"Grow up, Eliza!"

13 February 2011

I watched a show on TLC today about wedding dresses and the girls who buy them. On this particular episode, the camera crew was in the alterations department to document a nervous bride’s first dress fitting. This bride wasn’t so much anxious about the big day as she was about the tent-like fit of her gown; pretty common fare for ladies about to take the long walk down the aisle, I’m told. When she decided on that dress, based on a sample gown she tried on during a previous shopping trip, the people in charge of such things advised her, normally a size four, to order the dress in a size twenty. The reason? This bride was pregnant. Six months pregnant at the time of her first dress fitting, to be more precise. Watching her walk down the aisle at the end of the episode, dress altered per her specifications, I couldn’t help but shake my head and yell to the screen, “You shouldn’t have got knocked up before you were married!” I realize that in this day and age, according to society, it’s not such a big deal for your groom to have to climb over your stomach to kiss you when the minister gives the okay. Heck, it’s not even that big a deal to never get married; instead, opting to be some guy’s “woman” and share his house and his VW van and have his babies, all the while working together to grow your own food. (If In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida isn’t playing in your head right now as you imagine the montage of Phil and Rainbow’s life together, I haven’t done my job.)

While I don’t support such things as cohabitation and premarital sex, society as a whole tends to care less these days. What is considered “appropriate” or “acceptable” or “decent” isn’t the same today as it was ten or twenty years ago; in fact, these terms all seem to be quite fluid. In my twisted mind, as my mind always ties everything I encounter in the real world back into literary issues, I thought about Hannah Webster Foster’s Eliza Wharton and how the coquette would stack up in today’s world. While Eliza probably wouldn’t have died an ignominious death if she were impregnated by her married lover today, I kept coming back to my initial reaction that she probably wouldn’t have been happy, either. I am confident that Eliza brings her horrible predicament upon herself through her naïveté and immaturity, making said predicament all the more tragic.

On first reading The Coquette, Eliza seems like a fun-loving gal who just wants to after the fortuitous death of her much-older, well-respected, long-time fiancé,

Mr. Haly. She is, in her own words, “[n]aturally cheerful, volatile, and unreflecting” and wants nothing more than to mix “in the busy scenes and active pleasures of life” (Foster, 808). If we were choosing literary characters to hang out with in a social setting, I would be the first to pick Eliza Wharton for my team. She’s witty, energetic, and by all accounts, a fun girl. That being said, I would also probably be the first one to tell her to reign in her volatility where interpersonal relationships are concerned. “Grow up, Eliza!” I can picture myself saying.

In looking back on the events leading up to her tragic, yet predictable demise, it’s fairly easy to see where she went wrong. Most critics read the novel and cast Eliza as a proto-feminist, at odds with the antiquated ideals of her family members and friends and a “powerful champion of personal freedom” (Korobkin). I read it and thought she was immature, which is really the festering sore from which all of her other problems stem.

Take, for example, a scene described in Letter III: Eliza, with the Richmans, attends a party at Col. Farington’s. After dinner, all the guests go for a walk in the garden. Eliza walks a little distance away from everyone and is followed by Mrs. Laiton, who takes the opportunity to offer her condolences at the passing of Eliza’s fiancé, Mr. Haly. Eliza proceeds to cop an attitude and throw a silent hissy fit

(Foster, 809 ). Don’t remember this scene? That’s probably because Eliza is the one describing it in the novel. It’s easy to side with the narrator, or in this case, the letter-writer; a reason I think most people mistake Eliza’s spirited “sense of entitlement” for freedom-loving and patriotic early feminism (Korobkin). When you do take the time to step back and evaluate the situation as an impartial observer, a few things come into focus: “As an acquaintance, Mrs. Laiton has no reason to know either that Eliza had no warm feelings for Mr. Haly or that she would not welcome condolence at the loss of a presumed loved one. Mrs. Laiton's expression of sympathy, which she waits to deliver until Eliza is walking alone, is not necessarily inappropriate or empty, nor is it clearly critical of Eliza” (Korobkin).

Eliza seems to make it a practice to run from responsibility, and fly off the handle when others mention it. But she’s not purely selfish and self-serving; if she were, we as readers would catch on pretty quickly and take an instant dislike to her, which isn’t the case. Along with her Peter Pan-like desire to avoid responsibility like the plague, there also seems to be an element of uncertainty underlying all of Eliza’s actions. She is a woman torn; torn between what she knows she should do (what her family and friends advise her to do) and her desire to do what she feels like (whatever vague or sudden inclinations her volatile disposition points her towards).

According to Laura Korobkin, modern readers tend to read Eliza’s materialism and preoccupation with hilarity and frivolous social pursuits as forward-thinking, glossing over “her hostility toward anything that interrupts her fun or smacks even minimally of middle-class adult responsibility” (Korobkin).

Representative of these two conflicting ideas are her two most ardent suitors, Mr. Boyer and Peter Sanford, and each has his pros and cons; hence the indecision. Marrying

Boyer would create the stable, dependable, and respectable life Eliza’s reason tells her she should want. But her materialistic, social-climbing self doesn’t see much insinuation into the glamorous upper echelons of society that she craves if she marries Rev. Boyer. Eliza is the daughter of a country minister herself, so an alliance with a man of the cloth wouldn’t be much of a step up for her. Peter on the other hand, is handsome and fun-loving. But he is a known rake which pretty much puts to bed (literally) most chances of having a respectable relationship (i.e. marriage) with him. Eliza’s indecision about these two suitors is the first tragically fatal mistake, stemming from her immaturity, that she makes.

Practically the entire first half of the novel is composed of her bouncing back and forth between Boyer and Sanford. In one letter, she’s decided to give up Sanford and cultivate her relationship with Boyer and in the next, she’s writing her girlfriend that “‟a reformed rake makes the best husband‟” (Foster, 835). Things finally reach a climax when Boyer, tired of being treated like a yo-yo, gives Eliza a deadline to give him a straight answer about their finally being engaged. On the day she is to give Boyer an answer, he finds her alone in her mother’s garden with Sanford and breaks off their relationship on the spot. After he’s gone, Eliza is sent into a profound melancholy because she realizes that she really did want to marry him. She laments to Lucy Sumner: “we know not the value of a blessing but by deprivation”(Letter XLIV). Eliza finally writes Boyer, offering herself to him as a wife, but he has already become engaged to another girl. This sends Eliza further into a spiraling depression. Ironically, one of the things that kept Eliza during their courtship was that she imagined a life with Boyer would be “dreary and confining” (Korobkin). But after she realizes she can’t have him, she becomes depressed and confines herself, mostly to her mother’s house. She no longer takes pleasure in parties or and it’s like pulling teeth to get her to talk to anyone. Up until Boyer dumped her, everyone thought that he and Eliza really were engaged. Being jilted by Boyer, therefore, somehow makes Eliza damaged goods. Apparently, because of some unwritten rule, and through mutual nonverbal agreement, all of the many admirers Eliza was “pestered with” at the beginning of the novel have all made themselves scarce now (Foster, 811).

All of these factors contribute to Eliza’s emotional and psychological condition at the end of the novel. Eliza just can’t pull herself out of her depression. She wants to feel like her old self, but she doesn’t know how, so she begins grasping at straws. Sanford is the one person who makes her feel like she’s still Eliza, that girl who was “the toast of the country”, the one who everyone wanted to be around (815). Naively, she lets him insinuate himself into her life again, a recurring theme in the plot. Her immaturity causes her to play right into Sanford’s hands.

Throughout the novel, Sanford says whatever he thinks she wants to hear and does whatever he thinks he needs to do to seduce her. He keeps coming to Eliza and trying to redefine their relationship because the seduction takes longer than he thought it should. Edison only needed one way to make a light bulb, right? If one way doesn’t work, abandon it and try another. This pattern keeps repeating itself throughout the entire novel: Eliza lets Sanford in a little, and then because of advice from friends she holds him at arms’ length. Then he comes to her and says he wants to redefine their relationship (i.e. to get serious, to just be friends, to be close friends, like siblings) so she lets him in a little more. But, more advice from friends persuades Eliza to be wary of him. While she does occasionally try to distance herself from the rake, Eliza can never seem to fully disentangle herself from Sanford. In Letter X, she says, “his assiduity was painful to me; yet I found it impossible to disengage myself a moment from him .” In Letter XIX, “My heart did not approve his sentiments, but my ear was charmed with his rhetoric, and my fancy captivated by his address.” Eliza’s immaturity, once again, aids and abets her downfall. She suffers from bad-boy syndrome, a malady common to females. She knows she shouldn’t like Sanford or have anything to do with him because he is a known rake. But that knowledge just adds a rush of adrenaline to her system every time she sees him and every time he talks to her. There’s probably also a little piece of her that thinks Sanford really will change for her, and become a reformed rake.

After Boyer breaks off their relationship (part of Sanford’s twelve-step seduction plot), Eliza turns to Sanford, who has reappeared, married, and with pretensions of being like a brother to Eliza. Elizabeth Dill in her “A Mob of Lusty Villagers” submits that this is part of a deeper, more sick and twisted psychological issue of incest, and apparently there are other people in this incest camp as well. I’m not saying that incest wasn’t on Hannah Webster Foster’s mind when she wrote The Coquette, but to me, that seems like a bit of a stretch. I think Sanford is just trying to lull Eliza into a false sense of security while he tries to insinuate himself further into her life and figure out his next move.

When she finally is seduced by Sanford, I think it’s because Eliza wants to be the old Eliza again so badly that she starts grabbing at any semblance of her old life, any vestige of herself. That, unfortunately, means Sanford and his attentions. Eliza learns too late that he is, both literally and figuratively, an empty shell of what he appears or professes to be. He’s not really rich and he’s just a lech, though he does in his own sick, perverse way love her.
Eliza is repeatedly described as “volatile”, and her volatility, I believe, is a by-product of her immaturity. Korobkin notes: “Chemically, a substance that was volatile showed a readiness to vaporize or evaporate, [a] tendency to be readily diffused or dissipated in the atmosphere, especially at ordinary temperatures‟ (OED); by analogy, a character similarly constituted has no independent central core holding it together, but dissipates itself through social interactions.” Had Eliza not invested herself so fully in superficial and inconsequential pastimes, perhaps she would have been able to be more serious or at least give more thought to serious subjects, like her relationships. She would have been more able to make an accurate appraisal of herself and her long-term goals and aspirations, and thus have realized before it was too late (1) that she wanted to marry Boyer, and (2) that Sanford was a rake and everything he supposedly had to offer her wasn’t enough to make her happy.

In the end, Eliza goes into self-imposed exile, leaving her mother a letter of apology and asking for her forgiveness. She gives birth to a baby who dies and shortly thereafter dies herself. All of this could have been avoided if she had reigned in her materialistic desires; if she had taken the time to make an accurate appraisal of herself and her real feelings and desires; if she had severed all ties with Sanford immediately upon hearing of his reputation; if she had realized that he hadn’t changed and was never going to change; in short, by simply being a little more mature. While I have no doubt that Eliza’s terrible, embarrassing end predicament would be substantially less so in today’s culture, I’m also fairly certain that her outrageous level of immaturity would prove to make her just as miserable carrying her married lover’s baby.

Works Cited
Dill, Elizabeth. “A Mob of Lusty Villagers: Operations of Domestic Desires in Hannah

Webster Foster's The Coquette.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 15.2 (2003):

255-280. Wilson Web. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.
Foster, Hannah Webster. “The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton. A Novel.

Founded on Fact. By a Lady of Massachusetts.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Vol. A. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007. 807-904. Print.

Korobkin, Laura H. “Can Your Volatile Daughter Ever Acquire Your Wisdom?” Luxury and False Ideas in The Coquette.” Early American Literature 41.1 (2006): 79-107. Wilson Web. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.