Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter Four: Women Who Choose Too Much: Reforming the Coquette

chapter฀4 Women Who Choose Too Much Reforming the Coquette The thing chosen; the thing taken or approved, in preference to others. —Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary The person or thing chosen or selected. —Oxford English Dictionary JOHNSON’S fourth and the OED’s fifth definition of “choice” both document its use to indicate the end of a decision -making process, the outcome of a consideration of one’s “preference ” or desire. But neither goes so far as to note that the noun “choice” in eighteenth-century English widely functioned to name a woman’s elected spouse. That is, a woman’s “Choice” often indicated not just any “person . . . chosen or selected,” not just any “thing taken or approved,” but, quite specifically, a man selected as a husband. Periodicals, novels, and conduct books all offer illustrative examples of this usage. Addison in Spectator 15 97 (1711), writing of women’s presumed love of “show,” sums up a story about a rivalry between two men for a young lady’s hand: “At length, when the Competition was doubtful, and the Lady undetermined in her Choice, one of the young Lovers very luckily bethought himself of adding a supernumerary Lace to his Liveries, which had so good an Effect that he married her the very Week after.” In Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Lady Mellasin contemplates the benefits of Betsy’s coquetry : “In her heart she was far from being averse to [Betsy’s] receiving a plurality of lovers, because whenever that young lady should fix her choice, there was a possibility some one or other of those she rejected might transmit his addresses to her daughter, whom she was extremely desirous of getting married” (193). Samuel Richardson’s 1741 instruction book known as Familiar Letters includes a letter “From a Daughter to her Father, pleading for her Sister, who had married without his Consent,” in which the daughter writes: “dear sir, be pleased to consider that it now cannot be helped, and that she may be made by your Displeasure very miserable in her own Choice” (93). Ranging from skeptical uses that suggest the woman ’s “choice” may be ill considered to sincere evocations of the seriousness and permanence of women’s “choices,” these passages exemplify a usage in which a word that potentially signifies both an array of options and the freedom not to narrow them signifies instead a single (act of) selection. This conflation of “choice” and “husband” has the capacity paradoxically to exaggerate both the expansiveness of and the restrictions upon even the most economically privileged woman’s control over her fate. On the one hand, it erroneously suggests that women have ultimate decisionmaking power over their marital destinies, the freedom to consider a broad series of options and select the preferred one. (As I noted in my introduction , Mary Astell in Some Reflections Upon Marriage resists adopting this usage, insisting, “A Woman, indeed, can’t properly be said to Choose; all that is allow’d her, is to Refuse or Accept what is offer’d” [37].) On the other hand, it suggests that women’s power to choose resides most importantly , and perhaps even entirely, in the arena of spousal selection: in this respect, the synonymity of “choice” and “husband” elides all of women’s options and decisions outside the matrimonial realm. This paradoxical 98 E our฀coquettes Women Who Choose Too Much E 99 “choice” pointstoearlyeighteenth-centurywomen’sincreasedsocialagency, mobility, and consumer power even while it encodes a gender ideology that defines women’s ideal life narrative as a willing progression from daughterhood to wifehood. As such, it conveys in miniature the sorts of critiques of coquetry I have been tracing. It suggests that, faced with an array of options (among consumer goods, public entertainments, admirers), a young women should not, as the coquette does, choose them all; rather, she should choose to become a wife. Which is to say—given the legal fact of coverture, a system in which a married woman is legally, socially, and economically subordinated to her husband—she should choose to limit her ability to choose.1 In this chapter, I analyze a trio of texts that tell the story of a young woman making such a choice. These early eighteenth-century “reformed coquette narratives” follow young women who initially reject but ultimately embrace marriage as a desirable goal for themselves. While the two previous chapters...