SOURCE: “Beyond ‘A Play about Words’: Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette,” in The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 71-151.

In the following excerpt, Stern explores the connection between women's imagination and freedom in The Coquette, concluding that women lacked true freedom in the American republic of the time.

Spectacle

Lucy's programmatic diatribe [in Foster's The Coquette] on the heroine's failure of resolution is followed in the same letter by perhaps the most fascinating and certainly the least explored passage in Foster's novel. Mrs. Sumner proceeds to unfold at Eliza's request an extraordinary disquisition on the moral inadequacy of Boston's “public and private places of resort” (113), the popular amusements at which she has been a spectator. It is here that the forms of play operating at the margins of Foster's representation come into view as cultural...