Prodigal daughters: Susanna Rowson’s early American women

Marion Rust

Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Susanna Rowson--novelist, actress, playwright, poet, school founder, and early national celebrity--bears little resemblance to the title character in her most famous creation, Charlotte Temple. Yet this best-selling novel has long been perceived as the prime exemplar of female passivity and subjugation in the early Republic. Marion Rust disrupts this view by placing the novel in the context of Rowson’s life and other writings. Rust shows how an early form of American sentimentalism mediated the constantly shifting balance between autonomy and submission that is key to understanding both Rowson’s work and the lives of early American women. Rust proposes that Rowson found a wide female audience in the young Republic because she articulated meaningful female agency without sacrificing accountability to authority, a particularly useful skill in a nation that idealized womanhood while denying women the most basic rights. Rowson, herself an expert at personal reinvention, invited her readers, theatrical audiences, and students to value carefully crafted female self-presentation as an instrument for the attainment of greater influence. Prodigal Daughters demonstrates some of the ways in which literature and lived experience overlapped, especially for women trying to find room for themselves in an increasingly hostile public arena.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages311
ISBN (Electronic)1469600846, 9781469600840
StatePublished - Jan 1 2012

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Social Sciences
  • General Arts and Humanities

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Prodigal daughters: Susanna Rowson’s early American women'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this