The Other American Renaissance
[In the following essay, Tompkins assesses the way in which women 's lives in the 1860s play into some recurring elements of sentimental fiction and the sensation novel. She focuses particularly on The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner.]
If the tradition of American criticism has not acknowledged the value of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has paid even less attention to the work of Stowe's contemporaries among the sentimental writers. Although these women wrote from the same perspective that made Uncle Tom's Cabin so successful, and although in the nineteenth century their works were almost equally well-known, their names have been entirely forgotten. The writer I am concerned with in particular is Susan Warner, who was born in the same year as Herman Melville, and whose best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World, was published in the same twelve-month period as Moby Dick. But I am not interested in Warner's novel for the light it can shed on Melville;1 I am interested in it because it represents, in its purest form, an entire body of work that this century's critical tradition has ignored.
According to that tradition, the "great" figures of the 1850s, a period known to us now as the "American Renaissance," were a handful of men who refused to be taken in by the pieties of the age. Disgusted by the clichés that poured from the pens of the "scribbling women," these men bore witness to a darker reality, which the mass of readers could not face. While successful female authors told tearful stories about orphan girls whose Christian virtue triumphed against all odds, the truly great writers—Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau—dared, according to Henry Nash Smith, to "explore the dark underside of the psyche," and to tackle "ultimate social and intellectual issues." And because they repudiated the culture's dominant value system, they were, in Perry Miller's words, "crushed by the juggernaut" of the popular sentimental novel.2 The sentimental writers, on the other hand, were sadly out of touch with reality. What they produced, says Smith, was a literature of "reassurance," calculated to soothe the anxieties of an economically troubled age. To the "Common Man and Common Woman," fearful of challenge or change, they preached a "cosmic success story," which promised that the practice of virtue would lead to material success. Their subject matter—the tribulations of orphan girls—was innately trivial; their religious ideas were."little more than a blur of good intentions"; they "feared the probing of the inner life"; and above all were committed to avoiding anything that might make the "undiscriminating mass" of their middlebrow readers "uncomfortable."3
Those judgments are, in fact, amplified versions of what Hawthorne and Melville said about their sentimental rivals, whom they hated for their popular and critical success. My purpose here is to challenge that description of sentimental novels and to argue that their exclusion from the canon of American literature has been a mistake. For its seems to me that, instead of accepting uncritically the picture Hawthorne and Melville painted—of themselves as victims, of the sentimental novelists as negligible, and of the general public as, in Hawthorne's words, "that great gull, whom we are endeavoring to circumvent"—modern scholars ought to pay attention to a body of work which was so enormously influential and which drew so vehement a response from those who—successfully as it turned out—strove to suppress it.
The publication of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World in December of 1850, caused an explosion in the literary marketplace that was absolutely unprecedented—nothing like it, in terms of sales, had ever been seen before. Fifteen months later, Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose fame is still legendary, broke the records Warner's novel had set. Two years later, Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter—the direct literary descendant of The Wide, Wide World, and the novel that earned Hawthorne's special contempt—made another tremendous hit.4 Critics have been at a loss to explain the enormous and long-standing popularity of these books, and one critic, who has devoted an entire study to the influence of popular fiction on classical American writing, dismisses the phenomenon, saying "it is impossible now to determine just what did happen to the market in the early 1850's."5
But it is not impossible to determine. The impact of sentimental novels is directly related to the cultural context that produced them. And once one begins to explore this context in even a preliminary way, the critical practice that assigns Hawthorne and Melville the role of heroes, the sentimental novelists the role of villains, and the public the role of their willing dupes, loses its credibility. The one great fact of American life during the period under consideration was, in Perry Miller's words, the "terrific universality" of the revival.6 Sentimental fiction was perhaps the most influential expression of the beliefs that animated the revival movement and had shaped the character of American life in the years before the Civil War. Antebellum critics and readers did not distinguish sharply between fiction and what we would now call religious propaganda. Warner, for instance, never referred to her books as "novels," but called them stories, because, in her eyes, they functioned in the same way as Biblical parables, or the pamphlets published by the American Tract Society; that is, they were written for edification's sake and not for the sake of art, as we understand it. The highest function of any art, for Warner as for most of her contemporaries, was the bringing of souls to Christ. Like their counterparts among the evangelical clergy, the sentimental novelists wrote to educate their readers in Christian perfection and to move the nation as a whole closer to the city of God. They saw their work as part of a world-historical mission; but in order to understand the nature of their project, one has to have some familiarity with the cultural discourse of the age for which they spoke.7
The best place to begin is with a set of documents that, as far as I know, have never made their way into criticism of American Renaissance literature: the publications of the American Tract Society, one of the five great religious organizations of the Evangelical United Front.8 These organizations were a concrete mobilization of wealth, energy, and missionary fervor designed to convert the entire nation and eventually the entire world to the truths of Protestant Christianity. That monumental effort, though it failed in its original purpose, did provide the nation with that "sameness of views" that, as Lyman Beecher, one of the movement's chief initiators, observed, was essential to the welfare of a nation torn apart by sectional strife.9 The literature of the American Tract Society, the first organization in America to publish and distribute the printed word on a mass scale, is a testament both to the faith of evangelical Christians—to the shape of their dreams—and to what they experienced as everyday reality. It is only by attempting to see reality as they did that one can arrive at a notion of what gave sentimental fiction its tremendous original force.
I. The Closet
The conception of reality on which the reform movement was based is nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in the activities of the New York City Tract Society which, in 1829, undertook a massive experiment in what we would now call social welfare. The Society divided the city's fourteen wards into districts of about sixty families each and appointed teams of its members to visit every family in each district once a month.10 The Tract Visiters, as they were called, ministered to the poor in a material way, helping them to find jobs and better homes; but this was not their primary purpose. Their major business was distributing Bibles and religious tracts, organizing prayer meetings, urging church attendance, and talking to people about the state of their souls. The Tract Visiters believed that the only real help one could offer another person, rich or poor, was not material, but spiritual, and the directions that guided them in their work insisted on this: "Be much in prayer," the directions said. "Endeavor to feel habitually and deeply that all your efforts will be in vain unless accompanied by the Holy Ghost. And this blessing you can expect only in answer to prayer. Pray, therefore, without ceasing. Go from your closet to your work and from your work return again to the closet."11
If one can understand what made these directions meaningful and effective for the people who carried them out, one is in a position to understand the power of sentimental fiction. For all sentimental novels take place, metaphorically and literally, in the "closet." Sentimental heroines rarely get beyond the confines of a private space—the kitchen, the parlor, the upstairs chamber—but more important, most of what they do takes place inside the "closet" of the heart. For what the word sentimental really means in this context is that the arena of human action, as in the Tract Society directions, has been defined not as the world, but as the human soul. This fiction shares with the evangelical reform movement a theory of power that stipulates that all true action is not material, but spiritual; that one obtains spiritual power through prayer; and that those who know how, in the privacy of their closets, to struggle for possession of their souls will one day possess the world through the power given to them by God. This theory of power makes itself felt, in the mid-nineteenth century, not simply in the explicit assertions of religious propaganda, nor in personal declarations of faith, but as a principle of interpretation that gives form to experience itself, as the records the Tract Visiters left of their activities show.
The same beliefs that make the directions to Tract Visiters intelligible structured what the Visiters saw as they went about their work. In one Tract Society report the Visiter records that a young woman who was dying of pulmonary consumption became concerned at the eleventh hour about the condition of her soul and asked for spiritual help. The report reads:
She was found by the Visiter supplied with a number of tracts, and kindly directed to the Saviour of sinners. Some of her relatives—they cannot be called friends—attempted to impede the visiter's way to her bedside, and would often present hinderances which she could not remove. God, however, showed himself strong in her behalf…. For some time clouds hung over her mind, but they were at length dispelled by the sun of righteousness…. As she approached the hour which tries men's souls, her strength failed fast; her friends gathered around her; … and while they were engaged in a hymn her soul seemed to impart unnatural energy to her emaciated and dying body. To the astonishment of all, she said to her widowed mother, who bent anxiously over her, "Don't weep for me, I shall soon be in the arms of my Saviour." She prayed fervently, and feel asleep in Jesus.12
Like all the fiction we label "sentimental," this narrative blots out the uglier details of life and cuts experience to fit a pattern of pious expectation. The anecdote tells nothing about the personality or background of the young woman, fails to represent even the barest facts of her disease or of her immediate surroundings. For these facts, the report substitutes the panaceas of Christian piety—God's mercy on a miserable sinner, the tears and prayers of a deathbed conversion, falling "asleep" in Jesus. Its plot follows a prescribed course from sin to salvation. But what is extraordinary about this anecdote is that it is not a work of fiction, but a factual report. Though its facts do not correspond to what a twentieth-century observer would have recorded, had he or she been at the scene, they faithfully represent what the Tract Society member saw. Whereas a modern social worker would have noticed the furniture of the sick room, the kind of house the woman lived in, her neighborhood, would have described her illness, its history and course of treatment, and sketched in her socio-economic background and that of her relatives and friends, the Tract Visiter sees only a spiritual predicament: the woman's initial "alarm," the "clouds [that] hung over her mind," God's action on her heart, the turn from sin to righteousness. Whereas the modern observed would have structured the events in a downward spiral, as the woman's condition deteriorated from serious to critical, and ended with her death, the report reverses that progression. Its movement is upward, from "thoughtlessness" to "conviction," to "great tranquality, joy, and triumph."13
The charge twentieth-century critics have always leveled against sentimental fiction is that it presents a picture of life so oversimplified and improbable, that only the most naive and self-deceiving reader could believe it. But the sense of the real that this criticism takes for granted is not the one that the readers of sentimental novels had. Their assumptions are the same as those that structured the events of the report I have just quoted. For what I've been speaking about involves three distinct levels of apprehension: "reality itself" as it appears to people at a given time; what people will accept as an "accurate description" of reality; and novels and stones that, because they seem faithful to such descriptions, therefore seem true. The audience for whom the thoughtless young lady's conversion was a moving factual report, found the tears and prayers of sentimental heroines equally compelling. This is not because they didn't know what good fiction was, nor because their notions about human life were naive and superficial, but because the "order of things" to which both readers and fictions belonged was itself structured by such narratives.
The story of the young woman's death from pulmonary consumption is exactly analogous to the kind of exemplary tale that had formed the consciousness of the nation in the early years of the nineteenth century. Such stories filled the religious publications distributed in unimaginably large quantities by organizations like those of the Evangelical United Front. The American Tract Society alone claims to have published thirty-seven million tracts at a time when the entire population of the country was only eleven million. And the same kind of exemplary narrative was the staple of the McGuffey's readers and primers of a similar type on which virtually the entire nation had been schooled. They appeared in manuals of social behavior, and in instructional literature of every variety, filled the pages of popular magazines, and appeared even in the daily newspapers. As David Reynolds has recently demonstrated, the entire practice of pulpit oratory in this period shifted from an expository and abstract mode of explicating religious doctrine, to a mode in which sensational narratives carried the burden of theological precept.14 These stories were always didactic in nature—illustrating the importance of a particular virtue such as obedience, faith, sobriety, or patience—and they were usually sensational in content—the boy who plays hooky from school falls into a pond and drowns, the starving widow is saved at the last moment by a handsome stranger who turns out to be her son. But their sensationalism ultimately lies not so much in the dramatic nature of the events they describe as in the assumptions they make about the relation of human events to the spiritual realities that make them meaningful. One of their lessons is that all experience is sensational, when seen in the light of its soteriological consequences: the saving or damning of the soul. In their assumptions about the nature and the purpose of human life, these stories provided a fundamental framework for the ordering of experience. The following typical account of a sick child's conversion provides some sense of how that interpretive system worked.
"Ann Eliza Williams, or the Child an Hundred Years Old, an Authentic Narrative" by the Reverend William S. Plumer, D.D. (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.) records that a young girl of "exquisite nervous sensibility" and "an irascible, obstinate, and ungovernable temper" had become concerned about her soul after two attacks of tuberculosis. During the second attack, she is converted, joins the church, and from that time on becomes a model of Christian deportment. On one particular occasion, the sick child is asked by her doctor and pastor how she feels. But instead of reporting her physical sensations, she "seems to forget all her bodily pain" and gives an answer that ignores the question: "O Jesus is precious, I am happy in him; his favor is life and his loving kindness is better than life."15 Far from ignoring the question, however, Ann Eliza implicitly rebukes her questioners by putting their question into its proper perspective. Her words can be paraphrased as follows: "My physical condition is not important; what matters is my soul, for that alone is immortal. And since Jesus by his death has redeemed my soul, I am happy because of him." This theological answer seems to deny the practical realities of Ann Eliza's situation—her sickness, her pain, her possible death—but in fact it deals with those realities directly by pointing to the means of overcoming them. The thought of Jesus' love transforms her experience, makes her happy, drives away her pain. Her recognition that God's love is the final fact of existence transforms Ann Eliza's situation: what she experiences now is not pain, but the knowledge of her salvation. And therefore when someone asks her how she feels, "O Jesus is precious" is not a pious evasion, but a truthful reply.
It is extremely difficult for modern readers to hold on to the perspective that makes Ann Eliza's answer seem true, both because its theological assumptions are different from ours and because those assumptions carry with them a correspondingly alien rhetoric. In the twentieth century, materialist notions about the ultimate nature of reality and faith in the validity of scientific method have given rise to strategies of persuasion that require institutionally certified investigators to argue in a technical vocabulary for conclusions based on independently verifiable evidence, gathered according to professionally sanctioned methods of inquiry. (The metaphysical assumptions behind this mode of argumentation are no less powerful for being unstated.) In the same way, a belief that reality is ultimately spiritual, and a conception of Jesus as a personal savior with whom one has a loving and intimate relationship, gave rise in the early nineteenth century to a rhetoric in which an individual (such as the Reverend Plumer) testifies in impassioned language to miraculous or sensational events bearing witness to the truths of religious faith. In this rhetorical tradition, a single representative case, strikingly presented, constitutes the most effective form of evidence because that is the form which the audience expects such demonstrations to take. The force of the demonstration, moreover, depends upon the miraculousness of the events it describes, not on their probability—as the subtitle "or the Child an Hundred Years Old" suggests—since the point of the story is to affirm the existence of supernatural powers by pointing to God's intervention in human affairs, and not to chart the course of natural, unregenerate behavior. There is no need, either, for independent verification of the evidence, because supernatural events, by definition, cannot be repeated experimentally. Other "authentic" cases just like this one—of which the tract literature is full—would be the best kind of auxiliary verification. The Reverend Plumer's credentials, moreover, are superb. He is a Christian minister and a doctor of divinity, and therefore can be presumed to have special insight into phenomena of the kind he relates, and he is vouched for by the prestigious American Tract Society, a bastion of the country's religious (and socio-economic) establishment. Finally, the language of his narration gives palpable proof of the spiritual realities he bears witness to, not because it is neutral and detached, but because it is so obviously the product of intense feeling. When the presence of the Holy Ghost is what is in question, spontaneous eloquence, Biblical and oracular in style, is the most persuasive form of rhetoric.
In short, the conditions within which Ann Eliza's story is heard as convincing are just as culturally determined as those that shape its theology. The same network of assumptions that supported the religious beliefs of evangelical Christians shaped their rhetorical and stylistic conventions as well. For a text depends upon its audience's beliefs not just in a gross general way, but intricately and precisely. It depends, to borrow a term from ethnomethodology, upon "the fine power of a culture," which "does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly the same way, but fills them so that they are alike in fine detail."16 And this means that the cultural conventions that make a narrative convincing inform not only the perception of nonmaterial concerns such as the existence of God or the shape of an argument, they also inform perception of the ordinary facts of existence.
The records people left of their lives in antebellum America suggest that the modes of thought underlying the Tract Society directions and the story of Ann Eliza Williams pervaded people's perceptions of their everyday affairs. The letters they wrote to one another, the diaries they kept, the way they thought about their work, their homes, and their families, reflect the same sense of millenarian purpose that drove the reform movement and inspired writers like Warner and Stowe. The Protestant-Republican ideology, which identified the spreading of the Gospel with the building of a nation, did not distinguish clearly if at all between activities that had a practical aim—such as the straightening of a room, the building of a school, or the starting of a business—and activities that were specifically spiritual—like reading the Bible or attending prayer meetings. The welfare of the nation, conceived in millenarian terms as the bringing of God's kingdom to earth, depended upon the virtue of the individual citizen; any task, no matter how small, could be seen as either helping or hindering the establishment of Christ's kingdom. As John Thompson declared in addressing the American Home Missionary Society's twenty-second annual meeting:
no nation can either prosper or last without popular virtue—… the virtue of the Bible, in all its purity and life, and generous conviction! Religion, Protestant religion, is our great national want, as it is our greatest national security…. Our power lies in no gleaming spear, or gloating admirals; … it dwells in the workshops, the manufactories, in the open fields, by the firesides, in the homes and haunts of our widespread population; and this virtue comes not of nature; it is a foreign element and must first be implanted.17
The implantation of virtue was the primary goal of nearly everything nineteenth-century Americans read: textbooks, novels, poems, magazine stories, or religious tracts. As David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot have recently argued, the entire educational system in this country was founded on the premise that a democratic republic depended on the Christian character of its citizens; the men who built the nation's common schools saw themselves as doing the Lord's work.18 When the coming of God's kingdom depended on the private virtue of every citizen, even deciding when to get up in the morning, or what time to eat dinner had consequences that no Christian could afford to overlook. For example, in this time schedule printed in a child-rearing manual entitled Thoughts on Domestic Education, The Result of Experience by a "Mother," the sense of an overriding purpose entwines itself with the minute-by-minute organization of a young lady's typical day.
| Hours | o'Clock |
| To rise, all the year round —7 A.M. | |
| 1 | Dressing, washing, bathing —8 |
| 1 | Prayer and Study —9 |
| 1 | Breakfast and conversation —10 |
| 4 | Studious occupation —2 P.M. |
| 2 | Walking, riding, or dancing —4 |
| 1 | Light reading or drawing —5 |
| 1 | Dinner —6 |
| 2 | Music, needlework, or reading —8 |
| 1 | Tea and conversation —9 |
| 1 | Dancing, music, needlework, or reading —10 |
| To be in bed by —11 | |
| 8 | Sleep —7 A. M. |
| The last question before going to sleep: What good have I done today?19 |
The question that ends the day is the key to understanding what the time schedule is for. So that the young lady will never be at a loss as to how to answer it, the Mother appends a table of virtues to her volume, starting with "Obedience," and including others such as "Humility" and "Industry," which the young lady can check off according to whether or not she has performed them. The organization of time into regular blocks of activity, beginning with prayer and ending with a checklist of virtues, provides a miniature example of how people in the antebellum era thought about their daily lives, and indeed about the whole of life. The cultivation of social skills like conversation, and of artistic accomplishments like drawing and needlework, the pursuit of "studious occupation" and of physical fitness through "walking, riding, or dancing" were conceived not as ends in themselves, but as part of the practice of virtue which had to be learned through conscious self-discipline. One had a "scheme" for the distribution of time the better to serve God and one's fellow man. The time schedule and the checklist of virtues were ways of building Christian character, the foundation stone of a democratic republic.20 And this sort of instructional material was not merely theoretical in its consequences; people did not simply talk about virtue, they lived it. Just as whole families in the slums of New York wept and asked to be instructed in the Scriptures when they heard Visiters read aloud the story of "Bob, the Cabin Boy," so young ladies really did organize their days according to the principles the Mother recommended.21 The best example I have found of how totally the evangelical movement had saturated American culture is this time schedule found in the pocket of a girl's dress. Mrs. Lydia Sigourney reprints it in her biography of Margaret Flower, who died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1834, at the age of fourteen.
Rise at half past five. Take care of the rooms. Sew until two hours from that time. Practice my piano one hour, then study one hour. Work till three in the afternoon, then practice an hour, and study an hour, reserving time for exercise.22
Margaret Flower's schedule (composed, as Sigourney notes, when she was on vacation) shows that directions such as those that the Mother offered her readers, and which the Tract Society distributed to its members, really worked. They had traction because the readers they addressed already understood life according to the principles that these directions are attempting to inculcate. Margaret Flower follows the instructions she finds in a manual because she already wishes to make herself into a more effective agent of God's will. The didactic literature of the antebellum era was not an abstract set of standards designed to force life into a predetermined shape; rather, it helped its original audience to put into practice the aims they already had at heart.23 As Robert Wiebe observed, the leaders of the reform movement "believed that they spoke for the nation rather than to it"; assuming that their audience "shared the same ethical system, the same dedication to public service," they attempted "not to convince people but simply to rouse them."24 For Margaret Flower, as for the author of Thoughts on Domestic Education, taking care of the rooms, practicing an hour, then studying an hour were activities that had to be regulated because they were understood in the light of a great purpose: the saving of one's soul and the bringing of all souls to Christ.
When you turn from the tract society reports, religious narratives, educational manuals, and autobiographical documents to the fiction of writers like Stowe and Warner, you find the same assumptions at work. Those novels are motivated by the same millennial commitment; they are hortatory and instructional in the same way; they tell the same kinds of stories; they depend upon the same rhetorical conventions; and they take for granted the same relationship between daily activities and the forging of a redeemer nation. When critics dismiss sentimental fiction because it is out of touch with reality, they do so because the reality they perceive is organized according to a different set of conventions for constituting experience. For while the attack on sentimental fiction claims for itself freedom from the distorting effects of a naive religious perspective, the real naiveté is to think that that attack is launched from no perspective whatsoever, or that its perspective is disinterested and not culture-bound in the way the sentimental novelists were. The popular fiction of the American Renaissance has been dismissed primarily because it follows from assumptions about the shape and meaning of existence that we no longer hold. But once one has a grasp of the problems these writers were trying to solve, their solutions do not seem hypocritical or shallow, unrealistic or naive; on the contrary, given the social circumstances within which they had to work, their prescriptions for living seem at least as heroic as those put forward by the writers who said, "No, in thunder."
II. Power
If the general charge against sentimental fiction has been that it is divorced from actual human experience, a more specific form of that charge is that these novels fail to deal with the brute facts of political and economic oppression, and therefore cut themselves off from the possibility of truly affecting the lives of their readers. Tremaine McDowell, writing in The Literary History of the United States, dismisses Mrs. Lydia Sigourney—who epitomizes the sentimental tradition for modern critics—by saying that while she "knew something of the humanitarian movements of the day, all … she did for Negroes, Indians, the poor, and the insane was to embalm them in her tears."23 Such cutting remarks are never made about canonical authors of the period, though they, too, did nothing for "Negroes, Indians, the poor," and wrote about them considerably less than their female rivals. But what this sort of commentary reveals, beyond an automatic prejudice against sentimental writers, is its own failure to perceive that the great subject of sentimental fiction is preeminently a social issue. It is no exaggeration to say that domestic fiction is preoccupied, even obsessed, with the nature of power. Because they lived in a society that celebrated free enterprise and democratic government but were excluded from participating in either, the two questions these female novelists never fail to ask are: what is power, and where is it located? Since they could neither own property, nor vote, nor speak at a public meeting if both sexes were present, women had to have a way of defining themselves which gave them power and status nevertheless, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world.26 That is the problem sentimental fiction addresses.
In his characterization of American women, Tocqueville accurately described the solution to this problem as it appeared to an outsider. He noted that the interests of a "Puritanical" and "trading" nation lead Americans to require "much abnegation on the part of women, and a constant sacrifice of her pleasures to her duties." But, he continues, "I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a usurpation of their rights…. It appeared to me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will and make their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off."27 The ethic of sentimental fiction, unlike that of writers like Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, was an ethic of submission. But the relation of sentimental authors to their subservient condition and to the dominant beliefs about the nature and function of women was more complicated than Tocqueville supposed. The fact is that American women simply could not assume a stance of open rebellion against the conditions of their lives for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. They had to stay put and submit. And so the domestic novelists made that necessity the basis on which to build a power structure of their own. Instead of rejecting the culture's value system outright, they appropriated it for their own use, subjecting the beliefs and customs that had molded them to a series of transformations that allowed them both to fulfill and transcend their appointed roles.
The process of transformation gets underway immediately in Warner's novel when the heroine, Ellen Montgomery, a child of ten, learns that her mother is about to leave on a long voyage for the sake of her health and that she will probably never see her mother again. The two have been weeping uncontrollably in one another's arms, when Mrs. Montgomery recollects herself and says: "Ellen! Ellen! Listen to me, … my child—This is not right. Remember, my darling, who it is that brings this sorrow upon us,—though we must sorrow, we must not rebel" (I, 12).28 Ellen's mother, who has been ordered to go on this voyage by her husband and her physician, makes no attempt to change the situation. She accepts the features of her life as fixed and instructs her daughter to do the same. The message of this scene, and of most sentimental fiction, is that "though we must sorrow, we must not rebel." This message can be understood in one of two ways. The most obvious is to read it as an example of how this fiction worked to keep women down. This reading sees women as the dupes of a culture that taught them that disobedience to male authority was a "sin against heaven."29 When mothers teach their daughters to in terpret the commands of husbands and fathers as the will of God, they make rebellion impossible, and at the same time, hold out the false hope of a reward for suffering, since, as Mrs. Montgomery says, "God sends no trouble upon his children but in love" (I, 13). In this view, religion is nothing but an opiate for the oppressed and a myth which served the rulers of a "Puritanical" and "trading nation." In this view, the sentimental novelists, to use Ann Douglas' phrase, did "the dirty work" of their culture by teaching women how to become the agents of their own subjection.30
The problem with this reading is that it is too simplistic. The women in these novels make submission "their boast" not because they enjoyed it, but because it gave them another ground on which to stand, a position that, while it fulfilled the social demands placed upon them, gave them a place from which to launch a counter-strategy against their worldly masters that would finally give them the upper hand. 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. Mrs. Montgomery tells Ellen that her tears of anger are "not right," that she must "command" and "compose" herself, because, she says, "you will hurt both yourself and me, my daughter, if you cannot" (I, 12). Ellen will hurt herself by failing to submit because her submission is not capitulation to an external authority, but the mastery of herself, and therefore, paradoxically, an assertion of autonomy.31 In its definition of power relations, the domestic novel operates here, and elsewhere, according to a principle of reversal whereby what is "least" in the world's eyes becomes "greatest" in its perspective. So "submission" becomes "self-conquest" and doing the will of one's husband or father brings an access of divine power. By conquering herself in the name of the highest possible authority, the dutiful woman merges her own authority with God's. When Mrs. Montgomery learns that her husband and doctor have ordered her to part from Ellen, she says to herself, "not my will, but thine be done" (I, 31). By making themselves into the vehicles of God's will, these female characters become nothing in themselves, but all-powerful in relation to the world. By ceding themselves to the source of all power, they bypass worldly (male) authority and, as it were, cancel it out. The ability to "submit" in this way is presented, moreover, as the special prerogative of women, transmitted from mother to daughter. As the women in these novels teach one another how to "command" themselves, they bind themselves to one another and to God in a holy alliance against the men who control their material destinies. Thus, when Mr. Montgomery refuses his wife the money to buy Ellen a parting gift, it is no accident that she uses her own mother's ring to make the purchase; the ring symbolizes the tacit system of solidarity that exists among women in these books. Nor is it an accident that the gift Mrs. Montgomery gives her daughter is a Bible. The mother's Bible-gift, in sentimental literature, is invested with supernatural power because it testifies to the reality of the spiritual order where women hold dominion over everything by virtue of their submission on earth.32
The bypassing of worldly authority ultimately produces a feminist theology in which the godhead is refashioned into an image of maternal authority. When Mrs. Montgomery teaches Ellen what it means to trust in God, she asks her to describe her feelings toward herself:
"Why, mamma:—in the first place, 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. Then everything you tell or advise me to do, I know it is right, perfectly. And I always feel safe when you are near me, because I know you'll take care of me. And 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." (I, 18)
Mrs. Montgomery replies:
"My daughter, it is just so; it is just so: that I wish you to trust in God. He is truer, wiser, stronger, kinder, by far, than I am, … and what will you do when I am away from you:—and what would you do, my child, if I were to be parted from you forever?" (I, 18)
Mrs. Montgomery's words produce a flood of tears from Ellen, but nevertheless Ellen has learned that when her mother dies she will not really be bereft, for God, who is just like her mother, will take her mother's place in her life; and conversely, the novel seems to suggest, Mrs. Montgomery will take the place of God. When the moment of parting comes, she writes in the flyleaf of Ellen's Bible:
"'I love them that love Me; and they that seek Me early shall find Me.'"
This was for Ellen; but the next words were not for her; what made her write them?—
"'I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee.'"
They were written almost unconsciously, and, as if bowed by an unseen force, Mrs. Montgomery's head sank upon the open page.… (I, 49)
There are two ways of understanding this passage which parallel the double meaning of "submission" in the politics of sentimental fiction. We can read Mrs. Montgomery's inscriptions so that the "I " in "I love them that love Me" and "I will be a God to thee" are spoken by God, whose words she is just repeating. Or, we can read the inscriptions so that the words are spoken by Mrs. Montgomery herself. Indeed, it is this interpretation that is borne out by subsequent events in which Ellen's goodness, her devotion to duty, her piety, and Christian deportment are all attributed to the influence of her mother. The definition of the mother as the channel of God's grace, the medium through which he becomes known to mankind, locates the effective force of divinity in this world in women. Doing the will of God finally becomes identical with doing what one's mother wants. And if one is a woman, doing the will of God means obeying a divinity that comes to look more and more like oneself. Scene after scene in The Wide, Wide World ends with Ellen weeping in the arms of a kind mother-figure—a representative of God in human form. As Ellen matures, and her spiritual counselors grow closer to her in age—she calls them "sister" and "brother"—she finally learns to control her passions on her own and becomes her own mother. Not coincidentally, the one completely happy, whole, and self-sufficient character in this novel is an elderly woman who lives alone on a mountaintop and is, so to speak, a God unto herself. This is the condition toward which the novel's ethic of submission strives. While outwardly conforming to the exigencies of her social role, inwardly the heroine becomes master of her fate and subject to no one outside herself.
Read within the context of nineteenth-century American culture, the scene between Ellen and her mother reconciles women's need for power and status with a condition of economic and political subservience. This fiction presents an image of people dominated by external authorities and forced to curb their own desires; but as they learn to transmute rebellious passion into humble conformity to others' wishes, their powerlessness becomes a source of strength. These novels teach the reader how to live without power while waging a protracted struggle in which the strategies of the weak will finally inherit the earth.
III. Trifles
But while women were attempting to outflank men in a struggle for power by declaring that it was not the world that was important to conquer but one's own soul, they did in fact possess a territory of their own that was not purely spiritual, and they made maximum use of the one material advantage they possessed. The territory I am referring to is, of course, the home, which operates in these novels as the basis of a religious faith that has unmistakably worldly dimensions. The religion of the home does not situate heaven in the afterlife, but locates it in the here and now, offering its disciples the experience of domestic bliss. Just as the practice of submission, which looks like slavery to us, became, in the context of evangelical Christianity, the basis for a claim to mastery, so confinement to the home, which looks to us like deprivation, became a means of personal fulfillment.
Social historians have tended to take a dim view of the domestic ideology, regarding its promises of happiness as illusory and the accompanying restrictions as impossible to bear.33 In the course of illustrating how women had to abandon any ambitions of their own, accommodating themselves to their husband's position in society, Barbara Epstein quotes a tale from a textbook for young girls about a man who had lost his fortune and was forced to move to a humble cottage in the country. As he walks home one evening with a friend, he worries aloud about his wife's state of mind. He is afraid she may not be able to cope with poverty, the fatigue of housework, and the absence of elegant appointments. But when the men arrive at the cottage, the wife
came tripping forth … in a pretty rural dress of white; a few wild flowers were twisted in her fine hair; a fresh bloom was on her cheek; her whole countenance beamed with smiles …"My dear George," cried she, "I am so glad you are home! I've set out a table under a beautiful tree behind the cottage; and I've been gathering some of the most delicious strawberries, for I know you are fond of them and we have such excellent cream, and everything is so sweet and still here.—"Oh!" said she, putting her arm within his, and looking up brightly into his face, "Oh! we shall be so happy."34
Epstein comments that although domesticity protected women from the harsh economic world, "in real life drudgery and isolation were more prominent than strawberries and cream."35 Epstein's sarcasm here is understandable, but it misses something important. Of course homelife was mostly drudgery, but the women who wrote scenes like the one I have just quoted knew that. The religion of domesticity could never have taken hold if it had not had something real to offer. And what it had to offer was an extraordinary combination of sensual pleasures, emotional fulfillment, spiritual aspirations, and satisfaction in work accomplished.
Of all the characters in The Wide, Wide World, the one who has achieved the greatest spiritual victory is old Mrs. Vawse, who lives in a house built into a cleft of rock on a windswept mountaintop. Though she has no one to lean on—her husband, children, and former mistress are all dead—she says "I am never alone … I have nothing to fear" because "my home is in heaven, and my Savior is there preparing a place for me" (XVIII, 201, 197). Though Mrs. Vawse says her home is in heaven, everything that the novel says about her goes to show how well she lives in her earthly one. Though deprivation is ostensibly the defining feature of this woman's existence—she has no money, no property, no relatives—her house is warm and comfortable, her surroundings are pleasant, she works at odd jobs to earn money when she needs it, and she obviously enjoys the company of her friends. She is always, says Warner, "cheerful and happy, as a little girl" (XIX, 203). While Mrs. Vawse claims that the secret of her contentment is "letting go of earthly things … for they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing," (XVIII, 197) she in fact has everything she wants. Mrs. Vawse is the most completely happy and fulfilled person in the novel because economically, socially, and emotionally she is the most independent. When Ellen asks her why she lives so far away from everyone, she answers, "I can breathe better here than on the plain. I feel more free" (XVIII, 201). Autonomy and freedom, exactly what the lives of antebellum American women lacked, are the defining features of Mrs. Vawse's existence. Heaven, as it is figured in Warner's novel, is a place of one's own where one can be "happy, as a little girl" but without the dependency of childhood, or of most Victorian women.
Despite the novel's emphasis on Mrs. Vawse's spirituality as the source of her contentment, it is the physical features of her one-room house that, rightly understood, provide a lesson to those who would emulate her success. Everything in Mrs. Vawse's house shines with the consequences of her labor. The floor is "beautifully clean and white," the windows are "clean and bright as panes of glass can be," "the hearth was clean swept up," "the cupboard doors … unstained and unspoiled, though fingers had worn the paint off (XVIII, 198). The work of scrubbing and polishing—women's work—has produced a spiritual purity and a physical beauty in which holiness and pleasure are combined, a combination repeated in the juxtaposition of her "large Bible" and "cushioned armchair" (XVIII, 198). Ellen and her friend, Alice, have come to Mrs. Vawse to "get a lesson in quiet contentment" (XVIII, 196). The lesson that they get—in addition to the one that Mrs. Vawse explicitly gives them—is that piety and industry, both activities over which a woman has control, can set you free. Mrs. Vawse's home presents an ideal of fulfillment toward which the readers of sentimental fiction could strive. It is full of material pleasures—cleanliness, attractive surroundings, warmth and good food (Mrs. Vawse gives Ellen and Alice delicious cheese, bread, and "fine tea" [XVIII, 200])—and it offers spiritual and emotional nourishment as well—Mrs. Vawse gives religious counsel and affection to her friends, and sends them on their way fortified in every sense. While the ethic of submission required a stifling of aggression, a turning inward of one's energies to the task of subduing the passions, the home provided an outlet for constructive effort, for doing something that could bring tangible results.
At the same time that the domestic ideal gave women a concrete goal they could work toward and enjoy the possession of, it gave them a way of thinking about their work that redeemed the particularities of daily existence and conferred on them a larger meaning. The triviality of sentimental fiction has, along with its morality and its tears, traditionally been the object of critical derision. But this triviality is the effect of a critical perspective that regards household activity as unimportant. Women writers of the nineteenth century, having been allotted one small corner of the material universe as their own, could hardly allow that area to be defined as peripheral or insignificant. Besides making the home into an all-sufficient basis for satisfaction and fulfillment in the present, they wrote about domestic routines in such a way that everything else appeared peripheral. Just as "submission" is transformed into "self-command," and the extinction of self into the assumption of a god-like authority, so the routines of the fireside acquire sacramental power in the novels of this period; the faithful performance of household tasks becomes not merely a reflection or an expression of celestial love but, as in this scene from Warner's novel, its point of origin and consummation:
To make her mother's tea was Ellen's regular business. She treated it as a very grave affair, and loved it as one of the pleasantest in the course of the day. She used in the first place to make sure that the kettle really boiled; then she carefully poured some water into the tea-pot and rinsed it, both to make it clean and to make it hot; then she knew exactly how much tea to put in the tiny little tea-pot, which was just big enough to hold two cups of tea, and having poured a very little boiling water to it, she used to set it by the side of the fire while she made half a slice of toast. How careful Ellen was about that toast! The bread must not be cut too thick, nor too thin; the fire must, if possible, burn clear and bright, and she herself held the bread on a fork, just at the right distance from the coals to get nicely browned without burning. When this was done to her satisfaction (and if the first piece failed she would take another), she filled up the little tea-pot from the boiling kettle, and proceeded to make a cup of tea. She knew, and was very careful to put in, just the quantity of milk and sugar that her mother liked; and then she used to carry the tea and toast on a little tray to her mother's side, and very often held it there for her while she ate. All this Ellen did with the zeal that love gives, and though the same thing was to be gone over every night of the year, she was never wearied. It was a real pleasure; she had the greatest satisfaction in seeing that the little her mother could eat was prepared for her in the nicest possible manner; she knew her hands made it taste better; her mother often said so. (I, 13-14)
The making of tea as it is described here is not a household task, but a religious ceremony. It is also a strategy for survival. The dignity and potency of Ellen's life depend upon the sacrality she confers on small duties, and that is why the passage I have quoted focuses so obsessively and so reverentially on minute details. Ellen's preparation of her mother's tea has all the characteristics of a religious ritual: it is an activity that must be repeated ("the same thing was to be gone over every night of the year"); it must be repeated correctly ("she knew exactly how much tea to put in the tiny little tea-pot," "the bread must not be cut too thick, nor too thin," "and if the first piece failed she would take another"); it must be repeated in the right spirit ("all this Ellen did with the zeal that love gives"); and it must be repeated by the right person (Ellen "knew her hands made it taste better; her mother often said so"). Ellen's hands make the tea and toast taste better because the ritual has worked, but it works not only because it has been performed correctly, but because Ellen and her mother believe in it. The creation of moments of intimacy like this through the making of a cup of tea is what their lives depend on. What the ritual effects is the opening of the heart in an atmosphere of closeness, security, and love. The mutual tenderness, affection, and solicitude made visible in the performance of these homely acts are the values sacred to sentimental fiction and the reward it offers its readers for that other activity which must also be performed within the "closet"—the control of rebellious passion. While Ellen and her mother must submit to the will of God, expressed through the commands of husbands and doctors, they compensate for their servitude by celebrating daily their exclusive, mutually supportive love for one another.
That is why this ritual, although it resembles the Christian sacrament of holy communion, does not merely promise fulfillment; it offers consummation in the present moment. The tea and toast are real food, and the feelings that accompany them, like those that characterize the soul's relation to Christ in evangelical hymns, are feelings living human beings share with one another.36 The exigencies of a Puritanical and trading nation had put women in the home and barred the door; and so in order to survive, they had to imagine their prison as the site of bliss. In this respect, the taking of tea is no different from hoeing a bean patch on the shores of Walden Pond, or squeezing case aboard a whaling ship; they are parallel reactions against pain and bondage, and a means of salvation and grace. The spaces that American Renaissance writing marks out as the site of possible transcendence are not only the forest and the open sea. The hearth, in domestic fiction, is the site of a "movement inward," as far removed from the fetters of land-locked existence as the Pacific Ocean is from Coenties Slip.
The happiness that women engender in the home is their prerogative and their compensation. But this felicity is not limited in its effects to women, although they alone are responsible for it. Like prayer, which must be carried on in solitude and secrecy in order to change the world, the happiness that women create in their domestic isolation finally reaches to the ends of the earth. "Small acts, small kindnesses, small duties," writes the Reverend Peabody, "bring the happiness or misery … of a whole generation. Whatever of happiness is enjoyed … beyond the circle of domestic life, is little more than an offshoot from that central sun."37 The domestic ideology operates in this, as in every other respect, according to a logic of inversion whereby the world becomes "little more than an offshoot" of the home. Not only happiness, but salvation itself is seen to depend upon the performance of homely tasks. "Common daily duties," says the Reverend Peabody, "become sacred and awful because of the momentous results that depend upon them. Performed or neglected, they are the witnesses that shall appear for or against us at the last day."38 By investing the slightest acts with moral significance, the religion of domesticity makes the destinies of the human race hang upon domestic routines. Margaret Flower makes out a time schedule when she is on vacation, and Ellen Montgomery treats the making of her mother's tea as "a very grave affair" because they know that "momentous results" depend upon these trifles. The measuring out of life in coffee spoons, a modernist metaphor for insignificance and futility, is interpreted in sentimental discourse as a world-building activity. When it is done exactly right, and "with the zeal that love gives," it can save the world.
It is easy and may be inevitable at this point to object that such claims are pathetic and ridiculous—the fantasies of a disenfranchised group, the line that society feeds to members whom it wants to buy off with the illusion of strength while denying them any real power. But what is at stake in this discussion is precisely what constitutes "real" power. From a modern standpoint, the domestic ideal is self-defeating because it ignores the realities of political and economic life. But those were not the realities on which Americans in the nineteenth century founded their conceptions of the world. As Lewis Saum has written: "In popular thought of the pre-Civil War period, no theme was more pervasive or philosophically fundamental than the providential view. Simply put, that view held that, directly or indirectly, God controlled all things."39 Given this context, the claims the domestic novel made for the power of Christian love and the sacred influence of women were not in the least exaggerated or illusory. The entire weight of Protestant Christianity and democratic nationalism stood behind them. The notion that women in the home exerted a moral force that shaped the destinies of the race had become central to this country's vision of itself as a redeemer nation. The ethic of submission and the celebration of domesticity were not losing strategies in an age dominated by the revival movement. They were a successful bid for status and sway. Even as thoroughgoingly cosmopolitan a man as Tocqueville became convinced of this as a result of his visit to the United States from 1830 to 1831. "As for myself," he said, concluding his observations on American women, "I do not hesitate to avow that, although the women of the United States are confined within a narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women."40
IV. Pain
The claims that sentimental fiction made for the importance of the spiritual life and for women's crucial role in the salvation of the race were not spurious or self-deceiving, because they were grounded in and appealed to beliefs that had already organized the experience of most Americans. But while the sense of power and feelings of satisfaction that the religion of domesticity afforded were real, not just imagined, they were bought and paid for at an almost incalculable price. The pain of learning to conquer her own passions is the central fact of the sentimental heroine's existence. For while a novel like The Wide, Wide World provides its readers with a design for living under drastically restricted conditions, at the same time it provides them with a catharsis of rage and grief that registers the cost of living according to that model. When Melville writes that Ahab "piled upon the white whale's hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down, and then, as if his chest had been a mortar … burst his hot heart's shell upon it," he describes the venting of a rage that cannot be named as such in Warner's novel, but whose force is felt nevertheless in the deluge of the heroine's tears.41 The force of those passions that must be curbed at all costs pushes to the surface again and again in her uncontrollable weeping. For although these novels are thought to have nothing to say about the human psyche, and to be unaware of "all the subtle demonisms of life and thought" which preoccupied greater minds, in fact they focus exclusively on the emotions, and specifically on the psychological dynamics of living in a condition of servitude. The appeal of Warner's novel lay in the fact that it grappled directly with the emotional experience of its readership; it deals with the problem of powerlessness by showing how one copes with it hour by hour and minute by minute. For contrary to the long-standing consensus that sentimental novelists "couldn't face" the grim facts of their lives, their strength lay precisely in their dramatization of the heroine's suffering as she struggles to control each new resurgence of passion and to abase herself before God. It is a suffering which, the novelists resolutely insist, their readers, too, must face or else remain unsaved. And they force their readers to face it by placing them inside the mind of someone whose life is a continual series of encounters with absolute authority.
Warner's novel pulls the reader immediately into such a situation. As the novel opens, Ellen Montgomery is sitting quietly at the window of her parents' New York townhouse, watching the evening close in on a partially deserted street. Her invalid mother is resting and has asked her to be still. (Characteristically, the heroine is trapped in an enclosed space, is under an injunction not to do anything, has no direct access to the world she can see from her limited vantage point, and must make the best of her situation.) Ellen studies the scene outside the window with great concentration. It is pouring rain. She watches the last foot passengers splashing through the water, horses and carriages making their way through the mud, until finally, at the far end of the street, one by one, lights begin to appear. "Presently," Warner writes, "Ellen could see the dim figure of the lamplighter crossing the street from side to side with his ladder;—then he drew near enough for her to watch him as he hooked his ladder on the lamp irons, ran up and lit the lamp, then shouldered the ladder and marched off quick, the light glancing on his wet oil-skin hat, rough great-coat and lantern, and on the pavement and iron railings" (I, 10). When the lamplighter has finally disappeared, Ellen sets herself to straightening the room: she adjusts the curtains, stirs the fire, arranges the chairs, puts some books and her mother's sewing-box back in their places. Finally, having done everything she can think of, Ellen kneels down and lays her head next to her mother's on the pillow and after a moment gently strokes her cheek. "And this succeeded," says Warner, "for Mrs. Montgomery arrested the little hand as it passed her lips and kissed it fondly" (I, 10).
What makes this scene work is the way it draws the reader into its own circuit of attention. Forced into the dark parlor with Ellen, the reader has to pay attention to what Ellen pays attention to—the tiny details of the lamplighter's progress down the street, parlor furniture, books, sewing-boxes, the moment of suspense when she lays her hand on her mother's cheek. These things become the all-engrossing features of the reader's world. The circumscribed materials of Warner's novel do not seem at all lacking in importance when seen from the heroine's perspective; instead, the restricted focus, which one might have supposed to be a disastrous limitation, works to intensify the emotional force of what takes place. At times, the vulnerability of the child, forced to live within the boundaries authority prescribes and constantly under the pressure of a hostile supervision, becomes almost too painful to bear.
Warner's refusal to mitigate the narrow circumstances of her heroine's existence is particularly striking when one compares this novel to the opening of Huckleberry Finn. When Huck is trapped by his drunken father near the beginning of Twain's novel, he concocts an elaborate ruse that allows him to escape. He kills a hog, scatters its blood around the cabin, drags a sack of meal across the threshhold to imitate the imprint of a body, and disappears, hoping that his father and the townspeople will think he has been murdered—and of course they do. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has for a long time stood as a benchmark of American literary realism, praised for its brilliant use of local dialects and its faithfulness to the texture of ordinary life. Twain himself is famous for his scoffing attacks on the escapism of sentimental and romantic fiction. But if one compares his handling of a child's relation to authority with Warner's, the events of Huckleberry Finn enact a dream of freedom and autonomy that goes beyond the bounds of the wildest romance. The scenario whereby the clever and deserving Huck repeatedly outwits his powerful adversaries along the riverbank acts out a kind of adolescent wish fulfillment that Warner's novel never even glances at. When Ellen is sent by her father to live with a sadistic aunt in New England, when she is deeded by him a second time to an even more sinister set of relatives, there is absolutely nothing she can do. Ellen is never for a moment out of the power of her guardians and never will be, as long as she lives. While the premise of Twain's novel is that, when faced by tyranny of any sort, you can simply run away, the problem that Warner's novel sets itself to solve is how to survive, given that you can't.
In the light of this fact, it is particularly ironic that novels like Warner's should have come to be regarded as "escapist." Unlike their male counterparts, women writers of the nineteenth century could not walk out the door and become Mississippi riverboat captains, go off on whaling voyages, or build themselves cabins in the woods. Nevertheless, modern critics, as we have seen, persist in believing that what sentimental novelists offered was an easy way out: a few trite formulas for the masses who were too cowardly to face the "blackness of darkness," too lazy to wrestle with moral dilemmas, too stupid to understand epistemological problems, and too hidebound to undertake "quarrels with God." But "escape" is the one thing that sentimental novels never offer; on the contrary, they teach their readers that the only way to overcome tyranny is through the practice of a grueling and inexorable discipline. Ellen Montgomery says to her aunt early in the novel that if she were free to do what she wanted she would run away—and spends the rest of the novel learning to extirpate that impulse from her being. For not only can you not run away, in the world of sentimental fiction, you cannot protest the conditions under which you are forced to remain. Ahab's cosmic protest "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me" epitomizes the revolutionary stance of the heroes of classical American fiction; sentimental heroines practice a heroism of another sort.
Learning to renounce her own desire is the sentimental heroine's vocation, and it requires, above all else, a staggering amount of work. Since self-suppression does not come naturally, but is a skill that can only be acquired through practice, the taking apart and putting back together of the self must be enacted over and over again, as each new situation she meets becomes the occasion for the heroine's ceaseless labor of self-transformation. It is, as Ellen often says to her spiritual mentors, "hard." And since, in any individual instance, crushing the instinct for self-defense and humbling oneself before God can only be accomplished through protracted effort, the scenes that enact this process are long and tortuous. Over and over again the heroine must overcome the impulse to rebel and justify herself, must throw herself on the mercy of the Lord and ask his help in forgiving those who have wronged her.
In a sense, these novels resemble, more than anything else, training narratives: they are like documentaries and made-for-TV movies that tell how Joe X, who grew up on the streets of Chicago, became a great pitcher for the White Sox, or how Kathy Y overcame polio and skated her way to stardom. They involve arduous apprenticeships in which the protagonist undergoes repeated failures and humiliations in the course of mastering the principles of her vocation. They always involve, prominently, a mentor-figure who initiates the pupil into the mysteries of the art, and enunciates the values the narrative is attempting to enforce. The trainer, who is simultaneously stern and compassionate, loves the protagonist most when she is being hardest on her. In sentimental fiction, the vocation to be mastered is Christian salvation, which, translated into social terms, means learning to submit to the authorities society has placed over you. In Ellen's case, her Aunt Fortune (a literal representative of fate), and later her Scottish relatives, are the authorities whom Ellen must learn to obey without a murmur. And her mentors are first her mother, then Alice Humphries, a young woman who befriends Ellen in her first exile, and then Alice's brother John, who takes over when Alice dies.
The role Ellen's mentors play in administering the novel's disciplinary program is a complicated and crucial one. Though they are her refuge and her loving saviors, it is they who put the "rock" in Ellen's soul by refusing to let her give way to her rebellious feelings. Whereas her Aunt Fortune exerts control over Ellen's life externally, her mentors control her inmost being; they alter her behavior at its source by teaching her how to interpret her feelings. Anger and indignation—no matter what the cause—are a disease of which she must be cured, and in order to be cured she must not "shrink" from her "physician." "No hand but His," they tell her, "can touch that sickness you are complaining of (XV, 158). Relentless in their determination that Ellen shall learn to humble herself before God, her mentors make demands of her that are excruciatingly intimate and exacting.
It is hard for people who have not read Warner's novel to understand the nature of the heroine's relation to her mentors. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel, its concentration on the moral consequences of even the smallest pieces of behavior, and above all the sense it conveys of someone utterly at the mercy of implacable authorities, trap the reader into the heroine's cycle of frustration, humiliation, and striving. The immediacy and force of her emotions invest the tiniest incidents with an intensity that a simple account of their features cannot recapture. What most eludes the attempt to portray these scenes is the passion that fills them—a passion that erupts continually and inarticulately in the flood of her tears, as repeatedly she is made to bare her soul to the gaze of her superiors.
When Ellen runs to her friend Alice, after her Aunt Fortune has treated her cruelly, at first Alice is all sympathy and affection. But what Ellen learns from Alice, comforting and solicitous as she is, is that her protests are all pride and selfishness, and that she must learn not to stand up to her aunt even to herself. "For," as Alice says, "the heart must be set right before the life can be" (XVI, 173). The only way to set the heart right is through total self-abnegation, and the only way to achieve that is by praying to the "dear Savior." When Ellen asks "what shall I do to set it right?" Alice's answer is "Pray," (XVI, 173) and this will always be her answer. When Ellen says "But, dear Miss Alice, I have been praying all morning that I might forgive Aunt Fortune and yet I cannot do it," Alice's answer is still the same, "Pray still, my dear, … pray still. If you are in earnest the answer will come" (XVI, 173). Alice never gives an inch in these exchanges because her job is to teach Ellen that the self must never have its way, for "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble" (XVI, 174). When Ellen bursts into tears at such sayings, and cries out "but it is so hard to forgive," Alice is unmoved. "Hard, yes, it is hard when our hearts are so, but there is little love to Christ and no just sense of his love to us in the heart that finds it hard. Pride and selfishness make it hard. The heart full of love to the dear Savior cannot lay up offenses against itself" (XVI, 174).
Tears and prayers are the heroine's only recourse against injustice; the thought of injustice itself is implicitly forbidden. The anger that such a thought would arouse is Ellen's worst enemy and her besetting sin; that anger must be transmuted into humility and love for "the hand that has done it" (XLII, 461). And so, Ellen's mentors are immitigable in their insistence that Ellen turn to Christ for help when she is in distress. If she wants to be happy, she must learn to seek him. "Remember Him, dear Ellen," they always say, "remember your best Friend. Learn more of Christ, our dear Savior, and you can't help but be happy" (XVII, 183). When Ellen thanks Miss Alice for befriending her, exclaiming, "Oh, Miss Alice, what would have become of me without you!" Alice gently rebuffs her: "Don't lean upon me, dear Ellen," says Alice, "remember you have a better Friend than I always near you…. Whenever you feel wearied and sorry, flee to the shadow of that great rock" (XVI, 174; XVII, 183). Through constant and repeated reminders, Ellen's mentors establish Christ in Ellen's mind as an all-powerful internal "Friend" who watches everything she does. Thanks to her mentors, when Ellen goes to her room in tears, she is not retreating to a safe place any longer because, once in the privacy of her room, she must abase herself before the authority she has internalized.
Ellen's self-command increases as she learns to turn more frequently to prayer, to her Bible, to hymns, and to religious books for strength and solace. And from time to time, Warner notes with satisfaction the "progress" of the "little pilgrim" (XXXV, 368);42 "solitude and darkness saw many a tear of hers," says Warner, as she "struggled … to get rid of sin and to be more like what would please God" (XXXI, 331). But despite her constant progress in the business of self-renunciation, Ellen always needs more inner strength than she can muster. She is constantly being caught in some attitude of incomplete surrender which earns her the devastatingly mild rebukes of Miss Alice or Mr. John. The faintest signs of irritation or self-concern tell them that her devotion to Christ is not yet absolute. "Is seeking His face your first concern?" they ask, "be humbled in the dust before Him" (XLV, 489; XXVIII, 309).
But the massive tests of Ellen's faith are still before her. Ellen learns that her mother has died, and is inconsolable. She goes into a decline from which she is rescued only by Mr. John's tutelage and affection. Then Alice dies, and Ellen is desolate. But this time "she knew the hand that gave the blow and did not raise her own against it. … Her broken heart crept to His feet and laid its burden there" (XLI, 446). The final blow is separation from Mr. John. Her father dies and deeds her to some rich relatives in Scotland; Ellen is cast upon the wide world a second time, and this time she will have no mentors to rely on. Like all true Christians, she must learn to live on faith alone.
The final chapters of The Wide, Wide World require of the heroine an extinction of her personality so complete that there is literally nothing of herself that she can call her own. Whereas Ellen's aunt had subjected her to constant household drudgery and frequently hurt her feelings, she made no attempt to possess her soul. But Ellen's Scottish relatives are spiritual tyrants; they look upon Ellen as a "dear plaything, to be taught, governed, disposed of." "They would do with her and make of her precisely what they pleased" (XLVII, 524). What they please is that she give up her identity. Under their rule, in which the "hand that pressed her cheek," though "exceeding fond," is also the "hand of power," (XLVII, 530) submission reaches its acutest manifestations. The store of loyalties and affections that Ellen has garnered during her first exile is stripped from her methodically and completely. The Lindsays' authority will brook no appeal. Her uncle makes Ellen call him "father," changes her name from Montgomery to Lindsay, orders her to forget her nationality, forces her to drink wine, forbids her to speak of her former friends, refuses to let her talk of religion, and insists that she give up her sober ways and act "cheerful." After prolonged internal struggles, many prayers and tears, and much consulting of her Bible, Ellen bends submissively to every one of these commands; her time, her energies, her name, her nationality, her conversation, her friends are not hers to dispose of. "God will take care of me if I follow Him," she says to herself, "it is none of my business." "God giveth grace to the humble, I will humble myself (XLVIII, 546). Absolutely friendless, with no one to understand and comfort her, Ellen (who is about thirteen years old by now) has only God to turn to. When the Lindsays try to take God away from her, it marks the turning point in her Christian education. Up to now, Ellen's Christian duty has required her to submit silently to every assault on her personal desires; the final test of her obedience will require that she disobey, because it is an attack not on herself but on "Him."
Ellen has been in the habit of spending an hour every morning in Bible reading and prayer; it is this hour that enables her to maintain her humble bearing in the face of the Lindsays' demands. When her grandmother learns of it, she forbids Ellen to continue, but this time Ellen says to her grandmother, "there is One I must obey even before you" (L, 563). Although it looks as though, in disobeying, Ellen has gone against everything she has been taught, in fact, the novel's lesson here is the same as it has been throughout: obey the Lord and He will provide. In her distress, Ellen behaves exactly as her mentors had instructed her—she "flees to the shadow of that great rock." She goes to her room, and cries, and then begins to sing:
When I draw this fleeting breath,—
When my eyelids close in death,—
When I rise to worlds unknown,
And behold Thee on Thy throne,—
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
(L, 566)
Because Ellen has not asked anything for herself, her will, which is one with the will of God, prevails. Ellen's uncle overhears her singing, and, won over by her meekness and humility, intercedes for her with her grandmother; he arranges for her to have her precious hour alone if she will promise to be more cheerful and keep her "brow clear." Ellen keeps the promise. "Her cheerfulness," says Warner, "was constant and unvarying." Her "unruffled brow," "clear voice," and "ready smile" are the product of a pure heart and a broken will, for though "tears might often fall that nobody knew of," Ellen had "grasped the promises 'He that cometh to Me shall never hunger,' and 'Seek and ye shall find'" (L, 569).
To Warner's audience, steeped in the Christian tradition of self-denial and submission to God's will, Ellen's suffering, as she gradually gives up the right to be herself, is necessary. It is not only necessary; it is desirable. Ellen's mentors express their love for her in their willingness to inflict pain as God, in the Protestant tradition, loves those whom he chastises. After her mother has died, John asks Ellen, "do you love Him less since He has brought you into this great sorrow?" "No," Ellen replies, sobbing, "more" (XXXIV, 363). But the embrace of pain and the striving for self-abandonment that characterize the heroines of sentimental fiction have, for the modern reader, psycho-sexual overtones that are inescapable and should at least be mentioned here. When Mr. John says to Ellen, "be humbled in the dust before Him—the more the better," (XXVIII, 309) his words, harsh and titillating at the same time, suggest the relationship between punishment and sexual pleasure, humiliation and bliss. The intimate relation between love and pain that Warner's novel insists on calls to mind nothing so much as The Story of O, another education in submission in which the heroine undergoes ever more painful forms of sexual humiliation and self-effacement, until finally she asks "permission" to die. In each case, when the heroine has learned to submit totally to one authority, she is passed on to a more demanding master, or set of masters, who will exact submissions that are even more severe.
The end point of the disciplinary process is the loss of self: either through physical death, as in O's case or Uncle Tom's, or psychological death, as in Ellen's, a sloughing off of the unregenerate self. By the end of Warner's novel, Ellen does not exist for herself any more, but only for others. Sanctified by the sacrifice of her own will, she becomes a mentor by example, teaching lessons in submissiveness through her humble bearing, downcast eyes, unruffled brow, and "peculiar grave look" (XLV, 494). Even the joy that Ellen gives her elders is not her own doing, but God in her. She is a medium through which God's glory can show itself to men. Like Alice, Ellen becomes a person who "supplied what was wanting everywhere; like the transparent glazing which painters use to spread over the dead color of their pictures; unknown, it was she gave life and harmony to the whole" (XX, 213). The ideal of behavior to which the novel educates its readers is the opposite of self-realization; it is to become empty of self, an invisible transparency that nevertheless is miraculously responsible for the life in everything.
Given the amount of pain that sentimental heroines endure, it is almost inconceivable that their stories should have been read as myths of "reassurance." But perhaps this reading, insofar as it arises from anything that is really in these novels, is based on the way they end. At the end of The Wide, Wide World. Ellen is rewarded for her suffering, like Job—to whom she is twice compared. Having given up everything, she now has everything restored to her a hundredfold. That restoration takes the form of Mr. John, whom Ellen loves, to whom she has "given herself," and who. Warner intimates, will marry her when she comes of age. In Mr. John the various authorities in Ellen's life are finally merged. Whereas before, the authorities over her had been divided into three separate realms—the earthly authority of her father, Aunt Fortune, and the Lindsays; the transcendent authority of God; and the authority of her spiritual mentors who mediated between the two—now they are all contained in a single person. Since, as Warner observes, Mr. John's commands are always "on the side of right," there will never again for Ellen be a conflict between duty and obedience. The male figure, representing both divine and worldly authority, who marries the heroine in the end, is the alternative to physical death in sentimental fiction; he provides her with a way to live happily and obediently in this world while obeying the dictates of heaven. He is the principle that joins self-denial with self-fulfillment, extending and enforcing the disciplinary regimen of the heroine's life, giving her the love, affection, and companionship she had lost when she was first orphaned, providing her with material goods and social status through his position in the world.
The union with Mr. John looks at first exactly like the sort of fairy-tale ending that sentimental fiction is always accused of fobbing off on its readers: Cinderella rescued by Prince Charming. One can see Aunt Fortune as the wicked stepmother who makes Ellen sweep and churn butter when she would rather be studying French, and Alice as the fairy godmother who provides supernatural help and leads her to the prince. But the real analogues to Warner's novel are not fairy tales, though they do have happy endings. The narratives that lie behind The Wide, Wide World are trials of faith—the story of Job and Pilgrim 's Progress—spiritual "training" narratives in which God is both savior and persecutor and the emphasis falls not on last-minute redemption, but on the toils and sorrows of the "way." These narratives, like Warner's novel, teach the reader, by example, how to live. And their lesson, like Warner's, is that the only thing that really matters in this world is faith in God and doing his will: nothing else counts. Although Ellen will be united eventually with Mr. John, her submissiveness has become so complete that it hardly matters who is her master now. Through prolonged struggle, she has taught herself to be the perfect extension of another's will; because her real self is inviolate, having become one with God, she can accept whatever fate deals out. And in fact, Warner gives her "three or four more years of Scottish discipline" before restoring her to the "friends and guardians she best loved" (LII, 592). The education of the sentimental heroine is no more a fairy story than the story of Job or Pilgrim's Progress. Rather, it is an American Protestant bildungsroman, in which the character of the heroine is shaped by obedience, self-sacrifice, and faith. Warner's language in summing up her heroine's career makes this plain:
The seed so early sown in little Ellen's mind, and so carefully tended by sundry hands, grew in course of time to all the fair stature and comely perfection it had bid fair to reach—storms and winds that had visited it did but cause the root to take deeper hold;—and at the point of its young maturity it happily fell into those hands that had of all been most successful in its culture. (LII, 592)
In an unfriendly review of Warner's book, Charles Kingsley quipped that it should have been called "The Narrow, Narrow World" because its compass was so small.43 And in a sense he was right. Although the frontispiece of the first illustrated edition shows a ship tossing on a stormy sea, with the sun breaking through clouds in the background, all of the heroine's adventures take place indoors, in small enclosed spaces that are metaphors for the heart. Warner tells the reader as much in the novel's epigraph:
Here at the portal thou dost stand,And with thy little handThou openest the mysterious gateInto the future's undiscovered land.I see its valves expandAs at the touch of FateInto those realms of Love and Hate.
The realms of love and hate are no less turbulent and suspenseful than those Kingsley described in Westward, Ho!, and considerably less given to the playing out of adolescent fantasies. The storms and winds of Warner's novel are those that nineteenth-century readers actually encountered in their lives. The wideness of this world is to be measured not by geographical or sociological standards, but by the fullness with which the novel manages to account for the experience of its readers. That experience, as I have argued, was shaped conclusively by the revival movement and by the social and economic condition of American women in the antebellum years. That is the condition that Ellen Montgomery's story represents, and it is "narrow" only in the sense of being confined to a domestic space, like most of Henry James' fiction, or Jane Austen's. But unlike Austen or James, the sentimental writers had millennial aims in mind. For them the world could be contracted to the dimensions of a closet because it was in the closet that one received the power to save the world. As the Reverend Dr. Patton, addressing the fifteenth annual meeting of the American Home Missionary Society, said:
The history of the world … is the history of prayer. For this is the power that moves heaven. Yet it is the power which may be wielded by the humblest and obscurest saint. It will doubtless be found in the great day, that many a popular and prominent man will be set aside; whilst the retired but pleading disciple, will be brought forth to great honor, as having alone in her closet, wrestled with the angel and prevailed.44
Notes
1 That is how twentieth-century critics have usually treated this work. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith, "The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story," Critical Inquiry, 1 (September 1974), pp. 47-49; John T. Frederick, "Hawthorne's 'Scribbling Women,'" New England Quarterly, 48 (1975), pp. 231-240; Ramona T. Hull, "Scribbling Females and Serious Males: Hawthorne's Comments from Abroad on Some American Authors," Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 5 (1975), pp. 35-38.
2 Smith, p. 58; Henry Nash Smith, Democracy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 12; Perry Miller, "The Romance and the Novel," in Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 255-256.
3 Smith, Democracy and the Novel, pp. 13-15.
4 James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), pp. 93, 94, 111; Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 122-125.
5 Smith, Democracy and the Novel, p. 8.
6 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965), p. 7.
7 Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), provides a valuable account of the social content of millenarianism which has been crucial to my own thinking concerning the assumptions about power implicit in all kinds of evangelical writing, including Warner's novel.
Burridge's definition of religion makes sense in the context of nineteenth-century social thought, which was so intimately bound up with religious beliefs.
"For not only are religions concerned with the truth about power, but the reverse also holds: a concern with the truth about power is a religious activity" (p. 7). "Religious activities will change when the assumptions about the nature of power, and hence the rules which govern its use and control, can no longer guarantee the truth of things" (p. 7).
"The rules which govern the use of power can be determined. Both emerge from the ways in which individuals discharge or evade their obligations, what they do to counter or meet the consequences of evasion, how they cope with a pledge redeemed, what they say the consequences will or might be." "Salvation equals redemption equals unobligedness" (p. 8).
"'Feeling themselves oppressed' by current assumptions about power, participants in millenarian activities set themselves the task of reformulating their assumptions so as to create, or account for and explain, a new or changing material and moral environment within which a more satisfactory form of redemption will be obtained" (p. 10).
"An adequate or more satisfactory way of gaining prestige, of defining the criteria by which the content of manhood is to be measured, stands at the very heart of a miilennarian or messianic movement. And these criteria relate on the one hand to gaining or retaining self-respect, status, and that integrity which is implied in the approved retention of a particular status; and on the other hand to an acknowledged process whereby redemption may be won" (p. 11). "The redemptive process, and so redemption, bears significantly on the politico-economic process, particularly the prestige system" (p. 13). "A prestige system is based upon particular measurements of manhood which relate to gaining or retaining self-respect and integrity, and which refer back to the politico-economic process, the redemptive process, and assumptions about power" (p. 13). "Indeed, all religions are basically concerned with power. They are concerned with the discovery, identification, moral relevance and ordering of different kinds of power, whether these manifest themselves as thunder, or lightning, atomic fission, untramelled desire, arrogance, impulse, apparitions, visions, or persuasive words…. And all that is meant by a belief in the supernatural is the belief that there do exist kinds of power whose manifestations and effects are observable, but whose natures are not yet fully comprehended" (p. 5).
"Religions, let us say, are concerned with the systematic ordering of different kinds of power, particularly those seen as significantly beneficial or dangerous" (p. 5).
8 This is the term given to the movement by Charles Foster in his excellent account, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790-1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
9 As quoted by Foster, p. 273.
10 In March of 1829, for example, a pamphlet entitled Institution and Observance of the Sabbath was distributed to 28,383 New York families. See Foster, p. 187.
11 New York City Tract Society, Eleventh Annual Report (New York: New York City Tract Society, 1837), back cover.
12 New York City Tract Society, pp. 51-52.
13 New York City Tract Society, pp. 51, 52.
14 David Reynolds, "From Doctrine to Narrative: The Rise of Pulpit Story-Telling in America," American Quarterly, 32 (Winter, 1980), pp. 479-498.
15 Reverend William S. Plumer, "Ann Eliza Williams, or the Child an Hundred Years Old, an Authentic Narrative," in Narratives of Little Henry and His Bearer; The Amiable Louisa; and Ann Eliza Williams (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.), pp. 4, 11.
16 Harvey Sacks, "On the Analysability of Stories by Children," in Ethnomethodology, ed. Roy Turner (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1974), p. 218.
17 American Home Missionary Society, Twenty Second Report (New York: William Osborn, 1848), p. 103.
18 David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1982), pp. 15-104.
19Thoughts on Domestic Education, The Result of Experience, by a Mother (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1829), p. 106.
20 For a comparable example, see Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1829), which devotes an entire chapter to the "Value of Time."
21 New York City Tract Society, p. 158.
22 Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, Margaret and Henrietta (New York: American Tract Society, 1852), pp. 12-13.
23 The expectation that children should order their lives for the furthering of God's kingdom is commonplace. See, for instance, Lydia Maria Child's New Year's message to children, The Juvenile Miscellany, I, 3 (January 1827), pp. 103-105, which urges children to "make a regular arrangement of time" and to be "always employed."
24 Robert Wiebe, "The Social Functions of Schooling," American Quarterly, 21 (1969), pp. 147-150.
25 Tremaine McDowell, "Diversity and Innovation in New England," in The Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., 3rd ed., rev. (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 289.
26 In the first half of the nineteenth century, single women could own real property but married women could not. "Essentially," writes Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 184, "husband and wife were one flesh; but the man was the owner of that flesh." For a good discussion of the growing discrepancy, from the seventeenth century onward, between anti-patriarchal theories of government and the reinforcement of patriarchal family structure, see Susan Miller Okin, "The Making of the Sentimental Family," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 11 (Winter 1982), pp. 65-88.
27 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reive, rev., 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), II, p. 223.
28 Chapter and page references to The Wide, Wide World are to the undated, one-volume "Home Library" edition of the novel (New York: A. L. Burt).
29 Reverend Orville Dewey, A Discourse Preached in the City of Washington, on Sunday, June 27th, 1852 (New York: Charles S. Francis and Company, 1852), p. 13. Dewey's sermon on obedience is characteristic of a general concern that a democratic government was breeding anarchy in the behavior of its citizens, and that obedience therefore must be the watchword of the day. In European society, Dewey argues, where the law of caste still reigns, there is a natural respect for order and authority. But "here and now," he continues, pp. 4-5, "all this is changed…. With no appointed superiors above us, we are liable enough to go to the opposite extreme; we are liable to forget that any body is to be obeyed—to forget even, that God is to be obeyed…. Only let every man, every youth, every child, think that he has the right to speak, act, do any where and every where, whatever any body else has the right to do; that he has as much right to his will as any body; and there is an end of society. That is to say, let there be an end of obedience in the world, and there is an end of the world." Since, in Dewey's eyes, pp. 13-14, the home is the source of anarchy in the state, family discipline is the source of all good civil order, and therefore the goal of domestic education must be "a patient and perfect obedience." "If the child is never permitted to disobey, it will soon cease to think of it as possible. And it should never be permitted! … Only when living under law—only when walking in obedience, is child or man, family or State, happy and truly prosperous. Selfish passion every where is anarchy, begetting injustice, and bringing forth destruction." Sentimental novels, along with advice books for young women, child-rearing manuals, and religious literature of all sorts, helped to inculcate the notion that obedience was a domestic as well as a civic virtue, especially in the case of women. Beginning in the 1830s, as Nancy F. Cott has shown in The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 158-159, clergymen directed their sermons on the need for order in family and society especially at women, "vividly emphasizing the necessity for women to be subordinate to and dependent on their husbands."
30 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 11.
31 Tocqueville, II, pp. 210, 212, describes the process of moral education of American women in very much the same terms. "Americans," he says, "have found out that in a democracy the independence of individuals cannot fail to be very great, youth premature, tastes ill-restrained, customs fleeting, public opinion often unsettled and powerless, paternal authority weak, and marital authority contested. Under these circumstances, believing that they had little chance of repressing in woman the most vehement passions of the human heart, they held that the surer way was to teach her the art of combating those passions for herself." Thus, Tocqueville continues, having cultivated an extraordinary "strength of character" and learned to "exercise a proper control over herself," the American woman "finds the energy necessary for … submission in the firmness of understanding and in the virile habits which her education has given her."
32 Harvey C. Minnich, ed. Old Favorites from the McGuffey Readers (New York: American Book Co., 1936), pp. 178-179, prints a poem, from the Fourth Reader, entitled "A Mother's Gift—The Bible." The first stanza reads as follows:
Remember, love, who gave thee this,When older days shall come,When she who had thine earliest kiss,Sleeps in her narrow home.Remember! 'twas a mother gaveThe gift to one she 'd die to save!
The Bible is the symbol of the mother in sentimental literature, taking her place, after she is dead, serving as a reminder of her teachings, and as a token of her love. To forget what the Bible says is to forget one's mother:
A parent's blessing on her sonGoes with this holy thing;The love that would retain the one,Must to the other cling.
33 For example, Douglas; Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976).
34 Epstein, p. 75. The original source is Irving's Sketch Book.
35 Epstein, p. 75.
36 Sandra Sizer, Gospel Hymns and Social Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), p. 33, describes that relation as follows: "The secret of his saving power lies in a movement inward, not only toward shelter and refuge with Jesus and/or in heaven, but to a realm of intimacy. It is a sphere not only of passivity but of passion—the passion, the emotions, in nineteenth-century language the 'affections.'" Sizer's book is the best discussion I know of the relationship between the domestic ideal and evangelical Christianity. In summing up the relationship between the gospel hymns and popular fiction, p. 110, she writes:
In short, the hymns incorporate the ordering of the world provided by the ideology of evangelical domesticity in the novels; the two rhetorics are parallel and very nearly identical. Jesus and heaven, so central in the hymns, are being understood in terms of domestic descriptions. The tender affections, the feminine virtues, the home-haven which gives protection and generates inward strength through intimacy—all become part of the hymns' picture of Jesus and his heavenly realm.
37 Reverend E. Peabody, "Importance of Trifles," in The Little Republic, Original Articles by Various Hands, ed. Mrs. Eliza T. P. Smith (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1848), p. 120. The "importance of trifles" theme is ubiquitous in nineteenth-century inspirational literature. It is directly related to the Christian rhetoric of inversion ("The last shall be first"), to the cultivation of the practical virtues of honesty, industry, frugality ("A stitch in time saves nine"; "A penny saved is a penny earned"), and to the glorification of the mother's influence. In another essay in the same volume, "A Word to Mothers," pp. 210, 211-212, Thomas P. Smith writes: "Let us not forget that the greatest results of the mind are produced by small, but continued, patient effort." "As surely as a continued digging will wear away the mountain, so surely shall the persevering efforts of a Christian mother be crowned with success…. She is, through her children, casting pebbles into the bosom of society; but she cannot as easily watch the ripples made: no, they reach beyond the shore of mortal vision, and shall ripple on, in that sea that has neither shore nor bound, for weal or for woe, to them, and to the whole universal brotherhood of man."
38 Peabody, in The Little Republic, ed. Smith, pp. 124-125.
39 Lewis O. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 3.
40 Tocqueville, II, p. 225.
41 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, ed., introd. Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964), p. 247.
42Pilgrim's Progress is Ellen's favorite book.
43 Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (London, 1903), p. 174, as cited by Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, p. 48.
44 American Home Missionary Society, Fifteenth Report (New York: William Osborn, 1842), p. 104.
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