The Wide, Wide World, Susan Warner - Nancy Schnog (essay date spring 1989)
Nancy Schnog (essay date spring 1989)
SOURCE: Schnog, Nancy. “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World.” Genders, no. 4 (spring 1989): 11-25.
[In the following essay, Schnog declares that The Wide, Wide World is a complex, psychological portrait of feminine sentiment.]
In the past few years Susan Warner's sentimental novel The Wide Wide World, one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novels and the nation's first best-seller, has been at the center of some of the most provocative and detailed discussions of the mechanics and politics of sentimentality.1 A decade ago, on the margin of this revival, Warner's novel was typically regarded as a subliterary fiction that peddled comfortable dreams and cheerful platitudes to a large and undemanding middle-class readership.2 More recently, in the wake of feminist re-evaluations of nineteenth-century women's...
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