Topic > The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster - 4243

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster Eliza Wharton has sinned. She also seduced, deceived, loved and was had. With The Coquette Hannah Webster Foster uses Eliza as an allegory, the archetype of a woman gone wrong. To a twentieth-century reader, Eliza's fate seems overly dramatized, pathetic, perhaps even silly. She loved a man, but circumstances dissuaded their marriage and forced them into a whirlwind, guilt-ridden tryst that destroyed both their lives. A twentieth-century reader might have supported Sanford's divorce, might have supported the affair, might have supported Eliza's acceptance of Boyer's proposal. She may have thrown the book to the floor in anger, disgraced by the image of incapable and trapped female characters. We might see similar reactions when we place Foster's novel in an eighteenth-century context. But would these have been the reactions Foster expected? Should eighteenth-century female readers see La Coquette as an instructive text, or should they enjoy it without applying it to their own lives? Did he aim to teach his female audience proper conduct and warn of the dangers of the licentious seducer? The book was a best seller; why would this type of text have been so popular? Writing a diary from the perspective of an imaginary eighteenth-century reader, a mother whose daughter is the age of Eliza's friends, will allow me to use reader response criticism to help answer these questions and to decipher the possible social influences and/or meanings of the novel. Although the reader's critical response varies from critic to critic, it is largely based on the idea that the reader himself is a valid critic, that his criticism is influenced by time and place,... by the medium of paper... .ontagu." [http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/montagu.html#Introductions]. June 1996.2. Davidson, Cathy. Revoultion and the Word, The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.3. Foster, The Coquette New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.4., Toward an Aesthetics of Reception Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.5 : Routledge, 1985.6 of reader response?" in The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Bedford, 1991.7. /www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/entries/reader-esponse_theory_and_criticism.html] 1997.8. A Vindication of Woman's Rights. New York: Penguin, 1992.