The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen
to say.
In this regard, novels and other forms of reading were not simply supplements to formal education; they were also alternatives to it. In part, this is because many girls and women did not have the opportunity to attend schools, or to do so to their satisfaction. And, as I have suggested, there may have been ideological motivations as well. Either way, the thirst for learning was evident. In her exhaustive study of novels in America before 1820, literary historian Cathy Davidson reports that she encountered a call for better female education in every single one. The emphasis was not institutional but personal: women should read to educate themselves. And the profusion of such self-help books as spellers, and the presence of books like Mary Wollstonecraft’s early feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) in 30 percent of libraries surveyed in one study, suggests that women were acting on this principle.28
The nascent fiction industry seems to have made a concerted effort to meet this demand. Davidson notes that much early fiction operated at a relatively unsophisticated linguistic level. Many books were shortened versions of longer, more complex works, using plainer language. Moreover, many included advertisements that were specifically directed toward women, children, or uneducated men.29 This is perhaps the clearest evidence of the diffusion of literature to a large number of people.
It may also be evidence of the growing sophistication of the early capitalist system. Yet here too there is evidence that suggests that it is simplistic to assume that mass culture is foisted on an uncritical populace. This is evident from Davidson’s imaginative effort to examine many copies of the same novel to see how individual readers personalized them with notes, doodling, and other marginalia. From such work, it became clear that even the most inexpensive editions of a book could have tremendous personal value. One reader, for example, decorated the cover of a novel in an edition so crude that the author’s name was spelled incorrectly. Inside she wrote poetry, and crossed out her maiden name and added a new one when she got married, suggesting that the book had become a prized keepsake. Conversely, the disgusted reader of another novel wrote that “a book more polluted with destruction and abominable sentiments cannot be put in the hands of anyone—shame to the age and country that produced it.”30
These novels attracted male readers as well. The inscriptions studied by Davidson indicate that men read seduction novels, while it seems likely that women, by the same token, read those that were directed at men.
A CLOSER LOOK: A Temple of the Imagination
Multiple allegiances—of sex, race, and ethnicity, among others—have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. So it seems appropriate that the first Great American Novel was written by a woman whose nationality has been open to question. That ambiguity—along with the author’s gender—has until recently led literary scholars to overlook both Susanna Rowson as the first major American fiction writer and her book Charlotte Temple as the first major American novel.
THE FICTIONAL CHARLOTTE TEMPLE
Rowson was born (as Susanna Haswell) in England in 1762 to a mother who died soon after her birth. Her father, an officer in the British navy, remarried and brought her to Massachusetts, where she enjoyed a happy and affluent childhood until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Though her father tried to remain neutral, political tensions made the Haswells’ situation untenable, and he was taken as a prisoner of war in 1776. The family’s property was confiscated, and the adolescent Susanna found herself tending to a makeshift home and trying to support her ill and depressed father (who was under house arrest) and stepmother. In 1778, the family was repatriated to England in a prisoner exchange. They began again in England, penniless, and dependent on Susanna’s skills as a teacher of wealthy women and a writer of verse for the theater.
In 1786, Susanna married William Rowson, an actor, musician, and sometime hardware merchant who was later described as a “deadbeat” by one of his relatives. The task of supporting the family—which eventually included two adopted children and her husband’s sister—fell to the young woman. (Her husband, however, assumed the rights to all her earnings under both British and U.S. law. Not that there was much involved: the prevailing wisdom was that, unlike men, women were not interested in money, and they were thus not paid very much.) Between 1786 and 1792, Susanna published a series of novels, including Charlotte: A Tale of Truth in 1791 (which, against prevailing custom, she authored in her own name). After her husband’s hardware business went bankrupt in 1792, the couple was recruited by a theater company in Philadelphia. Susanna became a U.S. citizen when her husband was naturalized in 1802.
Susanna Rowson might have been better known as an actress—or later, as the founder of a highly successful women’s academy—had it not been for Matthew Carey. Carey was an Irishman who had been imprisoned by the British for publishing an Irish nationalist newspaper. He emigrated to the United States in 1784, when he was twenty-four years old, to avoid further persecution and to begin a new publishing operation (with a loan from the Marquis de Lafayette, who aided the cause of U.S. nationalism by fighting alongside Washington in the Revolutionary War). Carey’s publishing house, founded in Philadelphia, went on to become one of the most successful in early U.S. history.
In 1794, Carey published a stateside edition of Charlotte. It was relatively cheap and easy for him to do, since there was no international copyright law. Indeed, an excited Carey reported the book’s steady sale to the Rowsons apparently without any thought of sharing the profits. Yet such a casual attitude toward what we now call intellectual property was a factor in the novel’s phenomenal success. Domestic publishers soon did unto Carey what he had done unto Rowson’s British publisher and the novel spread like wildfire, until there were over two hundred editions, ranging from expensive leatherbound volumes to the most ephemeral chapbooks. Gradually it became known by the title Charlotte Temple.
The plot of the novel can be easily summarized. When a British nobleman named Temple aids a heavily indebted army officer, he is gratefully offered the hand of the soldier’s daughter. This turns out to be a match of love, not money (which Temple essentially renounces by refusing to marry the woman his father had chosen for him) and the happy couple are soon blessed with a daughter named Charlotte. They send her off to a boarding school, where she befriends an unscrupulous schoolteacher named Mademoiselle La Rue. An army lieutenant named Montraville bribes La Rue to introduce him to Charlotte, with whom he has become sexually infatuated. Montraville and his friend Belcour are bound for the colonies to fight the Americans in the Revolutionary War, but they convince La Rue—and manipulate a reluctant Charlotte—to join them. Once in New York, Montraville sets the fifteen-year-old girl up as his mistress in a house outside of Manhattan, and the two live happily until he meets an aristocratic woman whom he wants to marry. La Rue fails to be a friend to Charlotte, and the evil Belcour steals the money Montraville intends to give her. Pregnant, impoverished, and alone, Charlotte finds her way to New York City as her distraught father searches for her, hoping to reunite her with her anxious family. But despite the efforts of a poor servant of La Rue’s, it is too late to save her life.
“For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed; and I could wish my fair readers to consider it not as merely the effusion of Fancy, but as a reality,” Susanna Rowson wrote in the introduction. The factual accuracy of the story (supposedly, only the names were changed to protect the innocent) seems to have been an important motive to Rowson, but it has never been independently verified. Perhaps this emphasis on reality was designed to justify writing fiction to disapproving elites; more likely, Rowson believed that underlining the authenticity of the story would give it more impact (much in the same way docudramas appeal to television viewers today).
On the face of it, Rowson’s message to her readers is deeply conservative. “Oh my dear girls—for to such only I am writing—listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbration,” she counseled. Yet her advice that young women be wary of men, even relatively well-intentioned men like the thoughtless Montraville,