Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction: “Our Present Numerous Race of Coquets”

1 Introduction “Our Present Numerous Race of Coquets” I do not perceive you have yet ever said one Word concerning a very reigning Foible among [our female contemporaries]. . . . What I mean is that enormous Vanity of attracting as great a Number of Lovers as possible, and giving an equal Share of Encouragement to all, keeping all in Hopes though there can be but one, and it very often happens that not one, she ever designs to make happy. —Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator To make her an agreeable Person is the main Purpose of Her Parents; to that is all their Cost, to that all their Care directed; and from this general Folly of Parents we owe our present numerous Race of Coquets. —Richard Steele, The Spectator BEFORE 1660, English readers and theatergoers had never heard of a “coquette”; by the early 1700s, they could hardly watch a play, read a poem, or peruse a newspaper without encountering one. Vain young women who defy dominant codes of sexual conductbyencouragingseveralsuitorsatonce,the“coquettes”thatabound in early eighteenth-century literature were consistently represented as 2 E our฀coquettes creatures of their historical moment. In particular, the coquette characters of this period exercise choice in ways only newly available to large numbers of women in Britain. They consume the imported luxury goods flooding domestic marketplaces in an era of expanding global trade, drinking coffee and tea out of Chinese porcelain and drawing attention to themselves through a display of “exotic” fans, combs, laces, and silks. They appear at a variety of newly popular public gatherings—operas, balls, ridottos, pleasure gardens—where “people of fashion,” diverse crowds drawn from the merchant classes, gentry, and nobility, spend or gamble their increasing disposable income. They travel improved roads between London and modish watering holes where they can find new suitors to encourage, new rivals to make jealous. Perhaps most definitively, these coquettes insist upon marrying only whom they want, when they want, and if they want. Although the term eventually comes to refer specifically to disingenuous sexual encouragement , the “coquette” in her earliest appearances in British literature is more expansively characterized as a woman who resists any constraint upon her choices. Offered an array of appealing options—of luxury goods, public entertainments, pets, clothes, or lovers—the coquette chooses them all. Whether or not large numbers of British women actually exhibited such behavior, the textual record from the late Restoration through at least the mid-eighteenth century documents a widely shared sense that coquetry was anewandpervasivephenomenoninEngland—andaproblemthatrevealed key truths about the contemporary world. Again and again, in periodical essays, poetry, stage plays, novels, and songs, the prevalence of coquettes is cited as a sign of the times. Our Coquettes examines the cultural functions of this sudden burst of discourse about unruly female choice. Most centrally, I analyze the ways early eighteenth-century authors use representations of coquetry to assert, define, and assess their culture’s modernity: that is, put most simply, their self-consciousness about living in a present defined by its distinctness from the past.1 Reviewing a range of texts that represent, address, critique, and/or celebrate coquettish women, I argue that coquette discourse in this period functions not only as a means of defining and inter- Introduction E 3 rogating standards of female virtue but also as a signifier of the newness of a series of social relations, practices, and experiences. I show, in other words, that writings about the coquette indicate not just what people thought about fashionable female behavior but also what they thought that behavior revealed about their historical moment more broadly. Itself a modern word, only imported into English in the 1660s, “coquette” does not simply supply updated nomenclature for an old type.2 Rather, I argue, this new term establishes a new constellation of associations specific to its historical moment , creating a cultural common sense about women, courtship, marriage, education, consumerism, travel, urban life, and the relations among all of these. Perhaps the most characteristic feature of descriptions of coquettes is the implication that everyone attuned to contemporary social dynamics knows what a coquette is. As when Spectator 66 (1711) nods to “our present numerous Race of Coquets” or when the Female Spectator (1745) refers to coquetry as “that indeed too reigning Foible” (4.357), the period’s authors regularly refer to the phenomenon of coquetry as something “we” all recognize as a defining trend of the...