|
|
This is only a preview of the paper
Click here to register and get the full text.
Existing members click here to login
|
|
|
You have full access to this document courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign What's Wrong with Charlotte Temple? Marion Rust ________________________________________ 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. 1 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." 2 1 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 2 Charlotte is "disappointed" in the only "pleasure" she does expect, that of the liberal provisions promised by Mademoiselle La Rue at the party to which she is lured early on, where she meets Montraville. Here, Charlotte experiences a rare instance of clear determination: she "heartily wished herself at home again in her own chamber" (p. 24). The narrator then acknowledges Charlotte's "gratitude" at Montraville's praises of her and, it must be admitted, a certain amount of satisfaction in his "agreeable person and martial appearance" (pp. 24, 25). But her subsequent "blushes" are from shame, not pleasure, and her strongest sensation almost immediately becomes that of not knowing what to do. After Montraville gives her a letter, she turns to her teacher, asking, "What shall I do with it?" (p. 28). With every moment of indecision, La Rue steps in to direct Charlotte's path —"Read it, to be sure" (p. 31)—and it is thus and not through any overwhelming desire of her own that Charlotte is impregnated. She meets her lover to tell him she will see him no more, is persuaded by fits and starts to approach his carriage, and ends up literally fainting into it, whereby we are to assume that the fatal deed is done.6 The less Charlotte credits her own instincts, the more her behavior is described as a form of collapse, in which her future direction is determined by nothing more deliberate than her center of gravity. 3 To seduce is to "induce (a woman) to surrender her chastity."7 And yes, the reader anticipates Charlotte's defloration from her "blushes" and "sighs" and witnesses its effects in her subsequent condition. The word "passion" is even used a couple of times. But the sex itself exists only through its after-effects, and Charlotte's behavior in this regard is never explained. Not only, that is, do we fail to witness her "surrender," being left to deduce it from subsequent irrefutable evidence, but we never learn just how she is "induced" to do so. In fact, Charlotte does not so much surrender her chastity—in the sense of giving up under duress something she values—as lose track of it altogether, along with every other aspect of her being. Thus, whereas to be seduced is to put "private and individual needs ahead of others" (by giving in to one's reciprocal lust), Charlotte loses her virginity only when she loses the ability to experience need altogether.8 As the story develops, she becomes increasingly incapable of knowing what it is she feels, and she does what she feels she ought not, it turns out, not through an excessive respect for her desires, but rather through an increasing distrust of them. With "her ideas . . confused," she is soon allowing herself to be "directed" not only by La Rue, but by her "betrayer" Montraville, rather than by her own self-appraisal, according to which she longs to remain loyal to her "forsaken parents" (p. 48). In sum, it is in relaxing her sensitivity to her own impulses, not in giving in to them, that Charlotte loses her virginity and then her life. 4 Unlike her sister protagonist Eliza Wharton, who begins the novel The Coquette in constant appreciation of the effect she has on men, Charlotte rarely refers to her own ability to obtain power, or pleasure, from erotically charged social interactions.9 But she does spend a great deal of time in contemplation of another aspect of her being, namely, its terrifying absence of self-direction. Just before collapsing into her lover's arms, Charlotte asks of her "torn heart": "How shall I act?" without receiving an answer (p. 48). It may be possible to explain her habit of prostrating herself as a manifestation of something other than sexual desire, for while fainting and napping share with more licentious behavior the tendency to take place lying down, they also possess another quality in common that is more important to understanding Charlotte than lust. They both entail the loss of consciousness and with it any capacity for self-direction. Asleep or passed out, Charlotte has virtually no say over how her life unfolds. Awake, she fares almost no better. Charlotte Temple, despite appearances to the contrary and decades of critical assumption, is not really a novel of seduction, in the sense of being a document that provides sexual titillation under cover of pedagogic censure. Instead, far from depicting Charlotte's overweening desire, the novel portrays the fatal consequences of a woman's inability to want anything enough to motivate decisive action. Charlotte falls into compromising positions not so much because she yearns to as because she does not, in the words of her evil counsel La Rue, "know [her] own mind two minutes at a time," and what she loses when she "falls" (p. 44) is not, or at least not importantly, her virginity, but rather her independent agency. 5 Disorientation, therefore, rather than passion, leads Charlotte from her British boarding school to her lover's arms and from there to a transatlantic crossing, the outskirts of New York, pregnancy, childbirth among strangers, temporary madness, and death in the redeeming presence of her father. This reading helps make sense of the observation that since Anglo-American women, far from being ostracized for having had premarital intercourse, were marrying after conception in record numbers by the late eighteenth century, the novel's extraordinary popular appeal in the new United States cannot be explained by its veracity as historical transcript.10 As recent studies make clear, post-revolutionary Philadelphia, where the novel's first two American editions were published in 1794 shortly after the author's arrival from England the previous year, had a "sexual climate . . . remarkable for its lack of restraint. Casual sex, unmarried relationships, and adulterous affairs were commonplace," and although such activity highlighted the predicament of extramarital pregnancy for young women, it also featured a frank acknowledgment in popular print media of the sexuality of women outside the elite. Her contemporary urban readers may have found Charlotte's struggle to maintain her chastity most important not as a reflection on her ability to regulate sexual desire but rather class status. For while women outside the elite were often depicted as explicitly and even joyfully carnal, those who wished to claim the status of a lady needed to subdue lustful urges in order to lay claim to the virtue that was theirs to safeguard in the new republic. Attitudes toward sexuality were thus key indicators of social standing. As the daughter of a rural commoner and a father who had married beneath him, Charlotte bore a class status that was as indeterminate as that of many of her readers, and her control over her virginity would determine, for a fascinated young American urban female reader in a similarly volatile class hierarchy, whether the heroine descended into Philadelphia's "naturally lustful and licentious" lower class or qualified as an "exemplar[ ] of moral integrity." Furthermore, that she managed to reclaim her virtue, in the guise of her father's forgiveness, even after being seduced, suggested a way out for those who found the requirements of female gentility trying, while the high cost of reclamation (namely, imminent death) reminded them of the risks involved.11 6 The pressure to "assume responsibility for sexual propriety" in a culture dedicated to sexual transgression provides but one example of the myriad difficulties facing a young woman of the early national period hoping to "possess her soul in serenity," to borrow Judith Sargent Murray's polemic of a decade earlier on "Desultory Thoughts."12 For even as certain valorized traits came to be associated with post-revolutionary womanhood, ranging from a duty-bound notion of rights to a public, but no longer politically useful, conception of virtue, women's behavioral options were increasingly limited. Female rights, while not ignored, were conceived of according to Scottish common sense notions of societal obligation, while men alone, following the alternate trajectory of Lockean natural rights philosophy, possessed liberty, the ability "to choose one's destiny." At the same time, virtue in the previously male-oriented sense of active self-denial for the good of the polis was feminized in early national period precisely because, as a holdover from classical republicanism, it no longer served a nascent liberal political sphere premised on competition.13 7 The savage irony of a notion of female rights developing after the Revolution only to foster an increased sense of duty to outmoded notions of sexual virtue is made even more severe when one compares it with the ideology of perpetual opportunity facing young men of the period. Jay Fliegelman has written about the late eighteenth-century Anglo-American "adaptation and secularization of the Puritan narrative of the fortunate fall" by which "God had 'allowed' Adam and Eve to fall to permit them eventually to return to an even more intimate relationship with their Father than that they had originally lost." This dawning cultural emphasis on man's capacity to learn, and hence to benefit, from his mistakes is nowhere more evident than in the ultimate report of a prodigal son returned, Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. By substituting the term "errata" for sin, Franklin turns moral trespasses into printer's errors that can, in the words of the epitaph Franklin wrote for himself, be "Corrected and amended." As Fliegelman suggests, the Autobiography exemplifies the belief that a prodigal son who has perfected himself is more valuable as a testament to self-improvement than would be one who had never failed.14 8 Franklin hardly mentions women in the Autobiography, and elsewhere he uses them mostly to illustrate lessons for men. This is because pregnancy gives the lie to Franklin's philosophy. Illicit sexual activity may, for a man, be simply another printer's mistake. A man who impregnates a woman bears no tangible mark of the experience, except possibly venereal disease (no slight possibility in postwar Philadelphia). But an impregnated woman bears a mark that can only be erased at great physical and emotional cost, either through abortion or miscarriage. Pregnancy is a uniquely tangible sign of past activity, and it cannot be "corrected" without leaving record of itself. Unsanctioned pregnancy thus threatened the optimism of a newly developing moral and cultural system that emphasized man's capacity for self-determination.
Approximate Word count = 9360
Approximate Pages = 37.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
|
|
|
|
|
|