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Sincerity; a Novel in a Series of Letters (1803-04), by Susanna Rowson1

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Sincerity; a Novel in a Series of Letters (1803-04), by Susanna Rowson1 Susanna Rowson, Sincerity (1803-04) Sincerity; A Novel in a Series of Letters (1803-04), paper, on the hope of rendering an essential service to the Fair Sex, by Susanna Rowson1 by offering them a work in which should be united at once, Amusement and Information, and thought it would be peculiarly Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824) was one of the early acceptable to them, as the daily papers are merely vehicles of US’s most prolific and popular authors. Born in Britain, she spent political controversy, and advertisements,” wrote the editors. several years of her childhood in Massachusetts, where her father “This being our avowed design, it behoves us to be particularly was a customs collector. As the revolutionary conflicts accelerated careful in what we present to their eye. Delicacy of sentiment, in the mid-1770s, her father was placed under house arrest before accuracy and elegance of language and purity of moral tendency, the family was finally sent back to England in a prisoner exchange. will ever be strong recommendations” (Dec 11, 1802, page 2). In England, she became active in the theater, marrying actor Susanna Rowson’s novel began to appear in the June 4, 1803 issue, William Rowson in 1786, and in 1793, the Rowsons journeyed to which opened with the twenty-eighth installment of an essay series the United States with a theater company. By that time, Susanna titled “The GOSSIP,” a short reflection on hope and another on Rowson had already published some poetry and six novels, intemperance, a biographical sketch of a French bishop and including Charlotte. A Tale of Truth (1791). By 1794 Rowson had another of a child prodigy, a number of short anecdotes under the republished some of her British works in the United States, while heading “AMUSING,” some scientific anecdotes (including one also publishing new works, including several plays: Charlotte, about a chicken with the face of a human), and a short piece of the republished in 1794 and again in 1797 as Charlotte Temple, becomes education of youth. Notices of marriages, deaths, and ordinations 1 a best-selling phenomenon. After a brief period in Philadelphia, follow, along with some notes to readers who had made she relocated to Boston in 1796. Over the next few years, she submissions. The paper’s fourth and final page has several poems, published additional novels, plays, and poetry; opened a Young a lottery notice, and, under the heading “THE NOVELIST,” the Ladies’ Academy and published textbooks, and contributed to first installment of “SINCERITY: A NOVEL IN A SERIES OF several magazines, including the Boston Weekly Magazine, though the ORIGINAL LETTERS.” Thereafter, for about one year, extent of her involvement with the latter remains unclear. installments of the novel appeared pretty much weekly—there was Certainly her largest contribution to this journal was the serialized a skipped week in late October, 1803, and two missed weeks in novel Sincerity. early June, 1804. The fifty-three pieces generally correspond to the The Boston Weekly Magazine started to appear in 1802, characters’ letters, though the longer letters are spread across published by Samuel Gilbert and Thomas Dean. While its heading multiple magazine issues. The installments varied in length from indicated it would be “Devoted to Morality, Literature, Biography, just shy of 800 words to just over 1700 words, with an average of History, The Fine Arts, Agriculture, &c. &c.,” the magazine was about 1300. In June of 1804, the serial was briefly interrupted for early in its history framed as a women’s alternative to the a notice that the novel, if it found sufficient subscribers, would be newspaper: “We formed our plan at first, of publishing a weekly published as a bound book volume. Apparently interest was too Prepared by Duncan Faherty (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center) and Ed White (Tulane University) Susanna Rowson, Sincerity (1803-04) low for this venture, and a book version would not appear for epistolary novel of letters by and about Sarah, but that set structure almost a decade: in early 1813, a book version appeared with the essentially crumbles in the novel’s final third. One of the most new title Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife, now with Susanna Rowson challenging questions, finally, is that of the Sarah’s narrative listed as the author. The magazine version of the novel was reliability; while the original title Sincerity seems to insist that she cleaned up a bit—the spelling of characters’ names was means what she says, there are fascinating suggestions that Sarah standardized, punctuation was made more consistent, and the simply cannot find a way to sincerely express her feelings about compressed columns of magazine text were broken up into Darnley. paragraphs, particularly in the sections with dialogue. Otherwise, Suggestions for further reading. In the first book length apart from the addition of a new preface (reproduced at the end of biography of Susanna Rowson, Elias Nason judged Sincerity to be our text, below), the changes were relatively slight. Our her “most important contribution” to the Boston Weekly Magazine, reproduction aims to approximate the periodical version, and even as he categorizes the text as largely autobiographical: “in the accordingly we have reproduced Sincerity with original headings, sufferings and unflinching fidelity of the heroine, Sarah Darnley, punctuation, paragraphing, and spelling, even when it is the author is said to have given with her pen, the portraiture of her inconsistent (as is often the case with character names). We have own checkered and eventful life”; see, Nason, A Memoir of Susanna only followed the text of the later novel version for obvious Rowson (Munsell, 1870). Over a century later, Dorothy Weil labels corrections of typographical errors, missing words, or grammatical Sincerity a “didactic” text aimed at delineating the “problems of a mistakes that make the meaning unclear. loveless marriage of convenience;” for Weil, Sincerity extends 2 While Rowson is today best known for Charlotte Temple, the Rowson’s pedagogical work around the question of women’s story of a very young woman’s seduction, Sincerity considers a very education by underscoring that “knowledge of the actual is more different scenario, that of an unhappy marriage and all the social valuable than ascent into imaginary realms”; see, Weil, In Defense of and institutional disadvantages that follow: there is no US novel of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) (The Pennsylvania State the time that delves so deeply into the details of abuse and University Press, 1976). Eve Kornfield considers how Sincerity unhappiness. The novel also demonstrates a growing and unusual “provided lessons in domestic virtue rather than romantic or attention to physicality: from the early scene of Sarah’s nosebleed sentimental love,” declaring that “realism was the note striven for to the many later scenes of her fatigue and hunger, readers are here; unlike in Rowson’s earlier novels”; see Kornfield, “Women attuned not only to the heroine’s emotional state but also her in Post-Revolutionary American Culture: Susanna Haswell physical well-being. The absence of an American setting was not Rowson’s American Career,” Journal of American Culture 6 (1983). common for novels written and published in the US, but it was not Cathy Davidson revitalized interest in Rowson and spurred the re- unusual for Rowson’s writing. A few of her novels have American canonization of Charlotte Temple, but she only gestures towards settings, most notably Reuben and Rachel (1798), an epic ten Sincerity to suggest that its portrait of the high cost of marrying a generation refashioning of the legacies of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ fool “had more than a passing personal relevance”; see, Davidson, of the New World, but the four-volume Trials of the Human Heart Charlotte Temple (Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). Patricia L. Parker (1795) was set in Europe. More striking to readers may have been offers the first sustained examination of Sincerity, and in addition to the novel’s odd structure. It first seems to be a conventional cautioning against merely reading the text as autobiography she Susanna Rowson, Sincerity (1803-04) credits Rowson for her “fully developed” female characters and for to diagnose the complexity of its narrative structure, “what how the text “differs from most eighteenth- or nineteenth-century emerges is what a recent strain of psychoanalytic criticism has novels” by opening with a marriage instead of ending with one; termed a parallax view: we hear the sentimental story as its subject see, Parker, Susanna Rowson (Twayne, 1986). Patricia Okker chooses to present it, and we hear the sentimental story from a observes that Sincerity draws “heavily on the didactic essay that distance (as the story of an object), but then go still further to an served as a key feature of eighteenth-century periodicals,” ‘objective’ position (the editor) before plunging back into a suggesting that such a “mixing of genres” stylistically emblematizes ‘subjective’ exchange between the two objects of Sarah’s desire”; what she calls “magazine novels”; see Okker, Social Stories: The see, White, “Rowson’s Arcs,” Studies in American Fiction 38:1-2 Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-century America (University of Virginia (2011). Although she fails to acknowledge that Sincerity first Press, 2003). Marion Rust highlights how Sincerity “contains cryptic appeared in 1803, Nicole Eustace interprets the 1813 book printing allusions to physical abuse and emotional neglect,” while also as a reflection of the bellicose tensions between England and the tracing how it “lays out reasons a woman suffering these ills might Unites States during the War of 1812; for Eustace, “Rowson’s choose to stay married, ranging from unwillingness to break a [1813] audience would have been primed to expect such disregard promise to the callous treatment that awaits her at the hands of the for freedom and for feeling from the British,” and thus would have larger community should she depart”; see Rust, Prodigal Daughters: understood why “the English advisors surrounding Sarah insisted Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women (UNC Press, 2008).
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