The Wide, Wide World, Susan Warner - Catherine O'Connell (essay date spring 1997)
Catherine O'Connell (essay date spring 1997)
SOURCE: O'Connell, Catherine. “‘We Must Sorrow’: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” Studies in American Fiction 25, no. 1 (spring 1997): 21-39.
[In the following essay, O'Connell illuminates narrative tensions between Ellen's feminine subjectivity and the directives of male-gendered authority figures—a conflict that precipitates the protagonist's suffering in The Wide, Wide World.]
Since its “rediscovery,”1 Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World has posed a challenge to critical readers: what is the meaning of the relentless, excruciating focus on the suffering of the young female protagonist in this record-setting bestseller?2 The novel is structured around the trials of Ellen Montgomery and her subjective experience of pain. Suffering is a crucial narrative element of The Wide, Wide World...
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