SOURCE: "Privileging the Feme Covert: The Sociology of Sentimental Fiction," in Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 110-150.

[In the following chapter from Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), Davidson discusses the popularity of sentimental novels and the social issues upon which they comment—including marriage, sexuality, childbearing, and domesticity.]

In the new Code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

Abigail Adams to John Adams (March 31, 1776)

As to your extraordinary Code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerful than all the rest were grown discontented. . . . Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our masculine systems.

John Adams to Abigail Adams (April 14, 1776)

In centering his fictive universe on both seduction and female education, William Hill Brown dramatized one of the chief issues of his time and place—the status of women in the Republic. Seduction, of course, served as both metaphor and metonymy in summing up the society's contradictory views of women. The huge social interest vested in women's sexuality, which was fetishized into a necessary moral as well as a social and biological commodity, meant that women themselves had little voice in the matter. Female education was, then, in a number of the first sentimental novels, an education in the value of playing the proper sexual roles available to women who were thereby seduced by the sentimental plot as well as in it. Wife or mistress, woman's function was to be socially possessed or dispossessed. Taken either way, she constituted mostly one more proof of male prerogatives and privilege. In other words, it is no surprise that The Power of Sympathy posits the very premise, the essential powerlessness of the female, that any real problematics of seduction might be expected to question.

Even on the level of narration, the first American novel confirms female victimization in that women are seduced in the novel not by their own uncontrollable desire but by the verbal chicanery of men. This masculine narrative superiority is part and parcel of the narrative method of The Power of Sympathy. Harrington can abandon his plan to "triumph over" Harriot, but he still dominates in all discourse between them. In the course of the novel, Harrington writes his friend Worthy twenty-six times; he writes Harriot only twice. Harrington's letters occupy almost half the entire narrative, Harriot's take up less than one tenth of the novel. Harrington's voice counts and is counted; it is his story he is telling, and that unequal distribution of story time tends to seduce the reader as well as the female protagonist whose tale has already been subsumed into Harrington's mastering narration. Who, after all, would want to identify with Harriot, who has no surplus of identity to lend to another?

The social and narrative problems that Hannah Webster Foster addresses are both similar to Brown's and a universe removed. While also concerned with the interrelationship between seduction and female education, Foster has significantly altered the plot structure of the sentimental novel by allowing her heroine some status and by relating the novel primarily from the female point of view. She thereby casts The Coquette as more a woman's story than a man's. Whereas Harrington relates his choice not to seduce Harriot but to marry her, Eliza Wharton must choose for herself between matrimony and coquetry, between one set of constraints and another. Still more to the point, by validating the capability of the finally fallen heroine, Foster affirms both the need to educate women and the uselessness of any such education in a society that has no place for educated women.

Eliza is a capable woman, yet she ultimately fails as miserably as any of the hapless victims in Brown's novel. I would suggest that this narrative bad end is not only crucial to The Coquette but is pointedly relevant to the whole debate on women's status carried on in diaries, letters, newspapers, magazines, and advice books of the time, and, of course, in the early sentimental novel as well. The horns of women's impossible dilemma can be summed up in two opposing questions: If a woman is inferior (susceptible to flattery, easily cajoled, prone to seduction), is she really educable, and, more to the point, does she in any way deserve a voice and a vote in the Republic? On the other hand, if some women are as capable as any man (Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and other exemplary women), then why all the fuss about needing better schools, better education, and what is all this Wollstonecraftism about? It is an impasse that every woman's movement has had to face. If women are inferior, they can hardly expect to be treated as equals; if women are equal, then why the clamor for special privileges?

The Coquette, countering received ideas on women's circumscribed power and authority, was an important voice in the debate on women's role in the Republic. But unless the sociology of the early reader is kept in mind, the novel is deprived of its chief narrative thrust. The book gives us, essentially, a portrait of the life, loves, and death of a well-known woman of the new Republic sympathetically portrayed for this protagonist's unknown contemporaries. Elizabeth Whitman, Eliza Wharton's prototype, was much criticized and scorned in contemporaneous newspaper accounts. In the novel, however, she takes on a surprising dignity. And in the disjunctions between Eliza Wharton and "Elizabeth Whitman" (also a fiction in the sense that her scandalous life was thoroughly allegorized in dozens of sermons and editorials), we may catch some glimpses of an implied reader of early American fiction and read something of the dilemmas confronting her, too, in her society. Reading this reader, I would even maintain, is a necessary prerequisite to reading the novels she read.

The first step in that preliminary reading is to reconstruct the conditions under which she read.¹ We cannot simply reconstruct her, for she is no more a monolith than is "the female reader" today. However, her society tended to define her monolithically, as societies tend to define most members of low-prestige groups. Although the educated woman may well have enjoyed a more privileged life than her serving sister, by law vast differences in wealth, educational level, capability, class, or race were outweighed by one common feature. Both were "women," a social construct as much as a biological entity.

How was woman "written" in the society at large and how did the early novel both contribute to and countermand that social text? To answer the first part of this contextual question, I will necessarily conduct various forays into the history of emerging America. In answering the second part, I will chart the ways in which numerous sentimental novels entered into the public debates on women and incorporated different arguments on women's status into their very structures. Only then will I return to The Coquette to examine how cogently and capably Foster gave voice to the "hidden woman" and dramatized her demise both as a personal tragedy and a social failure. Just as The Power of Sympathy can be seen as a countertext to the Bowdoin/Adams proclamations, so can The Coquette, as I shall subsequently argue, be seen as a counter text to the Elizabeth Whitman allegory of the fall of an intellectual woman.

Who were the implied readers of the early American sentimental novel? The novels themselves suggest a ready answer in that many of them are addressed, either prefatorially or in the text, to the "daughters of United Columbia," who are, implicitly or explicitly, young, white, of good New England stock, and for the most part unmarried. Their class, however, is rarely specified, and different novels give us female characters drawn from various social levels, ranging from the working poor to the relatively well-to-do. The very rich rarely appear in early novels except, occasionally, as seducer/villains or as wealthy women typically victimized by fortune hunters, which suggests that the wealthy were not paramount consumers of fiction. Similarly, although black women are sometimes included in subplots (typically to demonstrate the inhumanity of slavery), they are never the focus of sentimental intrigue nor is it likely that they read sentimental novels in any number. Finally, few of the novels focus significant attention on mature women, matrons. Sentiment seems to have been mostly a province of the young.

Young people constituted a ready audience. Because of the high mortality rate during the Revolutionary War and the population explosion in its aftermath, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, a full two-thirds of the white population of America was under the age of twenty-four.² Furthermore, because of the increasing attention to childhood education in the later part of the eighteenth century, young people, especially women, tended to be more literate than old people. The early American writer capitalized on this market of potential readers by featuring young people prominently in the plots of the majority of early American novels of all genres. In fact, the mean age of the hero and heroine in novels written in America before 1820 is under twenty-five, as was the national mean. Most of the plots of early American novels also center around issues of importance to young readers. In sentimental fiction, particularly, far more emphasis is placed on a young woman deciding whom to marry than on an older wife determining how best to raise her family.

An emphasis on marital decisions also reflects other demographic considerations. The average marriage age of the republican woman was between twenty-two and twenty-three years of age and her average life expectancy in 1800 was only forty-two years of age.³ Since no college admitted women in America until 1837, when Oberlin first opened its doors to women, and since female secondary education was rare, a significant portion of a woman's life (perhaps as much as one fifth) passed in what might be called a premarital state—beyond childhood but not yet, to use the eighteenth-century term, "settled."⁴ While virtually all young women, even the wealthiest, were occupied either inside or outside the home in some kind of labor (sometimes remunerated, sometimes not), a woman's chief social goal during these years was to find a suitable husband, either independently or with the aid of her friends and family. Diaries of young women describe how part of virtually every day was spent visiting with one's friends and otherwise circulating, very much as do the characters in numerous sentimental novels.⁵ Assessing one's male companions or studying men in company or sounding out one's acquaintances about a certain man's reputation are all recorded again and again and with good reason. Because of eighteenth-century laws of coverture, a woman had to be particularly careful in her choice of a mate, for, after marriage, she became, for all practical purposes, totally dependent upon her husband. Her rights would be "covered" by his, and it was his legal and social prerogative to define what those rights would be.

For the large available audience of unmarried young women, sentimental novels fulfilled the social function of testing some of the possibilities of romance and courtship—testing better conducted in the world of fiction than in the world of fact. Both Susanna Rowson and Hannah Foster demonstrated, for example, that a reformed rake did not make the best husband after all and that a womanizer was likely to also be a woman-hater. But by portraying dashing roués, sentimental novelists still allowed women to vicariously participate in a range of relationships with diverse suitors and to imagine what the aftermath of marriage to different men might be like. Most of these novels, however, did portray, at least on one level of discourse, the dangers of unsuitable relationships and, as we have seen with The Power of Sympathy, graphically described the heavy portion of blame and suffering that would necessarily fall on the shoulders of the sexually transgressing woman.

The concomitant unstated premise of sentimental fiction is that the woman must take greater control of her life and must make shrewd judgments of the men who come into her life. Implicitly and explicitly, the novels acknowledge that married life can be bitterly unhappy and encourage women to circumvent disaster by weighing any prospective suitors in the balance of good sense—society's and her own. A novel such as Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton, to cite but one example, considers little more than questions of matrimony. Women who choose wisely are briefly described, catalogued, and ranged against a contrasting catalogue of women who do not. The most pathetic of the latter, a Mrs. Henderson who is brought to the verge of death by a violent, alcoholic, profligate, and emotionally abusive husband, was based on the sad life of one Mrs. Anderson, a neighbor of Vickery (who was herself an unmarried young woman when she penned her first and only novel).⁶

Mary Beth Norton has suggested that young women in early America, particularly those in the higher classes, may well have enjoyed more leisure during their premarital years than at any other time. The daughters of well-to-do families were often free of some of the household tasks that occupied their mothers such as overseeing the ever-fluctuating household help or raising children.⁷ But these young women were by no means perpetually idle and looking about for a good read. On the contrary, one of the chief arguments against novel reading in the eighteenth century held that such idle employment kept young women from contributing to the family economy. Linda K. Kerber has noted, in this regard, that household manufacture occupied a large percentage of even upper- and middle-class women's time in both cities and the country until well into the middle of the nineteenth century and that unmarried daughters participated in virtually all aspects of household production, including working the loom and the spinning wheel.⁸

During their premarital years young women even of the middle classes often worked outside the home, especially as teachers, while those lower on the social scale could seek work as domestics or, increasingly, in the new factories or mills. Or young women might engage in various given-out industries and thereby earn a minimal income while working in the home (typically making straw bonnets or stitching boots or shoes).⁹ Although officially "unsettled," women in their premarital years were very much a part of the domestic economy and even contributed to the beginnings of the industrial economy in early America.

Yet they still made time for novel reading, either as a respite from other work or often as an accompaniment to it. For example, young Julia Cowles of Connecticut squeezed in a full syllabus of novel reading (The Unfortunate Lovers, Adventures of Innocence, The Boarding School, Sir Charles Grandison, Amelia, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family) amidst her round of household duties—washing, cleaning, quilting, spinning, ironing, sewing: "Been so much engaged in readfing] 'Grandison,'" she apologized to her diary, "that other things have been neglected, especially my journal." Or in Pennsylvania Molly Drinker read aloud from The Mysteries of Udolpho while her mother, Elizabeth, plied her needle—much the way Miss Granby reads aloud to Eliza Wharton and her mother in The Coquette. On another day, Mrs. Drinker herself read The Haunted Priory but then concluded her diary entry with a long list of the various household chores she had also accomplished "to shew that I have not spent the day reading."¹⁰

Women often met together to engage jointly in such tasks as sewing or quilting; while the others worked, one member of the group would read aloud—typically from a sentimental novel. Such group reading was often followed by discussions on topics ranging from national politics to local gossip. Not only was the novel thus made a part of the daily life of republican women, but the discourse of fiction was itself made contiguous with or incorporated into their discourse. In effect, then, just as a local scandal was easily fictionalized (a common source for sentimental novels), so, too, might the fiction be readily "scandalized" (that is, transformed by oral discourse and circulated as story). And through the grammar of these simple transformations, the news of the day—fictional, factual—could make its rounds.

Important social matters are reflected in sentimental plots, including the preoccupation with extramarital sex and the social and biological consequences of sexual trangressions. That preoccupation no doubt did not cause, as the critics of the early novel regularly asserted, a sharp rise in illegitimacy. But it is correlated with it. During the revolutionary and postrevolutionary era as many as 30 percent of all first births occurred less than nine months after marriage; the percentage of conceptions prior to or without benefit of matrimony was not equaled again until the present permissive era.¹¹ Many social authorities were alarmed by that new laxity, and the emerging novel provided them with a convenient scapegoat. I would suggest, however, that the novelist, as much as the professed moralist, simply perceived and addressed an issue of the time. The main difference was that the novelist's critique of illicit sexual behavior often had a feminist import and emphasized the unfortunate consequences of seduction for the individual woman, not the social mores (although these were in the novel, too) against which she had offended.

The sentimental novel also portrayed, frequently in graphic terms, the deaths of many characters in childbirth. Although, then as now, the overall life expectancy for women was higher than for men, every young woman facing marriage also faced the prospect of death in chidlbirth, which did increase woman's mortality rate above men's during prime childbearing years.¹² Julia Cowles was not too busy with her novels and her spinning to note that in 1802, in her small community of Farmington, Connecticut, four women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four had died, and she could not help but identify with them: "Shall I, who am now 17 years of age, live to see that time and leave, as 3 of them did, families? Ah! methinks I shall .. . be cut of[f] in the bloom of my life. . . . And time shall be no longer."¹³ Cowles's diction and description come straight from the sentimental novels we retrospectively criticize for their lack of realism.

The lurid portrayal of death in childbirth allegorized what every early American woman already knew. Intercourse begot children and having to bear a child was a mixed blessing. In postrevolutionary America, birth control was still considered immoral, so even though earlier sanctions against premarital sex had waned to a certain extent, the biological realities of pregnancy, then as now, burdened only the newly "liberated" woman and not the long-liberated man, a fact virtually every sentimental novel emphasized (without ever mentioning birth control).¹⁴ And, of course, death in childbirth could come to married and unmarried women alike.

Demographic studies indicate that the average number of children born to an American woman in 1800 was an extraordinary 7.04, a number which does not include pregnancies that ended in miscarriage or stillbirth.¹⁵ A typical American woman could thus count on spending virtually all of her mature years bearing and raising children. Fertility was higher in America than in most European countries at the same time, and many a European visitor noted the remarkable change in New World women after marriage. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "in America the independence of women is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of marriage."¹⁶ But it did not take de Tocqueville to tell them so. Norton has documented how some of these women described their own condition. One Molly Tilghman wrote of her sister, Henny, in 1788: "She is decidedly gone [pregnant] to my great grief, and to her own too." Or Abigail Adams employed another apt metaphor when she noted of a young woman in her family, "it is a sad slavery to have children as fast as she has."¹⁷

The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate declined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900.¹⁸ Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century America (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in the birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two. Equally interesting is the fact that relatively few written documents survive to chart the changing social attitude except, perhaps, novels in which a small, intimate family of only three or four children more and more is posited as an ideal. It seems, then, that there was a dramatic shift from an abhorrence of contraception to a widespread but discreet and private reliance on methods of reducing family size. Carl N. Degler further argues that women were primarily responsible for this shift in attitude and that their increasingly asserted control over family size paved the way for greater reform movements at the end of the century. But whatever the causes and consequences, the unprecedented, rapid decline in fertility rates in the nineteenth century was one of the chief indices of women's changing role in family and society.¹⁹

Another index was the rising literacy and education levels of women. Nor does it seem merely coincidental that fertility rates fell almost 25 percent during the same period in which women's sign literacy rate (according to Kenneth A. Lockridge's data) more than doubled. Demographers chart a surprising correlation between the levels of education and fertility. More educated parents (the mother's education level being especially pertinent) tend to have fewer children.²⁰ The high correlation between increased female literacy and decreased fertility suggests that education brought with it a sense of control over one's body, over one's role in the reproductive process, and even some control over one's husband. I am not being entirely facetious, therefore, when I suggest that, with its double focus on improving female literacy and controlling sexuality, the sentimental novel may well have been the most effective means of birth control of the time.

By its emphasis on improved female education and its sensationalizing of the dangers of childbearing, the sentimental novel seems intimately linked—as mirror or catalyst or both—to larger social forces at work in the lives of women readers. But what was woman's status in the early years of the Republic, from 1789 to 1820? In almost all the sentimental novels, we see women dominated by larger social and economic forces, controlled by selfish parents, sadistic husbands, or strong-willed seducers. Viewing the typical sentimental novel as a reflection of the society, one must conclude that women were powerless and that the primary relationship between men and women entailed domination, exploitation, appropriation, and abandonment, on the one hand, and submission, appeasement, and other such defensive strategies on the other. Yet just how accurately did these novels reflect the lives of women readers and their relationships to the men in their lives? As Perry Miller noted, the Revolution gave American legal thinkers a unique opportunity to invent new systems of law and new standards of justice.²¹ For the most part, however, the new Republic modestly revised British principles and procedures and did so essentially to maintain the existing power structures of class, race, and gender in America. Marylynn Salmon has shown that most of the legal changes that occurred in America between 1775 and 1800, especially those bearing on women's rights, were "gradual, conservative, and frequently based upon English developments."²² As American jurist St. George Tucker indicated in his 1803 annotations of Blackstone's Commentaries, a cornerstone of English law, American judicial practices preserved the inequities between men and women, particularly the idea that a married woman is a feme covert [sic], a hidden woman, whose rights are both absorbed by her husband and subject to her husband's will. Tucker also observed that American women were, de facto and de jure, victims of "taxation without representation; for they pay taxes without having the liberty of voting for representatives." As his very phrasing emphasizes, the Revolution freed America from an oppressive Colonial status, but it had not freed American women from their subservient status. As Tucker summed up the matter, "I fear that there is little reason for a compliment to our laws for their respect and favour to the female sex."²³

Although the situation varied from state to state and sometimes from case to case, one can make a few generalizations about women's legal status in the new Republic. Before marriage, a young woman was typically considered the property of her father. Sometimes, as Kerber has pointed out, this concept of property could take grotesque forms. For example, in a Connecticut court case of Samuel Mott v. Calvin Goddard (September 1792), a father was able to sue his daughter's rapist for damages on the grounds that "the plaintiff's daughter and servant," by being made pregnant, had been rendered "unfit for service."²⁴ Kerber also notes that St. George Tucker was particularly offended by the terms of the proceedings whereby the rapist could be prosecuted only through the legal fiction that the victim's father's property had been irreparably damaged—a holdover from British law and a clear testimony to the woman's primary status as property not as person. In sentimental fiction, too, the unmarried young woman was, for all practical purposes, the property of her father. The common Clarissa theme of the avaricious parents who essentially sell their daughter into an economically advantageous marriage was not just an extravagant borrowing from earlier British fiction but was an apt metaphor for the legal status of the postrevolutionary American girl.

It was an apt metaphor for the legal status of republican wives as well. Marriage, for the women involved, was mostly a change in masters. The new bride, admittedly, was to be protected by her husband, and she was protected, so far as the law was concerned, because her rights were subsumed in his. Yet as many legal historians have shown, a wife's status as feme covert effectively rendered her legally invisible. With some notable exceptions, the married woman typically lost her property upon marriage. She lost her legal right to make a will or to inherit property beyond the one-third widow's rights which, by common law, fell to her upon her husband's death. For the most part, in 1800, by law and by legal precedent, a married woman's signature had no weight on legal documents and she had no individual legal identity.²⁵

As with many key historical issues, there is substantial debate over just how much coverture "actually" limited women's lives. The pioneering women's legal historian, Mary Beard, disputed nineteenth-century feminist reformers who described marriage, in Harriet Martineau's memorable phrase, as the "political non-existence of women."²⁶ Beard argued that both the equity courts and common law gave married women far more legal rights than those allowed by Blackstone or codified into the statutes of the different states. Relatively speaking, Beard was right in stressing that equity and common law tended to extend to women some measure of power and control. But one can easily romanticize the degree of equality granted here, and recent studies of equity rulings by Salmon and Norma Basch suggest that Beard may well have been too optimistic in her estimates.²⁷ For the most part, the nineteenth-century reformers accurately perceived the injustices of coverture. In Basch's summation, "the law created an equation in which one plus one equaled one by erasing the female one." The married women's property acts passed in New York in the mid-nineteenth century (and the result of considerable reformist activity), not only improved women's prospects but provided the locus of further feminist protest by emphasizing that the traditional concept of coverture was a "source of crippling sexual discrimination." The antebellum feminists, Basch continues, were "neither naive nor misguided" in focusing their attack on coverture for that focus "was essential to an exploration of the conflict between motherhood and citizenship [and] the critical first stage in bridging the world of domesticity and the world of politics."²⁸

Various commentators of the time emphasized women's legal powerlessness. One of the most eloquent assessments is that of Judge Hertell of New York, who in 1837 argued on behalf of a married woman's rights to retain her own property. Hertell noted that the current marriage laws gave a husband "uncontrolled, indefinite, irresponsible and arbitrary power" over every aspect of his wife's life and subjected her to an "abject state of surveillance to the will, commands, caprices, ill humours, angry passions, and mercenary, avaricious and selfish disposition, conduct and views of her husband." For Judge Hertell, a wife's situation, at least metaphorically and often literally, was comparable to slavery or imprisonment.²⁹ Cott, Norton, and Kerber have all found repeated statements in private papers of late eighteenth-century women about the privations of marriage; women such as Abigail Adams, diarist Eliza Southgate, Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna Rowson, Mercy Otis Warren, and others all noted that women suffered in life proportionate to the rights they surrendered by law.³⁰ Even Abigail Adams's request that her husband "Remember the Ladies" in the new Constitution was primarily addressed to the legal and social inequities of married women (rather than a more direct plea for political rights). "Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands," she wrote, because "all Men would be tyrants if they could." She counseled her husband to "put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity."³¹ Abigail Adams's prediction is starkly substantiated by a private complaint in verse by Grace Growden Galloway, the wife of politician Joseph Galloway:

.. . I am Dead
Dead to each pleasing thought each Joy of Life
Turn'd to that heavy lifeless lump a wife.

³²

The flat despair of that declaration of dependence and defeat anticipates writers such as Sylvia Plath or Ann Sexton, and emphasizes the debilitating potentialities inherent in the system of coverture.

Mrs. Galloway's private complaint remained private in her lifetime. It is now more acceptable for a woman to speak the woe that is marriage, especially her own, but it is now also more acceptable for a woman to remove herself from that same marriage. In the late eighteenth-century colonies, however, and also in the new Republic, divorce, for most women, was simply not an option. As a result of a British ruling, Colonial divorce bills were effectively rescinded in the decade preceding the Revolution. Pennsylvania and New York, for example, granted no divorces during the prerevolutionary era. Not until 1785 in Pennsylvania and 1787 in New York could any foundering marriage be officially dissolved. Maryland granted its first absolute divorce in 1790. There was, furthermore, a good deal of variation from state to state. In South Carolina, absolute divorces were not allowed until 1949 (although legal separations could be granted there by Courts of Chancery).³³ What was universal, however, was a declared, public, official abhorrence for divorce, and both social pressures and legal practice insisted on the sanctity of marriage. For example, until well into the next century, women were granted divorces only if they could prove extreme physical abuse and their own total innocence. Consequently, a "guilty" woman, whether confirmed adulteress or occasional shrew, was often denied a court hearing. The impasse was early dramatized in Gilbert Imlay's sentimental novel, The Emigrants (1793), which was apparently written with some help from his lover, Mary Wollstonecraft, and is essentially a fictionalized tract in favor of divorce. As Imlay notes in his preface, "I have no doubt but the main 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 . . . of obtaining a divorce."³⁴

Women's restricted status within marriage (and the corresponding restrictions on divorce) presumed a patriarchal domestic order often breached during the Revolutionary War years when many American women were suddenly forced to survive without the economic assistance or legal protection of a husband. As numerous historians have demonstrated, the War ambiguously emphasized to women both their private capability and their public powerlessness. Thousands of women during the war suddenly became responsible for running a family business or for continuing the operations of a family farm. Those women, of course, were still also responsible for the array of household manufacture essential for survival in the rural market economy. Extant letters indicate that sometimes a conscientious husband might write home giving his wife advice on how to manage complex business or agricultural operations, but there was little he could actually do while he was away fighting and there was always the possibility of his death. Women managed, as they have managed during all wars, to keep the economy going, surreptitiously circumventing their lack of legal rights, often to their financial detriment. Many learned firsthand the shackles law placed upon them, as wives and also as widows. In most states, women could not legally inherit property or businesses. The assumption that they could not manage, at odds with the fact that they did, was rendered even more ridiculous when destitution at home followed the husband's death in the war. Only through extralegal maneuverings by widowed women and their male kin could the law's clear intent—property was to be controlled by men—sometimes be subverted.³⁵

Having demonstrated their capability in the face of a national emergency, many women in the postwar years felt that they had fully earned those new rights and responsibilities which they had exercised, de facto, already. The new Constitution, however, did nothing to acknowledge women's contribution to the war effort. In only one state, New Jersey, and only briefly, were propertied women (black and white) granted the vote. That enfranchisement was unusual enough that newspapers as far away as Boston reported on women voting in local New Jersey elections.³⁶ Equal pay was not even an issue; it was assumed that women would earn less. Technically, a woman factory worker could not even collect her earnings without a man's signature (although this restriction may not have been widely enforced). Not until the end of the nineteenth century could a woman serve on a jury or, concomitantly, be tried by a jury at least partly of her peers. Married or single, she had virtually no rights within society and no visibility within the political operations of government, except as a symbol of that government—Columbia or Minerva or Liberty.

As one immediate consequence of the Revolution, the family and, more particularly, woman's role in the family became a matter of considerable social concern. There is almost a natural tendency, after any war, to seek within domesticity some release from what might be termed a postmartial letdown. The comfort and safety of hearth and home are welcomed, by women as well as men, after the dangers of battle, the chaos of war. There is something comforting in seeing that much of the old order survived. Consequently, Sally the Shopkeeper, like her latter-day daughter, Rosie the Riveter, soon found her new occupation gone and was obliged to return to her old one—tending house and husband and raising children to repeople the Republic.

Typically, too, after the War of Independence, some women were reluctant to relinquish the freedoms that they had gained while men were occupied elsewhere and otherwise. As a poem published in the Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum in 1794 proclaims:

No ties shall perplex me, no fetters shall bind,
That innocent freedom that dwells in my mind.
At liberty's spring such draughts I've imbib'd,
  That I hate all the doctrines of wedlock prescrib'd.

³⁷

Or as another anonymous poem published the following year in the Philadelphia Minerva declares:

Man boasts the noble cause
  Nor yields supine to laws
Tyrants ordain;
Let Woman have a share
Nor yield to slavish fear,
Her equal rights declare,
And Well Maintain

³⁸

The diction has gone from post-Freneau to pre-Emerson, but the sentiments remain the same. A spirit of "woman's rights" was felt throughout postrevolutionary America, celebrated by some, derided by others.

Certain demographies of the time contributed to this strain of female independence. Studies of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania suggest that the number of unmarried and never-married women increased, as would be expected, in the postwar era. Many men had died in the war, leaving widows behind. Records show that a number of these widows (perhaps at least partly to circumvent legal problems arising from not being able to inherit their husband's land or business) quickly remarried, sometimes to relatives of the deceased husband, sometimes to men considerably younger than themselves, thus further depleting the pool of men available to a young woman reaching marriageable age.³⁹ But despite the surplus of unmarried women in the late eighteenth century, spinsterhood hardly embodied a respectable option in the society of the time. On the contrary, the spinster was an object of pervasive cultural ridicule. As we see in the plots of numerous sentimental novels, the specter of spinsterhood drove more than one sentimental heroine into the arms of a seducer. Eliza Wharton is merely one case in point, a case that I will subsequently consider in some detail. For the present, suffice to say that when, at the age of thirty-seven, she finally yielded to her seducer's blandishments, she knew exactly what she was doing, and so did many readers of the time who obviously sympathized with her plight.

The sentimental novel as a form mediated between (and fluctuated between) the hopes of a young woman who knew that her future would be largely determined by her marriage and her all-too-well-founded fears as to what her new status might entail—the legal liabilities of the feme covert, the threat of abandonment, the physical realities of repetitive pregnancy, and the danger of an early death during childbirth. Many republican women expressed deep reservations about marriage. "I keep my name still," Betsey Mayhew wrote to her good friend Pamela Dwight Sedgwick in 1782, "I think it is a good one and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage." Somewhat less hard headed but no less ambivalent was Sarah Hanschurst: "I often Run over in my mind, the many Disadvantages that Accrue to our Sex from an Alliance with the other," she wrote to her friend Sally Forbes, but "the thought of being Do[o]med to live alone I cant yet Reconcile . . . [T]he Appeallation of old Made .. . I don't believe one our Sex wou'd voluntarily Bare."⁴⁰ Or in the literature of the time, Mrs. Carter, in Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin, can paraphrase Mary Wollstonecraft and insist that marriage is a vital institution "founded on free and mutual consent" and one that "cannot exist without friendship" or "without personal fidelity." For her, "as soon as the union ceases to be spontaneous it ceases to be just." Yet that idealistic portrait must be set against her own earlier description not of marriage as it should be but marriage as it too often was in America. The married woman "will be most applauded when she smiles with the most perseverance on her oppressor, and when, with the undistinguishing attachment of a dog, no caprice or cruelty shall be able to estrange her affection." Carter's final pronouncement on the role of women in marriage anticipates that of Judge Hertell: "Females are slaves."⁴¹

As any number of public and private documents attest, marriage was a crucial matter for women of the time. Just as they knew and differently adumbrated the central question in their lives, so, too, did the authors of the fictions they read, fictions that were primarily sentimental. That last literary adjective carries, in contemporary discourse, a heavy load of negative connotations and suggests self-indulgent fantasies bearing little relationship to real life. Yet the private and nonfictional commentaries of the time suggest a contiguity between the sociology of the early American family and the plots of the sentimental novel that is easily overlooked by the contemporary reader. Indeed, the seemingly melodramatic death with which so many of the sentimental novels end both fictionalizes and thematicizes the seriousness of the woman's questions raised in the plot. Given the political and legal realities of the time, the lack of birth control, the high fertility rate, and the substantial chances of death at an early age, many of the readers fared no better than did their most unfortunate fictional sisters.

The sentimental novel spoke far more directly to the fears and expectations of its original readers than our retrospective readings generally acknowledge. Conveniently divorcing the novel from the social milieu in which it was originally written and read, recent critics easily condemn as clichéd and overdone the plight of the assailed, sentimental heroine hovering momentously between what seems a mechanical fall (seduction), on the one hand, and an automatic salvation (marriage), on the other. Yet for her and her reader the choice was desperate. Moreover, if the right decision would not necessarily assure her happiness, the wrong one would guarantee suffering in abundance. So the contemporary critic literalizes and thereby trivializes what the contemporaneous reader took symbolically and thus seriously.

Style, too, has changed since the late eighteenth century, and the language of sentiment interposes itself between the modern reader and the eighteenth-century text. In our lean and antirhetorical time, the very excesses of the novel's sentimental "effusions" (a term derogatory in our vocabulary, not theirs) call the sentiments thereby expressed into question. Yet other discourse of the time employs much the same language as does the early American novel. Consider, for example, the courtship correspondence of John and Abigail Adams as represented by the following excerpt from a 1764 letter from John (signing himself Lysander) to Abigail (Diana):

You who have always softened and warmed my Heart, shall restore my Benevolence as well as my Health and Tranquility of mind. You shall polish and refine my sentiments of Life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill-natured particles in my Composition, and form me to that happy Temper, that can reconcile a quick Discernment with a perfect Candour.⁴²

Harrington himself could not have said it more sentimentally. As Jane Tompkins has recently reminded us, contemporary tastes and values applied indiscriminately to older literature may illuminate contemporary tastes and values but say little about the literature itself.⁴³

Addressed to young female readers, the first novels performed vital functions within their society and did so more than parallel vehicles such as sermons or advice books. The most important of these functions in my view was the reappropriating of choice. "Seduction," at first glance, implies female powerlessness; nevertheless, by reading about a female character's good or bad decisions in sexual and marital matters, the early American woman could vicariously enact her own courtship and marriage fantasies. She could, at least in those fantasies, view her life as largely the consequence of her own choices and not merely as the product of the power of others in her life—the father's authority, the suitor's (honorable or dishonorable) guile, the husband's control. Thematicizing, then, the necessity of informed choice, these fictions championed the cause of female education that they typically proclaimed in their prefaces. Weighed in that balance, many of the novels of the time are not the frothy fictions that we commonly take them to be, but evince, instead, a solid social realism that also constitutes a critique (even if sometimes covert) of the patriarchal structure of that society. Thus, if many early novels end unhappily, it may be because they acknowledge the sad reality of marriage for many women. As Catherine Maria Sedgwick wryly notes in her story "Old Maids" (1835), it is best to conclude a story with the wedding if one wants to end on a happy day, for "it is not probable another will succeed it."⁴⁴

Other forms of literature in the new Republic also specifically addressed the woman reader, most notably a wealth of advice literature often penned by clergymen. But this literature usually referred women more to the kitchen and the nursery than to the study or the library. Only in fiction would the average early woman reader encounter a version of her world existing for her sake, and, more important, only in the sentimental novel would her reading about this world be itself validated. As an added bonus, in not a few of these novels, women readers encountered women characters whose opinions mattered. Numerous sentimental novels, beginning with the first one, took time out from the main seduction plot to show women discussing politics, law, philosophy, and history—those same arenas of discourse from which the woman reader was often excluded. As Rachel M. Brownstein has recently observed, such reading, for women, serves crucial functions:

Recognizing the problems and the conventions of a woman-centered novel, the reader feels part of a community and tradition of women who talk well about their lives and link them, by language, to larger subjects. Looking up from a novel about a girl's settling on a husband and a destiny so as to assert higher moral and aesthetic laws and her own alliance with them, the reader can feel the weight of her woman's life as serious, can see her own self as shapely and significant.⁴⁵

A feme covert, a hidden woman, the early American reader had even greater motivation than the contemporary woman reader to find books that rendered her life, in fiction if not in fact, significant.

Given a married woman's status as feme covert, many late eighteenth-century readers (particularly women readers) were, understandably, vitally concerned with marriage and strove to educate or otherwise prepare themselves to make a good choice in marriage. Questions of the importance and nature of the family and woman's role within the family were widely debated. As recent historians such as Degler, Kerber, and Norton, as well as Jay Fliegelman, Philip Greven, and Michael Zuckerman have pointed out, with considerable differences in emphasis or interpretation, there was in the eighteenth century at least a theoretical concern with reforming patriarchal structures. It has also been argued that some substantial changes did occur in the daily family life of Americans in the new Republic. Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection for authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutionalized in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsible for childrearing and household management.⁴⁶

The extent and nature as well as the consequent implications of large changes in the family raise issues that simply do not admit definitive historical assessments. Did women, despite few advancements in political and legal rights, achieve a new domestic status that testified to an egalitarian impulse in the society as a whole, or was that new domestic status intended to tell a wife that she had none elsewhere and that her place was in the home? The very terms with which the question is posed invite a reading of the historian's personal predilections as much as of the historical record. Nor did the commentators of the time, unhindered or unhelped by any historical perspective, deal any more conclusively with the same question. Yet we can observe that the impetus of change was both proved and problemized by a wealth of advice literature that debated questions of domesticity, questions, not coincidentally, much debated in the early novel.

The sentimental novel, in particular, was generically suited to addressing, in detail, the range of ideological assessments of the family and the implications for women of different visions of what the family should be. Furthermore, since the sentimental novel focused almost exclusively on young women standing virtually on the doorstep of definitive marriage choices, it necessarily dramatized the grounds on which the final crucial step was taken. What qualities, in her, would promote a happy match? In him? How should she best be schooled to cultivate the former and to perceive the latter? Would a purely domestic course of training or formal schooling best foster her husband's future happiness? And hers as well? More specifically, and this was a major question of the day, did education enhance or impede a woman's chance of making a suitable match and, correspondingly, did education alter her expectations of what a good marriage should be? Was she to be the submissive helpmeet or the equal partner? Was she to be motivated mostly by duty or desire? What other questions should she be asking? To whom could she best turn for advice—suitors, friends, or parents? All such questions were extensively discussed in the didactic advice literature of the time, but they were worked out in far more detail and by example in the sentimental novels.

The didactic literature on the role of women tended to be divided into two highly polarized camps. The more prevalent of these, the conservative or traditional position, relied especially on the Biblical story of Eve's ordained subservient status to argue the justice of God and man's established ways with women. The opposing view, "equalitarian feminism" to use Cott's phrase, or the "group consciousness" movement, which took place between 1770 and 1800, admitted women's "shared weakness relative to men" but questioned "whether this weakness was natural or artificial, biological or cultural."⁴⁷ And if women's supposed "natural inferiority" were really imposed by custom and culture, then, the argument implicitly and often explicitly ran, it could largely be remedied through an equal or at least improved education. As we shall see, specific sentimental novels took up one or the other side of this debate, but at either pole, the need to portray with some recognizable validity the social conditions of the young women who might read a particular novel subtly altered its reading of her actual and ideal case.

Three writers—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, James Fordyce, and John Gregory—best represent the conservative or traditional view of the role of women. Although not American, they were each exceptionally popular in America. Both Rousseau's Emile and Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774) were American best-sellers in 1775, and both, along with Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765), were widely published and read in America in the postrevolutionary era.⁴⁸ In these three books, to summarize briefly, women were portrayed as naturally subservient within the family, and each author also argued that education made a woman less submissive and thus less appealing. In Emile, for example, the great French republican philosopher heaps contempt upon any woman who might believe that the new radicalism and egalitarianism somehow includes her. For Rousseau, any social contract between man and woman must be premised on her natural inferiority. Thus her necessary subordination in all matters, domestic and social.⁴⁹ Before marriage, maidens were to be chaste and retiring, rarely seen and seldom heard. After marriage, wives were to efface themselves in perpetual attendance on their husbands' needs and desires. Such service, moreover, should come naturally, and education, Rousseau argued, destroyed a woman's natural charm and equable disposition, thereby rendering her unfit to fulfill her chief function of happily bringing happiness to others. The Reverend James Fordyce and Dr. John Gregory popularized similar views. In Sermons to Young Women, Fordyce maintained that a woman's most important function was to serve and please her man, while Dr. Gregory asserted that such traits as vitality and spirit were unfeminine, unfashionable, and unattractive. He insisted that only a languishing, pallid passivity would attract a potential husband and repeatedly lays the blame for any domestic disharmony on woman's natural selfishness and vanities along with any unnatural and necessarily unrealistic education.

Books by Rousseau, Fordyce, Gregory, and other similar social theorists were widely read and discussed in postrevolutionary America; their ideas were paraphrased and promulgated in dozens of essays that appeared in newspapers and magazines. One representative sample of this social theory in the popular culture-advice column mode is "From a Mother to Her Daughter, Just on the Point of Marriage," from the Boston Weekly Magazine of 1804. The bride-to-be is counseled:

You have a father, whose mild and beneficient exercise of authority must have taught you to wish, that your husband may possess all the prerogatives, which all laws, divine and human, have given him in the headship of his own house, and to remove far from you, every desire of degrading, much more of endeavoring to make him contemptible by any efforts to usurp his place yourself.

The young lady should have no problem; all her life has been a study in her subservient status. But even more conservative, or perhaps merely more explicit, is another piece, "Woman; An Apologue," from a different 1804 issue of the same paper:

Women were created to be the companions of man, to please him, to solace him in his miseries, to console him in his sorrows, and not to partake with him the fatigue of war, of the sciences, and of government. Warlike women, learned women, and women who are politicians, equally abandon the circle which nature and institutions have traced round their sex; they convert themselves into men. . . . And, besides, where is the feeling and amiable woman who would exchange the ineffable happiness of being loved for the unsubstantial pleasure of fame?⁵⁰

Fame, for a woman, is by definition (gender definition), unfeminine, infamous.

A few writers of sentimental novels championed this conservative view of woman's proper place and function. In Helena Wells's Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (1800), for example, Mrs. Hayman patiently endures all the abuses heaped upon her by a cruel and loutish husband.⁵¹ The more she suffers from the accepted status quo, the more she affirms it. Even while engaged in such tasks as raising her husband's illegitimate offspring (there are apparently several), Mrs. Hayman lectures the readers on the joys of being a dutiful wife. But when it comes to marital bliss there are singularly few objective correlatives in this novel. The protagonist can claim that she is content, but contemporary readers (in the unlikely event that the book might reach them—it was never reprinted) would doubtless reach a different verdict. Similarly, in S.S.B.K. Wood's Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue (1802) the protagonist struggles to provide a "useful lesson" in submissive wifehood. Obeying the deathbed request of her adopted mother, Amelia marries Sir William Stanly only to learn that Sir William still loves another. Too sentimental a heroine to grant him a divorce, Amelia must accommodate herself to her husband's extended affair with the other woman. Through all, Amelia endures—virtuous, innocent, patient, perfect, and quite unappreciated. Like Mrs. Hayman, she even takes on the task of raising her husband's illegitimate child. As Wood assures us, Amelia "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."⁵²

This passage humorously epitomizes the contradictions that underlie the conservative sentimental novels. Both Mrs. Hayman and Amelia submit to all that is required of them. But given women's official status of the time, they really had little alternative. The fiction, in short, attempted to valorize a choice, where, according to that same fiction, there was none. The very form of the medium, too, worked against the message it was assigned to convey. Whereas a tract might extoll the virtues of submission in the face of all trials, a novel must create trials to which a dedicated heroine then virtuously submits. But those trials fully visualized give us not an inspiring icon of feminine virtue but a perturbing portrait of the young wife as perpetual victim. The tract can lecture in the abstract, but the conservative novel, portraying through concrete example, evokes (quite inappropriately for its own rhetorical purposes) the legal, social, and political status of the average female reader, and that reader is not apt to applaud the tortured image of her own condition. I would also suggest that fictions such as Amelia and Constantia Neville set forth the sad truths of many women's lives in the late eighteenth century more tellingly than did the overtly reformist novels. As heroines, Amelia and Mrs. Hayman are, ultimately, inescapably, failures—even if they do eventually receive some compensatory reward (i.e., heaven, authorial approval, etc.) They are failures because their stories deny any cult of ideal domesticity far more convincingly than their commentary affirms it. Indeed, and on an elementary level, the infidelities of the husbands suggest a breakdown of the family, a breakdown the wives are powerless to prevent. The heroines' suffering may be chaste, but it is also banal, even ignominious, and suggests that both wives would have done better if they (or their parents) had chosen more wisely. The novels end up inadvertently advocating the need for better female education and for greater female self-sufficiency, which is precisely what they set out to deny.

The sentimental plot simply would not serve the objectives which the conservative writers had drafted it to advance. Women, of course, could be portrayed as innately inferior to men; weak in body, mind, and spirit; needing guidance, counsel, a controlling hand. Marriage could be cast as the one proper refuge, after the father's home, from the dangers of the wide, wide world. Yet if the wife was protected by a caring husband, her wants essentially the same as his and his the same as hers, where then was woman's subservient status? Somehow her haven also had to be at least in part or in potentiality her hell—or who was marriage for? That contradiction could neither be resolved nor glossed over but served instead to indict—to deconstruct—the very theory of domesticity that regularly led the conservative sentimental novel to this impasse. So Helena Wells, in The Step-Mother; a Domestic Tale, from Real Life (1799), for example, can urge her readers "to think of man as a lord and master, from whose will there is no appeal."⁵³ Thinking of not thinking; willed will-lessness; the appeal of the unappealing: The duplicity of the advice highlights the tyranny it would explain away, invokes the very appeal that it would deny, and since that appeal cannot be carried to a higher court (lord and master), God's ways to women are pointedly called into question. Simply put, this counsel for total defeat necessarily carries its own cry for radical revolution.

Interestingly enough, the most consistently conservative of the sentimental writers, S.S.B.K. Wood, seems to have practiced in her own life a more liberated philosophy than she promulgated in her fiction. There is, first, the obvious fact of her writing career. There is also the curious matter of Wood's tribute in the dedication to Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800) to "Constantia," who is none other than Judith Sargent Murray, the most vocal proponent of the equalitarian feminist position in early America.⁵⁴ That reference makes one wonder if the contradiction the modern reader discovers in Wood's portrayal of the submissive helpmeet is perhaps grounded partly in the ambivalence of the author and not just in the recalcitrance of the form.

Judith Sargent Murray, more than any other single American writer, represents the equalitarian position. Her Gleaner essays were published serially, republished in a collected edition that attracted nearly seven hundred subscribers, and were pirated (in whole or part) dozens of times in the 1790s.⁵⁵ Through their subject matter alone, these essays, dealing with such disparate topics as military strategy, the new Constitution, political philosophy, or legal reform attest to at least one woman's wide-ranging intelligence and her readiness to address cogently issues ostensibly beyond woman's ken. The most persistent topic of the Gleaner pieces, however, is closer to home but no less radical in its import and implications. Murray regularly advocated the need for better female education and argued the relationship between such education and greater independence. She also stressed the importance of female education for fulfilling the traditional role of wife and mother but noted, too, that "marriage should not be presented as a sumum bonum [sic]." For Murray, education would serve a woman in whatever state she happened to find herself. "The term helpless widow," for example, "might be rendered as unfrequent and inapplicable as that of helpless widower."⁵⁶ In one important essay, "On the Equality of the Sexes," Murray argued that if women lacked the same power of reason and judgment exhibited by men, it was only because they also lacked the proper training in those skills. Following Locke, she maintained that "we can only reason from what we know and if an opportunity for acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex cannot fairly be deduced from thence."⁵⁷ Certain that education would bring advancement, Murray even predicted, "I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history."⁵⁸

Best known as an essayist, Murray was also an author of sentimental fiction. Most notable for my purposes is her novella, Story of Margaretta (1798), in which she reformulated the role of the sentimental heroine by revising that heroine's educational preparation for the role. In her essays, Murray had advocated that natural philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, geography, and history be taught along with such traditionally feminine subjects as painting, needlepoint, French, and piano playing. This is the curriculum set for the protagonist in Story of Margaretta, a work instructive, as Murray intended, in several different senses.

Margaretta Melworth begins her career as a sentimental heroine somewhat unthinking in her actions and apparently destined for disaster. Fortunately, however, she encounters a sagacious woman who teaches her that education is necessary for any woman who would answer sensibly the one question posed to almost all sentimental heroines: Whom shall I marry? This emphasis on education, often promised in the prefatory statements, is rarely so carefully executed as it is in Murray's plot. Because she gains some education, Margaretta escapes the standard sentimental role of the helpless victim of fate, fate typically taking the form of a designing man whose machinations the innocent heroine simply cannot decipher. Schooled to weigh the worth of various propositions and proposals, Margaretta has no problem disposing of those who are found wanting, especially an ominously named suitor (and would-be seducer), Sinisterus Courtland, who is, she later discovers, already married and the father of three children. With equal good judgment she chooses Edward Hamilton, and everything in the novel suggests that their union will be one of "mutual affection." That promised reward for female perspicacity is a powerful argument in favor of just such capability and also a not-so-covert suggestion that, in the schoolroom and the home, many women were being sadly short-changed.

Judith Sargent Murray was herself apparently inspired by the ideas and examples of other female philosophers, including Aphra Behn (1640-89), Mary Astell (1666-1731), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), and, most specifically, Catharine Macaulay (1731-91), one of the finest historians and social philosophers of the late eighteenth century and the author of the feminist Letters on Education (1790), a work advocating views on education similar to Murray's. Macaulay, incidentally, was widely known in the New World. As Dale Spender notes, she visited America in order to see and judge for herself the promise of the new country and she maintained an active correspondence with George Washington throughout the revolutionary period. Macaulay's inspiration can also be seen in the work of a number of other American feminists such as Abigail Adams, diarist Eliza Southgate, and the anonymous "Female Advocate," all of whom linked feminist reform with the promise implicit in the new republican form of government.⁵⁹

For the earlier writers, however, and for Murray, too, feminist reform could best begin in the family. Women's greater domestic equality could then pave the way to larger forms of equality as well. As we see in Story of Margaretta, education allows for a rational choice of a good husband who believes in affection and not in wifely deference. Because Margaretta has proved herself to be both virtuous and wise, she deserves a larger role in the home and in society, and, conversely, because America is young and virtuous, it needs women like Margaretta. The implicit assumption here is that virtuous women will be rewarded; the governing term virtue has simply been redefined and the scope of the expected reward expanded to include not just a good marriage but greater legal and political power, too. In short, Murray does not share Mary Wollstonecraft's suspicion that oppressive systems are systematically and designedly so. She believes that the goodwill latent in the existing order might become the lever whereby that same order could be moved to be more just and fair.

If Wollstonecraft seems to have been the more perceptive of the two, Murray was still on firmer ground than were such advocates of social radicalism as Thomas Paine, Montesquieu, and Condorcet, all of whom expressed far less concern with women's continuing domestic subservience than with her coming political emancipation as part of a revolutionary reordering of society at large.⁶⁰ Somehow, these men seemed to assume, we could achieve the latter without altering the former. In contrast to that self-serving contradiction, we see a dilemma of the sentimental reformers, all of whom were going to alter the former without affecting the latter. The changes proposed by the reforming novelists turn out to be largely grounded in the old order, and what is advocated is a readjustment of the marriage contract rather than a second revolution led by "the Ladies."

Only a few novels significantly questioned received ideas as to woman's place. Fewer still disputed the sanctity of the sexual double standard, and even those did so with a measure of ambivalence. In James Butler's Fortune's Foot-ball: or, The Adventures of Mercutio (1797), one woman character rails against the "tyrannical custom" which forbids women to make advances towards the men they might like. "How peculiarly hard that woman's situation, who possessing the most unadulterated passion . . . must, in obedience to an arbitrary custom, linger out her days in the most excruciating torture."⁶¹ But after eight months of an illicit and apparently guilt-free relationship, the young woman dies at sea while her lover escapes to other adventures and liaisons. Conversely, but not altogether differently, Laura, in Leonora Sansay's 1809 novel of the same name, lives with Belfield without benefit of matrimony but then, after his death, her harrowing illness, and a bout of insanity, she meets a man with whom (so the novel portends) she might enjoy an egalitarian (and, this time, legal) match. And the double sexual standard is pointedly and overtly challenged by Gilbert Imlay, who argues in The Emigrants that men and women should be allowed the same sexual rights, including the right to divorce.⁶² But Imlay does not envision female freedoms beyond sexual freedom, and his female characters are often Rousseauisticly passive helpmeets.

A few other novels also call into question the social program of the double standard. The title character of Sukey Vickery's Emily Hamilton observes "that the world has been too rigid, much too rigid, as respects the female sex," and at one point ironically argues that if we must accept the "assertion" (derived, she notes, from Pamela) that "reformed rakes make the best husbands" then "might it not be said with equal justice, that if a certain description of females were reformed, they would make the best wives?"⁶³ Or in the anonymous Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (1787) and in William Hill Brown's Ira and Isabella, minor women characters enjoy sexual freedom, but it is difficult to determine if these "loose women" serve as vehicles for or objects of an indiscriminate satire. For the most part, those who noted that the traditional double standard was unfair still had, when it came to sexual affairs, nothing else to put in its place.

No early American novelist went as far as Mary Wollstonecraft in reevaluating the political and sexual roles of women. Her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was the single most important theoretical contribution to the egalitarian cause. Printed in America in 1792 and reprinted in 1794, the book persuasively advocated the justice of women's equality in matters social, political, and sexual.⁶⁴ Quantitative studies of the period indicate that Wollstonecraft's feminist tract was available from some 30 percent of the libraries in America (based on a controlled sample of libraries whose records still exist) during its first years in print, and the fact that it had its own American printing and reprinting similarly attests to its popularity.⁶⁵ Moreover, the Vindication appears in advertisements bound in the back of early American novels more often than any other philosophical tract (suggesting that publishers perceived that readers of novels might be predisposed to purchase this feminist book).

Like Montesquieu and Condorcet, Wollstonecraft argued that no society can call itself free unless it grants equality to both sexes. But more than either of the male social theorists, Mary Wollstonecraft focused on the usual workings of the matrimonial bond, on the biased nature of the social contract between the sexes, and on the freedoms women lost in order for men to be still more free. She did not reject marriage. On the contrary, she praised domestic union as humanity's highest state, but only if redefined as a partnership of equals, based on mutual affection and respect. Furthermore, unlike Murray and other American reformers, Wollstonecraft knew full well that marriage could not be restructured unless the society, too, was restructured. In the Vindication, she pointedly and systematically refutes the social vision promulgated by Rousseau, Fordyce, and Gregory, and she proposes an alternative organization in which men and women would have the same social and political privileges and would be allowed the same legal freedoms as well as freedom of movement, freedom of personal expression, and freedom of sexual expression.

Many Americans were intrigued by the promise implicit in Wollstonecraft's radicalism, but many others found her vision extremely threatening and labored to countermand it. For example, an article entitled "Rights to Woman" in the New England Palladium of 1802 portrayed a "Mary Wolstoncraft [sic] Godwin" sitting on a throne-like chair surrounded by a host of adoring women and a few quisling men. Arrogant, silly, and ugly, this parodic Wollstonecraft lectures her assembled audience on nature versus nurture and is especially convinced that, given the right physical conditioning, women can even be as strong as men. Her diatribe concludes when "the lady herself says, women are entitled to all the rights of men, and are capable of assuming the character of manly women.''⁶⁶ This was a common refutation of Wollstonecraftism—it would make women manly, with bulging muscles and hair sprouting in inappropriate places, a metamorphosis to be avoided at all cost.

Wollstonecraft's ideas were all the more suspect when viewed in the lurid light that her life seemed to cast on her feminist philosophy. After she died of septicemia following the birth of her and William Godwin's daughter, a child conceived out of wedlock, Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of The Rights of Woman" (1798). Intended to celebrate the strength and independence of Wollstonecraft's life and philosophy (which, Godwin insisted, changed much of his own thinking), the published memoirs, to say the least, fell far short of that objective. Not that the book failed to gain notice; it was translated almost immediately into French and German and was published in America in 1799 and again in 1804. Everywhere the reaction to the work was immediately and violently negative. Reviewers did not praise Wollstonecraft's unconventional thought but condemned her unconventional life. Her different affairs and her suicide attempts were read as a total refutation of her philosophy, so much so that Godwin attempted, in a second edition, to play down the damning evidence of Wollstonecraft's illicit relationships with other men. But it was too late. Once the Memoirs was published, Wollstonecraft was no longer a heroic "female Werter" [sic] (his term) or a challenging social thinker; she became, instead, an object lesson on the dangers of feminist ideas and ideals—as if a woman could not live in the world she advocated but had no problems in the one she opposed. Thus the European Magazine prophesied that the Memoirs would be read "with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by every one attached to the interests of religion and morality; and with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion." Or the Anti-Jacobin Review not only railed against the impropriety of her life, but, in its index, listed under the heading "Prostitution" the cross reference, "See Mary Wollstone-craft." The Memoirs were thereby translated into a compelling argument for the status quo, and Wollstonecraftism (a word originally used to designate the equalitarian feminist movement) became a damning label for the loose feminine morals in which libertarian principles, ostensibly, necessarily ended.⁶⁷

The life and death of Mary Wollstonecraft, thus interpreted, demonstrated how radical life imitated conservative art and thereby validated the social vision of the most reactionary of early American sentimental tales with their plots of aberrant female crime and consequent female punishment. Transformed from a feminist social theorist and philosopher into a fallen sentimental heroine, a woman who had loved badly and necessarily lost, Wollstonecraft, like many other female protagonists, provided merely another admonitory example of the downward path to sexual disgrace and dishonorable death. The parallels between this reading of her life and standard plots are obvious. Essentially, had she never asserted her own freedom, the whole tragedy could have been avoided. Here, especially, was a woman too capable for her own good, one who desperately required a father's, a husband's constraining hand. There are even the requisite hints of the happiness that might have been hers when, after a few preliminary and necessarily abortive affairs that drove her to attempted suicide, she meets the man she can truly love and finds him as ready to love her. But even here a fatal weakness undoes her.

She dies bearing the baby conceived out of wedlock, leaving him to mourn for some forty years his loss—and hers—before death claims him, too. Even better, a subsequent generation could read in the fate of Wollstonecraft's first daughter further proof of the mother's folly. In 1816, when Fanny Imlay, the illegitimate daughter of Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay, discovered belatedly the sad facts of her own beginning, she took her life, leaving only a note to the world in which she described herself as "one whose birth was unfortunate," as sentimental an epilogue to a sentimental tale as anything a Mrs. Wood or a Mrs. Wells could ever conceive.

If even one of the most brilliant and independent women of the era could be so subject to the various ills that seduced female flesh was heir to—abandonment, temporary insanity, attempted suicide, death in childbirth, enduring infamy, and the suicide of an illegitimate daughter—how could the average American woman reader hope for a different outcome if she should venture the same perilous journey? Considering the referential powers attributed to texts in the late eighteenth century, it was tempting to "read" the Memoirs as the punishment meted out for the ideas promulgated in the Vindication. Justice had been done, and the very questions that Wollstonecraft was determined to pose had been, so far as her society was concerned, definitively answered. The Memoirs was further compromised by its timing, published during the violence of the French Revolution, which was viewed as a case study on the largest public level for all that was wrong with Wollstonecraftism or other such radical thinking, just as the author's life was viewed as her own refutation on a private and personal level. After 1799, virtually every portrait of Wollstonecraft in America was a negative one. To put oneself forward as a proponent of Wollstonecraftism was to advocate private licentiousness and public corruption. As America entered the nineteenth century, any new "rights" for women were simply the traditional ones reentrenched—a right to marriage, to children, to domesticity.

Writing in 1808, the Reverend Samuel Miller could heave a sigh of relief that the Wollstonecraftism of a few years earlier had thoroughly passed away. He, happily, even has to remind his readers what some of the unlikely tenets of that erstwhile radical feminism had actually been:

Whatever opinion may be formed on this subject, I take for granted, we shall all agree, that Women ought not to be considered as destined to the same employments with Men; and, of course, that there is a species of education, and a sphere of action, which more particularly belong to them. There was a time indeed, when a very different doctrine had many advocates, and appeared to be growing popular:—viz. that in conducting education, and in selecting employments, all distinctions of sex ought to be forgotten and confounded; and that females are as well fitted to fill the Academic Chair, to shine in the Senate, to adorn the Bench of Justice, and even to lead the train of War, as the more hardy sex. This delusion, however, is now generally discarded. It begins to be perceived, that the God of nature has raised everlasting barriers against such wild and mischievous speculations; and that to urge them, is to renounce reason, to contradict experience, to trample on the divine authority, and to degrade the usefulness, the honor, and the real enjoyments of the female sex.⁶⁸

Perhaps because the novel as a genre was already associated with corruption and libertinism, after the publication of the Memoirs American sentimental writers were quick to deny that they might be guilty of borrowing from Wollstonecraft.⁶⁹ The contretemps over the Memoirs also effectively silenced many of the advocates of women's rights in America. Even though the Wollstonecraft scandal, grotesquely magnified by the Reign of Terror in France, did not necessarily precipitate a reactionary retrenchment, it certainly served as a potent sign of the dangers inherent in radical action and a symbol of the negative consequences, for women, of unconventional lifestyles.

It is not within the scope of this study to document and analyze what changes in the prescriptive literature occurred in the nineteenth century, but I wish to conclude, briefly, by suggesting that, over the course of the next generation, both the conservative side of the debate on the role of women and the reformist position gradually changed in tone and focus so that they were no longer dialectical opposites but rather simply different approaches to a similar view of woman as par excellence the republican mother.⁷⁰ A nineteenth-century rhetoric of "true womanhood" or a "cult of domesticity" extolled women as specially gifted for the crucial task of rearing children. As Ruth H. Bloch has observed, a new focus on motherhood effectively reversed an older Puritan emphasis on the paramount importance of the father in the intellectual, moral, and social molding of children.⁷¹ And at least on the level of rhetoric, this hyperbolic language of republican motherhood also seemed to offer women new social status, as was argued in 1802 by the Reverend William Lyman:

Mothers do, in a sense, hold the reigns of government and sway the ensigns of national prosperity and glory. Yea, they give direction to the moral sentiment of our rising hopes and contribute to form their moral state. To them therefore our eyes are turned in this demoralizing age, and of them we ask, that they would appreciate their worth and dignity, and exert all their influence to drive discord, infidelity, and licentiousness from our land.⁷²

The question of political power—central to Wollstonecraftism and important to American reformers as well—was rendered irrelevant by this co-opting ideology that mothers were indirectly responsible for everything that was crucial in the society. In the words of one advocate of omnipotent motherhood, "compared with maternal influence, the combined authority of laws and armies and public sentiment are little things."⁷³

With the cult of domesticity, there was also a shift in women's fiction. Earlier novels, as noted, had focused on women's life preparatory to marriage and posited a good marriage as virtue's reward. Portraying the lives of girls and unmarried young women, these novels necessarily described how such women proceeded within and around the restrictions placed upon them by their society, a plot structure that can be observed in progressive novels such as The Coquette and also more conservative books such as Wood's Amelia or Julia. To generalize, the plots of most sentimental novels of the early national period concentrate on a young woman's freedoms prior to wedlock, often epitomized (and tested) through the seduction plot or an equivalent subplot. But as Helen Waite Papashvily observes, after approximately 1818, the seduction plot virtually disappears from sentimental fiction, and, with the graphic exception of The Scarlet Letter, the "fallen woman" does not figure prominently in the design of nineteenth-century American fiction.⁷⁴ At the same time, the sentimental heroine grows up. Numerous nineteenth-century novels centered on older women working out their lives within their domestic sphere, whether as matron or "old maid."⁷⁵

Writing in 1804 in the Literary Magazine, in an essay entitled "Female Learning," Charles Brockden Brown early identified the contradictions in the contemporary ideology of women, the presumed opposition between female intellect and domesticity. "A woman who hates reading," he countered, "is not necessarily a wise and prudent economist." But he also understood, with remarkable sensitivity, that polar categorizations of women—maternal paragon or learned woman, wife or author—necessarily diminished both the woman writer and the woman reader, who could always be condemned for being too much or not enough of one or the other. "Of that numerous class of females, who have cultivated their minds with science and literature, without publishing their labours, and who consequently are unknown to general inquirers; how many have preserved the balance immoveable between the opposite demands of the kitchen, the drawing room, the nursery, and the library? We may safely answer from our own experience, not one."⁷⁶ From the personal evidence Brown had at hand, women simply could not maintain rich intellectual lives while bearing the full burden of perfect domesticity. Despite the rhetoric, or perhaps because of it, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, a cult of "true womanhood" all but smothered the cry for female equality, a cry faintly but subversively heard in those sentimental novels such as Charlotte Temple and The Coquette that remained steady sellers into the last half of the nineteenth century and the dawnings of America's first full-fledged feminist movement.

Just as women could ambivalently embrace the promise of marriage along with its promised restrictions and just as neither the reactionary nor the reformist novel could univocally assert its politics of marriage, so, too, do we regularly encounter in the very structure of the sentimental novel tensions and unresolved contradictions. There is often a glaring gap between the public morality officially espoused and the private behavior of the characters who voice or supposedly validate that morality. What is promised in the preface is not always proven in the plot. As earlier noted, much early sentimental fiction was forced into a difficult balancing act—not always successfully executed—between readerly demands (especially from the professional readers) for moralistic restraint and writerly demands for artistic license. But that wavering and uncertain balance can be read not just in the sociology of the production of these texts but in the texts themselves and even in the first readers of these texts. Indeed, I would suggest that these texts find one of their chief loci in the difference between the reader's private reservations about her own limited legal and social standing as opposed to her public acceptance of ostensibly unquestioned social values and established good order. Such private discourse mirrors a larger discourse between the reader and the sentimental novel in its different versions and between the novel in all its versions and the critics who saw it rightly as raising issues that they would have preferred to remain repressed.

Consider, for example, Samuel Relf's Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment, a novel to which I have previously referred as one of the few that survives with its original subscription list bound in the volume. Almost one half the book's original subscribers who can be identified by gender are women; two of the men who subscribed, James A. Neal and John Poor, were not only preceptor and principal, respectively, of young ladies' academies, but they advertised themselves as such in the subscription list itself (which, after all, is a public declaration of one's reading habits), suggesting that they approved of the "lesson" of the book for their charges. But what lesson did young women readers learn from Caroline Courntey, the heroine of the novel and an obvious ancestress of Hester Prynne? Like many a sentimental heroine, Caroline submits to her parents' judgment and weds, much against her own wishes, the elderly Mr. Franks. This dutiful daughter is thereby rewarded with an unhappy marriage. Neglected by her cruel husband, she finds solace in the concern of a younger, more sympathetic man. That infatuation, apparently unconsummated, is nevertheless 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 wasn't. Marriage is vindicated by the fatal consequences of its failure. The probably nonadulterous lovers are vindicated by their sinless love. "Persecuted innocence" (to use the novel's own diction) has been sacrificed in order that compromised propriety might be saved.⁷⁷

Other characters took other ways to much the same sentimental impasse. Thus, the thoroughly virtuous Mrs. Morley in Wood's Dorval does not even flirt with the possibility of seduction. Unfortunately for that formerly wealthy former widow, her new husband turns out to be, in order, a fortune hunter, a bigamist, and a murderer. Feminine virtue, the rock on which the sentimental novel was founded, was, in this case, clearly no match for masculine vice. Or, in a somewhat different fashion, moral spokespersons could practice considerably less than they preached. The jejune and platitudinous Worthy in The Power of Sympathy is germane here, as is, in Susanna Rowson's Mentoria; or the Young Lady's Friend (1791), the equally inappropriately named Prudelia, whose ever-ready sententia serve mostly as a moral smoke screen behind which she busily pries into the possible sins of her neighbors instead of cultivating any virtues of her own.

The sentimental form was also modified and its meaning compounded when main characters were rendered novelistically, not morally; when they were brought down from the heights of spiritual grandeur to be portrayed as flawed and, consequently, as believable human beings. When Harrington, for example, ignores Worthy's long-winded advice and seeks refuge, instead, in suicide, his end is not a heroic vindiction of high ideals but a recognition that his tragic dilemma lies beyond the reach and scope of any available code of conduct. The power of sympathy, in this text, runs head first into its own powerlessness in the face of overpowering incestuous desire. Conversely, moral issues are complicated when the villain of the piece is recast as more than just another advocate of illegitimate affairs. Belfield in Sansay's Laura, 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.

Charles Brockden Brown's Carwin is perhaps the most complex and certainly the most discussed villain in early American fiction. But Montraville, in Rowson's Charlotte Temple, provides a less analyzed example of how problematic villains spin problematic plots.⁷⁸ Charlotte Temple, it will be remembered, 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. The seducer in this best-seller 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. He partly evades that first dilemma by procrastinating marriage, which presently leads to his second dilemma when he chances to meet another woman who is virtuous, beautiful, kind, and even rich. Should he remain with Charlotte, his now pregnant mistress, or should he eschew vice, in favor of the virtue of a clearly rewarding marriage?

Partly to exonerate Montraville, Rowson provides a second male character, Belcour, who conventionally counsels that sin should not be sanctioned, that a mistress must be renounced. Belcour, a parallel and parody of the stock moral adviser, is determined to see "morality" prevail and 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 persuades Montraville to abandon the young woman. The two former lovers are then further victimized by Belcour. As a proponent of the sentimental credo that a "perfidious girl" such as the pregnant Miss Temple deserves whatever fate befalls her, he keeps for himself the money provided by Montraville to take care of Charlotte.⁷⁹ So Montraville, the concerned seducer, is not the true villain of the piece, and a standard moral dictum is compromised by the way Belcour employs it to serve his vicious purpose.

Or perhaps Montraville is the real villain in that his villainy is so sanctioned by his society that it can pass as virtue. Rowson's larger point here well might be that a standard double standard of sexual conduct allows even a relatively decent young man to become, indirectly and second hand, a murderer. Montraville thus interpreted serves as a symptom of a much larger social phenomenon, just as Charlotte's fate also attests to the social context in which it is realized. She is a victim not so much of her wayward desires but of a shoddy education, of evil advisers (including one schoolteacher), of her legal and social inferiority. Many of the first commentators on the novel also read the book in this way—as a work of "truth" and "realism" in which Charlotte was rightly pitied and wrongly sentenced. Most notably, the assessment in the London Critical Review (1791) powerfully argued for both the truth of the work as a whole and the innocence of its title character. This review was tipped into early American and British editions of the book and was later reprinted opposite the preface in all eighteenth-century and many nineteenth-century American editions. As that review concludes:

Charlotte dies a martyr to the inconstancy of her lover, and the treachery of his friend.—The situations are artless and affecting—the descriptions natural and pathetic; we should feel for Charlotte, if such a person ever existed, who, for one error, scarcely, perhaps, deserved so severe a punishment. If it is a fiction, poetic justice is not, we think, properly distributed.⁸⁰

Rowson, I suspect, felt so, too. In a fiction grounded in sexual crime and feminine punishment, she problemizes the official justice ostensibly implicit in her conventional plot.

Other early novels also realigned what Herbert Ross Brown has called the "sentimental formula" ("a simple equation resting upon a belief in the spontaneous goodness and benevolence of man's original instincts").⁸¹ For example, instead of positing clearcut moral choices between virtue, on the one hand, and vice, on the other, a number of early novels present heroines with more complicated and, consequently, more believable moral dilemmas. She must choose, say, between loveless respectability and unrespectable love, not simply between marriage and illicit sex. Thus, in the anonymous Margaretta; or, the Intricacies of the Heart (1807), the female protagonist prefers passion to propriety 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 declares, "I think I was not destined by nature for an humble cottage."⁸² Numerous abductions and other trials and tribulations later, 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 social respectability although settling this time for marriage but marriage to the penniless de Burling.

Or a husband could subvert the social authority implicit in his role by too much insisting on that role and authority. In Well's The Step-Mother, Caroline Williams, the put-upon heroine, repeatedly advocates that a woman do whatever her husband requires, but the reader sympathizes more with Mrs. Malcolm, an emotionally and perhaps physically abused wife, who escapes a loveless marriage to form an illicit love relationship with a young man of egalitarian views. Both women must balance the quite different questions of to obey or not to obey the husband, to resist or not to resist the tyrant. Or the parents' claims to control the daughter could similarly be called into question by the very tyrannical overtones of their assertion. A protagonist must frequently choose between a father she loves and a lover her father, often for no valid reason, opposes. Almost half of the sentimental novels written in America before 1820 employ this cruel parent motif. One example is The History of Constantius and Pulchera, in which Pulchera's father forces her to break off her engagement to Constantius so that she can marry Le Monte whom she does not love and who, even worse, is French. Only after a mind-boggling series of misadventures on the high seas, in Europe, and in Canada are the true lovers reunited. All the calamities could have been avoided through a little parental reasonableness, but perhaps that is the point of the book. Or notice how The Unfortunate Lovers, and Cruel Parents (1797) advertises its plot in its title. And in both Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard (1801) and Margaret Botsford's Adelaide (1816), we see young men and women marry because of parental pressure, not from love, and suffer from that decision into the next generation.

The sentimental plot could also be complicated by posing, for the central heroine, the dubious charms of a restrictive domesticity, on the one hand, against the freedom from stultifying convention promised by a socially unsuitable but passionate suitor, on the other. In a few of these novels, virtue is presented as no less demeaning an alternative for an intelligent young woman than vice. Not infrequently, a capable heroine clearly foresees the protracted unhappiness that would be hers if she married the respectable male character whom society views as her proper mate. Just such a dilemma faces Deborah Sampson in The Female Review, which makes it easier for her to opt for transvestism and the army, a revolutionary choice for which she is not punished in the novel. Similarly, Martinette de Beauvais, in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799), disguises herself as "Martin" and enlists in freedom's cause, thereby acquiring an appropriate metaphoric platform from which to question the propriety of society in general and of woman's assigned roles in particular. These are extreme cases, but they reinforce choices made in other novels where a heroine sees the constrictions implicit in her proposed marriage. Moralists say that virtue should be rewarded. But is marriage to a stodgy moralist truly a reward for a sensitive, capable heroine? In the best of these novels, the issues raised by the plot often go considerably beyond the prefatory promise of safe social truth in fictional packaging.

Even the early sentimental novel cannot be reduced, then, to the simple formula that contemporary readers and critics commonly ascribe to it. The recipe was more complicated than we assume as, from the very beginning, one key ingredient was to experiment with the recipe. Instead of positing simple answers about the powers of pious procreation, many of the novels question the efficacy of the prevailing legal, political, and social values, even if the questioning is done by innuendo rather than by actual assertion of a contrary view. What else can we make 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 novels, her predicament demonstrates that the postulated dichotomy of the clearly virtuous and the clearly vicious central to this fiction 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 assurances 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 later Romantic tradition, these protagonists seek to establish their own destinies.⁸³ Given the mores of late eighteenth-century American society and the biological reality of pregnancy, they cannot succeed. But often we wish they could.

William Godwin's 1798 publication of the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft had the unexpected effect of immediately translating her life into an allegory of feminine crime and punishment, and American public opinion was quick to draw the reactionary moral. When a thirty-seven-year-old woman came to the Bell Tavern in Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, to give birth to a stillborn child, and then followed that child to her own death on July 25, 1788, a similar fictionalizing was at once set in motion, as can be seen in even the first published account of the event which appeared in the Salem Mercury for July 29, 1788. Purportedly written by one Captain Goodhue, the landlord of the Bell Tavern, this first notice effectively balances asserted propriety (she was waiting for her husband) and suggested scandal (did she really have one?):

Last Friday, a female stranger died at the Bell Tavern, in Danvers; and on Sunday her remains were decently interred. The circumstances relative to this woman are such as excite curiosity, and interest our feelings. She was brought to the Bell in a chaise .. . by a young man whom she had engaged for that purpose. . . . She remained at this inn till her death, in expectation of the arrival of her husband, whom she expected to come for her, and appeared anxious at his delay. She was averse to being interrogated concerning herself or connexions; and kept much retired to her chamber, employed in needlework, writing, etc. . . . Her conversation, her writings and her manners, bespoke the advantage of a respectable family and good education. Her person was agreeable; her deportment, amiable and engaging; and, though in a state of anxiety and suspense, she preserved a cheerfulness which seemed to be not the effect of insensibility, but of a firm and patient temper.⁸⁴

Within days the account was picked up and reprinted by the Massachusetts Centinel and then in dozens of other newspapers throughout New England. It was the stuff of good rumor, of gossip, of sentimental novels.

What led to the Elizabeth Whitman mystery? Surely many another woman had borne a child out of wedlock and died of puerperal fever? But, as even the above report suggests, the essential appeal of this story was its contradictory nature. To start with, what was a nice woman like Elizabeth Whitman doing in a tavern like that and in that condition? Miss Whitman was the daughter of a highly respected minister, the Reverend Elnathan Whitman. On her mother's side, she was descended from the Stanley family that had governed Connecticut almost from its Colonial beginnings. She was also related to the Edwards family, to Aaron Burr, and to the poet John Trumbull. Two of her suitors had been Yale preceptors. She had corresponded regularly with Joel Barlow. Hartford's highest society knew and respected her for her wit, her intelligence, and her charm. Yet she died in a tavern, seduced and abandoned, a fate right out of the novels that vociferously warned against just that fate. Nor were the novels the only texts bearing on the matter of her demise. Once Whitman's identity was revealed, ministers, journalists, and free-lance moralists industriously made meaning—their meaning—of her otherwise incomprehensible life. In the redaction of an anonymous essayist in the Boston Independent Chronicle of September 11, 1788, for example, Elizabeth Whitman's life and death becomes, simply, "a good moral lecture to young ladies."⁸⁵

Readers in the early Republic were well versed in the process whereby the complexities of a disordered life could be reduced to a simply ordered moral allegory. Virtually every condemned crook, con man, or other criminal recorded the outlines of his or her life before ascending to the gallows. Published in inexpensive chapbook form, republished in newspaper columns throughout America, these confessions straddled the line between truth and fiction as much as did the Elizabeth Whitman allegories that were reprinted all over New England. Most readers of The Coquette would have already known the outlines of Whitman's life either from the newspapers or from sermons of ministers who regularly mined gossip for material. These readers would also have known the lacunae in Whitman's story that have continued to intrigue biographers down to the present day. Although Whitman left a cache of poems and letters at her death, none refers to her lover by name—and the ironic pseudonym she used to refer to him, Fidelio, provides no clue to his identity either. Pierrepont Edwards, by the middle of the nineteenth century, was generally assumed to be the model for Major Peter Sanford, but other candidates for the honor have also been proposed: Aaron Burr, New York State Senator James Watson, Joel Barlow, and an unnamed French nobleman whose parents objected to his secret marriage to a Protestant minister's daughter from Connecticut. The secret marriage theme, incidentally, at one point had considerable currency. Caroline W. Dall (in 1875) and Charles Knowles Bolton (in 1912) both of them tried, a century after the events, to salvage the reputation of the lady by proposing a secret wedding.⁸⁶ In different ages, the historical record differently fabricates the story of Elizabeth Whitman—seduced woman or suffering wife, smirched or sacrificed or sanctified—mostly to confirm its story of itself. But Victorian hagiography or eighteenth-century moral tracts, the histories of Elizabeth Whitman all share the governing assumption that lost virginity signifies, for a woman, lost worth; that the sexual fall proves the social one, so much so that in this case the signifier and its significance are one and the same.

The earliest accounts of Whitman's decline and fall served the dual purpose of criticizing any intellectual pretensions that a woman might possess and of condemning the novel as a new form which fostered such pretensions. Whitman became, in effect, a case study, a woman first misled by her education into a taste for novels and then corrupted through indulging that unwholesome appetite. The first American novel argues, ironically, against novels by promulgating just this interpretation of this character's fate: "She was a great reader of novels and romances and having imbibed her ideas of the characters of men, from those fallacious sources, became vain and coquetish [sic], and rejected several offers of marriage, in expectation of receiving one more agreeable to her fanciful idea." It was the official view. In fact, William Hill Brown practically plagiarizes the verdict delivered in the Massachusetts Centinel on September 20, 1788: "She was a great reader of romances, and having formed her notions of happiness from that corrupt source, became vain and coquetish."⁸⁷ Thus was one of the most learned American women of her generation translated into a poor, pathetic victim of fiction whose dishonor and death could be partly redeemed only by serving to save others from a similar end.

To turn that well-known scandal and accepted story into one of the most reprinted early American novels, Hannah Webster Foster had to reread this protagonist and her plight, had to deconstruct the entrenched interpretation so that a novel one might be advanced. One of the more striking changes in Foster's different account is the deletion of the charge of an addiction to fiction. The Power of Sympathy, it will be recalled, did not even refer to itself as a novel on its title page, whereas in 1797, when Charlotte Temple was well on its way to becoming a steady seller, Ebenezer Larkin published a book that he hoped might be similarly successful under the title The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton: A NOVEL.⁸⁸ In the intervening decade, the novel had come of age in America and no longer needed the protective coloration provided by an occasional sermon against novel reading. In The Coquette, fiction is valorized. When Eliza is at her most rejected and depressed her friends and moral advisors send her novels to read. More pointedly, Eliza's seducer, Major Sanford, numbers among his manifest faults a singular unfamiliarity with fiction, especially with the works of Richardson.⁸⁹

Other alterations in the Whitman story were more subtle. Several historical characters, for example, underwent name changes while retaining the same initials, which suggests an intentional blurring of the division between fiction and fact and an invitation to the reader to enjoy that same blurring. Eliza Wharton both is and is not Elizabeth Whitman. Similarly, two of Whitman's historical suitors, the Reverend Joseph Howe (whom her parents originally chose for their daughter but who died before the marriage could take place) and the Reverend Joseph Buckminster (who subsequently sought her hand) are lightly fictionalized into the Reverends Haly and Boyer. Historical personages have also been advanced as the originals for the protagonist's women friends as well. But Peter Sanford (by initials or occupation) does not figure forth a historical personage but remains a literary one. A "second Lovelace," Elizabeth/Eliza's seducer becomes allegorized in Foster's novel very much as Whitman had been allegorized in the newspaper accounts. Conversely, the heroine gained in fiction the complexity of which she had been deprived in the early allegories of her life and death.

None of the early accounts of Whitman's life, for example, credit her with a rational weighing of a prospective husband's qualifications, despite the fact that her second suitor, the Reverend Buckminster, was well known in his day as a man subject to prolonged fits of depression and outbursts of uncontrolled temper. "She refused two as good offers of marriage as she deserved," avers the Boston Independent Chronicle, "because she aspired higher than to be a clergyman's wife; and having coquetted till past her prime, fell into criminal indulgences."⁹⁰ Foster, however, transforms this reductionist account. Elizabeth's anticlericalism and social climbing become Eliza's determination that her marriage must be an egalitarian match based on mutual affection. A clergyman's wife herself, Foster well knew just what that employment entailed (as is shown even more clearly in her second novel, The Boarding School), and, more to the point, her fictional Eliza, the daughter of a minister's wife, also knows the prerequisites for the position and knows, too, that she does not fit the bill. As she admits to her mother, "My disposition is not calculated for that sphere. There are duties arising from the station which I fear I should not be able to fulfill, cares and restraints to which I could not submit" (p. 162). Having narrowly escaped one loveless marriage—through the fortuitous death of the fiancé—imposed upon her by the "shackles" of "parental authority" (p. 140), she is determined to marry in the future only if reason and fancy, her mind and her heart, are both engaged.

Socially conservative readers may well have intimated the seeds of Eliza's downfall in this daughter's belated declaration of independence and her egalitarian concept of marriage. Foster, however, takes considerable pains to affirm her protagonist's ideals. When, early in the novel, she leaves her mother's home in which she was immured with her dying clergyman fiancé, she goes to visit her friends, the Richmans, whose marriage exemplifies the Wollstonecraftian 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 not that she set her sights too high but that she encounters no equivalent of a General Richman. What she is offered, instead, is a difficult choice between unsatisfactory alternatives, a common quandary in early American sentimental novels, and a dilemma, no doubt, faced by many American young women.

The Coquette, then, is not simply an allegory of seduction. The generic shift from sermon to novel in the Whitman/Wharton narrative entails a concomitant transformation of focus and philosophy. Set within a specific context of limiting marriage laws and restrictive social mores, the novel is less a story of the wages of sin than a study of the wages of marriage. In the realistic world of this fictional account, virtue and virtuous women are not always rewarded. Sanford's lawfully wedded wife, for example, a woman shown to be intelligent, kind, honest, and attractive, fares almost as disastrously as Eliza. She is ruined financially by her marriage to Sanford, and her child, too, is stillborn. Furthermore, even Mrs. Richman, the epitome of republican motherhood in the novel, cannot be permanently happy within her familial sphere. "I grudge every moment that calls me from the pleasing scenes of domestic life" (p. 210), she writes, soon after the birth of her daughter—who soon afterwards dies, a realistic tempering of the proclaimed joys of domesticity.

By fictionalizing the lives of the women who surround Eliza, Foster provided her early readers with an opportunity to see, privileged in print, women very much like themselves. As the community of women within the novel exchange views and ideas on such crucial subjects as friendship, marriage, and economic security, their letters constitute a dialogical discourse in which the reader was also invited to participate if only vicariously. For its first audience particularly, The Coquette set forth a remarkably detailed assessment of the marital possibilities facing late eighteenth-century women of the middle- or upper-middle-classes. Crucial questions for just such women are asked and dramatized in the text. What were her choices? What kinds of behavior would promote or prevent certain matches? How do men view the whole matter of courtship and marriage? On that last score, the twelve letters that Sanford sends his friend, Charles Deighton, provide a telling example of male discourse in contrast to female discourse, and Sanford effectively voices the self-justifying evasions, the hypocrisy, and the overt misogyny of the seducer. Similarly, the nine letters exchanged between the Reverend Boyer and his friend Selby attest to how much respectable men assume the subordinate status of women and thereby validate Eliza's apprehensions about the restricted life that would be hers if she were to marry Boyer and become a clergyman's wife.

The bulk of the novel is "woman-talk": women confiding, advising, chiding, warning, disagreeing, deceiving, and then confronting each other. A full two-thirds of the seventy-five letters that comprise The Coquette are written by women to women, and not always about the men in their lives. Eliza, especially, exhibits in her discourse the ideas and aspirations of a feme sole—the independent, unmarried woman. In contrast to that state is the status of Eliza's close friend and most regular correspondent, Lucy Freeman, who, in the course of the novel, marries to become Mrs. Sumner. As a married woman, she can no longer be so free as she formerly was with her time or attention. To quote Eliza: "Marriage is the tomb of friendship. It appears to me a very selfish state. Why do people in general, as soon as they are married, center all their cares, their concerns, and pleasures in their own families? Former acquaintances are neglected or forgotten; the tenderest ties between friends are weakened or dissolved; benevolence itself moves in a very limited sphere" (p. 150). "Women's sphere" is here aptly portrayed as "a very limited sphere"—a closed and enclosing concern for a husband's well-being—which gives us one of the earliest fictional critiques of the "cult of domesticity."

The Coquette, however, does not openly challenge the basic structure of patriarchal culture but, instead, exposes its fundamental injustices through the details and disasters of the plot. Consider, for example, how, after the Reverend Haly's death, Eliza's mother along with the young woman's female friends worry constantly about her marital prospects, for she does not have an inheritance of her own. They do not advise (much less prepare) her to earn a wage; they only urge her to obtain a husband who does. Yet her manifest talents—her beauty, her charm, her intelligence—constitute no negotiable capital in any matrimonial transaction. "Forgive my plainness," Eliza's friend, Lucy Freeman, writes of the Reverend Boyer. "His situation in life is, perhaps, as elevated as you have a right to claim" (p. 152). Neither does a fortune of one's own substantially alter one's case, as the example of Nancy Sanford amply attests. The wealthy woman, as much as the poor, is still dependent upon a husband's good sense and good will. All women are thus potential paupers and married women especially so. But without a husband to provide for her and lacking the skills to earn her own living, a woman's situation can be as desperate as was the historical Elizabeth Whitman's at the Bell Tavern. Dying, the abandoned woman left "2 ginneys, 1 crown, 2-4 pistoreens dollars," and a few other paltry possessions (six silver spoons, a few rings, a couple of dresses, handkerchiefs, ribbons, and caps; an "ink case with Sealing wax, wafers, etc."; "Sundry Babe cloths").⁹¹ That sad inventory, in actual and symbolic measure, movingly sums up the unmarried woman's social worth and her final estate.

Other features of the society are also summed up in the novel. As Eliza fully realizes, when a woman marries a man, she must marry not only into his class but into his occupation too. She anticipates being "completely miserable" (p. 153) as a minister's wife, and Sanford effectively reiterates those ail-too-well-founded fears: "You are aware, I suppose, when you form a connection with that man, you must content yourself with a confinement to the tedious round of domestic duties, the pedantic conversation of scholars, and the invidious criticisms of the whole town" (p. 171). Boyer is a pompous, self-satisfied clergyman who attempts (the choice of words here is most appropriate) to "seduce [Eliza] into matrimony" (p. 184) by soberly expatiating on the advantages of being joined to such an admirable man as himself. "He is," Eliza writes, "very eloquent upon the subject; and his manners are so solemn that I am strongly tempted .. . to laugh" (p. 184). And so is the reader. But Major Sanford is hardly an alternative. Witty and charming as he may be, he is also a thoroughgoing misogynist, and a thoroughly dishonest one at that. His letters to Deighton are filled with stupid and shallow remarks about the stupidity and shallowness of women. He insists, for example, that he can be "severe upon the sex" because he has "found so many frail ones among them" (p. 234)—as if he were a latter-day Diogenes searching for an honest woman. He also insists that if he seduces Eliza, the fault will 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), which is hardly the open avowal of his intentions that he subsequently and quite hypocritically pretends he has made.

What seemed to Eliza to be choices, alternative men and alternative lifestyles, do not constitute, then, a dialectic that will yield a final synthesis such as the egalitarian marriage of the Richmans. We have, instead, oppositions that cancel one another out to emphasize that the choices Boyer and Sanford embodied were not ultimately so different after all. For each, she was mostly a prize and a proof of his own prowess. In each case, more could be proved by discarding the prize than by claiming it. As will be remembered, Eliza does decide to marry the minister but "was entangled by a promise" (p. 208) to tell Sanford first. When Boyer discovers his prospective bride in conversation with that rival, he storms from the scene. He will not hear Eliza's explanation, for his dashed hopes (he thinks) and offended vanity (we see) provide all the explanation he needs. Soon he is writing to renounce his love and to catalogue her various faults and failings and all from pure "benevolence." Sanford, delighted by his success in destroying Eliza's chances with Boyer, also soon leaves town. He goes away "on business" promising to return in a few months but, a year later, he is still gone and in that whole time he has not once written to the woman he claimed to love. Eliza, faced not with a freedom of choice but an absence of suitors, begins to realize that she has been played for a fool, a truth brought home even more forcefully when Boyer announces his engagement to a suitably appreciative, suitably proper woman and when Sanford finally returns, having acquired, while away, both a wife and that wife's fortune. Eliza naively sought to exercise her freedom only to learn that she had none.⁹²

The course of that learning is crucial to the novel and must be examined in some detail, for the genesis of Eliza's fall lies at least as much in the virtues of Boyer as in the vices of Sanford. When that clergyman first goes off in his terminal huff, Eliza well can wonder "whether [she] had sustained a real loss in Mr. B oyer's departure?" (p. 207). But Sanford's subsequent departure along with the continuing absence of any other official suitors soon casts a different light on her first loss from which the second has followed. She must remain in the fishbowl of Hartford, scorned by those who knew all along that her flirtations—her decision to "sow all my wild oats" [very tame wild oats] (p. 186) before settling into the restricted role of the clergyman's wife—could only lead to disaster. Publicly humiliated by the way in which the town so obviously relishes and affirms her discomfiture, she is brought, partly through her failing spirits and partly through Mrs. Richman's counsel, to reevaluate the Reverend's dubious charms. Her letter to him is all humility and self-abnegation, but perhaps the most poignant detail in this pathetic missive is her hope that even if his "affections are entirely alienated or otherwise engaged," he still might consent to consider himself her friend. That last hope is as vain as all her others. Again Boyer writes to shower her with accusations before announcing his betrothal to "the virtuous, the amiable, the accomplished Maria Selby" and finally counseling Eliza to "adhere with undeviating exactness to the paths of rectitude and innocence" (p. 216).

"O my friend, I am undone" (p. 217), Eliza writes upon receiving B oyer's letter, using the precise word that in seduction novels typically signals a woman's fall. "His conduct," she continues with an even more loaded term, assures her "ruin." "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. 217-8). Three times Eliza voices the plaintive cry of the seduced woman. Soon thereafter, she falls more conventionally into the affair with Sanford and, concomitant with that fall, into physical infirmity, mental instability, and narrative invisibility. Increasingly, others must recount the story that was once her own but that in the very mode of its telling has been taken from her.

This negation of the female self—her freedoms, her possibilities—forms the basis of the sentimental plot, just as it informed the lives of a vast majority of the sentimental novel's readers. One effective method Foster employs to convey this demeaning of her central character is to have her literally render herself as she has been symbolically rendered by her society. At crucial junctures in the novel, Eliza chooses silence, but that narrative silence, a depotentizing in the novel as a whole, provides the subtext from which we can best read the protagonist's fall. How, Foster in effect asks, can a woman denied voice and will be seduced? Simply put, she has no say in the matter. Succumbing to Sanford merely confirms and symbolizes what rejection by Boyer has already proved. We have sex as an only half-sublimated suicide and as a decline into a figurative death (a horrific rendition of "the little death") that will soon slide into the real thing.

"How to write a novel about a person to whom nothing happens? A person to whom nothing but a love story is supposed to happen? A person inhabiting a world in which the only reality is frustration or endurance—or these plus an unbearably mystifying confusion?" These questions, rhetorical and very real, raised by Joanna Russ in her classic essay, "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write," perfectly epitomize the narrative problems Foster faces in rewriting Elizabeth Whitman's story.⁹³ The same general problem is inherent in the entire sentimental subgenre. How does one privilege the voice of a woman who, given the society in which the novel is written and read, enjoys neither voice nor privilege?

More specifically, how can the life and death of Elizabeth Whitman emphasize meanings other than those already overencoded in the society and overexpounded in innumerable sermons, newspaper accounts, and didactic essays of the time? Russ suggests that one form women have evolved for writing the essentially unwritable is, in her term, the "lyric mode"—that is, a fiction which organizes "discrete elements (images, events, scenes, passages, words, what-have-you) around an unspoken thematic or emotional center." In circling around that unspoken, invisible center, the lyric novel necessarily repeats itself (which is also a quint-essential feature of the epistolary form). That circling is the meaning; the novel is about this silent center because "there is no action possible to the central character and no series of events which will embody in clear, unequivocal, immediately graspable terms what the artist means" since the society precludes all the symbols and "myths of male culture" (like lighting out for the territories or signing on for a whaling voyage) that could serve to express—or to elude—the woman's situation for the woman reader. "There is nothing the female character can do—except exist, except think, except feel."⁹⁴ Eliza Wharton's long protracted fall and the silence that surrounds it constitutes the invisible center around which this sentimental novel turns.

The Coquette and other sentimental novels in the new Republic are ultimately about silence, subservience, stasis (the accepted attributes of women as traditionally defined) in contradistinction to conflicting impulses toward independence, action, and self-expression (the ideals of the new American nation). But what is the resolution of that central conflict? If the sentimental novel, as I am suggesting, entered fully into the current debates on the status of women, then what do we make of a novel such as The Coquette that jumbles all the terms? Mrs. Richman, like Judith Sargent Murray, argues that women must join men in articulating the political concerns of the nation—lest the emerging consensus be ludicrously one-sided—a position antithetical to that enunciated by writers from Rousseau to Chesterfield to Gregory. Yet Mrs. Richman advocates Eliza's marriage to Boyer. Is marriage to a Boyer the best that an intelligent, well-educated woman can do, particularly when the alternative, Major Sanford, is no alternative at all? "What a pity," Eliza confides to her friend Lucy, "that the graces and virtues are not oftener united! They must, however, meet in the man of my choice; and till I find such a one, I shall continue to subscribe my name Eliza Wharton" (p. 148). She does, of course, precisely that. As Eliza Wharton she departs initially from her mother's house and as Eliza Wharton still she departs finally and through death from the text of the novel, from the tragedy of her life, which hardly constitutes a vindication of the rights of women.

Eliza Wharton sins and dies. Her death can convey the conservative moral that many critics of the time demanded. Yet the circumstances of that death seem designed to tease the reader into thought. It is in precisely these interstices—the disjunctions between the conventional and the radical readings of the plot—that the early American sentimental novel flourishes. It is in the irresolution of Eliza Wharton's dilemma that the novel, as a genre, differentiates itself from the tract stories of Elizabeth Whitman in which the novel is grounded and which it ultimately transcends. Tracts readily prescribe how a young woman should lead her life and make her marriage. But in the fullness of The Coquette, we see just how the governing equation that innocence and virtue are to be rewarded must break down in a society in which women have no power to procure their own rewards but depend, in marriages or affairs, on the luck of the draw. Thus the novel's surplus of socially unsanctioned significance calls the more conventionally grounded stories of Elizabeth Whitman into question. It is easy, of course, to avoid too much novel reading. It is also easy to avoid social climbing and an anticlerical cast of mind. But how does one escape the social parameters of female powerlessness and female constraint?

That rhetorical question is left pointedly unanswered in the novel by the juxtaposition of the independent Miss Wharton, feme sole, and Mrs. Wharton, the quintessential feme covert, who, as a virtuous widow, has been ironically deprived of her covering. If virtue is to be rewarded, then surely Mrs. Wharton's life should be rich, an example to both her daughter and the reader. Yet the mother is exactly what the daughter does not want to be, and the novel validates the daughter's judgment. Observing the older woman in conversation with Boyer, Eliza wryly recognizes that her mother would "make him a [better] wife than I" (p. 186). And Eliza is right. The mother is precisely the kind of woman whom Boyer should marry. Desiring little or nothing for herself, she is a cipher in search of an integer, an empty sign seeking for another's (a husband's) excess of significance to provide her own meaning. Quite characteristically, her endeavors to dispel her daughter's doubts about matrimony never address the substance of those doubts but slide into an extended encomium on the clergyman himself, his worth to the community, his friends, the rewards that will accrue from selfless devotion to such an unselfish man. For Mrs. Wharton, the worth of his wife, of any wife, is immaterial; her duties go without saying. As even that advice suggests, for this conventional woman, female being, by her own definition and her culture's definition, is nothingness.

As that advice also suggests, Mrs. Wharton's philosophy of wifehood considerably compromises her performance as a mother. The nullity at the core of the older woman's existence renders her utterly ineffectual as a moral guide, as a concerned advisor, and even as a sympathetic confidante of her daughter. Four times in the novel Eliza, on the verge of a mental breakdown, writes to a friend about how she must feign happiness so as not to perturb her poor mother. Her mother, in turn, confides to a friend that she suspects something might be bothering her daughter but she lacks the will to inquire what it might be. Instead, she stands silently by, a mute witness to her daughter's progressive physical and mental debilitation. Even more obvious, Eliza yields herself to Sanford virtually before her mother's eyes—first in her mother's garden and then, after the weather turns cold and Eliza's health deteriorates, in her mother's parlor. It is a harrowing denouement: Eliza, physically emaciated and mentally deranged, allowing herself to be repeatedly "seduced" in her mother's house; Sanford triumphing over both women; Eliza presently dying; Mrs. Wharton wringing her hands, but living on as a continuing testimony to her daughter's tragic death and her own ineffectual life.

The full tragedy of the novel, however, is that ultimately there was no tragedy at all—only the banal predictability of a fall that was precisely what the most conservative proponents of the status quo labored to prevent. Or perhaps the tragedy is that it can readily be reduced to this formulation and is thus reduced even in the telling. Consider how Eliza's desire for freedom devolves into sexual acquiescence, accomplished with an appalling lack of desire. Eliza Wharton, vividly rendered in Foster's fiction, still cannot be separated from her story, which is necessarily conjoined with Elizabeth Whitman's different but finally unknowable story, so much so that the historical personage and the fictional person shared a common tombstone. It is as if the tragic and the trivial, the real character's puzzling death and the fictional character's problematic one, had all been interred together leaving the survivors—within the text and without—to puzzle out the meaning of it all.

The female mourners at the end of the novel articulate their sense of having lost through Eliza's death not only a friend and a relative, but also a part of themselves and their own desires. I would also suggest that many readers of the time, turning over a story they already knew and did not know at all, must have felt a similar shock of recognition, which might partly explain the great popularity of the novel. Writing a preface to the 1855 edition of The Coquette, Jane E. Locke referred to the extraordinary appeal of Foster's Eliza Wharton who had become, by that time, virtually a cult heroine in both her novelistic form and as dramatized in a popular 1802 play based on the novel, The New England Coquette.⁹⁵ Readers, according to Locke, read Eliza's story as their own and cherished her story, their story, the story of an "actual" American woman who had loved badly and lost. Here was a New England Clarissa who had lived in Hartford, who had attended the theater in Boston, who had died and was buried in Danvers—real places, places that one could visit. And the readers did, like pilgrims to a sacred shrine. Some nineteenth-century editions of The Coquette included engravings of the Bell Tavern in Danvers. Even after The Bell was torn down, its doorstep, upon which, according to legend, Whitman had written her initials as a signal to Fidelio, was removed to the Peabody Historical Society where, into the twentieth-century, lovers would come to look upon it and to touch it. Whitman's gravestone, in the Main Street Burial Ground and bearing essentially the same inscription reported in the novel, became a favorite trysting place for nineteenth-century sentimental lovers who during the century carried away portions of the gravestone to keep as talismans—like pieces of the One True Cross. By the twentieth century, the whole engraved name had been chipped away from the stone, its absence a tribute to Eliza's continuing cultural presence.

Mostly, however, Eliza/Elizabeth was honored by those who bought or borrowed The Coquette and read and reread it virtually into oblivion. Like such popular books as the New England Primer of which very few early copies remain today, less than a dozen copies of the first edition of this novel survive and equally few of the second edition of 1802. Yet editions of the book remained steadily in print until 1874. It enjoyed its greatest popularity between 1824 and 1828 when it was reissued eight times. And in 1866, it was still important enough to be added to the Peterson and Brothers "Dollar Series" of popular fiction—"The best, the largest, the handsomest, and the cheapest books in the world," according to the Peterson advertisements.⁹⁶ But most noteworthy for my purposes is the popularity of this text to late eighteenth-century readers. At a time when American novels were not plentiful (nor, for that matter, other books either), The Coquette occupied a special place. As Locke notes:

It is not surprising that it thus took precedence in interest . . . of all American novels, at least throughout New England, and was found, in every cottage within its borders, beside the family Bible, and, though pitifully, yet almost as carefully treasured.⁹⁷

Our retrospective reading, I have argued throughout this [essay], must somehow recover and make sense of that sense of treasuring lost.

¹ See Peter J. Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World," PMLA, 97 (May 1981), 408-19.

² J. Potter, "Growth of Population in the United States, 1700-1860," in David Glass and D. Eversley, eds., Population in History (London: Arnold, 1965), p. 271.

³ Bernard Farber, Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 41; and Robert V. Wells, "Family History and Demographic Transition," Journal of Social History, 9 (Fall 1975), 1-19.

⁴ For a perceptive discussion of the changing American attitude toward adolescence, see James Axtell, The School upon a Hill (New Haven; Yale Univ. Press, 1974); and Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 15-50.

⁵ The Patty Rogers Diary, Manuscript Department, [American Antiquarian Society (herafter AAS)], records a constant and even exhausting round of social visiting as does the Elizabeth Bancroft Diary (also at AAS). The fluid social and courtship patterns of the early Republic are discussed in Ellen K. Rothman's study of 350 women's diaries, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

⁶ The story of Mrs. Anderson is told in Sukey Vickery's letter of July 19, 1799 to Adeline Hartwell, Sukey Vickery Papers, Manuscript Collection, AAS.

⁷ Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 3-9.

⁸ Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 252; and Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980), pp. 6-35.

⁹ Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ''Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 39-41. James A. Henretta, in The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973), notes that in 1776 in Philadelphia alone over four thousand women and children earned minimum wages by "putting out" their spinning for the local textile mills (p. 194). See also, Edith Abbot, Women in Industry (New York: D. Appleton, 1918), pp. 66-70, 262-316; and Rolla M. Tyron, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640-1860 (1917; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), pp. 124-33.

¹⁰The Diaries of Julia Cowles: A Connecticut Record, 1797-1803, ed. Anna Roosevelt Cowles and Laura Hadley Moseley (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1931), pp. 40-41; and the diary of Elizabeth Drinker, especially the entries for June 20, 1795 and February 29, 1796, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

¹¹ Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social History of the American Family (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1917), 51-64; Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 113-16; Henretta, Evolution of American Society, p. 133; Edward Shorter, "Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 237-72; Daniel Scott Smith, "The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution: Evidence and Interpretation," in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 323; and, especially, Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, "Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1971: An Overview and Interpretation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5 (1975), 537-70.

¹² Catherine M. Scholten, "'On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art': Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34 (July 1977), 426-28; Daniel Scott Smith, Population, Family, and Society in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1635-1880, Ph.D. diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1972, pp. 219-25; and Robert V. Wells, "Quaker Marriage Patterns in a Colonial Perspective, William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 29 (July 1972), 422.

¹³The Diaries of Julia Cowles, pp. 91-92, 94.

¹⁴ Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Clio 's Consciousness Raised, ed. Lois Banner and Mary Hartman (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 119-36.

¹⁵ Ansley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnick, New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 35-36; Potter, "Growth of Population," pp. 644-47, 663, 679; Warren C. Sanderson, "Quantitative Aspects of Marriage Fertility and Family Limitation in Nineteenth-Century America: Another Application of the Coale Specifications," Demography, 16 (1979), 339-58; and Robert V. Wells, "Demographic Change and the Life Cycle of American Families," in Theodore K. Rabb and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 85-88.

¹⁶ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., ed., Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 2:212.

¹⁷ Molly Tilghman and Abigail Adams quoted in Norton, Liberty's Daughters, p. 75.

¹⁸ Sanderson, "Quantitative Aspects," pp. 339-58.

¹⁹ Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), p. 196; and Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1936); and Robert V. Wells, "Family Size and Fertility Control in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Quaker Families," Population Studies, 25 (1971), 75.

²⁰ Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974); and Maris A.Vinovskis, "Socioeconomic Determinants of Fertility," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (Winter 1976), 375-96; and Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Patterns of Childbearing in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Determinants of Marital Fertility in Five Massachusetts Towns in 1880," in Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis, eds., Family and Population in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 85-125; and Wells, "Family Size and Fertility Control," p. 76.

²¹ Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 128.

²² Marylynn Salmon, "Life, Liberty, and Dower: The Legal Status of Women After the American Revolution," in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), p. 85.

²³ St. George Tucker quoted in Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 137; Tucker, ed., Blackstone's Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Wm. Birch and Abraham Small, 1803), 2:445.

²⁴ Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 140.

²⁵ For an intriguing discussion of how changing inheritance laws may have eventually contributed to redefining the married woman's status as an individual, see Kerber, ibid., pp. 140-55.

²⁶ Harriet Martineau is quoted in Joan Hoff Wilson, "The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution," in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1976), p. 419.

²⁷ See Mary Beard, Woman as Force in History (New York: Macmillan, 1946). A similar view is supported by Richard B. Morris in Studies in the History of Early American Law (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930); and Morris, ed., Select Cases of the Mayor's Court of New York City (Washington, D. C: American Historical Assoc, 1935), pp. 21-25. For a revisionist view, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982); Peggy Rabkin, "The Origins of Law Reform: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century Codification Movement and Its Contribution to the Passage of the Early Married Woman's Property Acts," Buffalo Law Review, 24 (1974), 683-760; and Marylynn Salmon, "Life, Liberty, and Dower." See also Salmon's "Equality or Submersion? Feme Covert Status in Early Pennsylvania," in Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds., Women of America: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).

²⁸ Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, pp. 17, 232.

²⁹ Judge Hertell quoted in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, p. 78.

³⁰ See especially, Norton's chapter, "As Independent as Circumstances Will Admit," which begins. "If any quality was antithetical to the colonial notion of femininity, it was autonomy" (Liberty's Daughters, p. 125).

³¹ Abigail Adams in a letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776, repr. in Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir (New York: Bantan Books, 1973), pp. 10-11.

³² Grace Growden Galloway quoted in Norton, Liberty's Daughters, p. 45.

³³ Salmon, "Life, Liberty, and Dower," p. 97; Nancy F. Cott, "Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (October 1976), 586-614; Leonard Woods Labaree, ed. Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670-1776, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century, 1935), 1:155.

³⁴ Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, & c., or The History of an Expatriated Family. 3 vols. (London: A. Hamilton, 1793), l:ix.

³⁵ Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895; repr. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), pp. 247-53; Elizabeth F. Ellet, The Women of the American Revolution (New York: Scribner's, 1853-54), passim; Wendy Martin, "Women and the American Revolution," Early American Literature, 11 (1976-77), 322-35; and Norton, Liberty's Daughters, pp. 195-227.

³⁶ Sophie Drinker, "Votes for Women in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey," New York Historical Society Proceedings, 31 (1962), 80. See also the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, (November 1, 1797), under a "Rights of Women" headline: "At the late election in Elizabethtown, (N.J.) the Females asserted the privilege granted them by the laws of that state, and gave in their votes for members to represent them in the state legislature" (p. 3).

³⁷ "Lines, Written by a Lady, who was questioned respecting her inclination to marry," Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, 6 (September 1794), 566.

³⁸ "Rights of Women, by a Lady," Philadelphia Minerva, October 17, 1795.

³⁹ Alexander Keyssar, "Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts: A Problem in the History of the Family," Perspectives in American History, 8 (1974), 83-119; Wells, "Family History," pp. 11-12; and Wells, "Quaker Marriage Patterns," pp. 433-34.

⁴⁰ Betsey Mayhew and Sarah Hanschurst quoted in Norton, Liberty's Daughters, p. 241. And for hundreds of comments about the advantages of remaining unmarried and the "Cult of Single Blessedness," see Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984).

⁴¹ Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. Lee R. Edwards (New York: Grossman, 1971), pp. 88; 24-25.

⁴² Lyman H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963-73), 1:87.

⁴³ Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).

⁴⁴ Catherine Maria Sedgwick, "Old Maids," in Susan Koppelman, ed., Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (New York: Pandora Press, 1984).

⁴⁵ Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 24.

⁴⁶ The historiography of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the U.S. by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982); Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980); and Ronald G. Walters, "The Family and Ante-Bellum Reform: An Interpretation," Societas, 3 (Summer 1973), 221-32. But Philip J. Greven, in The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1978), argues for different methods of child-rearing occurring simultaneously rather than evolving. Michael Zuckerman, in "Penmanship Exercises for Saucy Sons: Some Thoughts on the Colonial Southern Family," South Carolina History Review, 84 (1983), 152-66, finds family patterns changing in the South by the end of the eighteenth century, while Jan Lewis, in The Pursuit of Happiness: Family Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), finds change occurring more gradually and much later. For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas P. Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America," American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606. My own focus is not on how the family "actually" changed but how selected social commentators of the late eighteenth-century presented dialectical views of the family and woman's role in the family and society.

⁴⁷ Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, p. 202.

⁴⁸ David Lundberg and Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976), 262-71; app. Lundberg and May conclude that 40 percent of all the booksellers and libraries in their sample made Emile available to the American reading public. See also Paul M. Spurlin, Rosseau in America, 1760-1809 (University: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1969).

⁴⁹ Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Emilius and Sophia; or, A New System of Education, trans. by "A Citizen of Geneva" (London: T. Becket and R. Baldwin, 1783).

⁵⁰Boston Weekly Magazine, 2 (May 5, 1804), 110; 2 (March 24, 1804), 36.

⁵¹ Helena Wells, Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (London: C. Whittingham for T. Caddell, 1800).

⁵² S.S.B.K. Wood, Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue. An Old Man's Story (Portsmouth, N.H.: William Treadwell, 1802), p. 103.

⁵³ Helena Wells, The Step-Mother; a Domestic Tale, from Real Life, 2 vols. (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1799), 2:21-22.

⁵⁴ S.S.B.K. Wood, Dorval, or the Speculator (Portsmouth, N.H.: Nutting and Whitelock, 1801), p. 78; and her Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (Portsmouth, N.H.: Charles Peirce, 1800), pp. 81-82.

⁵⁵ When published serially in the Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum from 1792 to 1794, Murray's Gleaner essays were signed with a male pseudonym, "Mentor." Reprinted in three volumes in Boston in 1798, however, they were signed Constantia, and earlier references suggest that, even before the collected edition, readers were aware that the Gleaner was a woman.

⁵⁶ Judith Sargent Murray, The Gleaner: A Miscellaneous Production. In Three Volumes. By Constantia (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798), 1:167-68; 3:220.

⁵⁷ "On the Equality of the Sexes," Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, 2 (March 1798), 132.

⁵⁸ Murray, The Gleaner, 3:189.

⁵⁹ For the British connection, see Dale Spender's indispensable, Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done to Them) (London: Ark, 1982). For a discussion of the most prominent of the American feminists of the time, see Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1935); and Wilson, "The Illusion of Change," pp. 386-93, 426-31. The "Female Advocate" became a subject of some controversy in the magazines of the time owing to an anonymous pamphlet published in New Haven, Conn., in 1801 called, simply, The Female Advocate. This pamphlet especially emphasized the importance of a thorough female education and suggested, whimsically, that the doors of all institutions of higher learning be shut to men and opened to women for a period of time and then it be seen just which was the smarter sex. See also Eliza Southgate Bowne, A Girls' Life Eighty Years Ago (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887).

⁶⁰ See Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1748; repr. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977); and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Outline of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1796), esp. pp. 24-50. Condorcet's arguments on behalf of women are alluded to in Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin. For a detailed discussion of Brown's feminist dialogue, see my essay, "The Matter and Manner of Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin," in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 71-86.

⁶¹ James Butler, Fortune's Foot-ball: or, The Adventures of Mercutio. Founded on Matters of Fact . . . , 2 vols. in 1 (Harrisburgh, Pa: John Wyeth, 1797), 1:145-46. (The title page indicates this novel was printed in 1797, although copyright was not secured until 1798.)

⁶² Imlay, The Emigrants, pp. ii, 22-23, 66.

⁶³ Sukey Vickery, Emily Hamilton, A Novel. Founded on Incidents in Real Life. By a Young Lady of Worcester County (Worcester, Mass: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1803), pp. 97-98, 108.

⁶⁴ Three 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 (April-June 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," Early American Literature, 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.

⁶⁵ Lundberg and May, "Enlightened Reader," app.

⁶⁶New England Palladium, 19 (March 2, 1802), 1.

⁶⁷ For a fuller discussion, 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. It must be emphasized that Godwin did not expect the Memoirs to in any way cast his deceased wife in a negative light. Utterly bereft at her death, Godwin moved his books and papers into her study and, until his own death forty years later, continued to work in Mary's room, among her belongings, beneath the magnificent portrait of her by John Opie. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between Godwin and Wollstonecraft and a sampling of early reviews of the Memoirs (including those quoted here), see Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 189-94.

⁶⁸ Samuel Miller, "The Appropriate Duty and Ornament of the Female Sex," in The Columbian Preacher; Or, A Collection of Original Sermons, from Preachers of Eminence in the United States. Embracing the Distinguishing Doctrines of Grace (Catskill: Nathan Elliott, 1808), p. 253.

⁶⁹ For an extended critique of Wollstonecraft's life and her ideas, see Benjamin Silliman, Letters of Shahcoolen, A Hindu Philosopher, Residing in Philadelphia . . . (Boston: Russell & Cutler, 1802), 29-32, 48. Two other novels denounced Wollstonecraft in the years immediately following the publication of the Memoirs, Wells's Constantia Neville and Wood's Dorval.

⁷⁰ The complex and heated debate over the limits or possibilities of domesticity in the nineteenth century is outside the focus of the present study. For a survey of the basic positions, however, the reader should consult the "Conclusion" (pp. 197-206) of Nancy F. Cott's Bonds of Womanhood.

⁷¹ Ruth H. Block, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," Feminist Studies, 4 (1978), 101-26. See also Mary Maples Dunn, "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period," in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 30-35; Linda K. Kerber, "Can a Woman Be an Individual? The Limits of Puritan Tradition in the Early Republic," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 25 (Spring 1983), esp. 161-65; Anne L. Kuhn, The Mother's Role in Childhood Education: New England Concepts, 1830-1860 (New Haven Yale Univ. Press, 1947); Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis, "The Puritan Family and Religion: A Critical Reappraisal," William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 39 (January 1982), 29-63; and Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and In Life (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press [Archon Books], 1977), esp. chaps. 3, 4.

⁷² William Lyman, A Virtuous Woman, the Bond of Domestic Union and the Source of Domestic Happiness (New London, Conn.: S. Green, 1802), pp. 22-23.

⁷³Parents' Magazine (October 1840).

⁷⁴ Helen Waite Papashivly, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 31-32.

⁷⁵ There were, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as Cigarette, an adventurous young woman who finds her way through several complicated adventures. See Russel B. Nye, "The Novel as Dream and Weapon: Women's Popular Novels in the Nineteenth Century," Historical Society of Michigan Chronicle, 11 (4th qr. 1975), 2-18.

⁷⁶ Charles Brockden Brown, "Female Learning," Literary Magazine and American Register, 1 (January 1804), 245.

⁷⁷ Samuel Relf, Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1797), title page; pp. 36-37.

⁷⁸ By viewing Montraville as the stock seducer and overlooking the problematic role played by Belcour, William C. Spengemann, in The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789-1900 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), can dismiss Charlotte as possibly "the most rigidly programmatic sentimental novel ever written" (p. 92). But he also concedes that "certain fictive energies seem to be at work, threatening to compromise the conservative values" of this novel (p. 90).

⁷⁹ For an excellent assessment of Rowson's feminism and a discussion of her fictional strengths and weaknesses, see Patricia L. Parker's Susanna Haswell Rowson (Boston: Twayne, 1986). I am grateful to Professor Parker for making her manuscript available to me. See also, Eve Kornfeld, "Women in Post-Revolutionary American Culture: Susanna Haswell Rowson's American Career, 1792-1824," Journal of American Culture, 6 (Winter 1983), 56-62; Wendy Martin, "Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist," Women's Studies, 2 (1974), 1-8; and Dorothy Weil, In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1976), esp. pp. 31-64. The quotations are from the paperback edition of the novel "edited for modern readers" by Clara M. Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New Haven: College & University Press, 1964), p. 121. Although this is the only readily available edition of the novel, it must be emphasized that it is neither a reprint of the original edition nor a scholarly modern edition of the work.

⁸⁰Critical Review (London) for April 1791, repr. in Rowson's Charlotte (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1794), n.p. For other sympathetic critical assessments, see the Boston Weekly Magazine, 1 (January 22, 1803), 53; and Samuel L. Knapp's "Memoir," in Rowson's posthumously published Charlotte 's Daughter: Or, The Three Orphans. A Sequel to Charlotte Temple . . . (Boston: Richardson & Lord, 1828). pp. 3-20.

⁸¹ Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), p. 176.

⁸²Margaretta; or, the Intricacies of the Heart (Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford, 1807), p. 80. The anonymous author of this novel well may be alluding to Judith Sargent Murray's earlier "Story of Margaretta." Both on the level of plot and characterization there are definite similarities between the two works.

⁸³ See Leslie A. Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1960; rpt. New York: Dell, 1966), p. 93; and Walter P. Wenska, Jr., "The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom," Early American Literature, 12 (1977-78), 243-55.

⁸⁴ The documents pertaining to Elizabeth Whitman's life and death (right down to an inventory of all she had with her at Bell Tavern when she died) have been included in Charles Knowles Bolton, The Elizabeth Whitman Mystery (Peabody, Mass.: Peabody Historical Society, 1912); Herbert Ross Brown, "Introduction" to The Coquette (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1939), pp. v-xix; Caroline W. Dall, The Romance of the Association: Or, One Last Glimpse of Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton (Cambridge, Mass.: Press of John Wilson, 1875); and Jane E. Locke, "Historical Preface, Including a Memoir of the Author" in The Coquette. (Boston: Samuel Etheridge for E. Larkin, 1855), pp. 3-30. The article quoted from the Salem Mercury for July 29, 1788 is reprinted in Bolton, pp. 33-37.

⁸⁵ Anonymous essayist quoted in Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, p. 59.

⁸⁶ Almost all discussions of The Coquette sooner or later raise the question of the real identity of Major Sanford. See Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, pp. 109-32, for a summary of the early choices; and Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1948), p. 16; Dall, Romance of the Association, pp. 101-15; and James Woodress, A Yankee's Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (New York: Lippincott, 1958), pp. 60-64.

⁸⁷ Quoted in Herbert Ross Brown's "Introduction" to The Coquette, p. xii.

⁸⁸ Despite its being generally acknowledged as the best of the early American sentimental novels, The Coquette has never been published in a modern edition using modern standards of textual accuracy. The only widely available edition of The Coquette is that edited by William S. Osborne with punctuation and spellings silently (and not always carefully) "edited for the modern reader." But because it is available in paperback, I have taken all my references from this edition (New Haven: College & University Press, 1970) and future references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text. Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789-1830 (1907; repr. New York; Frederick Ungar, 1966), was one of the first critics to note that The Coquette "is superior to its predecessors in interest and especially in character-drawing" (p. 14).

⁸⁹ Sanford does, however, allude to Laurence Sterne in the letter in which he announces his triumph over Eliza—a fitting allusion considering Foster's comments about Sterne in The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to her Pupils (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798), warning her readers against the "licentious wit" that is "concealed under the artful blandishments of sympathetic sensibility" in Sterne's fiction (p. 205).

⁹⁰ Bolton, Elizabeth Whitman Mystery, pp. 39-41.

⁹¹ Bolton, Ibid., pp. 59-60.

⁹² I have elsewhere assessed at length the inadequacy of the choices presented to Eliza. See my article "Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel," Studies in American Fiction, 10 (Spring 1982), esp. 27-34.

⁹³ Joanna Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write," in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), p. 13.

⁹⁴ Russ, ibid., pp. 12-13.

⁹⁵ Jane E. Locke, "Historical Preface," to her edition of The Coquette, pp. 3-30. The novel was dramatized by J. Horatio Nichols, The New England Coquette: From the History of The Celebrated Eliza Wharton. A Tragic Drama, in Three Acts (Salem: N. Coverly, 1802).

⁹⁶ Herbert Ross Brown, "Introduction," The Coquette, p. ix.

⁹⁷ Locke, "Historical Preface," p. 4.