At Long Last, The Missing And Half Complete American Studies Paper

In her horrible little novel, CHARLOTTE TEMPLE, Rowson leans heavily on the tired convention of the moral. Her particular moral can be summed up as "you should seek to be wholly protected from the world by keeping yourself under the care of your family." The reason this might make sense within the story is because the main character, Charlotte, falls victim to a plot hatched by the opportunist Miss La Rue. Had Charlotte followed this moral more stringently, she would supposedly have fared much better than she actually did. From a contemporary perspective, this is hardly a worthwhile practice, but Rowson may be excused somewhat for her shortsightedness. After all, she wrote this during the Sentimentalist period, so we should not expect too much from her. One of the key markers of this period is a stout display of naivete by the main character. However, it is hard to imagine how this would be a good moral to follow during any period, whatsoever.

The moral appeals to what I will call a shelterist mentality. Charlotte should have sought the shelter of her family, particularly her father, instead of trusting her own supposedly inferior judgement. This kind of thinking presupposes that her own judgement is inherently worse than her parents', specifically, her father's. It seems rather intuitive that if she were to make that supposition, she would tend to see herself as an unintelligent individual. It would discourage her from facing any challenge whatsoever that is not first approved by her parents. And this essentially means that as long as she lives according to this moral, she will not face anything more challenging than her own loving father.

Yes, this might work, given one of two conditions are met. She either has to live in a hermetically sealed bubble, or her father has to be God. In a bubble, she would be totally safe, as long as she never stepped outside of the bubble. If her father were God... all bets would be off. In the real world, either of these conditions are seldom met. It turns out that there are in fact many Miss La Rue types out there. In order for the moral to be worth while, it would have to give us a clue as to how to deal with these kinds of people. Simply avoiding them would only be possible if we knew everything about them without going through the trouble of being duped by them in order to learn anything valuable about them them.

Rowson might respond that you don't need to know EVERYTHING about La Rue, just the important stuff, like whether or not she is trustworthy. You can get that information from other people you already trust. The best source for this would, of course, be your family. And the best family member would be, as always, the patriarch.

But, how does your family know whether or not its sources are trustworthy, which leads to questioning the structure of determining trustworthiness, which leads to a never ending loop of paranoia, ad infinitum? At some point someone has to be up to the challenge of dealing with La Rue.

Rowson would say to ignore all this nonsense, that the right person to deal with La Rue would be the patriarch,and that's all you need to worry about. And this works as a systematic approach because Charlotte is living in a fictional, patriarchal society. She will always have a patriarch there to protect her.

But when Rowson invokes the concept of "protecting" a proper translation would be something more like "thinking". Her father will do all the thinking for her until she is married off... then her husband will take it from there.

The moral is short sighted because in reality you can never be wholly
protected from the outside world, unless of course you were completely
isolated from it. Supposing this principle was known to her all along, I
assume she was at least trying to follow it, and was tricked into stepping
away from it. By adhering to this principle, as well as she knew how,
Charlotte was made especially susceptible to the wiles of such savory
characters as La Rue. In other words, we can try to follow the principle,
but it tends to make us vulnerable to being compromised - to compromising the very principle we are trying to follow. Again, it might work as long as there are no La Rues in the picture. But there are loads of them.

Therefore, it's a doomed principle.

I think this would parallel UNCLE TOM'S CABINn in the sense that the
principle Uncle Tom is adhering to is designed to keep him at bay. The
fact that he is working against his own interests is one thing, but when
Stowe presents it as a matter of fact, she is prescribing a certain moral
standard. Just as it is supposedly better for Uncle Tom to remain docile,
so too is it better for Charlotte to remain completely isolated from the
outside world. They follow the same shitty logic.