feeling. He writes, “The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.” Smith's location of the gaze of sympathy at a circus performance is a striking philosophical parallel—and perhaps the source—for Foster's scene, which represents Lucy's reluctance to indulge in the pain of fellow feeling at a similar exhibition: “But setting aside this circumstance, I cannot conceive it to be a pleasure to sit a whole evening, trembling with apprehension, lest the poor wight of a horseman, or juggler, or whatever he is to be called, should break his neck in contributing to our entertainment” (113). Although gender constitutes the crucial category of difference in the two tableaux, it is nevertheless telling that Lucy exhibits a lack of compassion so profound that it shades into outrage at a sight very like the one that moves Smith's theoretical observer into sympathetic identification. Lucy's attitude toward others and their plights perversely parodies the notions of sympathy and compassion that eighteenth-century aesthetic and moral philosophers—particularly Rousseau and Smith—are espousing.³⁰

Despite the fact that in The Coquette genteel women all ride horseback for exercise and diversion, equestrianism is immediately problematized as a forum for the heroine's waywardness. The author literalizes this quality through representations of Eliza's immoderate physicality, a zeal for riding that is figured as somewhat unnatural. Foster may be the first American woman writer to use equestrianism as a metaphor for female sexuality: Eliza's problematic desire is embodied in her willingness to travel “so far” in excess of Nancy Laurence, who stands as the norm of female decorum in an early scene. In contrast to Miss Laurence, Eliza is “induced … to protract the enjoyment of [the ride] abroad” (46). Almost all of her early and innocent encounters with Sanford involve expeditions on horseback. In light of such detail, the woman equestrian at the Boston circus serves as an objective correlative for Eliza in her quest for freedom. In the expropriation of an activity associated with men and the public sphere, the acrobatic horsewoman embodies a complex and resonant expression of female fancy. Like Eliza before her capitulation to Sanford's erotic advances, the woman equestrian is both sexually suspect and technically innocent of public indecency, and she is simultaneously transgressive in her departure “from the female character” and her assumption of “masculine habit[s] and attitudes,” enacting through her exuberant physicality what Eliza expresses in her ironic language.

Tellingly, Eliza's last social commentary, a rare moment in which neither humor nor irony figures in her discourse, comes as a rejoinder to Lucy's castigation of female equestrians in phrases one might use to speak of prostitutes. Eliza's response to Lucy's most salient objection, that these women riders become masculinized, marks the only time she articulates her feelings about female freedom in a single voice, turning to the language of rationality rather than fancy: “Your remarks on the public entertainments are amusing, and as far as I am a judge, perfectly just. I think it a pity they have not female managers for the theatre. I believe it would be under much better regulations, than at present” (124).

Read as an extended metaphor for the heroine's analysis of the politics of gender in early national culture, her advice for regulating the theater proves particularly haunting. If social life is a kind of spectacle, a public stage with political implications, is it not telling that Eliza Wharton desires female executive power to better regulate the system?³¹ And if women equestrians represent, on one level, the public commodification of female sexuality as spectacle for the male gaze, Eliza's proposition that female managers could better direct and control such displays suggests something further: that women on horseback, like their male equestrian counterparts, may be both as virtuous and as virtuosic as Washington himself if guaranteed the proper liberty. Women's sexuality, when managed by women, need not be debased as theater.

In Lucy's assessment of Boston's popular entertainment in the Federalist period, both the tragic drama and the equestrian circus constitute deeply unruly if not actually transgressive cultural forms, but Bowen's Museum, the third and final place of resort mentioned in her letter on amusements, proves a genteel exception to this disturbing pattern: “With Mr. Bowen's museum, I think you were very much pleased. He has made a number of judicious additions to it, since you were here. It is a source of rational and refined amusement. Here the eye is gratified, the imagination charmed, and the understanding improved. It will bear frequent reviews without palling on the taste. It always affords something new; and for one, I am never a weary spectator” (113). According to Lucy's narrative account, the local modes of mass entertainment break down into three important typologies that reflect late-eighteenth-century ideas about perceptual experience: that of sensibility, both head and heart, undone by tragedy; that of the gazing eye, outraged in its vision of the circus; and that of disembodied reason, elevated by the museum.³² Both the theater and the circus are modes of spectacle that produce their generic effects through the articulation of physical sensation, but, while the drama calls for a visceral response that immediately translates into cerebral activity, the circus would seem to pander to the baser nature of its audience. Waxworks like those exhibited at Bowen's Museum, in contrast, make of embodiment an uncanny thing: existing on the middle ground between theater and painting, wax figures defamiliarize both the animation of dramatic performance and the stasis of the painted portrait. Such likenesses afford their beholders a greater emotional remove than do theatrical representations, because of their striking resemblance to human bodies that have been cosmetically transformed for viewing before burial. Indeed, as Marie-Hélène Huet suggests in the chapter on Mme Tussaud in Monstrous Imagination, evocatively titled “Family Undertaking,” there exists a fascinating connection between the art of the mortician and that of the sculptor using wax as a medium. In her discussion of Tussaud's wax museum, Huet argues similarly that the wax figures occupy a transitional space between life and death; Tussaud crafts the faces for her chamber of horrors from death masks she casts from famous personages of the French Revolution.³³

As an art form whose origin lies in mortuary practices, waxworks make particularly evocative objects of admiration in The Coquette, given the associations between the patriarchal majority and the clerical dead that Foster draws throughout. I will return to this connection shortly, but before doing so it is important to understand something more about the origins and nature of the cultural forum in which these waxworks are displayed.³⁴ Daniel Bowen's museum originates as a traveling exhibition that moves up and down the eastern seaboard in the post-Revolutionary period. Its growth and development, though given scant detail, are recorded briefly in histories of both the early American theater and the circus as well as in books on the origins of waxworks in the new nation. Amplifying on contemporary newspaper reviews that enumerate the contents of the collection in the 1790s, Isaac Greenwood provides a late-nineteenth-century account:

In 1788 and '89, Mr. Bowen had a much more extensive exhibit at No. 74 Water street, opposite Crane Wharf [in New York City], with which he had come up from the Carolinas; it included the Royal Family, several of the prominent clergy of the city, some scriptural and humorous subjects, and the President, with a flying figure overhead crowning him with laurel.³⁵

Late-eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for the museum provide an extensive if hyperbolic catalogue of its curiosities (most likely composed by Daniel Bowen himself). A notice run on December 7, 1795, announces in somewhat less heightened language that

Bowen's Columbian Museum At the head of the Mall, Boston, was opened (for the first time) on Thursday last, Containing a large and elegant collection of paintings, historical, theatrical, and fancy subjects; with portraits of some of the most distinguished characters in the United States; Landscapes, Drawing, &c. Wax figures in a detached room; a perfect representation of a man suffering under the guillotine. The assassination of John P. Marat by Miss Charlotte Carde [sic]. Baron Trench loaded with chains in a Dungeon. A great variety of more pleasing Wax Figures placed in the museum hall. Curiosities, natural, and artificial, among which, are a Glass Ship; a real Scalp of an Indian Chief, lately taken at the Westward; together with a Collection of Birds, in the highest state of preservation, &c.³⁶

These historical facts allow us to make some informed speculations about the symbolic import of the curiosities Bowen displays to the public and to which Lucy makes general reference in The Coquette.

In its elaborate totality, the exhibit constitutes a narrative representation of early national identity formation at work. As scholars of Charles Brockden Brown have argued, the American subject—read native or English born, white, male, and middle class—is constructed over against the bodies of the new republic's reprobated alien, African, Native, “savage,” female, and indigent others who function as the negative of this picture. The effigy of Charlotte Corday telegraphs in elegantly economical fashion a composite version of the loathed trio of American altierity: the alien (she is French); the savage (like the Native Americans who threaten the frontier, she too is a barbarous murderess); and the female. While Bowen's waxen image of the guillotine reinforces the impact of Mlle Corday's homicidal power and underscores the Federalists' virulent hostility to the events, practices, and material artifacts of the French Revolution, the scalp of the Native American becomes not only an emblem of the vicious ferocity of the republic's aboriginal enemies but also an index of early American colonial prowess; in this fetishistic display of the scalp, early republicans can disavow their own decided affinity for savage acts of violence, behavior that unsettles any claims to moral and cultural superiority attending the establishment of national identity and of individual republican selfhood.³⁷

In light of the contents of the exhibition, patriarchal power—incarnated in the figures of George the Third and his family, notable members of the local clergy, and George Washington being crowned with laurel—would seem to be the prevailing theme of Bowen's wax assemblage. This panorama is peopled by an idealized if phantasmagoric gathering of the early republican elite who coexist in odd array with their former political nemesis and his kin. The characters of the two wax Georges, the literal (ex)-monarch of the Anglo-American community and the figurative “father” of the new nation, reflect two visions of authority existing in such close proximity in the Federalist imagination that their boundaries begin to blur;³⁸ though his wreath is made of laurel rather than gold, the spectacle nevertheless enacts the wish that Washington be crowned.³⁹ If we read the tableau as a narrative, the separate parts of which exist in syntactical relation to each other, the contiguity of these two Georges becomes significant. Despite the powerful and transformative reality of the American Revolution, these uncanny mirror figures signify that the republic's orientation lies as much in a patriarchal and autocratic past as it does in any rising liberal future.⁴⁰ The notable figures of the local clergy only reinforce this reading, and their presence in the display conjures the spectral patriarchs of Foster's book, the ministers Wharton, Haly, and Boyer.

While the tragic and equestrian entertainments recast The Coquette's abiding thematic issues in uncanny form, the museum's curiosities constitute a far more direct if nevertheless exalted reflection of the novel's social world. Crafted in wax, which gives them the unnatural aura of corpses,⁴¹ the figures in Bowen's Museum dramatically display what we might call the “consolidated ego ideal” of the Federalist elite; composing a striking vision of hegemonic political authority en route to ossification, the collection personifies the values of the community for which Lucy Freeman Sumner speaks in The Coquette.

Projecting and affirming an idealized image of the world she actually inhabits, the museum is the perfect “place … of resort” for Lucy Freeman Sumner (113); it becomes not only a site of recreation or entertainment but also a refuge and a resource. In fact, Foster's word bears both meanings: deriving from the Old French term “to escape, ally,” resort is related to the word “resource,” which comes from the Latin for resurrection and means a “source of supply or support,” “something to which one has recourse in difficulty,” a “possibility of relief or recovery.”⁴² In the second half of the novel, the notions of resort and resource take on vital importance, as the letters that pass between the heroine and her community begin to chart the progressive disappearance of such forms of respite for Eliza in the face of her quest for freedom.

THE FEMALE WORLD OF LOVE AND RITUAL

The nostalgia infusing Eliza's ruminations over cherished moments of female communion suggests that, for the heroine, resort has existed exclusively in the homosocial circle. Lying at the center of Eliza's yearnings, the world of female friendship that had sustained her grows increasingly barren with every rite of passage undertaken by one of its members. It is no accident that Foster populates her novel with a group of women who exist at significantly different points on the developmental continuum of female experience: Mrs. Wharton is a widow; Mrs. Richman becomes a mother and then is bereaved of her child; Lucy Freeman turns into a bride, losing her significant maiden name; Eliza exists in the throes of courtship and failed betrothal; and Julia Granby emerges to usurp the heroine's place as an eligible young lady.⁴³ Every transformation of status further disturbs the equilibrium that grounded what we might call this idealized republic of women—Eliza's fantastic vision of an elite collectivity in which virtue and interdependence are the hallmarks of social relations. But this utopia exists only in fancy, as the example of Julia Granby proves: the girlhood community is always already shaken by tremors emanating from the marriage market, the pressures of which are virtually inescapable.

As its members realign along heterosexual and reproductive lines and the doctrines of republican wife and motherhood bear down on them, annexing their energy and redirecting it inside the family, the center of this collective shifts significantly. Having lived at the hub of the circle, Eliza finds herself gravitating toward its margins, compelled by her “eccentric” and “wayward” impulses to resist confinement by republican ideologies constructed to channel and bind women's nondomestic impulses. In the novel's most important critique of republican marriage, Eliza writes of the Richmans' contentment as a kind of social withdrawal and inversion: “They should consider, said I, that they have no satisfaction to look for beyond each other. There every enjoyment is centered; but I am a poor solitary being, who need some amusement beyond what I can supply myself. The mind, after being confined at home for a while, sends the imagination abroad in quest of new treasures, and the body may as well accompany it, for ought I can see” (14-15). The heroine's analysis of this union, which in its exercise of mutual interest and affection marks the nuptial ideal of the novel, in fact reveals the contradiction lying at the heart of early national domestic ideology; it is not the protoliberal Eliza who seeks to retreat into the recesses of privacy but rather the “disinterested” and civic-minded Richmans who mask their possessive individualism with the rhetoric of late-eighteenth-century American republican marriage.

In the resounding refrain that “marriage is the tomb of friendship” (24), Eliza articulates the judgment that matrimony does more than simply dampen the impulse toward public virtue and sociality; her assertion suggests that wedlock actually destroys such communitarian impulses. The incisiveness of this insight comes hauntingly home during Lucy's wedding. Foster emphasizes the heroine's grief over her friend's transformation by having the outspoken Eliza make her own silence a recurring motif of the letter in which she recounts the nuptials. This episode rings a change on the scene where Mrs. Richman imperiously presumes to speak for the heroine, an act of vocal cooptation unfolded from Mr. Selby's external, dramatic point of view. Finding the voice she had uncharacteristically lost at the wedding, Eliza pens an eloquent missive to Mrs. Richman in which she relates the disquieting experience of being unable to bring herself to utter a word: “Every eye beamed with pleasure on the occasion, and every tongue echoed the wishes of benevolence. Mine only was silent” (70).

Eliza's muteness on the occasion of Lucy's marriage prefigures the silence with which she will respond to her traumatic initiation into adult sexuality; if female homosocial bonds are knit of epistolary fabric, heterosexuality is the force that unravels such ties in Foster's fictive universe. On the eve of Lucy's marriage Eliza reflects, “Though not less interested in the felicity of my friend than the rest, yet the idea of a separation; perhaps, an alienation of affection, by means of her entire devotion to another, cast an involuntary gloom over my mind” (70). That the most outspoken woman in the novel should have nothing to say in the face of Lucy's submission to the rituals of patriarchy suggests that silence itself becomes an expressive venue when there is no audible space for dissent.

Yet the chorus's ability to decode the meaning of the heroine's reticence proves as poor as its grasp of the irony that marks her letters. Thus, to Boyer, Eliza's sorrow over Lucy's wedding becomes an opportunity for advancing his own romantic cause, not an occasion for extending the sympathy and commiseration for which the heroine virtually pleads, “Permit me, Miss Wharton, said he, to lead you to your lovely friend; her happiness must be heightened by your participation of it. Oh no; said I, I am too selfish for that. She has conferred upon another that affection which I wished to engross. My love was too fervent to admit a rival. Retaliate, then, said he, this fancied wrong, by doing likewise. I observed that this was not a proper time to discuss that subject” (70). Eliza's refusal to affirm the felicitous nature of Lucy's metamorphosis marks another moment in which her language, notable here as an eloquent failure of expression, articulates her resistance to romantic norms. The negativity she expresses by withholding her congratulations extends beyond the level of a pointed violation of social forms and into a statement of censure by omission. As the novel's incarnation of convention and propriety, Mr. Boyer responds to Eliza's silence in predictable fashion, endeavoring to script her behavior, produce her appropriate congratulations, and extract her consent to his offer of marriage. Such acquiescence remains unspeakable for Eliza until she finally appropriates the minister's language and extends the offer herself, thereby subverting Mr. Boyer's demand for her compliance and annulling his desire for her hand.

Major Sanford is equally unsuccessful in generating language of consent from the heroine: her sexual capitulation to the libertine takes place outside the representational register, neither discussed in the remaining letters she writes nor depicted in dramatic form by the novel's other correspondents. Like Boyer, Sanford wishes to obtain words of concurrence from Eliza, but the rake is able to value the tragedy of the heroine's silence in ways that the minister is not. Immediately prior to her flight from home, he reports a moment in which speech fails Eliza: “I begged leave to visit her retirement next week, not in continuation of our amour, but as a friend, solicitous to know her situation and welfare. Unable to speak, she only bowed assent” (160). A vital, if ostensibly reprobated, member of a community that would ventriloquize for the heroine, Sanford nevertheless recognizes the way in which Eliza has been confined by the dominant voice of the chorus—whose opinion she ultimately internalizes in an act of capitulation that marks her movement toward death.

The heroine's final fate in the novel suggests that it is not only marriage, per se, but heterosexuality itself that binds women's zeal for liberty and engenders their “confinement.” As we have seen, feminist historians studying the early national period note that the ideologies of republican daughterhood, wifehood, and motherhood reenvision the operations of domesticity as outlets for political expression. Foster's story troubles the recuperative thrust of these accounts by exposing the fact that women in the Federalist period are themselves aware of the limits and internal fissures that mark such roles. In that regard, Mrs. Richman's rhapsodies about the civic benefits of republican motherhood ring the sound of early national patriarchal propaganda that the novel itself will disrupt. Her most famous articulation of the formula comes in the statement that “the little community which we superintend is quite as important an object [as former associations like friendships]; and certainly renders us more beneficial to the public” (25, my emphasis). As an ostensible form of female agency that in fact operates through mechanisms of displacement, how does republican motherhood give women real power to influence the public sphere? Foster short-circuits any efforts to draw political conclusions when she issues a generic blight on maternity in The Coquette by killing off every child born within its pages.⁴⁴

The author identifies Eliza with Mrs. Richman's ill-fated baby Harriot, from the beginning of the story: the heroine visits the Richmans during the pregnancy, playing the role of surrogate child; she is effectively replaced in Mrs. Richman's affections by Harriot's arrival, evidenced by the paucity of postpartum letters from the new mother; and her destiny is portended ominously in the little girl's death before her second birthday. It is no accident that the fact of Eliza's fall from sexual innocence—a transformation never narrated from her own point of view—is displaced onto her report of the death of the Richman's babe (134). A double for Eliza, the daughter of Foster's Washington figure incarnates in female form a sense of hope for the new republic and, simultaneously, the precariousness of its survival.

The death of this baby carries complex symbolic resonance: it stands for the fragility of republican motherhood as an efficacious occupation for patriotic women, and it dramatically enacts the new nation's hostility to both female creativity and a viable female future. Equally emblematic is Foster's gendering of the novel's other newborn babies and her depiction of their fates: Major Sanford's wife, the lovely and unappreciated heiress Nancy, delivers a dead baby boy. The dissipated aristocracy has reached the end of its line in a legitimate but stillborn male Sanford heir. Meanwhile, Eliza's misbegotten babe, who dies shortly after birth, is represented without being gendered, erased of the basic rudiments of identity and rendered placeless by its illicit genealogy.

Good republican stock, however, survives the trauma of birth and actually flourishes for nearly two years. One cannot help speculating on potential political allegory at work here; as a vision of republican life in the era without Washington, Foster's novel would portend bleak prospects for America indeed. In that regard, it is significant that the only female baby in the novel is also the only child who weathers the storms of infancy. In this gesture, Foster makes an important connection between young Harriot and Eliza as republican daughters, figures whose status remains tied to their families of origin rather than to their future marriage choices or any children they might produce.⁴⁵ Equally suggestive is the developmental detail that the author provides about Harriot: we learn from a letter penned by Mrs. Richman that the little girl, approaching two, has not yet learned to talk. In a moment of joyful expectation, ruminating on the potential pleasure of hearing her daughter speak for the first time, the mother exclaims, “How delightful to trace from day to day the expansion of reason and the dawnings of intelligence! Oh, how I anticipate the time, when these faculties shall be displayed by the organs of speech; when the lisping accent shall heighten our present pleasure” (97). This maternal fantasy, the auditory projection of a baby girl's voice at the dawn of its expressive career, takes us as close to an image of uncorrupted female language as we are to reach in The Coquette. Like the theatrical tableaux that appear in Eliza's letters, this too is an epistolary daydream, but one that rings a change on the heroine's dramatic self-inventions, for, despite her linguistic efforts at resistance, the wish to be known as a voice rather than as a phenomenal vision, Eliza remains immersed in the realm of the visible, even in her fancy.

Mrs. Richman's imaginings would seem to uncouple female expression from the specular regime and relocate it in sonorous language. But her fantasy proves as ephemeral as any of Eliza's whimsical flights. Though phantasmagorically Harriot's words remain immune to totalizing forms of patriarchal inscription, what Lacan characterizes as the imprint of the “symbolic register,” these infant utterances never reach articulation. The dream of an imaginable female language that in fact will never materialize becomes Foster's most powerful metaphor for the failed promise of women's expression in Federalist America. Rowson's utopian fantasies about a maternal voice so powerful that it could register in the symbolic regime of language and culture form a vivid contrast to Foster's more gothic vision of the possibilities for female expression—the vision of Harriot Richman shut up in the grave. The dead babe is thus a figure for the heroine's blighted possibility, the end of her “youthful” career, and the loss of her womanly innocence and liberty. If to Eliza domesticity has meant constriction, then that equation will be brutally literalized in her final experiences: once she gives up her freedom, symbolized by her virginity, the tragic result is a one way journey of “confinement,” pregnancy, labor, delivery, and, finally, death, the ultimate form of restriction, isolation, and alienation.

The letter recounting the demise of baby Harriot can be seen as Foster's pessimistic meditation on the limits of women's creativity, for it also describes Eliza's very changed attitude toward epistolary composition itself: “Writing is an employment, which suits me not at present. It was pleasing to me formerly, and therefore, by recalling the idea of circumstances and events which frequently occupied my pen in happier days, it now gives me pain” (134). As the likelihood of sympathetic understanding and exchange narrows down to near impossibility, the prospect of writing to a hostile audience loses all appeal. Thereafter, the heroine's letters are prompted by the need to transmit pressing social information; thus, she relays the news of Harriot Richman's death, which is followed by a drawn-out, abstract meditation on bereavement over children. Eliza is mourning for Harriot, for herself, and for her own unborn child: none of these figures has the remotest chance of surviving in the world of The Coquette. All acts of female invention—writing and childbearing—would seem to lead from a delusive pleasure to silence, loss, and death.

That ideologically inflected maternity guarantees neither women's patriotic occupation nor their happiness in Foster's fictive world is made clear by the loving but distant connection that exists between Eliza and Mrs. Wharton; their relationship, marked by a shared reluctance to engage in intimate exchange, is the only ongoing mother-daughter bond that Foster represents. Although each pays lip service to a mutual devotion, in fact the heroine and her mother correspond only twice until Eliza's final confession and request for absolution in the closing pages of the novel. Punctuating Eliza's letters to the chorus, the reports of their conversations reveal a pointed failure of communication that takes one of two unfortunate forms: each woman suppresses her true thoughts and feelings in full cognizance of the other's opinion; alternatively, Mrs. Wharton indulges in the monitorial censure of the chorus, while Eliza responds with angry defiance. Once she has eloped, Charlotte Temple fares little better than Eliza in her experience of the mother-daughter bond, though in Rowson's novel attempts at connection are thwarted by the forces of villainy rather than by vast temperamental differences between parent and child. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the most powerful maternal-filial bond in Charlotte Temple is disembodied and phantasmagoric, as if even in its utopian heyday the early American novel cannot incarnate this union in material and inner-textual form.

Early in the novel, despite the uneasy reality of actual relations with her mother, Eliza expresses the longing that the maternal embrace could provide a respite from the tyranny of the majority, whose exertions on behalf of Mr. Boyer's suit have begun to alienate her. She writes to her mother, “The different dispositions of various associates, sometimes perplex the mind, which seeks direction; but in the disinterested affection of the maternal breast, we fear no dissonance of passion, no jarring interests, no disunion of love. In this seat of felicity is every enjoyment which fancy can form, or friendship, with affluence, bestow; but still my mind frequently returns to the happy shades of my nativity. I wish there to impart my pleasures, and share the counsels of my best, my long tried and experienced friend” (39). That Mrs. Wharton has been squarely aligned with the community's strictures is clear from Eliza's inaugural letter, in which she describes how both parents had been instrumental in urging the match with Haly (6). In light of that fact, this laudatory epistle must be read not as a mimetic account of maternal liberality, but instead as the heroine's idealizing wish to escape the oppressive majority for a comfortable and tolerant maternal breast—one that exists primarily in her imagination. In the name of “disinterest,” a key term in republican theory and one that both The Coquette and the other early American novels explored in this study rigorously interrogate, the heroine enlists her mother to take her side, but her mother's home, an ongoing repository of associations to the patriarchal dead, is the very place from which Eliza had initially sought to flee.

Under the guise of loving concern, Mrs. Wharton's failure to affirm her daughter's desire for succor is utterly in keeping with the values of the community she has always upheld. Eliza writes to Lucy, “My mamma doubtless saw the disorder of my mind, but kindly avoided any inquiry about it. She was affectionately attentive to me but said nothing of my particular concerns. I mentioned not my embarrassments to her. She had declared herself in favor of Mr. Boyer; therefore I had no expectation, that she would advise impartially” (89). Refraining from any entreaty about her daughter's troubles, Mrs. Wharton offers a form of “affectionate attention” that becomes tantamount to emotional tyranny when, in the following passage, she determines to speak for Eliza without her daughter's knowledge. Eliza relates the conversation in which her mother concedes that she has dismissed Major Sanford from their door: “she thought it unnecessary to call me, as she presumed I had no particular business with him” (89).

Beginning with the mutual exchange of speechless gazes telegraphing the reality of all that cannot be said and ending with the mother's imperious usurpation of her daughter's agency, this entire episode enacts a powerful dialectic of specularity and silence that comes to dominate Foster's representation of Eliza in the final portion of the novel. At the end of the scene, the heroine speaks out, castigating her mother for interfering with her romantic affairs. But, in the face of the chorus's efforts to foreclose her expressions of dissent, Eliza later increasingly withdraws into reticence and immobility. The articulate heroine becomes a monumental and voiceless spectacle, transformed into the object of a gaze she can no longer legislate by a chorus that refuses to harken to her transgressive language.

In that regard, silence, which initially functions as a mode of resistance, ultimately marks Eliza's internalization of the community's real desire that she cease and desist from disputing its admonitions. With her death in sight, the heroine claims no expectation of forgiveness from “the general voice” (143), by which she means the feminized chorus under whose censorious judgment and opprobrium she suffers. Eliza asserts that all she desires is the consolation of maternal forgiveness: “From the general voice I expect no clemency. If I can make my peace with my mother, it is all I seek or wish on this side of the grave” (143). What Eliza never fully grasps is the tragic fact that the maternal voice and the general voice are fatally intertwined.

FETISHISM AND LIVE BURIAL

At the hour appointed, I went tolerably composed and resolute into the garden. I had taken several turns, and retired into the little arbor, where you and I have spent so many happy hours, before Major Sanford entered.

(Eliza Wharton to Lucy Freeman, 91)

As a space of resort, the female world of love and ritual that Eliza nostalgically recalls in this letter haunts Foster's novel in two important ways: within the fiction, a women's sphere exists only in the girlhood of Eliza's past; and outside the book, in the world of history, a sanctioned female homosocial realm does not come into meaningful existence until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.⁴⁶ By attempting to identify sisterhood as a redemptive arena for women's action in Foster's book, critics such as Pettengill seek to recuperate the novel from its melancholy ending, but, in the present tense of The Coquette's historical moment, a separate sphere of adult women, living in meaningful relation to each other inside but apart from patriarchal culture, is simply a fantasy. Pettengill is attentive to the contradictions republican ideology presents to American women in the early national period, noting that Eliza is angry at the “inadequacies of both sisterhood and republican motherhood, which have promised so much and delivered so little” (197). But her idealizing argument that homosocial bonds constitute a distinct space of possibility for women ignores the fact that the female community, pointedly called “the whole fraternity” by Major Sanford (158, my emphasis), exists at no distance from the dominant culture and in fact has been thoroughly penetrated by the patriarchal values for which it speaks.⁴⁷

The “world of love and ritual” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg identifies in the essay of that name is a very different place from the fictional universe of Foster's book. Smith-Rosenberg writes that this was a domain “in which hostility and criticism of other women were discouraged, and thus a milieu in which women could develop a sense of inner security and self-esteem.” She goes on to note that “an intimate mother-daughter relationship lay at the heart of this female world” and that the marriage relation did not foreclose on the intimacy of women's friendships, which were recognized as socially “viable forms of human contact—and as such, acceptable throughout a woman's life.”⁴⁸ In the imaginary realm of The Coquette, the female community expresses hostility to the heroine's quest for freedom from the beginning of the novel; she cannot depend on her mother to provide interested and supportive relief from the romantic pressures that burden her; and marriage diminishes if not destroys the depth and power of her female friendships.⁴⁹ A separate sphere constituted by, of, and for women simply does not exist in The Coquette. Pointing beyond the margins of Foster's book, Eliza Wharton's tragic quest for freedom eloquently bespeaks the need for such a world.

Under this illumination we can read the nostalgic quotation from Eliza's letter in two different ways. It suggests, on the one hand, that what the heroine really seeks in the arbor is a reprisal of the kind of bond she has shared with Lucy, even if such sympathy emanates from the libertine. Indeed, Eliza understands her capitulation to Sanford solely in terms of his willingness to offer her the conversation, companionship, and understanding that the chorus has failed to provide: “I embraced with avidity the consoling power of friendship, ensnaringly offered by my seducer” (145). On the other hand, a far darker reading is possible. Major Sanford is surely the snake in Eliza's current garden. The odd syntax of the sentence describing the libertine's sudden advent endows him with a peculiar destructive power that collapses the multiple temporalities organizing the heroine's description: it is as if he has come to destroy both the present moment with Boyer as well as the past pleasures of a lost homosocial paradise. The fantasy of a female world of love and ritual is always already shattered by the presence of a destructive force woven into its very fabric, embodied either by a third figure who breaks up its characteristically dyadic bonds or by an internal attribute of the other in the pair who fails to function as a sympathetic mirror. Sanford is able to glide seamlessly into the space that has been inhabited by the spokeswoman of the chorus precisely because the two figures incarnate, in superficially antagonistic form, the same repressive principle. Whether driven into melancholic despair, silence, or illicit sexuality by the intolerance of the chorus or actually consumed and wasted by the voraciousness of the rake, Eliza Wharton is destined to suffer an unrelenting fate, one that in either case involves erasure, invisibility, and, finally, death.

That the impulses of the female community prove as sadistic and destructive to Eliza's equanimity as the physical incursions of the libertine, that, indeed, they are symbolically linked, is brought home in the curious behavior of Julia Granby, the confidante Eliza recruits from Boston to take Lucy's place, on the latter's defection to marriage. After a one-year absence and in the company of a new wife, Major Sanford returns to Hartford, news that provokes Eliza to remark that she “has no wish to see him,” since “his presence may open the wounds which time is closing” (117). Rather than affirming the heroine's resolve and restraint, Julia's advice to Eliza is perversely monitorial: “I see no harm in conversing with him, said Julia. Perhaps it may remove some disagreeable thoughts, which now oppress and give you pain. And as he is no longer a candidate for your affections, added she, with a smile, it will be less hazardous than formerly. He will not have the insolence to speak, nor you the folly to hear, the language of love” (117). As the community's ultimate spokeswoman, Julia imperiously believes it is her prerogative to determine and script its vocal practices.

The newcomer also wants to retrace the primal scene of Eliza's close encounter with and avoidance of sexual transgression in the arbor. The heroine notes, “Julia and I have been rambling in the garden. She insisted upon my going with her into the arbor, where I was suprised by Major Sanford” (109). Designed to instruct Eliza by provoking her aversion in the form of unhappy memories, this bizarre exhortation is offered under the guise of moral exercise. But Julia's notions of leisure and reflection constitute nothing less than an attempt to execute the punishment of the chorus in all its sadistic self-righteousness. How else are we to understand her compulsion to reenact the drama in which Eliza's disastrous romantic fate is sealed? Symbolically, of course, Julia's gesture rehearses the wish to insert herself into Lucy's structural position, to reprise the role of the heroine's companion at the scene of their youthful female pleasures, but, in “insisting” that Eliza accompany her into the arbor, she also recapitulates the very demand that Major Sanford has made, the exigency that has ruined Eliza's prospects with Boyer. In requiring Eliza to restage that trauma, Julia metaphorically identifies with the libertine. Thus, these two ostensibly divergent readings—one innocently homosocial, the other demoniacally heterosexual—are in fact congruent: Lucy and Sanford and Julia Granby herself all are linked inextricably in Foster's narrative economy.

Despite a moral zeal that puts Julia in the forefront of the chorus, she is tagged as a virtual doppelgänger for the heroine as well, personifying, according to Eliza, “all that I once was; easy, sprightly, debonair” (108). Julia embodies Eliza's finest qualities without her unreasonable desire for freedom; she replicates the heroine's charms while she simultaneously reflects back on the community the level of moral hygiene it requires. Eliza continues her praise of Julia in a remarkably terse letter to Lucy, the last epistle she will ever write to Mrs. Sumner. She opines that Julia is “a valuable friend. Her mind is well cultivated; and she has treasured up a fund of knowledge and information, which renders her company both agreeable and useful in every situation in life” (127). Eliza's withdrawal from what had been her most intimate and meaningful correspondence must be read in the context of Julia's advent in Hartford: knowing that her friend will triumph under the chorus's scrutiny, Eliza cedes her social stakes to Julia, who begins to absorb the glare of collective attention. It is fitting that immediately after Eliza drafts the letter commending Julia as an ideal life companion, she withdraws from the quasi publicity of epistolarity into the private recesses of the female body and gnomic silence. As Eliza bows out of a spectacle in which she can no longer bear to play a starring role, Julia, the perfect understudy, assumes the lead in the patriarchal drama of proper female comportment.

Once Julia becomes the central correspondent in the final quarter of the novel, she also seizes narrative hold of Eliza Wharton's life; by doing so, the newcomer literally usurps the last vestige of control Eliza maintained over her destiny—the power to tell and shape her own story. Julia even attempts to appropriate Eliza's language: she is the only woman in the novel to borrow the heroine's ironic locutions from the public sphere, remarking that “a treaty of peace, and amity (but not of commerce)” has been “ratified” between Eliza and the libertine (120). In her efforts to occupy the heroine's linguistic place, she uncannily repeats the earlier moment in which Mrs. Richman also spoke “for” Eliza. The desire to assume the voice of the dangerously political woman becomes tantamount to rendering her mute: for to occupy another woman's subjectivity in The Coquette is to annex and ultimately to efface it.

From the time of her rejection by Mr. Boyer to the point at which she succumbs to Major Sanford's sexual demands, Eliza charts a trajectory of increasing social withdrawal, domestic confinement, physical immobility, and epistolary silence. In her drive to escape relegation to the world of domesticity by asserting her sexual freedom as a last resort, she winds up as confined, homebound, and trammeled as the most docile of republican wives. Eliza's capitulation to Sanford under her mother's roof marks the final enactment of her double-voicedness: an attack on the very heart of domestic ideology, Eliza's defilement of maternal space at the same time reveals that, despite her hostility to home and hearth, she cannot escape their pervasive reach.⁵⁰ The immobility that overtakes Eliza operates in direct contrast to her former propensity to remain always in motion. Wayward desire has become paralyzed. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that Eliza begins to suffer the symptoms of agoraphobia (literally, fear of the marketplace) after having been utterly exploited by market conditions: “I intended, this week, to have journeyed to Boston with Julia Granby; but my resolution fails me. I find it painful even to think of mixing again with the gay multitude. I believe the melancholy reflections, by which I am oppressed, will be more effectually, if not more easily, surmounted, by tarrying where they are rendered familiar, than by going from them awhile, and then returning” (126). Eliza's bad feelings allow her space neither for dissent nor even for escape but render her incapacitated and frozen; in contrast, having assumed Eliza's former life and identity, Julia Granby is able to travel with full mobility.

That we can locate Eliza's sexual fall in the period of Julia's ill-timed visit to Lucy, when the heroine, sunk in the depths of despair, needs the newcomer's companionship more than ever, suggests how unmerciful the majority's adherence to republican ideology can be. Despite the overpresence of the moralizing chorus and its rhetoric of sororial care, the community's investment in “disinterest” becomes code for an inability to tolerate fanciful behaviors like melancholic resignation. Such brutality is not unique to Julia. Both Lucy and Sanford himself turn their backs on Eliza's predicament at the end of the novel, the former in order to travel into the country with her husband and the latter so he can protect his property from confiscation by angry creditors. The matron and the libertine uphold, respectively, two defining attributes of the classical republican citizen: allegiance to republican wifehood and concern for the preservation of financial independence; allowing such ideologically driven considerations to supercede the claims of any possible “interest” in Eliza, both Lucy and Sanford show their dispassionate colors while the heroine is sacrificed in the wake of their insensibility.

Claims for sympathy become compelling to the community only after the threat posed by Eliza's zeal for freedom is neutralized by her death: from outspokenness to silence to immobility and dissolution, the heroine regains her appeal to her women friends as she moves toward the monumentality of an emblem.⁵¹ Indeed, Julia will liken the no-longer-virginal Eliza, reclined on a settee, to a statue, “in a very thoughtful posture,” sitting “‘Like patience on a monument, smiling at grief!’” (137). Her quotation from Twelfth Night (2.4. 110-115) is evocative on multiple levels. Iconographically, it likens the heroine's stasis to the fixity of the patriarchal dead, suggesting that in her stillness, Eliza has herself become tomblike. The allusion to Shakespeare's comedy of cross-dressed women “assuming [the] masculine habit and attitudes” (Coquette, 113), also deepens the connection between Eliza's transgressive quest for female freedom and her eventual confinement and death. Finally, Shakespeare's words resonate on the metanarrative level: they are spoken by Viola who, dressed as a boy, concocts the story of a sister—fictional doppelgänger for her transvestite self—who “never told her love” (2.4. 110). The theme of speaking for the silent woman who is herself a product of the fancy of a cross-dressed narrator brings us back to the central political and aesthetic issues of Foster's book, as well as to her unique dilemma as a woman writer in the Federalist period. The majority can align the dead Eliza, as they could not do romantically when she lived, with the clerical patriarchs whose uncanny power she sought so desperately to escape. No longer able to express her dissent through either voice or pen, Eliza is nevertheless more audible after her passing than she was during her final decline: remnants of her writing from the period of her confinement surface and circulate as community property, enabling the chorus to re-cover its vision of Eliza by selectively revising the words its members had found so problematic.

In a novel absorbed with a failure of female decorum, it is apt that Foster foregrounds the metaphor of the veil to describe these practices of re-covery and re-vision. “Veiling” is The Coquette's term for the process we have come to call “fetishism,” the chorus's magnification of and substitution for the heroine's transgressive qualities in order to occlude or ward off the disturbing sight of her imperfection or lack.⁵² Although this mechanism is usually associated with Freudian psychoanalytic theory and as such with a late-nineteenth-century European sensibility, in fact the general dynamic takes significant social and political form in the early culture of the American 1790s—most notably in the national fetishization of Washington.⁵³ Idealized by the people and their representatives as the living incarnation of republican virtue, the great Washington, less private man than public totem, eclipses any competitor who could appear on the political landscape. Indeed, his gigantic shadow obscures the very sight of those smaller men, Adams, Jefferson, and others, who are diminished simply by living in Washington's wake. This national investment in a primal father enables the illusion that government and politicians themselves are not riddled by interest, venality, and deficiency; the fetish of Washington makes it possible for Americans to disavow the reality of increasing political conflict by facilitating a fantasy of paternal care so powerful that it might ward off social contention forever. The idea of Washington is virtually all that keeps the Jeffersonian democratic-republican cohort, already operating coherently beneath the surface of Federalist politics by the early to mid-1790s, from becoming fully visible at the level of public acknowledgment.

In Foster's novel, which translates national politics into social drama, the practice of fetishism is not unique to the chorus. Indeed, Eliza's doomed engagement to the invalid Haly can be seen as the collective acting out of a fetishistic impulse. By allying herself “romantically” with the ailing minister, Eliza diverts the negative gaze of the community from the sight of her singleness: that the man is dying affords the heroine both the prospective protection of coverture and the promise of future freedom. Reciprocally, by fetishizing the heroine's betrothal to the minister, the chorus can disavow and defend against the reality of Eliza's waywardness, volatility, and zeal for liberty, the incontrovertible fact of her resistance to republican marriage. As a collaborative act of fetishism, the engagement temporarily affords the heroine the tolerance of the chorus, while it appeases the majority's need for Eliza's social compliance. The only figure excluded from this collective conspiracy is the Rev. Haly, who, dying in a state of celestial assurance, remains detached from the profane machinations of his fiancée and her friends.

Such mutuality offsets the violence of a dynamic that in its more characteristic form is decidedly brutal to its living objects. In his letter of denunciation to the heroine, the Rev. Boyer writes of the way in which he had disavowed Eliza's “levity,” “extravagance,” and self-adornment until the fatal revelation in the garden with Sanford: “Many faults have been visible to me; over which my affection once drew a veil. That veil is now removed” (84). That the cleric's “resentment of her behavior has much assisted [him] in erasing her image from [his] breast” (82) only completes the veiling process begun earlier; in order to construct of Eliza a woman he could love, Boyer has shrouded to the point of near obliteration the very qualities of wit and whimsicality that most define her politically. In his final communication with the heroine, the minister reveals the lengths to which he has been able to go to deny her most threatening attributes: “Whatever we may have called errors, will, on my part, be forever buried in oblivion; and for your own peace of mind, I entreat you to forget that any idea of a connection between us ever existed” (104, my emphasis). Boyer's fantasy of encrypting the heroine's faults gives full voice to the community's repressive impulses, its inclination to bury alive potent expressions of resistance to its social convictions.

Eliza's literal death allows the chorus to achieve what for Boyer has only been figurative: the definitive entombment and selective re-covery of the heroine's reputation through fetishistic rituals of memorial. Louise Kaplan remarks that, “unlike a fully alive, human female being with dangerous, unpredictable desires … fetish objects are relatively safe, easily available, undemanding of reciprocity.”⁵⁴ Death renders irrelevant Eliza's emphatic need for mutuality; thus, she perfectly fulfills the requirements of a community fetish. In that sense, Eliza functions most successfully after she is dead, for as a memory and a monument she can no longer resist being inscribed by the language of the majority.

Although the heroine's own literary productions take on a perverse half-life postmortem, her personal agency continues to be erased. In that regard, her passing becomes a fact of public record before it is privately known among her family and friends (161). Epistolarity, the representational form through which Eliza has had some (fictive) agency in constructing a self, yields sway before the faceless attention and power of the newspaper report; personal tragedy becomes fodder for endless judgment and speculation when the semiprivate realm of the personal letter is overtaken by the public sphere of print. As an object of the press, the heroine will be penetrated by the gaze of the communal eye and devoured by a popular appetite for scandal. Such commodification proves inescapable for Eliza, who is fated to exist as a form of public property even after death.

The heroine's final words suffer a more ironic and complicated fate. Like pieces of the true cross, her repentant reflections in writing become objects of worship for her mourners. Julia notes that Eliza's brother, who namelessly emerges into narrative representation as another doppelgänger for the clerical dead, appearing only as the heroine moves into her final decline, is deputized to retrieve his sister's most important, because written, effects from the tavern in which she dies. Writing remains detached from the vocal charisma of the affective body and as such constitutes a more plastic medium for ideological manipulation than does voice:⁵⁵ “Mr. Wharton has brought back several scraps of her writing, containing miscellaneous reflections on her situation, the death of her babe, and the absence of her friends. Some of these were written before, some after her confinement. These valuable testimonies of the affecting sense, and calm expectation she entertained of her approaching dissolution, are calculated to sooth and comfort the minds of mourning connections. They greatly alleviate the regret occasioned by her absence, at this awful period” (162-63). Although this passage would seem to imply that Eliza's enigmatic brother has collected the entirety of the heroine's random textual remains, the notion that some of these “several scraps” were “written before, some after her confinement,” in fact intimates that a careful culling process may have taken place. If this editorial selection indeed occurred, who would have been its agent? Eliza's brother is certainly the likely candidate, for, in his capacity as Mrs. Wharton's deputy, he works for the community and as such is invested in preserving and disseminating only the most moral and sensible effusions of his sister's pen.

But the fact that pieces of the collection antedate Eliza's removal and lying-in suggests another, more ominous reading: that the heroine's public “silence” may have been coterminous with a burst of private expression in which she internalized and then articulated the chorus's maxims in writings for an audience constellated in imagined anticipation of her death.⁵⁶ Like the bromides of the clerical patriarchs whose ossifying influence she has failed to avoid, Eliza's last words are composed according to patriarchal prescription, and, aptly, they issue as if from the grave. Significantly, Foster does not directly represent any of Eliza's pious meditations in extremis: instead, Julia Granby, ever eager to speak for the heroine, provides a general précis. In expressing the essence of what it takes to be the real—i.e., the penitent—Eliza, the chorus chooses the paraphrase as its preferred genre, thus repeating once and for all its own abiding and tyrannical impulse to redirect the words of the once outspoken heroine.⁵⁷ She writes knowing that, between her weakness from self-starvation (the characteristic affliction of seduced and abandoned heroines in eighteenth-century fiction) and an imminent and dangerous confinement, she cannot possibly endure.⁵⁸ Thus, the ruined heroine ultimately collaborates with the fetishizing impulses of the community that would “re-cover” her; she colludes with a majority that has denied her both freedom and expression by offering at last what it wants to hear. As Elkins and McKitrick note, “the tyranny of the majority … exerts its coercions not through naked power; it overcomes all but the hardiest resistance by working from within.”⁵⁹

The community's posthumous celebration of Eliza's professions is thus perfectly congruent with its earlier disavowal of the gravity of the plaintive epistles she dispatched in her last year of life. Yet the chorus's consolation, the notion that the “regret occasioned by her absence” could really be “greatly alleviated” by her pious scraps of writing, remains a scandal of sympathy, for, while the heroine's earlier letters, faithfully mimetic effusions of her volatile nature, disturbed the propriety and equanimity of her friends, the funereal shards to which the grieving community clings conjure none of the living power of her “play about words.” When Lucy mourns for “Not only the life, but what was still dearer, the reputation and virtue of the unfortunate Eliza” (163), we see the fetishizing impulse at work. She notes that the heroine lives “still in the heart of her faithful Lucy; whose experience of her numerous virtues and engaging qualities, has imprinted her image too deeply on the memory to be obliterated” (167). Entirely erased from this hagiographic tableau is any recognition of the positive power of Eliza's fancy, which defined her charm as well as her unhappy fate; in the eyes of the community, the heroine's extravagant zeal for liberty casts her beyond the pale of sympathy,⁶⁰ leaving her isolated from decorous republican society. At such a sanitary distance, the chorus can disclaim the way in which her fall casts a shadow on their collective enterprise, tainting the purity of their ideas of independence, disinterest, and virtue itself.

The majority's renunciation of the heroine's totality, its erasure of her fancy and imagination as vital aspects of her being, constitute the ultimate forms of violence against Eliza Wharton. Such fetishism, inscribed on her very tombstone, goes far beyond Sanford's power to harm precisely because it exists in the monumental public sphere.⁶¹ Consider this final act of cooptation:

                                        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 distinguished 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. ———,
                              in the 37th year of her age,
                    and the tears of strangers watered her
                                                                                grave.

(169, my emphasis)

In The Coquette, weeping words etched in granite or marble become the definitive mode of inscription by ossification. Indeed, the genre of the funeral monument stands as a perfect metaphor for the community's zeal to write its signature all over such objects of “affection” as Eliza Wharton.

In marked contrast to the enduring tombstone, the chorus's concluding textual production, Eliza's last autographical act (her final piece of “public” writing) is tragically mutable. In the early pages of the novel, the heroine has made much ado about maintaining her maiden name: writing to Lucy she affirms, “Whatever my fate may be, I shall always continue your Eliza Wharton” (9), and soon afterward she confesses to her friend that until she meets the man who unites graces and virtues, she “shall continue to subscribe [her] name Eliza Wharton” (22). But after fleeing her mother's home and finding a haven at Salem,⁶² the heroine agrees “to chalk the initials” of Major Sanford's name “over the door, as a signal to [him] of her residence” (157), a gesture that grotesquely parodies the dynamic of coverture. In the abbreviated signature, a mark of legibility heading toward degree zero, the formerly prolix Eliza will inscribe in place of her own name the appellation of the male who has destroyed the purity of hers yet to whom she has no legal tie. That the heroine promises to use chalk as the medium for her communiqué signifies the way she has begun to fade from comprehensible view, first from the universe of textuality and finally from the world of visibility itself. In its insubstantiality, chalk is an apt instrument for inscribing the ephemeral: come the first rain, all traces of presence and identity are washed away.

In keeping with her wish to dissolve from the public picture, Eliza implores Julia in a letter to submerge the reality of her “crimes in the grave” (156). But the “veil” the majority constructs exhibits a part rather than buries the whole of these frailties; Eliza remains marked even in this act of covering. The performative phrase “let candor throw a veil,” conjuring Mr. Boyer's wish to cloak Eliza's real nature, constitutes a wonderful example of the simultaneous exhibition and disavowal that mark the fetishistic act. Even in death, Eliza remains the ready object of the voyeur's gaze: she must either be looked at, compulsively, or shrouded. Fetishism is a profoundly divided impulse, fixated on the very thing it also wants to hide.⁶³

The text of the gravestone, framed by “weeping friends” and “the tears of strangers,” neatly summarizes the distance charted by Eliza's community in its affective relation to her. Abandoned by her so-called friends well before she flees their sight, she is effectively mourned by strangers. More precisely, the two groups have in an important sense exchanged identities: though she is barely alive, Eliza has captured the interest of those alien folk who attend her, while she remains estranged from the companions whose disinterest led her into melancholic despair and, eventually, the arms of Sanford. In this regard, she follows almost exactly the pattern of her literary forerunner, Clarissa Harlowe, who dies in the care of the Smith family, middle-class drapers whom she chances to meet during her final phase of decline. With the important exception of Mr. Belford, the sentimental circle that forms around the dying Clarissa is composed entirely of strangers who lavish more love and attention on the heroine than she has ever known in her natal family, beyond the misguided affections of her grandfather, which set the entire plot in motion. Coming full circle, Eliza is reinscribed in the epitaph by the cohort of women who failed to commune with her in life because, in the face of her dissent, it could countenance no dialogue.

Consecrated to fixing forever the wayward eccentricity that characterized the heroine, the chorus determines to transform her story into an emblematic warning to the “American fair” (168), on the model of the conduct book. According to the politics of genre at work in the early national period, this move effectively neutralizes the social and cultural significance of the heroine's resistance and negates the tragic import of her life. In her final face-to-face exchange with Julia, Eliza had expressed the desire for “pity” (143) rather than “censure and reproach” (142), the wish to be read through the lens of tragedy rather than according to the dictates of the advice manual.⁶⁴ Instead, her life in letters moves from active to passive: from the empowered subject writing in the first-person voice to the effaced third-person object of another's sentimental discourse—or, most painfully, the mouthpiece for maudlin effusions when Eliza has internalized the community's language and begins to pen pious reflections on the eve of her death. Thus, the heroine known for her sparkling irony is reduced to a moralistic paradigm, embodying the role of fallen virtue outlined in eighteenth-century manuals of advice or, even more pointedly, in a certain form of didactic fiction not unlike the manifest narrative of The Coquette.

Out of a gothic tragedy the community reconstructs a heroine of sentiment and inscribes itself for posterity. While Eliza's transgressive writing diminishes to the point of nonexistence, the chorus writes furiously about her.⁶⁵ If grammatical forms can be read for symbolic content, it is surely interesting that, in her final epistolary reports to Eliza's grieving mother, Julia Granby dispatches her information about the heroine's last days in the first-person-plural voice (161). Although I have spoken of the feminized majority that dominates the discursive world of The Coquette, that term has been less literal than suggestive: in the final pages of Foster's book, however, the most aggressive and self-righteous member of “the whole fraternity” (158) begins to speak as “we,” erasing any possible distinctions of perspective within or among the female friends. Thus, the wound to the social fabric created by Eliza's death has a perversely reparative effect on the majority left behind. The coherence and uniformity of the chorus have never been greater than at the moment when Julia proclaims to Mrs. Wharton, in the final letter of the novel, “I hope … that you will derive satisfaction from these exertions of friendship” (169).

That such collective forms of relation are not all they purport to be, that communities based on a proudly held “disinterest” may in fact be destructive, is nevertheless the latent suggestion of the novel's penultimate epistle; in it, Lucy Sumner makes an uncanny statement about the impulses of affiliation: “to associate, is to approve; to approve, is to be betrayed” (168). On the surface, her statement alludes to Eliza's efforts to seek avenues of exchange outside conventional venues: Major Sanford is the obvious, though unmentionable, referent of her maxim. Yet it is precisely Eliza's wish to remain independent of associations that jeopardizes her relationship with the community. The price she pays for her reluctance to associate or approve of the feminized majority is nothing short of being betrayed by their indifference. In fact, it could be said conversely that the ultimate associations and betrayals Eliza faces come not at the hands of the libertine but from the heart of the majority of which he is a member. In her final moments, Lucy continues to insist that Eliza's troubles can be located outside the safety and security of the Federalist community. But the duality of her own aphorism suggests something far darker: that the sources of destruction lie within the very disinterested impulses of republicanism itself.

The Coquette is less a didactic or even a subversive novel than it is an early American palimpsest. Constructed of an ostensible panoply of voices, it tells the story of an outspoken republican woman who ultimately fails to be heard. The book unfolds as a dialectic of revelation and erasure, which becomes the author's subject and which also dictates her form. Foster's transvestite story-telling embodies at the level of narrative Eliza's impulse to venture into the linguistic terrain of the masculine public sphere, which is figured in the novel by the woman equestrian. Novelist, heroine, and minor character alike traverse this difficult border to make statements about women's freedom that will be audible above the roar of the feminized patriarchal discourse that characterizes post-Revolutionary culture. The significance of Foster's achievement, paradoxically, rests on its constitutive failure: in bypassing the discourse of sentiment for the vocabulary of politics, or more precisely, by speaking the language of liberty but overlaying it with the rhetoric of moral feeling, she reaches for a level of expression foreclosed to republican women at the very moment she buries it alive. Thus, the auditory apparition of Eliza's voice as it takes form in her remarkable epistles resonates beyond the bleakness of The Coquette's ending; raising haunting questions about the success of such efforts of entombment, its tones evoke the enormous cultural power available to women such as Foster when they presume to play about words.

Notes

1. See Waldstreicher, “‘Fallen Under My Observation,’” 207; and Adam Goldgeier, “The Coquette Composed,” Constructions 1 (1990): 1-14.

2. For the origins of this phrase, see Joan Riviere, “Femininity as Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303-13. For a postmodern feminist elaboration of Riviere's psychoanalytic formulations, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routlege, 1990), especially 47-56.

3. In Declaring Independence, Fliegelman takes the theatricality of politics and the politics of theatricality as one of his primary subjects. See, in particular, “Natural Theatricality,” 79-94.

4. Kenneth Silverman remarks that Shakespeare's drama of star-crossed lovers is also the “play most frequently performed at Covent Garden's Drury Lane Theatre in London.” The transatlantic fame of Romeo and Juliet is a phenomenon that, on its own terms, tells us little: the taste of pre-Revolutionary Anglo-American theatergoers is largely determined by the British theatrical domination of the colonies. It is nevertheless interesting that colonies and mother country share, even if by necessity, a cultural imagination that embraces the dramatic exploration of a factional conflict that ends with the death of its central figures. See Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theatre in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington, 1763-1789 (1976; New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 62.

5. Dating the events of the novel from its range of historical allusions proves an interesting challenge. Elizabeth Whitman, the historical figure whose story forms the basis for Foster's tale, dies in 1788. Bowen's Museum debuts in Boston in 1791 and accumulates its collection until 1795, when it assumes the name of the Columbian Museum. The most frequently mentioned early American female equestrian is a Mrs. Spinacuta, who appears in Ricketts's Circus, usually considered the first professional circus to play in the early republic, in Boston in 1796. R. W. G. Vail writes that competing for the title of the first equestrienne in the history of the American circus is a Miss Venice, or Vanice, who appears in Lailson's Circus, also in Boston in 1796. Assuming that Foster's fictional practices involve a protorealist form of historical representation, we can date her story as beginning in 1796, providing that people conventionally continue to refer to the museum in Boston as Mr. Bowen's, despite its renaming. On Bowen's Museum, see William W. Clapp, Jr., A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 1853), 87; Ethel Stanwood Bolton, American Wax Portraits (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1929), 16-21; and Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968), 28-29. On Mrs. Spinacuta, see John Culhane, The American Circus: An Illustrated History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1990), 4. On Miss Venice, see Vail, “Random Notes on the History of the Early American Circus,” in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series 43. April 19, 1933-October 18, 1933 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1934), 176.

6. For two short but incisive treatments of Tyler's comedy, see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 212-15; and Jeffrey H. Richards, Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 272-79.

7. Romeo and Juliet is performed as a moral lecture in Boston in 1792; in fact, Susanna Rowson actually plays the part of Juliet's nurse in a production at Boston's Federal Street Theater before she retires from the stage in 1797. See Clapp, Record of the Boston Stage, 8; and Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 4.

8. Shakespeare and Richardson, in addition to Laurence Sterne, whose language is sprinkled throughout the libertine's villainous letters, constitute the most important literary precursors for The Coquette. The author's allusions to Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Twelfth Night, as well as Clarissa, provide a rich set of clues for unpacking the latent, antididactic narrative that runs against the grain of Foster's manifestly moralizing intentions.

9. Literally featuring the live burial of its heroine, Romeo and Juliet functions as potent background against which the funereal dynamics of Foster's novel unfold. Thanks to Martin Müeller for his insights on the significance of this play to an eighteenth-century audience.

10. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

11. See Edmund Burke, Reflections, 176.

12. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 91.

13. Also see Warner, Letters of the Republic, 64.

14. On the power of dramatic representation to obliterate the externality of the beholder and draw him or her inside the fictive world, a condition that he equates with the experience of sympathy, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 104.

15. See Marshall, Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 148.

16. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre,” in Politics and the Arts: “Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre,” trans. Allan Bloom (1758; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 16-17.

17. See also Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 269-70; and Marshall, Surprising Effects of Sympathy, 135-77.

18. See letter 194 of Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (1747-48; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 618.

19. For Adams's letter to William And, March 15, 1804, see Correspondence between the Hon. John Adams and the Late William And, Esq. (Boston: 1823), 19; quoted in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 237. For details about Richardson's correspondence with his readers, see Eagleton, Castle.

20. I am grateful to Helen Deutsch for this insight.

21. Thanks to Jana Argersinger for sharing Prof. Alexander Hammond's observations about the politics of narrative in Charlotte Temple.

22. See Othello 3.3.155-61, in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1221.

23. See Culhane, American Circus, 4.

24. Culhane, American Circus, 5.

25. Jefferson is quoted in Culhane, American Circus, 4.

26. In fact, Ricketts is a known admirer of Washington, who seeks the company of the Scottish riding master to discuss the relative gates of indigenous American horses. See Culhane, American Circus, 4.

27. See Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 21.

28. The third is a Miss Johnson of Swann's circus; see Stuart Thayer, Annals of the American Circus, 1793-1829 (Manchester, Mich.: Rymack Printing Co., 1976), 7.

29. Columbian Centinel [sic], August 31, 1796. See Thayer, Annals of the American Circus, 13.

30. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 10.

31. A recurring refrain among scholars and students of Foster's novel regards the author's failure to imagine, much less to represent, a viable economic alternative to marriage for Eliza Wharton. While I am not suggesting Foster believes that a genteel woman like her heroine, who hails from the elite Federalist community, could go to work managing a theater, it is interesting to note that, in the period immediately following the publication of her novel, a few American middle-class women do just that. The most famous of them is Anne Brunton Merry, who after the death of her husband manages the “Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia between 1803 and 1805” (Dudden, Women in the American Theatre, 12). See also Gresdna Ann Doty, The Career of Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry in the American Theatre (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); Glenn Hughes, History of the American Theatre, 1700-1950 (New York: Samuel French, 1951), 121; and George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–49), 2:598.

32. See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in 18th-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986).

33. See Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 212-14, and 188.

34. Lucy does not describe Daniel Bowen's museum as a display of waxworks; nor does she detail the contents of the collection. Such omissions suggest that Bowen's establishment is well known to Foster's audience, functioning as a part of its collective mentalité. Although the museum probably figures in what we might term eighteenth-century America's repertoire of cultural literacy, little information about it survives in the historical record. Those few remaining sources that however incompletely document portions of Bowen's collection can be found scattered in Boston newspapers from the period as well as in early nineteenth-century histories of the American theater and circus and twentieth-century studies of wax sculpture in America. For an advertisement for Bowen's museum from the beginning of the 1790s, see Columbian Centinel [sic], June 1, 1791, 91. For an anonymous review of the collection that appears during the (roughly approximate) period in which the novel is set, see Boston Gazette, December 28, 1795, 3.

35. Isaac J. Greenwood, The Circus: Its Origin and Growth (1889; Washington, DC: Hobby House Press, 1962), 82.

36. See the Boston Gazette, December 7, 1795, 3.

37. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-covering the Subject”; and “Subject Female: Authorizing American Identity,” American Literary History 5.3 (fall 1993): 481-511. See also Jared Gardner, “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly's Savage Awakening,” American Literature 66.3 (September 1994): 429-61; and see chap. 4 below.

38. Looby writes of another instance in which George the Third is figuratively linked with George Washington. This is the moment when the King's visage transforms into the face of the American general, Founding Father, and first President on the sign in front of the local inn in Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle.” Looby argues that what is “decisive” about this detail is “Rip's recognition of the change as one of semiotic substitution, his immediate demystification of the new order of signs of authority.” See Voicing America, 43 and 94-96. In Foster's representation of Bowen's Museum, in contrast, there is no dissenting spectator from outside the Federalist majority who could demystify the reactionary, indeed the nostalgic, political aura that surrounds these doppelgängers in wax. In fact, this contiguity carries a decidedly conservative ideological charge, suggesting that the differences between the two figures are easily collapsed.

39. Elkins and McKitrick note that “Adams laid himself open to charges, which he never fully lived down, of secretly favoring monarchy” (Age of Federalism, 46). Looby suggests, however, that “George Washington's construction as a charismatic symbolic presence was largely a posthumus, retroactive phenomenon, part of a long and contested process of creating out of an ambiguous revolutionary past usable political myths and traditions; and to the extent that the cult of Washington existed during Washington's life and during the immediate postrevolutionary consolidation, it was a deeply ambivalent phenomenon, marked by bombastic inflations and the widespread dissemination of his idolized image on the one hand, and on the other hand by such public demurrals as that of John Adams, who in Congress in 1777 said he was ‘distressed to see some of our members disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molten. I speak here of the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington’” (Voicing America, 43). See also Adams, quoted in Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (New York: Free Press, 1987), 22.

40. Liberalism as a political philosophy does not reject patriarchal authority; indeed, Carole Pateman, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacobs, Smith-Rosenberg, and others have argued that the de facto liberal subject is a white male of the privileged classes. It is nevertheless true that the Lockean model of individualism is less inflected by gender than is the male homosocial republican formulation that originates in classical theory. See, in particular, Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). See also Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

41. Although allegedly originating in the horrors of the French Revolution, Marie Tussaud's waxworks actually postdate the figures in Bowen's Museum by at least a decade. It is not until 1802 that Tussaud makes her debut at the Lyceum Theater in London, as part of Philipstal's Phantasmagoria, a magic lantern show. Fliegelman chronicles an earlier example of waxworking that has its origins in pre-Revolutionary America in his relation of Patience Wright's story. Wright leaves the colony of New York for London in 1772 in order to practice her extraordinary art of “utterly realistic, fully in the round, life-size wax portraiture modeled from life.” See Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 194-95; and Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 84-85, 87.

42. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., sv “resort.”

43. Pettengill makes a related observation: “It is important to remember that Eliza is not the only character who completes a major transition in the novel. Her two best friends, Lucy Freeman and Mrs. Richman, also undergo critical changes—Lucy marries, and Mrs. Richman bears and loses a child” (“Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere,” 193).

44. Harris reads the plague on the infants in the novel as a reverberation “of the death of innocence” that she argues Eliza experiences on recognizing that “there is no place in late-eighteenth-century America for her opinions.” Harris's essay foregrounds the political critique at work in Foster's novel, and, as such, it echoes my own arguments in important ways. Our interpretations differ, however, in their assessments of the female community's response to Eliza's death. Harris sees in the emerging cohesion of the chorus members a potentially positive vision of a female future, while I read their exercise of sympathy as an ominous extension of the fetishizing process that creates community at the cost of the transgressive individual. See “Critiquing Franklin's America,” 5.

45. The term is discussed at greatest length by Fizer. While her essay offers a lively account of female possibility in the wake of the American Revolution, the reading of Eliza as a figure of excessive sexual appetite flattens Foster's nuanced portrait of the heroine's desires and thereby overlooks the cultural significance of her struggle; in important ways, Fizer's treatment of The Coquette partakes of the monocular vision of the chorus. See “Signing as Republican Daughters.”

46. Although both Smith-Rosenberg and Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller locate the origins of the dynamic at the turn of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the substantiating data derives from early nineteenth-century sources. It is my contention that the dominant energies of Foster's novel, embodied in the feminized patriarchal chorus, look backward to a real eighteenth-century ethos, while Eliza's desires point to the opening possibilities of the nineteenth century. But, as much as the heroine would revel in a female world of love and ritual, such a space is precisely what is missing in Foster's novel. See Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual”; and see Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband. Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

47. Scholars such as Harris, “Critiquing Franklin's America,” Smith-Rosenberg, “Domesticating ‘Virtue,’” and Shuffelton, “Brotherly Watch,” note the parallels that exist between the chorus and the patriarchy. For the historical origins of this alliance, see Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 94-139.

48. See Smith-Rosenberg, “Female World of Love and Ritual,” 64, 74.

49. Harris charts the waning of Lucy's intimate attention to Eliza; see “Critiquing Franklin's America,” 11-12.

50. Fizer similarly notes that “Eliza's final acts of fornication” “mark at once the libertinous nature of her sexuality and its redomestication” (“Signing as Republican Daughters,” 244).

51. On the issue of emblematic monumentality and its destructive interpretive valence, see Mitchell R. Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), particularly 17-70.

52. Louise Kaplan writes, “A fetish is designed to keep the lies hidden, to divert attention away from the whole story by focusing attention on the detail.” See Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 34 and 35. For the original psychoanalytic formulation of the concept, see Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 21:149-57. See also Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 95-97.

53. See George Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), in particular chap. 1, “The Founding Heros and the Post-Heroic Generation,” 13-53. Mason Weems's biography of Washington constitutes the original textual instantiation of this dynamic. See The Life of Washington, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

54. Kaplan, Female Perversions, 35.

55. See Looby, Voicing America; see also Warner, Letters of the Republic; and Fliegelman, Declaring Independence.

56. Harris traces much of the chorus's platitudinous language to the proverbs and aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin. See “Critiquing Franklin's America,” 4, 6.

57. For a different reading that suggests Eliza's is indeed the editorial hand behind her posthumous anthology but that sees this gesture as her radical assertion of independence from the patriarchal voice, see Goldgeier, “Coquette Composed,” 8.

58. Identifying the connection between the consumption of women as sexual commodities and the self-wasting disease of anorexia nervosa that fictional victims of seduction and abandonment inflict on themselves, Maud Ellmann writes, “[I]t is unclear from Clarissa's syntax whether she is dying of the illness or the ethic of consumption, and whether she is suffering or perpetrating her decline. The ambiguity is telling, since her illness both resists her family and acquiesces in its woman-eating values.” See The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 82, my emphasis. See also Gillian Brown, “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 5.1 (1991): 189-215.

59. See Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 482.

60. I here borrow the language of Christopher Castiglia, “In Praise of Extravagant Women: Hope Leslie and the Captivity Romance,” Legacy 6 (1989): 3-16.

61. Franklin's textual transcription in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin of the tombstone he erects for his parents' grave bears comparison here. Particularly interesting is the way in which both Franklin and Foster's chorus create monuments that glorify themselves far more than they honor their beloved dead. Inscribing their own autographs in stone becomes the ultimate signature of possession, the most permanent form of rewriting the past in the interest of a future posterity. See Franklin: Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1315-16.

62. Major Sanford believes that Eliza has chosen to suffer her seclusion and confinement in Salem, the site in early America most famous for the repression and extermination of female “eccentricity” and “waywardness” during the witchcraft delusions of the 1690s. She will actually die in Danvers, but the libertine's mistaken association marks another occasion of the patriarchal impulse to demonize female nonconformity. Harris also notes this connection: “That Eliza's final destination is Salem, the symbolic place of persecution, should not be overlooked. The fallen Eliza's fate differs from that of the ‘witches’ only in the manner of death. The finger has been pointed, and society willingly listens to her accusers. Foster extends the painful irony of this allusion by including Eliza, who has now internalized her society's values, as one who joins in the process, damning herself” (“Critiquing Franklin's America,” 16).

63. See Helen Deutsch, “‘Is It Easier To Believe?’: Narrative Innocence from Clarissa to ‘Twin Peaks,’” Arizona Quarterly 49.2 (summer 1993): 137-58.

64. In the Poetics, pity and terror are precisely the reactions that tragic drama is said to evoke in its audience. See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 17.

65. Pettengill notes, “Ironically, Eliza's friends continue busily to communicate with one another for and about Eliza. When she stops writing, her conversations and actions are reported at second hand, passed around from friend to friend” (“Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere,” 198).