Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter Three: The Coquette Here and There: A Cartography of Coquetry

64 chapter฀3 The Coquette Here and There A Cartography of Coquetry ALEXANDER POPE’S remarkably tender and good-humored “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation” depicts its addressee as the “fair Zephalinda,” a young woman who was “Drag[ged] from the town to wholsom country air” (2) by her mother, just as she had begun to perfect a series of coquettish skills.1 In London, she had learned to “roll a melting eye” and “hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh” (3–4). And she had moved happily between “Op’ra, park, assembly, play,” becoming familiar with “Earls, and Dukes, and garter’d Knights. . . . scepters, coronets, and balls.” Now in the country, Zephalinda contends with “Old-fashion’d halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks” and at least one coarse country squire who “loves [her] best of all things—but his horse.” Here she spends her time praying, staring into the fire, and counting the passing hours. Pope’s languid spondees in these lines (“dull aunts,” “slow clock”) contrast sharply with the rapid, uneven syllables of his descriptions of fashionable London life. In a playful inversion of a conventional pastoral thematic of longing for a rural ideal, the “Epistle” affectionately elaborates the perspective of a character bored by the slow pace and relative solitude of the country, pining from the country for the busy, dynamic, and sexually stimulating life of a coquettish young woman in town.2 The poem’s structure entails a series of imaginative exchanges between country and town, as the final verse paragraph reveals the speaker to be Zephalinda’s “slave” in town (in fact, a headache-suffering poet friendly with Gay—i.e., a figuration of Pope himself) who imagines the countrybound young woman fantasizing about life back in London. The poem ultimately links speaker and addressee in their discontent about their respective locations (a doubly unfortunate discontent, since the two would still be separated if each wish for relocation were granted). Just as Zephalinda is roused by a flick of her fan from her visions of town life to the unwelcome realities of the “lone woods, or empty walls” around her (40), so the speaker in the final lines is roused from his visions of her country pastimes to his immediate context of urban chaos and excess: Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite; Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight; Vext to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sow’r, and hum a tune—as you may now. (47–50) With that final four-word phrase, the poet returns to imagining Zephalinda in the country, emphasizing their temporal connection despite their spatial separation. In this poem, here and there constantly vie for attention; both characters, it seems, readily slip into the reverie of imagining themselves elsewhere. This chapter explores the frequent yoking of these ideas of coquetry and elsewhere in early eighteenth-century texts. Regularly characterized as a woman in constant motion between fashionable places, the coquette also regularly figures in representations of others’ travel, both literal and imagined. Time and again, depictions of a coquette involve a speaker’s or character’s contemplating being in another place, pondering differences between a here and a there, or moving between locations that are understood to contrast one another. As I argued in chapter 2, though “coquetry” over time comes to name a primarily sexual behavior—that is, flirtation with (and presumed desire for) a variety of men—depictions of the coquette in The Coquette Here and There E 65 66 E our฀coquettes the early eighteenth century often emphasize other attributes or behaviors over flirtation and sometimes suggest that the coquette feels no desire for men at all. In that chapter, I highlighted the coquette’s desire for consumer goods as a defining feature. Here I will document a closely related pattern : the coquette’s association with various sorts of motion, through small spaces and across great distances. As we see in Pope’s “Epistle,” such representations imagine the coquette in relation to a series of overlapping maps. Pope’s poem, for instance, invokes specific socio-geographical schemas of nation, city, and world: it represents England as divided into the two, very differently inhabited terrains of “town” and “rural shade”; depicts London as a collection of particular public sites (the coquette’s “Op’ra, park, assembly , play”) linked by busy thoroughfares...