Week 5: The Coquette

The Coquette


I find that really anything can be broken down into good and evil. Granted most things aren't as black and white, but everything in essence is either good or bad. Or even, one thing is not as bad as something else. Everything can be placed on a spectrum of good and evil. This spectrum stems from human nature. Almost everyone has a conscience, logical thought process, that helps determine actions and such. In The Coquette Eliza (and her allegorical counter-part, America) must weigh the decision of whether to follow the path of good (safety, easiness, Boyer, English rule) or evil (war, hardship, Sanford, Liberty). The choice Eliza makes again matches her allegorical mate, America—she chooses liberty with Sanford. Does this mean that Liberty is evil? No, not in the slightest. But no one said conquest was easy. One must steal the mind and charge into the face of certain death. The Coquette is a cautionary tale in a way—almost a “be careful what you wish for” type, written after the action had already happened. Are we going down a path that will lead to our destruction? What happened to our allegorical America? She died, alone, and impregnated by liberty.

When reading The Coquette, I couldn’t help but think of a combination of Chopin’s The Awakening and James’ Daisy Miller. In both, the female characters liberate themselves from normal constrains of social life, just as Eliza tries to liberate herself. In The Awakening, Edna finds that she can never really be happy now that she is awake, and ends up finding the only happiness she can in death. Daisy Miller also meets a tragic end after she professes her independence. These are just two examples but there are many female literary figures that portray the independent woman meeting her demise. It seems almost inevitable that Eliza should meet her own tragedy after her own freedom. The female literary figure is flawed in a way that the male counterpart is not. She has to overcome so many obstacles, social, emotional, and so forth that are not always written for the men.

It’s doesn’t make much sense to me, to have a woman author writing about such a horrible situation with a tragic lead character. Yet many times this happens. Hannah Foster presented the situation as Elizabeth Whitman (the real Eliza Wharton), in a tragic sense. She is not a heroine in my eyes. Even if she tried to break out and do her own thing. I know she says “…leave me to exercise my own free will” (Foster 29), but she wants freedom, that’s it. I get it. But she goes on to say on a later page, “I am young, gay, volatile. A melancholy event has lately extricated me from those shackles, which parental authority had imposed on my mind. Let me have this opportunity, unbiased by opinion, to gratify my natural disposition in a participation of those pleasures which youth and innocence afford” (Foster 13).