Mademoiselle La Rue

Mademoiselle La Rue

In Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson creates the fictional persona of Mademoiselle La Rue to illustrate the negative consequences of living a life of sin and vice. Mademoiselle La Rue is the French teacher of Charlotte Temple and is both young and beautiful. She has the “manners of a gentlewoman” (24; Ch 6) and frequently attends church, but these outer trappings of piety only make Mademoiselle La Rue’s true sinful nature that much worse. In the past, Mademoiselle La Rue ran away from a convent with a soldier, then proceeded to live with different men. In her position as a French teacher, she is able to lead Charlotte astray by introducing her to the officer who is interested in Charlotte, John Montraville, and encouraging Charlotte to keep seeing him. Rowson shows Mademoiselle as a deceitful person when she is persuading Charlotte to keep silent about her role in their impropriety by acting. Mademoiselle is an “artful woman” (27; Ch 7) and uses “hypocritical tears” (28; Ch 7) to keep Charlotte quiet. When Mademoiselle and Charlotte run away to America with Belcour and Montraville, respectively, La Rue proves to be false even in her sin when she leaves Belcour to marry an officer named Crayton. In America, La Rue, now Mrs. Crayton, shows the full extent of her rottenness by refusing to help Charlotte when she has been abandoned and evicted. At the very end of the book, years after Charlotte has died from childbirth, her father, Mr. Temple, happens upon a wretched, dying woman who turns out to be Mrs. Crayton. He takes Mrs. Crayton to a hospital, where she dies. Rowson writes that this situation proves that “vice...in the end leads only to misery and shame” (135; Ch 35). With Mrs. Crayton’s death, Rowson proves her point that a life of sin and misdeed will end badly.

The Theme of Lust

A major theme of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple is the dangers of lust and sexual promiscuity. Rowson illustrates this theme through the downfall of the main character, Charlotte, due to her relations and the resulting teenage pregnancy from John Montraville. While Charlotte is only a naive fifteen-year-old, and Rowson places little blame on her, the fact that she ends up dying, unmarried, from childbirth is a warning of the unhappy endings that result from immorality. Before she dies at the end of the book, Charlotte goes through some unpleasant times, all due to the lust of, if not herself, those around her. The soldier John Montraville convinces her to go with him to America, where he buys her a house. However, Charlotte suffers loneliness, as Montraville’s affections are placed on another woman. Charlotte again suffers from the blow of lust, but this time it is Belcour’s, Montraville’s friend. Belcour wants Charlotte to be his mistress, so sabotages her relationship with Montraville. He does this by sneaking into Charlotte’s bed while she is asleep and letting Montraville find the two together so that Montraville believes that Charlotte has been unfaithful. Charlotte is eventually abandoned by both men, and left destitute and alone, and is even evicted from her house. Charlotte calls on Mrs. Crayton for help but is rebuffed. Mrs. Crayton arranged the meeting between Charlotte and Montraville, and is partly responsible for Charlotte’s situation, but refuses to help her, all because of the stigma surrounding the whole sordid situation. As Rowson writes, “Charlotte is held up as an object of terror, to prevent us from falling into guilty errors” (108; Ch 28). The final consequence of these “guilty errors” is Charlotte’s death after childbirth, which serves to firmly cement the idea that lust has only negative consequences.