[In the following excerpt, Argersinger probes Warner's use of “authorial seduction” in The Wide, Wide World, a process of subtly eroticizing familial and power relations in the novel so as to draw in readers.]

In the originally unpublished final chapter of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Ellen and her new husband, John Humphreys, stand together before a painting of the Madonna and child and consider its meaning. This ideal woman's beauty, John declares, exists as a mere transparency through which the viewer may perceive the light of transcendent truth, the Word of the divine Father. After briefly challenging this reading, Ellen evidently capitulates—but at the same time she tells another story about the painting directly to the reader, unheard by the ravishingly masterful husband:

It was merely two heads, the Madonna and child, … yet how much! The mother's face in calm beauty bent over that of the infant as if about to give the kiss her lips were already pouting for; the expression of grave maternal dignity and love; but in the child's uplifted deep blue eye there was a perfect heaven of affection, while the little mouth was parted, it might be either for a kiss or a smile, ready for both.¹

In Ellen's narrative, mother and child are poised in the moment of yearning before a kiss, and the invisible paternal presence that presides over John's reading, and incarnates itself in him, seems to dissolve into absence. This scene, in its contemplation of Ellen as storyteller, caught up in spinning a private tale of family embrace, consummates a subtext that runs through the published version of the novel (1850), twining together the tropes of familial and eroticized relation to tell a story of Warner's coming-of-age as an author. That Warner permitted, and possibly sanctioned, the omission of the chapter in which the climactic expression of this subtext appears becomes part of that story.²

Many readers of Warner's unexpected bestseller, from its first appearance through much of the twentieth century, have regarded it, above all, as a religious book, one that wholeheartedly embraces the values of piety, self-discipline, and (female) submission central to the revivalistic Protestantism that dominated the antebellum era. In 1852, anthologist John Hart hailed The Wide, Wide World as the only novel “in which real religion, at least as understood by evangelical Christians, is exhibited with truth”; for Hart, as for legions of Warner's admiring contemporaries, the author and her text succeeded by giving passage to the Author and His Text, by turning as transparent as the painted Madonna that Warner herself proffers as possible exemplar in the novel's intended conclusion.³ Not so for such renowned dissenters as Hawthorne and Melville, whose dismissal of what seemed to them shallow-brained scribblings rather than new pages of Holy Writ—contemptible for the commonplace piety that broke sales records in an undiscriminating marketplace—set the tone for critics in the next century. “What can be said of the intrinsic merit of the books themselves?” asks one scholar, writing in the 1940s about “the vogue of the domestic novel” in which The Wide, Wide World participated. The answer he hastens to supply epitomizes the kind of judgment that kept Warner's novel and others like it out of serious scholarly sight for decades: “Very little. Obviously they are in no cases the product of first-rate writers.” Such inferior books were wildly popular, popular enough to provoke Hawthorne, this scholar explains, because they appealed to the religious emotionalism of the era and because they were crafted well enough to impersonate “good” literature, despite an abysmal lack of originality.⁴

In the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars interested in reclaiming undervalued episodes in the history of women's experience began to look at Warner's text with different eyes. Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins, to cite two influential examples, argue that compelling portraits of female selfhood can be found in the pages of Warner's novel and others like it—if their merits are appreciated within nineteenth-century limits. Baym sees in Ellen a “pragmatic” if “unspectacular” feminism, reflecting deep concern with the question of how to survive and grow as an integral self when social and spiritual power is out of reach, in other (largely masculine) hands. For Tompkins, Warner and her sister novelists address this question—again, without making a dramatic break through cramped borders—by reconstituting the little space of home and heart as, in fact, a center of spiritual power. Tompkins, like Baym, discerns in Warner's text a program of self-reform meant to inspire world reform. This vision of meaningful female identity demands, however, that the self, with its private, unruly desires, be strenuously disciplined, even at the cost of great pain—a cost that both Tompkins and Baym do find intimated in The Wide, Wide World, though overshadowed by a more strongly voiced consciousness of the benefits conferred by self-denial.⁵

In the wake of these pioneering studies, recent feminist treatments by such scholars as Susan Williams and Veronica Stewart have described a Warner more sharply at odds with Christian ideologies of the feminine. Warner's iconoclastic impulses become visible, Williams and Stewart contend, only when the time-honored conflation of the author of The Wide, Wide World and the virtuous jewel-in-the-making at its center, Ellen Montgomery, is pulled apart.⁶ I would like to enlarge upon these treatments by looking, critically, both backward and forward: by reexploring the freshly challenged but, I believe, especially vital connection between Warner and her protagonist, between the new author's deeply conflicted sense of herself as a female Christian writer and the dissenting current that runs beneath her sentimental narrative of a young girl's training in submissive piety. As Warner wrestles with issues of power, compliance, and transgression that confronted mid-nineteenth-century women seeking to construct creative identities, she gives voice to a sustained subtext that approaches the proportions of a Künstlerroman—which, in the final accounting, resists containment with more vigor, and particularly more sexual vigor, than usually supposed.

To read The Wide, Wide World, in tandem with the biographical record of letters and journals, as a story of authorial experience is to return to the assumption of Warner's alliance with Ellen that underlies early feminist recoveries (as it does previous unsympathetic readings)—but with a difference, an intensification. Baym and Tompkins tap into the broad cultural resonance of the Warner-Ellen story and those features it shares with other popular women's fiction in order to contest a criterion by which it was typically judged a creative failure: the equating of literary worth with originality, with the expression of “things counter, original, spáre, strange.”⁷ This recuperative tactic did its work well, bringing a disregarded genre back into critical view and in the process, perhaps paradoxically, opening the way for further forays into its human particularities. Reading Ellen not simply as Warner's mouthpiece for relatively monologic, culture-bound views but more intensively as a figure for Warner as author, whose story works as a richly shaded Künstlerroman, throws into relief a vividly felt, almost Hopkinsian, individuality. Warner and her text are certainly meshed in a network of cultural identities—she writes within large interlocking circles defined by gender, class, race, and religion, as well as within more localized discursive communities (which for Warner often contracted to her small family in an isolated farmhouse on a Hudson River island).⁸ But amid the welter of cultural influences, a distinctive—and, in nineteenth-century terms, heretical—sensibility refuses to be crowded out.

What makes itself obliquely known is a driving, eroticized passion for power, actualized and satisfied in the very medium that makes it known: words. Several recent studies of veiled eroticism in Warner's novel convincingly challenge its reputation for primness, but by concentrating on submissive, even masochistic, tendencies, they uncover only one side of the picture.⁹ On the other side, sexual dominance is, for Warner, profoundly connected to a form of narrative authority that she clandestinely and with towering ambition desires. Trying on a range of possible authorial selves, including the Madonna and other female figures both quiescent and resistant, she shows herself in startling affinity with a celebrated nineteenth-century “masculine” type: the ravishing evangelist, agent of the Father's Word, whose persuasive prowess verges on the sadistic. Warner's evangelical narrative, read slant, speaks of power illicitly enjoyed by way of the lips.

While Warner's protagonist is more than a simple incarnation of her creator—more than the flesh made Word—she emerges through a web of textuality that invites us to read her career as a camouflaged version of Warner's entry into authorship.¹⁰ Ellen is an eager consumer and producer of language: the dynamics of naming continually intrigue her. She insists, for example, that a bee for putting up apples and sausages ought to be called a hive—a label that better conveys its collective busyness (237). Like the young Susan Warner, she hungrily reads a wide range of texts—the Bible, history, natural philosophy, biography, and especially (though with guilty pleasure) novels and Blackwood's Magazine stories. She pens numerous letters using a writing desk lovingly outfitted by her mother, an event Warner represents in elaborate detail (32-36). And she spends hours learning, discussing, and singing hymns. Perhaps most significantly, however, Ellen shapes her own behavior as a text to be read. Struggling toward selfless Christian perfection, she offers herself as an evangelical narrative meant to persuade those empowered to judge her as well as those in need of redemption themselves—a reflection of Warner, who holds up to the public eye a textual image of her desire to win believers by making her own piety manifest.

Projecting an emergent authorial self in her first novel intended for publication, Warner moves Ellen through a series of family groupings that configure ways in which a writer might relate herself to literary authority as well as to her general audience. The novel opens as Ellen learns she will be parted from her beloved mother, whose grave illness requires (at least according to Ellen's unfeeling father) that she travel overseas. Beginning in circumstances typical of the “overplot” that Baym distills from what she calls “woman's fiction,”¹¹ the heroine finds herself orphaned, at first in a practical and soon in a real sense; the novel subsequently charts her quest to domesticate the wide, wide world by winning its embraces, placing herself in family relation to the strangers she meets—a figurative domestication of authorship that at first glance seems to stay neatly within the bounds of sentimental piety. A few potential family members resist Ellen—most notably the nonmaternal Aunt Fortune, who grudgingly takes charge of the abandoned child—but the majority welcome her as one of their own: John and Alice Humphreys provide a haven from Aunt Fortune and make her their adoptive “sister,” though they act more as parents; their father, a pastor, is one in a procession of kindly paternal characters who treat her as a cherished daughter; and her Scottish relatives insist that she join their family circle and address her Uncle Lindsay as “father.”

In Warner's subtextual Künstlerroman, parental characters (particularly fathers) often stand as figures for the merger of literary and religious authority, guiding Ellen's textual production and reading the results, whether written, sung, or performed, as a theatrical demonstration of growth in her character. Fatherly authority concentrates most potently in Ellen's supposed “brother” John, who embodies the omnipresent, omnipotent Father and is aligned through his biblical first name with the creative power of the Word.¹² The exacting John oversees Ellen's thinking, reading, painting, writing, and self-presentation and then sits as judge of their worth—an enactment of the tightly closed circle prescribed for the (female) Christian author, whose self-effacing creativity originates and ends in the Father's will. The story of Mr. Van Brunt, a kindly farm manager eventually won to Christ by Ellen's performance of virtue, follows this prescription: Warner's text, it suggests, must devote itself solely to such conversion of its readers, stifling (like Ellen) any more private aspirations and appetites. The familial logic of Warner's allegory appears to demand that both she and her fictional surrogate accept the role of the perpetual child, who transparently channels the Father's text (like the painted Madonna of John's exegesis) and relies on His readerly approval alone, forgoing the worldly pleasure of personal power over both the text and a wider audience. As the novel suggests, Warner has “‘always one hearer … of so much dignity, that it sinks the rest into great insignificance’” (474).

This vision of authorship dominates The Wide, Wide World—as well as the Warner family's stories about the novel's genesis. According to Anna Warner, her sister Susan wrote “in closest reliance upon God: for thoughts, for power, and for words … and the Lord's blessing has followed it, down to this day. How many of whom even I have heard, trace their heart conversion straight to … the ‘Wide, Wide World.’” In the familiar Christian rhetoric that Warner herself typically uses to frame her lifelong struggle with an extraordinarily “imperious” self-will, right living and right authorship both demand that she humble herself as a “child of God,” laying her own desires at the feet of the Father.¹³ And according to many passages in her letters and journals, the faith that requires such sacrifice brings genuine solace into a life fraught with difficulties.

But alternative Warners push against the borders of this vision. The family allegory of The Wide, Wide World sets up, at least in passing, possibilities for relations based on parity. An outspoken champion of American democracy, Ellen invites readers both inside and outside the text to join what promises to be an egalitarian fellowship of God's children, of author and audience drawn together as sisters and brothers; she tries, in the words of her antirepublican Scottish uncle, to “‘fraternize with all the world’” (530). Such fellowship takes on a homosocial cast in the persuasive readings of Tompkins and Nancy Schnog, who propose that the text's maternalized, Christocentric image of deity challenges the Father's rule by promoting a community of sympathy among women.¹⁴ This model of relation finds a real-life corollary in the authorial habits of the Warner sisters: they often collaborated and, even when writing singly, met in the evening with their Aunt Fanny to appraise the pages composed during the day.¹⁵ Finally, in another iteration of sibling ties within the novel, Ellen's spiritual guides, Alice and John, insistently figure as her adoptive “sister” and “brother,” looking toward an authorial family united in mutual, democratic exchange. Images of interdependency in The Wide, Wide World, however, are unstable and transient, despite their appeal; they tend to slide into inversions of power. Although Ellen opens her arms in sisterly welcome to a wide circle of would-be converts (reader figures), she regulates the warmth of her embrace according to her perception of their social and intellectual standing. The sympathetic communion of women survives only temporarily: mothers and sisters must depart or die, in a feminized version of Bloomian literary inheritance, so that Ellen can find voice and ascendancy in text as well as home. And the brother is really a future husband who will master her words in fatherly fashion, unless she wrests power from him.

The eroticized relation of power and submission intimated in these relations enters the implicit Künstlerroman in the gesture of the kiss, which is nearly as pervasive as the weeping that alternately repulses and intrigues modern readers. Although kisses are generally better appreciated by applying some less mechanical measure than counting, it is significant that in the not-quite-600 pages of the novel the gesture of the kiss, metonymic locus of both language and sexuality, appears 161 times. Like recent critics who remark the number of times Ellen cries, I suspect that such an abundance, or even excess, marks a rupture in the plot's compliant surface.¹⁶ Kissing, like crying, demarcates a site of contested power for the woman author. Through the kisses that her fictional double craves, bestows, and withholds, Warner violates proper family boundaries and betrays her attraction to an illicit version of authorial relations that empowers the female writer: winning over the reader—whether figured as father, mother, sister, or brother—becomes an act of seduction, of orphic or sirenic enthrallment that revels in its own potency. And at one extreme, engaging with literary authority becomes a contest with a male lover, whom the woman author may defy by withholding erotic embrace. Startlingly, the character at the center of Warner's seduction narrative is a child—a girl of ten when the story begins and only about thirteen when it officially ends. Leslie Fiedler argues that the dangerous Richardsonian seducer had disappeared so completely from the sentimental tradition by Warner's time that novels like hers could sell as children's fiction. But in Warner's text, I suggest, the seducer is revenant in the adolescent female child—the girl-provocateur who stands in for the author herself.¹⁷

Ellen the child-seducer does, at several points, offer up what appear to be chaste, sisterly kisses that define relationships of equality with others who may become children of God. Nancy Vawse, an unruly country girl whose bold, dark-eyed stares have long offended Ellen, eventually receives from her what Warner explicitly calls the “kiss of peace” (264). In this salutation, granted as the “bad girl” begins to come under the sway of the supposedly “good girl,” Warner evokes the ritual Christian greeting by which brethren symbolically unite with each other and God through a holy kiss, a long-standing practice probably instituted by apostles Paul and Peter.¹⁸ Mr. Van Brunt is similarly favored; although Ellen recoils when the working-class Dutchman first demands a kiss in exchange for making her a swing (116), she later relents in the interest of evangelism. Passionately desiring that he enter “‘[t]he fold of Christ's people,’” she works on him with the redoubled power of a kiss and a tear, to which he later traces his conversion: Ellen “carried the great brown hand to her lips before she let it go. He … looked at a little tear she had left on the back of it … till one of his own fell there to keep it company” (216, 569).

Such scenes suggest an impulse, on Warner's part, to kiss “the great brown hand” of the masses, to fight down her sharp sensitivity to class and reach out in selfless Christian good will, through Ellen, to readers of all levels. But signs of an unabated will to superiority unsettle this authorial democracy. In a scene following Alice's death, Ellen throws her arms around the Humphreys' housekeeper, Marjery, who responds to her caresses “most affectionately” but, Warner finds it necessary to add, “respectfully” (457). And as late as the unpublished conclusion, when Ellen returns unexpectedly from Scotland as John's wife and surprises Marjery with an exuberant kiss and hug, the speechless housekeeper finally finds her voice but can “hardly,” of course, “return the embrace” (572). Aristocratic members of Ellen's extended “family,” moreover, receive consistently different treatment. Genteel fatherly characters, in particular, inspire in Ellen an openly insatiable craving; she must have kisses, as many as possible, from John, from his friend the wealthy Mr. Marshman, and from Uncle Lindsay, even though her uncle's loving tyranny demands, in exchange, that she muffle her loyalties to John, his God, and American democracy—and she painfully feels the lack of these caresses when denied.

When Ellen's social delicacy raises its head at Aunt Fortune's bee, Alice gives her a gentle rebuke that calls her honesty—and Warner's—into question: “‘[I]t's very funny what a notion people have for kissing,’” Ellen complains, alluding to several young men who are decidedly not gentlemen; “‘I've run away from three kisses already, and I'm so afraid somebody else will try next.’” “‘You don't seem very bitterly displeased,’” the perceptive Alice observes, as the girl blushes (255). Later in the evening, Ellen joins in a boisterous game called “the fox and the goose,” and when the fox captures her, she must give up yet another kiss, which the fox provocatively terms, without elucidation, “‘the worst kind’” (260-61). In the face of such popular entertainments, genteel etiquette manuals of midcentury raise scandalized eyebrows. Expressing the general dismay, the Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette registers “an earnest protest against the promiscuous kissing which sometimes forms part of the performances in … these games.” As if to confirm the danger, a nineteenth-century discussion of kissing reports that a game of “drop the handkerchief” played by the youth of a Massachusetts Baptist church caused such uproar that the minister resigned. The “‘church was built for a house of God,’” the minister admonishes, “‘and not for kissing-parties.’”¹⁹ Kissing, it seems, is not automatically sanctified by a holy setting—whether a church or Warner's evangelical novel. Human appetites and distastes intrude.

The Ellen that Alice's remark unveils is something less—or more—than perfectly virtuous: she plays elaborate kissing games, acting out a complex pattern of authorial desire and guilt as Warner flirts with proper and improper significations for the gesture of the kiss. Ellen sometimes grants and sometimes withholds the egalitarian embrace. She brings herself to offer to Nancy and Van Brunt the kiss of Christian love—the kiss of peace she feels she ought to give freely but secretly resists—while she coquettishly runs, at the bee, from promiscuous embraces not hallowed by the evangelical impulse—kisses she should not want but secretly does. Underlying both scenarios is Warner's suspicion that reaching for a wide, undifferentiated audience is, in fact, promiscuous, whether motivated by Christian feeling or not, because it violates the “laws of acquaintanceship” intricately codified in antebellum conduct manuals and carefully followed, according to Karen Halttunen, by a burgeoning affluent class that wished to draw clear borders around its gentility.²⁰ Warner considered herself part of this genteel circle, even after the financial panic of 1837 permanently destroyed her life of privilege, and she mirrors this class affiliation in Ellen's beautiful manners; the good breeding with which Warner's other characters constantly credit the young heroine may indeed, Warner suspects, be synonymous with good morals and godliness—as advice manuals insist again and again.²¹

Yet while Warner through Ellen condescends to “inferiors” and worries back and forth over her social trespass on the one hand and her un-Christian sense that it is a trespass on the other, she at the same time implicitly hungers for the broad, promiscuous embrace that sweeps away such considerations for the sake of authorial power over readers of every kind. Warner and Ellen want to influence the wide, wide world, and this evangelical desire shades over into an improper lust for mastery, for the ability to win over all who witness their performance of virtue. As Tompkins remarks, “The enormous amount of attention Ellen receives”—much of it in the form of kisses and lavish approbations of her goodness—“is one of the most seductive features of her story.”²² Projecting such a reception for her book, Warner exults as much in the effect of her own Word as she does in the effect of God's. And the wicked thrill of this seductive power, which Ellen experiences as a throb at the heart, arises largely out of its theatricality. The human heart is “deceitful,” John warns (352), sounding in explicitly religious tones the chord that, according to Halttunen, dominates the prescriptive literature of the antebellum period: the urgent call for sincerity, or “transparency,” and the corresponding diatribe against hypocrisy—the latter a threat to the American social order embodied in such figures as the confidence man and his female counterpart, the painted woman.²³ Because the show of virtue that Warner stages in Ellen covers a heart throbbing with an unrighteous love of sway, the kiss of brotherly love can look, at times, like the kiss of Judas—a symbol, in Christian writing and iconography, for deceit of the worst kind, because it feigns what should be an open-hearted expression of spiritual unity; in St. Augustine's view, Nicolas Perella explains, this kiss stands as “the prototype of a lack of correspondence between the lips and the heart.”²⁴

And Warner, like Judas, trades her less-than-holy kiss for money, seeking to win readers out of the imperative need to support her family and perhaps even restore something of their lost affluence²⁵—a motivation that complicates her vision of authorship as divine mission. In The Wide, Wide World, the gesture of the kiss often goes hand-in-hand with tropes of exchange, bringing the act of authorial seduction into relation with the literary marketplace that Warner intends to enter. After indignantly refusing the kiss Van Brunt demands as payment for a swing but then pressing her lips to his hand in God's name, Ellen repeats the pattern with the more genteel Mr. Marshman; in a scene that casts the eleven-year-old as an adept seducer, her kisses provoke an explicit offer of money. Believing that Ellen has courted his affection out of cupidity, the paternal Mr. Marshman hides a new banknote under her napkin on New Year's Day, a “detested” gift that she publicly returns with painful blushes and tears, along with a corrective reading of her desires: “‘I had rather never have any thing in the world than that you should think what you thought about me’” (327). “‘I will never think any thing of you,’” the “old gentleman” responds, “‘but what is the very tip-top of honourable propriety. … [Y]ou must give me half-a-dozen kisses at least to prove that you have forgiven me for making so great a blunder.’ ‘Half-a-dozen is too many at once,’” Ellen says “gayly; ‘three now and three to-night’” (328).²⁶ The negotiations with Van Brunt and Marshman are differentiated by class status, but in both, Ellen professes herself ready to trade kisses only for righted readings of her character. Money, the decorous and devout Warner seems to insist through Ellen, is immaterial; what matters is a public that reads her properly and is thereby persuaded into God's family.

But as Ellen demonstrates in her transaction with Marshman by provocatively granting and, in the same breath, deferring kisses, the authorial embrace of inclusive, disinterested evangelism doubles as a less righteous gesture of seduction that really gives less than it offers—of taking in the reader by a show of goodness that, Warner fears, is more theatrical than genuine. And this performance takes on a doubly illicit coloring because, despite Ellen's demurral, it seduces for profit. Victorian manuals of proper conduct repeatedly insist that kissing and fondling—whether within families or between friends or courting lovers—be kept private,²⁷ yet Warner tenders kiss after symbolic kiss in the emphatically public space of the literary marketplace. In The Wide, Wide World the bliss of proper, democratic family ties between the author and her sisters and brothers in Christ tends to give way to prospective bliss of a less proper kind: the duplicitous pleasure of swaying an audience and getting paid for it, by telling a story that publicly disavows that very pleasure.

A feminized, homosocial version of the democratic family, extending outward from the mother to enfold women in the sympathetic care she fosters, exists in Warner's novel as a less inclusive alternative to the communion that includes brothers as well as sisters. The maternal ethic that informs domestic fiction generally—whether read as the reflection of a patriarchal ideology that confines women, and women authors, at home or as an image transvalued by women for their own benefit—clearly has a strong magnetic pull in The Wide, Wide World. Scenes of affective unity between Ellen and her mother, and between Ellen and Alice (who supplies the place of the lost mother), unfold in profuse detail, and Ellen's grief over the loss of both overflows page after page with painful intensity. But by insisting on the loss of the mother's embrace, the narrative—and particularly the authorial parable—suggests that Warner gravitates toward another center. Her allegiance to the mother, and metonymically to the literary tradition she inhabits, develops fault lines at points where Ellen's career as her stand-in seems to be furthered by the withholding of maternal kisses. Although Mrs. Montgomery specifically links maternity with textuality by providing Ellen's writing desk, thereby calling up in the epistolary exchange a strongly mutual rendering of author-audience relations, it is the absence not only of her person but also of her letters that promotes her daughter's textual performance. The cold aunt, whose failure to offer a welcoming kiss mortifies Ellen, compounds the absence of the maternal embrace by keeping Mrs. Montgomery's letters from her daughter. Yet by suppressing one side of the epistolary conversation, she paradoxically helps to give Ellen's writing pride of place in the narrative: because the mother's responses do not appear for long stretches of time and so cannot be reproduced in the narrative, Ellen's own letters have representational primacy.

When the maternal absence becomes permanent, in the deaths first of Mrs. Montgomery and then of Alice, Ellen advances into the space they have left. In a scene immediately following Alice's death that is pivotal to the novel's domestic ideology, John asks Ellen to sing hymns for the grief-stricken Humphreys men, and she agrees; standing in the library, surrounded by books belonging to John's father, the Reverend Mr. Humphreys, Ellen sings with increasing poise, working her way up to the favorite hymns of the lost mothers—and as she sings she takes possession of the room, holding the men rapt in “breathless silence” (451-54). This passage marks, on one layer of the narrative, the rite of succession by which Ellen takes on her shoulders the cultural and literary mantle of true womanhood, becoming the home's spiritual center; but the telltale “strong throb of pleasure” that comes when she sees the spellbinding effect of her song points to another layer of meaning: her attraction to an unsanctioned model of woman's storytelling that Warner codes as dominantly masculine and embodies in the charismatic John. In him, she projects an alternate self who holds sovereignty over the Word, and through the Word, over the reader; killing off the mothers (particularly Alice, who holds first place in the heart of John, the Fatherly brother) becomes a subtle act of deposal whereby Warner, through Ellen, takes possession of the Father—a double seduction in which she appears to make love to the Father's will yet at the same time revolts by appropriating his linguistic power.

While for modern readers like Noble and Tompkins Ellen's ecstatic prostration before John brings to mind the submissive protagonist from The Story of O, I would argue that Warner obliquely invests her surrogate with an equal desire for dominance.²⁸ Ellen watches in envious admiration as John, an autocratic but much-loved minister as well as a skilled horse-breaker, imposes his will on others without sacrificing either their affection or respect. When he visits the haughty Scottish relatives with whom she is staying, she sits “with charmed ears, seeing her brother overturning all [their] prejudices, and making his own way to their respect at least, in spite of themselves. … ‘I knew he would do what he pleased,’ she said to herself,—‘… but I did not dream he would ever make them like him’” (568). His ravishing word is her law, too, a mastery she appears to crave, though her compliance has a touch of theatrics about it: “[W]hat John told her was done. … In her eagerness to please and satisfy her teacher her whole soul was given to the performance of whatever he wished her to do” (351, second emphasis mine). His penetrating eyes seem to read her very soul: he knows when anything is “not right” with her; but this is a “censorship,” Warner claims, that she “rather love[s] than fear[s]” (461). And John's linguistic dominion extends to a broader audience in his ministry: professing to care only that his sermons have their intended evangelical effect and not that they win personal regard, he succeeds at both. “‘It gives me small gratification,’” he declares, “‘to see the bowing head of the grain that yet my sickle cannot reach’”—a missionary zeal that betrays human arrogance and even sadism but that nonetheless enraptures his parishioners (474-75).

The magnetic John evokes the breed of revivalist preacher that Halttunen suggestively relates to the antebellum confidence man, himself a variant of the wicked seducer who dominates sentimental plots of the postrevolutionary period. Righteous persuasion here shades over into irresistible but ruthless seduction, the violation of one human will by another that is stronger; this is “the type of minister who attempts to ravish his congregation into heaven,” as R. McClure Smith observes in his reading of Dickinson's poem “He fumbles at your Soul.”²⁹ John's kind of oratory bears a strong resemblance to the preaching style that Warner's letters and journals say “please[s]” her “best,” though these renderings soften the sadistic edge. “Impressive delivery,” more than “excellence of … matter,” makes a sermon “tell,” in Warner's view.³⁰ A prime exemplar of such rhetorical force for Warner was her minister, Thomas Harvey Skinner, a proponent of the revivalist movement that surged through American Protestantism in a series of “Awakenings” from the early nineteenth century until the end of the Civil War, powered by such evangelists as Lyman Beecher and the famously compelling, incendiary Charles Grandison Finney. Finney, the New York revivalist whose “magnetic eye drew thousands to rebirth in Jesus” in Warner's home state (particularly during the 1830s) aspired not to dry theological complexity but to what he called a “‘gushing, impressive, and persuasive oratory’” that would move the heart.³¹ Halttunen numbers him among an elite group of heroes cum confidence men who “held the fascinated attention of the American people” by “us[ing] the power of charisma to bend others to their will.” Recognizing a darkly erotic side to this potency, Ann Douglas observes that another modern characterization of the “dynamic and imperious,” even “‘demonic,’” evangelist “come[s] close to equating religious and sexual prowess.”³² Although a man of gentler fire, as Warner and her sister describe him, Skinner shows himself a worthy compatriot for such celebrated reapers of souls as Finney and Beecher, impressing Warner with the “beautiful exhibition” of his “countenance” and a “perfectly infectious” manner that demands from her, as if against her will, “an answering smile” that soon “turn[s] to weeping.” After delivering what Warner praises as a “most excellent effective discourse on the words ‘Turn you at my reproof,’” Skinner remarks with satisfaction that “he felt he had the minds of the congregation in his hands.” Musing on the effect of his oratory, Warner observes: “[W]hat a difference there is between being, as it were, borne up on eagle's wings toward the sky when I hear him preach …, and being left to myself, as it were, on the ground, struggling to rise a little way by flapping my own untrained and unpracticed pinions. Alas! what a difference. But I ought not to say ‘alas,’ but to be glad that I have the teaching and stimulus of his example.”³³

Exclaiming “Alas!” Warner betrays her desire for oratorical force to match Skinner's, a force she “ought not” want but does—a force that, according to the accounts of those who heard her tell stories, she did in fact possess in good measure. A family friend recollects a scene that testifies to the writer's narrative power:

I had always heard of Miss Susan's ability in telling stories, and the enjoyment she had in doing this, but I had no idea of the vividness and captivating interest that she gave to these stories. … [O]ne of the men of the family much given to outdoor life and usually impatient of a long afternoon indoors sat with us, and Miss Susan began to relate [a] true story. …

… We were deeply impressed with [her] wonderful ability in telling this story, and sat until the evening came on and we were obliged to disperse to dress for dinner.³⁴

Warner's tale, as suggestively summarized in this memoir, is one of attempted seduction: staging a confidence game, an Italian makes himself “intimate” in the home of a newly married couple, apparently murders the husband, and then courts the wife; the “ardent suitor” is later “struck by lightning” and “killed.”³⁵ In this scenario, Warner as seductive storyteller relates a story of seduction with grave consequences—indirectly anticipating, perhaps, that her own unsanctioned mastery of language could call down the Father's wrath.

A “feminine” version of ecclesiastical oratory does speak in Warner's novel, through Alice, who regularly and persuasively “preaches” to homebound members of her father's congregation. When Miss Fortune remarks that she ought to be a minister, Alice demurs and says that she prefers to “‘preach without taking orders’” (217); with this choice of phrase, Warner intimates that a woman may find liberation in unlicensed preaching even while she feels guilty about overstepping boundaries—and further, Warner allows something yet more unhallowed to slip through the interstices of language: the woman who preaches need not be nun-like. As Douglas observes in her treatment of the “uneasy” and competitive “alliance of ministers and women” who, she contends, sentimentalized American Protestantism in the mid-nineteenth century, female writers like Warner “could and did bypass clerical sanction even while they usurped clerical authority.”³⁶ Ellen does try to fill Alice's office after she dies, but the rhetorical style to which the young heroine elsewhere aspires—a style figured by her spellbinding performance in the library—more strongly recalls the magnetic John than the gentle Alice. Moreover, while Warner manifests through Ellen her lust to preach like a man, her transgression goes deeper: she wants to tell stories like a novelist, stories not dissimilar to those John prohibits Ellen herself from reading.³⁷

As Warner's romantic tale of the lightning-struck seducer suggests, and as the appetite for novels shared by the author and her heroine seems to confirm, Warner would like to co-opt the Father's linguistic power in order to convert readers not only to Christianity but also to the conviction of her novelistic gifts, her place in the canon of literature as well as church. And this power she allows herself and Ellen to enjoy in some measure, at the level of discourse, by reinvoking the eroticized gesture of the withheld kiss. In the novel's published ending, Warner conspicuously has her heroine insist on calling the intended husband “brother” to the very last, and she chooses to glance over the marriage toward which the sentimental plot has been building by refusing to name it except through artful innuendo that leads only to a dismissive final paragraph (569). In both refusals, the author sets herself above the authority of tradition and audience expectation: Ellen challenges John's dominion by denying him, through language, the erotic connection connoted by the status of fiancé, and Warner realizes the figurative potency of this gesture by refusing to fulfill what the sentimental genre requires.³⁸ Because Ellen implicitly will marry John, these refusals can also look like compliance; however, while she and Warner offer a submissive embrace to that imperious representative of God, they stop provocatively short of consummation, effecting a moment of suspension that carries through into the deferred kiss pictured in the novel's unpublished last chapter.

In Warner's original conclusion, Ellen seems to accept John's paternal exegesis of the painting of Madonna with child, conceding that her spiritualized beauty surpasses the voluptuous beauty of the Correggio Magdalen that hangs in a frame nearby. As John has declared, comparing the two images mounted above a window in the private room he has prepared for his new wife, “‘[T]his is moral beauty, that is merely physical; there is only the material outside, with indeed all the beauty of delineation, here is the immaterial soul’” (578). John's reading rehearses the familiar nineteenth-century polarity: a “basically Protestant ethic,” as feminist scholar Susan Haskins describes it, “recreated the old [Catholic] duality of madonna and magdalen,” casting a sensualized Mary Magdalen as the “antithesis” of the Victorian “angel in the house.”³⁹ John's critical focus on contrasting modes of artistic representation, however, doubles the scene's prescriptive force, showing Ellen-Warner what she should and should not aspire to be, not only as a woman but also as an author. Pursuing his relentless program to discipline Ellen's taste, John insists that Spirit matters most, that in properly self-erasing Christian artistry, “excellence” of spiritual “matter” must supersede “[i]mpressive delivery” or any “beauty of delineation” that is humanly crafted; he thus overturns the preference that Ellen in the narrative and Warner in her private letters and journal entries about sermon style have expressed.

But in the dissenting story of the two “painted women” that the protagonist and her author tell directly to the supposed reader, circumventing John's narrative authority, the alluring Magdalen breaks out of her own frame and infiltrates the other: the lips of Ellen's holy mother are “pouting” in readiness to kiss her child, and in a manner that is disconcertingly nonmaternal—suggesting a Madonna who is Magdalenlike in her seductiveness. While paying lip service to hegemonic dictates for which John is the mouthpiece, Warner in this final kiss—climactically unconsummated—blurs the boundary between his two Marys, secretly entertaining an attraction to the traditionally opposed pair at a point where their characters overlap. Through the erotic gesture that links them, Warner offers a glimpse of an alternative woman (who might inhabit the third frame, the prospect through the window that opens out beneath the two paintings), one who is alive to related forms of oral pleasure and power.⁴⁰

Warner's sense of the Magdalen and the Madonna would have been shaped not only by her Christian training and intensive scripture reading but also by her education in visual art, begun by Henry Warner at an earlier stage in his daughter's life. The “recumbent Magdalen” of Correggio, a “fine copy” of which the author elects to have John display in Ellen's claustrophobic retreat (578), probably first came before the young Warner's eyes in the Musée de peinture et de sculpture, a collection of engraved black-and-white reproductions of European artworks issued in installments, many of which Henry brought home for Susan and Anna's edification.⁴¹ In the renowned and much-imitated Mary Magdalen Reading in a Landscape (c. 1522), Correggio arranges a graceful young figure in languorous repose on the ground in a secluded dell, gown draped to bare the shapely curves of arms, shoulders, breasts, and just a teasing hint of nipples. This Magdalen is part of a Renaissance tradition that takes up an earlier Christian tableau, the “penitent in her grotto,” and re-dresses (or undresses) its subject to create a Venus-Magdalen, in whom are blended the vestigial glories of pagan fertility goddesses and early-sixteenth-century strains of Platonic love.⁴²

Mary Magdalen as the sensual icon of redeemed yet still seductive carnality in Correggio's time—and of unregenerate womanhood (specifically, prostitution) in Warner's—derives from centuries-old but questionable conflations of the figure scripturally identified as the Magdalen with sexual sinners who appear, unnamed, elsewhere in the Gospels. Most strongly, Mary Magdalen became associated with the wayward woman who, according to Luke's story, intrudes on a Pharisee's dinner party to kiss and anoint Jesus' feet, after a bath of tears wiped away with her hair—an act of loving humility that wins forgiveness of her many sins, typically assumed to be sexual (Luke 7:36-39). An eroticized myth, gradually coalescing in the early centuries of the Christian era and finally receiving sanction from Gregory the Great in the late sixth century, put the Magdalen in the service of an evolving Church patriarchy fearful of the flesh—especially female flesh.

The figure of the penitent prostitute, still prevalent today, thus came to eclipse a rather different character: in those biblical passages that explicitly name Mary Magdalen, she is always a close companion of Christ and a devoted member of his retinue, often in company with his mother, and most compellingly for Warner's clandestine project, she takes a central role in the Easter drama (especially in the renderings of John and Mark) as the primary witness to the resurrection and the first charged with evangelism, as apostle to the apostles.⁴³ This privileged relation to the Word, which challenged Peter's exclusive priority as founder of the Church (and thereby the male succession of popes), did not give way entirely to the sexualized myth but resurfaced over the centuries in persistent incarnations of the Magdalen as preacher. According to early medieval traditions of the East, for example, she preached with John the Evangelist in Ephesus; in later legend, she traveled farther afield to convert the heathens in Gaul; and in the sixteenth century she appeared in a Flemish altarpiece painting entitled Mary Magdalen Preaching. This evangelistic figure, inspirited by her special bond with Jesus, harks back to the Magdalen glorified in the apocryphal texts of Gnosticism (expanding on her role in the canonical Gospels) as the Savior's “consort,” his “counterpart” and “chief interlocutrix …, who brings gnosis to the other disciples.”⁴⁴

How much of this representational history specifically entered Warner's thought is uncertain, but legends of Mary Magdalen as evangelist did circulate in the mid-nineteenth century,⁴⁵ and the potential for a Magdalen charged with verbal and spiritual power is more than latent in the Gospels that Warner knew intimately. Furthermore, determined attempts to rescue the biblical figure from her house of ill repute continued in Warner's time, giving latter-day evidence of the Magdalen as a “vessel,” in Marjorie Malvern's words, enduringly “capable of holding controversial ideas.”⁴⁶ Several of Warner's contemporaries in the evangelical Protestant movement put forward the biblical (“unmythologized”) Magdalen—the faithful companion and favored witness to the events of Easter—as a model for Christian women, who calls them to make their influence actively felt in social reform and mission work.⁴⁷ And in the Musée itself, commentator Jean Duchesne strenuously dissents from the received notion of the “unific Magdalen,” complaining often (in his remarks about Correggio's Magdalen, which Warner likely read, as well as in other entries) about artists' “mistaken” conflation of pious saint and repentant sinner; however, what discomposes him is not the degrading of a vital female exemplar but more fundamentally the interpenetration of holy and carnal, the “scarcely credible” possibility that “Jesus would have admitted … into the society of the Virgin and apostles, a woman whose previous conduct had been so reprehensible.”⁴⁸

But interpenetration—the cohabiting of a potent evangelical voice with a sensual persona—is just the possibility that Warner, as she experiments with the features of an authorial self-portrait, dares to envision. In Correggio's rendering, the voluptuous penitent in fact engrosses herself in a text, presumably though not visibly scripture—an iconographical attribute that connotes a humble desire for divine solace and forgiveness but that at the same time can signify the Gospel figure's privileged access to the Word. In Warner's scene this potential is made real—she transforms the passive to the active—by means of an adroit displacement: conspicuously, she and her protagonist omit any mention of the Magdalen's book, a focal element of the painting; spiriting this image of text out of Correggio's frame, where woman appears as object, she quietly, without fanfare, relocates the contest over woman's right to textual control to the level of discourse, to her own narrative frame, where she becomes the storytelling subject and subtly but effectively undermines the semidivine John and his reading of the two male-authored Marys.

The sexual gesture on which Ellen-Warner's retelling turns thereby becomes closely imbricated with the power of language; by coupling the kiss and the act of storytelling, she sets into vibration an intertextual web that reveals, in representations of the two Marys, points of kinship centered on a lover-like relationship with Jesus, the Word Incarnate. Figurations of the Madonna, like those of Mary Magdalen (though not to the same libidinous extreme), slide back and forth between the heavenly and the earthy, a push and pull out of which emerges, for Warner's use, a muse of seductively potent religious rhetoric: both women appear persistently as versions of Venus, among other earth goddesses, and typologically as the new Eve, and both are repeatedly identified with the mystically symbolic yet openly sensual Bride of Christ in the Song of Songs (the Madonna as mother-bride and the Magdalen as sister-bride).⁴⁹ From this special intercourse, this extraordinary liaison to divine truth, issue two women big with the potential for preeminent voice: the Magdalen as apostle to the apostles, the first Christian commissioned with spreading the good news, and the Madonna (wedded figuratively to two manifestations of the Godhead) as poet of the rapturous Magnificant and also as apostle, the “bearer of the divine Word” who enjoys “privileged access to the Holy Spirit” as well as the Son.⁵⁰

In Warner's novel, the passive conduit for transcendent truth pictured in John's Madonna and the passively absorbed reader in Correggio's painting (who seems oblivious to her audience and undesirous of effect, an enactment of coyness when seen in retrospect, given her famously sensual sway over both artistic imitators and the viewing public)⁵¹ thus exist in tandem with a Mary capable of her own dazzling rhetoric, brought into sub-rosa relation through Ellen's description of the Madonna's Magdalenian kiss. This multiveiled authorial figure carries implications at least as seditious as those of the mid-nineteenth-century American novels by women that Susan Harris terms “exploratory,” including in her category Warner's second novel, Queechy, but not what she seems to view as the more conservative Wide, Wide World.⁵² Warner's painted Marys capture in tableau a twofold tension that runs through the novel, not only between the fledgling writer's impulse toward Christian subjection of self and her urgent ambition for authority but also between her rival ambitions for literary authority of two casts, the spiritual and the secular. She slips over the border into secular narrative and stakes her claim there by telling the countertale of the two Marys in language that uses remarkably few explicit religious referents (as does the Correggio Magdalen itself, which in the absence of its title could pass as any young woman reading a novel) but that attends with some care to matters of aesthetic effect. The eroticized mother bending to kiss her baby is enclosed, Ellen reports with adjectival flourish, in “a little antique heavily carved oval frame”; and “‘the perfect graceful repose’” of the Magdalen “‘figure,’” the “‘natural abandonment of every limb,’” paradoxically bespeaks “‘a wonderful art’” that, she declares twice, she doubts “‘anything’” could “‘surpass’” (578)—anything, that is, except her own wonderful art/ifice, which prostrates the authorial self humbly, chastely, before the Father even as it demonstrates its own virtuosity, even as it stages, in its agile dissimulations, a masterpiece of seduction. Eve-like, Lucifer-like, Warner discovers the dissembling power of language.⁵³

Looking toward modern feminist attempts to rehabilitate the Magdalen without divesting her of sexuality,⁵⁴ Warner surreptitiously fashions her own muse (or deific self-image) out of a conjunction of the sensual and the verbal. However, writing “through the body” from within religious and literary institutions that operate not a little like Sade's schools of discipline, as Jane Gallop describes and as Ellen and John enact, Warner writes through to the “masculine” position of mastery—precisely not the position that Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray would come to dream of for authors of écriture féminine. Cixous, Gallop finds, “affirm[s]” a feminine “model of writing as oral love,” a Warneresque notion, but on one layer of Warner's narrative, her seductive orality thrusts toward a model of writing as penetrative or devouring ravishment, aiming to take over a role that these French theorists identify as male (as does the nineteenth-century novelist) and that they eschew for women writers.⁵⁵ In this reading, the Father is absent from Warner-Ellen's version of the painting of Madonna and child because his linguistic authority has been assimilated; through John's kisses, always mouth-to-mouth, Ellen has, on Warner's behalf, absorbed his power over language—subverting the venerable Christian tradition of the religio-erotic kiss, which symbolizes the passing of the Father's Word to the human soul.⁵⁶

Yet the lips that entice and swallow up the Father are not one, do not speak—or kiss—univocally. Able to act several parts at once, to inhabit conflicting subject positions in her authorial parable (a capacity that R. McClure Smith theorizes as a defining feature of subversive masochistic fantasy in women's writing), Warner-Ellen expresses a fluidity that Irigaray might applaud, though the author's own pride in her prowess runs side by side with a sense of wrongdoing.⁵⁷ Strikingly, the “pouting” kiss of Ellen's reconceived Madonna is not only Magdalen-like but also child-like. Erotic provocation and childlikeness here converge, reproducing the doubleness, the multiplicity, of Ellen herself—whose elusive nature has sparked an unresolved debate in the novel's latter chapters (continuing into the unpublished ending, which finds her at age sixteen or seventeen) about whether she is woman or child. While Warner's richly multivalent portrait of a promised maternal kiss may be read as her embrace of the religious sentimental genre centered in the mother, that embrace is not fully realized; conjoined in the pouting kiss, Magdalen, Madonna, and child (the Word made flesh) also stand as a composite image of the female self as writer. The most compelling figure of authorship in The Wide, Wide World is finally the seductive little girl, a girlish Madonna-Magdalen, whose eroticized relations with family show Warner either submitting to paternal authority or trying to substitute ties of mutuality, but at the same time leaning irresistibly toward fatherly dominance herself. By projecting the writer as child, Warner assumes a Christian humility she wants to desire; but by investing that child with a surprisingly sexual sway over admirers, she at the same time covertly identifies with the charismatic male preacher.

The scene over which Warner's Madonna-Magdalen presides did not reach its intended audience, a fact that complicates its status as a denouement to the covert story Warner has been telling about herself. The initial decision to cut the last chapter, and the author's part in it, is sparsely and equivocally documented. The “Note on the Text” that prefaces the 1987 edition can report only this: “An unsigned note in the papers of The Constitution Island Association suggests that the manuscript had gone to Putnam without the last chapter and that Putnam urged omitting it since the book had run longer in galleys than he had expected and the last chapter, in his opinion, did not contribute substantially to the novel” (8). The publisher's worries about the unwieldiness of the project do find their way into Warner's journal; she writes in November 1850, “I got my last proof today, the end, as a note on the margin from the printer considerately informed me,” and continues, “Mr. Putnam told father he was afraid the book would be too large still; a pleasant and inspiriting kind of remark, seeing that in the first place it is all set up, and in the second place if it were not, it would be impossible to abridge it much except by horrible mutilation.”⁵⁸ The chagrin Warner privately expresses over the general need to shorten her manuscript and the specific need to end it prematurely, perhaps, is suggestive but not decisive (the adverb “still” may point to the excision of passages other than the final chapter);⁵⁹ available records do not clearly indicate how she reacted to the disposability of her conclusion or whether, as a first-time author anxious to publish and in need of income, she would have ventured to oppose “urgings” from Putnam even if she felt particular cuts did violence to authorial design.

Scholarly accounts of Warner's role in shaping the conclusion that her first readers experienced are necessarily speculative, but according to Susan Williams, the mark of her hand in later editions is more distinct: “[D]espite frequent requests from Warner's readers that she amplify the ending,” neither Warner, Putnam, nor Anna Warner (after her sister's death) offered up the omitted chapter as a complement to one of the many subsequent editions or as part of a sequel. This determined refusal, Williams proposes—as well as the original suppression, she implies, of Ellen's reentry into a life of wealth and aesthetic pleasure—is part of a pattern of revision and mediation in which Warner consciously tailored her book to the market for religious sentimentalism by suppressing worldlier passages.⁶⁰ Williams's persuasive reading of the publication history throws into relief an under-explored aspect of Warner's complex temperament, yet given the final chapter's multifaced figurations of female selfhood and authorship, other readings of Warner's decision to withhold it are possible. Warner had what her public clamored for, what the conspicuously foreshortened, tantalizing end to the circulated version invited her readers to desire, but she chose over the years not to satisfy that desire; this posture of invitation and denial works powerfully as a projection of the endlessly deferred consummation pictured in the Madonna-Magdalen's promised kiss, moving seduction beyond the text into the more immediate marketplace intercourse between author and audience.

The authorial seductiveness that Warner stages on a subtextual level of The Wide, Wide World and brings to arresting nonclimax in her intended last chapter thus had its way with the reading public, or so the novel's unprecedented popularity suggests. It took in readers of both sexes and all ages and classes who embraced Ellen's piety, crediting her creator with heart-changing power, as well as those who applauded the novel's literary merit.⁶¹ The seduced apparently included T. W. Higginson, who describes in an 1851 letter a bedtime reading ritual that eerily replays Warner's scene of the child-provocateur. Referring to a six-year-old girl who visited his household, Higginson exclaims:

I cannot tell you how I enjoy Greta; she is the most noble & highminded child I ever knew, & yet a perfect child. I read her a little bit of the Wide Wide World every night after tea, selecting only what she can understand, & I lose my place sometimes in looking up at her beautiful glowing eyes. And every night after she goes to bed I go up to kiss her & she puts her arms around my neck so that I have to struggle to get away.⁶²

A twin to Warner's duplicitous Ellen, Greta can be maturely “noble & highminded,” perfectly childlike, and seductive—all in the same paragraph. Distracting Higginson from his John-like censorship of the woman's text with beguiling looks and embraces, she points with Ellen toward an empowered version of female authorship that Warner imagines as both alluring and transgressive. In The Wide, Wide World, Warner, like the eloquent Skinner, the minister she longs to rival, and like Ellen's irresistible John, does indeed hold her hearers in her hands.

Notes

1. [Susan Warner], The Wide, Wide World (1850; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 578; further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Warner's original conclusion was not published as part of the novel until the 1987 edition; see “A Note on the Text” in that edition (8).

3. John Hart, The Female Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1852), 387. For excerpts from responses comparable to Hart's, see Edward Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne, n.d.), 35, 47-48; and Anna Warner, Susan Warner (New York: Putnam's, 1909), 344, 354, 355. For a recent analysis of such responses, see Susan Williams, “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): especially 569 and 573-74.

4. Alexander Cowie, “The Vogue of the Domestic Novel, 1850-1870,” South Atlantic Quarterly 41 (October 1942): especially 422-23; see also Henry Smith, “The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): especially 50-51; and John Frederick, “Hawthorne's ‘Scribbling Women,’” New England Quarterly 48 (June 1975): 231-32, 235. On the wrinkling of critical noses over Warner's novel, see Jane Tompkins's overview in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 147-49.

5. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), especially 18-19, 144-46; and Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 147-85.

6. See Williams, “Widening the World”; and Veronica Stewart, “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World,” Legacy 11.1 (1994): 1-16.

7. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” in The Oxford Authors: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 133.

8. See Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993).

9. See G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), 76-120; and Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 94-125. Mining a vein similar to the one I explore, Goshgarian contends that “domestic novels” are suffused with sexuality despite—or more precisely by virtue of—their determined refusal of it; Goshgarian uncovers intersections between profane familial relations in The Wide, Wide World and its creator's emerging sense of her writing project but implies that Warner's submission to the Father's Word is confirmed through Ellen. In Noble's well-wrought account, the masochistic pleasure that Warner's heroine finds in suffering and subjection is channeled through the “twin discourses” of “true womanhood” and “providential Calvinism” (95).

10. On biographical resonances, see Stewart, “Wild Side,” 1, 13 n. 1; Jane Tompkins, afterword to Wide, Wide World (1987), 586-96, 601-3; and Williams, “Widening the World,” 565-66.

11. Baym, Woman's Fiction, 11-12, 22.

12. See Goshgarian, Chastening Rod, 114-15.

13. Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 264. For references to Warner's penchant for domination, see, for instance, 34, 199, and 104-5, the latter offering the elderly Anna's account, in a tone of lingering enchantment touched with indignation, of her sister's teenaged storytelling practices. Presiding over Anna and two cousins, the older Susan would allow for certain democratic freedoms in their collective spinning of “silken, golden, impossible visions,” but “hers was always the ruling hand,” the one that held “certain particular charms which like a master key dominated the rest.” For counterposed passages from Susan's journal that show her striving to be a humble “child of God,” see 211, 353, 475.

14. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 163-65; Nancy Schnog, “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide Wide World,” Genders 4 (spring 1989): 11-25.

15. See Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 264, 338-39 (quoting Susan's journal entry of 7 January 1850), 377; and Mabel Baker, Light in the Morning: Memories of Susan and Anna Warner (West Point, N.Y.: Constitution Island Association, 1978), 44, 68.

16. Tompkins and Baym see Ellen's stormy weeping spells as inarticulate eruptions of rage over powerlessness (Sensational Designs, 173, 178; Woman's Fiction, 144). For a tear count of 245, offered in a disparaging tone typical of earlier assessments, see Fred Pattee, The Feminine Fifties (1940; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1966), 57.

17. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 52; see also Baym, Woman's Fiction, 26. Elizabeth Barnes also sees in Warner's text a survival of the eighteenth-century seduction tale but from a different perspective. In her provocative reading, the mother whose profound influence shapes the sentimental heroine's coming-of-age “seduces” her daughter into reenacting the tight patterns of stricture that have made up her own history, thwarting the younger woman's quest for autonomy by highly textual means (see States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997], 100-110).

18. See Nicolas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), especially 25-26, 12-13.

19. See [Samuel Wells], How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette. … (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856), 91; see also [Eliza Farrar], The Young Lady's Friend (Boston: American Stationers' Company, 1837), 293. For the Baptist anecdote, see Charles C. Bombaugh, The Literature of Kissing, Gleaned from History, Poetry, Fiction, and Anecdote (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876), 89-90.

20. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 101, 111-16.

21. See, for instance, Mme. Celnart, The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness. …, 5th American ed. (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1840), 9; Farrar, Young Lady's Friend, 10; Mrs. Manners, At Home and Abroad. … (New York: Evans and Brittan, 1853), 8. On the aristocratic life that Warner enjoyed well into her teens, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 56-58. Warner's class consciousness appears to have begun early and persisted long after the family's financial decline; see Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 109, 427-28. Compare Jennifer Mason, “Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 (March 2000): 503-33.

22. Tompkins, afterword, Wide, Wide World, 597.

23. Halttunen, Confidence Men, especially xiv-xvi.

24. Perella, Kiss Sacred and Profane, 28.

25. See Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 261-63, 346, 351-52.

26. Mary Hiatt also notices that Ellen is “strikingly seductive” in this scene (“Susan Warner's Subtext: The Other Side of Piety,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8 [August 1987]: 257).

27. See Manners, At Home and Abroad, 63-64; Farrar, Young Lady's Friend, 269; Celnart, Book of Politeness, 14-15; and John Young, comp., Our Deportment; or, The Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society. … (Chicago: Union Publishing, 1881), 51.

28. See Noble, Masochistic Pleasures, especially 219 n. 3; and Tompkins, afterword, Wide, Wide World, 599-600. My reading of Warner's eroticized relation to readers as a rhetorical variety of “masculine” sadism that masquerades as “feminine” masochism is indebted to Leland Person, “Sadomasochism, Prince Amerigo, and The Golden Bowl” (paper presented at the American Literature Association Conference, Baltimore, May 1997; published as “Jamesian Sadomasochism: The Invisible [Third] Hand of Manhood in The Golden Bowl,” in Questioning the Master: Gender and Sexuality in Henry James's Writings, ed. Peggy McCormack [Newark, N.J.: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000], 149-75).

29. Halttunen, Confidence Men, 23-24; R. McClure Smith, “‘He Asked If I Was His’: The Seductions of Emily Dickinson,” ESQ 40 (first quarter 1994): 49, 54, 64 n. 23.

30. Susan Warner, quoted in Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 275 (letter of 18 April 1848) and 499.

31. Halttunen, Confidence Men, 24; and Charles Grandison Finney, quoted in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965), 31 (see also 26).

32. Halttunen, Confidence Men, 24; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978), 18 (quoting from Miller, Life of the Mind, 23).

33. Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 218-19, 237, 236 (quoting an undated journal entry and letter of Susan's). On Susan's moorings in evangelical Christianity and her near-idolatrous admiration for Skinner, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 22, 27-31, 39. According to Foster, the form of evangelical belief espoused by Skinner's Mercer Street Church in New York, where Susan and Anna became members in 1844, was “New School” Presbyterianism, which looked for salvation in heartfelt conversion rather than close compliance with doctrine; for Skinner, as for Finney, religion was “a matter of emotions or sensibility,” an act of “absolute submission to divine will” accomplished in the heart rather than the intellect (29, 39). On the centrality of masterful sermonizing, in which the irresistible will of God and of human orator seem to merge—of “impressive delivery” more than “excellence of … matter”—to this evangelical cause, see Miller, Life of the Mind, 60-63; for a textual rendering of such eloquence, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 30. On the revivalist movement generally, see Miller, Life of the Mind, 3-95.

34. Olivia Phelps Stokes, Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1925), 9-11.

35. Ibid., 9, 10.

36. Douglas, Feminization, 79, 86. Douglas argues that in the nineteenth-century, liberal male ministers and female Christian writers, similarly cloistered in church and home, entered into the emerging mass market for popular literature as an avenue to spiritual and cultural power (77 and 80-117). These nonevangelical ministers, who eschewed rhetorical bombast and whom Douglas depreciatively labels “feminine” (91), are not, however, of the breed that sets Warner on fire. Awe-inspiring pulpit effects, in a style that both Warner and Douglas define as “masculine,” were more characteristic of preachers in Warner's revivalist wing of liberal Protestantism. On women writers as “counterparts” to evangelical pulpiteers, see also Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 149; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 285-315, especially 294; and Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1991), 11.

37. “[C]urrent opinion forbade a clergyman or a woman to publish a work concerned with thoroughly secular themes or informed by secular ambitions for artistic excellence” (Douglas, Feminization, 84).

38. On the conventional marriage ending, see Donna Campbell, “Sentimental Conventions and Self-Protection: Little Women and The Wide, Wide World,” Legacy 11.2 (1994): 123; and Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels,” American Quarterly 38 (summer 1986): 225-26.

39. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 319.

40. For a complementary angle on Warner's critique of the female “transparency” that John tries to inculcate, see Grace Hovet and Theodore Hovet, “Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner, Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton,” ATQ [American Transcendental Quarterly] 7 (December 1993): 335-56, especially 337-42.

41. See Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 132-33, 149 (quoting Susan's November-December journal and a journal entry of 8 February 1836); and Musée de peinture et de sculpture, etchings by [Etienne Achille] Réveil, 17 vols. (Paris: Audot; London: Bossange, Barthés, and Lowell, 1828-1834). On the first occasion that Anna recalls seeing the pamphlet, in 1834 or 1835, Susan was about fifteen. (Volume 1, which includes Correggio's reclining Magdalen as plate 97, initially appeared in 1828.) In the novel, when John leads Ellen to his painted copy, she remarks: “‘I have seen that before, … in an engraving—not in colours’” (578).

42. The summary of the Magdalen's representational career in this and following paragraphs derives, except where noted, from Haskins, Mary Magdalen (see 304 for a reproduction of Correggio's painting); and Marjorie Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalen's Origins and Metamorphoses (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1975). In Haskins's view, the Gospel Magdalen's potential as a liberating example for Christian women has been stifled beneath layers of mythic accretion.

43. Mary Magdalen appears by name in Matthew 27:56-61, 28:1-10; Mark 15:40, 47, 16:1-11; Luke 8:1-3, 24:1-11; and John 19:25, 20:1, 11-18. Her inclusion with the Virgin Mary in the circle of intimates around Jesus is imaged often in European visual art; volume 1 of the Musée collection, which features the recumbent figure that attracts Warner's notice, reproduces several such groupings (plates 27, 44, 464).

44. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 40, 38; Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth, 55; and Perella, Kiss Sacred and Profane, 20-21.

45. See, for example, Mrs. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 1:337, 364, 371.

46. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth, 15.

47. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 365, 331-33, 327, citing Warner's contemporaries Clara Lucas Balfour, The Women of Scripture (London, 1847), and John Angell James, Female Piety: or, The Young Woman's Friend and Guide through Life to Immortality (London, 1852).

48. [Jean] Duchesne, in Musée, vol. 1, plate 97. See also vol. 3, plate 287; and vol. 4, plate 396.

49. In addition to detailing Mary Magdalen's alliances with these figures, Malvern and Haskins mention parallel associations for the Virgin Mary (Venus in Sackcloth, 67; and Mary Magdalen, 56, 66-67, 40, 141, 238). The holy mother takes center stage in John Gatta's American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), an insightful look at her “countercultural” appeal for Protestant writers in America (3); on the Madonna's sensuous incarnations, especially in the texts of three Warner contemporaries, see 7 and 10-71.

50. Gatta, American Madonna, 11, 40; see also 6, 7, and 57.

51. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 236, 307-8.

52. See Susan Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 12-13, 20, 64, 135.

53. On Eve, Satan, and the seductive “uses of rhetoric,” see Smith, “Seductions of Emily Dickinson,” 34-42. Weaving her own spell of words, Warner finds a narrative means of resistance and escape (see, in contrast, David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989], 188).

54. For a (disparaging) digest of such attempts, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 367, 382-86, 391.

55. See Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 3, 42-53, 165; Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (summer 1976): 887; and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 32-33.

56. Perella, Kiss Sacred and Profane, 21-23, 38. On the danger that the mystical Christian kiss may edge into carnality, see 29-31.

57. See R. McClure Smith, “Dickinson and the Masochistic Aesthetic,” Emily Dickinson Journal 7 (fall 1998): 1, 8-9, 14-15; see also Irigaray, This Sex.

58. Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 326 (quoting Susan's journal entry of 7 November 1850).

59. See Susan Roberson, “Ellen Montgomery's Other Friend: Race Relations in an Expunged Episode of Warner's Wide, Wide World,” ESQ 45 (first quarter 1999): 1-31.

60. Williams, “Widening the World,” 577.

61. On the novel's broad appeal, see Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 345, 354-55, 387 (quoting Susan's journal entry of 23 February 1859). For the response to its literary qualities, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 48-49; and Dobson, “Hidden Hand,” 240 n. 7.

62. T. W. Higginson to Louisa Higginson, 30 October 1851, Thomas W. Higginson Collection, bMS Am 784 (374); quoted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. I thank Judy Breedlove for pointing me to this letter.