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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers
The desire to tie the historical figure of Elizabeth Whitman to the fictional one of Eliza Wharton unmistakably compelled an 1855 edition to include a historic preface in which “the real names of the principal actors in this most affecting and lamentable Drama are for the fi rst time given to the public by the daughter of the author who possesses peculiar means to ascertain the FACTS” (reprinted in Bolton 153). Jane E. Locke writes a memoir of Foster in the 1866 edition, which is the fi rst version of the novel to carry Foster’s name as the novelist (Bolton 154). There is also mention of a three-act play, The New England Coquette, made of Foster’s novel by J. Horatius Nichols in 1802 (Bolton 154–155). Charles Bolton writes sympathetically of Elizabeth Whitman, stating that hers was a tale “of an era when there was less of variety in a girl’s daily round, and few opportunities for the expression of her individuality. These pages tell also of one who chafed under these conditions” (xi). Bolton cites another source who believes that Elizabeth Whitman may have been the figure who inspired Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (10). Bolton reproduces a poem penned by Elizabeth Whitman, which appeared in the Centinel on September 20, 1788, entitled “Disappointment” (16–22). Whitman died, probably of puerperal fever (a common cause of many women’s deaths after childbirth due to infection of the uterus), on July 25, 1788 (Bolton 30). Notice of her death, and the death of her child, appeared in the Salem Mercury on July 29 and was soon reprinted and circulated in the Massachusetts Centinel (Bolton 33–37). The notice was intended to alert family and friends of the demise of the “strange woman.” Interestingly, the language employed in the description of Elizabeth Whitman seems very much in keeping with Foster’s fictional Eliza: “Her manners bespoke the advantage of a respectable family and good education. Her person was agreeable; her deportment, amiable and engaging; and though in a state of anxiety and suspense, she preserved a cheerfulness which seemed to be not the effect of insensibility, but of a fi rm and patient temper” (Bolton 36).
Aspects of this language are echoed at the novel’s conclusion on the tombstone erected by Eliza’s friends (260). Following this moral line, it would be quite easy (and ultimately simplistic) to read Foster’s novel as a tale intended to warn young female readers. Boston’s Independent Chronicle printed an article of September 11, 1788, that drew upon Elizabeth Whitman’s personal tragedy as a source for a communal morality lesson: Both this aforementioned article as well as one published in the same newspaper just nine days later credit Whitman’s reading habits with her demise (xi–xii). The September 11 and September 20 letters refer to Whitman as a “great reader of romances” with the latter pursuing the logic that this genre was culpable for her downfall by insisting that “she had formed her notions of happiness from that corrupt source” (xii). Because the newspaper accounts of the historical figure who many see as the basis for Eliza Wharton all point to her seduction as a moral tale intended to warn young ladies against following the same path, it seems quite logical to imagine that readers of Foster’s novel would consider the fictional figure as a subject of moral instruction. Unlike her fallen heroine, Hannah herself appears to have led a conventionally moral and upstanding life. In their fi rst 10 years of marriage, she bore six children: three sons and three daughters. Until his retirement in 1827, John served as a minister in the local church. Two years later, John Foster died. After her husband’s death, Hannah Webster Foster left Massachusetts to live in Montreal, closer to two of her daughters, Harriet Vaughan Cheney and Eliza Lanesford Cushing. Hannah Foster Webster died in Montreal in 1840 at the age of 81.
The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton (1797) When it was fi rst advertised in Boston’s Columbian Centinel on August 5, 1797, the author appeared under the nearly anonymous descriptor of “a lady of Massachusetts” (v–vi). It was not until 1866,