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What's Wrong with Charlotte Temple?
Marion Rust
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CHARLOTTE Temple, the eponymous heroine of Susanna Rowson's late
eighteenth-century best-selling novel, is fond of "lying softly
down," and her timing is terrible. She faints into a chaise in Chichester;
she crawls into the bed where her seducer, the dashing Lieutenant
Montraville, already sleeps; and she takes an afternoon nap that
allows his even less scrupulous "brother officer" in the British
army, Belcour, to position himself beside her in time for her beloved
to discover them together.
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Given Charlotte's propensity for putting her feet up, it is no wonder
that critics have taken the book bearing her name as an exemplar
of the novel of seduction, a genre wherein the reader "is asked
to deplore the very acts which provide his enjoyment." Some see
the novel as evidence of "the appalling popularity of the seduction
motif" in early American sentimental fiction, while others take
a gentler view of how the genre "blended the histrionic and pedagogic
modes." But whether they favor pleasure or instruction as the primary
narrative impetus behind Charlotte's loss of virginity out of wedlock,
most scholars take the centrality of the sex act—and with it, of
Charlotte's presumed lust—for granted. A story of "the fatal consequence
of . . . illicit sexuality," the novel is said to depict a woman
"betrayed by her own naive passions" and thereby to provide an "example
of virtue fallen through seduction and sexuality."
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A closer look calls this emphasis on Charlotte's passion, and its ill-effects on her virtue, into question.3 The novel rarely mentions sex: there is no indication of how the "kindness and attention" that Montraville shows a seasick Charlotte during their voyage from Portsmouth, England, to New York leads, five chapters later, to the first allusion to her "visible situation" (pp. 62, 81). And while Charlotte's pregnancy attracts other euphemisms, such as "present condition," it receives little actual discussion beyond Charlotte's brief description of "an innocent witness of my guilt" in a letter to her mother and a posthumous reference to a "poor girl . . . big with child" (pp. 99, 85, 129). This reticence cannot be attributed merely to a desire to spare the reader's feelings, since Rowson had no qualms about sensationalizing sexuality in other work. At the same time that the novel was taking off in America, Rowson was in Philadelphia writing stage comedies and patriotic drinking songs in which lust, albeit parodied, racially marked lust, played a central role. Her play Slaves in Algiers, first performed in 1794 in Philadelphia and Baltimore, makes much of the Algerian Dey's "huge scimitar" and includes a scene in which the cross-dressed heroine makes a "mighty pretty boy" in the eyes of her unknowing lover. The sailors drinking to their lasses in "America, Commerce and Freedom," Rowson's popular song of the same year, show "eager haste" to join the young women running across the beach to meet them over the "full flowing bowl." Even in the novel at hand, desire is given its due as long as it occurs within the sanctified bonds of marriage.4 Mrs. Temple, Charlotte's mother, is the very picture of marital satisfaction, in continual possession of "the delightful sensation that dilated her heart . . . and heightened the vermillion on her cheeks" (p. 34) in the presence of her husband. The woman who speaks to Charlotte when no one else will and ministers to her in the hours before her family arrives (in opposition to Charlotte's female undoer, the malicious and cunning boarding school teacher Mademoiselle La Rue, this angel of mercy's name is "Mrs. Beauchamp") is similarly blessed, as "the most delightful sensations pervaded her heart" at the "encomiums bestowed upon her by a beloved husband" (p. 79). Clearly, Rowson is capable of alluding to heteroerotic attraction—it is just not what she is after in Charlotte's case.5 |
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