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