Motherhood and literary form in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

In 1794 Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth appears in the United States. Unmistakably a novel about seduction and abandonment, the tale is also one which discusses the tie between a mother and daughter, an image heavy in both its real and symbolic value for the post-Revolutionary American nation. In a poignant early scene of the novel Mr. and Mrs. Temple, the parents of the main character, Charlotte Temple, walk in an almost utopian garden discussing their daughter who is away at school. As they praise her beauty and affection her mother states that Charlotte “will never lose sight of the duty she owes her parents,” and her husband in turn formulates a telling response: “If she does…she must forget the example set her by the best of mothers” (Charlotte 32). It is this image of the ideal mother, described by Rowson as possessing “Humility, Filial Piety, conjugal Affection, Industry…Benevolence [and] Content [sic]” which is held up throughout the text as the framing device of the narrative and the touchstone for the fallen daughter’s actions (Charlotte 32). In this essay I will examine mother-daughter relationships in eighteenth and nineteenth century American novels, claiming that the mother characters instruct their daughters to function within society’s guidelines while at the same time encourage them to develop individuality. I will frame my argument using Lora Romero’s discussion of nineteenth century American domesticity in which she claims that domestic novels are conservative in some areas yet progressive in others. I compliment this perspective with that of Julia Stern who provides criticism of eighteenth century American sentiment which I use as a model for acknowledging the ambiguities in mother-daughter relationships. My essay directly responds to a recent special edition of Studies in American Fiction in which editors Jennifer Desiderio and Desireé Henderson call for a recontextualization of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. In analyzing the relationships between mothers and daughters in Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, I will show that eighteenth and nineteenth century American daughters can neither separate themselves entirely from maternal figures nor wholly conform to them. Instead daughters must find ways of manipulating the socially constructed maternal role in order to illustrate their own individualities and function within the changing American nation.