Charlotte Temple, a novel by Susanna Rowson, details the life of Charlotte, who is an adolescent girl when the novel begins. Adolescence is viewed as a time of growth or vulnerability. Most people try to find themselves during this stage of life. For Charlotte, she was not granted the luxury of experimentation to find her … Continue reading Charlotte Temple: Autonomy and Identity →

Author Susanna Rowson, in her magnificent 1791 novel Charlotte Temple, makes a clear statement about the world -- trust few and trust carefully. She makes this point most clearly through the relationships of the characters. The main character, Charlotte Temple, lives in a bleak world, a world where there are very few characters that she … Continue reading “You Can’t Handle the Truth!”: Charlotte Temple’s Struggles with Trust →

            The Lowell Offering, like a time machine transporting us back to the nineteenth century, gives modern readers an idea of how mental health and mental illness was viewed during the Industrial Revolution and prior. At a time when mental illness treatment was just beginning to be reformed thanks to pioneers such as Phillipe Pinel and … Continue reading Mental Health & Faith in the Lowell Offering →

The Lowell Offering was a magazine, published originally in 1840, which was a collection of writings written by young, female workers working in the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. These adolescent women wrote about their daily strife with the factory conditions and how both their jobs and their living arrangements created an abundance of mental … Continue reading Girlhood and Identity in The Lowell Offering →

If I had a dollar for every time my mother told me, “Devin, keep your hands out of the cookie jar” …I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post. In fact, my hands were in the cookie jar so often that my mother would joke about having to cut my hands off! Thankfully, she didn’t, … Continue reading Autonomy & Control: The Weapons of Adolescence →

Adolescence is a time in which adolescents struggle to find a place where they feel comfortable. It’s a time for them to discover who they really are; their identity. In The Lowell Offering, many young girls leave their home to work in mills in New England. Their families were in need of extra support, so … Continue reading Identity and Control In The Lowell Offering →

In Susanna Rowson’s 1791 novel, Charlotte Temple, there are several reoccurring themes surrounding the main character, Charlotte. One that stands out is how Charlotte’s whole life was controlled by someone else, so then when an opportunity presents itself, it ends with her losing control of her life. It is interesting though how everyone except Charlotte had … Continue reading Charlotte Temple: Lack of Control →

When one lacks a strong sense of identity, they lack true agency. In the world of Susanna Rowson’s 1791 novel Charlotte Temple, one’s sense of identity is an important determinant in the amount of control one has over one’s life. Charlotte, as a young, naïve teen with little exposure to the real world and the … Continue reading Identity and Agency in Charlotte Temple →

One could argue the worst things happen to the best people, and there is certainly some truth to this sentiment.  Almost everyone can think of a time when something rather upsetting happened to a person who did nothing to deserve it.  Sometimes, these situations are caused by forces of the universe, completely out of anyone’s … Continue reading When Bad Things Happen to Good People: Charlotte Temple Edition →