Bad Girl, Bad Girl, What You Gonna Do?

In a couple of ways Foster's novel The Coquette (of which you have an excerpt) falls into some fairly common literary traditions.  First, the novel takes an epistolary form--the narrative is told through a series of letters--which is a novel form that goes back to the 17th century and the works of a writer named Aphra Behn.  The epistolary form was popular during much of the 18th century, though beginning to fade by the time of The Coquette.  (Typical American writer--late to the party.)

Second, and more interesting given the themes of The Coquette, is the novel's association with the "seduced and abandoned" story line, a story line common to sentimental romance novels.  The seduced-and-abandoned story is fairly simple: a young woman is seduced by an unscrupulous man (sometimes older, usually wealthy or at least having some social status); she believes his promises of love and marriage, gets pregnant, is cast aside (the abandoned part) and lives out the rest of her life in moral ruin.  If she's lucky, she dies, though death in these novels functions as a moral judgment.  The purpose of these novels, as you can probably guess, was cautionary, specifically to warn young women to keep their skirts on (literally and figuratively) until they could make a proper, moral marriage.  Yes, I know--why are the women getting stuck with these expectations?  Why isn't anyone telling the men to keep it in their pants?  The simple answer is that culturally (including American culture) women had long been regarded as the moral and spiritual centers of the family and of society.  A ruined woman threatened the stability of the family, and consequently, threatened the stability of the society in which she lived.  Often a religious justification would be offered for this--if Eve had just been a carnivore, none of this would have happened.  The subtext of all this, of course, is that the ones best served by these perceptions were men.  It would be ridiculous to assume that men consciously conspired to invent this notion--as with most cultural values, this evolved over time.  Nevertheless, the seduced-and-abandoned model, to get all Marxist on you, was a cultural production that served to secure power with the dominant members of a culture.

The Coquette - James Wells Champney

However, I don't think it's quite so easy to say that Foster fits comfortably into this design, and that perhaps is what makes her novel worth considering.  What strikes me about this novel is not so much that Eliza is "irresponsible" in the conventional ways that we understand that term, but that she lives within a society that has no means to accommodate someone like her.  She lives in a society that defines relationships in rational terms; note how Mr. Boyer, who just oozes excitement, speaks about how he will pursue his courtship of Eliza: "I am in no danger, however, of becoming an enthusiastic devotee [of Eliza].  No, I mean to act upon just and rational principles."  Fair enough--but Eliza's society deems him the appropriate choice, despite that fact that he bears little in common with Eliza, who, as the man who will seduce and ruin her writes, is "apparently thoughtless of every thing but present enjoyment."

Illustration from The Art of Home-Making, by Margaret E. Sangster

To ask the question to get the discussion started, is whether this novel is a critique of rationality.  We've talked in other places about the significance of the concepts of reason and rationality in the development of individualism, but have not talked about potential dangers that lie in a culture devoted to reason.  I also wonder whether this novel is less a critique of the moral character of Eliza Wharton, and more a critique of a culture that can find no place for someone like her.