Coquetry is at core an issue of consent, or the suspension of consent. In the seduction novels of the 1790s, and indeed, in the culture of the 1790s, a woman's refusal to decide whether to accept or reject a suitor is a crime grave enough to justify that woman's ruin. Eliza Wharton, the protagonist of Hannah Foster Webster's The Coquette is the prototypical coquette: desirable and intelligent, but reckless in her assertion of social independence. Her eventual seducer, Peter Sanford, writes of Eliza:

I first saw her on a party of pleasure at Mr. Frazier's where we walked, talked, sung, and danced together. I thought her cousin watched her with a jealous eye; for she is, you must know, a prude; and immaculate, more so than you or I must be the man who claims admission to her society. But I fancy this young lady is a coquette; and if so, I shall avenge my sex, by retaliating the mischiefs, she meditates against us. Not that I have any ill designs; but only to play off her own artillery, by using a little unmeaning gallantry. And let her beware of the consequences. (Foster 118)

If the seducer is an incarnation of Satan, then the victim of his seduction, a woman in league with Satan, is a witch (Reed 26). Even more witchlike is a coquette. "The coquette appears in these novels as one of the modern figures of sorcery. Despite the widely held belief that witches had been expelled from the Age of Enlightenment and packed off far from the shores of Reason along with their craft, the eighteenth-century novel brings the sorceress back into our phantasms, back within the horizon of our desires. Her secrets, her ability to hypnotize the other through her enticing attire, her rites of initiation are all terrifying: once again, the witch is back with her charms, potions and poisons" (Saint-Amand 5). The implication of sorcery is just another way to deprive women of their agency, since even the power of a witch derives from her connection with Satan, a man. Freud felt that female seduction is an extension of penis-envy, or a compensation for female sexual inferiority, or "genital monstrosity" (Saint-Amand, 19).

Anticoquetry rhetoric is often political. Gillian Brown points out two opposite readings of The Coquette. Mary Wollstonecraft identified the coquette with Marie Antoinette and "the corrupt economic and sexual practices of monarchy" (Brown 633). In this light, the suitor who evades the charms of a coquette is like a revolutionary. On the other hand, Eliza's "characterization of the change in her situation as a movement from subordination to freedom conspicuously echoes the rhetoric of filialism--the rights of each new generation over the claims of hereditary authority embodied in monarchy--that figured so urgently in American revolutionary polemics" (Brown 636). So the coquette, as well as the suitor who escapes her, can be a revolutionary character.

1790s feminist Catherine Macaulay claimed that social equality would eliminate coquetry (Brown 632). Her assertion is yet to be tested.

• Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Libertine's Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel. Hanover: Brown University Press, 1994.

• Brown, Gillian. "Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences." American Literary History 9.0 (1997), 625-652.

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

• Reed, Toni. Demon-Lovers and their Victims in British Fiction. Lexington (KY): The University Press of Kentucky, 1988.