SOURCE: "Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 17-39.

[In the following essay, Davidson argues that some domestic novels ironically subvert typical social constructions of femininity.']

Even though the late eighteenth-century American public was "reading novels with increasingly greater frequency than it read other kinds of books," the growing popularity of fiction did not assure its respectability.¹ On the contrary, the rise of the novel in the United States elicited a general condemnation of the form.² Such prominent Americans as Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster all denounced the new genre, a genre that necessarily offended, by its very nature, those whose literary standards had been shaped by either a residual Colonial Puritanism or an emerging Yankee pragmatism.³ Did novels promote the Kingdom of God? Could they further the wealth of man? On other grounds too fiction was deemed morally and social suspect. As Carl Van Doren has aptly observed:

The dullest critics contended that novels were lies; the pious, that they served no virtuous purpose; the strenuous, that they softened sturdy minds; the utilitarian, that they crowded out more useful books; the realistic, that they painted adventure too romantic and love too vehement; the patriotic, that, dealing with European manners, they tended to confuse and dissatisfy republican youth. In the face of such censure American novelists came forward late and apologetically, armed for the most part with the plea that they told the truth, pointed to heaven, or devoutly believed in the new republic.⁴

In the face of such censure American novelists also came late to sustained considerations of craft and technique. "There was little time for [and little concern with] conscious artistry in the early novel."⁵ Consequently, and as might be expected, America's pioneer novelists have been widely criticized for their aesthetic limitations. For example, Henri Petter begins his major work, The Early American Novel, by maintaining: "The three decades ending in 1820 are not considered a distinguished epoch either in the history of American writing or, more specifically, in the development of the American novel." Most of the early novels, Petter concludes in his first paragraph, exhibit a "widespread mediocrity" and justify the "complaints" that "turn up regularly" in the "book reviews" and "essays" of the time and even in the "prefaces" of the novels themselves.⁶ However, despite the utilitarian, moralistic, and patriotic biases that hindered their course, a few early novelists still found ways to experiment with the conventional forms in which they were compelled to work and thereby circumvented, sometimes with surprising subtlety, the various criteria whereby they were condemned.

The form most commonly employed in late eighteenth-century America was the sentimental novel. These plots, centering on a possible seduction, were more acceptable than others borrowed from the burgeoning British novel for two reasons.⁷ The social critics were placated by Richardsonian fables that advocated middle-class ideals regarding the necessity of and the necessary connection between virtuous maidenhood and holy matrimony. Moral critics were appeased by the way in which these same novels ostensibly fostered morality through pointed examples of virtue rewarded and vice punished. Writer and reader alike could take comfort in the salutary propriety of tales designed to promote both sanctity and connubial bliss. But demonstrating that the road to heaven and the road to family happiness were one and the same, early sentimental novelists too much simplified their moral cosmology. They saw "virtue" as merely chastity and "vice" as nothing more than virginity's loss.⁸ Overtly, didactically, persistently, most of these writers proclaimed that female virginity had to be preserved at all cost and that its loss must necessarily lead to degradation and even death. They were, in short, morally simplistic, so much so that books that were sentimental to avoid being dismissed because they were "fictions" are now largely dismissed because they are "sentimental."

Nevertheless, some writers did manage to transcend the limitations commonly associated with the early American sentimental novel. Partially yielding to the pressures that Van Doren summarized these authors only appeared to write as convention required. Their books could be dedicated (literally) to the preservation of "female virtue" yet still exhibit a definite tension between the public morality apologetically espoused in the preface and the actions portrayed in the plot. Such a tension, in the better fiction, need not be surprising. The first American novelists insistently claimed that their works were founded on "truth" and "life." Yet the truths of life in the new republic, especially for women, the primary subjects of sentimental fiction, were often contradictory and confusing. Furthermore, since there was a wide disparity between accepted ideals regarding women and women's real status, those writers who wished to explore the complexities of their society were partly at odds with a society that judged fiction tolerable only when it promulgated accepted moral dicta. That adversary relationship is a classic American phenomenon, and so is one predictable resolution of the impasse. Writers like William Hill Brown, Hannah Webster Foster, Isaac Mitchell, Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna Haswell Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Tabitha Tenney perhaps at times subconsciously and certainly "covertly and by snatches" managed to present truths other than the expected ones. In the process—possibly because of the process—they also produced books that continue to merit the attention of both the cultural historian and the literary critic.⁹

This is not to say that the first American fictionalists are yet undiscovered Melvilles. The novels of the early national period deserve examination not because they are hitherto unappreciated literary masterpieces but because they mark the beginning of a tradition. Indeed, any attempt to explain either America's eighteenth-century sentimental fiction or its great nineteenth-century classics primarily in terms of their English parallels ignores the different ways in which the uncertain moral and social climate that succeeded the American Revolution set the first novels on the same course later—and more capably—followed by Hawthorne, Melville, James, and other major nineteenth-century authors.¹⁰ In essence, the young American genre coped with repression by quickly passing into an adolescence accomplished in duplicity. If among these early authors there are no Melvilles, there are forerunners of his confidence men. To avoid moral censure, the writers of the early republic often hypocritically posed as plainspeaking advocates of simple virtue. To meet the unreasonable demand for truth in fiction, the first novelists sometimes lied.

Thus numerous early works such as Fidelity Rewarded; or The History of Polly Granville (1796), "founded on truth, and nature"; Amelia; or, The Faithless Briton (1798), based on "Recent Events"; and Monima; or, the Beggar Girl (1802), "chiefly founded on fact," masquerade as nonfiction novels or romans a clef.¹¹ As the first title clearly implies, the books are ostensibly histories with the names changed only to protect the principals. So established was the assertion of historical validity that William Hill Brown, in his second novel, Ira and Isabella; or the Natural Children (1807), burlesqued the usual title page by proclaiming that he was writing "A NOVEL, Founded in FICTION." In somewhat similar fashion, writers could also pragmatically pretend to advocate virtue while indulging in rumor-mongering of the basest sort. For example, William Hill Brown's first novel (and the first American novel), The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature (1789), purports "to expose the fatal Consequences, of SEDUCTION" and thereby "Promote the Economy of Human Life" but also contains both footnotes and subplots detailing the various sexual transgressions—incest, adultery, cohabitation—of a few prominent late eighteenth-century Americans.¹² This book proved to be so scandalous and libelous (the claim to factuality was not always a fiction) that even the author cooperated in its "suppression." And still another version of authorial moral duplicity was suggested by the very structure of sentimental fiction. Writers regularly decried in their prefaces any topic that might, in other novels, sully virtue. They thereby condemned even while they composed voyeuristic tales that titillated, in imitation of one of the more dubious aspects of the Richardsonian tradition, with portraits of intended vice inching towards consummation.

In short, early American novelists resorted to a number of expedients, beginning with a predilection for sentimental plots, that served to diffuse the opprobrium under which they necessarily labored. Since most of them employed these devices in a conventional fashion, they continued to produce formula fiction—typical sentimental novels only slightly modified for the new American market. These authors, like James Butler or Martha Read or Helena Wells (to name but a few), are now largely forgotten and justifiably so. But a number of other writers went considerably beyond these ploys and exhibited a different order of duplicity in their attempts to acknowledge the limiting concerns of contemporary critics even as they expanded the action and the issues in their plots to engage more fully, aesthetically and intellectually, their readers' attention. It is this difficult balancing act—not always successfully executed—that characterizes the best early New World sentimental fiction and gives it its distinctive American tone. One example is Caroline Courtney, an obvious ancestress of Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. This protagonist in Samuel Relf's Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (1797) obeys her parents and weds, much against her own wishes, the elderly Mr. Franks. For being a dutiful daughter she is punished by an unhappy marriage. Neglected by her cruel husband, the wife finds solace in the concern of a younger, more sympathetic man. That infatuation, apparently unconsummated, is still the "infidelity" of the title and brings death to both participants and disaster to their friends and families. Yet the epigraph to the novel reads "—'Tis not a sin to love," to which the reader can only reply that it was and it was not. Marriage is vindicated by the fatal consequences of its failure. The probably non-adulterous lovers are vindicated by their sinless love.

As a summary suggests, the sentimental writers who especially merit attention do so for the ways in which they could turn the sentimental on itself to question the very propositions they supposedly unquestionably extolled. So works such as Susanna Rowson's Trials of the Human Heart (1795)—in which the innocent Meriel marries Clement Rooksby at his mother's instigation and to save him from a disastrous affair but is rewarded by his abuse and philandering—or Relf's Infidelity portray unions that do not at all correspond to the pervasive sentimental ideal of tranquil, connubial domesticity, an ideal which is elsewhere espoused in even those novels themselves. These unhappy marriages, it should also be noted, are not originally merited by any consideration for which the wife can reasonably be blamed. Even more morally problematic is the tragic marriage between Mrs. Morley and the title character in S.S.B.K. Wood's Dorval, or the Speculator (1801). Unfortunately for Mrs. Morley, who was both a wealthy widow and a good woman, her husband turns out to be a fortune hunter, a bigamist, and a murderer. Virtue, the rock on which the sentimental novel was founded, goes quite unrewarded when a virtuous woman is wed to such a vicious man.

A different compromising of expected moral stances is sometimes seen in the supposed moral spokesmen themselves. Too often to be merely coincidental, the proponents of standard ideals are portrayed as almost self-parodies, characters too shallow and priggish to be taken seriously. Thus in The Power of Sympathy Worthy bases his frequent moral pronouncements on the wisdom gained in his "pilgrimage of two and twenty years" through this world of delusions.¹³ Homilies are hardly validated when they are voiced by a callow youth.¹⁴ In much the same fashion, Prudelia, in Susanna Rowson's Mentoria; or the Young Lady's Friend (1794) belies her Bunyanesque name and, despite her frequent sententia, proves to be merely a self-righteous busybody too concerned with uncovering the sins of her neighbors to cultivate any virtues of her own.

When conventional moral pronouncements are advanced by spokesmen such as Worthy and Prudelia the reader is encouraged to look beyond those pieties to discover deeper meanings and other truths. The form is also modified and its meaning altered when sentimental heroes are brought down from the heights of spiritual nobility and portrayed as believable characters. An example from The Power of Sympathy is germane. Harrington, the main male character in that novel, ignores Worthy's platitudinous advice and seeks refuge, instead, in suicide. That end is not a heroic vindication of high ideals. It is, considering the circumstances which prompt Harrington's death, understandably, fallibly, human. Or, conversely, moral issues are complicated when the "villain" of the piece is recast as more than just another advocate of illegitimate affairs. Belfield in Leonora Sansay's Laura (1809); Count Hubert in Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811); and, most obviously, Carwin in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland or The Transformation (1798) are all examples of such humanized antagonists—the seducer who is himself seduced by delusions, misconceptions, and his own naive egotism. These characters suggest dangers other than, and embody the consequences of falls more subtle than, mere physical seduction.

Brown's Carwin is perhaps the most complex and certainly the most discussed villain in early American fiction.¹⁵ But Montraville, in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte. A Tale of Truth (1794), provides an equally novel (and less analyzed) example of how effectively a few early authors could create rounded characters instead of merely those one-dimensional proponents of vice whose machinations generally spun the conventional sentimental plot.¹⁶ Charlotte Temple elopes with this seducer partly because she has been misled by the dubious logic of Mademoiselle La Rue but primarily because she loves Montraville and fully expects that he will immediately marry her. That expectation is not unreasonable. He clearly loves her. The seducer in this first American bestseller sins primarily because he too sees himself as an honorable suitor anticipating wedlock. Charlotte, however, is no heiress, and marrying her would preclude the affluent life to which Montraville aspires. So he partly evades that first dilemma by procrastinating marriage. While he does so, he almost accidentally meets and then, conveniently, falls in love with a second woman who is virtuous, beautiful, kind, and even rich. Yet Charlotte, at this point, carries his child. Montraville's second moral quandary is therefore more pointed than was his first one. Should he remain with Charlotte, his pregnant mistress, or should he enter into a respectable and rewarding marriage?

Partly to exonerate Montraville, Rowson provides a second male character, Belcour, who tries to convince Montraville that he should affirm virtue by abandoning the now fallen Charlotte. That counsel is thoroughly conventional. Indeed, Belcour is a parallel and parody of the stock moral advisor. But this "moral" man does more than most in his efforts to see that "morality" prevails. Belcour even contrives to be found "sleeping" beside Charlotte, who really is asleep and quite unaware of the plot against her. The discovery of a betrayal that never took place finally brings Montraville to abandon Charlotte. The two former lovers are then further victimized by Belcour. This proponent of the sentimental credo that a "perfidious girl" such as the pregnant Miss Temple deserves whatever fate befalls her, employs that truism to justify keeping for himself the money provided by Montraville to take care of Charlotte.¹⁷ So Montraville, the concerned seducer, is not the real villain in the novel, and a standard moral dictum is compromised by the way Belcour employs it to serve his vicious purpose.

Just as the seducer in some sentimental tales is humanized, so too is the woman he seduces. Instead of positing clear-cut moral choices between virtue and vice, a number of early novels present the heroine with more complicated and consequently more believable moral dilemmas. She must choose between respectability and love, for example, not between marriage and illicit sex.¹⁸ Or she must decide between arents whom she loves and a lover whom her parents, often for no valid reason, oppose.¹⁹ She must weigh the prospects of a restrictive domesticity against the freedom from stultifying convention that is promised by a passionate suitor.²⁰ Virtue is sometimes presented as no less demeaning than vice. Not infrequently, an intelligent young woman clearly foresees the protracted unhappiness that would be hers if she married the respectable male character whom society views as her proper mate. Moralists say that virtue should be rewarded. But is marriage to a stodgy moralist truly a reward for a sensitive heroine? In brief, in the best of these novels, the real issues of the plot do not always bear out the prefatory pieties and cannot be reduced to obvious lessons on how inevitably chastity is rewarded and seduction punished.

The apparent dichotomizing of male characters into "good" and "evil," the husband—actual or anticipated—and the seducer, is almost pro forma in some early American novels.²¹ Contemporary critics may have been appeased by this didactic device, but the message of the novels often lies elsewhere. Written frequently by women, almost always for and about women, the best books of the time suggest questions about the slowly changing roles that were available to women—and to men—instead of positing absolute answers. What else can be made of fallen women who are more the victims of circumstance than the embodiments of sin and who scarcely deserve the punishments that are heaped upon them? Of seducers who are not villains? Of villains, like Belcour, who ascribe to the standard morality? Furthermore, the seducer, proud of his conquests but contemptuous of the women he seduces, often inversely mirrors the values of the moralist. The one, to prove his reputation, would despoil what the other, to prove his, would preserve. For each, the heroine is almost incidental. For the heroine, both are equally unappealing. She is caught in a double bind, and, in the best sentimental fiction, her predicament demonstrates that the postulated dichotomy of the clearly virtuous and the clearly vicious is itself a fiction.

Virtue (writ large) does not always save the heroine. Bombarded with pompous precepts on the one hand and assailed by promising temptations on the other, the perceptive female protagonist merits the reader's attention and sympathy. Prefatory statements to the contrary, hers is no easy choice. Chaste, she is rewarded by a limiting marriage, often to a limited man. Should she fall, her death is hardly triumphant proof that the social norms are just, that vice has been rightly punished. Anticipating the great romantic tradition, these protagonists seek to establish their own destinies.²² Given the mores of late eighteenth-century American society and the biological reality of pregnancy, they cannot succeed.

The ambivalence in the structure and resolution of the early American sentimental novel is not simply a fumbling towards moral and psychological subtlety. These works express a general uncertainty in the larger society of the time. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century numerous political and economic theorists proposed widely divergent courses that the new republic might follow. This period also saw a growing concern with questions about woman's role and woman's rights. Issues such as extending the franchise were discussed, and in New Jersey women were briefly allowed to vote.²³ The beginnings of the movement away from the agrarian "home" economy and towards a somewhat more urban economy in which wages were earned increasingly outside the home and mostly by men also brought into sharper focus questions about women's proper place. As recent historians have noted, Americans at this time extensively debated the political status of women, the importance of female education, the nature of marriage, the limits of sexual freedom, and the function of the family.²⁴ But what should be emphasized here is the way in which sentimental novels also reflect a pervasive concern with what later would be called the "woman question." Implicitly and explicitly, American novelists, like others in the new republic, advanced views that ranged from a conservative misogyny to an equalitarian liberalism and invoked social theorists as different as Rousseau and Wollstonecraft.

In Emile (1783), a book widely read in early America, Rousseau enunciated his belief in the innate inferiority of women and the consequent necessity for female subordination in all matters, domestic and social.²⁵ Before marriage, maidens were to be chaste, retiring, silent—rarely seen and never heard. After marriage, the good wife was to be ever attentive to her husband's needs and desires. Rousseau even maintained that education destroyed a woman's natural charm and equable disposition, thereby rendering her unfit to fulfill her chief function of happily bringing happiness to others. Two English writers who were widely read in America, the Reverend James Fordyce and Dr. John Gregory, had already popularized similar views. In Sermons to Young Women (1765), Fordyce maintained that a woman's most important function was to serve and please her man, while Dr. Gregory, in The Father's Legacy to his Daughters (1774), insisted that such traits as vitality and spirit were unfeminine, unfashionable, and unattractive. He argued that only a languishing, pallid passivity would attract a potential husband. There were American novelists who concurred with that viewpoint and advocated the ideal of the submissive helpmate. For example, Helena Wells, in Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (1800), portrays a Mrs. Hayman who suffers patiently all the abuses heaped upon her by a cruel and loutish husband.²⁶ While engaged in such tasks as raising his illegimate "offspring," she can still lecture the reader on the joys of being a good wife.

At the same time, however, another view of women was gaining an increasingly wide audience. Some spokesmen of the Revolution such as Thomas Paine argued that women should have greater political and social freedom. Daniel Defoe, who had modestly advocated women's rights as early as 1697, was exceptionally popular in America immediately after the War of Independence. Abigail Adams, in a number of letters to her husband, suggested (admittedly, with little success) that women be allowed some political voice in the new republic. More publicly, Judith Sargent Murray wrote several "Gleaner" essays in which she maintained that women had the same intelligence and abilities as men and therefore should have the same status.²⁷ This new equalitarian assessment also appears in the fiction of the time. Consistent with her theories, Murray allows her protagonist in "Story of Margaretta" (1798) to assess rationally the merits of an ominously named suitor, Sinisterus Courtland, and to decide that he is not suitable. Or Melissa Bloomfield, in Isaac Mitchell's sentimental protogothic novel, The Asylum, capably contends with threats from family, suitor, and the supernatural, while Deborah Sampson, in Herman Mann's The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (1797), true to her last name, heroically opposes "tyranny" by disguising herself as a man and bravely defending her country during the Revolutionary War. Charles Brockden Brown also created a number of intelligent, capable fictional heroines and in Alcuin; a dialogue (1798) argued for women's education and greater political independence.

But the book that most significantly contributed to the equalitarian cause was surely Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This work, printed in America in 1792 and reprinted in 1794, persuasively advocated the justice of sexual equality.²⁸ As the two printings indicate, Vindication was widely read in America. But a better indication of Wollstonecraft's impact in the United States is found in some of the negative tributes paid to her ideas.²⁹ Hannah Mather Crocker's Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818) is, as its title implies, a counter-argument against Wollstonecraft. For Crocker, women's "real" rights are maintained by their continuing not to have any. Equally obvious, and humorously so, is a passage in S.S.B.K. Wood's Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue (1802). In this novel Amelia, a standard and much put-upon sentimental heroine, "was not a disciple or pupil of Mary Woolstonecraft [sic]. . . . She was an old fashioned wife and she meant to obey her husband: she meant to do her duty in the strictest sense of the word. To perform it cheerfully would perhaps be painful, but . . . it would most assuredly be best."³⁰

That quote from Mrs. Wood epitomizes the contradictions that underlie many eighteenth-century American novels. These fictions asserted that women were frail, could not act on their own or make a decision for themselves, and thus should enter into the permanent haven of marriage. Marriage, however, as even the fictional example of Amelia demonstrates, was not always a haven. In the late eighteenth century a married woman had no rights to money or property of her own but was herself almost a possession of her husband.³¹ Thus, although characters such as Amelia or Mrs. Hayman submit to all that is required of them, given woman's legal status, they really have little other choice, and when these protagonists celebrate matrimony they almost always inadvertently admit to its limitations.³²

Yet those who objected to matrimonial constraints did not reject marriage itself. The alternative, "spinsterhood," was generally conceded to be a woman's greatest defeat. In the mass culture of the time, particularly in the sentimental novel, the unmarried, middle-aged woman—the spinster—was portrayed as deserving derision and contempt.³³ Not surprisingly, proponents of women's rights did not recommend the single life. Even the "radical" Mary Wollstonecraft, in both her personal life and her public writings, insisted on marriage. She proposed, however, a union of equal partners instead of the prevailing concept of marriage which posited the bride's innocence, inexperience, and irrationality, and her consequent need for lawful love and careful guidance.

Of course, the helpless, young single woman (what the French would call the jeune fille a marier) was essential to the sentimental plot. Her limitations were regularly resolved positively by matrimony or proved negatively by seduction. But even this conventional view of woman's nature could be called into question by only a slight change of focus or timing. A heroine encountering a seducer well might demonstrate her need for a hero who will rescue her from the evils from which she cannot save herself. Yet if that good man is hard to find or arrives too late, there is an obvious lesson on the high cost of haplessness and a convincing demonstration that she should have been more capable. This second lesson, sometimes advanced in the plot, was also often argued in the preface. In fact, sentimental novelists prefatorially espoused the need for better female education, for moral awareness, for a certain capability almost as insistently as they advocated the innocent ideal of absolute chastity.

Just as Americans read such radicals as William Godwin, Mary Hays, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, and conservatives such as William Beloe, James Fordyce, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Hannah More, on the other, so too was the sentimental novel pulled simultaneously in opposite directions. One result is a polarized canon.³⁴ Novels like Amelia, a conservative tract, can be contrasted to novels like Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), which thoroughly satirizes sentimental heroines such as Amelia. But the more intriguing result is the ambivalent vision of a number of novelists who could "neither believe" their own fables "nor rest content in their disbelief." With these authors, simple stereotypes of evil seducers and frail virgins give way to more intricate psychological and sociological investigations into human relationships, relationships that, in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, must have been more complex than the moral lessons these first novelists were expected to exemplify.

It might be helpful to examine in some detail how these factors operate in a specific representative work, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797). This first authentically American bestseller (written by a native-born American, first published in America, set in America, and concerned with American characters) is useful for several reasons.³⁵ To begin with, it employs a number of the processes whereby the trappings of the sentimental (stock figures, a fall, a moralistic ending) are subsumed into a story that does not simply prove the traditional moral. This same novel also demonstrates how real questions about woman's proper place could be advanced in the very form that supposedly provided socially conservative answers to those same questions. Far from being a paean to wedlock, The Coquette substantially justifies Eliza Wharton's originally jaundiced assessment of the happiness that would be hers if she allowed a moralizing clergyman suitor to "seduce [her] into matrimony."³⁶ Finally, partly transcending the conventions out of which it comes, The Coquette illustrates the art of the early American novel. And considering the moral, social, and critical climate in which these first novelists worked, the small ways in which they were artists should not be overlooked.

Part of Foster's art lies in the manner in which that art is hidden. The Coquette can be seen as little more than another minor variation on a basic theme. Eliza Wharton, the heroine, is courted by the respectable Reverend Boyer and the roguish Major Sanford. The former, at length, proposes matrimony; the latter, at equal length, does not. In hesitating between the two—hesitating, finally, too long for Boyer—Eliza acts contrary to the advice generously supplied by her concerned friends. Their concern was apparently justified. Eliza's infatuation with an obvious seducer eventually leads her into an illicit relationship. She becomes pregnant; she flees in the night to a lonely retreat; she bears an illegitimate baby; the child soon dies; so too does the mother, who, after her lonely death, is buried where "only the tears of strangers watered her grave" (p. 271). It would seem that the lesson apparent in this plot could scarcely be more clear.

A careful assessment of the novel, however, does not sustain this didactic summary. The Coquette is more than another demonstration of the fatal consequences of a "fate worse than death" and a consequent warning to female readers that they should avoid such lapses. From the first, the author counters the conventional interpretation that a superficial reading of her novel invites. Thus Eliza is not the frail, unthinking heroine who needs to be taken in hand by some strong, rational hero. Instead, she is portrayed as an unusually perceptive woman.³⁷ She can discuss politics intelligently with her friends. She can carefully assess private life too and, before her judgment is overcome by a personal disaster not of her own making, she is well aware of her own worth and the worth of those around her.

The novel, in fact, begins with Eliza's fortunate escape from an unsatisfactory marriage that she was about to enter only because she had not been guided by her own reason. The clergyman whom her family wished her to wed has just died. "No one," she writes in her first letter, "acquainted with the disparity of our tempers and dispositions, our views and designs, can suppose my heart much engaged in the alliance" (p. 133). But because "both nature and education had instilled into my mind an implicit obedience to the will and desires of my parents," she would have foregone "my fancy in this affair, determined that my reason should concur with theirs and on that to risk my future happiness" (p. 133). So the Reverend Haly's death thus proves to be, she observes, simply "a melancholy event that has lately extricated me from those shackles which parental authority had imposed on my mind" (p. 140). Prompted by that narrow escape, she plans to sample personal freedom before declining into a wife. She also determines to marry in the future only if reason and fancy, her mind and her heart, are both engaged.

Socially conservative readers well might find the seeds of Eliza's downfall in this daughter's belated declaration of independence and in her equalitarian concept of marriage. But again the book affirms Eliza's ideals. When she leaves her mother's home in which she was immured with her dying clergyman fiance she goes to visit her friends, the Richmans, whose marriage exemplifies the Wollstonecraft ideal of a partnership of equals. That relationship is Eliza's ideal too. Her "heart approved and applauded" (p. 181) this couple's happiness. Her tragedy is that she would enter into a similar union but encounters no equivalent of General Richman. What she is offered is the difficult choice between unsatisfactory alternatives, a common quandary in the better sentimental novels.

Eliza's continuing dilemma is early established through the conflicting claims of judgment and fancy, the judgment and fancy that she originally intended to reconcile before entering matrimony. She can esteem the Reverend Boyer's moral nature, admire Major Sanford's easy manners, but finds that they both lack the character of a General Richman. Neither really meets her requirements, and those requirements are not invalidated during the course of a novel. The Reverend Boyer, whom her friends particularly recommend, is in several senses a successor to the unsatisfactory Reverend Haly. When this second Reverend, whom Eliza encounters at the Richmans, immediately declares himself a suitor, she is not impressed by "his conversation, so similar to what I had often heard from a similar character" (p. 140). Somewhat later, she admits that she found his moral discourse, "for several hours together . . . rather sickening to my taste" and was "agreeably relieved" when Major Sanford intruded on the interview (p. 156). The Major might be a rake but at least he has some social polish. "What a pity," Eliza writes, with considerable justice, to one of her friends, "that the graces and virtues are not oftener united" (p. 148).

She hopes that a prospective husband would possess both the social graces that appeal to her fancy and the moral virtues that speak to her judgment. She expects that she must choose between the two. She is actually offered neither. Sanford's refinement and polish are merely the outward expressions of that gentleman's hypocritical misogyny. His letters to his one correspondent, Charles Deighton, are filled with stupid, shallow remarks about the stupidity and shallowness of women. He can be "severe upon the sex" because he has "found so many frail ones among them" (p. 234), as if he were a later day Diogenes searching for an honest woman. Furthermore, the frail deserve, he self-righteously claims, whatever punishments they might receive. Ascribing to the standard morality, he insists that should he decide to seduce Eliza and succeed in that enterprise, the fault would be entirely hers. "She knows my character and has no reason to wonder if I act consistently with it" (p. 176). Yet he has just implored her to "let the kind and lenient hand of friendship assist in directing my future steps" (p. 160). That pleading is hardly the open avowal of his character that he subsequently pretends he has made. He is just as hypocritically self-righteous with his wife, who certainly was not seduced, and conveniently blames her for her unhappiness when, after marriage, he still pursues Eliza. His wife, he claims, "wanted but very little solicitation to confer her self and fortune on so charming a fellow" as himself (p. 226). Such self-deluding justification continues until the end of the novel. It is only when he has lost everything—his wife, his mistress, his legitimate child, his illegitimate child, and the fortune for which he married—that he can, in uncharacteristic fashion, estimate his true worth.

He then sees that his sin was far blacker than his victim's, and in his last letter he draws "a deplorable yet a just, picture of himself that is "totally the reverse of what I once appeared" (p. 269).

Foster's protagonist succumbs when she is apparently taken in by such a sham. Yet just as there is less to Sanford's character than immediately meets the eye, there is more to Eliza's fall. Certainly the seduction is not simply the consequence of his intriguingly dangerous charm working on a naive virgin's vanity. Once more Foster markedly departs from the basic sentimental plot even as she utilizes the essential element of that plot, the "seduction." Flighty, flirtatious girls were typically undone as much by their own foolishness as by the novel's villain. But as a free-spirited coquette, seemingly the perfect candidate for a seduction, Eliza was quite immune to Sanford's blandishments. She is seduced only after she has been cruelly disappointed by both Boyer and Sanford and has sunk into despondency; in brief, after she has given up coquetry. The act that brings the usual victim to her fall and suddenly requires her to see herself as fallen is mainly intended in The Coquette to affirm Eliza's sense that she is already defeated.

Foster alters the standard pattern in other ways too. For example, she reverses the usual relationship between sin and matrimony. In the novels of the time a seduction usually precluded a possibly desirable marriage. In The Coquette, however, the fact that an imperfect marriage does not occur sets the stage for the subsequent seduction. The author's plotting is here particularly effective, for Foster carefully structures the way in which her tragic comedy of errors develops to its necessary denouement and divides the process of Eliza's fall into three distinct parts, into, as it were, three parallel falls. The two earlier ones foreshadow and lead to the final disaster. The two later large steps on the road to ruin follow from the first, which is the miscarried marriage with the Reverend Boyer. Furthermore, that first failure is essentially similar to the victory with which the book begins, a reprieve from the undesired role of clergyman's wife. The escape which launched Eliza into life, later reenacted in a slightly different fashion, propels her towards disgrace and death.

When a second marriage does not occur, Eliza accepts the blame because she is stridently told that she is grievously at fault. But the fault is Boyer's, not his intended's. Seeing himself as duped by her "dissimulation" (p. 197) and an innocent victim caught in the "snares of the deluder" (p. 198), he is just as conveniently short-sighted about who should be blamed for what as even Sanford was. Indeed, Foster has this disappointed clergyman carry on very much as if he himself had just been seduced. Yet he is the one that "dissimulated" in their relationship. When Eliza did not encourage his suit, they still agreed that he could "expatiate" on love, she writes, "provided he will let me take my own time for the consummation" (p. 184). But soon he will not be deterred because "she pretended a promise from me to wait her time" (p. 192, emphasis added). He would force the issue. While doing so, he finds her in conversation with Sanford and thereupon decides that he is completely betrayed. He denounces her; he allows her no opportunity to defend herself; she cannot even point out that she met with Sanford to tell him that she had decided to marry Boyer. So the supposed assignation with another does not prove her dishonesty. Quite the contrary. As Sanford notes in one of his letters, "she was entangled by a promise (not to marry this priest without my knowledge), which her conscience would not let her break" (p. 208, emphasis added).

Undone by that kept promise, Eliza is castigated as a villain when her "perfidy" is first discovered and is even more condemned in a hypocritically priggish letter that her "betrayed" lover soon sends her. In that missive Boyer first discusses the "innumerable instances of your impudence and misconduct which have fallen under my observation" (p. 198) and then assures her that his denunciations of her various failings derive not from a lover's "resentment" but from pure "benevolence" and his laudable desire that she should improve the state of her soul. In all he says he is only doing his "duty" as a clergyman (p. 200). He concludes in much that same vein with an arrogant insistence that she can address him later only if she concurs with his present assessment of his present action: "I wish not for an answer; my resolution is unalterably fixed. But should you hereafter be convinced of the justice of my conduct and become a convert to my advice, I shall be happy to hear it" (p. 200). In short, his moral virtues are as false and as self-serving as are Sanford's social graces.

Foster astutely demonstrates how her perceptive protagonist finally comes to believe that this pompous moralist was right. Eliza at first can well wonder "whether [she] had sustained a real loss in Mr. Boyer's departure?" (p. 207), but she soon retrospectively exaggerates the dubious merits of the Reverend Boyer as much as she has all along discounted the obvious faults of Major Sanford. Rejected by the one, abandoned by the other, she begins to realize her precarious position. Her "bloom is decreasing"; her "health is sensibly impaired" (p. 218). Her situation is the talk of the town. The prospect of becoming a spinster is not appealing. Eliza thinks of herself as humiliated, and by the standards of the time she is. She becomes depressed, loses her former confidence, and exists once again almost as a recluse in her mother's house. Her plight, as an unmarried woman, is brought vividly before her—and the reader's—eyes. She even stops writing letters which, in an epistolary novel, is a sure indication that something is wrong. But only from the point of view of one who fears spinsterhood does Boyer seem attractive. "His merit and worth now appear in the brightest colors" (p. 212), when earlier she was "strongly tempted . . . to laugh" at his solemn "sentiment and sobriety" (p. 184).

This dubious re-evaluation of Boyer brings about Eliza's second fall. She swallows her pride and writes to him, apologizing for her previous behavior. She abjectly asks if he will still have her. He will not. He has quickly recovered from his earlier infatuation and is preparing, he informs her, to marry another. The Reverend further patronizes his humbled former fiancee by cautioning her to pass the remainder of her days undeviating from the "paths of rectitude and innocence" (p. 216). Eliza is crushed. When she subsequently discovers that Sanford has married a rich heiress, she is even more defeated. So when Sanford, although married, addresses her again, she acquiesces not because of any ardent passion but out of loneliness and despair. She submits mostly because her pride has failed her and because she desires the disaster that she knows will be the consequence of her action.

"O my friend, I am undone" (p. 217), she writes on receiving Boyer's final letter. Significantly, she employs the phrase, "I am undone," which in a typical sentimental tale signals that the seduction has taken place. "His conduct," she continues, with an even more loaded word, assures her "ruin"; and later, in this same letter, she laments: "O that I had not written Mr. Boyer! By confessing my faults and by avowing my partiality to him, I have given him the power of triumphing in my distress; of returning to my tortured heart all the pangs of slighted love. And what have I now to console me?" (pp. 217-18). Three times Eliza voices the plaintive cry of the seduced woman that reverberates throughout any number of conventional sentimental tales. But Foster sounds that note in a different context. Her protagonist's seduction is psychologically realistic, artistically subtle. It is also, in effect, accomplished before it actually takes place. Defeated by circumstances in which she has not yet debased herself, Eliza will affirm that defeat in debasement. Lost already, she can find a bitter consolation only in her further fall.

That third and final fall, under these circumstances, does not prove, as Boyer with characteristic obtuseness concludes, that female virtue, "in the common acceptance of the term," is largely synonymous with female chastity (p. 193). It does not demonstrate, as Lucy Sumner, one of Eliza's correspondents, declaims in the obligatory moral which concludes the penultimate letter of the volume, "that virtue alone . . . can secure lasting felicity" (p. 270). Instead, there is a convincing study of the problems faced by an Eliza Wharton in a world of Boyers and Sanfords, in a world that is largely governed by the social thought of Boyers and Sanfords.

The novel that begins with happiness achieved through escape ends much the same way. When the Reverend Haly died, Eliza, spared from what would have been an unhappy union, could leave the narrow confines of her mother's house to discover the world. But what awaits her in the world is another marriage that does not take place, an affair that does. Considering these alternatives and the men who embody them, the last words of the novel, assuring the grieving mother that she must believe "your Eliza is happy," seem more than conventional consolation. Marriage has been conjoined, through the structure of the book, with spinsterhood and seduction as fates that one might well wish to avoid. And as The Coquette turns, in this strange fashion, full circle, the novelist as artist again calls into question the public stance taken by the author as moral historian.

Eliza Wharton sins and dies. Her death can convey the moral that the moral critics and readers of the time demanded. Yet the circumstances of that death seem designed to tease the more perceptive into thought. It is in precisely these interstices—the disjunctions between the conventional meanings and the covert ones—that the art of the American novel begins. For that reason alone these early sentimental novels merit more attention, and more credit, than they have generally received. Furthermore, if the very term "sentimental" almost assures neglect, one immediate consequence of that neglect is an uncertainty about the evolution of the American novel. That uncertainty is not resolved by moving the ostensible beginning of an American tradition back from James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving to Charles Brockden Brown. Instead, the real roots of American fiction are to be found exactly where one would expect them: in the first novels of the new republic, in sentimental tales that are sometimes surprisingly subtle, ironic, complex, almost—in a modern sense—unsentimental. As Walter P. Wenska, Jr., recently observed in his study of The Coquette: "The distance between seventeenth-century Boston and late-eighteenth-century New Haven is not great. Nor is it much farther to mid-nineteenth-century Concord or New York."³⁸ Neither is the journey retraced really that arduous, as scholars of literature can discover simply by reading some of these early novels, as they must discover if they wish to understand the origins of American fiction.

¹ Robert B. Winans, "The Growth of a Novel-Reading Public in Late-Eighteenth-Century America," EAL, 9 (1975), 272.

² For detailed assessments of the American critical attitude towards fiction, see G. Harrison Orians' "Censure of Fiction in American Romances and Magazines, 1789-1810," PMLA, 52 (1937), 195-214; Ormond E. Palmer, "Some Attitudes Toward Fiction in America to 1870, and a Bit Beyond," Diss. Univ. of Chicago, 1952; and William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), especially pp. 7-26, 134-63.

³ Terence Martin, in The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), has argued that Puritan ideas were revived by a burgeoning interest in Common Sense philosophy. This philosophy, especially taught in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American academies, was also suspicious of the imagination. Thus "old [Puritan] arguments could be given a new force" and through these arguments "the imagination could be contained and controlled in a respectable, safe, and enlightened manner which would have important effects on the attempt to conceive and execute fiction" (p. 161). Martin also discusses (pp. 155-66) the ways in which the British and American critics of the time assessed novels from quite different perspectives.

⁴The American Novel, 1789-1939, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1940), p. 4.

⁵ "Introduction," in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, ed. William S. Osborne (New Haven: College and University Press, 1970), p. 13.

⁶ Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 3.

⁷ Since we lack the sources necessary to do accurate "influence" studies, a comparative approach to the study of early American fiction is, as Henri Petter points out, "precariously conjectural more often than not" (p. x). However, a number of critics have provided illuminating insights into some of the ways in which eighteenth-century American novelists borrowed from their English counterparts. See Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 28-51; Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), pp. 23-104; and William Spengemann, The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), especially pp. 68-118.

⁸ Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. (1792; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), early addressed herself to such a one-dimensional sounding of woman's virtues: "But, with respect to reputation, the attention is confined to a single virtue—chastity. If the honour of a woman, as it is absurdly called, be safe, she may neglect every social duty; nay, ruin her family by gaming and extravagance; yet still present a shameless front—for truly she is an honourable woman!" (p. 206).

⁹ In "Some Notes on Early American Fiction: Kelroy Was There," SAF, 5 (1977), 1-12, Harrison T. Meserole points out that few scholars have gone beyond Henri Petter's "compendious" survey of early American fiction to produce detailed studies of the novels themselves. Meserole also insists that "our most challenging task, in my judgment, is a reassessment of the early American novel" (p. 4). As he emphasizes, we have not yet distinguished those early novels that really merit neglect from those "undeservedly overlooked" (p. 5) works that do demand serious critical attention.

¹⁰ A recent study which defines the major differences between the nineteenth-century American and British fictional traditions is Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978). Douglas notes the ways in which the major writers of Victorian England "dedicated their enormous talents to an exploration of Victorianism" while major nineteenth-century American writers "turned their sights principally on values and scenes that operated as alternatives to cultural norms" (p. 5). While accepting this crucial difference between serious American and British writers after 1820, one should note that the iconoclastic American tradition actually begins with the best early "sentimental" novelists whom Douglas overlooks in her study of the later sentimentalists.

¹¹ Quoted from the anonymous Fidelity Rewarded (Boston, 1796), p. 4; the anonymous Amelia (Boston, 1798), p. 2; and Martha Read's Monima (New York, 1802), p. v.

¹²The Power of Sympathy (1789), ed. William S. Kable (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 3. In his introduction, pp. xv-xxvi, Kable discusses the inauspicious publishing history of the "first American novel." See also Arthur W. Brayley, "The Real Author of 'The Power of Sympathy,'" Bostonian, 1, No. 3 (Dec, 1894), 224-33; Milton Ellis, "The Author of the First American Novel," AL, 4 (1932), 359-68; and Richard Walser, "More about the First American Novel," AL, 24 (1952), 352-57.

¹³The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable, p. 10.

¹⁴ For an extended discussion of the ways in which even the first American novel deviates from what we now think of as the "sentimental formula," see Cathy N. Davidson, "The Power of Sympathy Reconsidered: William Hill Brown as Literary Craftsman," EAL, 10 (1975), 14-29. Leslie A. Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel, points out how Mrs. Holmes, another moral spokesman in The Power of Sympathy, is also undercut. Fiedler maintains that "the book finally equivocates in a way not untypical of the later American novel" (p. 104).

¹⁵ Because the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown has already been extensively assessed, references to his novels have been deliberately limited in order to emphasize the work of his less well-known predecessors and contemporaries. But a novel such as Wieland certainly fits within the framework of "unsentimental sentiment" explored in the present essay. See, especially, Larzer Ziff, "A Reading of Wieland," PMLA, 77 (1962), 51-57, who argues that Brown transformed Wieland "from a sentimental romance into an anti-sentimental record of life" and thereby "perceived the theme and the manner of the American novel" a "half-century before the great literary movement in New England" (p. 57).

¹⁶ By viewing Montraville as the typical seducer-villain and overlooking the problematic role played by Belcour, William Spengemann, in The Adventurous Muse, can dismiss Charlotte Temple as possibly "the most rigidly programmatic sentimental novel ever written" (p. 92). Nevertheless, Spengemann still concedes that "certain fictive energies seem to be at work, threatening to compromise the conservative values" of this novel (p. 90). See also, Wendy Martin, "Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist," Women's Studies, 2, No. 1 (1974), 1-8.

¹⁷ Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth, ed. Clara M. and Rudolf Kirk (New Haven: College and University Press, 1964), p. 121.

¹⁸ Thus, in the anonymous Margaretta; or, the Intricacies of the Heart (Philadelphia, 1807), the female protagonist prefers love to respectability and rejects dependable Captain Waller, who proposes matrimony, for the dashing Will de Burling, who plans to marry an heiress but will keep Margaretta as his mistress. As Margaretta then declares, "I think I was not destined by nature for an humble cottage" (p. 80). Later, after many trials and abductions, she finds that she must again choose between the good Waller and the handsome de Burling. Now herself possessed of both a title and a fortune, she once more bypasses respectability, this time for marriage to the penniless de Burling. Love and respectability are even more in conflict in those novels in which a mistreated wife is tempted by adultery, a sin more heinous to the sentimental tradition than seduction. In Helena Wells' The Step-Mother; a Domestic Tale, from Real Life (London, 1799), Caroline Williams insists that women must "think of man as a lord and master, from whose will there is no appeal" (II, p. 342, italics in the original). But unhappiness in marriage compromises this dicta and partially explains another wife's escape from a loveless marriage to an illicit love relationship.

¹⁹ Perhaps as many as half of the sentimental novels written in America before 1820 employ the cruel parent motif. Good examples are the anonymous The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or Constancy Rewarded (Norwich, Conn., 1796); Mrs. Patterson's The Unfortunate Lovers, and Cruel Parents (n.p., 1797); and Margaret Botsford's Adelaide (Philadelphia, 1816), all of which pit harsh parents against young lovers. See Petter, The Early American Novel, pp. 188-209, for a fuller discussion of this theme; and Meserole, "Some Notes on Early American Fiction: Kelroy Was There," for an examination of Rebecca Rush's psychologically astute treatment of this same basic theme.

²⁰ Lucinda, an important subsidiary character in William Hill Brown's Ira and Isabella, postpones marriage in favor of a less settled life which includes numerous affairs. "Lively, affable, and simple" (p. 113), she consciously rejects the restraints of domesticity and yet is not punished for her choice. Similarly, the title character in Leonora Sansay's Laura (Philadelphia, 1809) rejects the respectable man her stepfather would have her marry in favor of Belfield, a medical student. Belfield has fits of debauchery but at least offers Laura a loving relationship characterized not only by physical but (even rarer) intellectual communion. Finally, Deborah Sampson, the heroine of The Female Review; or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady (Dedham, Mass., 1797), rejects both the conventions of domesticity and the passionate suitor when she repeatedly chooses not to wed in order to pursue her career as a Revolutionary soldier.

²¹ The dichotomizing of good and evil male characters represents a significant thematic and structural departure from the pattern employed in Pamela and Clarissa. Thus Leslie A. Fielder, in Love and Death in the American Novel, notes that the American introduction of the virtuous hero stands "the Clarissaarchetype on its head" (p. 37) in that the main opposition is no longer between the capable "good" heroine and the "evil" man who assails her. Fiedler also suggests that this change takes place in the late nineteenth century. One must note, however, that the American pattern appears in even the first eighteenth-century sentimental fiction and when subtly employed allows for a characteristically American ambivalence and duplicity.

²² In "The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom," EAL, 12 (1977), 243-55, Walter P. Wenska, Jr. persuasively argues that The Coquette foreshadows the romantic tradition in American fiction.

²³ David Lee Clark, in Brockden Brown and the Rights of Women (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1922), pp. 15-29, provides a concise and still reliable account of the post-Revolutionary debate regarding women's political status. For more contemporary assessments see Marguerite Fisher's "Eighteenth-Century Theorists of Women's Liberation" and Ralph Ketcham's "The Puritan Ethic in The Revolutionary Era: Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson," both in "Remember the Ladies": New Perspectives on Women in American History, ed. Carol V. R. George (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 39-47, 49-65.

²⁴ These same historians, it should be noted, question whether the nineteenth century actually marked an improvement in women's status or a retrogression from the heights attained at the end of the eighteenth century. It is not the purpose of this essay to enter into that complicated debate, the various sides of which are discussed by Nancy F. Cott in the "Conclusion" to her excellent study, The Bonds of Womanhood: ''Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 197-206.

²⁵ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, A New System of Education, trans. by "A Citizen of Geneva" (London, 1783). Those Americans who did not actually read Rousseau could have become familiar with his basic ideas through the even more popular writings of Hannah More, especially her Essays for Young Ladies (London, 1789).

²⁶ For an extended analysis of the "patient Griselda" motif in sentimental fiction, see Herbert Ross Brown's discussion in The Sentimental Novel in America, pp. 100-32.

²⁷ The cultural documents which advocated the cause of feminism in the eighteenth century are discussed in Mary Sumner Benson's Women in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935). A more recent study which covers the same ground is Barbara J. Berg's The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 11-29.

²⁸ Three recent essays perceptively discuss the American reaction to Wollstonecraft and "Wollstonecraftism." See R. M. Janes, "On the Reception of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 293-302; Patricia Jewell McAlexander, "The Creation of the American Eve: The Cultural Dialogue on the Nature and Role of Women in Late-Eighteenth-Century America," EAL, 9 (1975), 252-66; and Marcelle Thiebaux, "Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America: 1791-1802," in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman, et al. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 195-245.

²⁹ For a fuller discussion of the negative reactions to Wollstonecraftism, see also Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Eric L. McKitrick and Stanley M. Elkins (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 36-59.

³⁰Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue (Portsmouth, N.H., 1802), p. 103.

³¹ Women's legal rights both before and after matrimony are discussed in Richard B. Morris, "Women's Rights in Early American Law," in Studies in the History of American Law, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 126-200; and, more recently, in Mary Beard, Woman as Force in History (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 122-44.

³² Gilbert Imlay, in The Emigrants, & c. or The History of an Expatriated Family (London, 1979), presents more directly the pitfalls of marriage. His novel includes numerous stories of emotionally, financially, and physically abused wives to underscore his message that "many misfortunes which daily happen in domestic life, and which too often precipitate women of the most virtuous inclinations into the gulf of ruin, proceed from the great difficulty there is in England [and America] of obtaining a divorce" (p. ix).

³³ We see one indication of the eighteenth-century disdain for the unmarried woman in the prefatory comments made by Mrs. Rowson, Mrs. Wood, and other writers, who insisted that their domestic roles were far more important than their careers (a word they would not have chosen). We also see typical portraits of the spinster in works like Mrs. Wells' Constantia Neville where the fifty-ish Miss Norcliffe is described as an almost hag-like "virago." But even though Miss Dorcasina Sheldon, in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (Boston, 1801), becomes increasingly foolish as she grows older, one other character, the sensible Mrs. Stanly, counters the prevailing view when she insists that it is "more respectable" to remain unmarried than to "marry barely for the sake of having a husband" or "merely to avoid the imputation of being an old maid" (II, 52).

³⁴ See Paul M. Spurlin, "Readership in the American Enlightenment," in Literature and the History of Ideas, ed. Charles G. S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 359-76; and also an important quantitative survey by David Lundberg and Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," AQ, 28 (1976), 262-71 and appendix.

³⁵ The two bestsellers in America in the 1790s were Rowson's Charlotte (1794) and Foster's The Coquette (1797). Mrs. Rowson, however, was born in Portsmouth, England, where the first chapters of Charlotte take place.

³⁶The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, ed. William S. Osborne, p. 184. Future references to this readily available paperback edition of The Coquette will be made parenthetically in the text.

³⁷The Coquette, which purports to be "A NOVEL; Founded on Fact" and is loosely based on the story of Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, in this instance stays close to its source. Miss Whitman was a poet and something of an intellectual who moved in the best social circles but ended her life, as did Eliza Wharton, soon after bearing a stillborn, illegitimate child. Some critics have also argued that Major Sanford is based on Pierrepont Edwards, a son of Jonathan Edwards. For hardly impartial discussions of this possibility, see Caroline W. H. Dall, The Romance of the Association; or One Last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1875) and Charles K. Bolton, The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery (Peabody: Peabody Historical Society, 1912). A more factual account is Robert L. Shurter's "Mrs. Hannah Webster Foster and the Early American Novel," AL, 4 (1932), 306-08.

³⁸ "The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom," p. 253.