[In the following essay, Chantell explores the way The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter embrace and critique conservative domestic ideologies relating to women and child-rearing.]

By the middle of the nineteenth century, domesticity had gained a position of prominence, if not dominance, in American culture; this discourse of home, family, and private life influenced everything from home design to social reform movements.¹ A primary feature of this ideology concerned the mother's role as child nurturer and educator, a role for which women were supposed to be divinely intended and biologically designed. As historian Mary Ryan has observed, “the feminization of child-rearing, in literature and in practice, dovetailed neatly with the gender system enshrined in the cult of domesticity. The true woman was the perfect candidate for the role of child nurturer. She was loving, giving, moral, pure, and consigned to the hearth.”²

Much mid-nineteenth-century domestic literature, in the form of advice manuals, articles in ladies' magazines, and published sermons, reiterated and reinforced this message through reverent portrayals of the mother as “tutelary seraph,” a home-bound figure who instills virtue and religion in her children through the medium of her matchless love.³ In his popular guide for parents, Fireside Education (1838), Samuel Goodrich describes the infant's early impressions of its mother, a “ministering spirit” who supplies all its inchoate needs: “If cold, [she] brings it warmth; if hungry, she feeds it; if in pain, she relieves it; if happy, she caresses it … The mother is the DEITY OF INFANCY!”⁴ As the child matures, though, it begins to require more than food, warmth, and affection. Now, according to Goodrich, the father steps in:

Hitherto, [the child] has been a creature of feeling; it now becomes a being of thought. The intellectual eye opens upon the world. … Curiosity is alive, and questions come thick and fast to the lisping lips … At this period, the child usually becomes fond of the society of his father. He can answer his questions. He can unfold the mysteries which excite the wonder of the childish intellect.

(15)

This description typifies the view taken by many didactic writers who focus on the mother's role as child educator. In these texts, maternal instruction appears as an instinctive, spontaneous reaction rather than a reasoned, deliberate choice (a competency reserved for fathers). Indeed, as a writer for The Mother's Magazine phrased it in 1841, a mother was supposed not “to teach virtue but to inspire it.”⁵ Taken together, these writings suggest that the ideal mother accomplished her work simply by loving her children; no more rigorous methods were necessary. At its core, the antebellum cult of the mother rested on the fundamentally emotional, irrational character of the mother's attitude towards her children. To underscore this point, I will use the term “sentimental maternalism” to refer to this cluster of beliefs.⁶

Most critics of nineteenth-century American literature conclude that the popular women's novels of mid-century bear the imprint of domesticity, including its emphasis on sentimental maternalism, although they debate the extent to which these texts advance or impede progressive political transformation.⁷ Stephanie Smith, for example, deems it a “commonplace” to say that “representations of a sanctified motherhood formed the primary cornerstone for commercially successful writing in the United States of the nineteenth century.”⁸ But to suggest that domestic fictions uniformly or unequivocally promote sentimental maternalism misreads this genre. Detailed portraits of competent, capable motherhood (let alone the sanctified variety) rarely appear in most domestic fictions.⁹ Far from promoting the mother's educative primacy, some of the nineteenth century's best-selling domestic novels demonstrate nothing so much as her superfluity.

This article shows how two popular domestic novels—Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter (1854)—point out the limits of sentimental maternalism as an instrument for educating young women.¹⁰ Though the heroines' training occupies these texts centrally, the novels minimize the mother's role in this work. These young women enjoy neither the tutelage of the seraphic mother nor the shelter of the sort of home into which she was usually projected. Instead, according to these novels the expertise required to cultivate exemplary women resides in many rather than one and in interaction with the world, not retreat from it. Ellen Montgomery and Gertrude Flint receive guidance from a series of surrogates, both male and female. Although like the archetypal sentimental mother in many ways, these surrogates evade the domestic isolation and extravagant emotion characteristic of the ideal. The reluctance of these fictions to embrace the fireside scenario—sanctified mother working within the intensely private setting of the middle-class home to inspire virtue in her children—registers their ambivalence about an ideology that, at first glance, they might seem to endorse.

Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World has often been understood as a “prototype of the domestic bildungsroman.”¹¹ Heroine Ellen Montgomery's spiritual, moral, and intellectual education occupies the text centrally. We first meet her as a ten-year-old girl; effectively orphaned soon thereafter, Ellen struggles on without the guidance of her idolized mother. Domesticity would suggest that Ellen's handicap is nearly insurmountable—the more so because Mrs. Montgomery perfectly embodies the characteristics of sentimental maternalism. Genteel, pious, submissive, and devoted to her child, the invalid Mrs. Montgomery clings to her parlor, where Ellen sews, reads aloud, and tends to the tea things. Indeed, Mrs. Montgomery ventures outside only once during her brief tenure in the novel.¹² Ellen's father, Captain Montgomery, inhabits an alien world outside the home; all Ellen and her mother seem to know of it is that in it there are lawsuits that force Captain and Mrs. Montgomery to leave for Europe. In the chapters preceding Ellen's separation from her mother, the two continually form and re-form a scene that can fairly be called the archetypal sentimental tableau: before the parlor fireplace of a genteel home, mother embraces child as the two pray, sing hymns, and discuss God's infinite goodness and wisdom.

Like the ideal fireside educator hailed by so many maternal advice books of the period, Mrs. Montgomery exploits the mother-child bond for the purpose of religious instruction—specifically, to teach Ellen to subdue her rebellious spirit and embrace the divine will lying behind every seeming injustice. And at first glance, it appears as though the novel vindicates the tutelary seraph; in the end, Ellen fulfills her mother's wishes, emerging as a model of Christian piety and submission to God's will. Both through her example and her instructions, Mrs. Montgomery lays the foundation for Ellen's future education; through her love, she embeds her authority within Ellen's conscience, continuing to regulate Ellen's behavior through the feelings aroused by the memory of that love. According to Richard Brodhead, Ellen's subsequent adventures and experiences testify to the power of the sentimental mother—so intolerable is her loss that Ellen spends the rest of the novel looking for new mothers.¹³ Ellen's encounter with her first surrogate, Mr. George Marshman, seems to confirm this interpretation. Ellen meets Mr. Marshman on the boat that takes her away from her mother; as she sits wondering “Who is there to teach me now? Oh, what shall I do without you? Oh, mamma! How much I want you already,” Mr. Marshman enters. He begins almost immediately to catechize Ellen in the same manner as her mother—giving her a book of hymns marked up just for her, like the specially inscribed Bible Ellen's mother leaves her (68).

But the surrogates who continue Ellen's education do more than merely bookmark the space left by her mother; they meet a far wider range of Ellen's needs, and they do so in ways that quietly highlight Mrs. Montgomery's weaknesses. Each of Ellen's guides—Mr. Marshman, siblings Alice and John Humphreys, Mr. Van Brunt—provides instruction that goes beyond religious indoctrination mediated through emotional manipulation. It is true that Mr. Marshman gives Ellen the hymns—but after he does so, he takes her all over the boat, explaining its different parts to her; “he was amused to find how far she pushed her inquiries into the how and why of things” (76). This scene introduces Ellen's insatiable curiosity about things, particularly those of a scientific nature. Later, we see much more of Ellen's thirst for information about the world. Watching Alice make hot chocolate, Ellen “wanted to know what chocolate was made of—where it came from—where it was made best” (272). Observing while Mr. Van Brunt cures some freshly slaughtered hogs, Ellen quizzes him about why he salts the pork, if salt would preserve things besides pork, if the hams are salted too, how long the hams must smoke before they are done, and what's in the kettle over the fire. In short, nearly as often as Ellen gives in to the tears so derided by some twentieth-century critics, she asks her favorite question of all: “I wonder what is the reason of that?” (233).¹⁴

Although religion is always Ellen's most important subject, her primary mentors focus as much on satisfying Ellen's intellectual curiosity as overseeing her moral development. Walking in the woods with Alice, Ellen wonders aloud why the leaves fall in autumn, whether trees can live without leaves, and why evergreens don't drop their leaves. In response, Alice provides a botany lecture, explaining the role played by leaves in the tree's circulatory system (185-86). Similarly, Ellen queries John Humphreys at length on the meanings of unfamiliar words; “oracle” provides him an opportunity to hold forth on Greek mythological history. In that lecture, he uses the word “hieroglyphics,” which provokes a curious look from Ellen; John asks if she wants to know what it means. “The pen was laid down while he explained, to a most eager little listener. Even the great business of the moment was forgotten. From hieroglyphics they went to the pyramids” (304). Well-read Alice capably teaches Ellen English and geography.¹⁵ Schoolmasterly John sets Ellen at drawing lessons, teaches her to ride, and provides her with books like Weems' Life of Washington and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Encomiums like the following, voiced by Ellen's friend, abound—testimonials to the Humphreys' teaching skills: “She must be very clever; don't you think she is, mamma? Mamma, she beats me entirely in speaking French, and she knows all about English history; and arithmetic!—and did you ever hear her sing, mamma?” (417).

Ellen's surrogate mothers thus marry intellectual inquiry with religious exhortation in their approach to her education. By contrast, Mrs. Montgomery uses an exclusively emotional tutelary method, focusing on Ellen's heart, specifically its susceptibility to religious penetration. She exploits Ellen's adoration and her desire to please as a conduit for her moral lesson. This is not to say that emotion rages unchecked in the parlor. As frequently as Ellen or her mother give in to sorrow, equally often they struggle—eventually succeeding—to quell these signs of excessive feeling. By thus acknowledging the antebellum middle-class imperative to exercise self-restraint, an imperative heightened by Mrs. Montgomery's physical fragility, this narrative clearly marks the unrestrained indulgence of intense feeling as undesirable and potentially dangerous. But though she well knows that her own health and the health of Ellen's character require emotional self-control, in the end Mrs. Montgomery betrays her own impulse towards indulgence. The night before Ellen leaves, Captain Montgomery breaks the solitude of his wife's parlor to tell her that Ellen will leave early the next morning. Though she conceals most of her agitation from her husband, Mrs. Montgomery frantically resolves to “waken Ellen immediately,” despite the lateness of the hour (58). Mr. Montgomery quashes the plan as irrational and unwise. Having glimpsed Ellen's intensely passionate nature as well as the dangerous effect of emotion on Mrs. Montgomery's health, a reader might conclude that Mr. Montgomery's veto is rooted at least partially in reason, rather than wholly in indifference to human feeling. As he asks his wife, “Why in the world should you wake her up, just to spend the whole night in useless grieving?—unfitting her entirely for her journey, and doing yourself more harm than you can undo in a week” (59).

Separation only intensifies Mrs. Montgomery's power to provoke profound feeling from her daughter. Whenever Ellen receives a letter from her mother, her reaction is violently emotional, as in the following example: “Her transport was almost hysterical. She had opened the letter, but she was not able to read a word; and quitting Alice's arms, she threw herself upon the bed, sobbing in a mixture of joy and sorrow that seemed to take away her reason” (223). Mrs. Montgomery's presence, whether in person or mediated through writing, serves primarily to “take away” Ellen's reason and replace it with a highly emotional state that leaves her susceptible to penetration by her mother's religious precepts. The logic of sentimental maternalism as articulated in this novel defines the mother's greatest triumph as the implantation of her image in her child's mind, so that he or she may carry it throughout life as an emotional and spiritual touchstone. Given this logic, the sentimental mother can hardly afford to diffuse her focus; her child's emotional orientation requires all of her attention, to the exclusion of all other matters. It is only when Ellen leaves the shelter of her mother's parlor that her voracious intellectual curiosity emerges and can be satisfied.

Although she seems to live for nothing but these cloistered moments with her daughter, Mrs. Montgomery herself catches at the dilemma posed by their relationship. When Ellen worries about going to live with an aunt who she fears will “not be so likely to love me,” her mother warns that she “must not expect … to find anybody as indulgent as I am, or as ready to overlook and excuse your faults” (21). The hallmark of sentimental motherhood—tender indulgence—stands simultaneously as Mrs. Montgomery's greatest strength and her principal flaw as a mother. It is telling that among the surrogates who take over Ellen's education she does not find a single one willing to “overlook and excuse” her faults, as her mother admits herself to be. Something more than maternal indulgence is required to bring Ellen to exemplary womanhood.

In arguing that this novel reveals the limitations of sentimental maternalism, I do not suggest that it rejects the ideal. Clearly, the novel indicates that affectionate bonding is the preferred mode of connection between all humans; Ellen's mentors all embed their instruction in a matrix of love and tenderness. For example, in Mr. Marshman, Ellen recognizes immediately a copy of that gentleness she misses; when he first addresses her, “there was no mistaking the look of kindness in the eyes that met hers. … All the floodgates of Ellen's heart were at once opened” (69). Ellen bursts into tears, and Mr. Marshman gently leads her away to a secluded part of the ship, where he holds her in his arms and speaks kind, soothing words to her. Though their encounter on the boat is brief, it simmers with an emotional intensity partly manifested in a tableau not unlike those of her mother's parlor: Mr. Marshman pets and hugs her, Ellen cries and falls asleep with her head on his chest.

Likewise, Ellen's most beloved surrogate mother, Alice Humphreys, treats her as tenderly as did Mrs. Montgomery. When Ellen first meets her, as with Mr. Marshman, she detects in Alice those characteristics her mother exhibited—characteristics Ellen absolutely requires from her mentors. Alice happens upon a sobbing Ellen; she asks the girl what is wrong:

The tone found Ellen's heart and brought the water to her eyes again, though with a difference. She covered her face with her hands. But gentle hands were placed upon hers and drew them away; and the lady sitting down on Ellen's stone, took her in her arms; and Ellen hid her face in the bosom of a better friend than the cold earth had been like to prove her.

(149)

The rest of Alice's and Ellen's encounters are characterized by a physical and emotional intimacy highly reminiscent of the sentimental tableau enacted in the Montgomery parlor.

But though sympathy and affection are necessary to the tutelary relationship, something more is required to bring a young girl to exemplary womanhood. I have already noted the intellectual and informational instruction Ellen receives from her mentors. We must also note that John Humphreys, who becomes Ellen's foremost earthly mentor, shows no difficulty at all reining in his tender feelings when it comes to Ellen. Indeed, Ellen remarks upon first meeting him that “she was quite sure from that one look into his eyes that he was a person to be feared” (275). Of course, it is only to be expected that, as a male in a strongly patriarchal culture, John Humphreys would demonstrate control over his tender emotions; this fact alone is not remarkable. Rather, I point to the fact that Humphreys, among others, plays a significant role in bringing Ellen to maturity. In the end, The Wide, Wide World does not reject sentimental maternalism's emotionally intense model of instruction; it rejects this model as the only one to be used in educating a young woman. In order to produce the Ellen Montgomery that emerges at novel's end, Mrs. Montgomery must be replaced with this varied contingent of surrogates.

Published four years after Warner's novel, Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter also seems attuned to the tenets of sentimental maternalism, particularly in its depiction of the character Mrs. Sullivan. We never meet the biological mother of Gertrude Flint, the orphaned heroine; she dies when Gerty is three years old. At the age of eight, the child is informally adopted by the lamplighter Trueman Flint and jointly cared for by Flint and his neighbor, the widowed Mrs. Sullivan. Like Mrs. Montgomery, the figure of Mrs. Sullivan articulates cultural fears of dangerous female emotion even as she commands reverence as the iconic sentimental mother.

Though Mrs. Sullivan lives in more modest circumstances than Warner's Mrs. Montgomery, the hallmarks of the figure—domestic genius, boundless love—are present from the moment we first meet her. As Gerty lies sick in bed following her rescue from tenement life, she wakes to find a woman at her bedside. The novel at first offers little physical description of this caretaker, describing instead her actions: she fixes gruel for Gerty, sews on a child's frock, and soothes the child. Once Gerty regains her health, Mrs. Sullivan provides her first lesson in domesticity, directing her efforts to bring order and cleanliness to bachelor True's apartment. Mrs. Sullivan proves an excellent mentor in this regard, as the narrator takes pains to establish her domestic bona fides:

Mrs. Sullivan was a little bit of a woman, but had more capability and energy than could have been found in any one among twenty others twice her size. She really pitied those whose home was such a mass of confusion; felt sure that they could not be happy; and inwardly determined, as soon as Gerty got well, to exert herself in the cause of cleanliness and order, which was in her eyes the cause of virtue and happiness, so completely did she identify outward neatness and purity with inward peace.

(25)

Later in the novel, Gertrude proclaims Mrs. Sullivan “a living lesson of piety and patience … I know of no one who seems so fit for heaven” (169).

If Mrs. Sullivan seems to Gertrude a living angel, to her son, Willie, she assumes an even more exalted status. In an early scene, she prays aloud for Willie:

laying her hand on the head of her son, [she] offered up a simple, heart-felt prayer for the boy,—one of those mother's prayers, which the child listens to with reverence and love, and remembers in the far-off years; one of those prayers which keep men from temptation, and deliver them from evil.

(39)

In this scene, the sentimental mother becomes nearly indistinguishable from God; it is Mrs. Sullivan's prayer that promises to perform the work asked of God in the Lord's Prayer—to lead not into temptation but deliver from evil. Willie is thus bound to remember this prayer, mediated through his mother's selfless devotion, in those “far-off years” when she is no longer present.

The novel tests the efficacy of this mother's prayer before the story's end. Willie accepts an opportunity to develop a business career by travelling to India with a local merchant. While he is gone, Mrs. Sullivan becomes ill. Approaching death and aware that she will never see Willie again, Mrs. Sullivan shares with Gertrude a “beautiful dream” that she had. In the dream, she floats through the air until spotting Willie below in a crowded street. She trails him as he moves through scenes of decadence—“a dining-saloon, in the middle of which was a table covered with bottles, glasses, and the remains of a rich dessert”—among fine-looking but evil people (170). Recognizing that her son is tempted to accept a drink, Mrs. Sullivan's dream-self intervenes: “Just then I touched him on the shoulder. He turned, saw me, and instantly the glass fell from his hand and was broken into a thousand pieces.” The mother's influence over her son is unassailable; Willie obediently follows her from that room despite the importuning of his new friends. Mrs. Sullivan has, literally, only to lift her finger to compel his obedience; as she recalls, “I placed myself in front of him, held up my finger menacingly, and shook my head. He hesitated no longer.” The rest of the dream finds the two moving through the city together, with Mrs. Sullivan leading, Willie following. In this way, she guides him past snares, pitfalls, and dangers “into which, without me, he would surely have fallen” (171). She wakes from this dream finally at peace with her impending death, and expresses her relief to Gertrude: “I now believe that Willie's living mother might be powerless to turn him from temptation and evil; but the spirit of that mother will be mighty still” (172).

Mrs. Sullivan's dream celebrates the power of the sentimental mother to shape and control her child's character at the same time that it exposes her central flaw: she is more powerful absent than present. Just as Warner's novel hinted at Mrs. Montgomery's weakness as a tutor for her daughter Ellen, Cummins' novel illuminates the limitations of sentimental maternalism—namely, a tendency towards too-great tenderness. Like Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Sullivan must be translated from corporeality into abstraction in order to achieve perfect influence over her child; living mothers, these novels imply, are limited mothers.

Take, for example, a scene that follows shortly after Uncle True's death. Hearing the news, Emily goes to the Sullivan home to see Gertrude. There she finds Mrs. Sullivan, who tells Emily the story “of Gertrude's agony of grief, the impossibility of comforting her, and the fears the kind little woman entertained lest the gift would die of sorrow” (96). She describes how Gerty huddled in the old man's chair for days on end, refusing to move or to eat. Mrs. Sullivan confesses to Emily, “I couldn't do anything with her myself … I couldn't bear to make her come away into my room, though I knew it would change the scene, and be better for her” (96). Though Mrs. Sullivan recognizes the danger of Gerty's brooding, she nonetheless can't steel herself to do the right thing. Only Willie's intervention breaks Gertrude's morbid trance; he does what Mrs. Sullivan cannot—removes Gertrude from the scene of sorrow—and so begins to cheer her up. Emily notes that “Willie shows good judgment … in trying to change the scene for her, and divert her thoughts” (97). It is a judgment that Mrs. Sullivan cannot exercise; though reason tells her it is best, her tenderness leads her to indulge Gerty's grief.

Mrs. Sullivan fails in similar ways when faced with her aged father's physical and mental decline. The adult Gertrude returns to assist Mrs. Sullivan at this time, believing that it is not “safe for such a timid, delicate woman as Mrs. Sullivan to be alone” with the increasingly senile man (130). Unwittingly, Gertrude indicts Mrs. Sullivan's distinctly maternal failing in this regard—her softness and indulgence: “He is like a child now, and full of whims. When he can possibly be indulged, Mrs. Sullivan will please him at any amount of convenience, and even danger, to herself” (130-31). It is true that Mrs. Sullivan's own health is failing at the same time; moreover, her father's behavior has become dangerously erratic. It is therefore not remarkable that Mrs. Sullivan needs help to manage her senile father. What stands out is rather that the novel portrays the sentimental mother as boundlessly powerful in absentia—memory of Mrs. Sullivan inspires Willie to heights of virtue—but compromised and even ineffectual in presence.

Gertrude herself provides the exemplary foil to Mrs. Sullivan's unchecked tenderness. Her great trial comes early in the novel, when Uncle True dies. Though still a child at this point, Gertrude commands her emotions as she faces the loss of one like a father to her. True asks Gerty to read him the prayer for the dying, and twelve-year-old Gerty trembles:

There was such a prayer, a beautiful one; and the thoughtful child, to whom the idea of death was familiar, knew it by heart,—but could she repeat the words? Could she command her voice? Her whole frame shook with agitation; but Uncle True wished to hear it, it would be comfort to him, and she would try. Concentrating all her energy and self-command, she began, and, gaining strength as she proceeded, went on to the end. Once or twice her voice faltered, but with new effort she succeeded … and her voice sounded so clear and calm that Uncle True's devotional spirit was not once disturbed by the thought of the girl's sufferings.

(93)

Gerty's performance here in subjugating her own sorrow for the sake of others demonstrates an emotional restraint that the novel clearly endorses. It stands in stark contrast to Mrs. Sullivan's inability to force Gerty from the scene of Uncle True's death and her breakdown in the face of her father's decline. In Gerty, we see the balance between emotion and self-control that the novel ascribes to the womanhood to which Gerty aspires. Although the novel honors Mrs. Sullivan's maternal love, we also see how sentiment circumscribes her in earthly matters. This set-piece demonstrating Gerty's self-command sets an example of steely sympathy incompatible, at this particular historical and cultural moment, with the ideal of sentimental motherhood. The cultural construction of sentimental motherhood emphasizes the emotionalism of the mother to a degree that hardly allows for easy self-command. Those features that make Mrs. Sullivan a formidable guardian after her death are exactly those features that circumscribe her power while alive.

Like Warner's novel, The Lamplighter provides its motherless heroine with extra-domestic, non-maternal surrogates who oversee her education and bring her to ideal womanhood. Indeed, it seems to take the proverbial village to transform Gerty from a hot-tempered waif into a paragon of emotional self-control. Lamplighter Trueman Flint is her first guide, taming Gerty's distrustful disposition with his love and kindness; she finds other teachers in Mrs. Sullivan and Willie. But it is the rich, blind Emily Graham who most centrally directs Gerty's transformation. Upon first meeting Gerty, Emily, we are told, “saw at once how totally neglected the little one had been, and the importance of her being educated and trained with care” (56). Thereafter, Emily lovingly guides and corrects Gerty's behavior; she oversees Gerty's intellectual education as well. Although The Lamplighter represents its heroine's reading matter and school subjects with far less specificity than The Wide, Wide World, nevertheless the novel firmly establishes not only that Gerty has formal schooling but also that Emily plays a major role in overseeing that aspect of her education. It is Emily who encourages Uncle True to send Gerty to school. Once Gerty learns to read (quickly, showing both an aptitude and an appetite for learning), Emily begins to supply her with books that she selects “carefully and judiciously [knowing] the weight that such tales often carried with them to the hearts of children” (66).

Though Emily also attends to Gerty's spiritual education, we must note that before she leaves Gerty for the summer—their first separation—she gives Gerty a gift that speaks to the child's scholarly rather than spiritual education: “a book and a new slate” (68). And when Emily returns from the country, she establishes a routine whereby “Gerty should come every day and read to her for an hour” (70). This program of reading enriches and excites Gerty's intellect, all because Emily chooses the books carefully; “history, biography, and books of travels, were perused by Gerty at an age when most children's literary pursuits are confined to stories and pictures” (70). As with Alice Humphreys of The Wide, Wide World, the surrogate mother Emily Graham is inextricably associated with books and reading.

But even in intellectual development, Emily is not solely responsible for Gerty's growth—others contribute, in an ever-widening cluster of surrogates. Willie Sullivan helps Gerty to learn, and to love learning, in his role as childhood friend. When Emily and Gertrude are separated, Willie steps in and helps Gerty keep up her studies, so that “when Emily returned to the city in October, she could hardly understand how so much had been accomplished in what had seemed to her so short a time” (70). Indeed, Gerty and Willie mutually encourage one another's studies, with Willie routinely spending his evenings in the Flint home, studying side by side with Gerty. Willie takes up the study of French, so Emily provides French books for Gerty as well, with the result that Gerty “kept pace with him, oftentimes translating more during the week than he could find time to do” (72).

As these novels resist the idea of entrusting the sentimental mother fully with the work of educating daughters, they also reveal the shortcomings of the highly privatized middle-class home as a site for such an education. In Cradle of the Middle Class, Mary Ryan describes the development of a new ideal of privacy as part of the ideology of the emerging middle class. According to her account, while the “families of the agrarian era repeatedly interwove and overlapped with church and town” and “mingled together in the larger network of face-to-face relations that formed the local community,” by the middle of the nineteenth century “social space was often divided up between the ‘home’ and the ‘streets,’ warm, personal, and stable ties as opposed to cold, brittle, and threatening encounters” (233). One result of this division, Ryan contends, is the increasing idealization of the middle-class home as a private space, one possessing “a special sanctity, a privileged position remote from public contention and impenetrable to prying outsiders” (234).

Though this imagined evolution in the relationship of the family to the community may have been widely viewed as a welcome development, I suggest that these novels consider what might be lost as well as what might be gained. This is not to say that domestic fictions repudiate the idealization of privacy that accompanies the rise of middle-class culture. But by sending Ellen away from her fireside for the educational experiences that eventually render her exemplary, the novel draws the community, however ambivalently constructed, back into the picture. Strangers shepherd Ellen to her state of moral near-perfection, while her blood kin—Aunt Fortune, Uncle Lindsay, her father, even her mother—prove the greatest roadblocks to her development (or, considered more generously, they stand in as the trials and tribulations required to hone Ellen to perfection).

The thorny truth is that the same discourses that painted the home as a retreat from a selfish, striving world also magnified the sense of the home's isolation from the world. Whereas the “eager vigilance of the community” had checked selfish passions in an earlier era, the community was slowly ceding that role as an ideal of the home as retreat from the public gained ground.¹⁶ The setting most closely associated with Mrs. Montgomery—the parlor—is notable for its insularity. Until the seventh chapter, when Ellen begins her journey to Aunt Fortune's, the narrative rarely strays far from this space, except for the shopping excursion that exhausts Mrs. Montgomery and Ellen's terrifying trip to the department store. Both of these trips, but particularly Ellen's solo flight, reinforce the sense in which the parlor functions as a haven from a chaotic, amoral world. In the parlor, mother and daughter cling to one another, focusing their attention inward. The narrator's first words directly addressed to the reader (following four lines of dialogue exchanged between Ellen and her mother) set the tone of both the parlor as well as the relationship between the two characters: “There was no one else in the room” (9). Outsiders rarely disturb their solitude; Mr. Montgomery himself never appears in the parlor with Ellen and her mother. In fact, we see Ellen going to great lengths to ensure that time spent with her mother remains untainted by her father's presence; twice she deliberately waits for him to leave the house before joining her mother in the parlor, despite her fierce longing for her mother's embrace. The two patiently endure the intrusions of Mrs. Montgomery's doctor, awaiting their reward; at last, “when evening came, they were again left to themselves … the mother and daughter were happily alone” (23). Even family functions simply defer the gratification to be had in the parlor: “When dinner was over and the table cleared away, the mother and daughter were left, as they always loved to be, alone” (36).

Although Ellen and her mother crave their parlor intimacy, the novel implies that in the physical and psychic seclusion of the parlor a dangerously unchallenged state of equilibrium exists between mother and daughter. Wholly enclosed in her mother's presence, Ellen hardly needs to assert herself at all. “I cannot thank you, mamma,” Ellen begins, but her mother arrests her: “‘It is not necessary, my dear child,’ said Mrs. Montgomery … ‘I know all that you would say’” (36). In the parlor, Ellen's primary occupations are to look out the window quietly, read aloud to her mother, and make tea in exactly the manner her mother prefers. When Mrs. Montgomery, for purposes of catechism, asks Ellen to describe the trust she reposes in her mother, Ellen replies, “I trust every word you say—entirely—I know nothing could be truer; if you were to tell me black is white, mamma, I should think my eyes had been mistaken” (18). Within the sentimental tableau represented by the parlor, Ellen has only to lean on her mother. As she confides, “I am glad to think I belong to you, and you have the management of me entirely, and I needn't manage myself, because I know I can't, and if I could, I'd rather you would, mamma” (18). As Ellen lies on the sofa next to her mother, we catch a glimpse of the central lesson she is learning in the parlor; “she thought it was greater happiness to lie there than any thing else in life could be—she thought she had rather even die so, on her mother's breast, than live long without her in the world” (38).

Though faithfully and perfectly articulating sentimental ideology, these scenes intimate that the sentimental mother will seduce her child away from engagement with any world beyond that of the cozy domestic enclosure.¹⁷ Mrs. Montgomery herself explains that God is separating them because, as she puts it, “perhaps he sees, Ellen, that you never would seek him while you had me to cling to” (41). Mr. George Marshman, the gentleman on the boat, observes the same: “You love your mother better than you do the Saviour?” he asks. To Ellen's eagerly positive reply, he pointedly responds, “Then if he had left you your mother, Ellen, you would never have cared or thought about him?” (70). Though these two characters focus on the improved opportunities for religious growth that will result from separation, I suggest that the novel (perhaps inadvertently) makes a broader argument; for all the emotional power of the sentimental tableau, The Wide, Wide World reveals how it falls short as an educative milieu rich enough to produce a young woman prepared for a complex world.

It is important here to remember the important role played by “experience” in nineteenth-century educational ideals. Lockean notions of the impressionability of the mind sparked a turning away from rote learning, towards a conception instead of experience—physical and emotional—as the building block for character. Mothers and teachers alike were to inculcate morality in their charges by constructing an environment in which all components conduced towards evoking the right feelings.¹⁸ Education was widely defined as experience, and vice versa: as an editorial in Godey's Lady's Book from 1858 phrased it, “Everything is education—the trains of thought you are indulging in this hour; the society in which you will spend the evening, the conversations, walks, and incidents of tomorrow.”¹⁹

Ellen Montgomery's experience follows this model. Once released from the cloistered captivity of her parlor world, Ellen sets out on a series of travels that demonstrate the existence of a widespread community of evangelical Christians—a ready-made family more crucial to her development than her biological family. On her journey to Thirlwall, Ellen meets the Reverend Mr. George Marshman on the boat; he takes up where her mother left off, giving Ellen a book of hymns and catechizing her on God's goodness. She first meets Alice Humphreys when she flees her aunt's house and literally climbs a mountain. And though Alice is without a doubt a paragon of domesticity, she is associated with the outdoors as well as with the intimate quarters of a parlor. Together, Alice and Ellen range about the countryside, climbing a mountain together to visit old Mrs. Vawse and descending in a snowstorm. Though critics may continue to speak, like Catharine O'Connell, for instance, of the novel's “absolute immersion in the female sphere of domesticity,” any drawing of that sphere's boundaries must recognize that domesticity travels.²⁰

Just as Ellen Montgomery could hardly have matured into the young woman we see at the novel's end had she remained embedded in the sentimental tableau, Gertrude Flint shows virtues that do not at all result from being sheltered in a home. From the beginning, she is quite literally associated with the streets. Though her salvation comes from Uncle True's taking her into a home, Gertrude remains linked to public and non-isolated spaces. She teaches school, takes a room in a boarding-house, and travels with the Jeremys. She demonstrates a level of comfort with being publicly observed that stems not from pride or a desire to be seen but from an acquaintance with public eyes. And though her work at the Graham home exhibits many of the hallmarks of domesticity—she helps with the housework, sews, nurses sick Emily, reads the newspaper aloud to Mr. Graham—the spaces with which she is associated do not seem isolated. Even Gertrude's own rooms are continually invaded by others, so that there are no closed-door tableaux like those of Mrs. Montgomery's parlor. Instead, Gertrude and Emily create a cheery space open to all who have the sense to value it.

If we wonder why domestic fictions might be reluctant to embrace the fireside ideal fully, we might look more closely at the product of this “more than maternal” labor—that is, the finished heroine herself. In many ways, the heroines who emerge at the end of these novels resemble the pious, pure, domestically gifted “true women” so frequently described in popular conduct literature of the antebellum period.²¹ But though they possess these characteristics, Ellen and Gertrude depart from the model of womanhood offered by prescriptive literature. Erudition occupies a far more prominent place among their virtues, for example; I have already shown how these novels highlight Ellen's and Gerty's training in academic subjects, and how they quietly suggest that this work requires the superintendence of someone other than the sentimental mother. Moreover, these novels emphasize their heroine's gradual acquisition of an emotional self-control that contrasts sharply with the irrational tenderness characteristic of the sentimental ideal.

It is undeniable that a rhetoric of feeling—an imperative to act from the heart, a regard for the tender embrace—pervades these texts. The villains in The Wide, Wide World are those who do not immediately provoke or provide hugs and kisses—the hooligan Nancy Vawse, for one, but most notably Ellen's Aunt Fortune. Indeed, Fortune stands as the novel's Anti-Mother. From the very outset, we see that she fails Ellen's (and implicitly the narrator's) primary test when she declines to embrace Ellen physically and emotionally upon her arrival. Though Fortune is taken wholly by surprise at her niece's arrival, and though she provides Ellen with a good supper and a room, Ellen sees nothing but neglect in her aunt's behavior, crying in agony, “She did not kiss me! She didn't say she was glad to see me!” (101). Despite feeding Ellen, clothing her, and training her to perform a multitude of useful domestic tasks, in the end Fortune earns the novel's reproach because she does not convey this instruction through sympathy and affection.²² And in The Lamplighter, Gertrude advises Fanny Bruce, a young admirer, that in order to learn politeness, “you must cultivate your heart, Miss Bruce; you must cultivate your heart” (213). In this counsel Gertrude can fairly be said to speak for the implied narrators of both novels. But though these novels valorize an ethics of feeling, their heroines in fact model rational behavior.

Take, for example, Warner's Ellen Montgomery. As the novel nears its close and Ellen nears adulthood, we begin to see her hard-won control over her passions pay dividends beyond helping her submit to seeming injustices; it also enables her to conduct herself in a manner that an earlier century might well have characterized as rational. At the end of the novel, Ellen goes to Edinburgh to live with her mother's brother. This Scottish sojourn serves very much as a final test of Ellen's education to this point; how well has Ellen learned to trust God and submit outwardly to her uncle's authority while he assaults her attachment to her religion, her country, and her American friends, without inwardly forsaking any of her beliefs? The novel vindicates Ellen's education, of course. Significantly, however, Ellen meets her uncle's challenges with cool deliberation more often than she flees the room in tears. For example, in the following conversation with her uncle about the relative merits of America's Washington and Scotland's Bruce, Ellen maintains her argumentative equanimity.

“Why do you prefer Washington?”

“I should have to think to tell you that, sir.”

“Very well, then, think, and answer me.”

“One reason, I suppose, is because he was an American,” said Ellen.

“That is not reason enough for so reasonable a person as you are, Ellen; you must try again, or give up your preference.”

“I like Bruce, very much indeed,” said Ellen musingly, “—but he did what he did for himself;—Washington didn't.”

“Humph!—I am not quite sure as to either of your positions,” said Mr. Lindsay.

“And besides,” said Ellen, “Bruce did one or two wrong things. Washington always did right.”

“He did, eh? What do you think of the murder of Andre?”

“I think it was right,” said Ellen firmly.

(515).

My point here is not that Ellen in fact reasons like Descartes—indeed, her argument in regard to Washington is partisan rather than impartial. Nor do I suggest that Ellen no longer cries when she is upset. My point is that the narrator frames Ellen's confrontations with Mr. Lindsay as exchanges in which Ellen reasons. The Wide, Wide World idealizes an educational method that cultivates as much sense as sensibility. Ellen's argumentative confidence in this exchange and in others contrasts sharply with critical commentaries on the novel's—and the genre's—supposed hysteria.

Similarly, after an early struggle to master her youthful hotheadedness, The Lamplighter's Gertrude Flint models a calm, deliberative approach to conflict. Consider the scene that occurs when Gertrude informs her present patron, Mr. Graham, that duty calls her to assist her earlier benefactor, Mrs. Sullivan. The exchange arouses intense feeling from both Gertrude and Mr. Graham, yet Gertrude manages to maintain the rational high ground. She earnestly minimizes the role played by emotion in her decision, stating that “it is not a matter of preference or choice, except as I feel it to be a duty.” Mr. Graham, by contrast, angrily brushes off Emily's appeal to logic with his own assertion of wounded sensibility:

“Father,” said Emily, “I thought the object, in giving Gertrude a good education, was to make her independent of all the world, and not simply dependent upon us.”

“Emily,” said Mr. Graham, “I tell you it is a matter of feeling—you don't seem to look upon the thing in the light I do; but you are both against me, and I won't talk any more about it.” (140)

Gertrude leaves “deeply wounded and grieved” and goes to her room where she “[gives] way to feelings that exhausted her spirit, and caused her a sleepless night” (141). During the night, the narrator informs us, “Gertrude had ample time to review and consider her own situation and circumstances” (143). She runs through a gamut of emotions, from grief and bitterness to—finally—a calm benevolence in which she gives Graham the benefit of the doubt but reaffirms her commitment to duty. Again, I do not argue here that this domestic heroine is not in fact motivated by her heart; clearly, Gertrude's affection for Mrs. Sullivan speaks as loudly as her sense of obligation to the Sullivan family. What draws my attention is the way the narrative characterizes Gertrude's response to an extremely upsetting situation—she reviews, she considers, she resolves. In an ironic contrast to Gertrude's composure, Mr. Graham is the one who gives in to violent expression of feeling.

In demonstrating the compatibility of rationality with more traditional “womanly” ideals, these texts silently emend the deficiencies of the sentimental model. Moreover, they demonstrate the incapacity of the fireside scenario, with its inward and exclusive focus on emotional nurture, to produce such exemplars.

According to the domestic rhetoric prevalent at mid-century, the individual mother held sole responsibility for childrearing; moreover, she was to perform this work at the fireside, that metaphor for the most private of all antebellum settings. The refusal of domestic fictions like The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter to fix responsibility for female education in “the mother at home” suggests serious ambivalence about the developing cult of motherhood. The surrogate system described in these texts, in which “strangers” take responsibility for tutoring the heroine in everything from Latin to Christian ethics, reintroduces an element lost in the valorization of family privacy. The path taken by Ellen and Gertrude on their way to maturity serves as a substitute for that “network of face-to-face relations” which Ryan claims is lost in the ideological division between public and private spaces. The “special sanctity” of the middle-class home could too easily slide into self-absorption or self-interest; these novels rescue young women from such private contexts and propel them out into the world, providing them a more useful and civic-minded education.

The fact that mothers in domestic fictions usually die young has not gone unnoticed by critics of antebellum literature. In her study of the role played by the discourse of affection in post-Revolutionary American literature, Elizabeth Barnes observes that “the mother often dies early in the domestic novel, and in her place is left a text—a Bible, a letter, a ‘history’—that functions as a substitute for the mother and her wisdom … By the mid-nineteenth century, associations between mother and text render them practically interchangeable” (104). But interchangeable does not mean identical; though domestic fictions consistently replace the mother with a substitute, that substitute—whether text or surrogate—cannot perform exactly the same way that the mother would have. The slippage inevitable in this act of substitution opens up the way, in terms both of narrative and ideology, for someone or something else to perform the work supposedly exclusive to the mother. Ellen's and Gertrude's devoutly Christian surrogates are, like sentimental mothers, associated with the home and family and use primarily emotional means to shape the character of their young charges. But, I suggest, their freedom from literal maternalism—the surrogates rarely are themselves mothers—frees these figures from the negative associations with privacy, emotionalism, and self-absorption inextricable from antebellum treatments of motherhood.

Although Warner's and Cummins' novels seek something extra-maternal for the work of female education, they also embrace sentimental maternalism. They emphatically represent the middle-class home as the source of the greatest possible happiness and fulfillment, painting vivid portraits of such homes. This orientation is not incompatible with a simultaneous critique of domesticity. Lora Romero has reminded us to recognize “difference, contradiction, and dissent within the culture of domesticity,” rather than reading the ideology as a unitary system uniformly applied and experienced (7). The fact that these novels choose figures other than mothers and sites other than the home for the work of shaping future generations of women suggests that the ideological enclosure of childrearing in highly privatized middle-class homes ruled by the mother sat uneasily with these writers. To the extent that the sentimental tableau enacts the developing middle-class ideal of privacy, The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter demonstrate the limitations of the work that can profitably be performed within the shelter provided by those four walls.

Notes

1. Mary P. Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981) argues cogently that the developing middle class depended for its identity on “domestic values and family practices” (15); hereafter cited parenthetically. For a study of both the character and the significance of the forming middle class, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). And in The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), Richard L. Bushman describes how the hallmarks of gentility—not synonymous with domesticity but overlapping in definition—served as a way for the expanding middle class to mark its distinction.

2. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York: Haworth, 1982), 56; hereafter cited parenthetically. Such was not universally the assumption before the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast to the rather utilitarian conception of motherhood prevalent before the American Revolution, as the nineteenth century opened motherly feeling was increasingly celebrated as exactly that which suited women to assume this burden. See Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815,” Feminist Studies 4 (1978), 101-26.

3. The phrase comes from Lydia Sigourney's Letters to Mothers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839), 128. For a study of the breadth and impact of these kinds of domestic writings, see Ryan, Empire, particularly Chapter 4. Jan Lewis draws heavily from articles published in ladies' magazines between 1830 and 1865 in her “Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987), 689-721.

4. Samuel Goodrich, Fireside Education (London, 1841), 15; hereafter cited parenthetically.

5. Quoted in Lewis, 215.

6. As an ideology, sentimental maternalism overlaps with the transition to “intensive motherhood” described by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in which middle-class mothers of the nineteenth century began having fewer children to whom they devoted more attention. Intensive motherhood contrasts with “extensive motherhood,” which Ulrich describes as a system in which women had more children to whom they dedicated relatively less attention. See her Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Knopf, 1980).

7. Beginning with H. Ross Brown's The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), there has been a long line of literary critics who have dismissed the popular novels of nineteenth-century women writers as essentially conservative works, thoughtlessly complicit with an intellectually bankrupt dominant culture. Ann Douglas renewed the vigor of this position with The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). Jane Tompkins directly addressed Douglas' view, arguing that these novels offered a radical alternative to the status quo, one shaped by domestic rather than marketplace values, in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). More recently, Lora Romero has challenged the binary nature of the critical conversation about domesticity; see Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997); hereafter cited parenthetically.

8. Stephanie Smith, Conceived By Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 1.

9. In Woman's Fiction, Nina Baym notes that many nineteenth-century novels written by women tell a single story—that of “a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had … depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.” The “support” most often denied the young heroine is that of a competent, loving mother. See Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, 2nd ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 11.

10. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987); hereafter cited parenthetically. Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter, ed. Nina Baym (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988); hereafter cited parenthetically.

11. See Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 105; hereafter cited parenthetically.

12. It must be noted at the outset that the Montgomerys rent their “home”; they live in a hotel. Nonetheless, the spaces in which Ellen and her mother act out their scenes, as well as the scenes themselves, are marked as middle-class, domestic, and intensely private. For the antebellum middle class, the parlor emblematized both the privacy and the aspirations to gentility characteristic of domesticity. See Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982) and Bushman.

13. Richard Brodhead reads certain domestic fictions—among them Warner's—as participating in the “articulation of [a] correctional model that made warmly embracing parental love the preferred instrument for authority's exercise” (47). He argues that a theory of “discipline through love” constituted the central normative model of character-formation of the antebellum middle-class, and he contends that mothers served as this disciplinary program's most powerful and effective instruments (18). See Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), Chapter 3, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America.” Hereafter cited parenthetically.

14. Nina Baym points out that Ellen's tears are “particularly associated with [her] early childhood—that is, with her condition as victimized and ineffectual orphan” (8) in arguing that Warner's novel portrays learning as a means of growing beyond sentimentalism. “Women's Novels, Women's Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction,” Novel 31 (Summer 1998), 335-50.

15. See pages 170-72 and 220, for example.

16. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 22.

17. For Warner's novel, of course, the “world beyond” is the spiritual world consisting of Ellen's relationship with God.

18. See Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).

19. Quoted in Eleanor Wolf Thompson, Education For Ladies, 1830-1860: Ideas on Education in Magazines for Women (New York: King's Crown, 1947), 24.

20. Catherine O'Connell, “‘We Must Sorrow’: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World,” Studies in American Fiction 25 (1997), 23.

21. Barbara Welter's influential 1966 essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” identified in popular literature the existence of a particular stereotypical ideal, the virtues associated with which were domesticity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. The essay has been collected in her Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1976). More recent works by feminist historians and literary critics have pointed out the extent to which Welter's analysis relied on prescriptive, rather than descriptive, texts.

22. Of course, Fortune's failing is also a class issue; she represents a world in which the constant presence of “rough work” renders middle-class gentility impossible. The reader searching for evidence of the distinction between Fortune and the genteel Alice Humphreys need look no further than the passage in which Alice shows Ellen her “large, well-appointed, and spotlessly neat kitchen.” Alice explains the division that enables her to enjoy such a pleasant room: “Beyond this is a lower kitchen where Margery does all her rough work; nothing comes up the steps … to this but the very nicest and daintiest of kitchen matters” (167). Fortune, a single woman running a farm almost single-handedly, has neither time nor patience for daintiness. For a reading of Aunt Fortune as Warner's rebuttal to Emersonian notions of independence, see Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, “To Be a ‘Parlor Soldier’: Susan Warner's Answer to Emerson's ‘Self-Reliance,’” in Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930, ed. Monika M. Elbert (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2000), 29-49.