If we accept Leonard Tennenhouse's assertion that American seduction novels, such as Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, view women as a commodity, passed or sold from man to man, then seduction is at core a not an issue of female restraint but a power play between males. Seduction violates the marriage commerce between elite families, and thus poses a threat to the system of patrilineage which maintains the privelege of the elite. "The seduction stories so popular during the early republic offered an American readership experiments in imagining just who could marry whom, thus new ways of reproducing class distinctions" (Tennenhouse 6).

The virtuous heroine or suitor desires marriage. The unvirtuous heroine, or coquette, desires to postpone consent and enjoy the affections of her suitors without making a commitment, while the unvirtuous suitor, who may be called a rake, libertine, or seducer, wants sexual gratification without binding himself through marriage to a woman beneath him in social or economic standing. In a culture where a suitable marriage is a woman's primary goal, then, she must be extremely careful to guard her reputation, and, on a superficial level, this is the message of the seduction novel. In The Coquette, the seducer Sanford states outright that he would be ashamed to marry a woman whom he had seduced, for the reason that she was "seducible" and thus unfit to be any man's wife. Katherine Kittredge writes, "In the eighteenth century, women's behavior was not exclusively monitored for the actual commission of sexual transgressions (these acts would have been private and largely undetectable): instead, the focus was on detecting the related behaviors that would indicate, through their deviance from the feminine ideal, that these women were rebellious in spirit and thus likely to commit or condone sexual transgressions. The obsession with female 'reputation' fostered the development of new social practices and complicated codes designed to make sexual purity highly visible within a public context--rules dictating dress, comportment, conversation, and even physical response (flushing and blushing). These rules for appropriate social behavior, which were instituted by the wealthier classes and gradually trickled down to the working classes, are both a reflection of and a force behind the widening divergence of the social roles of men and women" (6).

Most authors within this genre depicted marriage as honorable and all other options as dishonorable. "Female novelists could further comply with constraints on their writing by casting heroines' stories in marriage plots, confirming that the acceptable trajectory for women's lives led to marriage; by rewarding heroines whose behavior fit the period's codes for female morality; and by punishing those whose behavior was less strict. Modest, tractable, self-effacing, and above all chaste heroines gained the reward of a loving, titled, wealthy husband as their stories moved to a euphoric close. Those with exceptions such as Pride and Prejudice, Emmeline, and Cecilia--ended with the marriage plot's dysphoric conclusion: death, signaling exclusion from the social system for failure to follow its rules" (Shaffer 287).

The author of a seduction novel must establish these "rules for appropriate social behavior." This is commonly done through the depiction of virtuous characters who act as foils to the erring protagonists. In The Coquette, for instance, Lucy Freeman and Julia Granby show us all the virtue that Eliza Wharton lacks. Lucy is married during the course of the story, and Eliza's seducer, Sanford, even notes the impossibility of a rake's insinuating himself into the regard of such a "prude" (Foster 118). In Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, there exists the opposite character in La Rue, the depraved French schoolteacher who encourages Charlotte's ruin by advice and example. La Rue lacks every female virtue; she lacks modesty, restraint, honesty, affection for the young girl in her care, responsibility to her employer, and even, finally, mercy on her pregnant, homeless and dying protegee. Next to La Rue, Charlotte is a wonder of virtue.

Another character type vital to the seduction novel formula is the confidant. To provide us with a window into the degenerate mind of a seducer, Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster both created depraved friends for their seducers to converse with. In the case of Charlotte Temple, Montraville's friend Belcour serves this purpose and then extends his service to the text by becoming truly remorseless in his destruction of Charlotte, letting us ponder the moral ambiguity of Montraville's actions in contrast with the decided wickedness of his own. In the narrative device of epistolarity, or letter-writing, makes it easy for us to eavesdrop on Sanford's correspondence to his friend, Charled Deighton. These letters, written to a confidant with no masking of true intention or character, show us what the author wishes us to believe are the real motives of a seducer.

These bystanders to the act of seduction provide a wealth of information about the moral, sexual, and social norms of the 1790s as well and about the character of the social world that would have been familiar to the young, female readers of seduction novels.

• Foster, Hannah Webster. The Coquette. In The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette. Ed. Carla Mulford. New York: Penguin, 1996.

• Kittredge, Katharine. "Introduction: Contexts for the Consideration of the Transgressive Antitype." In Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003. 1-15.

• Krause, Sydney J. "Ormond: Seduction in a New Key." American Literature 44.4 (1973), 570-584.

• Shaffer, Julie. "Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality." In Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor (MI): U of Michigan P, 2003. 283-310.

• Tennenhouse, Leonard. "Libertine America." A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies11 (1999), 1-28.