We discussed Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson today in discussion section. Charlotte Temple was one of the first bestselling novels in American history and had outsold all other books (excluding the Bible) until Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Novels, especially at that time, were considered much like we consider video games today – solely entertainment, and nothing more. The novel’s entertainment was as dangerous as it was addictive and were often believed to be corrupting. They lacked real moral value and fabricated false emotions in the heart of the reader. Rowson knew this, and took steps to defend her novel from charges of sensationalism. She was not corrupting the youth, she claimed, but instead educating them:
“Now, my dear sober matron, (if a sober matron should deign to turn over these pages, before she trusts them to the eye of a darling daughter,) let me intreat you not to put on a grave face, and throw down the book in passion and declare ’tis enough to turn the heads of half the girls in England; I do solemnly protest, my dear madam, I mean no more by what I have here advanced, than to ridicule those romantic girls, who foolishly imagine a red coat and silver epaulet constitute the fine gentleman; and should that fine gentleman make half a dozen fine speeches to them, they will imagine themselves so much in love as to fancy it a meritorious action to jump out of a two pair of stairs window, abandon their friends, and trust entirely to the honour of a man, who perhaps hardly knows the meaning of the word, and if he does, will be too much the modern man of refinement, to practice it in their favour.” (p. 28)
Who doesn’t love a semicolon? Anyways, I tried to teach the students what it mean to “break the fourth wall” in literature, art, film, theater, etc. I asked one class if they knew any examples of breaking the fourth wall, and when I didn’t receive any answers, I offered my own favorite fourth wall breaker. High Fidelity. And they didn’t know what that was either. What are they teaching kids in schools these days?
