Coquettish Mothers across the Atlantic: Gendered Liberty, Disciplinary Sexuality and Colonial Productivity in Lady Susan and The Coquette

Abstract

This article reads Jane Austen's Lady Susan alongside Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette in the context of the shifting British colonial relationship with America. I present the coquettish mother as a historically significant literary figure who embodies the rival claims of Enlightenment liberty and the necessity to control national (re-)production via an exploitative, colonial logic that enables ideological formations of domesticity. My analysis of the socially corrective drive captured in these novels suggests that British anxiety over the loss of the American colonies prompted an urgent and ongoing effort to redefine productivity by obscuring the economic consequences of female sexuality.