Throughout The Coquette, ties of bondage such as shackles, chains, and nooses serve as a motif representing the limitations of marriage for both men and women.
This motif first appears early in the novel, when Eliza tells Mrs. Richman that
A melancholy event has lately extricated me from those shackles, which parental authority had imposed on my mind.
Without specifically naming Mr. Haly, Eliza is saying that her fiancé's death has provided a reprieve from a marriage she accepted to please her parents but inwardly saw as a form of "shackles." Eliza continues to use similar figurative language to describe her unwillingness to circumscribe her life through matrimony, even referring to Mr. and Mrs. Richman's relatively happy marriage as a "hymenial chain." The novel's important male characters use similar language to describe marriage. Sanford repeatedly declares his intention to avoid what he calls "the noose of matrimony" as long as possible. Boyer has a much higher opinion of the institution of marriage; but in his final message to Eliza, he describes their tentative engagement as "the chain by which you held me enslaved."
At times, this motif works to negatively characterize the male characters who describe themselves as constrained by marriage. Sanford's self-indulgent belief that marriage is a form of entrapment helps him to justify his cruel behavior towards his wife, and his seduction of Eliza. He ignores the ways in which marriage empowers him, giving him access to his wife Nancy's considerable fortune and endowing him with a respectable social situation that allows him to pursue Eliza without incurring the suspicion of his neighbors. Boyer's assertion that Eliza kept him on a "chain" is no less hypocritical; as a male suitor in a conservative society, he gets to decide when to initiate and end his engagement with Eliza. What Boyer sees as a form of imprisonment for him is actually just Eliza asserting her own agency in matters of love and marriage.
By contrast, it's understandable that Eliza expresses her suspicion of marriage through language of bondage and imprisonment. Her engagement to Mr. Haly really did constrain her life, forcing her to devote her time to nursing a much older man she didn't love. Marriage to Boyer, a pedantic pastor with a sober lifestyle, would also compel her to curtail her social life and give up some of her favorite pursuits. In this sense, Eliza's language shows that for women, even an advantageous marriage involves unwanted subservience to husbands.
Deployed by characters in vastly different social situations, the motif of bondage shows that marriage involves much higher stakes for women than for men. Ultimately, the motif assists Foster's argument that women are harmed not by their individual choices to marry untrustworthy men, but by the entire institution of marriage in a highly patriarchal society.
