Comparing Letters From An American Lover And Royall Tyler's Etiquette

In many texts during the mid to late 1700s and after, women were starting to play major roles. In Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, women played central roles, either on the sidelines like in Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Franklin’s Autobiography, or front in center like in Tyler’s The Contrast. While Charlotte in The Contrast serves as a moral message to women of the time, both Miss Read in the Autobiography and the Wife in the Letters from an American Farmer become modes of reason, advice, and morality to the men in their lives. However different the functions and roles these three women participate in their individual texts, they are all three equally important. Miss Read played a major role not only in the personal life of Benjamin Franklin but in the business …show more content…
Miss Read and the Wife function to serve the men in their lives and in a way epitomize the ways in which a woman should act in regards to their husbands. Charlotte on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Charlotte is considered a coquette, a free bird, a sexual agent and transgressive by nature. She states in the first scene, “Why, my dear little prude, are we not all such libertines? Do you think, when I sat tortured two hours under the hands of friseur, and an hour more at my toilet, that I had any thoughts of my Aunt Susan, or my cousin Betsey? Though they are both allowed to be critical judges of dress” and after Letitia questions her motives for why women dress Charlotte exclaims, “Man! – my Letitia – Man! for whom we dress, walk dance, talk, lisp, languish and smile” (Norton 778). Unlike her counterpart Maria, Charlotte functions as her own agent, which to society is seen as