Steele, Jessica
Sample Academic Paper
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Description: Academic paper written for a cross-listed English and cultural studies course. This paper
applies a post-modern feminist framework to an eighteenth century author. I believe both narrative
studies and cultural studies are influential to modern marketing strategy.
Eliza Wharton: Between Woman, Nation, and Beyond
The Coquette through a Transnational Feminist Framework
Kaplan, Alarcón, and Maollem, in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational
Feminisms, and the State, illustrate “the making of new ‘civilizations’” as “imbricated in notions of ‘The
Rights of Man’ and ‘Rights of the Citizen’”(1). Absorbed in the “dialectic of equality and freedom”
(Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1), Hannah Foster’s eighteenth-century novel, The Coquette, revolves
around the social constructs of post-Revolutionary America. Foster illustrates a community of women
whose desires of “independence, action, and self expression”, purportedly guaranteed to all citizens in
the new nation, are repeatedly denied within the construct of women’s rights and social responsibility,
most noticeably through the restrictions of marriage and the denial of rights through “spinster[hood]”
(Davidson 145). Here, the heroine and her female companions find themselves within a nationalistic
meta-narrative, or the “unstable fiction” of an “imagined community”, where the “denial of sexual or
racial difference or both” is achieved through the collapse of the concepts of “Man” and “Citizen” to deny
difference of sex and race (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 2-6). Through these fissures of an incongruous
definition of “citizen”, The Coquette examines a nation questioning the contradictory denial and
simultaneous “affirmation of (these) difference(s)” in nationalistic discourse and power
structures(Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1). By identifying the heroine’s inability to assume the ideals
of the new nation, patriarchal schisms in this hegemonic dialect appear to represent woman as an
“eccentric subject”, identifying a “communal identity crisis” through Foster’s fatal conclusion, as well as
in all forms of “incongruous” citizens mimicked in today’s transnational narratives (Kaplan, Alarcon, and
Moallem 1). In this paper, I will examine how Foster both succeeds and fails to question the nationalistic
formation of the Republican woman from a transnational feminist perspective.
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While many of the sentimental novels of the time portrayed a “solid social realism…(even if
sometimes covert) of the patriarchal structure of that society” (Davidson 123), Foster pointedly bases her
fiction on the historical narratives produced around the biography of Elizabeth Whitman whose death
(1788) she emulates in the fictional heroine, Eliza Wharton (published 1797). Foster’s fiction retells the
monolithic narrative structured though historical gossip, newspapers, and additional tracks, which
perpetuated Whitman’s story as a simplistic rendering of “The Fallen Woman” (“Introduction” viii).
Whitman’s “seduction” was historically given “meaning” as a “good moral lecture to young ladies”
(“Introduction” viii). As a statement against women’s education, which was often traditionally paired
with the fear of women’s liberty, Whitman was portrayed as a female lead astray from her duties of
womanhood, and citizen, by the irrational sentiments derived from her readership of the sentimental
novel, and, therefore, her education. Early European sentimental novels (Richardson, Sterne), in fact,
perpetuated the physical and theological notions of seduction and ruin collapsed into one identity of “The
Fallen Women”. Such as in the case of The Coquette, we see death and/or suicide follow the
metaphorical and/or physical act of seduction. Although fictional pieces, these narratives reconstructed a
realistic patriarchal society where women’s inclusion or exclusion in a nationalistic identify was bounded
by her dependence on the male citizen. Female characters independence was limited to the acceptance or
denial of marriage proposals (which would lead to inclusion within a national community) or of an
independent rake (leading to the destruction of the American family and the exclusion or, even, death of
the heroine). Through The Coquette, Foster attempts to create new meaning surrounding Whitman’s
“Fall”, to highlight the denial of difference between woman as subject and the “universal” citizen which
were perpetuated through these tropes of the “The Fallen Woman”. While avoiding an overt political
statement, or even reconstruction of plot, Whitman’s story, through Foster’s tale, then becomes a subvert
political statement on the ideal woman in the new nation, one structured around “the negation of the
female self – her freedoms, her possibilities” (“Introduction” xviii), yet at odds with “universal” ideals of
the “Rights of the Citizen” (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 1).
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Rather than portraying Whitman’s outcome as the result of one disillusioned choice toward
passion, Eliza is presented with a lack of choice, as represented in her fictional suitors: Peter Sanford
whose rakish demeanor will only “submit [Eliza] to be shackled [if] it must be from a necessity of
mending…fortune” (Foster 23) or the “dependent situation” (41) of marrying a clergyman, in which she
fears of “the duties” of “that sphere”(Foster 39). Wavering between the uneasy positions of bachelorette,
mistress and spinster, Eliza attempts to take on the nationalistic ideal of independence for as long as she is
able: “I have but lately entered society”, she writes, “and wish, for a while, to enjoy my freedom, in the
participation of pleasures, suited to my age and sex” (Foster 50). Throughout the novel, the reader
observes Eliza’s inability to exist as both independent woman and citizen, existing neither as the ideal
citizen (and its simultaneous patriarchal subjections) nor the independent woman. Rather than drawing
her in opposition, as subject, to “the nation” or “the husband”, Foster embodies her immobility through
Eliza’s inability to choose a husband, the circulatory nature of the letters as she vacillates between a lack
of suitable options, and her silence in both choosing a partner and voicing consent.
As we examine the idea of “borders” of the nation, in a modern sense, “the concept of inner/outer
constructs an edge, or a border, that helps us apprehend the double movements of the nation-state, its
plural logic of doubleness and aporias” ( Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 5). Instead of overlooking and
perpetuating nationalistic discourse, or the “doubleness” which “serves to speak simultaneously in the
name of the people ‘inside’ and those who are outside, Foster employs Eliza’s immobility and silence to
place her in an “in-between” space, versus opposing her “adversely to a ‘center’” ( Kaplan, Alarcon, and
Moallem 5). In reconstructing Whitman’s fall, Foster, through a postmodern vision, places Eliza both
inside and outside of the national construct through her refusal to identify as married and/or unmarried,
and therefore, legitimate or illegitimate citizen – as defined by the patriarchal social constructs of the
nation. As symbolized through Eliza’s immobility and refusal to voice her acceptance or denial to
marriage, Foster highlights the problematic concept of “citizen” in a heroine who faces death when she
chooses to act both as an independent woman and citizen.
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Foster succeeds in working within the patriarchal narrative trap of the “universal” citizen, a
national meta-narrative which “preclude[ed] all the symbols and ‘myths of male culture’…that could
serve to express-or to elude-the woman’s situation for the woman era” (Davidson 13), while still
deconstructing the subjective role of woman as citizen within such a meta-narrative. One could argue
more aggressive tracts, such as Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, fought to disrupt
the existing meta-narrative by highlighting the borders (inclusion or exclusion) of identity in relation to
nationhood and gender. As the editors, and Butler would perhaps argue, this totalizing of difference
served to perpetuate the “rhetoric of margins” (8) through the “performance” of women as subject
(Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 7). Foster, in refusing to accept or deny her place within the nation,
highlights an “invisible center”, in which Eliza is both inside and outside:
“… the novel is about this salient center because ‘there is no action possible to the central
character and no series of events which will embody in clear, unequivocal, immediately
graspable terms what the artists means…There is nothing the female character can doexcept exist, except think, except feel…[the] long protracted fall and the silence that
surrounds it constitutes the invisible center around which this sentimental novel turns”
(Davidson 145).
Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem describe the theoretical temporal and spatial benefits of such a state of
“betweenness”, as a “suspended moment” which “refuses a moment of reversal of women for nation…or
nation for women” (14). Foster succeeds in identifying the paradoxical “doubleness” of the nation,
without constructing such a subversive concept of woman as “other”. In “double”, I draw on the editors’
notion of the contradiction between the “contents” (i.e. - the concept of the nation) versus the “concept”
as the women as illegitimate citizen, creating the “impossible unity of nation” ( Kaplan, Alarcon, and
Moallem 5). Therefore, Foster works within the existing meta-narrative to illustrate the incongruous
condition of women as citizen without re-creating the gender in opposition to the nation.
Highlighting the contradiction of the universal citizen, the reader learns the heroine cannot
achieve both states: woman and citizen. Vacillating too long in independence, Eliza finds her suitors
married and, through lack of choice, finds herself assuming the identity of a spinster. Desperately, when
faced with the “torture” of permanent independence, she begins to long for the “health, placid serenity,
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and every domestic pleasure” of married life (Foster 105). At this time, marriage, for women, represented
not only a subversive role within the new nation, but rested in her very survival due to economic and
political power structures. Realizing, “what are now my prospects?”, Foster calls on the terminology of
“The Fallen Woman”, even before the physical seduction takes place, “Oh my friend, I am undone! I am
slighted, rejected by the man who once sough my hand” (105). As a consequence for her overindulgence
in her quest for independence, Eliza’s physical death then serves to demonstrate her rejection as a citizen
in the nation.
One can argue Foster succeeds, progressively for her time, in Spivak’s call to avoid the positive
and negative dichotomies of gender through a demonstration of the “doubleness” of nation in its “crisis of
legitimization” (16), it is also important to examine Foster’s ability to “negotiate between the national, the
global, and the historical, as well as the contemporary diasporic” (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 15).
Foster was clearly writing within, and to, a select elite audience who were not only able to afford to read
her novel, but permitted to. Entitled The Coquette or, the History of Eliza Wharton a Novel Founded on
Fact, Foster alludes to the criticism of the novel, generated from a fear of disruption to elitist masculine
European power structures: “Might not the unsophisticated reader, these critics worried, readily emulate
unsavory portrayals of illicit sex, of dishonest dealings, of revolution and anarchy?”(Davidson 58). We
see, then, through multiple class structures, cultures, and histories, the “doubleness” of the “universal
citizen” applied, certainly not simply to women. Foster not only served to a select group of her gender,
she was also writing to a national versus local audience, where, by midcentury, only eight percent of
fiction was published by local, regional printers (Davidson 18). In limiting the deconstruction of the
problematic role of “citizen” to those of an elite Republican woman, Foster failed to consider the
“spatiality” and “temporality” of feminist concerns nationwide (Kaplan, Alarcon, and Moallem 15).
Through The Coquette we see representations of the white Republican women as unchanging in their
changing relationship to marriage structures within the nation (regardless of location, religion, etc.), as
well as an exclusion of the numerous cultures and races of women historically removed from the
traditional American citizenship narrative. Separating her female characters apart from the diverse range
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of concerns of both women and the multiple problematic “citizens” within post-Revolutionary America,
Foster contributed to a modern representation of a gendered Eurocentric nationalistic discourse limited to
these monolithic domestic concerns and roles.
Although the meta-narrative of the post-revolutionary culture may now have ebbed, as Ella
Shohat, in Talking Visions states, we find ourselves in a “moment of both rupture and continuity” where
the construction of Eliza, as a monolithic representation of her gender, leaves traces in a globalized
transnational discourse. How, then, do we move past these traces and remove ourselves from a narrative
trap, similar, yet different to the one Foster found herself in? Where Foster fails to remove herself and
her subjects from the specificity of their roles within a singular community, Shohat critiques the role of
Western feminism “practiced largely within the context of national/racial liberation”, historically
contributing to the “false dichotomies” of a “U.S.-based” perspective of nationalism including the global
creation of “a simplistic First World/Third World dichotomy” (3-12). Calling for the need to address
“both the Eurocentric assumptions of Western feminism and the (hetero)masculinist culture of nationalist
movements”, Shohat notes the importance of “dismantling” a “patriarchal nationalist…historiography
while also challenging the Eurocentric contours of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ within feminist
histography”(12). While Foster gives voice to the subjectivity and a false representation of a monolithic
struggle of the Eurocentric Western woman versus nation, Shohat describes the need to “stage a shifting,
multifronted constellation of struggles”, or multiple differences, “that can synergistically meet and
mutually reinforce one another” (Shohat 15). Although Foster falls short in examining the “hybrid culture
of all communities”, the eighteenth-century author nevertheless deserves credit for examining the place
(or lack thereof) of one community of women within the national post-revolutionary discourse, without
creating a positional and subjective representation of “sisters” versus nation (Shohat 12). As we continue
to observe traces of Foster and similar traditions of nationalist narratives, Shohat reminds us to do so
with a critical eye and to empower such differences through alliances, placing “diverse gendered/sexed
histories and geographies in dialogical relation in terms of the tensions and overlapping that take place
‘within’ and ‘between’ cultures, ethnicities, nations” (Shohat 1).
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Works Cited
Davidson, Cathy. "Introduction." The Coquette. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986. Print.
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1986. Print.
Foster, Hannah W. The Coquette. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.
Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcon, and Minoo Moallem. Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms,
Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Print.
McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial
Perspectives. 11. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.
Shohat, Ella. Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. New York: MIT, 1998.