The Coquette and Depression

29 August 2019: "I would fly to almost any resort, rather than my own mind. What a dreadful thing it is to be afraid of one's own reflections, which ought to be a constant source of enjoyment!" --Eliza Wharton in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette

I am teaching The Coquette again in my ENGL 346 class. On this read-through I am struck by Eliza's "melancholy" and how much it reads like our modern conception of depression. This spoiler is about 220 years old, but basically, she kind of wastes away until she dies. Very 18th/19th century in a literary sense, but also not a bad description of what it must feel like to be so very depressed.