Adolescence as we know it now occurs at around the age 11 or 12 and is over by 18, the purgatory between childhood and adulthood, existing in a state of turmoil and melodrama, directly in the throes of puberty, verging on an identity crisis. Any minor inconvenience seems like the end of the world, but for Charlotte Temple it really was.
The idea of autonomy or free will seen in Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple (1791) perfectly parallels the real life struggle to find your identity during adolescence. Throughout the novel we see Charlotte powerless, she surrenders all her agency as she is just a child thrown into a very adult situation. She lets LaRue manipulate and control her, she lets Montraville bring her to a foreign country, and she even entrusts him to mail a letter she could have mailed herself. Charlotte sits there idly while life continues to treat her with no mercy, her passivity allows for her downfall as she never once tries to get herself out of her situation. Even Charlotte knows she has “‘fallen so low’ said Charlotte, ‘as to be only pitied?’”(Rowson 53). She is painted as pathetic and helpless and the audience sees her that way, but at age fifteen I’m sure most of us were freshman or sophomores in high school and we were lazy, immature, and unimpressed, if thrown into these circumstances at that age I’m not sure how proactive I would be about anything.
This concept is representative of adolescence as a whole, we’re powerless about our life and situation, being forced to go to school, do chores, and obey our parents. As children we have very little agency and no sense of who we are, our teen years are the time to find that out, we start to come into our own and make decisions for ourselves. Much like the transition from high school to college Charlotte goes from having her life planned out to having to fend for herself, but unlike Charlotte we enter college at 18 not 15 so we are more fully realized and secure with ourselves, and we don’t have two manipulative 30 somethings whispering in our ears leading us astray.
Along with the concept of agency goes identity to be able to make the most of ourselves and our free will it is important to have at least some semblance of who we are. Identity is something Charlotte had no concept of. One huge marker between a child and an adolescent is self awareness and the vague understanding that you are an individual and the things you say or do affect yourself and the people around you, and Charlotte being 15 has started to grapple with that. She understands that her parents will be disappointed in her if she leaves for America, but she gets swept away both physically (with some mild kidnapping) and emotionally. When asked to run away Charlotte refuses, understanding the what the consequences would be if she did, “‘Ah, Montraville,’ replied Charlotte, forcing a smile, ‘how can it be avoided? My parents would never consent to our union; and even could they be brought to approve it, how should I bear to be separated from my kind, my beloved mother?’”(Rowson 34). Her sense of self awareness was still only developing, as it should be at 15 years old, but she was tasked with making a very big decision, one she was not at all mature enough to handle.
It takes people years and years of bad outfits, tragic haircuts, and regrettable decisions to find themselves and figure out who they are. We struggle through middle and high school and by the end most of us still aren’t fully realized yet. Finding out who you are, what you want, and how you want to be perceived is one of the hardest things about growing up and Charlotte who had been treated like a delicate flower her whole life was supposed to figure it out instantly. She was supposed to decide if she wanted to be Montravilles wife, an American, and someone who runs away from their family and elopes. She never had any time to figure herself out.
Many of the internal struggles Charlotte faced were due to the fact that that while she was treated like a child she was expected to act like an adult, and in a time where there was no in between, she was expected to flip the switch in an instant, which as we know now is impossible. Adolescence is a such an long and arduous but formative time in one’s life and being expected to bypass all of that and go straight into mature adulthood leads to some disastrous consequences.
-Giuliana Galati
Representing Adolescence @ Pitt 