Uncivil Tongues: Slander and Honour in Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart
Joseph Fichtelberg, Hofstra University
Volume 18, no. 4, Summer 2006
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
One of the greatest ordeals that Meriel Howard, the longsuffering heroine of Trials of the Human Heart, shares with her creator, Susanna Rowson, involves the effects of unmerited slander. One example among many may help to establish this parallel. Accosted by a rakish admirer, Meriel is discovered by her equally dissolute husband, who immediately spurns her and confronts her “abandoned seducer”: “Tell me, thou vile reptile,” he says, “who under the mask of friendship hast dishonoured me, what reparation can you make for the peace you have destroyed.” The answer follows immediately: “Tomorrow between five and six o’clock, I shall expect to see you in a proper place to settle this difference” (3:123). Although the duel is averted, this is not the first time in the text that such charges are levelled. As she imparts in the preface, Rowson was herself slandered by a vile “reptile” (xiii), William Cobbett, who assailed her “sudden conversion to republicanism” as mercenary and subversive. Unable to respond in the field, she did the next best thing: she wrote a literary defence in which a persecuted British woman melodramatically and stoically withstands assaults on her character. If as a woman she felt “embarrassed and timid” (xi), she nevertheless found the proper place to defend her fragile honour.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sentimental Fiction” include:
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PETTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
“Women Love to Have Their Own Way”: Delusion, Volition, and “Freaks” of Sight in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism
by W.C. HARRIS (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple
by JAMES KIM (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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