One of the ways of talking about Charlotte’s—and British colonial America’s— seduction is as a crisis of reading brought about by modernity that may have occurred in her father’s generation, or possibly before (“modernity” is not an isolable phenomenon in history). Many scholars have identified reading as a central concern of Charlotte Temple, usually by calling attention to Rowson’s apparently contradictory use of fiction in order pedagogically to disclaim the dangers of fiction, a long-standing pattern in eighteenth- century Anglophone novels. What I want to propose in this section is a little bit different: Rowson uses narrative to recall the reader to allegory. This is a paradox, but not
necessarily a contradiction, because (as I have attempted to suggest) in the allegorical paradigm with which Rowson is working, the pedagogy of avoidance might be out of the question: inclination cannot be taught away, the war has been fought, we are too late. While Rowson’s narrator does interject to deliver moral lessons to her readers in the course of the narrative, I propose that Charlotte Temple’s most consistent pedagogical design is to re-sensitize its audience to allegorical reading practices. What thus plays out
across the generational saga of Lucy and Charlotte’s stories is a drama of good and bad reading that revolves around emblems, symbols, and allegory.
We have to start over, cycle back to the Lucy narrative. When Henry Temple first lays eyes on Lucy, he sees “a lovely creature busied in painting a fan mount. She was fair as the lily, but sorrow had nipped the rose in her cheek before it was half blown” (13). In this scene, Lucy’s physical presence is consistently associated with decorative or
impressed “surfaces”—in this case, a fan mount, a lily, and a rose. But note that the rose in Lucy’s cheek simultaneously has a kind of concrete materiality (it has been “nipped”) as well as a more abstract set of associations. The rose is not a symbol of sorrow: sorrow is what has nipped it. The rose in Lucy’s cheek is thus a place in her flesh that time has touched; it is an aesthetic mark of Lucy’s positionality as matter that is in contact with historical pressure. The rose, therefore, is not a representation per se, because it is comes into view as an effect of its nipping. It is incompletely available to transfiguration, potentially like Lucy herself, even though it registers the touch of time in beautiful terms, as a “flowering.” The rose might therefore be described as an emblem, a highly specific aesthetic form that Benjamin associates with a metaphoric sensuality that “avoids constant emphasis of its basically metaphoric character.”67 Emblems are forms of abstract-concretion that cannot be fully vaporized into signification.
67 Benjamin, Trauerspiel, 198.
The narrator makes Lucy’s emblematicity explicit in the text. Indeed, shortly after he first sees Lucy (and before she has uttered a single word), Temple witnesses her
crying:
Temple cast his eye on Miss Eldridge: a pellucid drop had stolen from her eyes, and fallen upon a rose she was painting. It blotted and discoloured the flower. “‘Tis emblematic,’ said he mentally: “the rose of youth and health soon fades when watered by the tear of affliction.” (13-14) Lucy is a rebus, or “thing-picture.” She appears to Temple as a constellation of
interacting emblems—a tear that falls on a rose and discolors it—which draws him into relation with her. By reading the emblems, he is able to tell a story about her in his mind. However, the story he tells is non-narrative; it is “emblematic.” When affliction waters the rose of youth, the rose of youth soon fades. I want to make two points about this. The first is that neither Lucy nor Henry are constructed as “subjects” by virtue of the emblematic significance Henry draws from her tears, by which I mean that they do not relate as subjects do to objects, or subjects to subjects. This is not about sympathy, which fantasizes an affectively transparent relation between two entities who both have insides and outsides. Sympathy is about accessing another person’s interior reality
imaginatively, while emblematic reading has to do with the way time stamps itself on matter. This leads me to my second point, which is that the “story” Henry tells about Lucy’s tears is not a story—it is non-linear. The crush of sorrow on youth is a
cosmological force that has been brought to bear on Lucy in her moment of grief. This is what the emblem tells Henry about Lucy: that they are both subject to time, that they are both at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Henry and Lucy are drawn into relation in the same way that the rose relates to time: as common matter.
As Benjamin points out, part of what is important about emblems is that they have a kind of inalienable noun-ness that is unavailable for wholesale metaphoric
expropriation (they can be only partially metaphorized). Emblems thus hold something in reserve, not as a quantity they possess intrinsically (i.e. on the “inside”), but as a characteristic of their material life. As a result, emblematic reading tends to slow down time, as we see in the passage above, where Henry takes time to ponder the falling of a tear and generates out of what he has seen a story-that-is-not-one about the timeless force of suffering. While Henry and Lucy’s emblematic encounter is erotic, Desire is not what drives the history in which Henry’s love for her burgeons into being. More importantly for my purposes, Lucy is not used up in signification as a consequence of Henry’s emblematic reading of her body. As Henry’s friend had put it before introducing him to the Eldridges, Lucy is indeed “a fine subject to exercise the goodness of [his] heart upon” (12), but part of what this seems to involve is that Lucy pulls a part of Henry’s heart into herself—into her physical presence—as much as he draws meaning from her tears. Henry’s “heart” thus also becomes sensually metaphoric by virtue of his reading.
As I have already tried to show, however, the tipping point for Henry is Lucy’s expression of memorial devotion to her father: her desire to be buried with Eldridge’s body. It is this statement to which Henry most forcefully responds, setting off the
commoditizing process that results in Lucy’s transfiguration from daughter to wife. She will be exchanged for money because she has no “insides.” The moment in which Henry enters into a history that is activated by Desire, then, is also the one in which a
surface/depth distinction takes hold of Lucy, or the moment in which she ceases to be “thingly” and becomes a hard surface: a mirror. Henry is impelled to take action,
mortgage his fortune, etc. because he is enchanted with the image of her father that Lucy compulsively reflects. Henry thus falls in love with the image of his own power over Lucy as a man, one with insides, One Who May Forget. Even within the Lucy and Henry narrative, then, there is an internal loop of regret for what was forsaken when Lucy ceased to be emblematic.
Yet this does not mean that a return to Lucy’s emblematicity is called for in
Charlotte Temple. Benjamin links emblems to the partial deterioration of the commodity form, but he also argues that allegory looks back at emblems with complex grief. The emblem glimmers with salvation which allegory knows to be impossible. What the emblem held out was not just the partial survival of things within a commoditizing logic, but the promise that they could construct forms of time and relationality that were
unmoved by modernity. As a rebus, Lucy emblematizes a possibility that was lost with La Rue: value that cannot be fully abstracted, the umbilical linkage between things and metaphors. And indeed, these possibilities are realized when Henry reads Lucy
emblematically—a stillness settles in time in which both Lucy and Henry become sensually metaphoric. The problem is that commodification turns out to have been not just a pre-existing condition for emblematic reading (which we already knew), but the
tide that overtook it in order for Lucy to have a future. Lucy’s emblematicity was bound up with her automatized memory, and that is what saved her. The Charlotte narrative thus looks back to Lucy-as-emblem with longing, but also from the knowledge that the promise she embodied was hopeless. As in Bejamin’s account, therefore, emblem gives birth to allegory in Charlotte Temple, where allegory might be described as a radical emblem in which time scours through the rose to the bone. The task of allegory, as Benjamin put it, is then to wrangle its vision of a “home in the Fall” from the clutches of a kind of mise en abime that is still secretly actuated by the hope of redemption: falling “from emblem to emblem down into the dizziness of its bottomless depths.”68
If Charlotte’s seduction occurred before her birth in the moment that her father saw his power reflected in Lucy, it also transpired when Montraville received his paternal marching orders. Both Temple and Montraville disobey their fathers, but they do so in different ways, and with seemingly opposite results. Temple Sr. is an aristocratic boor, concerned with title, honor, and fossilized notions of tradition—he is thus legible as a Tory caricature. Henry’s disobedience seems dignified because it entails an explicit refusal to subscribe to his father’s view of women exclusively in terms of money or sex (though of course Henry does not eschew this view either). Montraville Sr. is a different case. His express reason for enjoining Montraville to marry well is that he, Montraville Sr., cannot provide wealth for his son, who must make his fortune on his own. If Montraville marries poorly, therefore, he will implicate “a deserving woman into scenes
of poverty and distress” (40) and incur his father’s displeasure. Montraville Sr.’s rationale is thus superficially humanitarian but subtended by economic imperatives of male self- possession (make it on your own) and female commoditization (marry a wealthy wife) that end up licensing the very “poverty and distress” which he disclaims. Montraville Sr. is legible as a whiggish figure identified with a cluster of liberal values including thrift, acquisitive ambition, pious morality, and filial self-fashioning. I have already suggested that the “choice” between Temple and Montraville is not one—they are both implicated negatively in differential gendered expectations around memory, and they both ultimately exchange women for money. However, the liberal patriarchal line that gives rise to Montraville appears to have already been visited by modernity. Montraville Sr. is insidious because what he says and what he means do not line up. He says: do not cause women distress. He means: do not marry a poor woman and make yourself poor. His paternal law includes no provision for women Montraville might seduce but not marry, because he, like Temple Sr., only thinks about women in terms of property. The
difference between Temple Sr. and Montraville Sr. is that the former openly signifies his avarice, while the latter does not. This means that Montraville’s disobedience only seemed to be one: he is able to obey his father and seduce Charlotte at the same time. Where Montraville is concerned, then, Charlotte’s seduction occurs in the vicious gap between the letter and the spirit of liberal patriarchy.
Montraville thus appears to have been pre-seduced by Desire because he has been taught to split signifiers from signifieds by his father. As a reader of signs, he habitually discards the apparent as superfluous, or addresses it only in fleeting, narcissistic fashion
as it pertains to himself. When he sees Charlotte in the first chapter, for instance, the narrator writes:
[. . .] the blush of recollection which suffused her cheeks as she passed, awakened in his bosom new and pleasing ideas. Vanity led him to think that pleasure at again beholding him might have occasioned the emotion he had witnessed, and the same vanity led him to wish to see her again. (10)
There is no rose in Charlotte’s cheek. She flushes with memory (they have met once before), and he reads it as “emotion,” thus attributing it to an interior space in which he imagines her “pleasure” to dwell. Montraville automatically reads Charlotte’s blush, then, as a physical symptom of deeper significance. He interprets her involuntary response as a symbol of her availability to his sexual prerogative, thus affirming his preconceived fantasy of himself as a sight to behold that produces delight in feminine interiors. In other words, in the story Montraville tells, Charlotte is made to have surfaces and depths insofar as this supports what Montraville already believes to be true about his own desirability. The blush itself is dismissed almost as quickly as it appears, a flash of color brushed aside in Montraville’s haste to make meaning his own.
Montraville speculates on the flesh; it does not abide with other things in the pressure of history. As a result, Montraville cannot find meaning that is held in common, but hoards it away in the lordly domain of subjectivity. Born into the court of Desire, he is always in a hurry, and is therefore strongly associated with what I will call “bad
he and Charlotte have been sleeping together. When Montraville enters the room, “the first object that met his eyes was Charlotte asleep on the bed, and Belcour by her side” (84). He immediately flies into a rage, refuses to listen to Charlotte, and declares their connection to be over. The reason I call this “bad allegory” is that it is a hideous miscarriage of non-narrative, non-symbolic reading practice that petrifies its objects as
“objects,” that is, the lifeless opposite of subjects. Bad allegory is allegory as it is
construed from the point of view of symbolism, which does not assume that surfaces can be complicated and worthy of detailed consideration. Such being the case, bad
allegorical reading strips meaning away from “objects” except down a single
preconceived channel, in this case: “Treacherous, infamous girl” (84). Indeed, Belcour fed this reading to Montraville in advance by claiming that she has been “false” to Montraville with him (83). Montraville only sees what he is inclined to see, and what is closest at hand. His reading is governed by Desire.
Allegory appears to offer an alternative way of approaching shame and ruin for Rowson that does not rest on the parting of surface from depth. Part of what interests me about this is that it also—and for the same reason—recalibrates personhood and
collectivity away from the individual, desiring subject. Rowson’s narrator quite often seems deeply invested in safeguarding Charlotte from personal rebuke, holding her in reserve of judgment as a thing of compassion. In one interjection, she addresses a matronly imaginary reader:
My dear Madam, [. . .] I mean not to extenuate the faults of those unhappy women who fall victims to guilt and folly; but surely, when we reflect how many errors we are ourselves subject to, how many secret faults lie hid in the recesses of our hearts, which we should blush to have brought into open day (and yet those faults require the lenity and pity of a benevolent judge, or awful would be our prospect of futurity) I say, my dear Madam, when we consider this, we surely may pity the faults of others. (68)
Charlotte appears here as an “unhappy victim” of vice and folly rather than as a woman who has chosen them for herself—she is presented in passive relation to the reader. However, by envisioning Charlotte as a woman on the receiving end of not-fully- conscious, disembodied forces, the narrator invokes the reader’s kinshipwith Charlotte rather than installing a specular, dialectical relationship between them. Indeed, Charlotte is not a consolidated object, but a thing that draws out the faults in the “recesses of our hearts.” The narrator appears to be using narrative allegorically to undo the integrity of subjects who rest within their interiors; this involves a kind of disembowelment that hauls error into the open. Dislodged from its presumptive roost in the “recesses” of individual being, error is now set loose into the world as a common force of abjection. The “blush” of the reader is no longer an incentive to appropriation, a badge of Desire, but the mark of Fortune. Cast off is the sense that we are the proprietors of guilt in a history of which we are the protagonists; instead, history ruins us all. In allegorical time, the strain of
compunction inscribed in “womanhood” may therefore take on a different drift as a cosmological and truly comprehensive principle of relation—feminine but not female— that is richly ethical in its outlines. We can dwell together in common mortification.
The kinship thus established is organic, but in the precise sense that creaturely life shares a common destiny with matter to be arbitrarily dispersed and destroyed. This experience of time recalls a very old revolutionary image from the Medieval and Renaissance periods: the Wheel of Fortune, or Fortuna.69 Indeed, the narrator invokes this image herself in the same chapter that she describes La Rue’s “followings”:
But fortune is blind, and so are those too frequently who have power dispensing her favours: else why do we see fools and knaves at the very top of the wheel, while patient merit sinks to the extreme opposite abyss. But we may form a thousand conjectures on this subject, and yet never hit on the right. Let us therefore endeavor to deserve her smiles, [. . .] whether we succeed or not. (100)
This, then, is the allegorical revolution which counteracts Desire’s rapidly spinning wheels, and it does so by absorbing them as epiphenomena within the slow grind of time
69 C.S. Lewis famously identifies the Wheel of Fortune as being “hostile” to dialectic historicism: “the medieval conception of Fortune tends to discourage attempts at a ‘philosophy of history.’ If most events