Maritime Mobility and the Work of Susanna Rowson: Transatlantic Perspectives

Abstract

The chapter explores how the work of Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824) employs ships and sea travel as sites of the cultural articulation and negotiation of mobility in the early modern Atlantic world. Through her writings on seafaring, the chapter suggests, Rowson examines the tensions between imperial fantasies of seamless connectivity across the Atlantic world and the typically flawed material and infrastructural conditions that enabled/foreclosed that connectivity. Critically reading the play Slaves in Algiers (1794), the didactic treatise “Rise and Progress of Navigation” (1811), as well as the novels Reuben and Rachel (1798) and Rebecca (1814 edition), the chapter analyzes the ways in which Rowson functionalized maritime mobility in order to deliberate the materiality of transatlantic travel and the ways such travel impacted on the cultural imaginaries of correspondence, circulation, and exchange. Moreover, Rowson used ships and seafaring as narrative devices to relate early U.S. national identities (such as her own) to larger transatlantic contexts. Ultimately, the chapter shows that Rowson’s writing establishes the Atlantic world as a contested and contradictory cultural space that could not always reconcile imperial fantasies of connectivity with the imperfect material conditions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century maritime mobility.