Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Natasha Sajé

Critical Essay by Natasha Sajé

SOURCE: Sajé, Natasha. “Open Coffins and Sealed Books: The Death of the Coquette in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred.” Legacy 15, no. 2 (1998): 158-67.

In the following essay, Sajé explores Stowe's comparison of the treatment of women to the treatment of slaves in Dred.

Under the pretext of regulating courtship, the one acknowledged ritual of female power, stories of coquettes expose embedded attitudes toward women's language. For Harriet Beecher Stowe the coquette embodies the problem of a woman writer in a culture that disciplines women into silence. The coquette contradicts every tenet of nineteenth-century American “true womanhood”—piety, purity, submission, and domesticity.¹ Coquettes play rather than pray, and not in the garden or the kitchen, but in the parlor, and in the cities and social centers of the world—Paris, New York, or Newport.

Stowe's second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), features a coquette protagonist who is...
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