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  • Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times
  • Joseph Fichtelberg (bio)
Susanna Rowson. Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times, ed. Joseph F. Bartolomeo. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. 418pp. CAN$19.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-839-0.

At last, Susanna Rowson has come of age. With Marion Rust’s major critical study, Prodigal Daughters, her Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Temple, the edition of Slaves in Algiers edited by Jennifer Margulis and Keren Poremski, and Joseph Bartolomeo’s valuable edition of Reuben and Rachel, we can begin to see the range and subtlety of a major early American artist. Long dismissed as a popular sentimentalist, Rowson has been acquiring increasing depth and gravity over the past twenty years through sophisticated studies by Julia Stern, Elizabeth Barnes, Christopher Castiglia, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and others. It may well be that a full appreciation of Rowson had to await an enhancement of our own critical categories—the application of feminism, nationalism, psychoanalytic method, and transatlantic approaches to her diverse texts. An unusually successful popular writer and public figure, Rowson was also exquisitely attuned to the stresses of her revolutionary time, capable of conveying the anxieties of seismic change in a rich, if conventional prose. Nowhere does she do this to greater effect than in Reuben and Rachel.

Reuben and Rachel (1798) capped a remarkable decade in Rowson’s career, one that included the publication of Charlotte Temple (1791), Rebecca (1792), and Trials of the Human Heart (1795), as well as her patriotic farce, Slaves in Algiers (1794). These texts feature wandering heroines seeking work (Rebecca), protection (Charlotte Temple), or social esteem (Trials). Only Reuben and Rachel presents all three. A panoramic celebration of American prospects, the novel surveys ten generations of Italian, Spanish, English, colonial, and Native American figures as they struggle for dignity and security, ending inevitably in Reuben Dudley’s flag-waving testament to “a young country, where the only distinction between man and man should be made by virtue, genius and education” (368). That this hymn to white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism raises a certain queasiness in contemporary readers has everything to do with Rowson’s art, which simultaneously embraces and questions the vast changes it depicts.

Rowson’s preface to Reuben and Rachel proclaims her intention “to awaken in the minds of my young readers, a curiosity ... [about] the history of their native country” (38). As in all her works of the 1790s, the novel features scenes of instruction, easily grasped moral exempla sustaining a wider narrative frame. The lessons here involve a genealogy of upright characters facing down challenges to their integrity as they cross cultural, ethnic, and religious lines. Thus Ferdinand, the son of Christopher Columbus, marries Peruvian princess Orrabella, whose [End Page 256] father is all too happy to ally with benevolent Christians, and it is Columbus himself who fights to restrain the brutality of avaricious Spaniards. Returned in chains to court after his third voyage, during which he is accused of improprieties, he represents a self-sacrificing, colour-blind idealism; his refusal to part with his chains, even after he is exonerated, serves as an emblem of saintly colonialism. That saintliness reappears in his descendants—in the fortunes of William Dudley, taken captive at age fifteen by Narragansetts and rising to the position of tribal chief after marrying the sachem’s daughter, as well as in the adventures of his grandson Reuben, who emerges from another captivity with an Indian beauty in tow, even after he marries his sweetheart. Such incidents suggest a Whiggish appraisal of young America poised to redeem its ancient promise on the world stage.

From this standpoint, the novel celebrates the triumph of republican virtue, yet it does so in a way that also underscores a tough-minded critique. In almost every generation, Rowson’s characters face down avarice and intolerance—often religious intolerance. For Columbus’s granddaughter Isabelle, the challenge is a prohibition against marrying a Protestant, yet she renounces her inheritance by wedding Thomas Arundel. Their daughter Columbia endures the religious persecution of Queen Mary, and Columbia’s granddaughter Isabelle Gorges similarly rejects a wealthy suitor so that she may wed her cousin in secret. In...

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