Norton showed in great detail the limits of women’s lives based on legal, cultural, and societal expectations. While I do not need to validate her writing here, her text gives added depth and richness to Foster’s novel. And as I think about Eliza Wharton, I have to compare her to another fictional heroine who shared her fate: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Both their stories follow the seduction plot narrative: they are seduced, give birth to a baby, and die. Both novels have strong narrative voices, but the epistolary form of The Coquette underscores the significance of female friendships. Where Charlotte Temple is a passive protagonist with little voice in her own story, the women in The Coquette—Eliza, Lucy Freeman, Mrs. Richman, Julia Granby, and Mrs. Wharton—all have strong, active voices in the story’s narrative. Eliza leaps off the page as a character that is enjoying her single-girl freedom and making conquests. Eliza’s letters and the responses from her friends show that, “friendships were essential to a woman’s happiness” (Norton 108).
After finishing The Coquette I realized that the real tragedy is not Eliza’s seduction and death, but her abandonment of her female friendships. Once Eliza allows herself to be conquered by Mr. Boyer’s rejection and Major Sanford’s desertion, she becomes like Charlotte Temple, a shadow. Her health fails and her spirits are depressed. Nothing her female friends can do will restore her to the vivacious person she once was. By allowing herself to be thus controlled and contained by the patriarchy, she abandons her female friends. Her letters are fewer and less revealing. She keeps secrets from her friends and mother. Eliza’s voice disappears from the narrative as her friends’ takes over—she is erased and lost from the female sphere. When she removes herself from her mother’s house and the protection of her friends to live with strangers, she finally signals her departure from the domestic sphere that would have and could have protected her in her own historical moment.
I hope you will forgive a personal conclusion to this posting. I have learned interesting lessons from looking back at female friendships in the Early National Period and at the friendships in The Coquette. First of all, I have learned that a husband cannot be a girlfriend, no matter how adorable he is. Secondly, I need to ask for help and comfort when I fell lonely and take it when it is offered. And like Eliza, I need to keep in touch with my female friends—I do this by writing to my girlfriends, mother, grandmother, and sisters while negotiating this new phase of my life as a married woman. Hopefully, if I ever have a friend or daughter like Eliza Wharton, she will take my advice since our female friendships are just as important today as they were in 1797.
Larisa, I loved reading your ideas about feminine community and female solidarity. I was particularly interested in your point that, by the end of the novel, Eliza has completely disappeared from the epistolary correspondence. We had talked about this on Wednesday, and I was interested to see what kind of meaning you'd make from Eliza's absence. I think you're right-- she could have found comfort and protection in the domestic realm, if only she hadn't dropped off the radar. But something else you said got me thinking. You mentioned that "Eliza’s voice disappears from the narrative as her friends’ takes over" and that "she is erased and lost from the female sphere" through this action. I wonder if the opposite could also be true. I wonder if, in her absence and personal withdrawal, the continued correspondence of her friends (who are writing for and about her) work to keep her alive. The continued letters of Eliza's friends certainly keep her alive in the novel (as a viable character), so perhaps we could extend that idea to women's lives in the early national period. Could the feminine solidarity that you highlight as so important (and I agree!) keep women "alive" through marriage, even when their identification as single women and participation in that narrative cease?
ReplyDeleteAh, awesome ideas. Very exciting. And on a different note, any time you want to hang out with a single girl, you just give me a call!
Oh, by the by, I meant to add that I know you already affirmed the importance of female solidarity through marriage. I guess I was just re-hashing. Say back and all that. :)
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about that--the women friends do keep Eliza alive in the narrative. She is propped up and supported by her mother and friends. I wish that Eliza would have availed herself of those friends and turned to them instead of wasting away with strangers. There must have been houses for for unwed mothers back in that day--but really, I am sure her mother would have welcomed her with open arms. So sad.
ReplyDeleteCould you look at the female characters in the novel in a more cynical way as the enforcers of patriarchal values upon Eliza? All that pressure to marry! To retain her relationships with them, she must marry. In highlighting through her actions the limiting roles for women, must she also reject the women in her life who represent and embrace those roles?
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