[In the following excerpt, Brodhead provides a psychological account of internalized moral discipline by a paradigmatic sentimental character. Only those footnotes pertaining to the following excerpt have been reprinted in the "Notes" section.]

Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851), which went on to become one of the four or five most widely read American novels of the whole nineteenth century, is often cited as the first of the new bestsellers. And it is Warner's book that offers the most impressive recognition of discipline through love as a culture-specific historical formation. The Wide, Wide World is a historical novel in a systematically restricted sense of the word. Throughout the book Warner poses the extradomestic world outside of her sphere, in a place unavailable to her literary knowing. Its initial harmony devastated by a lawsuit, neither the book's characters nor the book itself can get access to the transprivate world in which they could know what the suit's occasion was. Through the same strict observation of the limits of her sphere, Warner makes history in the usual sense unavailable to her knowing: what is going on in the world outside of certain family spaces is, in this book, a sealed book. But if she fails to locate her character's private lives in relation to any sort of generalized process of collective change, part of Warner's power as a writer is that she implicitly grasps the households she represents as historically different formations of the domestic sphere. Aunt Fortune, to whose grumpy care Warner's child heroine Ellen Montgomery is shipped off after the book's opening crisis, plays the role in The Wide, Wide World of fairytale's cruel stepmother. But Warner registers her milieu quite concretely—and registers it not in idiosyncratic or local-color detail only, but in such a way as to grasp its surface features' relation to its sociohistorical form. While this point is never commented on overtly, every feature of Aunt Fortune's household exemplifies the logic of the old-style household economy: Fortune is always busy, because this home is a place of work; her house is smelly and noisy, because this house is still a scene of production; her coverlets are of linsey-woolsey, because the necessities of life are still homemade in her world; she scorns Ellen's desire to go to school, because in her world knowledge means knowing how to do practically productive tasks; entertainment at her house takes the form of an apple-paring and pork-packing bee, because in her world entertainment is not disconnected from the household's economic productivity; and so on through a legion of comparable details. The other households in the book differ from Aunt Fortune's on every count. But they differ not just because they are the homes of other people, but because they embody different social formations of the home's place and work: the more genteel (and less productive) formation of a historically later phase, in the case of Alice and John Humphreys; the altogether leisured, pleasure-oriented formation of a Europeanized gentry class, in the case of the aristocratic Lindsays.

While this point too is never registered in any abstract form, Warner's picturing strikingly represents the discipline of love as inhering in a differentiated way in one of these social formations. In contrast to Aunt Fortune's, the household associated with Ellen's mother and Ellen's exemplary friend Alice is characterized by a raised threshold of decency and comfort. (Its furniture is tastefully ornamental, not only functional; Ellen's traumatic experiences at Aunt Fortune's suggest that she is used to indoor plumbing.) In it women are conspicuously exempted from productive functions. (Alice does the more delicate baking, but has a maid to do heavy housework; Ellen's mother, with the wearying exception of one shopping trip, does nothing at all.) Its forms of entertainment are mentally uplifting, and also unproductive and privatized. (Where Aunt Fortune has a bee, these women read.) And this household is also and indistinguishably two more things: it is affectionate, so much so that the cultivation of close relations might be said to be its productive activity; and it is pious, specifically in a way that makes its female heads feel called to the work of improving others' spiritual characters. (When Ellen first meets Alice, Alice at once picks up the task of revivalistically reforming Ellen's temper that her mother had left incomplete.) This reformatory lovingness is profoundly different from any disciplinary method seen elsewhere in the book. Aunt Fortune, untender and impious, is too busy to care about Ellen in Alice's and Mrs. Montgomery's way, let alone to care about her moral nurture; her discipline is confined to occasional bouts of highly arbitrary authoritarianism, backed up (in one instance) by blows.³⁶ The Lindsays, more genial but quite secular, try to make Ellen sleep late, drink wine, cut back on religious reading, and be more fun at parties: theirs is another discipline entirely, training for life in the very different gentry world. Moralizing lovingness is confined to scenes that have all the marks of the new middle-class feminine domesticity. Warner knows that discipline as that social formation's pastime and work; she knows that discipline as forming the self that world aims to reproduce.

Part of the distinction of The Wide, Wide World is that it specifies the cultural location of this scheme of acculturation so precisely. Another of its distinctions is that it plots the actual psychological transactions this scheme entails with unmatched precision and care. The novel begins, thus, by showing what it would mean, in human terms, to be encompassed with tenderness as this plan requires. Ellen Montgomery lives with her mother at the novel's opening, but this phrase does not begin to describe the form of their attachment. It would be more accurate to say that she lives in her mother, in the Umwelt her mother projects. Her mother is always with her, her mother is the whole world available to her (when her mother sleeps Ellen looks out the window, but the world outside the window is inaccessible to her; hired food preparers and even Ellen's father sometimes intrude on this domesticity, but when they withdraw "the mother and daughter were left, as they always loved to be, alone"; 1:43).

Enclosed within her mother's emotional presence, Ellen has been bred to a reciprocating strength of love that makes her feel each event first in terms of how it will bear on her mother's frame of mind. And this other-centeredness or (as we say) considerateness is what makes her responsive to the authority of her mother's codes. As she surrounds her child with her highly wrought emotionality, Mrs. Montgomery also fills the world so centered with moral prescription. She has a rule for everything, a rule in each case absolutely and equally obligatory: "Draw nigh to God" is her religious requirement for her daughter, but her rules of etiquette, even of fashion—one must never ask the names of strangers; girls' cloaks must be of medium-grade merino wood, and not green (1:26, 65, 56-57)—are put forward as binding in no less a degree. And as the beginning of the novel (a little pathetically) demonstrates, Ellen's love for this authority figure—her continual impulse to think of her mother before she thinks of herself, and the absolute imperative she feels under to maintain her mother's favorable emotional atmosphere—makes Ellen, in and of herself, want to do and be what her mother would require of her. While her mother pretends to nap in the first chapter, Ellen makes the tea and toast, not only makes them but makes them just so, with a ritualistic precision of observance. And she performs this labor and follows this tight prescription because the tea is for her mother, and she is driven by "the zeal that love gives" (1: 14). Crushed to hear that her mother (quite incomprehensibly) must abandon her and move with her father to Europe now that the lawsuit is lost, Ellen is required to suppress her grief in consideration of her mother's fragile state—"Try to compose yourself. I am afraid you will make me worse," the tyranically delicate Mrs. Montgomery says. This injunction is hard for the aggrieved Ellen, but the stronger emotion of "love to her mother" has "power enough" to make her "exert all her self-command" (1:13).

What the opening of The Wide, Wide World really dramatizes is the primitive implantation of moral motivation, as discipline by intimacy specifies that practice. Made into a compulsive love seeker, Ellen shows how the child so determined becomes driven, by her heightened need to win and keep parental favor, not just to accept but really to seek out the authority of the parent's moral imperatives. What the rest of the novel then dramatizes is the ongoing career of authority seeking this primal scene initiates. Two facts, not one, constitute Ellen's initial world: the fact that the world is centered in the mother, and the fact that the mother is going to be lost. The news that inaugurates this narrative, the news that the lawsuit is lost and Ellen must be abandoned, carries a powerful sense of women's victimization by the nondomestic masculine economic world they are now dependent on but shut out from knowledge of. (When the separation scene finally arrives Ellen is viscerally wrenched from her mother by the disruptive stranger who is her father.) But in another sense the separation crisis that inaugurates this novel simply recognizes that oneness with the mother is what one cannot not lose—a fact that the child's new centrality to the mother's life in middle-class domesticity makes in new measure traumatic.

What the plot of this novel then shows is how an acculturation system like Ellen's makes this newly intensified grief of separation a psychic resource for the disciplining of the subject. In The Wide, Wide World to love one's mother is to wish to do things her way, but to love her and lose her is to have this wish heightened into full-fledged moral imperative. Loving and losing her mother commits Ellen to a career of seeking for substitutes for this lost beloved. But since the mark of others' substitutability for the mother is that they simultaneously give warm baths of affection and impose strict codes of obligation, this way of repairing an emotional breach drives Ellen deeper and deeper into the territory of psychological regulation. (The final beloved regulator, John Humphreys, does not even tell Ellen his final requirement of her, "but whatever it were, she was very sure she would do it!"; 2:333.) Coached by such surrogates, Ellen's achievement as the novel plots it is to move toward ever more perfect internalizations of parental authority—an achievement whose psychic payoff, as the book shows it, is to restore oneness with the mother now lost.³⁷ Conscience, at last grown strong enough to make her obey even the most outrageous of Aunt Fortune's commands, lets Ellen hear an inner voice that she knows as coming from "her mother's lips" (1:317). When she then undergoes the conversion her mother had covenanted her to, Ellen at once accepts the authority of her mother's religious system and recovers, through participation in that system, felt contact with the mother herself: after her conversion "there seemed to be a link of communion between her mother and her that was wanting before. The promise, written and believed in by the one, realized and rejoiced in by the other, was a dear something in common, though one had in the mean while removed to heaven, and the other was still a lingerer on the earth" (2:72).

Jane Tompkins, the strongest recent champion of Warner's novel, writes in a fine phrase that "a text depends upon its audience's beliefs not just in a gross general way, but intricately and precisely."³⁸ This is exactly the relation The Wide, Wide World has to the living-scenario adumbrated in the philosophy of disciplinary intimacy: proof that the world this novel knows and speaks is by no means only the (in her formulation apparently universal) mid-nineteenth-century American evangelicalism that Tompkins has nominated as its cultural context, but the quite particular middle-class world (evangelical Protestantism was one of its constituents) that coalesced around this socializing strategy in the antebellum years. . . .

³⁶ Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World, 2 vols. (1851; New York, 1856), 1:193. Numbers after subsequent quotations from the novel refer to pages in this text.

³⁷ My understanding of what might be called motivation-by-reunion has been helped by Nancy Schnog's unpublished essay "A History of Sentiment: Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World in Psychosocial Perspective."

³⁸ Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York, 1985), 156. The social undifferentiatedness of the context Tompkins proposes is evident throughout her otherwise useful chapter on Warner, "The Other American Renaissance": revivalism thus has "'terrific universality'" (149; the undisowned phrase is Perry Miller's); evangelical thought "pervaded people's perceptions" (156), informed "how people in the antebellum era thought" (158), and so on. . . .