Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women

Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson's Early American Women

Rust, Marion

Paperback

Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo

Literary CriticismWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0807858927
ISBN13: 9780807858929
Publisher: Univ Of North Carolina Pr
Published: Mar 24 2008
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.78 Width: 6.27 Depth: 9.12
Language: English
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.

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