Charlotte Temple unmistakably revisits the “civil war” seduction paradigms that I have traced through the debates of the 1770s. Charlotte is of course a British girl, the sole product of her parents’ union. At the opening of the novel, she is a student at a Sussex boarding school near Portsmouth, where, due largely to Mlle. La Rue she is seduced by Montraville, an officer in the British army awaiting deployment to the
colonies. While Rowson never names the Revolutionary war as the setting for the novel, clues in the text confirm that this is where Montraville and his friend, Belcour, are headed. In the opening chapter, Belcour remarks to a love-struck Montraville that “a musket ball from our friends, the Americans, may [. . .] make you feel worse” (10).49 In addition, when Montraville abandons Charlotte toward the end of the novel, it is because he has been redeployed to St. Eustatia, which Admiral George Rodney took in an
infamous sacking in 1781.50 The reference to St. Eustatia dates the story roughly
between 1780-82, a hinge period between the conclusion of Anglo-colonial hostilities on the continent (Yorktown in 1781) and the Treaty of Paris (1783).51 This is not simply a
point of historical interest. It means that in the diegetic time of Rowson’s story,
Revolution had not yet officially concluded with U.S. independence; the novel is set in a limbo period after war but before “peace,” when the “end” of Revolution was yet to be determined and the U.S. nation-state did not exist. This is also the period in which Peter Oliver’s Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (1781) cast the colonies as victims of seduction fated to descend into “Wilderness”: a scenario that the plot of Rowson’s novel recalls with uncanny fidelity. Charlotte accompanies Montraville from Portsmouth to America; she becomes pregnant and eventually dies of puerperal fever somewhere in British-occupied New York. In the lead-up to her death, she laments her separation from her parents in “parricidal” terms with increasingly hallucinatory intensity. We also learn that the Temples, and Mrs. Temple in particular, have been awaiting word
50
Rodney plundered the island for wealth and subjected the Jewish population, in particular, to brutal treatment—at one point digging up the Jewish cemetery in search of hidden goods and money. Rodney’s actions were widely decried in Britain, but when he defeated the French at the Battle of the Saintes (1782) he was hailed as a national hero. See Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1988). Derek Walcott describes the Battle of the Saintes as seen from St. Lucia in Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).
51
The reason for the delay between Cornwallis’s surrender and Paris is that Britain was fighting naval war in the Caribbean with the colonies’ European allies—France, Spain, and the Netherlands—during this time. Ironically, Britain emerged the victor from that war-within-the-war, consolidating its authority as a major naval power. This sealed Britain’s imperial hold on major Caribbean territories and supported the British empire’s “swing to the east,” particularly on the Indian subcontinent. For the war in the Caribbean, see Tuchman, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1988) and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean
(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000). For coverage of the “swing to the east,” see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2006); Nicholas B. Dirks,
The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006); and Myra Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011).
from her in the hopes of bringing her home to England. But Charlotte seems doomed despite all—she dies in her father’s arms soon after he arrives in New York to rescue her. The contours of the mother/daughter familial allegory I sketched in the previous section are thus clearly visible even in this simple overview of the plot, with Charlotte as Britain’s colonial “daughter” fatally separated from her benevolent parent by a military man (the British army) and a scheming ministerial body (La Rue, Montraville).
But Charlotte Temple’s overt resemblances to civil war seduction paradigms are fully supported by the text’s internal operations, which couch Charlotte’s seduction as a crisis of memory that brings about her ruin. Jefferson’s lost passage from the Declaration theorizes independence as a condition that depends on forgetting: a willful amnesia that casts love aside. But for Jefferson, what must be repressed is the memory of family that Charlotte Temple compulsively remembers. Jefferson refuses to remember; Charlotte is unable to forget—on (possibly) all but one occasion. Jefferson’s passage and Rowson’s novel thus converge in their assessment that filial autonomy takes “forgetting” as its condition of possibility, except for Charlotte this is a prospect that seems inexorably linked with death. Much as in “The Parricide” (fig. 2), seduction figures in Charlotte Temple as a moment of unthinking with catastrophic consequences for everyone involved. However, Rowson’s narrative might usefully be considered as a kind of extreme close-up on Wilkes’s outstretched finger in that print. The pathos of parental distress is present in Charlotte Temple, but the narrative’s emphasis falls on the circumstances that bring about the daughter’s lapse in memory; Rowson invites her
readers into America’s addled mind. Rowson thus investigates the conditions subtending the arrangement that Oliver presents as axiomatic: even if they are seduced into doing so, daughters who forget their mothers commit a murder and a suicide in one fell swoop. Daughters cannot survive without the memory of their parents.
Rowson frames her investigation of this problem in generational terms. Indeed, Charlotte Temple comprises two narratives. The first is nested as a flashback in the opening chapters of the novel and describes the courtship and marriage of Charlotte’s parents, Henry Temple and Lucy Eldridge. The second, introduced in Chapter I and resumed in Chapter VI, relates the demise of their daughter, Charlotte, some fifteen years later. While it is perhaps an obvious point, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of Charlotte Temple’s opening chapters is revolutionary in the sense that it recoils on itself, which evokes the “revolting” metaphorics of civil war as inward corporeal
violence. The temporality of the text is complex: written in the combustive early 1790s about a hiatus in the 1780s with an interpolated narrative from the 1760s in Chapters II- V. Tunneling backward through time in an internally looped retrospection, the narrative has a spiraling action that holds pasts and presents in constant negotiation. The
involution of the opening chapters sets in motion an imperative to read cyclically—to visit and revisit evidence—that I have attempted to adopt procedurally into this chapter’s discussion. The hope is that this method holds process open, much in the way that the novel’s diegetic time between war and peace suspends historical outcome, resisting the assignation of final significance to the Revolution’s undoings.
In thematic terms, the flashback in Chapters II-V links the question of Revolution to questions of female memory and forgetting. We have to go back to the previous
generation to discover why Charlotte’s “revolt” occurs. The ostensible purpose of the nested narrative is to establish Lucy Eldridge’s story as a powerful counter-instance to her daughter’s: one that illustrates the correct and desirable outcome that Charlotte’s pitiful mischance denies her. The difference between these two stories can be described in terms of memory. Where Lucy’s obedience to her parents (her devoted remembrance of them) leads to happy marriage, Charlotte’s seduction appears as a “forgetting” that brings about her death. To remember one’s parents is to be re-membered in turn, through the transformation from daughter to wife; to be seduced is to forget one’s family and endure dismemberment—to move from daughter to pariah, sexual object, schizophrenic and, finally, corpse.
As we learn in the flashback, Lucy Eldridge meets Charlotte’s father, Henry Temple, at a moment of exigency. She has recently rejected a man named Lewis, who expected Lucy to become his mistress as a kind of return on a loan he has made to her father, Mr. Eldridge. Ever the exemplary daughter, Lucy makes Lewis’s proposition known to her parents and declares that “her heart [is] perfectly unbiassed” towards him (16). Eldridge sends Lewis away, whereupon Lewis demands payment for his loan and has Eldridge jailed when he is unable to settle his debt. Lucy’s brother is killed in a duel with Lewis and Mrs. Eldridge dies from shock, leaving Eldridge and Lucy alone and destitute in debtor’s prison. Enter Henry Temple, a “benevolent fellow” introduced to the Eldridges by a mutual acquaintance who correctly surmises that their predicament will give Temple “a fine subject to exercise the goodness of [his] heart upon” (12).
During Mr. Eldridge’s relation of his family’s misfortunes to Temple, Lucy’s filial excellence emerges as a quality of co-dependence first with her family, and later with her
father. This manifests as her apparently total lack of desire. She interposes no preference of her own in Lewis’s consideration, for instance, declaring that she is “ready chearfully [sic] to submit to their direction” (16). Lucy’s lack of desire also seems to link her with non-narrativity.52 While Eldridge relates the tale of their predicament to Temple in her presence, she remains silent. She mutely adorns his story with corroborative blushes and tears, speaking only once to express that she and Eldridge are not only of one mind and voice (his), but also of one body (also his):
‘Oh, my father!’ cried Miss Eldridge, tenderly taking his
hand, ‘be not anxious on [my] account; for daily are my prayers offered to heaven that our lives may terminate at the same instant, and one grave receive us both; for why should I live when deprived of my only friend.’ (14)
A few pages later, Eldridge reports Lucy as saying, “when it pleases heaven to take one of us, may it give the survivor resignation to bear the separation as we ought” (20)—but this is quite different from what she says in the passage above. She prays not to bear
Eldridge’s death as she ought, but to share death with him, and a common grave, and thus
“‘never [to] leave him’” (20). Her fantasy of dying and being buried with her father underlines the radical entanglement of her sentient life with his; their bodies will, and perhaps must, eventually molder together. Lucy’s sole expression of desire is thus one
52
My understanding of the connection between desire and narrative is drawn from Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1971); and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), esp. Chapter 2: “Narrative Desire,” 37-61.
whose realization would relieve her of a life in which any desire she experienced would unavoidably be her own. For Lucy, death is preferable to the ghastly prospect of filial autonomy. Or perhaps “death” is simply the name for the natural fact of Lucy’s existence in the absence of her parents; her separation from them literally cannot be thought or endured. When Lucy speaks for herself, as it were, she presents her self reflexively as an extension of her father’s organic being. Her remembrance of her father is self-cancelling; it reveals that there is nothing “inside” her.
And this is what wins her a husband. Temple is “moved even to tears” (14) by Lucy’s expression of devotion and takes steps to ensure that the “‘sweet maid [does] not wear out her life in a prison’” (21), first by paying her father’s debts and then by
marrying her. There are, then, distinctly material rewards to be reaped from Lucy’s brand of self-erasure; likewise, her feminine charms can in some sense be purchased. Indeed, Lucy’s perfect memorial obedience to her father seems to bear commodified value, which in this case gets bound up in the patriarchal exchange of money, acting as a kind of bond on the Eldridges’ economic future. However, if Lucy can be had for a price—and clearly she can—the narrator is quick to mitigate the obvious parallels between what the
villainous Lewis had attempted (buying an financially-embarrassed mistress) and what the noble Temple manages to pull off (buying a financially-embarrassed wife). The narrator emphasizes that Temple gains nothing materially by marrying Lucy except Lucy, her aged father, and a saccharine scene of rustic wedded bliss. In fact, Temple loses his birthright as a result of their match. He raises the money to discharge Eldridge’s debts by
“mortgaging part of his fortune” and subsequently gets into an argument with his father, Temple Sr., who wishes him to marry a wealthy heiress and make Lucy his mistress. When Temple refuses, his father banishes him and marries the heiress himself. If we suspect that Temple’s decision to rescue Lucy and Eldridge is motivated by anything but disinterested kindness, the narrator thus heads us off by associating such suspicions with Temple’s contemptible papa.
The Lucy narrative seems obviously to support a whole host of bourgeois ideological projects, but the argument of this chapter is that it is possible to read
Charlotte Temple allegorically in order to reach radical feminist conclusions. This requires a withdrawal from the supposed depth of ideology critique to the level of narrative surface, much as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the practice of “reparative reading,” which is adjudicated for me in this case by Rowson’s handling of allegorical form.53 To proceed along these lines, then, one notes that while the narrator draws a veil
over the issue, she does not deny that Henry acts on his sexual desire when he decides to rescue the Eldridges. The narrator writes: “We will not enquire too minutely into the cause which might actuate him in this instance: suffice it to say, he immediately put the
53 My reading of allegory through Benjamin has been informed and enriched by the turn in queer studies
toward what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “reparative reading.” Sedgwick distinguishes reparative reading from paranoid reading, which “places its faith in exposure” and evinces a “contagious tropism [. . .] toward symmetrical epistemologies” (131). This last point has been especially clarifying for me in the effort to subvert binary partisan and national interpretative paradigms. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 123-51. My work in this chapter also draws from the influence of queer temporality studies. This bibliography is enormous. Work that I have returned to most often includes Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004); Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke UP, 2010).
plan in execution.” Moments later, Henry’s father accuses him of the truth—“[I] cannot suppose that any thing but attachment to the daughter could carry you such imprudent lengths for the father.” This comes as a revelation to Temple, who “had never asked himself the question” of his motives (22). The narrator thus quietly reveals both that Temple’s sexual and economic investments in Lucy are embroiled, and that he is unaware of the fact until someone else points it out to him.
This becomes important in Charlotte’s story, because it will also be the case for Montraville, whose father has threatened to disown him if he forms “a precipitate union with a girl of little or no fortune” (40). Montraville takes this prohibition to heart, but in a way that has no effect on the course or management of his desires: “it was impossible he should ever marry Charlotte Temple; and what end he proposed to himself by continuing the acquaintance he had commenced with her, he did not at that moment give himself time to enquire” (41). The upshot is that Montraville will disobey the spirit but not the letter of his father’s law: he pursues Charlotte unthinkingly, but will not marry her, thereby producing the very misery that his father decries. Rowson thus draws
Montraville and Temple into a rather unexpected alignment on the basis of their gender, which entitles both of them not to know their own minds. In this way, the Lucy narrative lays the groundwork for a critique of patriarchy which turns on the gendered
disbursement of optional and mandatory memory functions: men can be “unthinking” and leave parental mandates behind, while women cannot.
Indeed, Rowson vascularizes the connection between the Lucy and Charlotte narratives with a network of examples which ensures that there are no men who disobey “good” parents in the novel, and no women who disobey “bad” ones. Temple Sr. and Montraville Sr. each set financial gain as an absolute condition for their son’s choice of wife. And while there are important differences between Henry and Montraville’s
patriarchal lineages to which I shall return, the underlying continuity between them is that they both support a gendered matrix that authorizes amnesia at little or no cost to men, and de-authorizes it at the expense of women’s lives. Men get away with “forgetting” their parents in Charlotte Temple, while the same spells Charlotte’s destruction. Rowson
thus makes it impossible to locate a gender-blind politics of disobedience in Charlotte Temple around the question of whether parents are “good” or “bad,” as Revolutionary
polemicists had done by amplifying Britain’s innocence (Oliver) or Britain’s monstrosity (Paine) in order to excoriate or defend colonial dissent. Instead, she isolates the
normative gender variables of seduction so that her readers have to deal with the most perplexing scenario of all: a perfect woman who forgets her duty to perfect parents. In this way, Charlotte Temple hardwires questions about rebellion’s (il)legitimacy to potentially unanswerable ones about female resistance and desire in an impacted system where women may not have either. What seems to be at issue is the proposition that good girls (Charlotte, America) are born and raised, like Lucy, to be incapable of forgetting their families.
Indeed, as we move into the second narrative, it appears that Charlotte Temple’s problems are all in her head. Her seduction is consistently described in terms of