포스터의 『교태부리는 여자』 연구: 폐미니즘 선언 또는 도덕적인 이야기?
A Reading of Foster’s The Coquette: A Feminist Manifesto or Another Moral Tale?
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Abstract
In the critical discourses, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) has long been read as one of seduction novels fraught with didactic moral messages. However, recent criticism rereads the work as a novel with subversive feminist intents. Basically following this latter group of critical viewpoints, and taking into consideration the historical and cultural background in which the work was produced, this paper attempts to read The Coquette as a moderate feminist manifesto with all its equivocal didactic elements. Eliza Wharton, the heroine in The Coquette, is portrayed as a woman who struggles to choose a husband of her own free will. She hesitates between a boring but respectable suitor, Reverend Boyer, and a charming but immoral rake, Major Sanford, in spite of her friends' uniform view of Boyer as a better match. Eliza's indecisiveness, after a while, leads Boyer to leave her, and she finally falls to a victim of Sanford's seduction and dies in childbirth. This story seems to confirm the Republican Ideology in which woman's proper place was confined to a moral center in the family, in the role of a virtuous wife and mother. On the other hand, however, Eliza’s story shows that the status of woman in the early Republic was narrowly limited, and that the ideas of individual independence and freedom were not open to women. Ironically, however, Eliza’s determination to pursue her own freedom is not supported by the tightly-knit circle of her female friends who staunchly vouch for the woman's role prescribed by the Republican Ideology. Although Eliza's female friends show a deep sympathy for her conflict and plight, a more subversive possibility of female communal vision is safely contained by a conservative message in the moralistic ending. Therefore, The Coquette can be read only as a moderate feminist manifesto, a ‘modest proposal' to criticize the limited status of woman in the early America.
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