Mrs. Foster's Coquette and the Decline of the Brotherly Watch

M rs. F oster'snmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Coquette an d the D eclin e o f the B roth erly W atchQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA F R A N K SH U F F E LTO N If one makes an informal survey of the novels written by Americans and published in New England before 1800, one is struck by the over­ whelming preponderance of sentimental fictions about beleaguered females, hapless orphans, and seduced and abandoned heroines.1 The earliest of these novels, William Hill Brown's T h e P ow er o f S y m p ath y , published in Boston in 1789 purports in its subtitle to be "Founded in Truth," but we might well wonder just what truths lie behind weepy epics such as this, seemingly compounded in equal proportions of sentimental effusions about thwarted love and intrusive moralizing about the dangers of seduction. Critics have tended to dismiss the moral injunctions of a writer like Brown as a means to evade vestigial Puritan condemnation of frivolous tales,2 but in doing so they run the risk of misrepresenting the way in which some of these novels in­ tended to speak to their time by imaginatively projecting their read­ ers' moral situation. This confusion about the apparently disparate purposes of fiction and moral education is occasionally encouraged by the novelists them­ selves. Brown, for instance, has a feminine paragon send "a little work entitled 'A Lady of Quality's Advice to her Children'" to a young friend, commenting, "I do not recommend it to you as a novel, but as a work that speaks the language of the heart and that inculcates the duty we owe to ourselves, to society and the Deity."3 We should, how­ ever, emphasize in this sentence not the seeming rejection of the fic­ tional art in which Brown himself is engaged but the connection he 211 212 / ponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA SHUFFELTON makes between heart and duty, and we should further perceive that his notion of the heart may have rather more to do with Jonathan Ed­ wards than with Lawrence Sterne or perhaps even Clarissa Harlowe. Although the literary devices of these American novels depend heav­ ily upon the tradition of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, it is somewhat of a mistake to read them only in terms of that tradition, for such reading inevitably leads to a focus on what is merely deriva­ tive and typical. The best of these novels deserve to be read on their own terms, for they are special cases, written for particular American audiences and, at their most perceptive, addressing particular Ameri­ can concerns. For example, Hannah W. Foster's 1797 epistolary novel, TSRQPONMLKJ T h e C o­ qu ette, carried on its title page the claim familiar to many of the novels of this period, "Founded on Fact." T h e C oqu ette, however, notoriously was founded on fact, for its heroine, Eliza Wharton, was clearly mod­ eled on the almost decade-old case of Elizabeth Whitman, a young woman of Hartford, Connecticut, who sought to conceal her seduction and pregnancy by hiding herself from her family and friends. Miss Whitman fled to Danvers, Massachusetts, took a room at the Bell Tav­ ern under the name of Mrs. Walker, and after giving birth to a still­ born child in July 1788, died of puerperal fever on the 25th of that month. After the landlord of the Bell placed an account of his myste­ rious lodger in the Salem M ercu ry for 29 July 1788, Miss Whitman's identity was revealed, and the Boston papers published accounts of her sad story, one of them embellished with a poem by her entitled "Disappointment." The In d ep en d en t C h ron icle of 11 September 1788 said Miss Whitman's story was "a good moral lecture to young ladies," for "having coquetted till past her prime, [she] fell into criminal indul­ gences, proved pregnant and then eloped—pretending (where she lodged and died) to be married, and carried on the deception till her death." The M assach u setts C en tin el of 20 September, which printed her poem, claimed, "She was a great...