The Difficulty of Representing "Just Say No"

In class on Wednesday the 19th, we discussed the aesthetic challenge Milton faced regarding how to portray a "negative," having to write about Original Sin while simultaneously characterizing Eve and Adam's action as a grievous mistake.  In other words, how does an author portray sin without representing it enticingly?  This was a key question confronting authors of the early republic whose genre of choice was the seduction novel. 

An image from one of the many editions of Charlotte Temple

Two of the key bestsellers of the era were Susanna Haswell Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797).  Both novels told essentially identical stories (spoiler alert!):  a virginal woman is seduced by a dashing army officer, fetched away from her friends and family, impregnated, and abandoned by her lover, eventually dying in childbirth, repenting her waywardness.  Both authors were writing in the tradition of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), one of the most popular novels of the 18th century on both sides of the ocean.

The risk of the genre, acknowledged by advocates and critics alike, was the possibility that a young woman would sympathize so strongly with the heroines that she would see their sins not as horrid but as understandable, that the power of representation would dilute (or worse, reverse!) the intended message.  Authors often tried to undermine such anxieties by claiming their novel was "a tale of truth" (Charlotte) or "founded on fact" (Coquette).  Unlike Paradise Lost, the sinful actions in these novels take place offstage, and readers realize the deed has occurred when the heroine runs away with her lover (Charlotte) or is found weeping after a rendezvous (Coquette).  Although the authors do not figuratively draw back the bed curtains for their readers to observe the act of sinning, the novels' dashing officers are still alluring characters, and the life of adventure they offer remains appealing.  (Another way to confront the challenge of representing seduction and maintain the moral is to relegate seduction to a subplot and only portray the consequences of that seduction for the primary characters, as Sukey Vickery does in Emily Hamilton [1803].   Even this strategy of consequences, however, did not save The Scarlet Letter (1850) from being called a "dirty book" by one reviewer.)

Despite its popularity, the novel itself was a suspect genre.  According to one critic, fiction takes "Every opportunity . . . to frame an apology for suicide, adultery, prostitution, and the indulgence of every propensity for which a corrupt heart can plead an inclination."  Another commentator noted in "Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity" that "Without the poison instilled [by novels] into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice . . . . It is no uncommon thing for a young lady who has attended her dearest friend to the altar, a few months after a marriage which, perhaps, but for her, had been a happy one, to fix her affections on her friend's husband, and by artful blandishments allure him to herself.  Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital!  Such serpents are really in existence . . . . "  (Both quotes from Cathy N. Davidson's Revolution and the Word [1986].)

Such are the trials that try authors' souls.