[In the following essay, Bauermeister asserts that Cummins's The Lamplighter pales in comparison to the cultural and ethical complexity of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World. The critic also suggests that The Lamplighter's ethical system and emphasis on female independence is better understood when compared to Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.]

For a variety of reasons, the critical work on American women novelists prior to 1860 has had a tendency toward generalization. Critics of the mid-twentieth century, including Fred Lewis Pattee, James D. Hart, Carl Van Doren, Henry Nash Smith, Alexander Cowie and Herbert Ross Brown, use vaguely defined terms such as “sentimental” and/or “domestic” to classify and then dismiss large numbers of women authors. Cowie, in fact, goes so far as to provide a “receipt” for the “domestic novel” (417) which is based directly upon the plot lines of The Wide, Wide World and St. Elmo, yet which he claims applies to eight specific women authors, as well as “others from 1850 to 1872” (419). Although Helen Papashvily attempts a more feminist interpretation, she also draws loose correlations in order to consider as a group a large and diverse number of authors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Lydia Maria Child and Susan Warner. While distinctions between authors are occasionally made (the question of whether or not to place the more celebrated Stowe within the category of “sentimental” or “domestic” is often problematic if the critic wishes to deride the aesthetic or political value of the “group”), the trend is toward finding congruence rather than divergence.

Although their motives differ substantially from their predecessors, recent sympathetic critics have perpetuated the notion of literary homogeneity. In their efforts to provide an alternative plot line to that found in male canonical novels, to question the assumptions of conservative mid-twentieth century critics and offer a new interpretation of “sentimental” authors, or to find a unifying approach to the issue of public and private lives, critics such as Nina Baym, Jane Tompkins and Mary Kelley continue to stress the commonalities among authors as divergent as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Augusta Jane Evans, Stowe and Warner, Southworth and Fanny Fern. As members of a group such as “woman's fiction” writers, “sentimentalists” or even “literary domestics,” these women present a more formidable challenge to the canon than as individual authors, and for a variety of reasons the strength of that unified challenge has been necessary to justify these writers as objects of academic study. Now that nineteenth-century American women writers are beginning to become accepted as worthy of examination, however, it is important that we look more closely at the differences between works in order to see the richness of and variety among the ever-increasing number of newly rediscovered texts, and to help substantiate the autonomy of individual works. Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), for example, has often received a mixed reception from critics, who view it merely as a bad imitation of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851), as yet another novel which follows, unsuccessfully, the simple formula of the “domestic novel” that “true happiness comes from submission to suffering” (Cowie 417). Yet a close examination of characterization and of narrative conventions reveals that The Lamplighter actually revises the presuppositions of The Wide, Wide, World and demonstrates the cultural and ethical complexity of nineteenth-century American women's fiction.

Critics in general are justified in drawing connections between The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter. The Wide, Wide World has been called the first novel to become a best-seller; The Lamplighter, with definite plot and thematic similarities, was published three years later. The parallels are most obvious in the early portions of The Lamplighter: both focus on young, orphaned heroines who must learn through the dictates of religion to subdue their passionate natures. As The Lamplighter progresses, however, the correlations become less obvious and the novel alters its tone. E. P. Whipple, writing at the time of The Lamplighter's publication, complimented the “simplicity, tenderness, pathos, and naturalness of the first one hundred pages” (qtd. in Pattee 115). Frank Mott in Golden Multitudes comments:

The first quarter of the book—up to the death of Uncle True, the lamplighter—could well have stood by itself. Alone, it would have formed a novelette of considerable pathos, simplicity, and dignity. Readers of the full-length novel which the book-trade required still remember better than all the rest the story of poor, miserable little Gerty of the slums, rescued by the kindly lamplighter. In the remainder of the book the heroine is translated into the inevitable middle-class heroine; she becomes Gertrude, a paragon of virtuous self-sacrifice and all that.

(124-25)

In actuality, the “middle-class heroine” Gertrude Flint resembles in the latter sections of The Lamplighter is not patterned on the self-abnegating Ellen of The Wide, Wide World, but represents a far more independent ideal such as that most often found in early nineteenth-century American women's novels characterized by adventure and social protest. The later Gertrude draws on a tradition which includes Mary of Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824); Hannah Lee's Grace Seymour and Elinor Fulton; Delia Bacon's female protagonists in Tales of the Puritans (1831); and the heroines from Catharine Sedgwick's A New England Tale (1822), Clarence (1830), The Linwoods (1835) and Live and Let Live (1837). The most striking resemblance can be found between Gertrude and Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, from the novel of the same name.

If we look to The Wide, Wide World as the sole source of inspiration for The Lamplighter and search merely for congruence between the two novels, we run the risk of seeing the last portions (thus the majority of the novel) as a failure, a breakdown of the myth presented by Warner, or as a fiction which lost control and coherence when the author was forced to extend it to a “full-length novel.” When The Lamplighter is placed in comparison with both Warner's novel and Hope Leslie (1827), the distinctions between the texts become clearer, and what appear as inconsistencies in The Lamplighter are given possible explanations. In addition, because Sedgwick has been grouped with Warner and Cummins by several critics, including Brown, Papashvily and Baym, highlighting the contrasts between these three novels also should help to dispel the image of homogeneity which surrounds American women's writing prior to 1860.

I am not the first to look to Sedgwick to illuminate the differences between The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter. In her introduction to the Rutgers Press edition of The Lamplighter, Nina Baym notes the close relationship of the two novels; she also points out the correlation between the plot elements of The Wide, Wide World and Catharine Sedgwick's A New England Tale, written almost thirty years previously. While The Wide, Wide World and A New England Tale share plot elements, Baym is quick to note that for Calvinist Warner, “[t]here is less human goodness, and the good are less powerful” (xvi) than for Sedgwick, a Unitarian. According to Baym, the affinity between Cummins's work and Warner's “would have emphasized to contemporary readers Cummins's rewriting of Warner's story in a more benevolent and rationalist mode, a returning to the Sedgwick camp” (xvii). Baym also notes that Cummins would have been familiar with Sedgwick's work; she attended school at the home of Charles Sedgwick, Catharine's brother, and Catharine spent much of her time there.

Baym chooses A New England Tale as a comparison for Warner and Cummins's work most likely because of the obvious plot similarities between it and The Wide, Wide World. A New England Tale is one of Sedgwick's more conservative works, however, and while it does illuminate some of the distinctions between Sedgwick, Warner and then Cummins, a comparison which also includes Sedgwick's slightly later and more overtly rebellious Hope Leslie provides the reader with a clearer understanding of what may appear as a change in tone in The Lamplighter after the first one hundred pages. Hope Leslie is a novel that applauds resistance, criticizes much of organized religion (in this case, Puritanism) and presents a heroine who is headstrong, intelligent, resourceful, independent and rarely frustrated by her guardian. In contrast, The Wide, Wide World presents a world where submission is the most essential lesson in a woman's life. Examining The Lamplighter with both sets of values in mind can give the reader an appreciation of how Cummins has attempted structurally to reconcile these two viewpoints. In addition, such an examination may well lead the reader to believe that the “break” commented upon between the first one hundred pages and the rest of the book is less obvious to those who look to Sedgwick as well as Warner for their literary context, and particularly to those who look for differences as well as commonalities.

The similarities between The Wide, Wide World and the early portions of The Lamplighter are so blatant that they often preclude other comparisons. Both texts begin with the image of young girls waiting for the arrival of the lamplighter (a symbol for God, who lights the stars as the lamplighter lights the lamps). Both young girls lose the influence of their parents; both have substitutes in the form of loving and pious women (Emily Graham and Alice Humphreys) and indulgent older men (Trueman Flint and Mr. Van Brunt). Both girls must endure the mean-spirited acts of their parsimonious and unsympathetic female guardians: Nan Grant throws Gerty's kitten into boiling water, while Aunt Fortune keeps Ellen's mother's letters from Ellen. Neither Gerty nor Ellen is accomplished in domestic duties; in addition, both need a great deal of spiritual guidance in order to subdue what are emotional, if not passionate natures. In both cases, however, the education is successful. Gerty's behavior during True's illness appears as proof that she has learned her lesson thoroughly. When True dies, Gerty is left sharing Ellen's status in the last chapters of The Wide, Wide World: both girls are dependent, spiritually and financially, upon the guidance of another. Yet while Ellen ends the novel in a position of subordination, Gerty's story continues on for several hundred pages after True's death, and as The Lamplighter progresses, it diverges more and more from the themes embodied in The Wide, Wide World, coming closer to the values of Hope Leslie.

In contrast to The Wide, Wide World, Sedgwick's Hope Leslie presents a world where rebellion and independence are applauded and the strict dictates of religion are questioned. The heroine, Hope Leslie, states, “I love to have my own way,” and the narrator comments, “she lived in an atmosphere of indulgence, which permits the natural qualities to shoot forth” (122). She obeys Mr. Fletcher, her guardian, because he loves her, but also because, as she acknowledges, he “never requires submission” (180). As a result of living with her Puritan guardian, Mr. Fletcher, and her worldly Aunt Grafton, who often would “rail with natural good sense” (123) at the Puritan beliefs, Hope,

like the bird that spreads his wings and soars above the limits by which each man fences in his own narrow domain … enjoyed the capacities of her nature and permitted her mind to expand beyond the contracted boundaries of sectarian faith. Her religion was pure and disinterested—no one, therefore, should doubt its intrinsic value, though it had not been coined into a particular form, or received the current impress.

(123)

Hope, as a symbol of democracy, represents the right of individuals to follow their own hearts and instincts (which may well be the same thing) without repression. Her freethinking philosophies stand in opposition to the rigidity of the Puritans, for whom “whatever gratified the natural desires of the heart was questionable, and almost everything that was difficult and painful, assumed the form of duty” (156). Hope has difficulty obeying their laws because she takes “counsel only from her own heart” (120). Whereas duty, submission and self-sacrifice are the foundation of Ellen Montgomery's religion, Sedgwick makes it clear through Hope Leslie that in Hope's world duty, submission and self-sacrifice are only successful when they follow the natural inclinations of the heart.

Sedgwick creates a story that condemns numerous uses of authority, even in the ninety-five pages before Hope becomes a principal part of the action. In the pages prior to William Fletcher's departure from England to follow his conscience, Sedgwick questions Sir William's separation of Alice and his nephew, and Mr. Winthrop's use of religion and God to further his own plans. America, for all its democratic ideals, is no improvement. Sedgwick challenges Fletcher's right to endanger his family by removing them from civilization and the “meek submission” that society expects from Mrs. Fletcher in “that age of undisputed masculine supremacy” (16). In addition, she examines the right of the English to slaughter the Pequods, of the Pequod chief to kill women and children to avenge his own child and of any of these men to follow “artificial codes of laws” (92) to make or justify their decisions in individual cases. When Hope finally takes center stage, the reader is prepared to give approbation to the actions of this young woman who follows not laws but instincts, who defies authority as easily as she breathes.

In contrast, The Wide, Wide World is self-contradictory and conflicted in its presentation of authority, as embodied in the treatment of Ellen's father and her relatives on the one hand, and God and John Humphreys on the other. Ellen's father is a patriarch no one dares defy, yet his is an authority that provides no financial security and no love. Interestingly enough, the God Ellen is taught to respect is also a patriarch to whom she must submit, and while He is loving and understanding, He most often is presented in terms of His power and proprietary nature. In response to Ellen's initial, emotional reaction to the news of her separation from her mother, Ellen's mother replies: “Remember, my darling, who it is that brings this sorrow upon us; though we must sorrow, we must not rebel” (12). After Ellen is separated from her mother, the kindly gentleman on the boat admonishes her, telling her that God

sometimes … sees that if he lets them alone, his children will love some dear thing on earth better than himself, and he knows they will not be happy if they do so; and then, because he loves them, he takes it away,—perhaps it is a dear mother, or a dear daughter,—or else he hinders their enjoyment of it; that they may remember him, and give their whole hearts to him … that he may bless them.

(69-70)

Although the gentleman is careful to interject qualifiers—“he knows they will not be happy if they do so,” “because he loves them”—to mitigate his message, the implied threats are clear. This is a God who will punish and inflict pain—for one's own good.

While proprietary behavior is condoned in God, it is not in Ellen's relatives. Both God and Ellen's relatives in Scotland want her “all to themselves.” Ellen sings in a hymn, “Here now to Thee I all resign / My body, soul, and all are thine” and while at first she finds these lines difficult, she learns to sing them willingly and her compliance is approved of by Alice, John and the narrator. On the other hand, when her relatives show the same traits, claiming their right to direct her life to the point of forbidding her to practice her religion, Ellen rebels both inwardly and occasionally outwardly, and the narrator again applauds her actions. Such conflict might have two interpretations: one, that humans should not usurp what is rightfully only God's authority, the other that Warner is introducing a subliminal story line which undermines the submission Ellen's religion teaches her. Two things disrupt both interpretations, however. The first is that there appears to be no irony present when Ellen is taught to submit to God's will; the second is that John Humphreys is allowed the kind of dictatorial authority over Ellen that, following the first interpretation, only God should be allowed.

Unfortunately for any feminist reading of the text, Ellen's submission to John is usually just that, submission. Jane Tompkins, attempting to alter traditional views of Warner's fiction, argues that “submission, as it is presented throughout The Wide, Wide World, is never submission to the will of a husband or father, though that is what it appears to be on the surface; submission is first of all a self-willed act of conquest of one's own passions” (162). While there are times when obedience to John means self-control—Ellen's effort to contain her frustration during John's “drawing lesson” is a good example—her dependence upon John for his spiritual interpretation, as well as her willingness to agree to all his wishes, emphasize submission far more than self-conquest. Ellen does not question, even when John tells her that, while she can decide if she is a good Christian by seeing if she follows God's commandments, “you have need to ask for great help when you go to try yourself by them; the heart is deceitful” (352). In contrast with the works of Stowe or Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, where the heart is the only true guide and the individual the best judge of each situation, John presents the heart as fallible and capable of deception. The result is that Ellen is taught not only to distrust her own instincts, but to look outside herself for assistance.

Jane Tompkins writes that “domestic fiction is preoccupied, even obsessed, with power” (160). In The Wide, Wide World this obsession manifests itself in several different ways. When power is wielded by Ellen's father or relatives, it is condemned: Ellen's father is criticized for his lack of feeling and inability to provide for his family; Ellen's relatives are chastised for being unsympathetic and jealous of Ellen's affections for others. When God is presented as jealous or judgmental, or John appears as dictatorial, these actions come with the approbation of the narrator. Perhaps the crucial difference between these various authorities is that Captain Montgomery and the Lindsays use their power to achieve things for themselves, while God and John are harsh or tyrannical because they “love” Ellen and have her welfare in mind. In the end, however, no matter the motivation, God, John and Susan Warner together place Ellen Montgomery in a dependent and subservient position; she is taught to question herself, to control her natural indignation and emotions and to enter a marriage that mirrors her dependent relationship upon God.

Hope Leslie's relationship to both temporal and divine power is in direct opposition to Ellen's. Sedgwick's novel presents a God who is all-inclusive and all-forgiving, the God of the Puritans as well as the Great Spirit of the Indians. Looking at the graves of Hope Leslie's and her own mother, the Indian heroine Magawisca states, “think ye not the Great Spirit looks down on these sacred spots, where the good and the peaceful rest, with an equal eye; think ye not their children are his children, whether they are gathered in yonder temple or bow to him beneath the green boughs of the forest?” (189). The Indians are not alone in their inclusive beliefs; the narrator says that Hope's beliefs are “non-sectarian … pure and disinterested” (123). Those who look to the Bible as the ultimate authority, as Esther does when she requires scripture warrant to help Everell break the law and free Magawisca, are treated with gentle scorn. In Hope Leslie God is not proprietary and the natural instincts of the heart are infallible.

In contrast, Ellen's God is exclusionary and her religion is filled with restrictions; Ellen's religion teaches her that she must control herself, and that her natural outbursts are wrong; Ellen's mother tells her, “You will hurt both yourself and me, my daughter, if you don't command yourself. Remember, dear Ellen, God sends no trouble upon his children but in love; and though we cannot see now, He will no doubt make all this work out for our good” (12). Not only does Ellen learn not to indulge her feelings, as Hope Leslie is praised for doing, but she is also taught that she may not be capable of understanding the world around her, and that she must wait until it is made clear to her. While Hope is allowed free rein, Ellen's confidence in herself as an individual is undermined, even though her strength through her faith in God is increased. The difference in the result of these two trainings is that while both are “successful” within the terms of their novels, success in Hope Leslie occurs when Hope follows her instincts and actively engages with the world, while in The Wide, Wide World achievement requires that Ellen restrain her impulses and patiently submit to life's trials as they come to her.

Female competence is construed differently by Sedgwick and Warner. Hope almost never fails in her endeavors; her one blunder is to attempt to make a match between Esther and Everell, mistakenly believing that submission against her nature would be a virtue, while “unconscious of the mistake by which she had put the happiness of all parties concerned in jeopardy” (216). When Hope acts on her instincts, however, she is always successful. She is strong, physically and mentally, and capable of taking care of both herself and others. Ellen not only is unable to rescue or care for others, but she is also incapable of taking care of herself. Ellen's first solo encounter with the outside world is a dismal failure; store clerks are rude to her and she is unprepared to bargain or even assert herself. Later, Ellen attempts to aid Mr. Van Brunt and overcomes her fear enough to ride her pony into town to get a doctor, but is met during her return by the same salesman who intimidated her earlier and who now terrorizes her pony. At an opportune moment, however, John arrives and chases off the salesman. John then distracts Ellen by showing her his horse, which “was larger and handsomer” than Ellen's, and then “praised her bridle hand; [and] corrected several things about her riding” (402). Thus Ellen is put in a dependent position, not only by her physical victimization, but by John's instruction afterward.

Given their backgrounds and training, it does not seem unusual that Hope marries her childhood friend, who both loves and respects her and with whom she has a marriage based on equality and trust, while Ellen will marry a man at least ten years her senior who has always been her superior. Hope and Everell are spoken of as partners, together loving those they bring into their home. Ellen, however, returns to America to be with John and his father, “to be unto them the ‘light of the eyes’” (264). In the end, whether or not Ellen's rebellion against her relatives is condoned, she is placed in a dependent and submissive position both in her religious beliefs and in her romantic relationship. Even in the formerly unpublished final chapter, now included in the Feminist Press edition, Ellen's “room of her own” has been furnished and decorated under John's guidance, down to the art work which comes complete with moral instruction.

Understanding the essential differences between Hope Leslie and The Wide, Wide World, especially the treatment of authority and submission, helps us to comprehend the change in tone as The Lamplighter moves beyond Gerty's life with Trueman Flint and into her adulthood. The cultural values represented by Warner's text certainly do not disappear; there is still Emily, who asserts, “[t]hose, only, my child, who have learned submission; those who, in their severest afflictions, see the hand of the loving Father and, obedient to his will, kiss the chastening rod” (104) will find peace. In addition, Gerty shows one example of Warner-esque self-control; after she has gone to live with the Grahams, their mean-spirited housekeeper, Mrs. Ellis, destroys all Gerty's mementos of True. Gerty steels herself not to speak of the incident, the housekeeper is impressed with Gerty's fortitude, Emily learns of the incident by accident and Gerty comes out a heroine. Gerty has “achieved the greatest of earth's victories, a victory over herself” (136), yet the rewards are temporal as well as spiritual, as is often the case in The Wide, Wide World.

Soon after Gerty's trial with Mrs. Ellis, however, an incident occurs which changes the theme of The Lamplighter from self-conquest to self-assertion. Gerty has been invited on a trip with the Grahams when she learns that Willie Sullivan's mother and grandfather are in ill health. Willie, who has gone overseas to gain his fortune, has left his only relatives in her care, and Gerty is eager to help them, to do her “duty,” earning her living by teaching while at the same time caring for Willie's relatives in their home. Mr. Graham accuses Gerty of ingratitude for choosing the care of these poor people over a trip with Emily and him, and reminds her of all he has done for her education and happiness. What begins as a discussion of Gerty's duty, however, quickly takes a new turn. Emily breaks in and argues, “I thought the object, in giving Gertrude a good education, was to make her independent of the world, and not simply dependent upon us” (140). Mr. Graham, however, will not reconcile himself to Gerty's decision, and Gerty is told that if she leaves the Graham house she should never return. In her more passionate moments Gerty thinks that “it would be tyranny in Mr. Graham to insist upon my remaining with them and I am resolved to break away from such thraldom … It is cruel of Mr. Graham to try to deprive me of my free will” (143). Gerty leaves, and from this point the resemblance between Gertrude and the heroines of novels such as Hope Leslie increases.

In spite of a superficial similarity, duty and rebellion have very different meanings for Gerty and Ellen. “Duty” to Ellen almost always means suffering and restraining her natural impulses and desires (which are seen as wrong). In contrast, Gerty's submission to duty is always what her heart dictates. Although Gerty would have appreciated a trip with Emily, she is fulfilled caring for Mrs. Sullivan and Willie's grandfather; when she is called back to Emily, her reply to friends who say she is giving up “all the independence she has been striving for” is simply “nothing that I do for Emily's sake can be called a sacrifice” (185), and her happiness in Emily's company works against the potential interpretation of Gerty as a martyr.

The presentation of the authorities Ellen and Gerty defy are also dissimilar. Ellen's difficulties are always with those characterized by a lack of religion: Ellen's father, her Aunt Fortune, her relatives in Scotland who believe her religion makes her too “serious.” The inference is that with religion, all of these authorities would be better people. In contrast, Gerty's conflict with authority again is reminiscent of Hope Leslie. Both Gerty and Hope rebel against men who are pillars of their communities and/or leaders in their religion. Gerty's father describes Mr. Graham as “a respectable man, one of your first men, yes, and a church member, whose hardness, injustice, and cruelty, made my life what it has been—a desert” (304). Hope's conflict is with a similar authority. Although Sedgwick comments that Winthrop is “well known to have been illustrated by the rare virtue of disinterested patriotism, and yet such even and paternal goodness, that a contemporary witty satirist could not find it in his heart to give him a harsher name than ‘Sir John Temperwell’” (144), she still chooses to portray her fictionalized character as a man who did not “shrink from inflicting what he deemed a salutary pain, because his patient recoiled from his touch” (153), a man who is able to use his religion to further his own aims. The result of creating authority figures who are also church members and who use words such as “duty” or “sacrifice” to further their own plans is that the heroines not only challenge a patriarchal figure but implicitly criticize the use of organized religion for selfish aims, reinforcing the value of a natural religion which follows the heart. In contrast, Warner does not critique organized religion, only those who do not follow it.

There is more to Gerty's rebellion than a defiance of Mr. Graham's autocratic rule or a sense of “duty.” Gerty is determined to prove her financial independence and her ability to take care of herself, things Ellen Montgomery is far more comfortable avoiding. When Ellen is young, she tells her mother, “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). At the end of the novel, we find Ellen unchanged in this regard, no more willing to govern herself or her financial destiny when John can dictate for her. Although in the previously unpublished final chapter Ellen is given financial control of the Humphreys's household in the form of a “certain concealed drawer, well lined with gold and silver pieces and bank bills” (582), she maintains the same subordinate attitude, telling John, “You will tell me if I do anything wrong, and it will be just like old times. How I have longed for those old times!” (583). Gerty's revolt against patriarchal authority in order to maintain her autonomy and establish her right to support herself stands out in contrast.

After Gerty's defiance of Mr. Graham and eventual return to Emily's side, The Lamplighter focuses increasingly on Gertrude's role in public and heterosexual society. In these latter portions of the novel, more often than not it is Gerty's wit, energy, bravery and general common sense which are applauded. Unlike sober little Ellen, and quite a bit like Hope Leslie, Gertrude often enjoys discourse in a social setting; in one instance the narrator comments on her “contribut[ing] not a little to the mirth and good-humor of the company by her playful and amusing sallies, and [her] quickness of repartee” (256). In addition, it appears that Gerty, who in the beginning of the novel believes she is so ugly that she declares she is glad Emily Graham is blind and therefore can't see her, has turned into a lovely woman. Both fashionable society, which compliments her on her “remarkably good figure” and her knowledge of “how to walk,” and those of a more spiritual bent, who comment on her “uncommon dignity of character, being wholly unconscious of observation and independent of the wish to attract it” (289), find her an object of interest. Even Willie, who has loved her since childhood, does not know her in “the lovely and graceful woman, her sweet attractions crowned by so much beauty as almost to place her beyond recognition” (410).

Gertrude and Ellen relate quite differently to the world of heterosexual relationships. Gerty changes from an ugly and dependent child into a beautiful and independent woman. Unlike Ellen, who stays in perpetual childhood, she becomes a woman who contends with both unwanted and unrequited love, rejecting a suitor who feels he has power over her and finally obtaining as a mate a man who considers her his equal. Ellen's marriage proposal, on the other hand, is in the form of a request from John who asks her to keep up a correspondence with him, “read no novels” (564) and … something he will leave for another time. Ellen, in fact, does not even seem to comprehend his meaning. In contrast, Gerty, like Hope, becomes a full participant in both romantic misunderstandings and romantic reconciliation. Both Hope and Gertrude selflessly resolve to give up the men they love, yet their resolutions are unnecessary and cause suffering for all concerned; if either heroine had looked to her own heart for guidance, the confusions could have been avoided. Like Hope's sacrifice, Gerty's is a mistake, based not only on a misreading of Willie's feelings, but also on a misunderstanding of Christian duty.

In the later sections of the novel, Gerty becomes a spokeswoman for her own religion, her own particular construction of Christian dogma. At one point, Gerty's father asks her who is better, an old swearing sailor with a pure heart, or Mr. Graham, a respected man of the community:

“Which, then, shall I trust,—the good, religious men, or the low, profane, and abject ones?”

“Trust in goodness, wherever it can be found,” answered Gertrude. “But, O, trust all, rather than none.”

“Your world, your religion, draws a closer line.”

“Call it not my world, or my religion,” said Gertrude. “I know of no such line. I know of no religion but that of the heart. Christ died for us all alike.”

(305)

In Gerty's religion, human nature becomes something to be trusted, not something to be overcome. While the concept of submission and the benefits of trials and suffering continue throughout The Lamplighter, they are presented through the character of Emily Graham, and not espoused by the heroine. In fact, Cummins presents several potential sources for Gerty's strength during trials. At one point she waits impatiently to learn from her father; it is difficult for her, as it is “to persons of an excitable and imaginative temperament,” but

whether the greatness of the emergency called forth, as it ever does in a true-hearted woman, a proportionate greatness of spirit; whether the complications of her web of destiny compelled her, with closed hands and submissive will, to cease all efforts for its disentanglement; or whether, with that humble trust, which ever grew more deep and ardent as the sense of her own helplessness pressed upon her, she turned for help to Him whose strength is made perfect in weakness,—it is certain that … the firmness of her step, the calm uplifting of her eye, gave token that she that moment conceived a brave resolve.

(339)

Even if a nineteenth-century audience, coming from The Wide, Wide World, most likely chose the last description, canceling out the possibility of an individual “true-hearted greatness of spirit,” it is important that Cummins not only provides more than one option, but allows the audience to question Gerty's source of strength.

Throughout The Lamplighter, Cummins attempts, not always successfully, to reconcile the ethic of dependence and submission to duty with that of independence and a more humanistic religion. The character of Willie plays an important role in this endeavor. While John Humphreys at times reminds the reader of Rochester—with his darkness, his abruptness and dictatorial manner, and the difference between his age and Ellen's—Willie is the male equivalent of Gerty, a combination of Christian humility and self-assertion. His mother's farewell upon his departure to earn his fortune is indicative of his upbringing: “love and fear God, Willie, and do not disappoint your mother” (107). In her final letter to her son, Mrs. Sullivan reminds him to “cherish the same submissive love for the All-wise” (173). Experience as well as exhortation have taught Willie the value of humility. Willie's inability to find a second job devastates him at first; Willie, who was proud of his ability to help support his family even at a young age, must learn submission and thankfulness. On the other hand, Willie is an ambitious man, striving to make his fortune. As he tells Gerty's father, “I have not, indeed, spent many of the best years of my life toiling beneath a burning sun, and in protracted exile from all that I had held most dear, without being sustained and encouraged by high hopes, aims, and aspirations” (347). Willie's motivation, however, cleverly combines domestic urges with his attractive energy: his desire is for “a home, and that, not so much for myself, though I have long pined for such a rest—as for another, with whom I hope to share it” (347).

By making Willie a man who shares Gerty's religious principles of “patience and resignation,” as well as her industry and forthrightness, Cummins creates a pair of equals who will together carry forth the doctrine of active benevolence, of natural feelings tempered by Christian humility. By doing so, she has managed to forge a compromise between the ethics of submission and autonomy, innate goodness and self-conquest. Unlike The Wide, Wide World, where the heroine will treat her husband as she does her God, The Lamplighter produces a new society where both women and men submit—to God—but where submission does not define their lives.

Female mentoring is another area where Cummins mediates the conflicting cultural values represented by Warner and Sedgwick. Gerty's relationship with Emily is crucial in understanding Cummins's compromise between subordination and independence. Hope's potential religious mentor is her friend Esther, but Hope does not hold Esther's advice in reverence. When Esther cautions Hope that she should be “guided by the advice and governed by the authority” of her elders, Hope responds:

“Esther, you are a born preacher,” … with a sort of half sigh, half groan of impatience. “Nay, my dear friend, don't look so horridly solemn: I am sure, if I have wounded your feelings, I deserve to be preached to all the rest of my life. But really, I do not entirely agree with you about advice and authority.”

(180)

In contrast, Ellen worships Alice. Gerty's feelings for Emily and her relationship with her are constructed in such a way that Gerty both reverences Emily and is needed by her. The narrator comments that Gerty,

All untaught as she was … had felt … Emily's entire superiority to any being she had ever seen before; and yielding to that belief in her belonging to an order above humanity, she reposed implicit confidence in what she told her, allowed herself to be guided and influenced by one whom she felt loved her and sought only her own good.

(64-65)

But while Gerty looks to Emily for spiritual leadership, Cummins has made Emily blind and so she must look to Gerty for temporal guidance; Gerty is able to help Emily even as Emily is teaching Gerty, establishing a reciprocity between them that is missing in Ellen and Alice's relationship. Gerty relies on Emily's advice, yet it is Gerty who nurses Emily through several illnesses, covers up the servants' disregard for Emily's wishes (taking on Emily's ironing and other domestic needs herself), and continually explains the physical world and reads the imaginary world to Emily. Gerty learns to drive horses so that Emily can go for daily outings after she has been ill; she braves flames and puts herself in danger to assure Emily's safety on a sinking steamboat. In contrast, Alice Humphreys is presented initially as strong, physically and mentally, and never needs Ellen's help. When Ellen and Alice are caught in a snowstorm it is Alice who is in control, who carries the cat and the basket, encourages Ellen with cheerful comments and allows Ellen to cling to her older friend's cloak, although Ellen's “close pressing up to her made their progress still slower and more difficult than it would otherwise have been” (198). Alice's death midway through the novel is presented quickly, and again Ellen is not called upon for aid. Cummins's creation of a mentor who both gives and receives aid, however, provides another opportunity for Gerty to encompass both the qualities of spiritual submission and patience, with physical daring, a spirit of industry and real courage.

Emily's need of Gerty, and Gerty and Willie's friendship are present almost from the beginning of the story, laying the groundwork for the compromise between conflicting cultural values which Cummins attempts, not always successfully, during the course of the novel. The early introduction of these characters and the themes they embody argue against the theory that The Lamplighter is a fiction which, due to financial pressure to make the book longer or a lack of artistry on the part of its author, suddenly and incongruously takes a detour after the death of Trueman Flint. Yet another important variation between The Lamplighter and The Wide, Wide World which is present in the early sections of the novel is the atmosphere in which the heroine receives her spiritual education. Ellen is moved from a world of love—where she and her mother have their own isolated paradise in which they can talk, sew and read the Bible—out into a world which is often unsympathetic to her trials. Even those who love Ellen teach her through lessons that are often painful. Alice constantly reiterates that “The heart must be right” before Ellen can behave rightly (79), but making Ellen's heart “right” requires continual mortification on Ellen's part. In contrast, Gerty moves literally from the street, from a life of emotional and physical deprivation, to something very much like Hope Leslie's upbringing: “so very indulgent was True, that he rarely laid a command upon the child, leaving her to take her own course, and have her own ways; but, undisciplined as she was, she willingly yielded obediently to one who never thwarted her” (43). From the beginning, then, Gerty is presented as a character who, when in a loving and indulgent atmosphere, is readily able to discern right from wrong, and who naturally acts in a Christian manner. The one time Gerty does display temper occurs when she hurls a rock through the window of her former guardian. Here is an example of unacceptable passion, yet the consequences are far from what one would expect from a Warner imitation. Gerty is not punished; True pays for the window without even telling her. In The Lamplighter, human nature, allowed to take its course, more often than not leads the heroine down the correct path, while indulgence rather than restriction brings an easily-achieved submission.

Readers of The Lamplighter who include Hope Leslie and Sedgwick's humanistic religion in their literary context are far more likely to note the divergences between The Lamplighter and The Wide, Wide World and to recognize the influence of a humanistic religion from the beginning of the novel through the end. The contrasts between The Lamplighter and The Wide, Wide World and the correlations between Hope Leslie and The Lamplighter are important because they highlight the growing sense of independence in Gerty's character. When Cummins gives Gerty a semi-dependent mentor, deprives her of Uncle True and sends Willie overseas for the middle portion of the novel, forcing Gerty to meet the crises of her life without support, she creates a character who learns to rely upon herself. The result is a woman characterized by independence in her thoughts and actions. The autonomous woman Gerty becomes shows by contrast the degree to which the philosophy incorporated in The Wide, Wide World requires the financial, physical and spiritual dependence of the woman. A heroine who is heroic only because she can control her own negative emotions is far different from a heroine who follows her instincts, refuses suitors, saves women in steamboat explosions and is able to control her financial destiny. In addition, a religion which is characterized by benevolence and which acknowledges the value of natural instincts contends against a religion where duty is painful, rebellion against authority is discouraged and the heart is not considered a trustworthy guide.

Recognizing the potential antagonism between the values present in Hope Leslie and The Wide, Wide World leads to a better understanding of what may appear as disjointedness in The Lamplighter. Although Cummins's creation of the submissive-yet-enterprising Willie Sullivan and the symbiotic relationship between Emily and Gerty helps to bridge this gap, the inconsistencies are still apparent in the conflict between Gerty's natural conduct in an indulgent atmosphere and Emily's extreme concern for Gerty's unruly temper, Gerty's determination to be Christ-like and the irony of her mistaken sacrifice of Willie, and Emily and Gerty's differing approaches to the concept of duty. Both the dissonance created by the conflicts within The Lamplighter and the way in which these conflicts point to differences between Warner and Sedgwick reveal that our vision of nineteenth-century American women authors and our interpretations of individual works will be illuminated if we acknowledge and even search for difference as well as commonality.

An understanding of the heterogeneity of nineteenth-century American women's novels should lead us not only to recognize distinctions between writers who have been perceived as stereotypically “conservative” or “progressive,” but also to observe variations in the works of individual authors; to note, for example, that Warner's second novel, Queechy, has a dynamic and independent heroine. Although, as Susan Harris points out in her recent study, Fleda ends the novel relaxing thankfully into dependence in a patriarchal marriage, she demonstrates in the middle portions of the novel the capability and initiative necessary to run a farm and support several family members. Acknowledging diversity also helps us to see that Sedgwick varies considerably throughout her novels, from the conservative A New England Tale to the more humanistic Hope Leslie, The Linwoods and Clarence and back to conservatism in Married or Single?. Perhaps most importantly for our understanding of the 1850s, seen by many critics as the bastion of conservative “sentimentalism,” the concept of diversity allows us to acknowledge the conservative elements as found in Susan Warner's work, but also to look beyond them to understand that the decade of the fifties was a vibrant and varied era for women's writing. It could embrace at the same time The Wide, Wide World and Cummins's modification of Warner's vision; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's powerful novel of social protest; and even E. D. E. N. Southworth's comic vision, Capitola Black, who maintains, “I will be a hero” (Southworth 77) and who literally thumbs her nose at villains. This body of work can hardly be said to follow uniformly or uncritically the “domestic novel” formula that “true happiness comes from submission to suffering” (Cowie 413) and that “virtuous deportment creates a happy home and a better social status” (Hart 91). Taking account of the diversity of nineteenth-century women authors will be a more complicated endeavor than we had initially expected. Yet as our understanding of American women writing before 1860 changes from that of a homogenous group to that of autonomous authors who at times, although not consistently, interacted with, challenged and altered the prevailing themes, plot lines and philosophies of their times, our awareness of the extent of their contribution to American literature can only be enriched.

Works Cited

Cummins, Maria. The Lamplighter. 1854. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988.

Cowie, Alexander. “The Vogue of the Domestic Novel, 1850-1870.” South Atlantic Quarterly (1942): 416-24.

Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Feminine Fifties. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts. 1827. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.

Southworth, E. D. E. N. The Hidden Hand: or, Capitola, the Madcap. 1859. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1851. New York: Feminist, 1987.