Refiguring the Coquette: Essays on Culture and Coquetry (review)

The image on the cover and frontispiece of Shelley King and Yaël Schlick's edited collection encapsulates the features of the iconic coquette during her heyday in the eighteenth century. An amiably adorned woman, with patches on her face, ribbons at her neck, and a hand placed at her décolletage, tips her head coyly so as to seem modest yet attract attention. This portrait actually shows a male singer in female guise as a coquettish nymph in a Rameau opera (ca. 1745). By surprising readers in this way, the editors signal their interest in looking at the coquette and reviewing her/his transformations.

Since the nineteenth century, the coquette has been construed conventionally as a young, unmarried, and sexualized woman, flirty with suitors and rivals, mannered in dress and behaviour, and alluring yet withholding. By contrast, the etymology of the term refers to male sexual behaviour, and eighteenth-century definitions of "coquette" and "coquetry" were not uniformly sexed and gendered. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language defines "coquetry" as "affectation of amorous advances; desire of attracting notice." The trajectory of the evolving usage of this word veered towards identifying "coquette" and "coquetry" with women, and the editors argue in a lucid and stimulating introduction that this history parallels ideas and practices about sexual difference and sexual differentiation over the course of the century. Current interpretive tools from gender studies and cultural studies help King and Schlick reflect on reciprocal relations between representation and sociocultural realities. They highlight the rise of middle-class and consumer culture, for example, to explain how the coquette was "reformed" over time into a domesticated model of exemplary femininity or new-style masculinity.

Essays in the collection re-examine cultural constructions of the coquette from the Restoration into the Regency. Section 1, "Façades, Performances, and Self-Fashioning: Constructing the Coquette," opens with Theresa Braunschneider's essay about the coquette as an iconographic figure whose accoutrements are visual, gestural, and material. Hair ornaments, jewelry, fans, lush fabrics, and lapdogs are part of a vocabulary of identity and performance. Braunschneider calls upon early eighteenth-century texts (for example, Anne Finch's "Ardelia's Answer to Ephelia") that satirize coquettish behaviour by linking sexual and consumer desire. Next, Brenda Foley discusses the coquette on stage in eighteenth-century theatre and pursues the theme of theatrical masking as having to do with both concealment and revelation. She argues that the features of a coquette are an intentional strategy; hence, the coquette is a decentering figure of ironic commentary and social satire "whose gaily painted face, objectified as an icon of desire, conceals the subjective agenda of its wearer" (70-71). Foley's examples include The Way of the World and The London Merchant.

Essays in section 2, "The Perils and Politics of Femininity: Embodying the Coquette," track the coquette into the later eighteenth century and beyond. Tamara Wagner studies elderly and decaying coquettes who represent Regency high life in women's writing from 1801 to 1831 (for example, Lady Delacour in Belinda and both Lady Catherine and Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice). These coquettes, placed within narratives of moral domesticity, highlight changes in class, generations, and taste. In contrast to these portrayals, Temma Berg gives a sympathetic account of coquetry in her essay about a woman on the marriage market in the 1780s and 1790s. Berg uses a series of letters found in the Society of Antiquaries, London, to read the young Sylvia Brathwaite "from within her own subjectivity" (103). These documents— acknowledged by Berg as being at the border between fact and fiction—portray coquetry as a deliberate form of self-fashioning. Sylvia Brathwaite reports, for example, turning to novels as self-help manuals about dress and manners so that a habit of coquetry could suit her needs and give her power as she moved from youth into marriage and motherhood. A similar strategy...