tombstone was erected in attempts to revive the community's interest in the tale of Elizabeth Whitman and Foster's novel. It is now included on the Literacy Trail of Massachusetts. With the growing popularity of Foster's novel, the true Elizabeth Whitman and the fictional Eliza Wharton became melded into one and are barely differentiable by most readers today. Interpretation and criticism The Coquette received a revival of critical attention during the late twentieth century. It is often praised for its intelligent portrayal of the contrast between individualism vs. social conformity and passion vs. reason. It has also been studied for its relationship to political ideologies of the early American republic and its portrayal of the emerging middle class. Foster's tale has been read on the one hand as a "novel for providing a subversive message about the ways in which the lives of women even of the elite are subject to narrow cultural constraints" and, on the other hand, as an instructive novel that "comes down on the side of the ideology of Republican motherhood and the women's sphere, a sphere that celebrated those women who with appropriate sentiment and rationality accepted their "place" in the world. Foster's epistolary narrative allows for the development of multiple points of view and for a variety of readings. Rather than being presented as a one-sided coquette, the development of Eliza's character through her letter writing allows for a reading of Eliza as both "victim" and "transgressor" of society's norms. Cathy N. Davidson argues that The Coquette is not merely a novel about the evils of sin and seduction, but rather "a remarkably detailed assessment of the marital possibilities facing late-eighteenth-century women of the middle or upper-middle classes." Davidson notes the centrality of Foster's novel in "countering received ideas on women's circumscribed power and authority," positioning The Coquette as "an important voice in the debate on women's role in the Republic." In her exploration of the early American novel, Davidson uses the contradictions between Foster's novel and the moral accounts of Elizabeth Whitman's death to explore the emergence of the early American sentimental novel: Eliza Wharton sins and dies. Her death can convey the conservative moral that many critics of the time demanded. Yet the circumstances of that death seem designed to tease the reader into thought. It is in precisely these interstices—the distjunctions between the conventional and the radical readings of the plot –