Anthology Paper JSteele v.2

8/2/2019 Anthology Paper JSteele v.2

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Jessica Steele

18 February 2011

ENGL 725

Eliza Wharton: Between Woman, Nation, and BeyondThe Coquette through a Transnational Feminist Framework

Kaplan, Alarcn, and Maollem, inBetween Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational

Feminisms, and the State, illustrate the making of new civilizations as imbricated in notions ofThe

Rights of Man and Rights of the Citizen(1). Absorbed in the dialectic of equality and freedom

(Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1), Hannah Fosters eighteenth-century novel, The Coquette, revolves

around the social constructs of post-Revolutionary America. Foster illustrates a community of women

whose desires of independence, action, and self expression, purportedly guaranteed to all citizens in

the new nation, are repeatedly denied within the construct of womens rights and social responsibility,

most noticeably through the restrictions of marriage and the denial of rights through spinster[hood]

(Davidson 145). Here, the heroine and her female companions find themselves within a nationalistic

meta-narrative, or the unstable fiction ofan imagined community, where the denial of sexual or

racial difference or both is achieved through the collapse of the concepts of Man and Citizen to deny

difference of sex and race (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 2-6). Through these fissures of an incongruous

definition of citizen, The Coquette examines a nation questioning the contradictory denial and

simultaneous affirmation of (these) difference(s) in nationalistic discourse and power

structures(Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1). By identifying the heroines inability to assume the ideals

of the new nation, patriarchal schisms in this hegemonic dialect appear to represent woman as an

eccentric subject, identifying a communal identity crisis through Fosters fatal conclusion, as well as

in all forms of incongruous citizens mimicked in todays transnational narratives (Kaplan, Alarcon, and

Moallem 1). In this paper, I will examine how Foster both succeeds and fails to question the nationalistic

formation of the Republican woman from a transnational feminist perspective.


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While many of the sentimental novels of the time portrayed a solid social realism(even if

sometimes covert) of the patriarchal structure of that society (Davidson 123), Fosterpointedly bases her

fiction on the historical narratives produced around the biography of Elizabeth Whitman whose death

(1788) she emulates in the fictional heroine, Eliza Wharton (published 1797). Fosters fiction retells the

monolithic narrative structured though historical gossip, newspapers, and additional tracks, which

perpetuated Whitmans story as a simplistic rendering of The Fallen Woman(Introduction viii).

Whitmans seduction was historically given meaning as a good moral lecture to young ladies

(Introductionviii). As a statement against womens education, which was often traditionally paired

with the fear of womens liberty, Whitman was portrayed as a female lead astray from her duties of

womanhood, and citizen, by the irrational sentiments derived from her readership of the sentimental

novel, and, therefore, her education. Early European sentimental novels (Richardson, Sterne), in fact,

perpetuated the physical and theological notions of seduction and ruin collapsed into one identity of The

Fallen Women. Such as in the case ofThe Coquette, we see death and/or suicide follow the

metaphorical and/or physical act of seduction. Although fictional pieces, these narratives reconstructed a

realistic patriarchal society where womens inclusion or exclusion in a nationalistic identify was bounded

by her dependence on the male citizen. Female characters independence was limited to the acceptance or

denial of marriage proposals (which would lead to inclusion within a national community) or of an

independent rake (leading to the destruction of the American family and the exclusion or, even, death of

the heroine). Through The Coquette, Foster attempts to create new meaning surrounding Whitmans

Fall, to highlight the denial of difference between woman as subject and the universal citizen which

were perpetuated through these tropes of the The Fallen Woman. While avoiding an overt political

statement, or even reconstruction of plot, Whitmans story, through Fosters tale, then becomes a subvert

political statement on the ideal woman in the new nation, one structured around the negation of the

female selfher freedoms, her possibilities (Introduction xviii), yet at odds with universal ideals of

the Rights of the Citizen (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1).


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Rather than portraying Whitmans outcome as the result of one disillusioned choice toward

passion, Eliza is presented with a lack of choice, as represented in her fictional suitors: Peter Sanford

whose rakish demeanor will only submit [Eliza] to be shackled [if] it must be from a necessity of

mendingfortune (Foster 23) or the dependent situation (41) of marrying a clergyman, in which she

fears of the duties of that sphere(Foster 39). Wavering between the uneasy positions of bachelorette,

mistress and spinster, Eliza attempts to take on the nationalistic ideal of independence for as long as she is

able: I have but lately entered society, she writes, and wish, for a while, to enjoy my freedom, in the

participation of pleasures, suited to my age and sex (Foster 50). Throughout the novel, the reader

observes Elizas inability to exist as both independent woman and citizen, existing neither as the ideal

citizen (and its simultaneous patriarchal subjections) nor the independent woman. Rather than drawing

her in opposition, as subject, to the nation or the husband, Foster embodies her immobility through

Elizas inability to choose a husband, the circulatory nature of the letters as she vacillates between a lack

of suitable options, and her silence in both choosing a partner and voicing consent.

As we examine the idea ofborders of the nation, in a modern sense, the concept of inner/outer

constructs an edge, or a border, that helps us apprehend the double movements of the nation-state, its

plural logic of doubleness and aporias ( Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 5). Instead of overlooking and

perpetuating nationalistic discourse, or the doubleness which serves to speak simultaneously in the

name of the people inside and those who are outside, Foster employs Elizas immobility and silence to

place her in an in-between space, versusopposing her adversely to a center ( Kaplan, Alarcon, and

Moallem 5). In reconstructing Whitmans fall, Foster, through a postmodern vision, places Eliza both

inside and outside of the national construct through her refusal to identify as married and/or unmarried,

and therefore, legitimate or illegitimate citizenas defined by the patriarchal social constructs of the

nation. As symbolized through Elizas immobility and refusal to voice her acceptance or denial to

marriage, Foster highlights the problematic concept of citizen in a heroine who faces death when she

chooses to act both as an independent woman and citizen.


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and every domestic pleasure of married life (Foster 105). At this time, marriage, for women, represented

not only a subversive role within the new nation, but rested in her very survival due to economic and

political power structures. Realizing, what are now my prospects?, Foster calls on the terminology of

The Fallen Woman, even before the physical seduction takes place, Oh my friend, I am undone! I am

slighted, rejected by the man who once sough my hand (105). As a consequence for her overindulgence

in her quest for independence, Elizas physical death then serves to demonstrate her rejection as a citizen

in the nation.

One can argue Foster succeeds, progressively for her time, in Spivaks call to avoid the positive

and negative dichotomies of gender through a demonstration of the doubleness of nation in its crisis of

legitimization (16), it is also important to examine Fosters ability to negotiate between the national, the

global, and the historical, as well as the contemporary diasporic (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 15).

Foster was clearly writing within, and to, a select elite audience who were not only able to afford to read

her novel, but permitted to. Entitled The Coquette or, the History of Eliza Wharton a Novel Founded on

Fact, Foster alludes to the criticism of the novel, generated from a fear of disruption to elitist masculine

European power structures: Might not the unsophisticated reader, these critics worried, readily emulate

unsavory portrayals of illicit sex, of dishonest dealings, of revolution and anarchy?(Davidson 58). We

see, then, through multiple class structures, cultures, and histories, the doubleness of the universal

citizen applied, certainly not simply to women. Foster not only served to a select group of her gender,

she was also writing to a national versus local audience, where, by midcentury, only eight percent of

fiction was published by local, regional printers (Davidson 18). In limiting the deconstruction of the

problematic role of citizen to those of an elite Republican woman, Fosterfailed to consider the

spatiality and temporality of feminist concerns nationwide (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 15).

Through The Coquette we see representations of the white Republican women as unchanging in their

changing relationship to marriage structures within the nation (regardless of location, religion, etc.), as

well as an exclusion of the numerous cultures and races of women historically removed from the

traditional American citizenship narrative. Separating her female characters apart from the diverse range


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of concerns of both women and the multiple problematic citizens within post-Revolutionary America,

Foster contributed to a modern representation of a gendered Eurocentric nationalistic discourse limited to

these monolithic domestic concerns and roles.

Although the meta-narrative of the post-revolutionary culture may now have ebbed, as Ella

Shohat, in Talking Visionsstates, we find ourselves in a moment of both rupture and continuity where

the construction of Eliza, as a monolithic representation of her gender, leaves traces in a globalized

transnational discourse. How, then, do we move past these traces and remove ourselves from a narrative

trap, similar, yet different to the one Foster found herself in? Where Foster fails to remove herself and

her subjects from the specificity of their roles within a singular community, Shohat critiques the role of

Western feminism practiced largely within the context of national/racial liberation, historically

contributing to the false dichotomies of aU.S.-based perspective of nationalism including the global

creation of a simplistic First World/Third World dichotomy (3-12). Calling for the need to address

both the Eurocentric assumptions of Western feminism and the (hetero)masculinist culture of nationalist

movements, Shohat notes the importance of dismantling a patriarchal nationalisthistoriography

while also challenging the Eurocentric contours of gender and sexuality within feminist

histography(12). While Foster gives voice to the subjectivity and a false representation of a monolithic

struggle of the Eurocentric Western woman versus nation, Shohat describes the need to stage a shifting,

multifronted constellation of struggles, or multiple differences,that can synergistically meet and

mutually reinforce one another (Shohat 15). Although Foster falls short in examining the hybrid culture

ofall communities, the eighteenth-century author nevertheless deserves credit for examining the place

(or lack thereof) of one community of women within the national post-revolutionary discourse, without

creating a positional and subjective representation of sisters versus nation (Shohat 12). As we continue

to observe traces of Foster and similar traditions of nationalist narratives, Shohat reminds us to do so

with a critical eye and to empower such differences through alliances, placing diverse gendered/sexed

histories and geographies in dialogical relation in terms of the tensions and overlapping that take place

within and between cultures, ethnicities, nations (Shohat 1).


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Works Cited

Davidson, Cathy. "Introduction." The Coquette. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1986. Print.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York, NY: Oxford

University Press, 1986. Print.

Foster, Hannah W. The Coquette. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem. Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms,

Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print.

McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial

Perspectives. 11. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.

Shohat, Ella. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. New York: MIT, 1998.

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Anthology Paper JSteele v.2