SOURCE: Schnog, Nancy. “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World.” Genders, no. 4 (spring 1989): 11-25.

[In the following essay, Schnog declares that The Wide, Wide World is a complex, psychological portrait of feminine sentiment.]

In the past few years Susan Warner's sentimental novel The Wide Wide World, one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novels and the nation's first best-seller, has been at the center of some of the most provocative and detailed discussions of the mechanics and politics of sentimentality.¹ A decade ago, on the margin of this revival, Warner's novel was typically regarded as a subliterary fiction that peddled comfortable dreams and cheerful platitudes to a large and undemanding middle-class readership.² More recently, in the wake of feminist re-evaluations of nineteenth-century women's fiction, scholars have begun to uncover Warner's multivocal handling of social and political themes as well as her positive imaging of female independence and self-assertion. Once thought to advocate an “ethos of conformity” and women's “unquestioning submission to authority,”³The Wide Wide World is now more often perceived as projecting and celebrating models of female autonomy and power.⁴ In the latest and perhaps most sophisticated analysis of this theme, Jane Tompkins has shown how Warner actively encouraged the ideal of female self-determination by teaching her readers to capitalize on their delegated roles and exploit them in their own self-interest.⁵

This essay also uses The Wide Wide World as a case study through which to examine the nineteenth-century sentimental novel's narrative mechanics and cultural power. It differs from its contemporary predecessors, however, by turning away from the theme of female power and giving emphasis to a more intimate, private dimension of the novel: female sentiment. Indeed, to read The Wide Wide World is to become enmeshed in a novel whose line of action unfolds as an emotional landscape. Along with Ellen Montgomery, the novel's adolescent heroine, readers follow, if not empathetically undergo, the series of deep attachments and traumatic separations which take Ellen first from her mother, then from Alice Humphrey, and later from a life she loves in America. In the past these tearful scenarios have merely confirmed hostile and cynical interpretations of the sentimental novel as a debased literary form, purveyed by women writers and dedicated to the exaggeration and distortion of human feelings. This essay challenges this perspective. It shows to the contrary that Warner's novel, like many other sentimental novels of the period, used sentimental discourse in an effort to represent and analyze significant and real emotional and psychological experiences. Whereas one critic of Warner's novel cast Ellen Montgomery as “a weeper of artesian resources,”⁶ this essay suggests, in a vein less contemptuous of feelings, that Ellen's tears were a valid and authentic response to traumas well known to a large segment of Warner's nineteenth-century readership, although no longer visible or familiar to us today.

Warner's serious interest in the exploration of female sentiment is evident in her novel's reproduction of an emotional and psychological terrain particular to the lives of many middle-class women in mid-nineteenth-century America. Accordingly, Part 1 of this essay will show how the intimate experiences of Warner's female heroines mirror and repeat some of the most important emotional events known to this class of women over a century ago. Part 2 will suggest the “therapeutic” function of Warner's psychological realism. Here we will see how Warner's novel not only represents shared points of crisis in women's emotional lives but also tries to reduce their traumatic significance by showing women readers how to prepare for and manage them.

1

Warner's recreation of a mid-nineteenth-century psychosocial landscape begins with what Warner pinpoints as the core of women's emotional being: mother-daughter attachment. Opening with a sequence of scenes that highlight the warm and dependent ties which unite mother and daughter, Warner writes:

The mother and daughter had had the Sabbath to themselves; and most quietly and sweetly it had passed. They had read together, prayed together, talked together a great deal; and the evening had been spent together in singing hymns; but Mrs. Montgomery's strength failed here, and Ellen sang alone … She [Mrs. Montgomery] listened—till she almost felt as if earth were left behind, and she and her child already standing within the walls of that city where sorrow and sighing shall be no more, and the tears shall be wiped from all eyes forever.⁷

Warner's description of Ellen and her mother on a Sabbath evening, prior to the news of Mrs. Montgomery's departure, conveys the affective climate within the feminine sphere. At home, “themselves,” without Mr. Montgomery, the mother and daughter establish their own private and exclusive world of personal contentments. As the four repetitions of “together” suggest, Ellen and her mother derive their contentment through their symbiotic attachment and mutual will.⁸ Intimate communion is a central feature not only of the mother-daughter relationship but also of the activities the women choose to engage in. Reading, talking, praying, and singing hymns are themselves systems which foster union between a practitioner and another person, an author, or God. By foregrounding the importance of communal activity, Warner locates the distinctive character of the feminine sphere in the value it places on the primacy of relation. As opposed to the virtues of individualism and nonconformity that Emerson expounds in the pages of “Self-Reliance,” experience in this milieu is judged by its potential to foster close and mutually dependent ties.

Although characters like Ellen and her mother have been regarded by twentieth-century critics as “inert puppets whom no one really believed in,”⁹ nineteenth-century audiences to the contrary recognized Ellen and her mother not as “puppets” but as symbols of a pervasive and deeply felt experience among women. In a study of nineteenth-century women's correspondences and diaries, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has demonstrated that mother-daughter relationships, as well as female friendships, were characterized by especially intense patterns of female bonding.¹⁰ Diaries attest to the overwhelming attention women paid to other women as well as to the trauma that resulted from the interruption of contact through either geographical separation or death. Rosenberg maintains that “for nearly a century … women played a central emotional role in each other's lives, writing time and again of their love and of the pain of separation.”¹¹ Expressions of “emotional dependency” and “confessions of loneliness” were typical of the cri de coeur of middle-class women in the nineteenth century.¹²

Social conditions and emotional imperatives sustained this female world. Rigid gender segregation as well as limitations placed on male-female social interactions spawned a severing of spontaneous relations between the sexes while encouraging the formation and meaningfulness of homosocial bonds. At the same time, female love nourished women's emotional needs. It allowed women to share their personal concerns with empathetic listeners and through those interactions to develop and strengthen qualities of personal dignity and self-confidence. Immersed in intimate mother-daughter, kin, and other female relations, women, deprived of opportunities to achieve power and self-fulfillment in the public sphere, were able to gain a sense of their own importance through the experience of loving and feeling loved by others. Warner echoes this sentiment when she has Alice Humphrey remind Ellen that “it is not beautiful things nor a beautiful world that make people happy—it is loving and being loved” (164, VII).

Although The Wide Wide World opens with scenes that foreground the close attachments between mother and daughter, it is noteworthy that the same sequence of scenes closes with a scenario that belies a suggestion of domestic harmony. From the beginning of the novel, stable domestic relations are challenged by the threat of separation. Mrs. Montgomery's trip to Europe prefaces the novel and is the condition which sets the novel underway; Ellen must be informed of her mother's immanent departure and of the separation that will necessarily follow. As a scene which joins the currents of dependency and loss, the Sabbath scene capitulates the larger structure of Warner's novel, in which scenes of attachment and separation flow one into another, comprising the book's narrative action. Indeed, by making the dynamics of dependency and loss ubiquitous in the novel, Warner fashions dramatic action as psychological movement. Within this context female experience can be seen as fundamentally active—a modus operandi that demands the continual mediation of conflicting affective forces. It also establishes attachment and separation as a transition of such emotional potency for women that it becomes the unit of experience around which women organize and posit meaning in their lives.¹³

Warner dramatizes the centrality of attachment and separation by delimiting action in The Wide Wide World as a woman's confrontation with either one of two events: geographical separation or death. Warner signals the preeminent experiential value of geographical separation by employing it as the internal measure of Ellen's development: Ellen's early life is marked by her removals from New York to Thirwall, from her Aunt Fortune's to the Humphrey parsonage, from the Humphrey parsonage to the Lindsays' in Scotland. This is equally true of the role of death in the novel, in which Ellen's despair over the loss of her mother and her “adopted sister,” Alice, comprises two distinct periods of emotional transition in Ellen's life. From this perspective accusations, such as Edward Foster's, that Warner's scenes are “almost entirely lacking in dramatic incident and conflict” reveal a misperception of the realm of action in the novel.¹⁴ By presenting emotional events as the substance of women's experience, Warner posits affective movement and change as untiring sources of drama and conflict in women's lives.

In addition, Warner illustrates how the loss of a primary love object, which breaks the female world of love, provokes an enduring source of pain for women. Representative of a plethora of such communications in the novel, a letter Mrs. Montgomery writes to Ellen describes her response to their interrupted contact: “I have missed you my dear child very much. There is not an hour in the day, nor a half hour, that the want of you does not come to my heart; and I think I have missed you in my very dreams. This separation is a very hard thing to bear. But the hand that has arranged it does nothing amiss; we must trust Him my daughter that all will be well” (274, VII). This style of writing has inspired the acerbic criticisms against the sentimental novel as preoccupied solely with the peddling of sentiment and piety. Such passages have become the prooftext of interpretations which cast Ellen as an unregenerate weeper and Mrs. Montgomery as a mouthpiece for Warner's overt and unrelenting religious teachings.¹⁵ Yet these views overlook the serious representation of female sentiment within these passages as well as the documentation of pain and trouble within this sphere. While the rhetoric of piety is undeniably a predominant feature in Warner's writing and one which she applies to her own therapeutic aims in the course of the novel, the rhetoric of emotional survival in this passage is just as strong. Away from Ellen, Mrs. Montgomery leads a new existence in which mourning plays an integral part. As this unhappy missive shows, the consequences of separation result in a pervasive and enduring experience of loss.

Those consequences are made painfully clear to Ellen in the wake of Mrs. Montgomery's absence and Alice's untimely death. Having taken up the care of the Humphrey parsonage, Ellen finds herself in an environment antithetical to her other homes. Now Ellen is alone. The passages describing this period return repeatedly to the theme of Ellen's isolation: “When John was gone and her morning affairs were out of the way, Ellen brought out her work basket and established herself on the sofa for a quiet day's sewing, without the least fear of interruption. But sewing did not always hinder thinking. And then certainly the room did seem very empty, and very still; and the clock, which she never heard the rest of the week, kept ticking an ungracious reminder that she was alone” (205, VII).

In the same scene Ellen spends Saturday evening contemplating Alice's death, followed by Sunday, which was “another lonely time” (207). With a day of sewing at home the only thing before her, Ellen's thoughts travel to her solitary condition and to the losses of the women who shared and enlivened the domestic sphere in the past. The image of Ellen's aloneness at the parsonage is the antipode of the Sabbath scene, the world of female love that opens the book. While it was Ellen's choice to fill Alice's place at the parsonage, it is, nonetheless, a painful one; without Alice there is no partner with whom to establish a continuum of intimate exchange and ritualized duty. In portraying these opposing portraits of female experience—female support networks and Ellen's solitary confinement—Warner articulates two of the most frequently voiced poles of feeling established by Smith-Rosenberg's study: emotional dependency and utterances of loneliness. Although the self-created world of female love enhanced the quality of women's lives part of the time, it was not a fully enduring solution to a cultural situation that increasingly stripped middle-class women of their productive functions and confined them to the home.

Furthermore, Warner shows how interruptions of primary female dependencies were complicated further by social conditions which were making communications “across the spheres” increasingly difficult. This can be clarified by way of reference to converging economic and social conditions which individually and collectively exerted pressures that divided the interests of men and women while bringing women into closer and more dependent relationships with each other. Mary Ryan has summarized these structural changes in nineteenth-century society in terms of “the divergence of private and public life,” “the separation of male and female spheres,” and “the emergence of the cult of domesticity and the parallel masculine ideal of the self-made man.”¹⁶ With the ebbing of household production and the formalization of distinctions between the workplace and the home, primary economic and social responsibilities became newly divided along gender lines. As guardians of the home, women were expected to oversee their children's development and the domestic economy, while men, as entrepreneurs of the marketplace, were expected to make money and conduct secular affairs. These separate provinces of activity and responsibility were equally overlaid with social meanings. A “canon of domesticity” imaged women as “wives and mothers” whose duty was “to nurture and maintain families, to provide religious example and inspiration, and to affect the world around by exercising private moral influence.”¹⁷ While women were cast as ministering angels, men, on the other hand, were conceived of in terms of their “selfishness, exertion, embarrassment, and degradation of soul” that resulted from their secular pursuits.¹⁸ The dichotomies that established the male sphere as public, secular, and aggressively self-assertive and the female sphere as private, sacred, and passionately self-denying deepened a rift between the sexes by separating male and female experiences, interests, and conceptions of value.

Warner characterizes interpersonal relations across the spheres as fraught with tensions and imbalances. This breakdown in heterosexual communication is illustrated in the second half of the Sabbath evening scene in which Mr. Montgomery arrives home and announces to his wife that Ellen will have to leave the next day. Too distraught to sleep that night, Mrs. Montgomery lies in bed fearfully anticipating the morning:

The fear of Ellen's distress when she would be awakened and suddenly told the truth, kept her in agony … The captain, in happy unconsciousness of his wife's distress and utter inability to sympathize with it, was in a sound sleep, and his heavy breathing was an aggravation of her trouble: it kept repeating, what indeed she knew already, that the only one in the world who ought to have shared and soothed her grief was not capable of doing either.

(72)

While the expectation of Ellen's departure causes intense upset for Mrs. Montgomery, Warner alerts us to the other source of her despair: Mr. Montgomery's complete irresponsiveness to his wife's condition. Mr. Montgomery's “happy unconsciousness” and “utter inability to sympathize” remind his wife of the paucity of emotional exchange within their marriage. For Mrs. Montgomery, it is not her husband who has tended to her emotional needs but Ellen. As a source of compassion, Mr. Montgomery is useless—he neither shares nor soothes—and as “a man not readily touched by anything” promises little hope of change. In recognizing the immutable space between her husband and herself, Mrs. Montgomery bares the “unhappy consciousness” of disappointment in a failed marriage.

Warner characterizes the relationship between Ellen and her father as similarly deficient in vital affective connections. In the disturbing conclusion to the Sabbath evening scene, Mr. Montgomery demonstrates his equal disregard of his daughter's feelings. Here Mr. Montgomery forbids his wife to spend the last hours before Ellen's departure with her daughter. He insists that his daughter's interests will be better served by a good night's sleep as well as a cool and sudden parting. That decision becomes the focus of Ellen's musings later the next day: “She went over again in imagination her shocked waking up that very morning—how cruel that was!—the hurried dressing—the miserable parting” (82). Instead of recognizing the need between mother and daughter to wean themselves slowly from each other, Mr. Montgomery orchestrates a jarring finale to the most important single relationship in each of the women's lives.

Moreover, Ellen's feelings of distance toward her father are not simply a response to her father's role in the “cruel” departure. The division between father and daughter, as with husband and wife, cuts more deeply into the very shape and development of the family history. Upon hearing of the possibility of her father's death in a shipwreck, Ellen reflects on how little this loss means to her: “Ellen rather felt that she was an orphan than that she had lost her father. She had never learned to love him, he had never given her much cause. Comparatively, a small portion of her life had been passed in his society, and she looked back to it as the least agreeable of all” (102, V. II, bk). The close ties which characterize Ellen's relationship with her mother have no counterpart in her father, since her father's absence has rendered impossible the nurturance of similar bonds. Like the relationship between wife and husband, father-daughter relations have failed to provide daughters with meaningful or even positive contact.¹⁹

2

In reaction to these sources of emotional crisis and to a culture that remained largely indifferent to the quality of women's personal needs, Warner shows evidence of building into her text a response to this neglected realm of women's psychological well-being. This has the effect of transforming what appears to be Warner's purely spiritual concerns into an extended dialogue on attachment, loss, and the dynamics of survival after the loss of a primary caretaker. This transformation reveals the broadened scope of Warner's story and her preoccupation with issues that transcend Ellen's spiritual training. For within what at one level operates as a spiritual training narrative there lies another pattern of development which is equally prominent, a progress in affective communion, or the daughter's symbolic journey of return to the mother. If it is separation between mothers and daughters that was the unraveling thread of women's emotional existence, then Warner attempts to rectify these conditions by creating strategies that could help daughters overcome the pain of separation by having them preserve their feelings of connection to the mothers they loved.

In the past critics frequently assessed the story of Ellen's religious and moral education as a polemic designed to impress upon women the correctness of self-sacrifice and piety and the justice of their abased position in the world. Because the novel portrays pictures of obedient womanhood (mothers and female mentors who educate their female dependents in the “hard” doctrine of self-denial and submission), traditional critics pointed to these images as proof of their thesis without questioning the way this ideology may have served the needs of women. In The Wide Wide World traditional ideologies help women because they come to the reader not separated from but inextricably tied to the emotional realities of the world of female love; in other words, conventional religious and social ideologies are accommodated by Warner into systems, or therapeutic strategies, that attempt to reduce women's vulnerability to dependency and isolation. Through the manipulation of familiar cultural myths, Warner conveyed a message to her audience that transcended an admonition to “submit and obey.” Rather, Warner softened the ethic of obedience by reformulating sacred and secular ideologies as a language that spoke directly to women's needs.

While in The Wide Wide World the female mentors, like Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Vawse, and Alice, present to the daughters, like Ellen, the absolute necessity of submission to worldly and divine authorities, it has been less readily apparent how this ideology became a special vehicle of communication among women; an ideology that could be used as a substitute to or replacement for the primary world of female interactions. This becomes clear by focusing not on the novel's didacticism but on the whole context through which Warner's conventional ideology is conveyed. For in the novel the medium is very much a part of the message; the attachment to and love for the mother is just as if not more important than her words and teachings. Because the novel is so thick in religious description and so committed to the fervor of its evangelicalism, it has been easy to interpret the role of the mother as a disembodied mouthpiece for the promulgation of Christian values. In the meantime this assessment has divorced the religion of the mothers from what Warner has clearly delimited as the book's psychosocial frame. In other words, a full interpretation of the religion of the mothers must take into consideration the social context of the female world of love—the mutually dependent interests of mothers and daughters—as well as the emotional imperatives that evolved as a consequence of those relations.

Warner's religious females were not the duped buyers of a system of belief that exacted their submission and obedience; to the contrary, they were the generators of a system of belief that was designed to respond to the separations and consequent isolation that so often characterized women's lives. When Mrs. Vawse, the novel's symbol of female health and autonomy, describes what has allowed her to achieve a perfect contentment in her hermetic existence on a mountaintop, she locates religion as the source of her freedom. Yet as she extols the benefits of her religion, she mentions solely her religion's consolatory power, which enabled her to survive personal experience with attachment and loss: “It is not until one looses one's hold of other things and looks to Jesus alone that one finds how much he can do. ‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother;’—but I never knew all that meant till I had no other friends to lean upon—nay, I should not say no other friends;—but my dearest ones were taken away” (228). Here religion is projected as a response to an emotional dilemma. Not a description of religious dogma alone, Mrs. Vawse's words radically alter the theology of her faith by reducing it to two main considerations—the permanence of Jesus and the evanescence of earthly love. This is illustrated in Mrs. Vawse's interchanging references to Jesus and to loss, to the “friend that sticketh closer than a brother” and to the “dearest ones [who] were taken away.” By constricting religious doctrine to these two features, Warner relates the importance of Jesus as a religious symbol and the importance of attachment and loss as a human predicament. Indeed, by the very nature of their juxtaposition and propinquity, the two principles emerge as mutually dependent ideas. In Mrs. Vawse's conception of religion, one which is shared and espoused by all the religious female characters in the book, there is no such thing as a religious stricture that is imposed from outside and divorced from female needs. Turning to Jesus is a solution to loneliness rather than a religious precaution against sin or evil. Mrs. Vawse's religious counsel is presented not as a jeremiad aimed at controlling female behavior but as a consolatory myth whose attractiveness and power lie exclusively in its ability to respond to women's painful feelings of loss.

The blurring of the edges between religious rhetoric and “female” rhetoric, or the language which appears in the novel to express the problematic affective conditions within the world of female love, is a pervasive trend in Warner's novel and one that plays continually on building an association between divinity and womanhood. On the one hand, Warner makes this association an implicit part of her story by having the book's female mentors—Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Vawse, and Alice—become identified personally with the conventional ideologies they espouse. The identities of these female mentors are linked to the conservative doctrines they practice and teach; to invoke womanhood in this novel is essentially identical to invoking religion and vice-versa. Warner makes this association explicit by having Ellen learn, just after the separation from her mother, the standing between motherhood and the divine:

In the first place, it is not your mother, but he, who has given you every good and pleasant thing you have enjoyed in your whole life. You love your mother because she is so careful to provide for all your wants: but who gave her the materials to work with? She has only been, as it were, the hand by which he supplied you! And who gave you such a mother?—There are so many mothers not like her:—who put into her heart the truth and love that have been blessing you ever since you were born? It is all—all God's doing from first to last.

(87)

This passage exhibits in its quintessential form the mixed rhetoric of divine motherhood. While Ellen's religious teacher, who we later discover is the Humphreys' friend Mr. Marshman, takes pains to separate in the child's mind the divine and maternal realms, his line of argumentation paradoxically undercuts his intentions. Whereas the content of his speech renders motherhood as the transparent medium through which God works, as God's ministering agent, the emphasis in the language, which keeps returning to the theme of ideal motherhood, ends by placing maternity on a level with God. This is established through a linguistic pattern in which the shuttling back and forth between subjects—“she” and “he,” mother and God—equates rather than separates the image of divine power. Even though mothers are characterized as the “hand” by which “truth and love” are carried to human beings on earth, they are empowered simultaneously in being singled out as God's representatives and as actors who work in full syncopation with God's will. While Mr. Marshman is intent upon proving that the source of all good is God, his inability to lose sight of the maternal presence simply reinforces the reader's perception of the mother as ubiquitous and divine. Despite the eulogy to God's unique strength, Mr. Marshman's words deify two subjective presences, mothers and God.

The link between divinity and motherhood is an association that Ellen becomes aware of through spiritual advisors like Mr. Marshman, but more importantly Ellen is educated into this school of thought by her female mentors themselves. It is this special twist, the fact that mothers were inculcating a theology of divine maternity in their daughters, that makes religion such a potent ideology in the novel and one that works so ingeniously against the problematics of female dependency and loss. The relationship between Ellen and her mother is a strong example of the way religion becomes transformed into a vehicle of connection between mother and daughter, an ideology which has the power to sustain their “primacy of relation,” although at a secondary or imaginative level, despite separation or death. Mrs. Montgomery's inscription in Ellen's Bible reveals her interest in passing on to Ellen a conception of divine maternity. On the flyleaf of the Bible which Mrs. Montgomery provides for Ellen before their separation, Mrs. Montgomery writes: “I love them that love me; and they that seek me early shall find me” with the afterthought, “I will be a God to thee, and to thy seed after thee” (49). The significance of these phrases lies in the ambiguous use of the first person, an ambiguity which makes it impossible to determine whether the speaker of these words is in fact Mrs. Montgomery or God.²⁰ Although this phraseology mingles suggestions of maternity and divinity, the heavy assertiveness of the “I will be a God to thee” takes divinity into the hands of the mother and reshapes maternity as the divine. Mrs. Montgomery writes herself into Ellen's Bible as source, not agent. Through the act of inscription, Mrs. Montgomery initiates a dual transformation; she joins herself with God and invests Ellen's Bible with words that become the lasting symbolism and legacy of maternal divinity.

Hence, it is no great surprise that, after her mother's death, the object Ellen gravitates toward most immediately is the Bible. While before the death Ellen had not been able to grasp the meaning of her mother's inscription or to appreciate the significance of her Bible, in the wake of her mother's death Ellen becomes alert to religion's healing potential. For Ellen discovers in her burgeoning religiosity “a link of communion between her mother and her that was wanting before. The promise written and believed in the one, realized and rejoiced in by the other, was a dear something in common, though one had in the meantime removed to heaven and the other was still a lingerer on the earth” (69, VII). In this passage Warner shows that Ellen's spiritual awakening is exciting and positive, not because she is entering an exclusive relationship with Jesus or with God, but because religious faith opens up to Ellen “a link of communion” between her mother and herself. Connecting her to her mother's desire and will, religion helps Ellen preserve the primacy of relation, or symbiosis of being, that characterized the mother-daughter attachment. Ellen's new faith provides a space in which an enclosed system of communion can be maintained between Ellen and her mother—Mrs. Montgomery's hopes can be rejoiced in and acted out by her daughter—despite Mrs. Montgomery's death. By responding to her mother's desires for her own salvation, Ellen adopts not solely a pious Christian demeanor and outlook upon the world but an ideology so thoroughly permeated with the maternal presence that her own mimetic expression of that ideology translates into a form of imaginative reconnection with her mother.

Hence, Warner advocates a theory of association as a strategy of response against female isolation and loneliness. For the power of association, as a process of imaginative union between subject and object, is what Warner holds out to her readers as their greatest and most readily available source of protection against separation and the problematics of dependency. The therapeutic value of this religious ideology is reinforced for Ellen through the parallel lessons of her four religious mentors, all of whom instruct Ellen to invest her affections in divine over human relations.²¹ Alice's words reflect the beliefs of the group when she advises, “Don't lean upon me, dear Ellen; remember you have a better friend than I always near you; trust in him; if I have done you any good, don't forget, it was he who brought me to you yesterday” (202). Similar to Mrs. Vawse's speech, Alice's words remind Ellen of the source of her salvation, Christ, yet like so many of the religious passages in the book, Alice's advice contains a subtext that deals more with emotional than spiritual reality. Here the terms of the promise of salvation, which demand of a communicant devotion to Christ above all, are adapted by Warner into a system of transference whereby women are taught and encouraged to invest their earthly affections in an image of the divine. Yet this process, which commands women to transfer human feelings from a love object to an abstract religious ideal, is really a strategy which helped women establish a durable sense of relation with the women they loved. Encouraging the deflection of attachments from the earthly to the divine allowed women to experience continuity in their feelings of love because the concept of divinity women were taught to submit to was already defined in terms of maternity. While a message like Alice's teaches the displacement of affections, this displacement does not so much force women to capitulate to a difficult religious precept as secure for them, paradoxically, a more private and lasting form of attachment to a woman whose image has been projected as the divine. Consequently, this strategy of “divine reliance” helped women combat emotional disruptions in the world of female love in two ways: it gave women a means of dealing with and speaking about the issue of separation early on in a female friendship and provided a method so that when separations approached women would be equipped with conceptions, objects, or patterns of behavior that could elicit sentiments of reconnection with the lost but beloved figure.

This strategy, and Ellen's access to it, is the issue at stake in the scene in which Ellen, during her stay in Scotland, struggles to maintain her prayer hour. Another scene once regarded as clear evidence of Warner's purely religious interests, the prayer hour conflict is important not as an experience of communion with Christ but as an experience which recalls a set of affective attachments to the people and places Ellen has loved in the past. When Mr. Lindsay, Ellen's authoritarian uncle, threatens to take away Ellen's prayer hour, he is denying Ellen something much more crucial to her well-being than a moment of pious expression. He is, instead, refusing Ellen her “recipe against loneliness” (303, VII). In denying Ellen her prayer hour, Mr. Lindsay suppresses the “link of communion” discovered by Ellen in the sharing of her mother's religion. It is this negation which prompts Ellen's passionate defense of her private morning hour and her first overt act of self-assertion against male authority. Ellen insists: “I want some time to myself … I cannot be happy if I do not have some time” (295, VII). This demand follows from the fact that it was Ellen's “special delight to pray for those loved ones she could do nothing else for … and that though thousands of miles lie between the petitioner and the petitioned-for, the breath of prayer may span the distance and pour blessings on the far-off head” (294, VII). In Scotland, where Ellen is removed from the people, the traditions, and the country she loves and is treated as “a darling possession—a dear plaything” by her uncle's family, the prayer hour becomes an especially valuable vehicle for establishing connections with a cherished past (292, VII). Hence, the prayer hour reflects Ellen's devotion to a self-interested act of personal rejuvenation rather than a religious example of Ellen's “submission to divine will and biblical authority.”²²

As this rendering of Ellen's prayer hour shows, Warner responds to the dilemma of female isolation by underscoring the individual's ability to activate within herself a series of associations that foster imaginative union with loved ones despite temporary or permanent separations. As John Humphrey explains to Ellen:

“When two things have been in the mind together, and made any impression, the mind associates them; and you cannot see or think of the one without bringing back the remembrance or the feeling of the other. If we have enjoyed moonlight happy hours, with friends that we loved … it yet brings with it a waft from the feeling of the old times—sweet as long as life lasts … This power of association is the cause of half the pleasure we enjoy.”

(221-222, VII)

This passage shows how meaningful experiences can become, through associations with enduring symbols, lasting and recurrent aspects of our everyday lives. As the passage suggests, a phenomenon, like moonlight, as an ever-present part of nature is liable to change through the power of imagination. Weaving connections between an object and human feelings, the power of association connects inherently separate phenomena until they appear to the senses as identical. This is the premise around which Ellen's religion functions: “the power of association” fuses the ephemeral experience of the mother-daughter relationship with the durable mythology of spiritual faith. In Ellen's mind, religion recalls motherhood, while motherhood recalls faith. In both cases, memorable experiences of love, either with friends or family, activate these associations and the conversions which turn secondary objects into extraordinarily powerful symbols of interpersonal communion. Because the power of association was private, accessible, and resistant to outside control, Warner could present this mental power as a stable source of emotional sustenance for women.

Given these circumstances, it is possible to comprehend why Ellen would be so ready to adopt her mother's, Mrs. Vawse's, and Alice's religion and style of behavior. Her readiness is derived not from the imposition of external regulations which force Ellen into untiring obedience but from an internal love and admiration for women that she wants to be like. For example, when Ellen takes over Alice's place at the Humphrey parsonage after Alice's death, Ellen adopts Alice's self-sacrificing mode of behavior not strictly as a capitulation to societal demands but as an assertion of love and connection to Alice: “Whatever she [Ellen] did was done with her best diligence and care; and from love to both the dead and the living, Ellen's zeal never slackened” (198, VII). In this context duty and service are cast as inner propulsions, as acts which cannot be understood properly unless they are seen as expressive of ties to the female world of love. The performance of duty fulfills Ellen by pleasing the living Humphreys, but just as importantly it pleases Ellen because she can do “whatever Alice would have wished” (193, VII). In this context Ellen's adoption of conventional behavior has little to do with the strictures of a society that disempowers her. Rather, she practices this pattern of behavior as an acting out of an allegiance to Alice, bridging the distance between her adopted sister and herself. As a mode of being, obedient womanhood—like religion or moonlight—stimulates Ellen's feelings of connection to her female mentors and therefore serves as an enduring “link of communion” with the female world of love.²³

In sum, to regard The Wide Wide World as a narrative of overindulged sentiments is to overlook the emotional and psychological levels at which Warner's novel operates. While Warner's religious and moral preaching may strike the contemporary reader as of dubious literary value, the book is nonetheless invaluable as a cultural document whose primary concern is womanhood. Few other texts offer such sustained and elaborate portraits of women's psychosocial conditions in the nineteenth century. Like women's journals and correspondences, the sentimental novel was a form in which women authors could distill and study feminine experience. Warner portrays this world by making her subject matter conform to the shape of women's sphere. This explains the thoroughly feminine character of her book—the lives of heroines, the recurrent descriptions of home, and the intensive focus on female relationships. Even more suggestively, Warner represents the psychological and emotional issues that faced many middle-class women in her time. Patterns of homosocial bonding, the sincere and unhampered connections between mothers and daughters, and the problems of attachment and separation are features of our foremothers' experience which, due to the misreading and suppression of the sentimental tradition, have been lost to us today. Nevertheless, the sentimental novel is an enduring testimony to the deeply felt interior experiences of women in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Richard Brodhead for taking the time to discuss and challenge my ideas for this essay and Laura Wexler and Jane Tompkins for their insightful and helpful editorial comments.

2. This perspective has been memorably set forth by Henry Nash Smith, “The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974); John T. Frederick, “Hawthorne's ‘Scribbling Women,’” New England Quarterly 48 (1975). Aligned to this viewpoint is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977).

3. Smith, “The Scribbling Women,” 51.

4. Presently, critical debates around the sentimental novel have divided into three identifiable camps: the conservative view, which casts the sentimental novel as an unconscious perpetuator and supporter of women's traditional roles; the subversive view, which treats the sentimental novel as a handbook on rebellion and liberation for women readers; and a third, more recent view, which attempts to work through the complicated interactions between these opposing perspectives. For examples of the former, see Alexander Cowie, “The Vogue of the Domestic Novel, 1850-1870,” South Atlantic Quarterly 41 (October 1942); Smith, “The Scribbling Women.” The liberation arguments are presented by Helen Waite Papashvily, All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper and Bros., 1957); Dee Garrison, “Immortal Fiction in the Late Victorian Library,” American Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976). For critics whose arguments yoke together elements of both perspectives, see Mary Kelley, “The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home,” Signs 4 (Spring 1979); Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

5. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 147-185. Tompkins's treatment of The Wide Wide World is to date one of the most detailed case studies of the internal dynamics and cultural function of sentimentality. While her argument focuses mainly on the theme of female power, it also discusses and prepares the way for further considerations of the role of intimacy, mutual support, and emotional experience in the sentimental novel.

6. Frederick, “Hawthorne's ‘Scribbling Women,’” 235.

7. Susan Warner, The Wide Wide World (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), 67. All subsequent references to this edition appear directly in the text.

8. As the following historical sections of this essay will show, Warner's representation of a close and dependent mother-daughter relationship, at the center of a broader female support network, replicates what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes as a “female world of love and ritual.” See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975). Interestingly, the opening scenes of The Wide Wide World aim to establish the absolute primacy of the mother-daughter relationship. Likewise, Smith-Rosenberg writes: “An intimate mother-daughter relationship lay at the heart of this female world. The diaries and letters of both mothers and daughters attest to their closeness and mutual emotional dependency” (15).

9. Smith, “The Scribbling Women,” 68.

10. As suggested above, Smith-Rosenberg's research offers an invaluable theoretical frame for interpreting the sentimental novel's intensive focus on women's emotional experience and homosocial attachments. For other important historical examinations of “women's sphere” in nineteenth-century America, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1976).

11. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual,” 4.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. In her recent work on gender identity Nancy Chodorow discusses the problematic depths of mother-daughter identification and separation in cultures which define mothering as a specifically female activity. Chodorow writes: “It seems likely that from their children's earliest childhood, mothers and women tend to identify more with daughters and to help them to differentiate less, and that processes of separation and individuation are made more difficult for girls.” Although one wants to be careful not to generalize psychological phenomena over time, Chodorow's theory of gender personality has special implications for my argument. It suggests that in addition to “a female world of love and ritual,” which strained women's experiences of loss, psychological factors, originating in girls' early and continuous identifications with their mothers, may well have deepened and complicated this already highly charged and difficult experience. For Nancy Chodorow's discussion of gender personality, see “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (California: Stanford University Press, 1974). For the classic discussion of the role of separation in child development, see the “fort-da” thesis in Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 8-11.

14. Edward Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne Publishers), 36.

15. See Frederick, “Hawthorne's ‘Scribbling Women,’” 235.

16. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 155.

17. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 8.

18. Ibid., 67.

19. In the novel Mr. Montgomery's preoccupation with public concerns, like his lost lawsuit, and indifference toward his private concerns, like his wife and daughter, offer the clearest example of the “divided spheres,” especially as they functioned to intensify and disturb female dependencies. Although outside the scope of this essay, Warner's novel depicts and explores several other models of heterosexual interaction and communication.

20. This observation has been discussed at length by Jane Tompkins in her thorough textual analysis of The Wide Wide World. Tompkins interprets Warner's feminine theology as a by-product of a fundamentally political issue, women's powerlessness in society, and views that theology as a way in which women reconciled their “needs for power and status with a condition of economic and political subservience” (see Tompkins, Sentimental Designs, 165). My view of the role of religion and female capitulation to the strictures of conservative cultural ideologies differs crucially from this point of view, in that I perceive the theology of maternal divinity as a system that aims to ameliorate women's psychosocial needs—needs which were produced because of the particular social structure of female relations in the nineteenth century—rather than as a system exposing Warner's concern with female power. Similarly, I view the act of submission to conventional ideology as less important for the self-mastery or the “assertion of autonomy” (162) that it paradoxically involved than for the way it enabled daughters to fulfill the maternal will and therefore experience a link of communion or form of connection with the mother.

21. In order to impress this point upon her reader, Warner has Mrs. Montgomery (68), Mrs. Vawse (228), Alice (202), and John (225, VII) tell Ellen that her best interests will be served by privileging her affections to Christ and suppressing her dependence on human relations. Here we see other examples of passages that read like religious polemics on the surface yet contain a latent discourse on the problem of durable versus transient relations.

22. Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 36.

23. For a reading of these relationships as complicit in a cultural system of social discipline as opposed to my own theory of emotional reunion and recuperation, see Richard Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 (Winter 1988): 67-96.