[In the following essay, Trubey evaluates the portrayal of women's reading in The Wide, Wide World as an instructional but potentially subversive activity.]

The act of reading plays an important thematic role throughout Susan Warner's 1850 bestseller, The Wide, Wide World.¹ Ellen Montgomery, the novel's heroine, is often depicted with book in hand, turning to the Bible and other moralizing texts for comfort, edification, and direction. Warner relates Ellen's method of approaching texts, as well as the titles of the works she reads, in extensive detail. Indeed, books and readership are integral to the novel's sentimental message. They teach the young girl morality and Christ-like submission; however, almost counter-intuitively, books also open up for Ellen the possibility of imagined acts of rebellion. In as far as Ellen is a behavioral model for Warner's female readers,² the cultural work performed by the girl's many interactions with texts is vital to an understanding of both Warner's contradictory vision of women's inner thoughts and outward behavior and the way Warner wanted her vast audience to approach The Wide, Wide World.

For the past fifteen years, The Wide, Wide World has been central to feminist critics' revival of nineteenth-century women's fiction. Because the text is so archetypal of sentimental novels, it has been the focal point of a scholarly discussion of the cultural work performed by this genre that began with Jane Tompkins' groundbreaking Sensational Designs.³ Whereas earlier critics like Henry Nash Smith and Ann Douglas had focused on the conservatism of Warner's novel, especially its millennial Christian vision,⁴ Tompkins' persuasive discussion of the empowering nature of female passivity changed the critical landscape. By calling Ellen's submission to authority a “self-willed act of conquest of one's passions” and, therefore “an assertion of autonomy,” Tompkins spawned a critical discourse that focuses on the potential for female resistance within the outwardly repressive world Warner creates for her heroine (152). Joanne Dobson, for instance, determines that the self-sacrifice the novel mandates merely covers a subtext of “strong, repressed anger at enforced feminine powerlessness” (227). Similarly, Catharine O'Connell compellingly suggests that the novel's emphasis on female pain and restriction “grants narrative authority to the anger and suffering of the powerless, and implicitly questions the rightful authority of the powerful who cause such suffering” (29). Such critical perspectives emphasize the radical impulses buried within a conservative overplot; they find evidence of subversive female emotions, thoughts and actions that push against the oppressive force of religious and earthly patriarchy.

Scholarship studying hidden radicalism has opened up the study of Warner's work and her thoughts on the nature of womanhood; however, its use of terms like “subversive” and “conservative” to describe the conflicting forces in the novel limit its impact. Critics often argue that the novel fits perfectly their definition of either “radical” or “repressive” instead of taking Warner's work on its own, politically slippery terms. As Nicola Diane Thompson explains:

The ideological agendas of twentieth-century feminism are incompatible with the unstable, fluid, and fundamentally different positions of … women writers on the woman question. Very often, the heroines of these popular novels, created against the backdrop of shifting nineteenth-century debates about the woman question, stubbornly resist approbation by twentieth-century critics as subversive role models for women.

(1-2)

Indeed, in their efforts to assert Warner's radicalism, feminist scholars continually point to submerged moments of female empowerment without adequately accounting for the novel's many repressive impulses. In these cases, the revival of the so-called submissive elements of the novel and the elision of its more conservative themes prevent the full exploration of the conflicted nature of the text and in effect circumscribe our understanding of the role for women imagined by The Wide, Wide World.

If, instead of searching for instances of radicalism or conservatism, one examines the novel on its own—often frustrating and contradictory—terms, one gets a clearer picture of the vision of female “power” and the nature of womanhood that Warner espouses.⁵ A study of the act of readership as described in the novel enables a fuller understanding of Warner's notion of women's place. Several other critics have discussed the different ways in which the Bible figures in Ellen's life: as a physical reminder or talisman of maternal love that guides Ellen in times of need,⁶ as a means to bond with other women,⁷ as an expression of patriarchal authority that is subverted into a mechanism of resistant female self-control.⁸ My own reading focuses not on the symbolic function of the text itself but on the impact of the method by which Ellen approaches it; the book is at once a conveyor of a widely-accepted notion of womanhood and, simultaneously, a vehicle that teaches women a method of reading that is potentially disruptive to this concept of women's place. Rather than searching for signs of power in the self-abnegation Ellen learns from the Bible, I argue that the text serves more as a reading primer that, when used to interpret John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Mason Weem's The Life of Washington, opens new imaginative doors for Ellen Montgomery that reveal an inner space where women actually can rebel against authority and assert their wills. The conservative force of Christian patriarchy, notably, is never erased completely from the novel—it remains the dominant part of Warner's message. However, the instances of imagined female strength offer up a different, stronger womanhood that pushes the limits of Victorian gender norms.

In order to interpret Warner's representation of women's reading, it is necessary to understand prevailing Victorian notions of what women should read and what female readership does. As both Cathy N. Davidson and Susan K. Harris have noted, although women read a variety of types of books—religious texts, biographies, histories, conduct books, and in the case of highly educated women, classical and Renaissance works—the most popular imaginative texts among women were sentimental novels like The Wide, Wide World. Reading texts of this sort primarily was a tool for female education, teaching women about new subjects and, more important, about their proper gendered role. Harris suggests that consumers of sentimental fiction were discerning readers interested in exploring their place in American society; novels like Warner's that focused on the struggles and successes of women's lives at once allowed women to imagine a variety of social possibilities while overtly advocating a traditional, domestic feminine ideal.⁹

Despite the potential educative value of sentimental fiction, as the novel grew in prominence as a literary form through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, anxieties about the pernicious effects reading novels could have on “true women” were prevalent. Davidson quotes an 1802 jeremiad titled, “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,” as an example of such thinking:

Without the position instilled [by novels] into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice … It is no uncommon thing for a young lady who has attended her dearest friend to the altar, a few months after a marriage which, perhaps, but for her, had been a happy one, to fix her affections on her friend's husband, and by artful blandishments allure him to herself. Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital! Such serpents are really in existence … I have seen two poor disconsolate parents drop into premature graves, miserable victims to their daughter's dishonour, and the peace of several relative families wounded never to be healed again in this world.

(quoted in Davidson 45-6)

The language the author uses points toward fears that fiction-reading will unnaturally stimulate female readers' bodies. Novels are “poisonous” to women's blood, arousing uncontrollable sexual passion that unsexes the readers. The woman who is moved by reading to violate the sanctity of marriage ceases to be a “young lady,” becoming instead a “serpent” who drives her parents to early graves. The concern expressed here is that, as the imagination is stimulated by fiction, so will be the body to the extent that the reader is no longer recognizably “feminine”; the excesses of novel-reading, it is feared, will not only ruin otherwise true women, but entire families and communities. Although this anti-novel discourse was declining by the middle of the nineteenth century, concerns about the effects of certain types of sensational fiction would have on the health and virtue of female readers remained common. For example, at the end of The Wide, Wide World, John Humphreys, Warner's voice of moral authority, warns Ellen not to read any novels. The girl implicitly understands his concern that such texts carry the potential to derail his teachings and demurs. Given this anxiety about the propriety of women and girls reading novels, many female writers refused to categorize their works as fiction, instead emphasizing, as for example Warner does, the religious and educative qualities of the book.¹⁰

Considering her protestations that The Wide, Wide World was not a novel per se, it is not surprising that Warner devotes a large portion of her book to discussing the proper way for women to approach texts. Warner treats reading foremost as a means to an end: instructing women in how to achieve true womanhood and Christian salvation. Within The Wide, Wide World, the message of piety and submission expressed in the Bible is of central importance. Indeed, readings such as Henry Nash Smith's that stress the conformity and submission learned from the Bible are repeatedly borne out in the course of the novel; Ellen's Bible-reading primarily teaches her to stifle her passions when she is upset. For example, as she begins to realize that her separation from her mother may well be permanent, Ellen reads a hymn that discusses the resignation of the soul to Christ: “Open my heart, Lord, enter in; / Slay every foe, and conquer sin. / Here now to thee I all resign,— / My body, my soul, and all are thine” (75). Before looking at the hymn, Ellen had been sobbing passionately, railing against the difficult fate facing her; once she reads it, however, the words help her make up her mind to “begin to follow [her] Saviour, and to please him” (75). Ellen learns from the Bible that her own desires and feelings must be secondary to divine will. She must suppress her own pain and resentment at losing her mother and instead submit to God's authority.

As she gets older, Ellen continues to have difficulty controlling her passions and imitating Christ's meekness. Alice and John Humphreys work hard to teach the girl to submit to authority; they constantly advise her to turn to the Bible for guidance. The restrictions Ellen's guardian, Aunt Fortune, places on Ellen's activities move the girl to constant, predictable, passionate outbursts; however, the Bible teaches her to control her anger:

Strong passion—strong pride,—both long unbroken; and Ellen had yet to learn that many a prayer and many a tear, much watchfulness, much help from on high, must be hers before she could be thoroughly dispossessed of these evil spirits. But she knew her sickness; she had applied to the Physician;—she was in a fair way to be well.

(181)

Here, Ellen's rebellious nature is treated as a disease; indeed, John later tells Ellen that she is “‘very, very weak—quite unable to keep [her]self right without constant help’” (296). It is the Bible that provides her with a cure from her “illness,” a model of passivity to emulate. Alice, for instance, instructs her to “‘see with how much patience and perfect sweetness of temper [she] can forbear; [to] see if [she] cannot win [Fortune] over by untiring gentleness, obedience, and meekness’” (241).

Tompkins has suggested that although this heavy moralizing “presents an image of people … [who] learn to transmute rebellious passion into humble conformity to others' wishes, their powerlessness becomes a source of strength”; the meek, she argues, by learning to master themselves, will inherit the earth (165). While this indeed may be true, the overarching model of womanhood that Warner represents through Ellen's Bible-reading is overwhelmingly traditional. The girl must learn to subsume her passionate and rebellious feelings under more lady-like, submissive comportment. Indeed, the entire purpose of Mrs. Montgomery, Alice and especially John's instruction has been to train Ellen to be the ideal domestic wife: she must be, as Barbara Welter has put it, pious, passive, and most of all submissive if she is to mature into a woman worthy of marrying John (152).¹¹ Even if Warner's support for this traditional feminine ideal is, as some suggest, tempered by the depiction of the toll Ellen's attempt to change herself takes,¹² the novel still espouses female behavior that is outwardly obedient and docile. More to the point, in her teachers' eyes Ellen's transformation cannot be simply a matter of changing her outward behavior; she must come to believe the words on the page. In large part, she does so. Over the course of The Wide, Wide World Ellen absorbs the Bible's lesson of submission: she is able to “temper and beautify her Christian character” and is proud of her hard-earned willingness to obey those who show her love (569).

This “conversion” to proper womanhood ultimately is made possible not simply by reading the Bible, but by learning to read it correctly. Ellen must master a specific way of approaching the text—delving deeply into the meaning of each word and phrase, learning them all by heart—in order to believe in the supremacy of God's message. There are several key aspects to the proper method of reading the Bible that she is taught. First, when perusing the Bible, her attention turns “entirely from herself” and instead focuses on the text and its message: “though, when she began [to read], her own little heart was full of excitement, in view of the day's plans, and beating with hope and pleasure, the sublime beauty of the words and thoughts, as she went on, awed her into quiet” (27). The act of reading turns Ellen's attention from the excitement of everyday life to the sublimity of the phrases. Her daily routine—doing chores, making tea, and occasionally going shopping—seems to vanish when she reads the Bible so that she focuses only on the meaning of the passages. As important as learning domestic skills is in the novel, these earthly trappings of woman's place are insignificant compared to the broader concerns of salvation and Christian love.

Second, the method of reading that Ellen learns is based on obsessive explication. The Bible's message must be pored over and closely read until every last drop of meaning has been gleaned. Ellen desired to “talk over” hymns, to read them “over and explain [them]”; she and Alice pick through the verses word by word, methodically explicating their meaning (238-9). Indeed, the Bible cannot be understood fully by mere perusal, Warner suggests. One must be a careful, focused reader in order to absorb God's message. This ideal Bible-reader becomes utterly lost in the words, entering into an emotional state of openness to the text's meaning. The effect of this kind of reading is similar to the experience that Georges Poulet describes in “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority”; as one reads, the text as object “is no more … It has become a series of words, or images, of ideas which in their turn begin to exist. And where is this new existence? … [In one's] innermost self” (42). In other words, because of the closeness of this mode of reading, the reader's identity and the words she encounters merge; the thoughts expressed in writing seem to originate not in the book but in the person who is holding it. The subject-object division is blurred, and thus it temporarily becomes possible for the reader to absorb and identify with experiences described in the text.¹³

Early in the novel, Ellen's mother serves as an example of this kind of reader; when reading the Twenty-third Psalm, Mrs. Montgomery clearly finds great comfort and solace in the words. The girl, on the other hand, seems more concerned with the possibility of losing her mother than she is with the meaning of the words, a state which she must learn to remedy: her “eyes were full, and her heart too. ‘If only I could feel these words as mamma does!’” she thinks (15; emphasis mine). Ellen longs for the type of emotional absorption into the text that her mother has; indeed, she wants to read so that the passage is not merely something to believe in, but rather a thought or feeling that seems to originate within herself.

Ellen quickly learns to read in this fashion. The girl comes to seek comfort in the Bible that is inscribed by and thus identified with her mother. While on the ferry that takes her to Aunt Fortune's, Ellen and the kindly Mr. Marshman read hymns together. She has a deep and sustained reaction to the words, yearning truly to be able to give her “body, soul, and all” to Christ (75). She frequently has emotional reactions of this sort to the Biblical passages she reads; for example, she says “[hymns] make me happy; I love them dearly” (215). This is the third key quality of Ellen's reading: the words come to life for her, and she loves them as if they were alive, as if they themselves were her friends or family. Because of this, she takes every word she reads to heart as an example of how she should behave. For instance, she relates a reading of the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, specifically verses about Christ's infinite capacity to forgive trespasses, directly to herself and a fight she had had with her aunt: “‘That means me,’ she thought … ‘I thought I was forgiven [by Christ], but how can I be, for I feel I have not forgiven aunt Fortune’” (157). Because Ellen's response to the Bible is emotional and personal, she is better able to incorporate the text's meaning, to believe in the reality of its power, and to emphasize with Christ and his love for others.

It is this detailed, emotional, personalized, identification-based mode of reading that makes the Bible's words so pertinent to the readers in The Wide, Wide World. When applied to Scripture, this method enables Ellen to absorb completely and to believe in the repressive passivity that the text emphasizes. Because she identifies her own thoughts with those expressed in the hymns and parables she peruses, Ellen comes to believe in the model of submissive, Christ-like womanhood promoted by the Bible, and she modifies her behavior accordingly. It is important to remember that Warner does not outwardly criticize this concept of woman's place; the sentimental plot of The Wide, Wide World revolves around Ellen's successful maturation into a pious woman ultimately worthy of marriage to a patriarchal figure. There is nothing insincere in Warner's representation of the value of female humility, submission, and docility. Even if one reads power into Ellen's passivity, this feminine strength does not in itself challenge the domestic womanly ideal. Rather, it is absolutely reliant upon a traditional concept of womanhood.

This is not to say, however, that Warner's ultimate promotion of one particular model of femininity is her final word on the subject. The scenes of Ellen's reading again hold the key to unpacking Warner's treatment of proper femininity. The obsessive, identification-based method of reading that Warner describes, while ostensibly pointing Ellen down the narrow path to salvation, notably resembles the interactions with the texts that anti-novel advocates labeled “dangerous.” Likewise, the self-indulgence implicit in Ellen's relating every event about which she reads to herself challenges the self-denying, self-abnegating notion of womanhood promoted elsewhere in the novel. Indeed, for all its traditionalism, The Wide, Wide World might best be described as an “exploratory” text, one that imagines new roles for women while ultimately opting for the culturally dominant one.¹⁴ While the behavior Ellen learns from reading the Bible is on the whole conservative, the interpretive skills she gains through reading that text, when applied to other books, open doors to intellectual and imaginative acts of rebellion. In other words, a method of reading that is largely responsible for the perpetuation of a traditional notion of womanhood also becomes a source of rebellion, at least in the mind of the female reader.

As Ellen begins to broaden her horizons by studying history, science and philosophy, she continues to read books in the personal, repetitive fashion in which she reads Scripture: “Alice insisted that when Ellen had fairly begun a book she should go through with it; not capriciously leave it for another, nor have half a dozen at a time. But when Ellen had read it once she commonly wanted to go over it again, and seldom laid it aside until she had sucked the sweetness all out of it” (335). Just as when she reads the Bible, when examining secular materials Ellen's mind is focused only on the text in front of her and nothing else, and she closely reads each book several times. Ellen's emotional reactions to these other books are also similar to those she has to Bible verses: “how delightful it was … to go with Alice, in thought, to the south of France … ; or run over the Rock of Gibraltar with the monkeys; or at another time … to forget the kitchen and supper with her bustling aunt, and sail round the world with Captain Cook” (336). Ellen's reading blocks out the intrusions of day-to-day life and her imagination allows her to become a part of the action about which she reads. Through focused acts of imagination, then, Ellen can escape from the daily minutiae of female duty and imagine herself actually out in the wide world, freely engaging in all sorts of “unwomanly” activities to which she does not otherwise have access. This escapism is a small-scale exercise of mental rebellion against the domestic lot the world has set for her.

This sort of imaginative resistance to the confines of womanhood runs through much of Ellen's extra-Biblical reading. She examines many secular and quasi-secular texts throughout the novel, but two are of particular importance to her: Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Mason Weems' The Life of Washington. The first book provides an example of Biblical reading practices apply to “secular” texts and the conflicted messages Ellen gleans from such study; the second demonstrates more specifically how Ellen's mode of reading holds the key to potential female rebellion within a text that, on the whole, supports a traditional, restrictive notion of women's place.

Ellen reads Bunyan's late seventeenth-century allegory Pilgrim's Progress at several points throughout the book. On the surface, the text serves to further the girl's connection with John Humphreys, her future husband. John tries throughout The Wide, Wide World to reshape Ellen's passionate behavior into more womanly, submissive conduct, and he uses Bunyan as a teaching tool. He wants her to see Pilgrim's Progress as an exemplar like the Bible, and the first time he reads to her from the book, her reaction is very much like the one that she would have to hearing the Bible read: “Her attention was nailed; the listless, careless mood in which she sat down was changed for one of rapt delight; she devoured every word that fell from the reader's lips; indeed they were given their fullest effect by a fine voice and singularly fine reading” (351). Ellen's attention turns from worldly thoughts to the text at hand, and her emotional state is one of rapturous joy that nearly defeats John's intentions. He reads to Ellen in order to contain her emotions, but the girl's reaction is more akin to being seduced both by the words and their reader. The physicality of Ellen's response recalls contemporary fears that reading fiction would unnaturally arouse and excite susceptible women, but ultimately Warner suggests that this unsanctioned pleasure enables John's tutelary purposes. Ellen's mind forms a pleasurable connection between the book itself and the man reading it,—one brings to mind the lessons taught by the other.

This link between man and text is further heightened by John's gift of a personally annotated edition of Pilgrim's Progress. The notes allow him to shape Ellen's reading process even when he is not with her: “she found all through the book, on the margin or at the bottom of the leaves, in John's beautiful handwriting, a great many notes—simple, short, plain, exactly what was needed to open the whole book to her and make it of the greatest possible use and pleasure” (370). John had been Ellen's teacher, instructing her to find a paradigm of proper behavior in her Bible-reading; his annotations ensure that Ellen will read Pilgrim's Progress in the same fashion. The shadow of John's authoritative presence looms over the text, and his comments control her interpretations, ultimately furthering the education in “proper” femininity she receives at his hands. Pilgrim's Progress becomes his primary tool for teaching Ellen that “‘what God orders let us quietly submit to’” (565). Indeed, Ellen does find the same meaning in Bunyan as in the Bible. Just as God's words comfort her in times of loss, teaching her acceptance and passivity in the face of challenge, reading about the death of Christian in Pilgrim's Progress consoles Ellen when her mother dies. Ellen becomes fascinated by Christian's ascension to heaven: “she pored over that scene with untiring pleasure until she almost had it by heart. In short never was a child more comforted and contented with a book than Ellen was with the ‘Pilgrim's Progress’” (353). By reading obsessively, identifying with Christian's travails and finding personal instruction in them, Ellen can take comfort in Bunyan as she does in the Bible. The book teaches her the supremacy of God's will and her own need to submit to it.

Interestingly, the path that Ellen takes throughout The Wide, Wide World follows a trajectory similar to that of the first book of Pilgrim's Progress. As Dobson notes, “The heroine's progress is from individuality to self-renunciation, from energy to stasis. This ‘progress’ reflects the pattern of living and aspiration that social authority prescribed for women” (226). Also intriguing is the fact that Ellen is not shown reading the second half of Bunyan's allegory, the section that details a woman's—Christiana's—journey to salvation. Rather than point to a female heroine for Ellen to imitate, Warner sets her up to identify with a male role model. This readerly cross-dressing is often inconsequential in the scheme of the novel: Ellen, just like Christian, learns the universal message of rejecting worldly goods and focusing instead on the hereafter. However, the gender difference between Warner's heroine and the hero she emulates becomes central in the rarely discussed last portion of the novel when Ellen lives in Scotland with her uncle Lindsay.¹⁵ As Judith Fetterley, among others, has pointed out, the experience of identifying with male rather than female characters is common among women readers: when Ellen identifies with Christian, she “is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded” (xii). However, instead of emphasizing Ellen's exclusion from Christian's pious, yet masculine bravery, Warner uses this moment of identification to empower Ellen. Embedded within Christian's trip down the path of righteousness are several bloody battles; he must engage physically with monsters such as Apollyon if he wishes to enter the kingdom of heaven. While Warner never mentions reading these scenes in particular, Ellen's behavior towards the novel's end suggest that these moments of fighting for one's beliefs made an impression on her. In spite of John's intentions for the text, in Scotland Ellen begins to exhibit rebellious, “unwomanly” qualities that she has learned through Pilgrim's Progress.

The last section of The Wide, Wide World signals a shift in the novel's focus. The story seems to start over again as Ellen feels “strangely that she was in the midst of new scenes indeed, entering upon a new stage of life” (500). Whereas the bulk of the novel deals with Ellen's efforts to find true piety through friendship, in Scotland she must learn to maintain her faith without the influence of her friends. Moreover, in a sort of reverse colonial pilgrimage, Ellen moves from America to Great Britain, from relative freedom to strict (albeit loving) confinement. The issue of autonomy is prominent in this portion of the novel, as Uncle Lindsay repeatedly reminds Ellen of his authority over her, telling her that she “‘belong[s] to [him] entirely’” (504). Ellen “‘must have no nationality’” beyond that of her adoptive family; she must not “speak of those [American] friends, nor allude to them, especially in any way to show how much of her heart was out of Scotland”; she must hide her faith from adults who “insisted that Ellen was spoiling herself for life and the world by a set of dull religious notions that were utterly unfit for a child” (505, 528, 542-3).

In Scotland, Pilgrim's Progress serves to comfort Ellen in her separation from her loved ones, and at least for a while helps her to be passive and meek in the face of her uncle's rules. However, when the Lindsays try her by taking away her copy of the book, her reaction to authority is not, as before, to cry uncontrollably (although she certainly does shed tears) but rather to argue with her uncle. Deprived of Pilgrim's Progress, that symbol of Christian trial and of John's regulating presence, Ellen loses her self-control and is “surprised and half-frightened at herself … to find the strength of the old temper suddenly roused” (553). Indeed, without Pilgrim's Progress her ability to control her passions begins to diminish; in effect, her hard-won “feminine” passivity and submissiveness vanish without the containing presence of the book. But even while she violates prescribed womanly behavior by fighting with her uncle instead of simply accepting his authority, her actions nonetheless have been inspired by reading Bunyan. Ellen feels that by taking away the text her uncle is inexplicably and wickedly preventing her from attaining salvation; similarly, Christian must fight the monster Apollyon who blocks the path to heaven. Although she must ultimately accede to her uncle's wishes, Ellen temporarily imagines a new role for herself, one based in resistance and defense of her faith—the traits of a Christian hero—instead of in more feminine passive acceptance of higher authority. Because she has learned to identify with the male characters she reads about and to take their exploits as personal models, reading Bunyan has inspired Ellen's “improper” and unladylike behavior; rather than simply obey, she momentarily imitates Christian, challenging those who would take away her faith.

The Christian-as-soldier archetype that reading Pilgrim's Progress teaches Ellen provides her with short-term means to resisting her uncle's will. Her historical reading, specifically The Life of Washington, enables Ellen to assert her autonomy on a larger scale. Mason Weems' biography of George Washington is part of the literary movement that mythologized the president, and historians have considered its accuracy suspect since its first publication in 1800.¹⁶ The book was largely responsible for the propagation of legends about Washington's life such as the cherry tree incident and is filled with anecdotes about his early years and military service. The basic thrust of his work is to present Washington's greatness as being a result of mother-love, piety, and patriotism. Weems claims that the president's “great talents, constantly guided and guarded by religion [sic]” lead to his early victories, an argument for success clearly in keeping with Warner's modus operandi and with Bunyan's stories of Christian heroism (172).¹⁷ In Washington, Weems stresses two types of behavior, both of which are familiar to Ellen: the president is at once full of religious and sentimental feelings—loving like Christ or even a sentimental heroine—at the same time as he is depicted as a strong and righteous crusader—heroic like Christian.

Given this attractive combination of meekness and strength, it comes as no surprise that Ellen is drawn in by The Life of Washington and treats the book as if it were as sacred to her as the Bible or Pilgrim's Progress. She becomes totally absorbed in the text, taking in every word as if it were the gospel truth:

Whatever she had found within the leaves of the book, she had certainly lost herself. An hour passed. Ellen had not spoken or moved except to turn over the leaves …

… The pleasure of that delightful book, in which she was wrapped the whole day; even when called off … to help … in fifty little matters of business or pleasure. These were attended to, and faithfully and cheerfully, but the book was in her head all the while … Even when she went to be dressed her book went with her, and was laid on the bed within sight, ready to be taken up the moment she was at liberty.

(329-30)

Just as when she reads the Bible, Ellen's attention turns entirely to the book at hand when reading Weems. Worldly matters are merely distractions that keep her from reading further. Reading The Life of Washington is for Ellen a “wonderful pleasure”: “Wiems' Life of Washington [sic] was read, and read, and read over again, till she almost knew it by heart” (335). Ellen memorizes the president's life so that, like the words of God the Father, the life of the father of the country is always in the front of her mind, permanently etched into her memory.

Although Ellen reads The Life of Washington in America, it is not until she is in Lindsay's thrall that the text becomes symbolically important. When she butts up against her uncle's many prejudices, she refers to Weems' book, engaging him in arguments about freedom and rebellion. For example, when the Lindsays make disparaging comments about Americans, calling them a “‘parcel of rebels who have broken loose from all loyalty and fealty, that no good Briton has any business to like,’” Ellen's frustrations are expressed not by tears but by the employment of knowledge that clearly has come from The Life of Washington:

“Are you one of those that make a saint of George Washington?” [Lindsay asked, amused].

“No,” said Ellen,—“I think he was a great deal better than some saints. But I don't think the Americans were rebels.”

“You are a little rebel yourself. Do you mean to say you think the Americans were right?”

“Do you mean to say you think they were wrong, uncle?”

“I assure you,” said he, “if I had been in the English army I would have fought them with all my heart.”

“And if I had been in the American army I would have fought you with all my heart, uncle Lindsay.”

“Come, come,” said he laughing;—“you fight! you don't look as if you would do battle with a good-sized mosquito.”

“Ah, but I mean if I had been a man,” said Ellen.

(506)

In this passage, Ellen's uncle, asking if she is “one of those that make a saint” of Washington, refers to Weems and other biographers of that ilk who portray the president as holy and nearly infallible. Ellen, having read “‘Two lives of Washington, and some in the Annual Register, and part of Graham's United States,’” has absorbed these texts' representations of the American Revolution as something of a holy war. Her “‘extraordinary taste for freedom’” has been cultivated by reading and memorizing quasi-historical texts (506, 515). Ellen reads these books, like everything she reads, in the same fashion as she reads the Bible, and the message of piety and freedom that she takes from them is just as central to her being as the word of God.

Because of this method of reading, Washington has become an exemplar for Ellen. She identifies with him as she does all the heroes about whom she reads, allying herself with his political and symbolic position. Washington, she claims, “‘always did right,’” and she accepts his perfection with the blind faith with which she reads the Bible: “‘If it had not been right,’” she claims, “‘Washington would not have done it … [W]hen a person always does right, if he happen to do something that I don't know enough to understand, I have good reason to think it is right, even though I cannot understand it’” (515). Even if some of Washington's actions appear questionable, Ellen dismisses her qualms as a sign of her ignorance, not of Washington's moral failing. She must simply believe and follow his example. Ellen in fact treats the biography like Pilgrim's Progress or the Bible: a practical guide for her own life and not simply a lesson about the past.

Perhaps the most interesting moment in the long passage I quote above occurs when Ellen claims that if she had been a man she would have fought for her independence against Lindsay and the British. While as a young girl Ellen is necessarily barred from physical combat, her desire to engage the enemy signals the existence of her remaining sparks of intellectual resistance. In spite of having been taught again and again the value of passivity, submission, and obedience to authority—“though we must sorrow, we must not rebel,” her mother tells her in a lesson that Ellen has, by this point in the novel, learned thoroughly (12)—the story of George Washington has inspired her. Washington is another paragon of Christian duty, someone whose motives are unquestioned and whose actions are always just. Surely, if a pious and righteous man such as he can fight with God's blessing on his side, Ellen should be able to resist her uncle, a “tyrant” who “governs” her tongue (530). And indeed, in making Ellen “forget” her nationality, taking away her freedom to worship as she pleases, forbidding her to speak freely, and constantly reminding her that she is owned by him, Lindsay is likened to a tyrant on the level of King George III. Uncle Lindsay represses Ellen as England did America; in fact, he takes away those very “American” freedoms established by the Bill of Rights. In the face of these actions, Ellen, having long learned from the Bible to emulate and imitate the great men she reads about in books, “becomes” Washington. As a girl, she cannot fight physically, but she can engage in intellectual warfare, fighting against her uncle for imaginative independence.

Although Ellen's attempts to struggle against her uncle's repression are largely futile (he indulges her whims, but she ultimately remains subject to his control), that she even has recourse to this kind of intellectual debate is significant. Positioning herself as a sort of female Washington fighting on the home front, Ellen argues the cause of liberty; specifically, she waxes rhapsodic about freedom fighters like Robert the Bruce and the Marquis de Lafayette. She also attempts to use “American” arguments for freedom and autonomy against her uncle. While, as a girl, she cannot fight against her “enemy,” she at least has the abilities, gained through extensive and obsessive reading practices, to imagine herself possessing the same freedoms as a man and to use her intellectual acuity to fight, on some level, for her self-control.

But the strength that she gains through reading texts such as The Life of Washington is different in kind than any “power” she gains from reading the Bible. Rather than finding her resolve in being Christ-like and passive, Ellen learns from Weems how to be Washington-like, at once faithful and rebellious, willing to go to war to defend political and religious beliefs. Even Pilgrim's Progress, which John uses to promote passive, obedient, Biblical values, encourages Ellen to fight against those who would keep her from true faith just as Christian fights monsters who block his access to heaven. The ultimate futility of Ellen's efforts make this intellectual rebellion all the more important: because she cannot enact her freedom in the physical world, she must cling to the power she has in her imagination, a power gained through using proper reading techniques in what might be called “improper” ways. Because she has learned to read all texts with the same set of interpretive tools that she uses with the Bible, Weems' depiction of pious rebellion is at the very heart of her understanding of the world around her. Because she is a good reader, Ellen can gain access to the idea of freedom and rebellion if not actual freedom itself.

Warner does not promote a wholesale revision of traditional, passive, womanhood in The Wide, Wide World, but she also does not accept this role uncritically. Rather, she uses the novel to imagine a different model of femininity, one based not in docility but in strength and assertiveness, while ultimately opting to defend a safer, more traditional place for women. More specifically, what Warner does is suggest that even though Ellen ultimately accedes to submission and domesticity, she possesses the all-important ability to imagine a new position for herself. Using the very skills with which she interprets the Bible, she can think herself out of her home and into the world. Ellen may not be able to enact her visions of Washingtonian command, but she can fantasize about a world where girls can battle against tyrants and can fight for their beliefs and rights.

When at the end of The Wide, Wide World John instructs Ellen to “Read no novels” (564), Warner's readers are put in a curious position, being about to finish doing exactly that. Having learned through Ellen that John's moralizing is to be obeyed, how can readers justify their attachment to the book in hand? After all, this book prompted such readerly identification with Ellen and Warner that one woman wrote to Warner, “I feel as if I knew you and you were my personal friend,” and another exclaimed that no author has “ministered to the highest and noblest feelings of my nature so much as yourself” (qtd. in Williams 573). Tompkins has suggested that Warner wanted readers to understand John's statement as proof that Warner thought of her book as a “story” that functioned in the same way as Biblical parables (149); O'Connell alternately claims that John's comment is ironized and is intended to undermine his authority (135). I would suggest that the decree appears to serve both purposes. It does not merely express disapproval of novels that could potentially corrupt the female mind and body. John is once again promoting a method of approaching texts which favors moral instruction rather than readerly pleasure. This notion of the value of reading comes out of Bunyan's own Puritan tradition and is the link between Ellen's interactions with the Bible, The Life of Washington, and Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the audiences experience of The Wide, Wide World.¹⁸ In particular, each text places the responsibility for personal reform squarely within the reader and requires its (female) readers to contain and control themselves. At the same time, the power of John's stricture is undercut by both Ellen's frequent experience of the emotional pleasures of reading and her identification with a more heroic female role. Even though she tells John that she stays away from novels, it seems impossible for her to avoid “novel-reading”; while she finds moral instruction in texts, her imagination is stimulated to the point that she can fancy herself in positions that push at the edges of the cultural order she is taught.

Because the novel is shaped so that its audience is encouraged to identify with Ellen's suffering and successes, they also learn to approach The Wide, Wide World as Ellen does the books she reads. Ellen is herself a model for the girls who read The Wide, Wide World; like Christian and Washington she has the power to influence by example. While I am not suggesting that Warner's female audience was prompted by the novel to start radically questioning their place in the world, I do claim that she teaches them a mode of reading that enables a potential challenge to dominant notions of gender. By privileging an active, empathetic mode of readership, Warner fosters sympathy for imaginative exploration of the woman question. The final result of this exploration is outward passivity, but in women's inner minds, there is still room for vividly imagined acts of female rebellion and resistance. The strength is not in the decision to submit, but rather in the ability to imagine alternatives.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the NEMLA conference in Buffalo, NY, on April 8, 2000.

2. Almost all critical discussions of The Wide, Wide World depend on the assumption that Warner's readers are meant to identify with and emulate Ellen. Catharine O'Connell is most direct about the link between heroine and audience. She explains that the narrative “appeals to and constructs the reader as a domestic woman, one who is expected to identify with Ellen and whose own emotional experiences are implicitly validated by the narrative attention given to Ellen's” (22).

3. Before Tompkins, Nina Baym had discussed The Wide, Wide World in a feminist context in Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870. It was Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 that established the terms on which the novel would be evaluated in the following years. Indeed, Tompkins' examination of the novel's cultural work—the way in which the text “engaged in solving a problem or a set of problems specific to the time in which it was written” (38)—shifted critic's focus from the literary value (or lack thereof) of The Wide, Wide World to the novel's discussion of woman's nature and role.

4. See Smith, 51; Douglas, 13.

5. My method for interpreting the often-contradictory gender politics of The Wide, Wide World has been influenced by Susan K. Harris' discussion of “exploratory” women's novels in 19^th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. Looking at the “Janus-face” of popular fiction (19), Harris examines texts' middle portions that establish “an area of female independence, competence, emotional complexity, and intellectual acumen” within a cover story of dependence and submission (21).

6. See Tompkins, 163-5; Barnes 104-9.

7. Schnog, 19-21.

8. Tompkins, 164-5, 171-3. Nearly all recent feminist interpretations of the novel make use of Tompkins' work in some way.

9. Harris writes that mid-nineteenth-century letters and diaries indicate that women readers were particularly interested in books that told historical or fictional stories of exceptional women, that provided intellectual substance which would give them “power in the world of ideas,” and, more specifically, that featured heroines who had to become professionally or emotionally self-sufficient (30). Davidson, although she discusses republican sentimentalism, similarly stresses the imaginative possibility of such fiction, suggesting that “sentimental novels fulfilled the social function of testing some of the possibilities of romance and courtship—testing better conducted in the world of fiction than in the world of fact” (113).

10. This practice of criticizing novels within novels was so common that one frustrated reviewer wrote in Godey's Lady's Book, “This species of disingenuousness, be it said, is a common thing with novel-writers. Is it not an affectation of humility? Or does each novel-writer, who condemns that sort of work, consider his or her novel an exception to the rule?” (quoted in Noble 116).

11. Welter determines that of the four attributes of womanhood (piety, passivity, submissiveness and domesticity) submission—the virtue for which Ellen must strive the hardest and is most rewarded—“was perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of women” (158).

12. See O'Connell 30-6, for a discussion of John's efforts to shape Ellen's behavior, the costs of his actions on the girl, and the rhetorical significance of her pain.

13. Wolfgang Iser, responding to Poulet, uses the subject-object relationship to describe the reading process: “It is true [as Poulet claims] that [books] consist of ideas thought out by someone else, but in reading the reader becomes the subject that does the thinking. Thus there disappears the subject-object division that otherwise is a prerequisite for all knowledge and all observation, and the removal of this division puts reading in an apparently unique position as regards the possible absorption of new experiences” (66).

14. See Harris, 20.

15. Critics tend to gloss over the Scotland section and the ensuing changes in Ellen's behavior. Baym discusses the role of Ellen's nationalism in Scotland (xxiv-xxv). Tompkins, ignoring Ellen's moments of resistance to her uncle's will, notes that “The final chapters of The Wide, Wide World require of the heroine an extinction of personality so complete that there is literally nothing of herself that she can call her own” (179). O'Connell discusses the struggle between John and Lindsay for control of Ellen without accounting for the girl's own actions (33-4). Dobson names Lindsay as an authority figure (230), and Schnog parses out Ellen's attempts to maintain her link to absent friends (21). However, none of these critics launch sustained readings of this important segment of the novel.

16. Tompkins mentions that sentimental fiction worked to demonstrate national unity in a time of sectional strife (149-50); Julia A. Stern has pointed out that from the 1790's on, the “national fetishization of Washington” made it “possible for Americans to disavow the reality of increasing political conflict” (144). I would suggest that Warner's use of Washington as a role model and of Weems' biography as a key text are part of this literary-political trend.

17. Indeed, the similarities between Weems' vision of success and Warner's lends credence to Henry Nash Smith's theory about the “cosmic success story” in sentimental fiction.

18. Linda K. Kerber suggests that the legacy of Puritanism for American women in the nineteenth century is Bunyan's message of renunciation and self-control; she argues that Bunyan's rhetoric “provides [women with] a way of defining the limits on their behavior, what they may not do, rather than what they might” (175).

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