Charlotte Temple: Mapping Social Status through Gender and Value Systems.

摘要

Susanna Rowson has been viewed as a minor writer of the Eighteenth Century, while her novel Charlotte Temple has been dismissed as overly sentimental by modern critics. However, the novel can be interpreted as a 'survival manual' for the women of Rowson's time, which was her stated intent in writing the novel. It serves as a guide and key to the social and cultural pitfalls inherent in the gender-based division between monetary and moral values, and the cultural institutions which perpetuated it. Although Rowson emphasizes the female-oriented social rules known as morals, she carefully analyzes the male-dominated economics which underwrite them, thereby giving women a worldly education which their upbringing denied them. Her method targeted women's subordinate position in a medium and manner which enabled her to reach her female readers without overtly challenging society's established structure. (sdw)