SOURCE: “Domesticating ‘Virtue’: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, edited by Elaine Scarry, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, pp. 160-84.

In the following essay, Smith-Rosenberg examines Eliza as representative of the nascent middle class in eighteenth-century America, characterized by a desire for individualism and risk-taking. According to Smith-Rosenberg, in The Coquette Foster reevaluates the place of women in society within male notions of nationalism and class.

Passion corrupting virtue, libertines destroying happiness, independence misused, seduction, betrayal and death.

This is a summary not of the torrid plots of afternoon soap operas or harlequin romances, but rather of the themes that obsessed America's first novelists, in the years following the American Revolution. Written as our national identity and modern class structure first took shape, America's earliest best-sellers—Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Ormond—were filled with scenes of fortune-hunting rakes...