Eliza Wharton’s Scraps of Writing: Dissipation and Fragmentation in The Coquette

Abstract

THIS HUMBLE STONE, IN MEMORY OF ELIZA WHARTON, IS INSCRIBED BY HER WEEPING FRIENDS, TO WHOM SHE ENDEARED HERSELF BY UNCOMMON TENDERNESS AND AFFECTION. ENDOWED WITH SUPERIOR ACQUIREMENTS, SHE WAS STILL MORE DISTINGUISHED BY HUMILITY AND BENEVOLENCE. LET CANDOR THROW A VEIL OVER HER FRAILTIES, FOR GREAT WAS HER CHARITY TO OTHERS. SHE SUSTAINED THE LAST PAINFUL SCENE, FAR FROM EVERY FRIEND; AND EXHIBITED AN EXAMPLE OF CALM RESIGNATION. HER DEPARTURE WAS ON THE 25TH DAY OF JULY, A.D.--, IN THE 37TH YEAR OF HER AGE, AND THE TEARS OF STRANGERS WATERED HER GRAVE The engraved tombstone of Eliza Wharton offers readers of The Coquette a brief moral for her tale of gaiety and seduction. Reproduced in the last letter of Hannah Webster Foster's 1797 epistolary novel, the tombstone closes the narrative with a heavy-handed attempt by Eliza's friends to communicate a final lesson. This record of Eliza's life and death provides narrative, emotional, and instructive closure for one of the most affectively provocative records of seduction in the late eighteenth century. Eliza's friends emphasize her honorable character, the superior acquirements, and uncommon tenderness that distinguish her; the inscription provides a well-intentioned perspective, but the commemoration also makes Eliza's life legible according to commonplace didactic and sentimental conventions (169). (1) In contrast, near the end of her life Eliza moves herself out of the spotlight and communicates using fragments of writing that include partial letters, abbreviated messages, and miscellaneous reflections (162). After Reverend Boyer rejects Eliza's offer of love and Major Sanford successfully seduces her (a seduction concealed from Eliza's correspondents), she further conceals herself via her silence, her self-imposed social alienation, and her retreat from day-to-day interactions. Eliza's subsequent fragmented writings diverge from the sentimental discourse--exemplified by the description on the tombstone--that constructs her experiences as open and comprehensible. Throughout The Coquette, Foster explores how Eliza absents herself from a legible epistolary network as a result of her community's relentless persecution. Even though I begin the essay by presenting the inscription of Eliza's friends, I will attempt to give Eliza a burial that conforms to her own hidden and fragmented self-representations. It is not only Eliza's friends who injure her memory. By disregarding Foster's criticism of the totalizing perspective of the tombstone, literary critics continue to reenact the community's problematic interpretive methods in their scholarship. Two main trajectories govern criticism on The Coquette; one argues for the novel's insistence on female autonomy, while the other approach argues for Foster's codification of conservative gender relations. Both these approaches share the mistake of historical anachronism, since they seek to locate Eliza at the opening of a long, later history of gender relations and feminism. The former approach--taken by critics like Sharon M. Harris, Claire C. Pettengill, and C. Leiren Mower--lauds female self-mastery as the primary lesson of Eliza's downfall (Mower 336). (2) According to these critics, Eliza's withdrawal from social relations at the end of the novel functions as an emancipatory escape that transcendently looks from late eighteenth-century history to the larger ideology of feminism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Ironically, this approach to the novel threatens to replicate the constrictive gender ideologies that initially lead to Eliza's effacement as the plot progresses; by reading self-mastery into Eliza's absence, self-negation, and fragmentation, these critics affirm and impose their own version of the history of women's rights without looking at the way Foster depicts Eliza's response to the traumatic events of her life. Taking Eliza's withdrawal from the gaiety of her social and family life as a radical feminist claim, particularly without looking at the form of Eliza's protest, this sort of reading fails to take her story at face value. …