Foster's Coquette: Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage

IVY SCHWEITZER Foster's Coquette: Resurrecting Friendship from the Tomb of Marriage BY THE MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, political and pedagogical writers in the American colonies were rethinking traditional relations of authority—parents over children, husbands over wives—in terms Jay Fliegelman identifies as the era's promotion of "rational, protective, and mutually satisfying contracts of friendship" (41). Neither required by custom, like familial duty, nor dangerously passionate like erotic love, "equalitarian friendship" was thought to temper and ennoble while it opened the self to sensibility, sociability, and reciprocity. In the eyes of many writers of the time, it was "the ideal relationship" (41 ). This development was politically momentous, since, according to Fliegelman, "the struggle for American independence and for subsequent federal union was intimately related to, and ideologically reflected in, a national affirmation of the sacred character of affectional and voluntaristic marriage" (129). Spouses were to be like friends, freely chosen, and their "reasonable liberty" to enter into matrimony and dissolve infelicitous bonds became a powerful argument for separation from England (125). There are, however, important differences between friendship and marriage as consensual relations, which republican apologists sought to downplay, and which historians have ignored. "Rational equalitarian friendship" was a form of affiliation adapted from classical and early modern discourses of "amity" that historically excluded women or limited their participation on the basis of their alleged emotionalism, while "consensual marriage," no matter how affectionate and voluntarily embraced, did not consider or render the spouses legally or socially "equal." Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 2 Ivy Schweitzer The evidence Fliegelman offers itself suggests how the rhetoric of contractualism disarmingly embraces consensual if not egalitarian modes of affiliation, but retains a gender hierarchy that disavows its hegemony.1 He cites how frequently, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, colonial North American newspapers reprinted and political writers alluded to John Milton's "hymn" to "Wedded Love" (PL 4: 750-67), often blithely changing phrases to fit more closely the colonial situation (127). A close examination of the verses Milton did write suggests that he viewed specifically prelapsarian heterosexual love as the basis for more profound, specifically masculine, and even civic, ties: Hail wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source Of human offspring, sole propriety In Paradise of all things common else. By thee adulterous lust was driv'n from men Among the bestial herds to range, by thee Founded in Reason, Loyal, Just and Pure Relations dear, and all the Charities Of Father, Son and Brother first were known. (4.750-58) These opening lines do not extol all matrimony, only the "wedded love" in paradise between unfallen Adam and Eve. Milton considers this foundational, because it remains the only instance of a pure but earthly "relation" between humans. These unfallen beings, though literally the same flesh, were not in Milton's mind ontologically equal, nor was their unfallen relation free from coercion.2 Eve herself echoes Paul's teaching on marital gender hierarchy in 1 Corinthians when she acknowledges Adam "My Guide / And Head" (4: 442-43). Although Adam's avowal, "Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim / My other half," uses a Christianized discourse of friendship (the soul "seeking" its equivalent part or reflection ), modified by the Platonic/Diotimic notion of love as the reunion of an originary whole, the "halves" are not equal and certainly not the same: what delights Adam most are Eve's "submissive Charms" (8: 487-88, 499). Furthermore, Eve's first impulse, upon awakening after her creation, is to embrace her own pleasing reflection she glimpses in a "pure" pool and innocently equates with "th' expanse of Heav'n." This is her first mistake, signifying her need for interpretive redirection to Foster's Coquette 3 the "true" heaven. The watery being she spies in the pool returns her gaze "with answering looks / Of sympathie and love," an allusion to the primacy but misprison of narcissistic female homonormativity. God must purposely tear Eve away from her own image and lead her to Adam, whom she at first regards as not only "less faire, / Less winning soft," but less "amiablie...