Marriage, Coverture, and the Companionate Ideal in The Coquette and Dorval

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