SOURCE: “The Politics of Seduction: Theater, Sexuality, and National Virtue in the Novels of Hannah Foster,” in Essays in Performance and History, edited by Della Pollock, The University of North Carolina Press, 1998, pp. 238-57.

In the following essay, Richards examines the motif of theatricality in The Coquette and The Boarding School as a paradigm for women's lives in the America of Foster's era, noting that women were called upon to know how to act on the social stage, yet they were expected to resist its attractions.

The novels of Hannah Webster Foster (1759-1840) show a thematic richness and a complexity of text that have only recently begun to claim the scholarly attention they deserve. Like many novels of the early republic, Foster's The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798) explore the problems faced by women caught in the trap of sexual seduction, a narrative situation usually explained by the...