“He’s a Witch!”: Foster’s Magical Emasculation of the Libertine in The Coquette

Written in 1797, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette exemplifies seduction and libertinism in the early American Republic. While much of the scholarship on Foster’s narrative centers on the coquette's image and consent, critics have also noted Major Peter Sanford's manipulation and control over Eliza. My paper seeks to dive deeper into Sanford’s character as I suggest Foster depicts Sanford with qualities that echo the outsider role of witches in Early America to critique his libertine image. Foster not only emasculates Sanford, but also highlights the libertine’s fallibility in the new republic and the rake’s danger to colonial society, especially in an age of fragmentation and instability. In this paper, I explore the three modes in which Foster presents Sanford as a feminized male witch: 1) as a deceiver, 2) as an outcast, and 3) as a weakened individual, attributes tied with the colonial witch. Foster’s rhetorical choice to liken Sanford to a feminized male witch has a twofold result: 1) she emasculates a seventeenth-century masculine image to stay in touch with late eighteenth-century discourses surrounding the feminization of the libertine, and 2) through Sanford’s emasculation, declares the libertine’s threat to the new Republic during an age when masculinity had altered. The feminization of the libertine is not unique to Foster; rather, her presentation of such emasculation of the rake through witchcraft terms is what makes Foster’s Major Peter Sanford so distinctive.