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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.2
EAN num: 9780140434682
ISBN number: 0140434682
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: November 01, 1996
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 41760
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Product Description:
Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in America. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy reflects eighteenth-century America's preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the country's morality. A novel about the dangers of succumbing to sexual temptations and the rewards of resistance, it was meant to promote women's moral rectitude, and the letters through which the story is told are filled with advice on the proper relationships between the sexes. Like The Power of Sympathy, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is concerned with womanly virtue. Eliza Wharton is eager to enjoy a bit of freedom before settling down to domestic life and begins a flirtation with the handsome, rakish Sanford. Their letters trace their relationship from its romantic beginnings to the transgression that inevitably brings their exclusion from proper society. In her Introduction, Carla Mulford discusses the novels' importance in the development of American literature and as vivid reflections of the goal to establish a secure republic built on the virtue of its citizens.
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Rated by buyers 
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An excellent book. I was really only interested in The Power of Sympathy because of its billing as the very first American novel. I had never heard of "The Coquette," a separate novel included in the Penguin Classic version. It turned out that The Coquette was the far more interesting of the two...much better writing and much better insight into the thinking of the times on the subjects of the role of women in the new United States and of the existence and the consequences of seduction. The actions of women have changed immeasurably since that time but the thinking remains remarkably the same.
Rated by buyers 
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Brown's The Power of Sympathy is a strange set of letters that form a strange world where sentimentality is outrageously rampant and its characters drawn in flat, lifeless tones. The main story (although that's a hard definition to give to anything in this jumble) is that of Harriot and Harrington, who fall in love. The correspondence that makes up the novel is mainly between Harrington and his friend Worthy - Harriot has one of the smallest roles in the story. Other seduction stories are told, all of them a little ridiculous. In one instance, a woman is tricked into a man's carriage, and her faithful, loving fiance immediately despairs and drowns himself in the river. Other men of the village track down the carriage and bring her back, but the man who apparantly loved her gave up all hope when she lost her innocence. What a bleak tale. This novel of morality is actually very shallow, enforcing and reinforcing one idea only: that of the sin of being seduced or seducing. Of course, Brown wrote for a female audience, so it can perhaps be assumed that the only sin they really needed to worry about was losing their virtue. And of the ten main characters in all the seduction stories in Sympathy (there are five separate seductions, I think), 6 do not survive to the end. According to Brown, the wages of sin are most definitely death.
These characters are either so boring or so over the top emotional that I found it hard to draw a good lesson from any of it. At the end, when tragedy has struck, Harrinton sends a series of distraut letters to Worthy, each one saying, in effect, "I'm going to kill myself." Worthy's somewhat delayed response is a dismal endeavor to save the life of his friend. "Our prison grows familiar," Worthy tells Harrinton, "there is not one but finds his partiality for his dungeon increase...how few are they who are hardy enough to break their prison?" That's not a very good endeavor to keep a grieving man from taking his life, and that last part almost seems like Worthy is egging Harrington on, saying, "c'mon, chicken, I bet you WON'T kill yourself, you aren't hardy enough!"
The Coquette - this is a far more interesting tale, starting out with a sort of anti-heroine in Eliza Wharton. She does enjoy society, and seems to have her heart in the right place, but is easily and repeatedly misled by the novel's rake, one Major Sanford. The story gets muddled as it tries to fictionalize a true account of Elizabeth Whitman, who bore an illegitimate child and died shortly after. The introduction by Carla Mulford gives us some information on the real woman, and it seems pretty clear that Whitman fully encouraged the love affair that led to her ultimate ruin. Foster attempts to make Eliza Wharton into a fully sympathetic character - Wharton denies to everyone that Sanford wishes ill for her, and seems never to notice (until too late) that he does not have good intentions. The effort to reconcile the real Whitman, 37 and completely in control of her (mis)conduct with the completely guileless woman who elicits pity from even the hardest heart does not quite work, and leaves a mysterious chasm.
All of Eliza's friends, her mother, her rejected ex-fiance, warn her about the intentions of Sanford. The fact that Eliza still believes he is a good man means that she is either completely oblivious, or pretending not to know his true colors so that she has an excuse to remain in his company. I think that Foster probably did not intend the second character to come across, but I think THAT Eliza would have been more compelling than the one we are given. What an interesting tale that would have been...sort of another Shamela. But, especially when compared to Brown's "Sympathy," "The Coquette" is really an interesting morality tale. Eliza, before descending into pure imbecility, makes a lot of compelling arguments for her freedom and her desire to remain as she was in society, which her society would not tolerate.
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