Charlotte Temple

Her form was faultless, and her mind,
Untainted yet by art,
Was noble, just, humane, and kind,
And virtue warm’d her heart.
But ah! the cruel spoiler came—

INTRODUCTION

Jane Smiley

When I was in college at Vassar in the late 1960s, I knew some boys at Yale who shared my literary ambitions—we wanted to become great, or at least successful novelists. As a way of demonstrating the futility of my dreams, one of them always dared me to name a great American woman novelist. I knew Jane Austen, of course, and George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but no Americans. Sarah Orne Jewett? He laughed. She was not even a novelist. Edith Wharton? We both laughed. We had read
Ethan Frome
in the ninth grade; Edith Wharton obviously didn’t qualify as great. And that was it. Even at Vassar, much less at Yale, our education did not include women novelists or a way to think of them with respect. The only mention ever made of the tradition of female writers in the United States was a quotation by Nathaniel Hawthorne about “the horde of scribbling women” who seem to have tormented him by their very existence.

An entire generation of feminist scholarship has intervened since those days, and college literature students in 2004 would certainly know whom to name and how to theorize about them. They would know that the two most popular and successful American novelists before the modern era were women—Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Susanna Rowson, author of Charlotte Temple. But they still might not want to read their novels, because modern scholars and critics tend to condescend to these books, and to feel that they aren’t quite up to the standard of novel-writing art that we expect of great works today. In fact, though, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is still a compulsively readable novel and an eminently defensible work of art. Its author was a skilled delineator of character, a sophisticated thinker about social and economic issues, and a dab hand at suspense. She was funny when she wanted to be and moving when she wanted to be. Many more respected novels aren’t nearly as fun to read, and none is a more important historical document. In 1851, Stowe wanted to write a novel and had plenty of models—she was an avid reader of Dickens, Thackeray, and her other contemporaries, and she was from an intellectual family.

In her time, Susanna Rowson was a no less respected American woman of letters and culture—she started one of the best schools for young women in America and ran it for twenty-five years. She wrote textbooks for her students and eight novels in addition to
Charlotte Temple.
Before founding her school, she worked as an actress and played fifty-seven roles. Always, she was the financial provider for her family, which included a ne’er-do-well husband, two adopted daughters, and other relatives.
Charlotte Temple,
first published as
Charlotte. A Tale of
Truth,
was Rowson’s most successful and famous book, but she never earned royalties from any of its more than two hundred editions, because the United States at the time was like China is now—a place where intellectual property ownership was unrecognized and books were routinely pirated.

Susanna Rowson was beloved as the author of
Charlotte Temple,
though, and she seems to have felt tremendous satisfaction at its success. But she never called it a novel—she called it “a tale of truth,” and generations of readers believed her, believed that, perhaps like a true-crime book today, it related the real adventures of a real Charlotte and her real seducer, even if the names had been changed.

If we, for the moment, take Rowson at her word, it perhaps changes our perception of her book—it was not a failed novel, not quite up to the standard of, say,
Clarissa,
by Samuel Richardson, but a successful cautionary tale, read by girls and women of all ages and social classes. As such, perhaps, it fulfilled Rowson’s ambitions, and, as such, it did not have to do some of the things that novels do, and that novels of the eighteenth century routinely did do—set the scene, portray the characters in detail, build suspense, construct a fictional world, afford the author a means of addressing the reader and of developing her opinions on all sorts of subjects. It merely had to make the point that Rowson wanted to make, and back it up with some emotional weight. Indeed, a cautionary tale is like a fable—if it is too specifically about a particular set of characters in a particular place and time, a reader might not take it to heart.

Charlotte’s tale is simple—a young English girl, she is seduced by a young officer who does not intend to marry her and is carried off by him from England to New York. There, he loses interest in her and marries someone else. Pregnant, she is evicted from her house in winter and flees to kind strangers, where she gives birth to her daughter and then dies, though not before seeing her father, who has followed her to America, one last time.
Charlotte Temple
is similar to almost every English and French novel of the eighteenth century (perhaps excepting only Laurence Sterne’s
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
) in that it concerns seduction or rape. Such stories were so common that modern scholars tend to demean them with epithets such as “dramas of beset womanhood,” but to eighteenth-century readers and writers, all of the possible forms of exploitation of young women were of crucial interest, not only rape and seduction but also incest (Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders
), abduction (Richardson’s
Pamela
), false marriage (
Moll Flanders, Pamela
), illegitimacy (Tobias Smollett’s
Humphrey Clinker
), child abandonment (Defoe’s
Roxana
), even murder. In Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
Sophia’s father tries to marry her off against her will and her cousin attempts to engineer her rape. Tom’s friend Nightingale seduces their landlady’s daughter and gets her with child—Tom talks him into marrying her against the wishes of his father. In French novels of the time, the type of the libertine is explored in detail, as in Laclos’s
Les
Liaisons Dangereuses
and the Marquis de Sade’s
Justine.
The modern reader can’t help but conclude from the literature that a young woman’s ability to preserve her virtue was almost a life-and-death matter, as Rowson contends, and that, as in traditional Islamic societies in our own time, a girl who made a mistake, or, indeed, who had the bad luck to fall victim to the predatory designs of some man (or some woman—characters such as Rowson’s La Rue, who serve as procuresses, are common, too) was simply done for. A girl alone was always at risk, and not only if she was in the out-of-doors—in
Pamela,
Pamela is forced to sleep with the virtuous housekeeper in order to prevent her master from coming into her bed at night; one of the duties of a lady’s maid was to protect the mistress from unwanted company.

Nevertheless, Susanna Rowson had to make Charlotte’s fall both plausible and sympathetic. Strictures surrounding the sexuality of a young woman were so great that entire innocence was required of her—no knowledge of sex, no desire for love, no interest in any particular man until the man had committed himself to her and her father or parents had permitted his attentions. When, in
Tom Jones,
Sophia begs her father not to marry her to the distasteful and scheming Blifil, she does not do so on the basis that she prefers Tom, but rather as a form of daughterly devotion—if her father agrees not to marry her to Blifil, she will devote her life to him. Fielding did not dare to allow Sophia any desires of her own. Marriages were arranged primarily according to property considerations, and only secondarily or not at all according to affections, or even attraction. Men without property, such as younger sons, were expected to make their way in the army, or in a profession such as law, or as clergymen, before taking a wife, which meant that girls in their teens were conventionally married off to men fifteen to twenty years older than they were, and that young men had no legitimate outlet for their sexual needs. When men did take wives, any money or property belonging to the woman immediately fell under the control of the husband, unless the young woman’s relatives were powerful enough to negotiate a portion for her, which her own male relatives controlled.

All of these considerations come into play in
Charlotte Temple.
Charlotte’s parents have made a love match, which has been expensive because it has resulted in their small estate becoming encumbered with debt. Her fortune is not enough to attract the man, Montraville, who becomes her seducer. Her escort and supposed protector, La Rue, allows Charlotte the freedom to meet Montraville, then betrays her into a semi-abduction, motivated by greed and also by contempt for Charlotte’s weakness, innocence, and lack of feminine wiles. Once they are in New York, and Charlotte is established in a sequestered spot by Montraville, he becomes enamored of a more lively and sophisticated young woman with a large fortune entirely at her own disposal. The main thing Rowson wants to impress on her readers is that once Charlotte has lost her reputation for virtue and the protection of her family, she cannot rely upon the kindness of strangers. Her vulnerability attracts more seducers (Montraville’s friend Belcour) and moves only two people to pity. One of these, Mrs. Beauchamp, must get her husband’s permission before risking her own reputation for virtue by associating with Charlotte. At this point, Charlotte is not even twenty years old, but to the characters in the novel she has become tainted by sexuality and has lost her value on the marriage market.

Modern readers complain that Charlotte is weak and lacking in enterprise, but Rowson was stuck with her because, by definition, to manifest enterprise or even energy would be to mitigate her status as a victim. Once an eighteenth-century female character lost her virtue, as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela points out repeatedly, death was the only honorable alternative, and even in seeking that death, she was required to be humble, pious, and remorseful, and to take entire responsibility for her loss of virtue. Even Sade recognizes this in his shocking novel
Justine.
After Justine tells her story of attempting to retain her virtue in the teeth of relentless attack, she is struck by lightning. Good intentions make no difference. Charlotte Temple’s world is a merciless one. What we read today as sentimentality of tone was an attempt to appeal to the feelings of individual readers, because institutions such as the law and the church, which in our day serve as some safeguard to the powerless, in Rowson’s day were as ruthless as the mores and the customs of society as a whole.

The riddle of how to write realistically about the inner lives of women and girls was not solved in the eighteenth century, even though the victimization of women was a perennial topic. From the earliest days of the novel in France and England—let’s say with Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Clèves in France (1678) and Moll Flanders and
Roxana
(1720s) in England—authors were perplexed about whether women, and particularly young girls, were to be treated as, and portrayed as, negotiable commodities on the marriage market or as people with feelings, intentions, and responsibilities. Most of the novelists in question were men, but for women writers this was no less of a dilemma. Well into the twentieth century, none of the women writers who solved that dilemma—Charlotte Lennox (who wrote a very interesting comic novel entitled
The Female Quixote
[1752] on the same subject), Rowson, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Edith Wharton—ever proposed the same solution (writing for money) for their protagonists as they had achieved for themselves. Such a thing was either too suspect or too implausible.

But novels like
Charlotte Temple
were alive to the contradictions in society, religion, law, and economics that made women’s lives so difficult, and they used the natural capacity of the novel to gain sympathy for women who readers sensed were much like themselves. The two hundred editions of
Charlotte Temple
did educate many, many American readers—not only to be careful, and not only to be compassionate, but also to understand the humanity of themselves and their sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends.

JANE SMILEY is the bestselling author of eleven acclaimed works of fiction, including
The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, A Thousand Acres
(for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize),
Horse Heaven,
and
Good Faith,
and is currently at work on a history of the novel. She lives in California.

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