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Elizabeth Whitman's Disappearance and Her "Disappointment"
Bryan Waterman
| ELIZABETH Whitman has been a missing person since the summer of 1788. She disappeared first, at age thirty-seven, of her own volition, fleeing a genteel home in Hartford, Connecticut, and hiding away in a rural Massachusetts tavern, where she died after giving birth out of wedlock to a stillborn child. She was further obscured after her death by the polite—perhaps cold—silence of friends, by the burning of correspondence, by layers of representations and interpretations in rumors, newspapers, epitaphs, and tour books, and, most dramatically and enduringly, by the character Eliza Wharton in Hannah Webster Foster's popular seduction novel The Coquette, which appeared in ten editions from 1797 to 1866. But Foster's novel, though many nineteenth-century readers assumed it was fact rather than fiction, was not the only version of Whitman's story to endure. Generations of New Englanders circulated alternative accounts of Whitman's last months, from the time her death was first publicized until interest finally waned in the early twentieth century. Some of these accounts seem to have been more widespread than the novel at times. Contributing to these competing histories, autobiographical poetry attributed to Whitman circulated in manuscript and newsprint and reappeared perennially in local histories and guidebooks. Foster's character Eliza Wharton, too, had a long history outside the novel's pages. She appeared in a dramatic adaptation of the novel, published in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802. Her wax likeness circulated among New England towns through the early nineteenth century; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow mentioned it as late as 1849 in Kavanagh. Wharton's name was even given to a famous antebellum racehorse.1 Together the combined and conflated legends of Whitman and Wharton drew travelers and locals to the rural cemetery where Whitman was buried. During the nineteenth century, the headstone and footstone placed there in 1789 by her friends were gradually chipped away until the epitaph was obliterated and only a pathetic stump of soft, red freestone remained. |
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The meanings assigned to Whitman's life and death from her day to our own have been more varied than consistent. Though Foster's novel positioned Wharton simultaneously as a coquette and a victim of seduction (leading two centuries of readers to disagree about the novel's attitude toward her), the two other most-circulated versions of her story—the autobiographical poem "Disappointment" and the epitaph on her headstone—position her as something else: an intelligent, self-determined woman, flawed but responsible for her own actions. Indeed the narratives contained in the poem and epitaph seem intent on extracting Whitman from the conventions of the seduction plot and writing her into a more active role than such a story typically allows. Seduction stories, which proliferated in the second half of the eighteenth century in newspapers, advice manuals, stage plays, novels, and poetry, dramatized contests for agency and authority between aristocratic men, the powerful, and lower-class or orphaned women, the subordinate (also sometimes between powerful older men and vulnerable young men). In novel form stories such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa gained new meanings and uses over time and in different geographic settings, and by the end of the century it seemed impossible to pick up a periodical without some mention of courtship, marriage, or seduction, often in fictional narratives that, like The Coquette, claimed to be founded in fact. Above all these stories stressed a lack of sexual agency on the part of their heroines, who more frequently suffered Clarissa's fate (death following dishonor) than Pamela's (leveraging her master's desire into upward social mobility). As one recent study of American seduction fiction argues, "Women in these American stories are the unvarnished medium for carrying on a relationship [of property relations and cultural authority] among men." In postrevolutionary America a seduced heroine not only is powerless to defend herself but also often brings disaster to her family, emphasizing the reach of the seducer's agency at the expense of his victim's.2 Seduction stories, that is, plotted against autonomous female sexuality. |
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