SOURCE: Ashworth, Suzanne M. “Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Conduct Literature, and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.” Legacy 17, no. 2 (2000): 141-64.

[In the following excerpt, Ashworth explains the thematic significance of Ellen's voracious reading and finds that this characteristic is an important mechanism of identity construction in The Wide, Wide World.]

“THE EYES OF HER MIND”: READING WITH SELF-APPLICATION

If [nineteenth-century] women readers were to begin with the interchangeable maxims “read with purpose” and “read no novels,” then they were supposed to end with an eye to their own betterment, translating purpose into self-application—into a regimen of self-examination and self-correction that was inspired by select texts and interpretive exercises. In archetypal terms, reading with self-application was supposed to create cultivated icons of ideal femininity. In the process, this trajectory of self-improvement quelled the threat of women's reading with the rubric of middle-class female virtue: piety, submissiveness, and benevolence. With successive portraits of its heroine reading, The Wide, Wide World intervenes in this mode of psychic construction, dramatizing the interplay between the eyes of Ellen Montgomery's mind, the book before her, and conduct-book calls for self-correction. Through it, we glimpse the makings of an ideal.

Because reading was such a volatile activity for women, advice manuals advocated close surveillance of women readers. Indeed, the manuals themselves served as instruments of that surveillance. As they mastered a self-proctored domestic curriculum, women were instructed to turn the conduct book's censorious vision on themselves. “Would my young reader belong to the model class of women?” Wise queries in representative tones. “Then she must turn the eyes of her mind upon herself …” [Harvey Newcomb, Newcomb's Young Ladies Guide, 1846, 186]. Belonging to “the model class of women” required a self-command that encompassed a woman's capacity to rise early, to wear clean underclothes, to wash every part of her skin daily, to chew food properly, to resist displays of irritation or anger, and to remain resolutely focused on her domestic and social duties. As Margaret Coxe writes, “We have thoughts to regulate, imaginations to control, tempers to subdue, a body of sin to destroy, appetites to bring into subjection; but how can we proceed in our work, and learn our weak points in order to guard against them, unless we turn our serious and constant attention to what is passing there?” (57). In essence, conduct books turned a woman's vision inward, and viable self-cultivation depended on her ability to survey herself for weak or ungoverned elements of her psychic and social character. This unrelenting system of self-examination effectively closed the gap between individual and cultural dimensions as productive self-examination wielded assessments of self that mirrored cultural notions of admirable and appropriate femininity.¹

Actively negotiating this aspect of conduct book ideology, The Wide, Wide World establishes an intimate correlation between reading, self-examination, and self-correction. In one instance, for example, Ellen's reading suffuses a self-punishing internal monologue as she repents a display of anger directed toward William Gillespie, an adolescent guest in the Marshman household at Christmastime: “‘[I]t was not a bit like peace-making or meek at all,’ Ellen said to herself. She had been reading that morning the fifth chapter of Matthew, and it ran in her head, ‘Blessed are the meek,’—‘Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God’” (317). The scripture “in [Ellen's] head” becomes a vehicle of self-surveillance and regulation as she strives “to get back a pleasant feeling toward her young companions, and pray[s] that she might not be angry at any thing they should say” (317). In this responsive act, Ellen takes the Word inside herself, and reading—specifically Bible reading—becomes an instrument of behavior modification, an interior gauge of right conduct, right mind, right womanhood.²

Predictably, the Bible occupies a sacrosanct position within the conduct of female reading, and Ellen is clearly modeling “good” reading behaviors in this scene. Newcomb, for instance, devotes an entire chapter to Bible reading in his Young Lady's Guide, and Wise urges women to “Adopt [the Bible] for your daily companion. Read it thoroughly, patiently, carefully. Read a portion of it daily, on your knees, pausing at each sentence, and asking its great Author to teach you its import” (192). More significant, Newcomb argues that women should read scripture “with self-application”: “Whenever you have discovered any truth ask what bearing it has upon present duty,” he writes; “If it relates to spiritual affections, compare it with the state of your own heart. If it relates to the spirit and temper of Christians, in their intercourse with one another, or with the world, compare it with your own conduct” (84). The verse in Ellen's head encodes the process of reading with the self-application that Newcomb endorses—a process in which women were schooled to inhabit the meaning of the text, measure their own self-worth accordingly, and infuse private thoughts and public deeds with its dictates.

Reading with self-application was such a valued interpretive strategy within advice manual rubrics that it extended beyond Biblical bounds to define appropriate textual engagements with English and American history, natural philosophy, biography, geography, and French—the principle genres deemed suitable for women within the conduct of reading (history and biography consistently ranking highest among them). In graphic terms, The Wide, Wide World represents how this devotional reading practice was employed in secular textual engagements. For example, engaging an exemplary text in an exemplary fashion, Ellen reads a biography of British Admiral Horatio Nelson, and as she relates her appreciation of his character to John, the novel deploys the founding tenets of reading with self-application: “‘I like Nelson very much; don't you?’” Ellen asks John. “‘Yes,’” he returns, “‘as well as I can like a man of very fine qualities without principle’” (478). John warns Ellen that her assessment of Nelson is clouded by her admiration for his persona, and he instructs her to reread the book “‘with a more critical eye’” (478). The conduct of reading teaches that cultivating this “critical eye” means reading history and biography from a highly moral vantage point; it means employing practices that defined Bible reading and occupying a secular text as a commentary on right conduct. As a result of this teaching, when she is asked to comment on Nelson's character later in the novel, Ellen responds, “I don't think, sir, I ought to like a man merely for being great unless he was good” (516). This idealized mode of response depends on a critical sort of empathy with a hero, an identification that subordinates emotional readerly responses to edifying lessons. Holding to this principle, as he prepares women to read secular history, Newcomb writes, “you must maintain, in the midst of your reading, a constant spirit of prayer” (222). “Whenever you take up a good biographical work,” Coxe advises, “endeavor to make it subservient to your own improvement; study the errors of others, not that you may talk of them, but that you may learn to correct your own” (171). The immediate moves to self-application afforded by biographies and histories rendered them idealized objects of study within the conduct of reading. Implicitly, they served as secular scripture, and the reading postures they required, according to advice manual maxims, necessitated both self-examination and self-correction. Such active contemplation of the text insures that it functions as a productive catalyst to moral reflection; it insures that, as John Humphreys puts it, “fine qualities” do not obscure right “principles” in the reader's mind.

Given its emphasis on self-correction and improvement, then, reading with self-application attempted to suppress the more individualizing aspects of the female reading experience. It sought to contain the activity of reading and the creation of meaning within a nexus of self-imposed disciplines and a gaze—the eyes of a woman's own mind. The end of this regimen of self-cultivation was a normative way of being. In essence, reading with self-application enlists the reading process in the production and maintenance of a “model class of women”—domesticated, self-denying, and self-regulating women; including Ellen Montgomery, who is perfectly suited to the sphere of white, middle-class, American womanhood.

MOTHERED READING

In broad terms, The Wide, Wide World is bent on producing the same breed of femininity. In fact, Shirley Foster and Judy Simon argue that The Wide, Wide World is ultimately concerned with “what constitutes ideal womanhood,” and within the context of the novel, the “highest level of womanly perfection” incorporates “virtues of submission, self-forgetfulness, loving-kindness, and piety” (42). Maternal influences play a pivotal role in forging that ideal: Alice Humphreys, as Foster and Simon note, continues Mrs. Montgomery's earlier lessons “of self-control and submission” to God (44). Still, scholarship on The Wide, Wide World has yet to identify mothered reading practices as a prominent vehicle of those lessons. Indeed, mothers not only ensure that their daughters learn the principles of “womanly perfection,” they also model reading postures that initiate the internalization of those principles. With an analysis of these maternal practices, we can see the role that mothered reading behaviors play in the female reader's social conditioning, in the formation of her interior vision, and in the dissemination of class-specific ways of reading.

Although advice manuals sanctioned an intense regimen of self-examination, women were simultaneously positioned within a larger field of vision that subjected them to the evaluative gaze of their immediate social relations. In The Young Lady's Friend (1837), for example, Eliza Farrar delineates appropriate deportment before parents, teachers, friends, servants, siblings, female friends, and gentlemen. Within the context of this delineation, self-cultivation was ultimately social capital—valuable as a form of cultural currency or as an entrée into white, middle-class arenas. Thus, the ability to read with self-application was the mark of a self-in-relation—a female ideal located entirely within the social order and its eyeline.

In light of this positioning, young women readers were not to trust the eyes of their minds alone, and mothers were primarily responsible for monitoring their daughter-readers. In The Mother's Book (1831), for example, Lydia Maria Child states that “children, especially girls, should not read anything without a mother's knowledge and sanction” (92). Images of reading in The Wide, Wide World document the psychological and social import of this maternal sanction, revealing how easily maternal approbation translates into maternal modeling. For example, in the scene that opens this essay, when Ellen's mother asks her to read the twenty-third psalm aloud to her, the novel dramatizes the emotional power that a mother deploys with exemplary reading postures: “Long before she had finished, Ellen's eyes were full, and her heart too. ‘If I only could feel these words as mamma does!’ she said to herself” (15). Ellen's identification with her mother makes her want to identify with text or “feel these words” as she does, and thus her mother embodies a reading identity that Ellen yearns to emulate.

More pointedly, as Ellen reads for her mother, and, ultimately like her mother, reading becomes a catalyst of both emotional connections and moral mandates. In fact, the novel represents the definitive aspects of “feeling these words” in a later instance, as Ellen again reads Bible passages aloud to her mother. After Mrs. Montgomery directs Ellen to verses that speak of heaven, the novel details how “her mother's manner at length turned [Ellen's] attention entirely from herself” (27). Captivated by her mother's responsive gestures, Ellen observes that “Mrs. Montgomery was lying on the sofa, and for the most part listened in silence, with her eyes closed, but sometimes saying a word or two that made Ellen feel how deep was the interest her mother had in the things she read of, and how pure and strong the pleasure she was even now taking in them …” (27). The gratification that Mrs. Montgomery finds in scripture stands in direct opposition to Ellen's more troubled emotional state at this juncture. Up to this point, Ellen has been unable to accept separation from her mother with calm resignation despite her mother's counsel that “‘[T]hough we must sorrow we must not rebel’” (18). Mrs. Montgomery's readerly interest in the midst of her grief and illness reflects her steadfast reliance on the printed word of God, her ability to enter the text, inhabit it, and modify her behavior accordingly. Feeling the words quells rebellion, and it constitutes a reading experience that Ellen must learn to pattern and replicate. Thus, before she leaves her mother's care, Ellen has internalized both her moral code and the way of reading that advances it.³

In her mother's absence, Alice Humphreys figures as another able mother of reading, guiding Ellen's studies when her solitary attempts fail, and in keeping with Mrs. Montgomery's exemplum, Alice actively reinforces reading behaviors that work through self-application. For example, as they read a hymn centered on the individual's “charge” to glorify God, Alice informs Ellen that her Christian duty requires that she be “‘faithful, patient, [and] self-denying’” (239). Like Mrs. Montgomery before her, Alice uses reading to endow Ellen with the comportment and character of a true woman. Ultimately, Ellen's mother-readers go beyond the simple “knowledge and sanction” that advice manuals advocated to assume the role of the conduct book itself, shaping Ellen into a receptive and pliant daughter-reader and ensuring the transmission of socially appropriate values and behavior.

Gender norms are not the only measure of what's appropriate for a true reading woman, and images of mothered reading in The Wide, Wide World also comment on the class and race conditioning at work in the construction of the daughter-reader. One way to understand this bourgeois maternal legacy is to turn to the one mother figure in the novel who represents a counter-class culture. Significantly, Ellen's agrarian Aunt Fortune refuses to mother her desire to read, and she has no use for the women within the middle-class sphere. “‘[I]t doesn't do for women to be bookworms,’” she grumbles when Ellen asks for the opportunity to resume her education. “‘That's the way your mother was brought up I suppose,’” Fortune determines; “‘If she had been trained to use her hands and do something useful instead of thinking herself above it, maybe she wouldn't have had to go to sea for her health’” (140). Fortune deems reading and studying a frivolous activity in her farming household, and she will not indulge Ellen's predilection for it. In contrast, the more leisured Alice Humphreys prominently displays her books and proudly claims possession of them: “‘But here, Ellen, … is my greatest treasure—my precious books. All these are mine’” (164). In the opposition between Alice and Aunt Fortune, then, reading becomes a resolutely white, middle-class activity, and by extension, it becomes a very visible way to mark that class identity.⁴

Not surprisingly, conduct books also capitalized on the correlation between reading and class distinctions, and Fortune's character continues to provide an interesting counterpoint to the advice manuals' seamless representation of a normative middle-class reading dynamic. According to Jane E. Rose, conduct books were not premised on a fluid notion of class identity, nor did they promote a self-interested advance through the social ranks.⁵ Instead, conduct books worked to define, solidify, and sustain the values and behaviors of the middle class as both the nation's and God's chosen people.⁶ Holding to this socioeconomic niche, Farrar directs her conduct book to women beginning their careers as “young ladies” (2), and Child's The Mother's Book speaks to the “wants of the middling class in our own country” (1). As they address this implied readership, conduct books invest middle-class courtesy, domesticity, and values with the power to elevate the nation as they elevate the individual. What is interesting about this investment in middle-class mores is that it ultimately transcends socioeconomic status.⁷ Indeed, middle-class virtue is the conduct books' holy grail, and advice manuals hold out the possibility that regardless of economic realities, working-class readers can attain it. Actual social mobility within the advice manual is subordinate to the solidification and popularization of an idealized middle-class existence. Fortune's caustic comments to the contrary, conduct books intimate that this middle-class state of being is one into which every woman can—and should—read herself.

As The Wide, Wide World dramatizes it, the conduct of reading is so invested in middle-class subjectivity that as Ellen attempts to mother the reading of others, the novel reveals how reading was supposed to colonize the under-classes and bring this bourgeois woman into being. With the gift of a Bible, Ellen hopes to regenerate and reform Nancy—the wild, unrestrained, poor girl who exists outside the bounds of true womanhood in the novel. Unlike Ellen, Nancy is able-bodied, athletic, and unchecked by standards of courtesy: she lights nimbly over fences and creeks that leave Ellen torn, wet, and muddy; when Ellen falls ill, she gamely rifles through her things despite Ellen's protestations. Nancy represents an uninhibited self, and unlike her middle-class counterpart, she says what she thinks and does what she likes. Having come to know this ungoverned girl, Ellen believes that if Nancy would only read the Bible, the practice could bring Nancy into the fold of (middle-class) ideality, making her domesticated, subdued, and self-sacrificing. “‘What did you give this to me for, Ellen?’” Nancy asks. “‘Because I wanted to give you something for New Year,’” Ellen explains, “‘and I thought it would be the best thing,—if you would only read it,—it would make you so happy and good’” (333). From Mrs. Montgomery and Alice, Ellen has learned the reading postures that distinguish a specific breed of womanhood, and, more important, she has learned to value them so wholeheartedly that she wishes to mother them into her social inferior. Ellen is sure that the Bible will engender “goodness” in Nancy because her own reading experiences are a testament to that fact. With the gift of the Bible and the reading practices that Ellen assumes always already go with it, Ellen is attempting to foster the binding emotional connections, moral imperatives, and ideological holds that mothered reading nurtured in her own character. With this textual exchange, the conduct of reading (and the ideal womanhood it cultivates) takes on an omnipresent power, one that pervades the social stratosphere to cultivate legions of reading women who are middle class in mind and manner, if not in economic means.

FATHERED READING

Were it taken to its logical extreme, this power might have created a very different woman reader and a very different Wide, Wide World, one in which networks of women nurture each other through matriarchal literary practices. Certainly, that is the plot line supported by conduct books' call for maternal sanction of a daughter's reading. “[E]ach woman in proportion to her mental and moral qualifications possesses a useful influence over all those within her reach,” writes The Young Lady's Mentor (145). But The Wide, Wide World resists the mother-reign at key intervals and seemingly breaks with the conduct of reading through its emphasis on the importance of paternal scrutiny and direction. In actuality, whenever Alice's brother, John, returns to the parsonage, he supersedes Alice's authority in Ellen's studies, and after Alice's death, Ellen reads entirely under his tutelage.

Interestingly enough, John's command of Ellen's reading practices becomes a psychological and bodily engagement that Ellen both welcomes and desires, and The Wide, Wide World presents Ellen's movement into John's paternal regulation as an evolution or a progression—a kind of graduation. In the process, the novel intimates that her mother readers have not nurtured or addressed the embodied dimensions of the reading experience. In truth, Ellen's mother readers die. Consumptive, frail, and piously devout, Alice and Mrs. Montgomery seem more spiritual than corporeal, and the reading postures they model subordinate lived reality to divine principles. Even their texts are sacred. Under John's direction, however, Ellen's reading engages this world and the next one, and his surveillance takes hold of her body as well as her mind and spirit. With John, therefore, reading mediates emotional and physical connections; deploying psychosomatic tactics, his surveillance of Ellen's reading habits enacts an erotics of discipline that gives the conduct of female reading flesh. In consequence, the novel graphically portrays what remains latent in the advice manual: women read within a highly eroticized body, a body that must be regulated within a heterosexual power structure if it is going to assume the countenance of true womanhood.

John achieves this requisite regulation through a scrupulous and unrelenting attention to Ellen's reading habits. More pointedly, John selects the books that Ellen reads, prohibits her from reading fiction or novels, schools her in reading aloud, and shapes her responses to texts. Even in his absences, “He arranged what books she should read, what studies she should carry on” (484). John not only dictates an acceptable curriculum for Ellen's reading, he also opens the production of meaning to his evaluative judgment, requiring that Ellen provide written and spoken records of her interpretative conclusions. In the midst of this regimen, Ellen's attraction and deference to John reinforce his status as a more effective interpreter and teacher than Alice or even Mrs. Montgomery. “In her eagerness to please and satisfy her teacher,” the narrative records, “[Ellen's] whole soul was given to the performance of whatever he wished her to do. The effect was all that [John] looked for” (351). While advice books privileged a mother's selection and interpretation of texts, The Wide, Wide World privileges paternal power over the woman reader. In this privileging, Ellen's reading moves from a maternal order where reading nurtures ties between women and the word to a paternalistic realm where reading becomes an exhibition of obedience before an earthly father.

Literally. Between John and Ellen reading literally stands as an exhibition of submission. Ellen habitually reads in John's presence, under his watchful gaze, and often aloud at his request. John uses these oral textual performances as a medium for exacting Ellen's compliance to his dictates and cultivating true womanhood within her. As he guides her elocution, for example, John “manages” Ellen psychically and physically: “[John] often read to her, and every day made her read aloud to him. This Ellen disliked very much at first, and ended with as much liking it. She had an admirable teacher. He taught her how to manage her voice and how to manage the language …” (464). Because reading aloud epitomized appropriate female reader activity within the conduct of reading, John's instruction is essential to Ellen's character development. According to advice writers, women were not only uniquely equipped to read aloud—“[T]he keynote of poetry,” writes Anna U. Russell in The Young Lady's Elocutionary Reader (1851), “seems to have been lent to woman” (10)—but reading aloud to husbands, children, parents, or siblings was also the woman reader's special charge. Even “talk[ing] about a book,” according to Sedgwick, made an individual woman's reading “a social blessing” (244). A “social blessing” because reading aloud takes the activity of reading out of the individual psyche, renders it a public performance, and pre-empts any privacy or autonomy the woman reader might claim. Given that reading aloud fixes the activity of reading entirely within a domestic milieu, it is not surprising that John makes it a daily instructive ritual.

In a provocative move, however, The Wide, Wide World reverses the gendered paradigm which grounds Ellen's aptitude for elocution: in the end, John's oral performance (not Ellen's) best exemplifies the power of cultivated tones, and the female voice does not remain the sole conveyance for the text. In this reversal, The Wide, Wide World documents the embodied reality of reading aloud and, more important, enlists the body in the cultivation of female ideality, turning reading into an erotic interplay of discipline and desire. Interestingly enough, as he reads Pilgrim's Progress to Ellen, John's lips and voice rival the written word in inspiring her response to the text: “[Ellen's] attention was nailed; the listless, careless mood in which she sat down was changed for one of rapt delight; she devoured every word that fell from the reader's lips; indeed, they were given their fullest effect by a very fine voice and singularly fine reading” (351). In this exchange, Ellen connects with both the reading and the reader, and the impact of the words is intensified by the lips that speak them. When John reads aloud to Ellen, his hold on her attention crystallizes, and as his voice and lips absorb her, his body becomes an emblem and a vehicle of heterosexual intimacy and instruction.

In this way, reading between John and Ellen comes to mediate a sexually charged relationship.⁸ As Ellen reads while John paces the room or studies or draws, reading becomes a medium through which John solidifies and sexualizes his dominance. In one instance, Ellen sits reading by the window late in the evening. “‘Too late for you, Ellie,’” John commands. Ellen promises to stop reading in “two minutes,” but “in a quarter of that time she had lost every thought of stopping, and knew no longer that it was growing dusk. Somebody else, however, had not forgotten it. The two minutes were not ended, when a hand came between her and the page and quietly drew the book away” (476). John's hand obstructing the page forces a tangible break in Ellen's reading process, and his physical removal of the book makes his paternalistic surveillance of Ellen's reading a very material reality. Ellen's reading, therefore, is positioned entirely within a space that John both defines and surveys.

After he removes the book, optical surveillance turns to even more invasive and sensual modes of discipline. With her book in hand, John clasps Ellen's arm and asks if she has taken any exercise that day. “‘No,’” Ellen admits, “‘… and I did not decide that I would not go … just as I did about reading a few minutes ago. I meant to stop, but I forgot it, and I should have gone on I don't know how long if you had not stopped me. I very often do so’” (477). John pauses, then returns, “‘You must not do so any more, Ellie’” (477). As John delivers this prohibition, he brings Ellen into an emotional state that is as sensual as it is submissive: his “tone, in which there was a great deal of both love and decision, wound round Ellen's heart, and constrained her to answer immediately” with obedient resolve (477). John's corporeal command of Ellen's reading practices works through “love and decision,” and the coagulation between these two forces constitutes a disciplinary erotic that enables John to fully command Ellen—her mind and body.⁹

In essence, John appropriates the more sensual realm of the reading experience to achieve a physical and psychological hold on the woman who reads within the range of his vision, one that is intimate, controlling, and made that much more potent in the erotics of his grip. This power becomes so potent that John is able to maintain his hold on Ellen's mind, behavior, and reading even when Ellen moves beyond his eye-line. Indeed, after John has shaped her reading, the book in Ellen's head is not the only constraint on her behavior (as it was at the Marshman household); rather, the word joins forces with a censorious paternalistic gaze to punish and modify her behavior. For example, to gain Mr. Lindsay's leave to go to church, Ellen misrepresents her motivation, saying she wishes to see Edinburgh. When she chides herself for that falsification, both John's persona and a relevant scripture propel her self-examination and self-correction. “‘Oh, how could I say that[,] how could I say that[.] Oh, what would John have thought of me if he had heard it. … “If ye love me, keep my commandments,”—I have not!’” (532). Ellen has learned to occupy more than just Biblical passages; she has also internalized John's disciplining vision—his way of evaluating thought and action against the sacred gauges of ideal womanhood. Still, Ellen welcomes John's judgments, and the sensual attraction between them seems to soften the strictures he places upon her mind, body, and reading behaviors. Sincerely interested in Ellen's well being, John acts out of the same love and concern that motivates Alice and Mrs. Montgomery.

But Mr. Lindsay's more tyrannical authority complicates the implications of the paternal discipline that John exercises, and for that reason, it is worth tracing Ellen's troubled relationship to her uncle and the role that reading plays within it. Ellen comes to know Mr. Lindsay when she learns of her mother's desire that she assume her place in her maternal grandmother's heart and home (489). In compliance with this wish, Ellen becomes the “darling possession” and “dear plaything” of her aristocratic Scottish relations—her grandmother, Mrs. Lindsay, her aunt, Lady Keith, and her uncle, Mr. Lindsay (538). But it is Mr. Lindsay whom Ellen loves, and it is Mr. Lindsay who consistently and physically intervenes in her reading habits. Like John, Mr. Lindsay positions his authority over Ellen (and the way she reads) within patrilineal designations: “‘I will not have you call me “uncle,”’” he declares to Ellen, “‘I am your father;—you are my own little daughter, and must do precisely what I tell you’” (510). Like John's dominance, Mr. Lindsay's authority works through love, decision, and physical holds: “She could not help loving her uncle; for the lips that kissed her were very kind as well as very peremptory; and if the hand that pressed her cheek was, as she felt it was, the hand of power, its touch was also exceedingly fond” (510). Both John and Mr. Lindsay intertwine the hand of power and the touch of fondness in effecting Ellen's compliance and submission, and that hand forces material censorship of Ellen's reading habits. When Mr. Lindsay discovers that Ellen has been reading Pilgrim's Progress to the housekeeper, for example, he takes “the book she still held” and quietly leaves the room (551). Ellen's reading to Mrs. Allen troubles Mr. Lindsay because it encourages Ellen to recall “old times” or her life outside his estate; equally, it troubles him because the book was a gift from John: “‘I hardly know [what the book is],’” he later says to his mother, “‘except it is from that person that seems to have obtained such an ascendency [sic] over her—it is full of his notes—it is a religious work’” (551). Ellen's reading disturbs Mr. Lindsay because it forges a space and a connection that supersedes his mastery and, ultimately, his ownership of her. When Ellen argues her claim to the book, saying “‘it is mine!’” Mr. Lindsay asserts his claim to her, “‘and you are mine, you must understand’” (553). As Mr. Lindsay's possession, Ellen can no more lay claim to a book or a reading of her own than she could as John's protégé. Unlike the emotional cadences of Ellen's apprenticeship in the Humphreys household, however, there is a measure of cruelty in Mr. Lindsay's discipline that does not enter John's governance: Mr. Lindsay speaks with anger to Ellen on more than one occasion, and he literally touches her lips to silence her. Nevertheless, Mr. Lindsay's harshness does not mediate the fact that his power colludes with John's command of Ellen's mind, behavior, and reading habits. In fact, his relative cruelty comments on both modes of paternalistic regulation: “John's was a higher style of kindness,” the narrative qualifies, “that entered into all her innermost feelings and wants; and his was a higher style of authority too … an authority Ellen always felt it was utterly impossible to dispute” (538-39). The power that John employs with solicitous hands, erotic discipline, and soft-spoken dictates is only one step removed from Mr. Lindsay's more heavy-handed authority, and, thus, the novel begs the questions: What sort of commentary does Mr. Lindsay's despotism make on the conduct of female reading? Why does reading assume such a visible and contentious role in that despotism?

In the most obvious sense, the conduct of reading licenses the exercise of Mr. Lindsay's authority. Trained as the woman reader to know her place, Ellen would be ill-equipped to defy Mr. Lindsay's commandments. Or so one might assume. The novel will resist that assumption in the successive power plays it stages between Ellen and her uncle, but in The Wide, Wide World, Ellen's reading encompasses a contested ground wherein competing paternalistic powers duel for possession and control of a prized womanly identity.

In this literary context, women's reading exists in a mimetic relation with female subjectivity. To regulate a woman's reading was to regulate the woman, and implicitly, that is the appropriate conclusion to the female reading behaviors as the conduct of reading defined them: reading with purpose or with self-application, reading within a surveying network of family relations—they all premise the conclusion that a woman is what and how she reads, and thus it follows that reading becomes a constitutive mechanism for shaping and creating the female self, a mechanism of which John Humphreys and Mr. Lindsay take full advantage.

TOUCHING HER NATIONALITY: READING AND A SACRED NATIONAL IDENTITY

Gender, race, and class are not the only identity markers that are at issue in this creation. In fact, Mr. Lindsay's governance of Ellen's reading habits operates within his larger mandate that Ellen “forget that [she was] American” (510), and both her national and religious identities come under attack in the Lindsay stronghold. The regulation of Ellen's reading habits figures as a primary arm of that attack—the Lindsays out-flank Ellen's reading preferences with the micro-management of her daily movements and her privacy. As Ellen struggles to retain her right to read, the conduct of women's reading becomes a discretely American code of behavior; its very viability depends on a sacred democratic sociopolitical system. Ultimately, in the formation of Republican mothers and daughters, the conduct of women's reading reproduces that system, and in consequence, women read with the weight of the nation on their shoulders.

There is, of course, a certain power in that burden, and as noted above, critics of The Wide, Wide World and historians of domesticity have underscored the proto-feminist leanings extant here. Because “the home provided a touch-stone of values for reforming the entire society” (Matthews 35), the women who kept it ranked as safeguards of a national consciousness. Thus, middle-class women enjoyed the power that came from such an ardent faith in a woman's influence on an evolving American character. Yet given its investment in domestic hierarchies, the conduct of reading has to find a way to circumvent that influence, and the limits of the discourse are just as telling as its more empowering possibilities. Interestingly enough, while the conduct of reading can foster intense nationalism and forge a uniquely American identity—an identity literally founded on revolution—it cannot embrace the revolutionary facets of that consciousness. Commenting on the limits of republicanism itself, the resolutely social uses of women's reading work to pacify individual resistance—even justified resistance to more despotic power dynamics. With a paradoxical simultaneity, the conduct of women's reading generates a sacred national identity that at once sanctions and subdues Ellen's revolt against the Lindsays' oppressive regulation. In the end, Ellen's efforts to retain the reading habits that buoy her religious and national character reveal the indiscriminate relationship between despotism and democracy for women. Regardless of the political topography, the ideal woman reader cannot read without paternal sanction, and in the final analysis, national, class, and religious allegiances are second to domestic power structures.

When Mr. Lindsay takes Ellen's cherished copy of Pilgrim's Progress and “hardly know[s] what the book is,” his ignorance distances him from Ellen's national, religious, and class origins. From its inception in 1678, Pilgrim's Progress was a dissenter's book—“the prose epic of English Puritanism”—and a middle-class manifesto; its author, John Bunyan, has been labeled the “poet-apostle of the English middle-classes” (Swaim 1). More important, Pilgrim's Progress became a seminal text in American culture, encompassing the religious beliefs and the reading practices of the Puritans who settled New England; most influential were its emphasis on spiritual autobiography, its tradition of meditation, and its reliance on scriptural paradigms and providential workings.¹⁰ For two centuries after its publication, Bunyan's narrative circulated among politically radical or intensely devout segments of the laboring and middle classes.¹¹ The Lindsays occupy another geography altogether: they are not American, not middle class, and although they are practicing Protestants, they are by no means ardently religious. (They go to church only once on Sundays; Ellen, in contrast, is accustomed to attending two services.¹²) When he takes Pilgrim's Progress from her hands, then, Mr. Lindsay implicitly confiscates those aspects of Ellen's identity that the book represents, and in the process, he attempts to reconfigure Ellen's national, class, and religious character.

However, Ellen's reading has functioned as formative mortar in nation building, and against this aristocratic Scottish censor, it bolsters a distinctly American identity. As they debate the justification for the American revolution, for example, Mr. Lindsay maintains that Americans forfeited “good character” in the break from England, but Ellen returns, “[I]t was King George's fault, uncle; he and the English forfeited their characters first” (506). Ellen's reading serves her well as she struggles to maintain her national allegiance: her “strange notions about the Americans,” Ellen explains, come from reading “‘Two lives of Washington, and some in the Annual Register, and part of Graham's United States; and one or two other things’” (506). Her reading in history and biography, therefore, has not only advanced the cultivation of her own character, it has also enabled her to defend her nation's character when pitted against an antithetical point of view. In this sense, the conduct of reading has empowered Ellen to resist Mr. Lindsay's invasion of her interpretive judgments and her patriotic reading identity.

In like manner, character, class, and nation formation also converge in the conduct of women's reading, and so it can illuminate Ellen's capacity for resistance in the Lindsay household. “Think, my dear young friends,” writes Sedgwick, “of the difference that is made in the character of a human being, simply by reading” (232). For Sedgwick, this difference immediately assumes national and class connotations: “Compare an Irish girl, who comes to this country at fifteen or sixteen, who has never been taught to read, with one of your own countrywomen, in the humblest condition, of the same age, who ‘loves to read,’ and who has read the books within her reach” (232-33). In the absence of economic gain, reading enables the approximation of a middle-class identity; more important, it distinguishes the Irish immigrant from her American counterpart. As if Warner's novel was meant to serve as a veritable testing ground for Sedgwick's theory, when Ellen reluctantly emigrates to Scotland, her reading becomes a measure of her difference, grounding a strong sense of nationalism. Nourished by a national literature, Ellen is a Republican Daughter, a child of both liberty and literacy.¹³ Thus, when Mr. Lindsay questions her national character—“‘You have an extraordinary taste for freedom! And pray, are all the American children as strong republicans as yourself?’”—Ellen responds, “‘I hope so’” (515).

Significantly, Ellen's single and most vehement acts of resistance to the conduct of reading occur when she moves outside American national boundaries. Ellen not only rebelliously asserts her ownership of Pilgrim's Progress when Mr. Lindsay takes it from her, she also covets her “precious hour alone” with her “little Bible” before the rest of the family rises (540). When her grandmother learns of this practice, she directs Ellen to come to her immediately upon rising each morning. From Mrs. Lindsay's vantage, “Ellen was spoiling herself for life and the world by a set of dull religious notions that were utterly unfit for a child” (542-43). Countering her grandmother's direction, Ellen insists on her right to read and defies the conduct of reading that checked women's reading habits within a network of domestic obedience and submission.

Paradoxically, although conduct book edicts sanction Ellen's resistance to the Lindsays' imperialism, they cannot promise her resounding victory over their tyranny or a room of her own, so to speak, in which to read. In her Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catharine Beecher writes, “[T]he democratic institutions in this country are in reality no other than the principles of Christianity carried into operation” (27). These principles, Beecher continues, “tend to place woman in her true position in society … in fact, they have secured to American women a lofty and fortunate position, which, as yet, has been attained by the women of no other nation” (27). The American republic, according to Beecher's logic, is religion in practice, and it secures a unique position and identity for American women. The Lindsay household seeks to undermine that identity, and the loss of her “greatest comfort”—her solitude, her hour, her Bible-reading—serves as an instrument of both religious and national oppression. Thus, Ellen's rebellion against such curtailment is authorized and enabled in the convergence of the American political and religious precedents that Beecher articulates. Beecher, however, also recognizes that women's subordination is essential to the workings of republicanism: “[I]n order to secure her the more firmly in all these privileges, it is decided, that, in the domestic relation, she take a subordinate station” (27). In “civil and political concerns,” she writes, women's interests are entrusted to men, their fathers, brothers, husbands, and “the inferior is to yield obedience” (27, 26).

With heightened awareness of that power dynamic, Ellen understands that once she has called Mr. Lindsay “father,” she is “‘bound to obey him’” (519). Because Ellen owes Mr. Lindsay a “child's duty,” she throws “herself upon her knees” and apologizes for arguing his claim to her Pilgrim's Progress (554, 547); she regains the time and space to read her Bible only with his intercession. Ultimately, the Lindsays successfully constrain Ellen's reading through an economy of time and social obligation. “‘I have read so little lately,’” Ellen admits to John in the final (unpublished) chapter, “‘Because I had not time. I could not help it. … They filled up my days and nights with engagements which I had no means of avoiding, unless I would have provoked scenes that would have done them and me more hurt than any loss I was suffering’” (576).¹⁴ The conduct of women's reading subordinates reading to a nexus of womanly duty and social responsibility, and given Ellen's idealized status within this ideology, she cannot read outside that nexus. To do so requires a display of temper, a resistance to temporal regulation, and an assertion of self that the conduct of reading forecloses. In Scotland, Ellen confronts the limits of the ideology that has licensed and regulated her relationship to texts, and in the process, she confronts the violence inherent in the woman reader's deference to domestic obligations and her ready submission to the censor and surveillance of her reading habits.

THE WOMAN READER BECOMES A WIFE

In the concluding, unpublished chapter of the novel, Ellen returns to America as John's wife. More pointedly, she returns to the national, class, and gender terrain that premises the conduct of women's reading, and thus it follows that she regains the sanction and space to read. John has furnished a “private room” for her, and as he opens the door, Ellen surveys a chamber filled with “the appliances of comfort and ease and literary and studious wants”—fine paintings and engravings, marble and bronze statues, easy chairs, footstools, lounges, and bookcases (574). “‘What a delicious place for reading!’” she proclaims, and the room itself is “delightfully private” (576, 577). Still, the room joins John's study, is entered through his study, and while Ellen may open, close, even lock the door at will, the room's privacy is qualified by its proximity to John's room. Ellen “read[s] next door to [John],” the novel relates, and John will “pilot” her reading when Ellen “dare not trust [her] own navigation” (577). Again, Ellen's perceptions, movements, and reading habits are contained within an arena that John has ordered and defined. Nevertheless, with her marriage and her return to America, Ellen reassumes her status as an ideal woman reader. Although her reading will be effectively husbanded, she repossesses the narrow space and time to read which the conduct of women's reading affords. The original manuscript ends as Ellen lays claim to a site of middle-class comfort and qualified isolation, a room especially suited to appropriate female readerly desires.

However, the novel—even with the original ending intact—never consummates that desire. It does not image Ellen reading alone, enveloped in solitude before her window, the door locked. Moreover, the exchange analyzed above does not appear in the original or subsequent editions of the text. The novel's nineteenth-century manifestations absent reading from Ellen's fate altogether. In the original ending, the woman reader becomes a wife, and reading is effaced in the revelation of her idyllic domestic relations: “[Ellen] went back to spend her life with the friends and guardians she best loved, and to be to them, still more than she had been to her Scottish relations, ‘the light of the eyes’” (569). In the end, the novel privileges a wifely woman, not a reading one. Paradoxically, for Ellen, reading herself into ideality ultimately means not reading; it means letting go of the text and assuming her position within the domestic fold.

Thus, even as The Wide, Wide World reinscribes and reinforces the conduct of reading, it simultaneously reveals the limits of the discourse. Republican daughters of reading were supposed to become mother readers, and as they read alone or aloud within the domestic circle, they were supposed to reproduce the norms of a middle-class national identity. Yet, in the mimetic relationship between female reading and female subjectivity, the conduct of reading creates a hierarchy of identity-markers; it subordinates a woman's national or class identity to her position within heterosexual, domestic disciplines. Democratic or tyrannical geographies, middle-class or aristocratic spaces—those distinctions collapse in the conduct of reading, subsumed by a husband's privilege. In both The Wide, Wide World and the conduct of reading, reading is a mechanism—a vehicle of ideality, and once ideality is achieved, the true woman relinquishes her books.

Notes

1. As Michel Foucault asserts, where power works through individual habits, daily practices, the organization and regulation of time and space, “there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself” (155). Instructed to occupy the text as a catalyst to self-examination, the woman reader becomes her own overseer, and reading becomes a mechanism of social conditioning.

2. Warner herself taught Bible classes to West Point cadets for years, and as John A. Calabro has shown, she firmly believed in a “right” way of reading it; so much so that one cadet comments, “Miss Warner is … very sure that she is in the full light and all who do not accept Christ as she has, remain in darkness” (Calabro 49).

3. This reading experience reinforces the power of what Brodhead terms “disciplinary intimacy, or simply discipline through love” (15). Ellen's love for her mother, Brodhead writes, “makes Ellen, in and of herself, want to do and be what her mother would require of her”—morally and spiritually (33). Ellen's desire to emulate her mother's relationship to scripture reveals the significance of women's reading in producing and advancing the moral imperatives that disciplinary intimacy enacted. In other words, reading figures as a point of both communion and discipline between Ellen and her mother.

4. Reflecting this class identity, the space that houses Alice's reading, her bedroom, likewise houses white dimity curtains, white floorboards, and a vanity draped with snow-white muslin. Roger Chartier reminds us that “reading is always a practice embodied in acts, spaces, and habits” (3); Alice mothers Ellen's reading habits in a space of white, middle-class womanhood.

5. Rose asserts that conduct books did not explicitly concern themselves with class mobility. As a genre, the conduct book remains distinct from etiquette or courtesy manuals. Etiquette manuals emphasized the rules and standards of polite society, and their primary purpose was to advance the individual's social status. Conduct books, in contrast, advanced the moral and intellectual stature of American women as the signpost of an advancing nation. As Rose notes, conduct books advocated “cultivating one's full potential, thereby meeting the components of ideal womanhood: serving God and the Republic by raising virtuous children, and ministering to one's husband …” (39).

6. Of course, this contention does not exclude the possibility that working-class readers read conduct books as etiquette books, as a guide to the protocols of middle-class identity, or as a reference manual for social advancement. Equally, this contention does not exclude the possibility that some conduct of life books were explicitly directed toward working-class readers. Sedgwick's Means and Ends, for instance, revolves around images of working-class existence—a soldier's wife's solitary condition, a blacksmith's quest for knowledge, a mechanic's lack of leisure to devote to reading.

7. John Kasson implicates all instructional literature at this time in the “spread of gentility” or “the cultivation of bourgeois manners” (43).

8. Attraction, fascination, and fear occupy the same relational space between John and Ellen, and Ellen's erotic connection to John is intimately allied with his power and dominance. Although the novel designates him “brother,” the sensual attraction between them is apparent upon their first meeting when John “kisses her gravely on the lips” (274). Previously repulsed at Mr. Van Brunt's moves to claim a kiss from her, Ellen's rising color and her placid acceptance of John's kiss betray her attraction to him. However, that attraction is immediately qualified. Although “Ellen's eyes sought the stranger as if by fascination,” she “was quite sure from that one look into his eyes that he was a person to be feared” (275).

9. In light of John's tactile and psychic hold on Ellen's reading processes, his prohibitions against fiction and novel reading discussed previously resonate differently: John forbids novel reading because that embodied and intensely emotional reading experience would pre-empt the erotic space that is his exclusive domain; and in a more holistic sense, the conduct of reading prohibits and punishes fiction reading because it can be a libidinal object, rendering women sexually independent and liberating them from the heterosexual dynamic that founds domesticity.

10. In John Bunyan's lifetime, Pilgrim's Progress sold one hundred thousand copies (Swaim 2). Bunyan's narrative spoke to a Protestant readership, portraying “a life made out of Scripture and bound by Scripture” (Johnson 210).

11. William J. Gilmore ranks Pilgrim's Progress among the most widely read texts in northeastern American family libraries well into the 1830s. Additionally, in the nineteenth century, as Barbara A. Johnson notes, Pilgrim's Progress was “spurned by the upper classes” (7).

12. For more on the relationship between Ellen's Protestantism and her bids for power in the Lindsay household, see Isabelle White's “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity.”

13. This distinction reflects and advances an ideology of Republican Motherhood that demarcated the political and social responsibilities of women in post-revolutionary America. As Linda K. Kerber writes, in addition to domestic and religious duties, Republican Motherhood required that a woman be “an informed and virtuous citizen.” (235). According to Kerber, well-governed reading practices ensured the transmission of virtue to husbands and children of the new nation.

14. As Jane Tompkins writes in her “A Note on the Text” in the Feminist Press edition of the novel,

    The final chapter … was omitted from the original edition and all subsequent editions. Mabel Baker published it in 1978 as an appendix to her biography of Warner. … An unsigned note in the papers of the Constitution Island Association suggests that the manuscript had gone to Putnam without the last chapter and that Putnam urged omitting it since the book had run longer in the galleys than he had expected and the last chapter, in his opinion, did not contribute substantially to the novel.

    ([8])

Works Cited

Alcott, William. The Young Woman's Guide. 1836. 13th ed. Boston: C. H. Pierce, Binney, and Otheman, 1847.

Arthur, T. S. The Mother's Rule; Or, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. Philadelphia: H. C. Peck & Theo. Bliss, 1858.

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870. 2nd ed. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Beecher, Catharine. Treatise on Domestic Economy. New York: T. H. Webb, 1842.

Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Calabro, John A. “Susan Warner and Her Bible Classes.” Legacy 4.2 (1987): 45-52.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

Child, Lydia Maria. The Mother's Book. 1831. New York: Arno, 1972.

Coxe, Margaret. The Young Lady's Companion, and Token of Affection, in a Series of Letters. Columbus: I. N. Whiting, 1846.

Dobson, Joanne. “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels.” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 223-42.

De Witt, William Radcliffe. Her Price Above Rubies, Woman: Her Excellence and Usefulness. Harrisburg: n.p., 1841.

Farrar, Eliza Ware. The Young Lady's Friend. Boston: American Stationers, 1837.

Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader 1837-1914. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Foster, Shirley, and Judy Simon. What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of “Classic” Stories for Girls. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. “The Eye of Power.” Power—Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-77. Ed. and Trans. C. Gordo. New York: Pantheon, 1980. 146-65.

Gilmore, William J. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England 1780-1835. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989.

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hart, John D. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. New York: Oxford UP, 1950.

Hiatt, Mary. “Susan Warner's Subtext: The Other Side of Piety.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8 (1987): 250-61.

Hovet, Grace Ann, and Theodore R. Hovet. “Identity Development in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World: Relationship, Performance and Construction.” Legacy 8 (1991): 3-16.

———. “Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner, Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton.” American Transcendental Quarterly 7 (1993): 335-56.

Johnson, Barbara A. Reading Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim's Progress: Reception and the Protestant Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Kasson, John F. Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

Kelley, Mary. “The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America.” Journal of American History 83 (1996): 401-22.

———. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1984.

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1980.

Newcomb, Harvey. Newcomb's Young Lady's Guide to the Harmonious Development of Christian Character. 7th ed. Boston: J. B. Dow, 1846.

Newton, Sarah Emily. “Wise and Foolish Virgins: ‘Usable Fiction’ and the Early American Conduct Tradition.” Early American Literature 25 (1990): 139-67.

O'Connell, Catharine. “‘We must sorrow’: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” Studies in American Fiction 25 (1997): 21-39.

Rose, Jane E. “Conduct Books for Women, 1830-1860: A Rationale for Women's Conduct and Domestic Role in America.” Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Ed. Catharine Hobbs. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995. 37-58.

Russell, Anna U. The Young Lady's Elocutionary Reader, Containing a Selection of Reading Lessons. Boston: J. Munroe & Company, 1851.

Sanderson, Dorothy Hurlbut. They Wrote for A Living: A Bibliography of the Works of Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner. Washingtonville: Spear, 1976.

Schnog, Nancy. “The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World.” Genders 4 (1989): 11-25.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Means and Ends, or, Self-Training. London: Charles Tilt, 1839.

Sicherman, Barbara. “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America.” Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Ed. Cathy Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 201-25.

Stewart, Veronica. “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World.” Legacy 11 (1994): 1-16.

Swaim, Kathleen M. Pilgrim's Progress, Puritan Progress: Discourses and Contexts. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

———. Afterword. The Wide, Wide World. By Susan Warner. Ed. Jane Tompkins. New York: Feminist, 1987. 584-608.

Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. Ed. Jane Tompkins. New York: Feminist, 1987.

Warren, Joyce W. “Domesticity and the Economics of Independence: Resistance and Revolution in the Work of Fanny Fern.” The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Ed. Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 54-72.

White, Isabelle. “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity: Susan Warner's Contradictions in The Wide, Wide World.” American Studies 31.2 (1990): 31-41.

Wise, Daniel. The Young Lady's Counselor; or Outlines & Illustrations of the Sphere, the Duties, & the Dangers of Young Women. Cincinnati: Swormstedt & Poe, 1855.

The Young Lady's Mentor: A Guide to the Formation of Christian Character. … 1851. Philadelphia: H. C. Peck & T. Bliss, 1853.

Zboray, Ronald. A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Zboray, Ronald, and Mary Sarcino Zboray. “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England.” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 587-622.

———. “‘Have You Read … ?’: Real Readers and Their Responses in Antebellum Boston and Its Regions.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52 (1997): 139-70.