Changing the Script: Rowson, Popular Drama, and Literary Masquerade

Abstract

Perhaps Dorothy Weil put it best when she wrote that Susanna Rowson’s most important creation was her authorial persona—the voice of a gentle and teacherly mother who had learned from personal experience that the passions of youth often lead to catastrophic mistakes, and was weary of seeing those errors repeated by the young. 1 The sincerity of Rowson’s voice in her fictional narratives is so striking and so apparently without artifice that even Rowson’s most sophisticated modern readers occasionally echo the nineteenth-century belief that Rowson wrote from her own life. 2 Had she been unhappy in love? Was her husband a drunk? Did she narrowly escape a Montraville herself? This essay works against the grain of this line of inquiry, arguing instead that Rowson’s stage experience helps us to see that her greatest achievement was the simulacra of sincerity she achieved on the page, a performance augmented by her theatrical training. In this sense, even though her fiction ostensibly offers the advice that boys and girls should heed the wisdom of their elders, Rowson’s larger career as an educator and a writer relied on her manipulations of such repressive conventions—such as making theatrical modes of expression respectable as educational tools—to enlarge women’s professional opportunities and creative potential. As her promotion of oratorical training for schoolgirls illustrates, Rowson’s alleged conservatism is complicated by her innovative pedagogy. If Marion Rust has recently demonstrated the limitations of placing Rowson within a narrow definition of republican motherhood—the selfless and disinterested mother—by acknowledging Rowson’s commercial savvy, this essay seeks to examine the performative backgrounds of Rowson’s work to reconsider Rowson’s affiliation with didactic literature. Rowson was acting within fairly repressive confines of