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.