Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women (review)

Abstract

Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women. By Marion Rust. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. 328. Cloth, $59.95; Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Charlene Boyer LewisThose of us who examine women or literature in early republic think we know Susanna Rowson and insufficiently distinguish novelist from her most popular fictional heroine, Charlotte Temple, who perfectly exemplified passivity and oppression. As Marion Rust persuasively shows, however, Rowson was not proponent of submission that many scholars have presented. Indeed, Rust argues, Rowson wanted women to move beyond their gender limitations, but cautiously. Through her myriad works and in her own life, Rowson sought to instruct women in ways in which they could find a successful balance between domestic constraints and intellectual expansiveness (7). Rust stresses that we need to understand not only popularity of Charlotte Temple and Rowson's other works but also Rowson's own life in context of changes of late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in lives of American women.Rowson enjoyed popularity not because women found message of submission attractive in an increasingly hostile public environment (as some scholars have argued), but, as Rust explains, because she made sense to literate, Anglo-American of new Republic for precisely reasons that she now strikes us as slightly distasteful - her profound relativism and corresponding facility at adaptation (15). No one, Rust argues, talked about effects of how new nation failed its inhabitants and the need to carry on nonetheless, as thoroughly as its best-loved author (22). In her novels, plays, and songs, and even at her academy, Rowson highlighted tensions between submission and autonomy for women and repeatedly demonstrated means in which female submission . . . could be manipulated to achieve social stature and wide public influence (25). This is why, Rust concludes, so many women read her works and extolled her as a teacher - and why Rowson is so valuable to understanding women's lives in early republic.Rowson lived a life far different from many of her characters, especially Charlotte Temple. Needing to provide for first her father and siblings and then her husband and adopted children, Rowson over course of her life performed as an actress; wrote plays, poems, novels, and songs; and founded a school for young women. She was an expert at improvising and crafting her own public identity, skills she would emphasize as crucial to success as a woman in new republic. While she may have presented characters who dutifully remained at home and listened to their husbands or fathers, Rowson herself rarely lived that life; Rust believes that her sense of independence also shaped fictional females she created, except Charlotte (the character we rarely go beyond).In chapters that explore and offer new analyses of Charlotte Temple, some of Rowson's lesser known works - such as novel Trials of Human Heart, play Slaves of Algiers, and Lucy Temple, sequel to Charlotte Temple - and some published verse, Rust shows how all of these public works reveal Rowson's sincere belief that women's attempt to influence, rather than merely emblematize processes of national self-determination was essential to the national well-being (197). Breaking with those who regard Rowson as first proponent of domesticity and passivity, Rust convincingly argues that Rowson preferred women to have a public, political voice over simply possessing moral authority. …