The Trials of a New England CoquetteRockford and the Romantic History of Lillie Devereux Blake

In 1863, Lillie Devereux Blake published her second novel, Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm,¹ which told the story of a genteel New England family who traveled in privileged Connecticut and New York social circles much like Blake's own.² Like many domestic novels of the 1860s, the novel culminates in a marriage: Blake's heroine, Edith Rockford, now Mrs. Lionel Rohan, "reigns" as "the gentlest wife and mother" ever to grace the halls of Rockford Lawn (Rockford 308). If this union follows convention, however, the heroine who achieves it does not. Traditionally, nineteenth-century domestic novels grant happy companionate marriages only to modest, reserved women like Gertrude Flint in Maria Cummins's 1854 best-seller, The Lamplighter, whose marriage to William Sullivan rewards the "wonderful patience" with which she has learned to "bear injury [and] injustice" (242). The 1860s saw the rise of bolder heroines such as Yone Willoughby in Harriet Prescott Spofford's "The Amber Gods," who proudly declares herself the heiress of "a cruel race" and refuses to apologize for stealing her cousin's lover (45).³ Even these more transgressive narratives, however, tend to punish rather than reward what their readers would consider promiscuous behavior. Thus, despite her undeniable charisma, Spofford's most infamous heroine finds herself caught in a loveless marriage which results in her illness and premature death. In domestic fiction, particularly during the Civil War period, marriage was the province of shy, retiring women who followed the rules of courtship without transgressing the bounds of propriety.

This prevailing literary trend was no accident. American reading habits in the mid-nineteenth century reflected a continued desire to see companionate marriage as the ultimate goal of virtuous women. The period's most successful novels offer ample opportunities for heroines to prove their commitment to modesty and decorum. From American icons to transatlantic luminaries, best-selling authors of the 1850s and 1860s embraced a prevailing notion best captured by the subtitle of Samuel Richardson's Pamela: "virtue rewarded." In keeping with this tendency, Scott E. Casper identifies "religious and reform publications that attempted to spread the values of self-culture, self-restraint, and self-improvement across America" as particularly popular between 1840 and 1880 (32). Such themes reflected a tendency among American readers and publishers to validate works that promoted these virtues, regardless of the author's nationality. This trend proves especially true of fictional publications. Canonical British figures such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins appeared alongside popular American authors like Louisa May Alcott and Augusta Jane Evans on mid-nineteenth-century American best-seller lists.⁴ These works tend to unite around the same principles of female decorum and feminine virtue that Blake depicts in Rockford. Great Expectations, for example, punishes Estella for her vanity and her selfish disregard for Pip's feelings with an unhappy marriage to a man "who used her with great cruelty" (356). Operating on similar logic, Collins rewards Rachel Verinder with a felicitous marriage only after she proves her propriety and fidelity throughout the solving of the titular Moonstone mystery. These novels confirmed to eager American readers that women who conformed to such prevailing domestic ideals would be the ones to reap the benefits of marital bliss.

Rockford complicates such notions of feminine virtue. Despite the sensationalist nature of her early fiction, Blake's antebellum Southwold and her post-bellum Zoe; or True and False and Forced Vows; or A Revengeful Woman's Fate follow the prevailing pattern of rewarding socially approved feminine conduct with happy marriages. Only Rockford deviates from this pattern by granting its coquette an ideal marital union. In light of her own experience "as the reigning belle of New Haven," Blake's motives for this anomalous treatment of Edith as a literary heroine make sense (Farrell 18); Rockford adapts prevailing understandings of literary and social conventions to create a more nuanced presentation of the vivacious feminine conduct that was often denounced in genteel circles as vulgar coquetry. Grace Farrell credits Blake's own reputation as a youthful ensnarer of hearts with Yale...