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  • Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women
  • Michael J. Drexler (bio)
Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women, by Marion Rust. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 311 pp. $24.95.

Marion Rust takes us beyond Charlotte Temple in her engaging and valuable study, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women. It may surprise those outside the field that, despite being among the early republic’s most prolific writers, Rowson and her long career are still underexamined and overshadowed by continued fixation on her first novel. To borrow a couple of insightful critical conceits, studies of Rowson have made a monument out of an early work, from which the author hoped to distance herself, at the cost of obscuring a career that spanned four decades.1 Note, too, the weighty influence of Cathy Davidson, whose Revolution and the Word (2004) provided a canonical reading, or interpretive framework, to recover a once overlooked novel.2 With attention to reading practices and the identification and classification of subgenres, Davidson set the terms for the critical reception not just of Rowson’s novel but also for the field’s dominant keywords—those primarily derived from cultural studies and concerned with shared and overlapping discursive networks, such as sentiment, education, and refinement. Here, authors and texts became occasions to sample the noise of culture, its dominant rhythms, tonal registers, and dissonant notes.

Refocusing our attention on Rowson as an author, Rust reminds us that writers are (at times very keen) readers as well. The picture of Rowson that emerges is one of a canny and self-reflexive strategist—one who crafts authorial personae to suit particular aims and to avoid undesirable associations. Rust’s Rowson is not a placeholder but an agent within a discursive habitus that she must both respond to and consciously endeavor to shape: “She worked with an acute sense of the pitfalls and prejudices that awaited her,” Rust writes, “finely crafting her projected image so as to win over the distrustful and evade the perennially hostile” (p. 103). Following an introduction that amounts to a survey of the critical literature on sentimentalism and a somewhat tentative chapter on Charlotte Temple, Rust’s second chapter describes how Rowson’s critics and patrons alike circumscribed the stage for Rowson’s self-fashioning. Rushing to defend her against attack from the scabrous William Cobbett, Rowson’s supporters, by serving as her surrogates in the forums of public debate and “invoking a cultural ethos of male deference and female ‘refinement,’ . . . effectively barred her from full participation in the early national realm of letters” (p. 137). Rowson responded in two ways, each described by Rust in fascinating detail: 1) she created “autobiographical incarnations” (p. 148) within her fictional universes to explore alternatives to the part cast for her by critics and defenders, and 2) she used her prefaces to insert her authorial self as [End Page 375] a presence commensurate to the protagonists of her novels. Here, writes Rust, Rowson “emphasizes diversity of experience, implication in worldly structures, and the capacity to learn from one’s past, so as to prevent any static perception of womanhood” (p. 148).

Other chapters offer extended readings of Trials of the Human Heart (1795), explore Rowson’s theatrical career as an occasion to fantasize about otherwise proscribed forms of pleasure, and elaborate Rowson’s theory of affective education with attention to her later works written from Boston in the 1820s. Each of these chapters continues to develop the dynamic consciousness of Rowson’s imagination and praxis in ways that will surely be influential to scholars for years to come.

My complaints about Prodigal Daughters are concerned primarily with the apparatus. The convention of omnibus notes at the end of paragraphs does not suit literary study, where frequent quotation from novels intermingles with critical commentary on the secondary literature. It can be frustrating to map lengthy notes, peppered with page numbers and interspersed with additional and substantive commentary, back to the main text. I also found the index less useful than it might have been. Given the relative obscurity of Rowson’s oeuvre even to field specialists, a chronological list of Rowson’s...

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