Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Karen A. Weyler, Associate Professor (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Abstract: In this essay, I focus on Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood's Dorval, novels suggestive of how the topos of coverture is explored in early American fiction with regard to bourgeois women. While discussions of coverture in general speak to the foreclosure of independence for women in the wake of the American Revolution, both Foster and Wood expose the larger economic implications of coverture for a nation in which wealth was becoming increasingly portable and hence vulnerable to the schemes of unethical or fiscally irresponsible men.
Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval
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Created on 6/6/2014
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Legacy 26.1 (2009): 1-25
- Language: English
- Date: 2009
- Keywords
- Marriage in literature, Married women, Legal status, American Literaure, 19th century, Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Dorval