The society Charlotte Temple lives in is a very conservative society that is filled with expectations to be fulfilled. When Charlotte was still living with her parents, before meeting Montraville, she was viewed as the perfect daughter everyone expected her to be and she had a set of rules that she grew up with and abided by. one of the rules that were embdedded in her brain by her society and parents was the fact that she "should never read a letter given [her] by a young man, without first giving it to [her mom]", which was simultaneously one of the first rules she broke since she accepted and read Montraville's letter.

Throughout the novel, whenever Charlotte is told to do something that she was not taught to do, she often reacted as a child being told to misbehave, "but mommy said no" or "daddy wouldn't like it" instead of acting like a teenager who was wise enough to make her own choices. The society that Charlotte lives in was a closed-off society that raised Charlotte with many expectations to follow, and because no one taught Charlotte about the real world or the dangers lurking in it, Charlotte grew up to be a naïve woman that fell headfirst into Monraville's manipulative ploy.

Charlotte was seduced and manipulated into the twisted plans of Montraville, and he knew exactly what he was doing, since he, later on, starts regretting his actions by saying "she was innocent when I first knew her, it was I seduced her, had it not been for me, she had still been virtuous and happy in the affection and protection of her family" (Rowson 66).

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted 
But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame
He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

Relating Charlotte's situation with the lyrics of this song, Charlotte was young and sheltered by her parents and society that she was not aware of what was happening. Because of the societal mimicking that goes on in the novel, Charlotte changes her attitude and actions based on who she is surrounded with since at first, she mimicked the perfect daughter and the perfect female figure the society expected her to be, yet when she met La Rue, she started disregarding the expectations and started mimicking La Rue and Montraville and abiding by their expectations of her instead.  

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream
I dreamed

"Life" referred to in the song can be seen to signify the society, whether the society she lived in before Montraville or the society that she was introduced to after Montraville, saying that because of what happened to her, the society burst her dream and gave her a reality check, showing her how cruel life really is.