SOURCE: Quay, Sara E. “Homesickness in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18, no. 1 (spring 1999): 39-58.

Taken as a whole, Susan Warner's best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), is about the experience of loss.¹ In fact, the novel might be said to have been generated from the profound loss its author, as a young woman, experienced when her family moved from their home in New York City to an isolated existence on Constitution Island in upstate New York. A result of the family's financial ruin, the move separated Susan Warner from the life she had known to that point.² She wrote in her journal soon afterward: “we have nothing to do with the world. Every human tie … is so broken and fastened off.”³ As if in response to this experience, Warner's novel, written while she lived on the island, centers around the losses undergone by its main character, Ellen Montgomery. After depicting early scenes in which Ellen is nestled safely at home with her mother, the novel goes on to record an extraordinary number of dislocations and separations. Warner's focus on loss was not just a personal preoccupation, but reflected a cultural one as well. The period in American history during which Warner wrote was marked, as Michael Rogin notes, by “a powerful sense of loss,”⁴ a result of geographical distance between family members and loved ones as well as of incurable illnesses and early, often unexpected death. Ellen's experiences would have been familiar to many of the novel's readers, who would have empathized, for instance, with her poignant expression of pain after her separation from her mother: “I cannot reach her,” she cries, “she cannot reach me!” (p. 148).

The Wide, Wide World foregrounds Ellen's losses but also works to resolve how individuals can both endure and recover from such experiences.⁵ More specifically, the novel works to solve the problem in mid-nineteenth-century America of nostalgia. Defined in contemporary terms, nostalgia is “a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country; severe home-sickness.”⁶ As the definition suggests, nostalgia characterizes the cultural affect of the mid-1800s in two ways. First, the term registers the challenge of maintaining the integrity of “one's home” or domestic space in the face of vulnerable interpersonal relationships and frequent geographic moves. Second, the term points toward the early-nineteenth-century wave of immigrants who, after leaving their country of origin, or national “home,” arrived in America to secure a new one.⁷ In both cases, homesickness is the affective corollary to the literal and figurative longing for home that shaped so much of mid-nineteenth-century American culture. In particular, it reflects the experience of loss the newly established American middle class underwent as it made the transition from a collection of individuals—from different national, geographic, and familial backgrounds—to a coherent group.⁸ The search for “home,” in other words, stands as a metaphor for the middle-class search for its identity. Conversely, the recuperation of home is marked by the cessation of nostalgia, which is replaced not only with a literal home in which to live, but a national and class-based sense of home defined by feelings of comfort and belonging.⁹

Warner's antidote to nostalgia—and to the losses the term connotes—lies in a particular relationship to the material world, one that marks the cultural shift from the Age of Homespun to full-fledged consumerism. As Ann Douglas has remarked, sentimental novels such as Warner's appear to embrace consumerism; they are “courses in the shopping mentality,” and Ellen in particular represents the “quintessential pleasure of the consumer.”¹⁰ Upon closer investigation, however, The Wide, Wide World does not condone consumerism as eagerly as Douglas asserts. In fact, the novel actively resists the emerging ideology of commodity culture, representing it as a system that contributes to, rather than mediates, the problem of homesickness. Objects under consumerism are reified: they are evacuated of any human origins and become instead valued in and of themselves. Commodities may temporarily distract Ellen from the pain she feels in her longing for home, but they will never help her to recover from that pain because they threaten to replace the search for home with a search for material things. At the same time, however, the novel does not counter consumerism by embracing a return to the residual ideology of utilitarianism that defined the receding Homespun Age. In preconsumer society, objects are meant to serve only practical uses; they have no emotional meaning and, therefore, can be of no help in overcoming the state of homesickness that Ellen experiences.

In contrast to what the novel sees as these fundamentally flawed understandings of material things, The Wide, Wide World offers a third alternative, one which stands at the juncture between the overdetermined value of objects under consumerism and the purely practical value of things in the Age of Homespun. The difference lies in the type of meaning attributed to material things. As Ellen learns, by investing objects with affect, by imagining them as repositories of emotion connected with her home, she can overcome the pain—the nostalgia—of modern life. In doing so, she creates keepsakes—objects invested with the ability to maintain connections, to maintain quite literally a sense of home in the face of loss. Warner's sister, Anna, illustrates the way that keepsakes help alleviate homesickness when she writes in her biography of Susan that, after the family left their home in New York, “more and more the girl [Susan] brought up in general luxury, found in books, pictures, and her piano, the only tokens of what had been” (p. 206). The objects the Warner family brought with them from their city existence to their life on the island were the only connections they had to their previous home. As a result, such things reminded Warner of “what had been,” providing her with a means by which she could remember, and perhaps even recover a sense of, the home she had left. Although keepsakes have been viewed as a defining trope of novels like Warner's, included in the genre of domestic or sentimental fiction, how and why they play so central a role has been only tangentially addressed. By examining the way that nostalgia is mediated through objects like keepsakes, this function can be clarified, not only within The Wide, Wide World, but in terms of the broader category of domestic fiction as well.¹¹

The importance of material objects is evident in the early chapters of The Wide, Wide World, which are striking because of their preoccupation not only with Ellen's impending separation from her mother but with her acquisition of things. In preparation for their split, a result of Mrs. Montgomery's illness requiring her to go abroad without her daughter, Ellen and her mother embark upon a shopping trip. In keeping with Douglas's thesis that Ellen is the quintessential representation of nineteenth-century consumerism, the girl's initial response to the stores she visits is to be “completely bewitched” (p. 32) by “so many tempting objects” (p. 31). “From one thing to another she went,” Warner writes, “admiring and wondering; in her wildest dreams she had never imagined such beautiful things. The store was fairyland” (p. 32). While Douglas sees Ellen's fascination as evidence of Warner's uncritical stance toward consumerism, she overlooks the critique inherent in this same scene. Mrs. Montgomery tells her daughter “I am a little afraid your head will be turned” (p. 31) by the objects in the store, and the scene warns against the blinding allure that commodities can have. As Ellen, with “flushed cheek and sparkling eye” becomes engrossed in the act of choosing a Bible—comparing the “advantages of large, small, and middle-sized; black, blue, purple, and red; gilt and not gilt; clasp and no clasp”—“everything but the Bibles before her” is completely forgotten. Most significantly, and problematically, Mrs. Montgomery herself is overlooked. Warner writes, “Her little daughter at one end of the counter had forgotten there ever was such a thing as sorrow in the world; and she at the other end was bowed beneath a weight of it that was nigh to crush her” (p. 30).

Although Ellen is clearly at risk of succumbing to the preoccupation with objects that Douglas accuses her of, Mrs. Montgomery counters this tendency by continually reminding her daughter that the items for which they shop have a particular purpose. She does so by instructing Ellen in the way that objects can hold meaning not because they are “beautiful things,” but for the emotional meaning with which they can be imbued. More specifically, whereas the objects in the store threaten to seduce Ellen away from her mother—make her forget that her mother is even with her—they can also serve a different, more connective purpose. The first stop of the excursion, a pawn shop, acts as Ellen's first lesson. For at the shop Mrs. Montgomery sells a ring that once belonged to her own mother. When Ellen sees her mother sell “grandmamma's ring,” she wonders how her mother can part with an item she “loved so much” (p. 29).¹² Mrs. Montgomery qualifies her action by stating: “You need not be sorry, daughter. Jewels in themselves are the merest nothings to me; and as for the rest, it doesn't matter; I can remember my mother without any help from a trinket” (p. 29). The issue seems to be resolved, yet Warner writes, “there were tears … in Mrs. Montgomery's eyes, that showed the sacrifice had cost her something; and there were tears in Ellen's that told it was not thrown away upon her” (p. 29). Although she assures Ellen that she can do without the ring, Mrs. Montgomery's tears suggest that to sell the ring is to lose something, “the rest” of the object's meaning.

The function the ring serves is that of a sentimental object or keepsake: it helps Mrs. Montgomery “remember [her] mother” from whom she has been separated. Warner describes the process by which objects are invested with memory and affect as follows:¹³ “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 … (p. 479, italics Warner's). Evoking the tenets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century associationism, Warner claims that through an initial association with a person, place, or thing, an object can stand as a tangible marker of an intangible connection; it recalls both the memory of what is absent and the emotions connected with it.¹⁴ That the above discussion takes place in relation to a book is no coincidence; in fact, the first recorded use of the word “keepsake” was in reference to a book exchanged between two women.¹⁵ This etymology suggests that objects that serve mnemonic functions can, like books, be read: they are attributed with narrative, imbued with the story of the past. Ellen exemplifies this relationship between memory and narrative when she tries to recollect an old acquaintance by “reading memory's long story over again” (p. 449). In a culture preoccupied with the power of reading, from novels, magazines, and manuals, to phrenological bumps and physiological characteristics, it is not surprising that objects too should be viewed as readable.¹⁶

With the lesson of the ring fresh in her mind, Ellen embarks with her mother on the next stage of the shopping trip. Together they purchase a long list of items, most importantly a writing desk, “dressing-box” (p. 32), “an ivory leaf-cutter, a paper-folder, a pounce-box, a ruler … a neat little silver pencil … some drawing-pencils, India-rubber, and sheets of drawing-paper” (p. 35). Each of these objects is meant to keep Ellen's relationship with her mother alive when they are separated. Although they initially stand in the store as commodities, Warner illustrates how such objects develop a more personal function, how they can be invested with emotional meaning. When Mrs. Montgomery later packs them into Ellen's trunk, Warner writes that

it went through and through her heart that it was the very last time … she would ever see or touch even the little inanimate things that belonged to her [Ellen]. … It was with a kind of lingering unwillingness to quit her hold of them that one thing after another was stowed carefully and neatly away in the trunk. She felt it was love's last act. …

(pp. 59-60)

Ellen's objects evoke almost as much emotion in Mrs. Montgomery as does Ellen herself. They emphasize her love for her daughter and the reality that, after their separation, “sight, and hearing, and touch must all have done henceforth for ever” (p. 60). The writing desk, dressing box, and other objects will provide the only connection between mother and daughter—between Ellen and her home—once they are parted.

Just as the sight of Ellen's things causes her mother to feel pain “through and through her heart” because they emphasize their impending separation, so are the objects meant to mitigate the pain such separation involves. In The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry explores the connection between pain and objects, yoking the alleviation of physical suffering with the existence and structure of material things. Taking the example of a chair, Scarry argues that the chair will “accommodate and eliminate the problem” of body weight, for in and through its very form the chair “perceives” and thereby works to relieve the pain of a tired body.¹⁷ The shape of the chair mimes the body, becoming the antithesis of the body in pain. The chair, in other words, holds two positions at once: evoking the presence of pain and its promised absence. Although Scarry is interested in physical pain, the ability of objects to symbolize both presence and absence can be applied to emotional pain as well. For here too objects become the shape, or perhaps more appropriately the hope, of “perceived-pain-wished-gone.” They do so not by structurally miming the body in pain, but by structurally representing the memory of what has been lost. When an object is given to one person by another, it becomes a symbol of the relationship between them. If they are then separated, the object becomes the marker of both the pain of that separation and its hoped-for-relief.¹⁸

This process becomes clear when Ellen and her mother return home from their shopping excursion. When Ellen examines her packages, she is overwhelmed by excitement: “One survey of her riches could by no means satisfy Ellen. For some time she pleased herself with going over and over the contents of the box, finding each time something new to like” (pp. 40-41). But Ellen has learned the underlying purpose of these gifts, and in the midst of her pleasure she suddenly processes the knowledge that the objects she now holds signify the relationship she is about to lose:

At length she closed [the work-box], and keeping it still in her lap, sat awhile looking thoughtfully into the fire; till turning toward her mother she met her gaze, fixed mournfully, almost tearfully, on herself. The box was instantly shoved aside, and getting up and bursting into tears, Ellen went to her. “Oh, dear mother,” she said, “I wish they were all back in the store, if I could only keep you!”

(pp. 40-41)

Warner is palpably aware that objects cannot actually replace people, yet she also knows that they can temporarily ease the pain of separation. And although Ellen would rather “keep” her mother and return the boxes to the store, she also knows that she must make do with what she has, using her new objects to maintain the about-to-be severed mother-daughter bond. For when she asks Mrs. Montgomery, “Is there no help for it, mamma?” her mother simply replies: “There is none” (p. 41).

Although Ellen seems to have learned the difference between objects that sever and those that maintain connections, this lesson is reinforced when she goes on a second shopping trip, this time alone. Her experience is completely different when the act of shopping is undertaken outside of the emotional context that characterizes the previous excursion. Warner writes that once in the store, Ellen

stood irresolute in the middle of the floor. … Clerks frequently passed her, crossing the store in all directions, but they were always bustling along in a great hurry of business; they did not seem to notice her at all. … She felt confused, and almost confounded, by the incessant hum of voices, and moving crowd of strange people all around her, while her little figure stood alone and unnoticed in the midst of them; and there seemed no prospect that she would be able to gain the ear or the eye of a single person.

(p. 45)

When Ellen finally gathers the strength to approach the clerk behind the counter, she is further overwhelmed by the way that a consumer culture impedes, distracts from, and thwarts interpersonal interactions. The clerk is condescending toward her requests and impatient with her uncertainty, so that Ellen quickly “wish[es] herself out of the store” (p. 46). In contrast to the earlier shopping trip, in which objects are sought in order to maintain interpersonal connections, this scene represents the way that commodity culture can leave individuals feeling isolated and alone. Here objects are more important than people and the pursuit of them seems to drain even the most basic forms of civility from human interactions. In response to this hostile culture, Ellen is left “confused” (p. 45) and with “feelings of mortification” (p. 48) that are reflected in “one or two rebel tears” (p. 48). Her experience reinforces her mother's warning against her “head being turned” by the vast array of objects available for purchase. The feelings of alienation Ellen undergoes in the store anticipate those that she will experience throughout the novel when she is separated from her loved ones. The world of consumer culture, like the homesickness she is about to experience, stand in negative contrast to the comfort and meaning with which keepsakes are invested.

By showing the ways that consumerism can both dissipate and reinforce feelings of comfort and connection, Warner reveals that it is not shopping that Ellen loves, but rather the experience of purchasing objects that are to be invested with meaning. The meaning is not only emotional, however, but social as well, for Ellen loses not just any home, but a middle-class home marked by certain emotional and social conventions. As a result, her objects are meant to recall the characteristics of home as much as they are meant to reduce her feelings of homesickness. Her mother informs her: “My gifts will serve as reminders for you if you are ever tempted to forget my lessons. If you fail to send me letters … I think the desk will cry shame upon you. And if you ever go an hour with a hole in your stocking … I hope the sight of your work-box will make you blush” (p. 37). Mrs. Montgomery's words describe the type of home that Ellen must remember in and through her objects. In Richard Bushman's words, “Ellen has the skills of a well-bred young woman,”¹⁹ and her objects will help to remind her of these middle-class ideals. Ellen understands and agrees to the terms, assuring her mother: “I will try to use them in the way that I know you wish me to; that will be the best way I can thank you” (p. 37). From that point on, her possessions remind Ellen of the values that define the home she is about to lose and the standards according to which the recuperation of that home must stand. Her possessions do not simply perform useful and practical functions—such as holding items of clothing or writing utensils—but emotional and, here, even social functions, representing the tenets of middle-class life—its values, refinements, and customs.

The objects serve their purpose immediately when Ellen leaves her home and journeys to her Aunt Fortune's farm. Upon her arrival, Ellen recognizes that her aunt's home is very different from the one she has just left. The comparison is based on the objects Ellen sees around her. Fortune's things are meant to serve only the most basic of functions. Her room, for instance,

looked to Ellen very comfortless … [it] was very bare of furniture. … A dressing-table, pier-table, or whatnot, stood between the windows, but it was only a half-circular top of pine board set upon three very long, bare-looking legs. … The coverlid … came in for a share of her displeasure, being of homemade white and blue worsted mixed with cotton, exceeding thick and heavy.

(p. 102)

As the critique inherent in the word “comfortless” expresses, Ellen correlates the physical comfort, or refinement, of objects with the emotional comfort she defines as home. The adjectives that characterize her aunt's things—“comfortless,” “bare,” “bare-looking”—emphasize the fact that those things are practical and functional: they serve the purpose for which they were made and nothing more. As Ellen notes, “her tea-spoon was not silver; her knife could not boast of being either sharp or bright; and her fork was certainly made for any thing else in the world but comfort and convenience, being of only two prongs, and those so far apart” (p. 106). Absent from her aunt's possessions is the refinement that Ellen has learned marks meaningful objects. The purely functional and “homemade” aspects of the house are what Ellen rebels against.

Ellen measures her aunt's home not only by what it contains, but by whether or not her own objects belong in it. As she tells Alice Humphreys, a neighbor with whom she becomes friendly: “Mama gave me a nice dressing-box before I came away, but I found very soon this was a queer place for a dressing-box to come to. Why, Miss Alice, if I take out my brush or comb I haven't any table to lay them on but one that's too high, and my poor dressing-box has to stay on the floor” (p. 175). That her aunt's is a “queer place” for Ellen's “neat little japanned dressing-box” (p. 32) “to come to” underscores the incompatibility between her aunt's home and the one Ellen recalls through her possessions. Ellen's personification of her things suggests that not only does her dressing box not belong at her aunt's, but she does not either.

In response to her recognition that certain types of objects correspond with certain types of homes, Ellen uses her mother's gifts to recreate the comfort she misses at her aunt's. Her “books, writing-desk, and work-box were then bestowed very carefully in the one” closet and “her coats and dresses” in the other (p. 144). Finally, “the remainder of her things were gathered up from the floor and neatly arranged in the trunk again” (p. 144). After she has arranged her things about the room, “Ellen's satisfaction was unbounded” (p. 144); she has used the objects that her mother gave her to restructure the “comfortless” environment around her, creating a semblance of the home she has lost and to which she so painfully longs to return. In doing so, she invests her surroundings with meaning, with physical and emotional comfort, a process that her aunt metaphorically tries to reverse when she dyes Ellen's white stockings and “nice white darning-cotton” “slate colour” (p. 113), so that they do not need to be regularly washed. Ellen is so distressed at her aunt's action that she “seemed in imagination to see all her white things turning brown” (p. 113), an image that records the larger fear that her upbringing will be tarnished by her stay on the farm. Sensing that her mother would disapprove of her aunt's definition of material things, Ellen resolves to “keep her trunk well locked up” (p. 113), as if by protecting her things, she can protect her middle-class sentiments from the less-refined influence of country life.

While Fortune's home is unlike Ellen's ideal because it defines things in the residual terms of use, terms that are opposed to the store-bought objects to which Ellen is attached, another home offers her a different contrast. The Marshmans, a local family, befriend Ellen and invite her to spend the holidays with them, in their large and inviting home. Unlike her aunt's house, the Marshman residence and its objects more closely resonate with Ellen's sense of what a home should be. As Warner writes:

The room to which her [Ellen's] companion led her was the very picture of comfort. It was not too large, furnished with plain old-fashioned furniture, and lighted and warmed by a cheerful wood-fire. The very old brass-headed andirons that stretched themselves out upon the hearth with such a look of being at home, seemed to say, “You have come to the right place for comfort.”

(p. 287)

Finding an apparent match between the type of objects and the type of home that offer “comfort,” Ellen at first feels safe and happy with her new friends. While such comforts would seem to correspond with Ellen's ideal of home, however, she is faced with yet another test of what home really means. Whereas Fortune's home is marked by its paucity of comforting objects, the Marshman home is noteworthy for its surplus. After dinner, for instance, Ellen “munch[es] almonds and raisins, admiring the brightness of the mahogany, and the richly cut and coloured glass, and silver decanter stands, which were reflected in it” (pp. 283-84). Though these two homes take different forms, the basic problem is the same. While Fortune's objects lack emotional meaning because they are purely functional, the Marshmans' things preclude affect because, rather than helping maintain memories or relationships, they are valuable in and of themselves. The result is that the Marshman home, too, lacks the precise feeling that Ellen seeks; emotional meaning is ultimately evacuated from it. Indeed, over the course of the Marshman chapters, Ellen begins to succumb to her earlier fascination with things. After a “day of unbroken and unclouded [Christmas] pleasure,” Warner writes, “Ellen's last act [i]s to take another look at her Cologne bottle, gloves, pincushion, grapes, and paper of sugar-plums” (p. 305) before going to bed. Ellen is seduced by the objects around her, by the very idea that she possesses them. As a result, she becomes more interested in her objects than in the people around her.

Ellen's seduction is checked, however, in a scene that evokes the early, anxiety-ridden shopping trip. When another Marshman guest suggests that Ellen would “give a great deal” (p. 318) to have received a pair of earrings like those the guest has been given for a Christmas present, Ellen replies: “I don't think I care much for such things,—I would rather have the money” (p. 318). The other children taunt her for saying so, for claiming to desire money over more personal gifts, and inform Mr. Marshman, their host, of her request. On New Year's Day, Ellen arrives at the breakfast table to find the table napkins “in all sorts of disorder,—sticking up in curious angles, some high, some low, some half folded” (p. 326). Ellen's own napkin, however, “lay quite flat” (pp. 326-27) and while the other napkins hide small gifts, Ellen finds under hers “a clean bank-note” (p. 327). As in the humiliating trip to the fabric store, “the blood rushe[s] to her cheeks and the tears to her eyes,” as she stares at the “unfortunate bank-bill, which she detested with all her heart” (p. 327). Unwilling to accept the “gift,” Ellen asks Mr. Marshman to take back the bill and, moreover, not to think of her as someone who would want “money for my present” (p. 327). The bank-note, a type of Marxian super-commodity, is the most offensive “gift” Ellen can imagine. Not only is it impersonal and uninvested with emotional meaning, but it completely undermines the sense of home that objects have come to symbolize for her. Far from reinforcing interpersonal connections, money, because it is not invested with affect, actually distances people from one another. Mr. Marshman acknowledges as much when he, in turn, feels ashamed of having given a piece of money as a present. When Ellen gives him her gift—a needlecase she made herself—he says with chagrin that Ellen has “come and made me a present” (p. 328) and that he has none to give her.

Despite these unsuccessful attempts to find an approximation of the home she longs for, Ellen eventually does find what she seeks. Her friend, Alice Humphreys, lives in a more suitable environment, one notably filled with objects with which Ellen can immediately identify:

The carpet covered only the middle of the floor; the rest was painted white. The furniture was common but neat as wax. Ample curtains of white dimity clothed the three windows, and lightly draped the bed. The toilet-table was covered with snow-white muslin, and by the toilet-cushion stood, late as it was, a glass of flowers.

(pp. 163-64)

Alice's possessions remind Ellen of her own, for they tell a similar story and evoke in the young girl similar feelings. Here the “ample” curtains, the bed drape, the toilet-table cover, and the unseasonable “glass of flowers” all suggest to Ellen something more than the functionality of her aunt's possessions, yet something simpler (more “common”) than those of the Marshmans. The Humphreys' home is modest yet comfortable; the objects in it do not overwhelm the family but create an environment in which people and relationships can flourish. Their middle-class status marks a happy medium between her aunt's and the Marshmans' situations and is characterized by its ability to balance physical and emotional comfort, by its possession of refined things that are not only physically pleasing, but emotionally comforting as well. Ellen finds here the semblance of the home she seeks, a discovery Alice encourages when she tells Ellen: “I want you to know it [her room] and feel at home in it; for whenever you can run away from your aunt's this is your home,—do you understand?” (pp. 162-63).

Alice's offer foreshadows the time when Ellen adopts Alice's home as her own, becoming a honorary member of the Humphreys family after Alice dies. Still later Ellen takes her place as a full member of the home as John Humphreys's wife. Before she can do so, however, before she can reclaim a personal home for herself, the novel redefines Ellen's search as one for a national home as well. In fact, just as she is moving into the Humphreys parsonage she is forced to relocate once again, this time to Scotland. She does so in response to her mother's dying request that Ellen live with her maternal relatives, so that the “old happy home of my childhood will be yours, my Ellen” (p. 489). By leaving America, Ellen traces the history not only of her fictional family, but of the individuals who gave up their national “home” to move to America during the early 1800s. Ellen's personal experience of homesickness thereby takes on the broader definition of nostalgia for one's country, for what Hawthorne called “Our Old Home.” The Wide, Wide World is striking for its emphasis on the different nationalities of its characters—Swiss, Scottish, British, Dutch—who have only recently immigrated to America.²⁰ Ellen herself is a first generation American, and her mother's desire that she visit her extended family abroad underscores the emotional import attached to one's country of origin. Mrs. Vawse, a woman of Swiss origin who lives in a home built far up in the mountains, embodies the nostalgia for one's native country that permeates the novel. When Ellen and Alice travel to see Mrs. Vawse, Ellen notices right away that the house and the woman who occupies it are “not American” in appearance (p. 190). Mrs. Vawse has reconstructed a Swiss-style home on the New York hillside, and when Ellen asks her, “why you loved better to live up here than down where it is warmer,” the old woman answers: “It is for the love of my old home and the memory of my young days. … If I have one unsatisfied wish … it is to see my Alps again; but that will never be” (p. 192). Fending off a homesickness for her native country, Mrs. Vawse uses the material things around her to recreate her “old home” as she adapts to her new.

Although Ellen's transatlantic trip symbolically retraces the steps of early-nineteenth-century American immigrants, her experience in Scotland ultimately reverses the direction of the nostalgic impulse present throughout the novel. It does so by identifying home not as a country other than America, but as America itself. The expectation is that, in moving to Scotland and joining her mother's relatives, Ellen will give up her American identity. As one friend asserts, “So you are going to be a Scotchwoman after all” (p. 494), and Ellen's Scottish relatives do their best to persuade Ellen to give up her ties to America. They attempt to do so, in part, through the objects she has brought with her from America, especially the Bible her mother gave to her when they parted and a copy of Pilgrim's Progress given to her by her future husband, John. Knowing that these books contain memories of, and therefore a connection to, Ellen's American life, her relatives try to erase the associations that such objects hold by taking away Pilgrim's Progress and threatening to confiscate her Bible as well. They also try to convince Ellen to give up her American name. Her uncle tells her that “it is right to love” her American friends “if they were kind to you, but as your aunt says, that is the past. It is not necessary to go back to it. Forget that you were American, Ellen,—you belong to me; your name is not Montgomery anymore,—it is Lindsay” (p. 510). Not only do they want to “adopt” Ellen, but they disdain America in general, describing it as “the backwoods” and asserting that Ellen “must learn to have no nationality but” theirs (p. 505).

Despite these efforts to make her abandon her American identity, Ellen refuses to do so. To her uncle's command that she “forget” that she is American, Ellen silently rebels, saying to herself, “Forget indeed!” (p. 510). More than simply national identities, Ellen thinks of the difference between Scotland and America in terms of her definition of a personal and familial home. Warner writes: “Alone, and quietly stretched on her bed, very naturally Ellen's thoughts went back to the last time she had had a headache, at home, as she always called it to herself” (p. 529, Warner's italics). As she had done at her aunt's, Ellen uses her keepsakes to create a semblance of home in her grandparents' house: “Her beloved desk took its place on a table in the middle of the floor. … Her work-box was accommodated with a smaller stand near the window” (p. 527). While arranging her “little sanctum till she had all things to her mind,” she realizes that it lacks “a glass of flowers” (p. 527), a decoration that recalls her first glimpse of Alice's home, the place to which Ellen feels she belongs. Ellen's nostalgia for her own “old home” signifies a new generation identified specifically with America. By representing Ellen's nostalgia for America, The Wide, Wide World provides its readers with a medium through which their own identification with their new home might take hold. By distancing the novel's readers from America, in other words, Ellen's return to Scotland evokes a homesickness not for their native countries, but for America itself.

This representation of nostalgia helps to define the difference between the novel's two endings: the chapter that Warner originally intended to end her work and the chapter that was ultimately published as the novel's conclusion. In the published ending, read by Warner's contemporaries, John promises to retrieve Ellen from her ancestral home in Scotland and return her safely and happily to her national and familial home as his wife. Despite its optimistic outlook, however, the published ending is somewhat surprising. Although the narrative moves insistently toward a recovery of home for Ellen, in this version that return home is not described; Ellen is never shown returning to America or to the parsonage she thinks of so fondly. Yet Warner did complete a chapter in which a more satisfying conclusion takes place, one that would have put her readers at ease about Ellen's search for home, for a place in which her objects and she belong. In this ending Ellen returns to America as John's wife and as the mistress of his house. Moreover, as Ellen enters her new home, she utters “an exclamation of surprise and fond pleasure” (p. 571):

around her, on every hand, were the very loved things she had been used to see at the Carra-Carra parsonage. … There stood the dear old book-case with its books—the sofas, the cupboard, the pictures,—yes, even Alice's cabinet of curiosities,—the same table in the middle of the floor. Ellen stood fixed, with clasped hands of pleasure and tender recollection, and eyes that were making too feeling a recognition of its objects.

(p. 571)

This ending is clearly cathartic: Ellen is restored not only to America and to her home, but to the objects that hold meaning for her, which make home what it is. Midway through the chapter Warner marks the end of Ellen's homesickness. As Ellen embraces her father-in-law, Mr. Humphreys, Warner writes that Ellen “felt that the old wound was healed at last” (p. 574).

Although this chapter provides closure—not only to Ellen but to the novel's readers—it was never published; the nineteenth-century editions of the novel end with the deferral, literally, of home and, consequently, the continuance of nostalgia. Although the omission of Warner's intended ending may have been simply the result of an editorial attempt to limit the novel's length, the decision to end the work with Ellen's return home still pending may have ensured The Wide, Wide World's successful reception by readers. The reason lies in the function of nostalgia itself. While it persists, nostalgia maintains a longing for home and, therefore, maintains an active pursuit of, and connection to, the past. Conversely, without the homesickness that nostalgia creates, the desire and therefore the effort to return home are not only given up, but also in some way forgotten; the past recedes and the present becomes permanent. Objects, for instance, take on different functions when they are not used for sentimental or nostalgic purposes, as the unpublished chapter reveals. Upon her marriage to John and her return to America, Ellen receives an “old escritoire” (p. 581) with “beautiful workmanship and costly antique garniture” (p. 582). A reminder of the smaller writing desk, the keepsake once meant to maintain Ellen's bond with her mother and therefore her home, the desk has altered not only its form but its function. As John explains, “This piece of furniture … belonged to my father's mother and grandmother and great-grandmother, and now it has come to your hands” (p. 583). An heirloom, as opposed to a keepsake, the desk tells not the story of loss or a search for home, but of the stability and permanence of John's family, which will continue its advancement through Ellen's possession of its material things. As George Kubler asserts in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962): “From … things a shape in time emerges. A visible portrait of the collective identity, whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self-image reflected in things is a guide and a point of reference to the group for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given to posterity.”²¹ In functioning as an heirloom rather than a keepsake, the desk marks the past as a memory not to be sought and regained, but to be carried into the future. Nostalgia is thus eliminated; the past becomes not something to mourn or recapture—to feel homesick for—but something with which to define one's identity and to propel oneself forward. Echoing the heirloom's meaning, John says to Ellen: “our happiness has a foundation and may stretch into the future far forward as faith can look” (p. 583).

In other words, if the novel had included Warner's original ending, thereby doing away with Ellen's search for home, it would have also done away with the nostalgic impulse so crucial to the novel's emotional weight, an experience also central to the novel's readers. As a form of processing tremendous change, nostalgia is a self-protective way to move gradually into the future while psychologically letting go of the past. The need for nostalgia lessens as a new identity evolves and takes hold. For a class in the throes of self-formation, to give up the longing or memory of home that the novel allows them to experience would be to give up part of its identity, a process it was moving toward but not entirely ready to complete.²² In contrast, by letting the hoped-for return home ambiguously remain still in the future, the novel leaves in place the feeling of nostalgia that pervades its pages, refusing completely to relieve it while simultaneously anticipating that relief. Readers could thereby continue to negotiate their transition from their old home to new, from non-American to American, from past to present.

The Wide, Wide World itself became a type of keepsake—an object, in the form of a book—which helped to mediate its reader's experience of nostalgia or loss. Given the original reference of the term “keepsake” to a book and the contemporary popularity of keepsake gift books—“literary annuals consisting of collections of verse, prose, and illustrations”—the idea that a novel like Warner's could serve an affective function makes tremendous sense.²³ The novel was certainly imbued with emotional import by Warner and her family, who seem to have viewed it as a way to help them overcome the experience of being separated from their home. As Warner writes after she had distributed the first copies of the novel: “One lovely red-edged copy I gave to Anna for a Christmas present; and she said she had seen nothing in a long while that had so reminded her of old Christmas times as the look of those red edges” (Anna Warner, p. 333). The book in its mere physical “red-edged” form calls to Anna's mind the family history of “old Christmas times”; the novel connects Anna to a prior moment in her life, a time identified with the emotions of home. Eventually, letters from admiring readers made their way into the Warner household, further connecting the novel's author to its readers. Anna writes, “in time, all this broke up our solitude, and both friends and strangers began to remember and look for us” (p. 360). The book quite literally helped the Warners reunite with their old, familiar world.

The novel served a similar function for its middle-class readers by connecting them to one another. The extent of those connections is revealed in one admirer's letter to Warner:

It is now nearly a year … since I first met with your incomparable work, The Wide, Wide World, which I read with the most heartfelt sympathy and delight. I immediately purchased it as a suitable gift for the thirteenth anniversary of my Ellen,—and recommended it to every one with whom I took the slightest interest,—and now every reading friend I have possesses a copy, and enjoys it as I do. During an illness of my husband (a grave man of fifty-seven), I read it aloud to him. … My oldest daughter of twenty (not very fond of reading) is charmed with it, and my Ellen (its owner) has read it three time alone, and as many times aloud, to a deeply interested circle of auditors.

(Anna Warner, p. 355)

The author of the letter articulates the way that Warner's novel bound its readers together. It did so, like a keepsake, through the act of exchange, both physically between family members and verbally through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Those recommendations are qualified, however, by the author's statement that they were made “to every one in whom I took the slightest interest,” the implication being that not everyone should have access to the novel or to the story it tells. In addition, the emphasis placed by the letter's author on “every reading friend” implies a distinction between reading and nonreading persons. These statements suggest what Anna Warner recorded other people stating outright: “not to have read the book is not to be in fashion,” or, as a “woman of fashion” exclaimed with “an expressive gesture,” “‘My dear, you know, one must read it’!” (pp. 359, 345). Just as Ellen's objects are invested with social value, so too is Warner's text. To own and, more importantly, to have read The Wide, Wide World was a marker of social standing, creating a community of readers that identified itself in part through its familiarity with Warner's popular novel.²⁴

Sentimental novels like Warner's, then, might be characterized not only by the recurrent use of keepsakes in their pages, but as keepsakes themselves that register a range of losses and assist their readers in the recovery from them. Those losses are primarily thought of in terms of the loss of home—or the sense of home—that the experience of nostalgia identifies. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance, can be seen as an object that negotiated the loss accompanying abolition by using the home as its central and recurrent motif. As Philip Fisher argues in another context, “the key detail [to the book] … is that … Tom no longer lives in the cabin and never returns there. It is therefore … the home he doesn't occupy, but to which all of his thoughts are directed as the home to which he would return if he could. The title therefore asserts his homelessness, his possession of a home that he has not yet reached.”²⁵ A metaphor for the sense of “homelessness” that would accompany the abolition of slavery, Uncle Tom's cabin and Uncle Tom's Cabin helped readers to process the urgent, though overwhelming change that resulted. The preoccupation with home and the attention to objects in other sentimental novels such as Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? reinforce the assertion that nostalgia for the home is central to the sentimental novel, and that nostalgia is resolved through the attribution of affect to the material world.²⁶ In fact, sentimentalism might be defined in these very terms: as the tangible representation of the past, a representation that permits an individual or a group to negotiate an irretrievable but necessary loss.²⁷ That the form of mediation takes place through the possession of objects, including books, helps to account for the widespread popularity of domestic fiction among middle-class Americans, who seem to have used such things as a way to process the alienation and loss that permeated the historical moment in which they lived.

Mid-nineteenth-century American culture was marked by a homesickness or nostalgia that, in her search for both a familial and a national home, Susan Warner's character Ellen embodies. Like the fictional Ellen, the middle class negotiated its experience of loss by correlating the emotional comfort of “home”—as both a physical and psychological site—with the physical objects available to them through the material world. Middle-class people imagined such objects as being invested with emotion and memory, with meaning that distinguished their function from the utilitarianism of the Homespun Age and the reification of emerging consumerism. Standing at the juncture between these two distinct cultural definitions of material things, keepsakes became the focus of middle-class life because they represented emotional continuity in the face of great personal and social change. This investment of objects with affect included an attachment to books like Warner's that evoked and even encouraged their readers to feel nostalgia, to experience a longing for home, in order to overcome those same feelings. Like Ellen, who uses the keepsakes given to her by her mother as a way to guide and gauge her search for a new home, the newly established middle class was able to absorb the process of its formation—and the loss that formation entailed—through the physical object, the keepsake, of The Wide, Wide World.

Notes

1. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World, afterword by Jane Tompkins (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987). All quotations from the novel will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. I would like to thank Nancy Armstrong, Michael T. Gilmore, and Cynthia B. Ricciardi for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

2. For more on Susan Warner, see Edward Halsey Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne Publishers, n.d.); Mary Kelly, Private Women, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Olivia Stokes, Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1925); Anna Warner, Susan Warner (“Elizabeth Wetherell”) (New York, 1909).

3. Anna Warner, Susan Warner, p. 333; subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

4. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 103.

5. For recent criticism of The Wide, Wide World, see Erica R. Bauermeister, “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World, and Hope Leslie: The Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 8, No. 1 (1991), 17-28; Richard H. Brodhead, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 13-47; Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels,” American Quarterly, 38, No. 2 (1986), 223-42; Grace Ann Hovet and Theodore R Hovet, “Identity Development in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World: Relationship, Performance, and Construction,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 8, No. 1 (1991), 3-16; Nancy Schnog, “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World,” Genders, 4 (1989), 11-25; Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Tompkins, Afterword, The Wide, Wide World, pp. 584-608; Isabelle White, “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity: Susan Warner's Contradictions in The Wide, Wide World,” American Studies, 31, No. 2 (1990), 31-41; Susan Williams, “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship,” American Quarterly, 42, No. 4 (1990), 565-86; Helen Papashvily, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1956).

6. The Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 535.

7. On the influx of immigrants between the years 1840 and 1860, see Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), and Philip A. M. Taylor, The Distant Magnet (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971).

8. For scholarship on the culture of sentiment and the nineteenth-century middle class, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).

9. For more on nostalgia, see Peter N. Carroll, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1990); Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian; Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989); David C. Stineback, Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia in the American Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976).

10. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), p. 64.

11. Dobson has claimed that the keepsake is the formal trope of the sentimental novel. See “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” American Literature, 69, No. 2 (1997), 263-88. In addition, critics have tended to analyze the relationship between sentimental objects and sentimental novels in terms of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. I have chosen Warner's novel in order to examine the way readers of sentimental fiction might have seen themselves not in terms of abolitionism, but of their own identity as a class. For criticism on Stowe, see Gillian Brown, “Sentimental Possession,” in Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 39-60; Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lynn Wardley, “Relic, Fetish, Femmage: The Aesthetics of Sentiment in the Work of Stowe,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 203-20.

12. In a different analysis, Tompkins views the ring as a symbol of “the tacit system of solidarity that exists among women” (Sensational Designs, p. 163).

13. For information on exchange and gift theory, see Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), and Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1967).

14. For more on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century associationism, see theorists like David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), or the works of David Hartley.

15. “She sent me a little neat pocket volume, which I accept … as just the keepsake,” in The Oxford English Dictionary, p. 377.

16. For more on reading in nineteenth-century America, see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984); Bushman, The Refinement of America; Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America; Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

17. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 289.

18. In a different context, Hannah Arendt argues that “in order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard and remembered and then transferred, reified as it were, into things. … The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and hear and will remember, and second on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 95. Although Arendt is talking specifically about works of art, and not what she calls “consumer goods” or “use objects,” the principle is similar to what I am arguing here. In order to make something real, even an absence, it must first be made present through a tangible object. For the importance the mere presence of things holds, see Robert Plant Armstrong, The Affecting Presence: An Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), and The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962).

19. Bushman, p. 288.

20. Even the Humphreys are “English born,” though, as Alice tells Ellen, “you may count me half American if you like, for I have spent rather more than half my life here” (p. 174). The qualification of “half” is what the novel, in part, moves to erase, making all immigrants fully part of their new “home.”

21. Kubler, p. 9.

22. Perhaps another reason the original ending was withheld was because it incorporates the world of consumerism into the novel in a way that is resisted throughout the rest of the book. Inside the inherited desk is “a certain concealed drawer” (p. 582), which contains “gold and silver pieces and bank bills” (p. 582). “[H]ere, Ellie,” John states, “you will always find what you want in this kind. I shall never ask you how you spend it. … You are to be my steward in all that concerns the interior arrangements of the household” (p. 582). Just as the need for keepsakes evaporates, and just as Ellen finally recovers the home she has remembered and sought, the symbols of consumerism—against which she has fought throughout the entire novel—return. Money does enables Ellen to maintain the home that she has so arduously sought, yet the very function objects have played throughout the novel begins to come undone, suggesting the corrosive effects consumerism has on the material world as a place of affect. In one of the last lines of the book, Ellen marks this shift. Looking at the inherited desk she muses: “How long such an insignificant thing … outlasts its more dignified possessors” (p. 583). That the desk is now “insignificant” stands in stark contrast to Ellen's focus on objects, including her own writing desk, throughout the novel. The final chapter, then, naturalizes the rise of consumer culture; it is complicit in encouraging consumer culture's role both in middle-class existence and nineteenth-century life.

23. Oxford English Dictionary, p. 377.

24. Among the many indexes of the novel's popularity is its appearance in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, read by the heroine, Jo March. See also Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Aracino Zboray, “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England,” American Quarterly, 48, No. 4 (1996), 587-622. This essay documents the way that sentimental novels functioned as meaningful objects, though it does not suggest why they do.

25. Fisher, Hard Facts, pp. 119-20. The idealistic presence of the Quaker settlement exists, as Fisher also points out, in contrast to the continual absence of the cabin; see p. 111.

26. For an excellent analysis of Caroline Kirkland's novel, see Lori Merish, “‘The Hand of Refined Taste’ in the Frontier Landscape: Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow? and the Feminization of American Consumerism,” American Quarterly, 45 (1993), 485-523.

27. As Dolf Sternberger writes, sentimentalism conceives of the novel as “precious memento” “because it painfully relives the sweet sensations and once again sheds the long-dried tears, in short, because it evokes the totally bygone ‘scenes’ and lends the genre an admittedly specious permanence … the scene and the pathos alone do not suffice; here the desire for giving permanence to the scene and the pathos in the locked-up interior, for making sighs and tears repeatable till the end of life, giving introspection a tangible possession—that device, the memento, has once again become the scene,” in Panorama of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), p. 62.