Abstract
While many scholars have analyzed friendship’s role in The Coquette, scant attention has been paid to friendship’s tendency to slow the novel’s plot. By impeding plot progression, Eliza Wharton’s friendships allow her to linger in a liminal state. In this way, she defers a future (both personal and national) determined by Republican Motherhood—a role that required wives in the early republic to reproduce ideologies that perpetuated their own subordination. Yet friendship’s remedy is temporary at best. Ultimately, the novel presents friendship as a relationship predicated on formal equality; The Coquette suggests that class and gender differences render friendship unsustainable. Thus, friendship proves unable to replace marriage as a model for more equitable sociopolitical relations. Still, in spite of these failings, friendship in The Coquette works to repurpose seduction fiction by inscribing the desire for a more expansive feminine self into a genre that often sought to contain such desires.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The evolving status of Anglo-American women is related to sweeping changes in governance. As David Kazanjian points out, the first decades of the United States’ national existence coincided with the emergence of biopower (114). Foucault writes that, under biopolitical regimes, “the government will have to ensure that the greatest possible amount of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population can increase” (99). He further notes that it is at roughly this moment that the science of demography begins to boom and, with it, the notion that a government’s success can be measured in the fecundity of a desired population. Given the increasing importance placed on cultivating a national population, it is unsurprising that domestic labor—particularly childbirth and childrearing—would be valorized in the early republic.
- 2.
Scholars have amply explored how The Coquette critiques Anglo-American women’s position in the early USA. Cathy Davidson, Kristie Hamilton, and Karen A. Weyler all offer historicist accounts of the gendered social conditions to which the novel responds. Similarly, Gillian Brown argues that The Coquette shows how consent cannot serve women or secure their place in public life. And while Julia Stern, C. Leiren Mower, and Ivy Schweitzer all cast Eliza as embodying different political commitments (whether “protoliberal,” civic republican, or some synthesis of these positions), each reads her as renegotiating the place of women in the early republic. Moreover, Schweitzer and Claire C. Pettengill both present friendship as a central term in the novel’s political intervention. Still, despite these rich explorations of The Coquette’s political content and its portrayals of friendship, no one has triangulated these concerns with the novel’s portrayals of time. Such triangulation illustrates how The Coquette addresses women’s vulnerability in the early republic by identifying their temporal subordination.
- 3.
For more on women’s complex status under coverture , see Dolan (Chapter 2) and Salmon (Chapters 2 and 3).
- 4.
Karen A. Weyler observes, “in the late 1700s … marriage began to be conceived less as a business partnership or a merger and more as a relationship based on personal inclination” (9). She further notes that “affectionate, voluntary marriage also became a prevalent political metaphor” for equal and elective political relations in the early republic, in spite of the fact that coverture made purportedly “equal” marital relationships deeply hierarchical (9).
- 5.
Jeanne Boydston argues that the transition to market capitalism in the early USA depended on the flexible labor of women; women would work for wages while their husbands might be disinclined to, since waged labor would compromise men’s “independent” status. Yet as women’s economic importance grew, domestic ideology more adamantly asserted that women who worked outside the home were not women at all, effectively obscuring their labor.
- 6.
Despite Lucy’s sense that Eliza’s hesitation about marrying is merely show, Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller and Mary Beth Norton have shown that Anglo-American women in this period were acutely aware of the dangers posed by marriage . Norton documents women’s “deeply felt … concerns” about marriage—an institution that gave her a “dependent status [that] made her peculiarly vulnerable to her spouse’s failings” (43, 44). Chambers-Schiller finds similar evidence, writing that the “picture of marriage as a relationship productive of much misery and rooted in chance dominated the didactic literature and advice manuals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (49).
- 7.
Tennenhouse finds that the villains in seduction fiction are often not rakes, but rather, domineering fathers who refuse to let a girl marry for love. Moreover, he asserts that these stories frequently depict rakes being reformed and brought into the family, evolving into liberal patriarchs after the initial act of seduction.
- 8.
This is not to say, however, that friendship was a trivial relation based solely on private pleasure. As Ivy Schweitzer has shown, eighteenth-century discourse held that the mirroring function of friendship promoted self-improvement and, in the process, strengthened the citizenry as a whole, making friendship a practice with public and private dimensions. Yet while friendship was thought to produce better citizens, it had a different temporality than Republican Motherhood. Friendships that help citizens better themselves in the present are entirely different from maternal labors that produce citizens for the future.
- 9.
Significantly, this rendition of companionate marriage resonates with homosocial friendship. The ideal marriages of the early republic were modeled, as Schweitzer and Jay Fliegelman have shown, on a specific tradition of friendship that sprung up in the early United States. Mingling classical and early modern ideas that positioned friendship as a particularly ennobling relationship, eighteenth-century discourses of friendship held that friends both reflected and improved one another. In the early United States, this discourse was used to imagine new forms of filiation. Elective bonds would bind the polity together, rather than the patriarchal hierarchies said to govern European society. As companionate marriage gained ascendance, even hierarchical marital relations were reimagined as a form of friendship.
- 10.
See Pettengill’s “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere” for a thorough account of the disciplinary uses of female friendship in The Coquette and in the early republic.
Works Cited
Boydston, Jeanne. “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States.” Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early Republic, edited by Paul A. Gilje. Madison House, 1997, pp. 23–47.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1984.
Brown, Gillian. “Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences.” American Literary History, vol. 9, no. 4, 1997, pp. 625–652.
Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840. Yale University Press, 1984.
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford University Press, 1986.
Dolan, Frances E. Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Foster, Hannah Webster. The Coquette and the Boarding School: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Jennifer Harris and Bryan Waterman. W.W. Norton and Company, 2013.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell University Press, 1980.
Hamilton, Kristie. “An Assault on the Will: Republican Virtue and the City in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette.” Early American Literature, vol. 24, no. 2, 1989, pp. 135–151.
Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York University Press, 1991.
Kazanjian, David. The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Kerber, Linda K. Towards an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber. University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Mower, C. Leiren. “Bodies in Labor: Sole Proprietorship and the Labor of Conduct in The Coquette.” American Literature, vol. 74, no. 2, 2002, pp. 315–344.
Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of Women, 1750–1800. Cornell University Press, 1980.
Pettengill, Claire C. “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School.” Early American Literature, vol. 27, no. 3, 1992, pp. 185–203.
Salmon, Marylynn. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. The University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Schweitzer, Ivy. Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Libertine America.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 1999, pp. 1–28.
Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
Weyler, Karen A. “Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval.” Legacy, vol. 26, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–25.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ball, M. (2018). The Liminal Time of Friendship: Narrative Delay in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-73850-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-73851-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)