"As Gary Kelly reminds us, all 1790s novels can be read as taking sides in ideological wars, even when not explicitly referring to political events; a writer's avoiding mentioning such events was political in itself. 'Thanks to [the Jacobins'] controversial work,' Kelly explains, 'the novel gained new prestige as a vehicle for ideological communication in an age of crisis'; it was, he asserts, in fact 'the most important single vehicle of ideological communication among the middle and upper classes in Britain'" (Kelly, cited in Shaffer 284). The very idea of seduction, of guiding an innocent into ruin by force of emotion, is fraught with political tensions. Futher, the abandonment that follows seduction is hard not to connect with the transfer of power from an overthrown aristocracy to a virginal, inexperienced revolutionary power.

The conservative political reading of a seduction novel like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple represents seduction as a tragic revolution. "The wish fulfillment expressed in Charlotte Temple is ultimately conservative, or, more precisely, regressive; Rowson's message to young women would seem to be 'if at all possible, do not separate'" (Stern 59). At the same time, though, the American novel "conjoins the efforts of individuals blending their voices with each other--whose experiences of identification become a form of democratic fellow feeling (Charlotte Temple, Wieland)--with the practices of those who would speak for each other--whose acts of representation degenerate into tyrannical usurpation (The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette, Wieland, Ormond)" (Stern 5). The combination of the advice,"do not separate" and the celebration of democratic fellow feeling in Charlotte Temple perhaps suggests that we should rely on the individual's compassion, or the sympathy of the people, instead of looking to the government to build a moral society. This supports the common patriarchal reading of the text.

Filial piety, or grateful behavior toward one's parents, is one of the most prized virtues in these novels, the violation of which victims of seduction most often lament. After her seduction, Charlotte Temple writes to her mother: "Alas! Thou much injured mother! Shouldst thou even disown me, I dare not complain, because I know I have deserved it: but yet, believe me, guilty as I am, and cruelly as I have disappointed the hopes of the fondest parents, that ever girl had, even in the moment when, forgetful of my duty, I fled from you and happiness, even then I loved you most, and my heart bled at the thought of what you would suffer. Oh! Never, never! whilst I have existence, will the agony of that moment be erased from my memory. It seemed like the separation of soul and body" (Rowson 72-73).

Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette begins with Eliza's joy at leaving her parents' house, and eagerness to live independently. She has just been freed from a situation in which her parents had pressured her consent to a suitor's proposal of marriage. "The scenario of a daughter compelled to follow her parents' will also evokes the republican rhetoric of violated filial rights that figured so urgently and effectively in American revolutionary politics" (Brown 625).

In conservative readings of seduction novels, France looks none too attractive. French-derivative names intimate inner corruption, as in the cases of Charlotte Temple's Montraville and Belcour. Even less subtly, we have La Rue, the appetitive, immoral Frenchwoman who encourages and enables Charlotte's ruin. Yet the identification of the Frenchwoman with French revolutionary ideals can represent these ideals in a positive, as well as a negative light: "[Mary Robinson's] argument throughout [The Natural Daughter that women who fall sexually should be forgiven and socially recuperated is not immediately obviously politically revolutionary, but it is in fact quite radical. Through linking lenience toward female sexual slippage with the French Revolution, Robinson insists that the cultural pressure to demonize, exclude, and eradicate fallen women has a negative social and political impact not only on women but also on the nation as a whole" (Shaffer 285).

Leonard Tennenhouse draws a clear division between English and American seduction story conventions. He explains that in British fiction, the interiority of a woman is the basis of her appeal to a seducer; her moral and intellectual struggle against temptation. American seduction stories, on the other hand, transform the seduced woman into a commercial unit, a "medium for carrying on a relationship between men" (Tennenhouse 9). In 1790s America, printers distributed American and English seduction novels simultaneously. In the American novels, a seduced woman meant ruin for her family, but in the English novels, a woman's interiority might overcome the dishonor of her seducer. Tennenhouse suggests that "the unregulated desire of the libertine pose[d] a threat to patrilineage in the United States" and that American seduction stories condemn the "disparity between desire and economic necessity" that causes seduction, rather than condemning the individual characters as do British seduction stories (Tennenhouse 12).

Americans may have feared a threat to patrilineage but they also drew from the English fear of maternal separation. "Maternal connection becomes the space of female salvation in the world of Charlotte Temple precisely because, as Rowson will reveal throughout her story, late-eighteenth-century patriarchy takes a fatal toll on disorderly female bodies" (Stern 48). Proudly separate from mother England but fearful of orphan status, clambering to uphold patriarchal society and seduced by the idea of national self-sufficiency, the 1790s were a confusing decade for gendered America.

• Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

• Brown, Gillian. "Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences." American Literary History 9 (1997), 625-652.

• Tennenhouse, Leonard. "Libertine America." A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies11 (1999), 1-28.

• Shaffer, Julie. "Ruined Women and Illegitimate Daughters: Revolution and Female Sexuality." In Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Katharine Kittredge. Ann Arbor (MI): U of Michigan P, 2003. 283-310.

  ---