Illegitimate Children and Bastard Sequels: The Case of Susanna Rowson's Lucy Temple

In recent years, Susanna Rowson's novel Charlotte Temple has gained critical attention as a classic seduction narrative, the first American best-seller, and an important depiction of the issues surrounding women's education, reading practices, and sexual choices in the new nation. Yet, despite the critical and pedagogical ubiquity of Charlotte Temple, little attention has been paid to the novel's sequel. Published in 1828 as Charlotte's Daughter; or, the Three Orphans, and thereafter as Lucy Temple, the sequel recounts the story of Charlotte's illegitimate daughter Lucy, who, like her mother before her, falls victim to the perilous world of romantic intrigue. The eponymous novel details the dramatic consequences that occur when families are disrupted by hidden or mistaken identities. Rowson's text details the particular effects that family secrets have upon daughters, rendering them socially illegitimate and threatening their morality and prosperity. Thus, Lucy subverts the didactic message of Charlotte Temple regarding a daughter's allegiance to her parents and instead valorizes independence and even isolation as the ideal state for young women. The function of Lucy as a sequel, moreover, is to enact the breakdown of lineage dramatized in the novel, as the story of Lucy Temple does not simplistically or seamlessly extend that of Charlotte Temple.

Lucy is not, however, the only sequel to Charlotte Temple. Charlotte Temple was so popular that, throughout the nineteenth century, it was often published in pirated editions that ascribed authorship to individuals other than Rowson.¹ In at least one instance Lucy was given the same treatment: in 1877, a spurious version was produced by J. Barnitz Bacon. This text, entitled The History of Lucy Temple, transforms Lucy's story into a sensational account of women's sexuality, adapting Rowson's narrative to later popular literary tastes. Yet Bacon's version consistently asserts its lineage, claiming to be an authentic sequel to the well-known novel. On its own, this text is simply a curiosity, but, paired with Rowson's official sequel, it raises questions of legitimacy that attend both to ancestry and to authorship.

In this essay, I analyze both sequels—the legitimate and illegitimate, the official and the spurious—in order to examine how notions of legitimacy relate not only to parentage but to publication. I argue that, ironically, the issues that beleaguer Lucy as a sequel parallel the problems of legitimacy and inheritance examined in the novel itself.

In Lucy, Rowson demonstrates that when children are defined by the identities or acts of their parents, their opportunities for self-determination or independence are circumscribed. In a similar way, when sequels are read according to the events or themes initiated in the original narrative, the possible meanings of the text are limited. Thus, both the content of Lucy and the nature of its relationship to Charlotte Temple serve to question systems of inheritance that attempt to enact a stable transference of "legitimacy" from one generation to the next. I argue here that Rowson's warnings about the dangers of inheritance can be applied to sequels as well as descendants to demonstrate why Lucy deserves to be read as more than just an addendum to Charlotte Temple.

Throughout my analysis, I will rely on the metaphorical parallels between author/text and parent/child relationships. The cluster of images that figure a book as a child, an author as a parent, and writing as a form of childbirth has been employed by authors from Defoe and Cervantes to Bradstreet and Cixous.² Traced back to the early modern period, these metaphors emerged as a means of embodying the otherwise immaterial notion of authorial property. Mark Rose tells us that the image worked to assert control over a text in the absence of legal protections like copyright. It is for this reason that the term "plagiarism" derives from the Latin word for kidnapping, in order to "speak of literary theft as a form of child stealing" (39). In a similar way, a sequel may be figured as the child to the original text; the biological bonds between the characters Charlotte...