Brown's The Power of Sympathy is a strange set of letters that form a strange world where sentimentality is outrageously rampant and its characters drawn in flat, lifeless tones. The main story (although that's a hard definition to give to anything in this jumble) is that of Harriot and Harrington, who fall in love. The correspondence that makes up the novel is mainly between Harrington and his friend Worthy - Harriot has one of the smallest roles in the story. Other seduction stories are told, all of them a little ridiculous. In one instance, a woman is tricked into a man's carriage, and her faithful, loving fiance immediately despairs and drowns himself in the river. Other men of the village track down the carriage and bring her back, but the man who apparantly loved her gave up all hope when she lost her innocence. What a bleak tale. This novel of morality is actually very shallow, enforcing and reinforcing one idea only: that of the sin of being seduced or seducing. Of course, Brown wrote for a female audience, so it can perhaps be assumed that the only sin they really needed to worry about was losing their virtue. And of the ten main characters in all the seduction stories in Sympathy (there are five separate seductions, I think), 6 do not survive to the end. According to Brown, the wages of sin are most definitely death.
These characters are either so boring or so over the top emotional that I found it hard to draw a good lesson from any of it. At the end, when tragedy has struck, Harrinton sends a series of distraut letters to Worthy, each one saying, in effect, "I'm going to kill myself." Worthy's somewhat delayed response is a dismal attempt to save the life of his friend. "Our prison grows familiar," Worthy tells Harrinton, "there is not one but finds his partiality for his dungeon increase...how few are they who are hardy enough to break their prison?" That's not a very good attempt to keep a grieving man from taking his life, and that last part almost seems like Worthy is egging Harrington on, saying, "c'mon, chicken, I bet you WON'T kill yourself, you aren't hardy enough!"

The Coquette - this is a far more interesting tale, starting out with a sort of anti-heroine in Eliza Wharton. She does enjoy society, and seems to have her heart in the right place, but is easily and repeatedly misled by the novel's rake, one Major Sanford. The story gets muddled as it tries to fictionalize a true account of Elizabeth Whitman, who bore an illegitimate child and died shortly after. The introduction by Carla Mulford gives us some information on the real woman, and it seems pretty clear that Whitman fully encouraged the love affair that led to her ultimate ruin. Foster attempts to make Eliza Wharton into a fully sympathetic character - Wharton denies to everyone that Sanford wishes ill for her, and seems never to notice (until too late) that he does not have good intentions. The effort to reconcile the real Whitman, 37 and completely in control of her (mis)conduct with the completely guileless woman who elicits pity from even the hardest heart does not quite work, and leaves a mysterious chasm.
All of Eliza's friends, her mother, her rejected ex-fiance, warn her about the intentions of Sanford. The fact that Eliza still believes he is a good man means that she is either completely oblivious, or pretending not to know his true colors so that she has an excuse to remain in his company. I think that Foster probably did not intend the second character to come across, but I think THAT Eliza would have been more compelling than the one we are given. What an interesting tale that would have been...sort of another Shamela. But, especially when compared to Brown's "Sympathy," "The Coquette" is really an interesting morality tale. Eliza, before descending into pure imbecility, makes a lot of compelling arguments for her freedom and her desire to remain as she was in society, which her society would not tolerate.

Hannah Foster Webster uses letters to tell a story of Eliza and her lovers. Although this is an ingenious method, it makes the reading so complex.Webster also explores the power that women have in Revolutionary America. It is a good portrayal of the exception. In a time when most women are ruled by their father or husband, Eliza and her mother are both independent. The most striking detail of the book is that Eliza is actually "past her prime" in terms of that era. She is 37 years old; many women would have been married at 16. Altogether this book was a good and quick read and I would recommend it to those who like history or women's studies.

Hannah Foster's 1797 novel, "The Coquette," seems, at first glance, like an early American ripoff of such famous 18th century British novels like Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" or "Clarissa," and indeed it contains references and allusions to both, and to a wealth of other 18th century British fiction. In its historical context, though, "The Coquette" acquires added significance and cultural depth, as a response to the guiding philsophies and political stances of the new American nation.

"The Coquette" begins with death and a rebirth. The main character, your title coquette, if you will, Eliza Wharton, rejoices in her freedom from the structure of her family's controls. Her betrothed, an elderly man named Haly, has just died, releasing Eliza from an unloving engagement. Free now to indulge her native sprightliness and sociability, Eliza goes to New Haven, Connecticut, to spend some time with and in the society of her married friend, Mrs. Richman. In New Haven, Eliza, already in her late 20's-early 30's, is the darling of society, where her cultivated mind, and liberal temperament are given free reign. Here, she is wooed by two men, Reverend Boyer, about to come into a residency in a fashionable parish, and Major Sanford, widely known as a libertine, but permitted into polite society because of his rank and apparent wealth. The action of the novel concerns Eliza's choice between the two.

The choice, simple as it may seem, is complicated by its inflections by way of the political and social culture of the early American republic. In such contexts, Eliza, with the help and advice of her confidants, Mrs. Richman, Lucy Freeman, Julia Granby, and her own mother, must try to negotiate newly-found freedom and independence within the gendered constraints of virtue and propriety. This is the philosophical and political crux of the novel - Foster asks the reader throughout the novel how individual freedoms are to be understood within a newly centralized federal government.

Alongside the common romance-epistolary tropes of seduction and violation, we read "The Coquette" with an eye toward agricultural and commercial expansion. In a novel where seemingly no one works to earn a living, we must extrapolate the typically early American notions of self-making and industrious citizenry through the characters' discussions of personal and social identity, as well as in the way that people create themselves through personal writings. This is evinced, of course, most obviously in early America by folks like Benjamin Franklin in his "Autobiography" and Thomas Jefferson in his "Notes on the State of Virginia".

Foster's "The Coquette" isn't the best novel. Shoot, in terms of artistry, it's really not very good at all. But as a barometer of one woman's opinions on the early American nation, and the place of women within it, it is an invaluable fictional resource.