Charlotte Temple’s Revolutionary Allegories

This chapter recontextualizes Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple in relation to 1770s–1780s allegorical discourses of parricide in which the conflict between Britain and the American settler colonies figures as a fatal separation of mother and daughter. Reading the novel alongside pamphlets and political cartoons, I argue that Rowson’s plot adapts parricidal allegory in the early 1790s in order to decry gendered politics of filial memory which require daughters to remember their parents at all costs. Whereas Charlotte Temple is typically read in relation to early U.S. national cultural formations, this chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s theories of allegorical form to argue that the text is better understood as a lingering meditation on the nature of Revolutionary time which neither looks nostalgically back to British empire nor optimistically forward to liberal democracy. Refracting Revolutionary history through the Fall, Rowson’s story engages its readers’ intermedial allegorical literacy in order to slow the rapid advance of liberal modernity in cycles of unfinished reflection.