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In Susanna Haswell Rowson's novel Charlotte Temple (published in England in 1791 and in the United States in 1794), Charlotte Temple is seduced and abandoned.1 A British officer, Montraville, promises to marry the fifteen-year-old naïf and takes her from her family and her native England to America. (Her father, the second son of an English nobleman, married for love rather than money, and a pretty and poor girl like Charlotte is more susceptible to seduction than to marriage.) When Charlotte is on her journey across the Atlantic, the narrator tells us how Charlotte "passfed] the time, during a tedious and tempestuous passage. . . . Naturally delicate, the fatigue and sickness which she endured rendered her so weak as to be almost entirely confined to her bed."2 The narrator assures the reader that Montraville's "kindness and attention . . . alleviate[d] her sufferings" (59). This purportedly moral and educational novel seduces the reader with the image of the lan- guorous heroine sick in bed with her lover. In the image of Charlotte's confinement in bed, sexual desire merges with an attractive but also dangerously susceptible weakness, a combination destined to blossom into full-blown illness. Soon after they arrive in America, Charlotte becomes pregnant with Montraville's child, and the term for the social isolation imposed on genteel women during childbirth, confinement, underscores Charlotte's constricting physical and psycho-social space.
Charlotte's sexualized sick bed, which becomes a birthing bed- and eventually a death bed-describes the restrictive intertwining of illness, female sexuality, and biological and socio-cultural reproduction. Charlotte's suffering-her melancholy, illness, homelessness, mental breakdown, and finally her death following the birth of her child-pro- vides much of the substance of the novel. Charlotte suffers as much as she does because she transgresses without fully rejecting her culture's sanctions. She dies confined by her own refined passivity, by her in- ability or unwillingness to rewrite her story and reject the restrictions on women's power in late-eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic culture.
Charlotte Temple offers its readers an alternative to Charlotte's constricted space and her passive suffering. Educating them in the per- formance of authenticity and the rhetoric of duplicity, Charlotte Temple is a treatise on authorial seduction that portrays narrative mastery-the power to influence one's own character and story-as both liberating and dangerous....