Enjoyment as an Ontological Factor: Sex, Death Drive, and the Subject of Jouissance in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette

Unaccountably wayward

About two thirds of the way through Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797), the novel's eponymous heroine, Eliza Wharton, provides a rather remarkable explanation for her prolonged indecision regarding her choice of suitor. Courted by two men, one of whom, the reverend Mr. Boyer, is a paragon of virtue, while the other, the rake Mr. Sanford, is a paragon of vice, Eliza, though she knows very well Sanford's reputation for "libertinism" (62), simply cannot bring herself to reject him outright. Indeed, much of the novel is comprised of missives between Eliza and her friends and family in which the latter continually strive to impress upon her the "fatal consequences" (122) of continuing to entertain the advances of a selfprofessed "man of pleasure" (51). The particular passage I have in mind here concerns Eliza's response to a letter from her best friend, Lucy Sumner (née Freeman), following the news that Boyer, having caught Eliza and Sanford in what he mistakenly believes is a lovers' tryst, has withdrawn his suit. Lamenting the "mist of fanciful folly" that has continually "obscured [Eliza's] brilliance," Lucy implores her friend to "return" to the "empire of reason," exclaiming, "Where, O Eliza Wharton! Where is that fund of sense, and sentiment which once animated your engaging form? Where that strength of mind, that independence of soul, that alacrity and sprightliness of deportment, which formerly raised you superior to every adverse occurrence? … Let reason and religion erect their throne in your breast; obey their dictates and be happy" (84). Having already confessed on multiple occasions that her "reason and judgment" are "in scales" with her "fancy" and that "[w]hich will finally outweigh, only time can reveal" (41–42), Eliza, in her reply to Lucy, does anything but assure her friend that she will obey the dictates of reason, writing:

The events of my life have always been unaccountably wayward. In many instances I have been ready to suppose that some evil genius presided over my actions, which directed them contrary to the sober dictates of my own judgment.

I am sometimes tempted to adopt the sentiment expressed in the following lines of the poet,

"To you, great gods, I make my last appeal;O, clear my conscience, or my crimes reveal!If wand'ring through the paths of life I've run;And backward trod the steps, I sought to shun,Impute my errors to your own decree;My feet were guilty, but my heart was free."

I suppose you will tell me, that the fate I accuse, through the poet, is only the result of my own imprudence. Well, be it what it may, either the impulse of my own passions, or some higher efficiency; sure I am, that I pay dear for its operation.

(85)

This is a remarkable passage for any number of reasons, but what I want to focus on here is its incredible prescience. Whereas Lucy's letter to Eliza is utterly of a piece with the contemporaneous discourse of sentimentality and the eighteenth-century philosophy of mind that helped shape that discourse (not only does Lucy appeal to Eliza's "fund of sense, and sentiment," but so too does she pit the "dictates" of reason against what another of Eliza's friends—her cousin, Mrs. Richman—at one point excoriates as "the delusions of fancy" [41]), Lucy's reply is uncannily forwardlooking. Though framed through the age-old dialectic between fate and free will, Eliza's suggestion that perhaps some "evil genius" has presided over her actions and impulses, rendering them "unaccountably wayward," anticipates Sigmund Freud's discovery of the "death drive" (Todestrieb), that psychic phenomenon which, in "act[ing] in opposition to the pleasure principle" and "over-rid[ing]" the "selfpreservative instincts," "give[s] the appearance of some 'daemonic' force at work," the "impression … of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power" (Freud, Beyond 41, 25, 46, 41, 23).¹

Freud's characterization of the death drive as a fate-like malignancy...