A central paradox of the seduction story is that of consent. If a woman is regarded as property, to be passed from father to husband, as women were regarded throughout most of the history of Western culture, then her consent to a marriage or other romantic arrangement becomes immaterial. However, in the seduction novels of the late 18th century, female consent is consequential, and female agency determines the outcomes of plots. Does this imply that seduction novels, often considered conservative because of the morals of virtue and chastity they sought to preserve, might be subversive? If we examine consent in the novels of the 1790s, we will run into what seems like a movement by the authors to discredit patriarchal ideas of woman's place in British and American society as well as issues of self-determination, accountability, and coquetry.

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that woman, created by God to serve the social and sexual purposes of man, fulfills her purpose best by feigning resistance to his sexual advances, "holding man at bay with 'the modesty and the shame with which nature armed the weak in order to enslave the strong'" (Rousseau, cited in Brown 629). In this view, rape is impossible because woman is by nature consenting, and her testimony to the contrary is worthless. Rousseau approvingly cites a law in Deuteronomy which punished only the seducer (rapist) if the crime had taken place in a rural area, but both the seducer and the seduced girl if the crime had taken place in a city, for the assumption was that if she had cried out, citydwellers would have rescued her, and the fact that the crime occurred implies her consent (Brown 630).

18th century feminists responding to thinkers like Rousseau developed a "feminist rhetoric of anticoquetry in order to "align woman with her words" (Brown 632). In taking on the role of the seducer and practicing ambiguity in her language and acts, writes Gillian Brown, the coquette "undermines consent's purpose as a vehicle of self-representation by detaching it from consequentiality" (633). This leads us to the problem of consequentiality, or female accountability.

Locke's theory that the consent of the governed establishes legitimate government makes a sad sort of sense in the society in which a woman's forced consent upholds the system which forced her consent in the first place. "Converting the liberal paradox of freedom and determinism into a causal sequence, [The Coquette] aim[s] to identify an accountable agent, to reduce the number of actors or agencies active in consent to one authorizing agent or source" (Brown 638). By boiling consent down in this way, and placing blame on the seduced female's agency, one could argue that Foster is vindicating the female gender at the expense of the unvirtuous, or one could argue that she is denying the social pressures which caused the victim to consent.

But consent to what? The consent which ruins women is not exclusively sexual consent. "For women, the lack of a single defining area of transgressive behavior that will convey the designation of 'lewd' makes the antitype even more threatening--how can one avoid crossing a line that cannot be seen? Patriarchal society is profoundly invested in the necessity of imposing the good woman/bad woman dichotomy, but the range of behaviors enacted on each side of the binary is frighteningly nondistinct" (Kittredge 8).

When a suitor's desired consent is denied, it may be the heroine's lack of agency which leads her to ruin. When Charlotte Temple is called upon to decide whether or not to get into the carriage that will carry her and her seducer, Montraville, away toward the New World, she faints and wakes in the carriage to find that her seducer has made the decision for her. "As an emotional infant, the heroine is not an agent in her own life, and she cannot be said to have enacted anything; in the getaway scene, Charlotte is rendered passive at the crucial moment, since to assent to such brutal divorce from her family would be unthinkable" (Stern 52). In the same vein, the narrator of Charlotte Temple skips over Charlotte's consent to her seducer's sexual advances, as do the letter-writers skip over Eliza's consent to Sanford in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. These missing moments could be read as a tribute to Rousseau--the assumption of conse--or as a more feminist implication that when female consent is not given priority and visibility, tragedy follows.

It is interesting to examine these novels in tension with William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, published in 1793, in which the raped woman Oothoon is able to regain not only her social presence, but also her sensuality. This kind of redemption is not possible in this world for Charlotte Temple or Eliza Wharton. In the note that she leaves for her mother before her flight, childbirth and death, Eliza Wharton writes, "Yes, madam your Eliza has fallen; fallen, indeed! She has become the victim of her own indiscretion, and of the intrigue and artifice of a designing libertine, who is the husband of another! She is polluted, and no more worthy of her parentage! She flies from you, not to conceal her guilt, that she humbly and penitently owns; but to avoid what she has never experienced, and feels herself unable to support, a mother's frown; to escape the heart-rending sight of a parent's grief, occasioned by the crimes of her guilty child!" (Foster 229).

• Blake, William. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy a. The William Blake Archive. Ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi. 13 November 1997

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

• 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.

• Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.