In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Eliza’s DispositionFreedom, Pleasure, and Sentimental Fiction
  • Abram Van Engen (bio)

I had a variety of concerns and exercises about my soul from my childhood; but had two more remarkable seasonings of awakening, before I met with that change, by which I was brought to those new dispositions, and that new sense of things, that I have since had.

—Jonathan Edwards in his “Personal Narrative”

My disposition is not calculated for that sphere.

—Eliza Wharton in The Coquette

Summing up the significance of Hannah Webster Foster’s popular seduction novel The Coquette (1797) in 2006, Laura Korobkin proclaimed: “What is at stake, finally, in fielding competing interpretations of The Coquette, is the meaning for Foster—and for us as well—of her central term, ‘freedom’” (99). I agree, but in this essay I argue that competing interpretations of the term have failed to account for the multiple fields in which it functioned. In the novel, the protagonist, Eliza Wharton, resists marriage to a socially respectable but overly patriarchal clergyman and instead succumbs to the temptations of a detested yet rather pleasing rake, eventually dying of childbirth in a tucked-away inn. Apart from Korobkin’s reading, critical interpretations often celebrate Eliza’s resistant pursuit of pleasure as an aspiration for social freedom or a potential instantiation of liberalism in a dawning political order. For over thirty years, such parameters—the social and the political—have defined debates not just about this book but also about sentimental literature more generally.1 Nor are such interests misguided. Throughout The Coquette, freedom often concerns precisely the role and rights of women under new forms of society and government. Yet while this novel asks what liberty looks like after national independence, it also investigates what it means and whether it exists in a providential—even predetermined—world. For Foster, freedom must consider the limitations of free will. [End Page 297]

The link between freedom and free will flowed most directly from the continuing presence of New England Calvinism, an influence that can perhaps best be seen in the rising reputation and importance of Jonathan Edwards. Philip Gura notes that “[b]etween 1800 and 1860 [Edwards’s] hortatory volumes, particularly his narratives of the eighteenth-century revivals, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and The Life of David Brainerd, were among the most frequently reprinted American books; their primary competition was Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography” (Truth’s Ragged Edge xiii). Even Edwards’s denser works were often reprinted, and the ideas they discussed would likely have been known by Foster, who was married to the only Congregational minister of Brighton, Massachusetts. One goal of this essay, therefore, is to situate early American fiction not just in its sociopolitical context but also in the context of religious ideas frequently debated in both pulpit and print. I want to sit Edwards next to Foster on the early American bookshelf. But opening Edwards, as I will show, initiates a discussion of beauty and pleasure as well; when we place these two together, we must consider aesthetic theory.

By drawing these discussions together, I hope to broaden our recognition of what freedom meant in early America, taking into account not just the social and political but also the religious and aesthetic. All these fields defined freedom differently, creating multiple meanings that sometimes sat in tandem and often existed in tension. For those scholars focused on the sociopolitical dynamics of The Coquette, freedom usually relates to issues of independence, autonomy, and the pursuit of pleasure—in short, Eliza’s self-determination. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory had a similar sense of freedom, but it also defined liberty as the cultivated space and open disposition—the ability—to make multiple associations through the use of one’s imagination. That definition sat between classic ideas of liberalism and the Christian tradition of liberty, which focused on an ability of a very different sort: Christian liberty defined freedom as being able to love and serve God. Such an idea is distinctly unmodern, but versions of it were common to the eighteenth century.2 In the first two sections of this essay, therefore, I will take some time to lay out the tradition of “Christian...

pdf