Brown, Gillian. "Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences." American Literary History 9 (1997), 625-652.

Gillian Brown examines Hannah Webster Foster’s critique of coquetry in The Coquette, viewing coquetry as a “critique and an appropriation of consent” (627). Agency, writes Brown, is not enough for the heroine of an 18th century seduction story. Though coquetry implies a certain level of female self-determination, “what Foster delineates in Eliza’s practice of consent is the limits in which consent always operates” (626). Brown looks to Lockean consent theory, or the idea that the consent of the governed establishes legitimate government, to explain the social system which operates around female consent and the subversiveness of coquetry, the refusal to give or deny this consent.

Brown devotes pages to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of the coquette, his denial of the existence of rape, and view that woman, created to serve man, is by nature sexually consenting. Compounded with the dissimulation inherent in the idea of coquetry and the historical identification of women as deceptive, Brown paints a picture of the opposition faced by feminist readers of seduction stories. She cites Catherine Macauley as a critic of the 1790s who responded to Rousseau with anticoquetry rhetoric that placed blame on the actively consenting woman, not the entire gender, and believed that coquetry derived from social inequality between genders.

Brown examines the disjunction between consent and consequences, the association of coquetry with monarchical power, and the very idea of female consent in a society which still often viewed women as property. She goes on to discuss Charlotte Temple’s ambiguous consent as well as evidence in the seduction story—destroyed and created bodies as proof of consent and the subversiveness of eliminating these elements from a story, as was done in The Coquette.

On the subject of determinism, Brown writes, “Converting the liberal paradox of freedom and determinism into a causal sequence, both narratives [The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy] aim to identify an accountable agent, to reduce the number of actors or agencies active in consent to one authorizing agent or source” (638). Blame is thus placed on the coquette, her seducer, and the practice of coquetry itself.

Entered by Sarah on 28 July 2004 at 10:38 AM.