SOURCE: Stewart, Veronica. “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World.” Legacy 11, no. 1 (spring 1994): 1-16.

[In the following essay, Stewart characterizes Nancy Vawse as a subversive trickster figure in The Wide, Wide World who provides a vital commentary on the use of power as represented in the novel.]

In Susan Warner's popular nineteenth-century novel, The Wide, Wide World, aged Mrs. Vawse supplies the most pertinent clue to a comprehension of her incorrigible granddaughter's role in the text when she informs us that Nancy Vawse does not return home “if there's a promise of a storm” (193). As a wild, unpredictable child of storm, aligned with nature and natural passions rather than with the dominant social conventions, Nancy escapes the cultural imperatives that require a self-willed command of all desires from the text's heroine, Ellen Montgomery. In keeping with the most articulated precepts of the “cult of domesticity,” as well as with the rhetoric of religious conversion that generally accompanied it, Ellen's rite of passage to womanhood involves a complete resignation to what Jane Tompkins calls an “ethic of submission” (162). Throughout Warner's novel, Ellen's adult advisors insist upon the need for her to curb every natural sentiment. These textual restraints on Ellen's behavior also reflect Warner's compliance with the accepted feminine ethos, the “stringently delimited terms [of expression] designed to reinforce conservative cultural assumptions about woman's identity” that, according to Joanne Dobson, restricted most nineteenth-century American women writers (Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence 2). Critical readings focused on Warner's biographical circumstances, however, suggest that the author only invested self in one character of The Wide, Wide World, i.e., her heroine, Ellen.¹ This limited vision of the creative process, particularly in regard to the complicated relationship between author and text, both denies the author a multi-faceted unconscious and refuses to consider the myriad ways in which that complexity may emerge in her creation.² If Ellen's acceptance of the cultural terms prescribed by domestic ideology implies a reticence on the author's part, then Nancy Vawse's defiant rebellion against those constructs must enact a more subversive and creative dimension of Warner's personality and work.³

To the extent that she resists what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the authoritative “word of the father” (“Discourse in the Novel” 342) that limits both Warner and her protagonist, Nancy's character represents an innovative, alternative stance, a female “other” who undermines and disrupts, however briefly, the novel's dominant ideological message. Through Nancy, a forceful, unembarrassed, outspoken female, Warner disturbs the stereotypical constructs of woman's identity that eventually overpower her heroine, lending a stylistic and aesthetic complexity to her narrative that might not otherwise have developed. Rather than mark a simple clash between direct opposites, with a good girl heroine struggling against her “bad-girl double” (Leverenz 189), the confrontations between Ellen and Nancy reveal several strata of dialogic, and therefore complementary, relations at work in the text. From a psychological perspective, Nancy's interactions with Ellen highlight conflicts taking place within the heroine herself. As a manifestation of Ellen's (and Warner's) unconscious and/or “unofficial” responses to external authority,⁴ Nancy's presence allows a dialogue to emerge between Ellen's deliberate attempts to conform to the principles of domestic ideology and her suppressed discomfort with the total abdication of self required of her. In this respect, Nancy's role corresponds with traditional trickster figures in literature and folklore, and seems particularly compatible with Carl G. Jung's definition of the trickster as an archetypal “shadow figure” of the unconscious, as a configuration of the psyche that confounds the “ego-personality” by personifying suppressed character traits (“Trickster” 262-66).⁵

Unlike Freudianism, which Volosinov/Bakhtin condemns as an ahistorical perception of the unconscious that disengages the individual psyche from its ideological content and context,⁶ Jungian psychology proposes an essentially dialogic “system of relations” among the unconscious and conscious aspects of human personality, as well as between “individual consciousness and society” (“Anima and Animus” 81, 84.)⁷ Nancy's character reveals Ellen's inner conflicts at the same time that she provides the heroine with the potential to actualize her individuation process by differentiating and developing self in compensatory relation to an “other,” a sociological perception of the psyche's interconnections with community that both Jung and Bakhtin posit as a required condition for self-awareness.⁸ Moreover, Nancy's alignment with the unconscious (specifically the feminine unconscious) and nature is also connected to Nancy's socio-economic status, opening up the potential for yet another dialogue in Warner's text, in this case between classes. Nancy's role as a trickster figure grants her the latitude to disrupt the status quo from both a psychological and cultural standpoint. Nancy's “otherness” in The Wide, Wide World, then, serves as a relatively flexible dialogizing element that energizes the novel's discourse, introducing difference so urgently that her presence, almost singlehandedly, keeps Warner's text from falling into a strictly monologic, dogmatic presentation of its heroine.

A storm announces Nancy's textual birth, an omen of her turbulent opposition to some of the suffocating circumstances imposed on Ellen. Her first appearance in the novel coincides with a spell of bad weather that has imprisoned Ellen in her Aunt Fortune's kitchen for several days:

With nothing to do, the time hanging very heavy on her hands, disappointed, unhappy, frequently irritated, Ellen became at length very ready to take offence, and nowise disposed to pass it over or smooth it away. She seldom showed this in words, it is true, but it rankled in her mind. Listless and brooding, she sat day after day, comparing the present with the past, wishing vain wishes, indulging bootless regrets, and looking upon her aunt and grandmother with an eye of more settled aversion.

(114)

In direct contrast to the heroine's subdued demeanor in this scene, Nancy bursts into the text on the heels of the same tempest that both physically and mentally immobilizes Ellen. Just as we begin to think of Ellen as doomed to a static, unproductive consideration of her own pathetic condition, Nancy pierces through the monotony and diverts our attention. Her presence also diverts the heroine's attention, interrupting her prolonged, unhealthy self-absorption by introducing a stranger, an outsider who stimulates both Ellen and the reader's curiosity. Like the breeze of a fresh summer storm, Nancy sweeps away the stagnant gloom and boredom pressing down on Fortune's kitchen, Ellen's mind, and the reader's imagination.⁹ It is as if Ellen's stifled frustrations spawn an untamed child of storm who, unlike Ellen, sweeps into the text equipped with the audacity to formulate her thoughts into “words.”

With no fear of adult authority, without so much as a civil knock on the door to herald her arrival, Nancy marches into Aunt Fortune's kitchen, strides up to the heartless spinster who intimidates Ellen, and demands a pitcher of milk. When Ellen's aunt hesitates, Nancy coaxes the stingy woman into compliance, beguiling Fortune with sugary compliments. Her cunning deception succeeds, but Ellen, who “did not understand” the knowing “look” Nancy gave her, fails to grasp the significance of Nancy's message—Fortune can be easily manipulated through flattery (114-15). While Ellen finds it impossible to assert herself without bursting into tears, Nancy milks language as a means to impose her will and gain power over others. At another point in the text, Nancy “scornfully” chides Ellen for not being able to discern whether her “tongue is [her] own or somebody's else” (119). Warner might well have posed this question to herself. Given the extent to which nineteenth-century women authors were expected to compose fiction that submitted to culturally determined definitions of woman's identity, Warner might wonder whether or not her “tongue” (her writing) was her “own or somebody's else.” Warner circumvents that problem through Nancy, who functions outside of the cultural terms that restrict Ellen's prerogative to verbalize dissatisfaction without experiencing punishment or guilt.¹⁰ Though Warner observes the narrative and ideological conventions imposed upon her by allowing several characters in the text to condemn Nancy's behavior and by developing Ellen as a saintly, obedient woman, she nonetheless creates in Nancy a female character who permits her some latitude to experiment with aesthetic freedom and narrative play.

Nancy comes into the narrative already empowered with an authority based primarily on her command of details about others. During Miss Fortune's canning bee, for example, Nancy provides information and opinions about the guests from a standpoint that seems to exceed her years. Her comprehensive social commentary ranges from commonplace gossip to shrewd condemnations of specific lifestyles and temperaments (250-51). Nancy's peculiar talent lies in her exceptional powers of observation, a skill she shares with her author-creator, whose realistic descriptions in The Wide, Wide World provide a wealth of information for scholars to draw on as they try to reconstruct the everyday life and concerns of the period.¹¹ Nancy displays a knack for sifting through her immediate environment, screening out superfluous information, and compiling the essential data required to exist on the margins of society, all capacities for self-reliance that Ellen never develops. Functioning as a centrifugal, subversive force, Nancy seems connected with Warner's artistic impulses, with that part of self engaged in a novelistic discourse that resists, whether consciously or unconsciously, sanctioned behaviors for women in the society.

Warner's creative investment in Nancy's character emerges most clearly during Nancy's first encounter with Ellen in Fortune's kitchen. While Miss Fortune fills Nancy's pitcher with milk, the two girls use the opportunity to study each other:

Ellen's gaze was modest enough, though it showed a great deal of interest in the new object [Nancy]; but the broad, searching stare of the other seemed intended to take in all there was of Ellen from her head to her feet, and keep it, and find out what sort of a creature she was at once. Ellen almost shrank from the bold black eyes, but they never wavered, till Miss Fortune's voice broke the spell.

(115)

Nancy's intense desire to study Ellen mirrors the kind of posturing an author might assume in the creative function of imagining her character. Her probing, consuming gaze during this scene marks a point in the narrative where the author, as creator, retreats from within her heroine and contemplates her through the eyes of another. As Bakhtin suggests, “aesthetic form” emerges in the text “from within the other,” from the “author's creative reaction to the hero[ine] and [her] life” (“Author and Hero” 90, original italics). Until Nancy appears in the text, the reader's attention has been riveted on Ellen Montgomery's suffering, an indication, perhaps, of the author's own preoccupation with developing her heroine. Warner's aesthetic impulse, her “creative reaction” to her own submissive, naive heroine generates Nancy, who dwells somewhere outside the cultural standards that demand Ellen's humble acceptance of intolerable conditions. Nancy's presence gives Warner as creator a new authorial stance apart from her heroine, and this aesthetic distance from her subject enables her to “take in all there was of Ellen,” i.e., to break out of the quasi-autobiographical fusion with her subject that has, at least in part, conveyed Ellen to such a narrative cul-de-sac in Fortune's kitchen.¹²

Through Nancy's spellbinding “bold black eyes,” Warner as author takes a long “searching stare” at the demure “creature” she is in the process of creating, and her protagonist can hardly bear up under such intense scrutiny. Nancy's creative force disrupts the ideologies that produce Ellen, creating new values, including that of speaking one's own mind, of being true to oneself.¹³ “Brooding” quietly in Aunt Fortune's kitchen, Ellen represses her tempestuous passions, while Nancy, as well as Warner's narrative as a whole, thrives on them. Resistance against androcentric social conventions, particularly the gender-determined split between public and private spheres, works as a propelling force in Warner's fiction; a fundamental discontent with family structure as it was articulated in domestic conduct manuals initiates the narrative plot, whisking Ellen Montgomery away from her natural parents and launching her out into The Wide, Wide World.¹⁴ To rewrite her grandmother's pronouncement, Nancy, the barometer of Warner's creative power, materializes whenever “there's a promise of a storm,” whenever an opportunity appears to subvert either the heroine's conservative worldview or the cultural terms used to form Ellen's character.

Nancy seems drawn to whirlwinds of psychic turbulence in the text. Not surprisingly, then, her second appearance follows Ellen's furious overreaction to Mr. Van Brunt's harmless request for a kiss, her subsequent “storm of anger” against Aunt Fortune, and her guilt over the prospect that such uncontrolled rage must displease Jesus (116-17). Nancy's propensity for showing up on the scene whenever Ellen tries to contain her passions, or whenever she experiences doubts about her salvation as an elect saint, suggests that Nancy, as trickster, works in a “complementary relation to the ‘saint’” (Jung, “Trickster” 256), compensating for Ellen's imbalances on the conscious level. Neither Nancy nor Ellen fit neatly into polar oppositions; they each reveal aspects of the “other” at various places in the text. Nancy relieves the built-up pressure of Ellen's submerged desires, a consequence of the heroine's insufferably restrictive conditions. At the same time, Ellen's eventual identity as an elect saint derives in part from her response to Nancy, that is to say, from the sundry methods Ellen uses to control, through denial or suppression, her own desires whenever they attain what seems to be an autonomous expression through Nancy.

In their second encounter, Nancy tempts Ellen away from home to ramble freely about the countryside, a concrete realization of Ellen's own desire to escape confinement. Throughout their forbidden adventure, the text cloaks Nancy in an aura of mystery, avoiding any mention of her name and referring to her instead as “she of the black eyes,” “companion,” “other,” and “stranger.” All these nameless identities assigned to Nancy arouse suspicion about her, creating an unsettling apprehension about possible impending and ominous consequences of the difference she embodies. Like a cautious animal stalking its prey or an ethereal, and perhaps demonic, supernatural being materializing out of thin air, this nameless entity sneaks up behind Ellen so well that the heroine hears no “footsteps drawing near,” remaining completely unaware of Nancy's presence until “a voice spoke almost in her ears” (117-21).¹⁵ Nancy's “voice,” which at first seems to emanate from within Ellen's own mind, poses a series of probing questions to Ellen, all designed specifically to elicit a confession of her hatred for Aunt Fortune (118). This disconcerting interrogation leaves the heroine feeling ill at ease because Nancy's queries verbalize Ellen's most hidden thoughts, another instance of Nancy's disturbing knowledge of other characters in the text. The reader knows that Ellen has already privately expressed the fear that she might “get to hate” Fortune (117), that Nancy's questions merely reiterate Ellen's own dark speculations about her unsatisfactory relationship with her aunt. In this minor altercation with Nancy, however, she refuses to acknowledge these feelings as her own, choosing instead to condemn Nancy for this improper “kind of talk” (119). Because Ellen denies her own emotions, because she repudiates, on a conscious level, her own repressed desire to rebel against the restrictions placed on her by authority figures, Nancy retains the power to afflict her.

When articulating Ellen's resistance to authority fails to raise the heroine's consciousness, Nancy tries to remove Ellen physically from the cultural environment that obstructs an apprehension of her inner self. With all the “wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism” that Jung assigns to trickster figures (“Trickster” 258), Nancy lures Ellen into an alternate reality, an enchanting region of nature where “every thing,” every remembrance of suffering past and present can be “forgotten in delight.” Like a “bird out of a cage,” Ellen travels with her shadow figure into the dark recesses of her unconscious, a deeply wooded area where the terrain becomes increasingly difficult for the dainty city girl to navigate: “Gradually the ground became more broken, sinking rapidly from the side of the path, and rising again in a steep bank on the other side of a narrow dell.” They descend the deep embankment to a charming brook, arriving at a “wild little place” where Ellen can “scarcely contain herself at the magnificence” of the scene (118-22). Free from the restrictive atmosphere inherent to the domestic sphere, liberated from chores, rules, and obligations, Ellen experiences, for the first and last time, an unchecked, uninhibited enjoyment of nature's beauty:

Often by the side of the stream there was no footing at all. … It was ticklish work getting along over these stones; now tottering on an unsteady one; now slipping on a wet one; and every now and then making huge leaps from rock to rock. … But they laughed at the danger; sprang on in great glee, delighted with the exercise and fun; didn't stay long enough anywhere to lose their balance, and enjoyed themselves amazingly. There was many a hair-breadth escape; many an almost sousing; but that made it all the more lively.

(122-23, original italics)

Through a precarious journey along the intricate, labyrinthine path of the winding brook, with its “foam[ing] and fum[ing] and frett[ing]” waters, its “noisy and lively” waterfalls, and its “tiny cascades” (122-23), Ellen experiences a momentary harmony with Nancy and with nature, which frees her to experience spontaneous, childlike pleasure with herself and her environment.¹⁶

In Warner's text, Nancy substitutes for Ellen's unconscious nature, enticing the heroine to follow the twisting, non-linear (and therefore deviant), creative stream of her imagination. Ellen's sojourn with her stormy, dark companion into the woods of her shadowy unconscious elicits a primordial, animalistic, instinctive joy. Nancy, as trickster, specifically as Ellen's suppressed nature, reveals the heroine's internalized predisposition to escape oppressive social conventions by tapping a sense of connection with nature's beauty. Ellen frequently imagines the possibility of alleviating her problems through a relation with the earth. During a moment of extreme anguish, for example, she “cast[s] herself down upon the moss, lying full length upon the cold ground, which seemed to her childish fancy the best friend she had left” (148). In another instance, a walk in the woods removes all memory of “Miss Fortune and all in the world that was disagreeable” (337). However, Nancy, as a representation of unconscious nature, of nature as it stands indifferent and detached from phallogocentric concepts in the novel, also has it in her power to disrupt idealistic illusions about nature's supposed sympathy with human events, to unleash destructive forces capable of unsettling any sense of order or security Ellen might achieve.

This subversive element of Nancy's character both figuratively and literally throws Ellen off balance at the conclusion of their excursion along the meandering brook. Although Nancy unlocks the portal to the imaginative realm and instigates a burst of playful, creative energy in the text, as trickster she also releases a scurrilous force that seeks amusement through atrocious deeds, through a “fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks” (Jung, “Trickster” 255). Ellen falls victim to one of these tricks when Nancy urges her to cross the water by walking barefoot on a log:

Slowly and fearfully, and with as much care as possible, she set step by step upon the slippery log. Already half of the danger was passed, when, reaching forward to grasp Nancy's out-stretched hand, she missed it,—perhaps that was Nancy's fault—poor Ellen lost her balance and went in head foremost. The water was deep enough to cover her completely as she lay, though not enough to prevent her getting up again.

(125, original italics)

Jung argues that “annoying accidents,” events we generally attribute to “defects of the conscious personality,” actually originate in the unconscious realm of the shadow (“Trickster” 262). Just as Ellen begins to think she will make a successful crossing, Nancy withdraws her hand. In a sense, then, Warner, as author, also withdraws her hand, permitting her heroine to fall back into guilt for her disobedient actions, reminding her of the reprisals she will likely suffer at the hand of Aunt Fortune. Ellen's “accidental” slip into the water dampens her spirits, effectively dousing any fantasies Ellen might have entertained of a prolonged escape from social responsibilities through a puerile, romantic fusion with idyllic nature.

Warner's text also plunges the reader into the harsh social realities of the communities depicted in The Wide, Wide World, refusing to validate any sentimental illusions about the world. The politics of Nancy's psychological and aesthetic trickster role in the narrative center on a power struggle between classes. Nancy's coarse language, crude syntax, and rough manners denote a poor education, and her unfamiliarity with the kind of plush carpeting that Ellen compares to soft moss affirms Nancy's lower-class status (120-21).¹⁷ Her position as a poverty-stricken, uneducated, rustic girl places Nancy's affiliation with nature in a particular historical framework, within a culturally determined understanding of nature's role as it finds its expression in social, religious, and philosophical constructs. The different ways in which Nancy and Ellen respond to nature during their journey into the woods provide a condensed version of the larger cultural issues that surround and submerge nature throughout the text. Specifically, the tensions between Nancy and Ellen uncover the novel's philosophical bias for polished, urbane, genteel learning over unaffected connectedness with nature. Ellen's enthusiasm about nature's beauty, for example, animates her longing to penetrate and master all of nature's secrets. She wants, as she informs Mr. Van Brunt elsewhere in the text, to “know the reason” for everything that occurs in nature (132), so she questions Nancy about the strange vegetation she finds growing on rocks and about the migratory habits of ducks. Her urge to exact some “truth” from nature, her penchant for possessing, cataloguing, and demystifying nature completely baffles Nancy (120).¹⁸ Nancy resists this quantifying and hence authoritative discourse on nature.¹⁹ On one textual level, Nancy's lower-class status excludes her from this learned discourse, but, beyond this, her own instinctive affinity with the indiscriminate, catastrophic force of storms precludes any desire to impose logical, unalterable natural laws on a naturally capricious, transient, and mutable universe.

Ironically, Nancy's alignment with unconscious nature as a trickster figure, the very source for her power and freedom in the text, simultaneously assures her continued exclusion from any economic, religious, or social power structures. The threat she represents to cultural order amounts to nothing less than the menace of an unmanageable, illiterate, poor female who fits both Jung's description of the trickster in its iconoclastic role (“Trickster” 255) and Bakhtin's delineation of carnival liberation from “established order” (Rabelais and His World 10). Julia Kristeva expands both of these definitions by aligning the carnivalesque with her concept of an essentially feminine semiotic.²⁰ Nancy's carnivalesque discourse shares the repressed (but not necessarily maternal) feminine drives of Kristeva's semiotic. Additionally, as trickster, Nancy “breaks through the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics,” while simultaneously voicing a “social and political protest” (Kristeva, Desire 65). However, while Nancy personifies feminine drives repressed by the symbolic in a capitalistic society, her connection with nature already situates her on the margins of the socially symbolic system, limiting her ability to make any permanent change within it.²¹ In Warner's text, Nancy's alignment with unconscious feminine nature reduces her subversive antics to fleeting, apparently ineffective disturbances of authoritative discourse. From the perspective of the creative process, however, these disturbances are not in vain. The ongoing dialogue between Nancy's unconscious (yet ideologically motivated) semiotic and Ellen's socially symbolic discourse generates a significant subversion of authoritative power in Warner's novel.

Despite the transient aspects of her struggle for power in The Wide, Wide World, Nancy expends most of her energy on efforts to penetrate the status quo, to bring her disruptive natural storms to bear on domestic ideology. She makes repeated attempts to infiltrate the inner space of Ellen's foster home, brazenly barging into aunt Fortune's kitchen, rudely pressing her face against Fortune's windowpanes to eavesdrop on private conversations (231), and impudently arriving at Fortune's bee despite the fact that she has been expressly forbidden to attend (247). She even threatens to smuggle herself into Ellen's bedroom when least expected by entering through the window at night (209-10), a terrifying prospect for Ellen. Her most successful intrusion into Ellen's domestic space, however, occurs while the heroine is in a weakened and vulnerable condition, recovering from a prolonged illness. Still needing Ellen's unconscious permission to materialize, Nancy invades Ellen's room in response to the bedridden heroine's repressed desire for a visitor:

After two weeks Ellen began to mend, and then she became exceedingly weary of being alone and shut up to her room. It was a pleasure to have her Bible and hymnbook lying upon the bed, and a great comfort when she was able to look at a few words; but that was not very often, and she longed to see somebody, and hear something besides her aunt's dry questions and answers.

(207)

Ellen's unspoken discontent with the comfort to be received from God's Word in the Bible, the most valued authoritative word in Warner's text, summons the “other,” the trickster, into the narrative again.

Under the pretense of assuming Fortune's place as Ellen's nurse, Nancy wrecks Ellen's tidy sick room, haphazardly rummaging through the heroine's personal belongings for ways to create havoc in Ellen's orderly existence:

Nancy was in great glee; with something of the same spirit of mischief that a cat shows when she has a captured mouse at the end of her paws. While the gruel was heating she spun round the room in quest of amusement; and her sudden jerks and flings from one place and thing to another had so much of lawlessness that Ellen was in perpetual terror as to what she might take it into her head to do next.

(208)

Nancy's chaotic “lawlessness” does no permanent damage to either Ellen or her possessions, but it does break apart several stereotypical notions about female identity propagated by domestic ideology. Nancy, an earthy creature linked with the feminine unconscious, demonstrates no natural instinct for mothering.²² Instead, she makes a cruel mockery of nursing, transforming proper sick-room deportment into sadistic burlesque. After binding her weak victim into bed by tucking sheets all around her, Nancy laughs as she tries to force-feed Ellen some poorly prepared gruel. With no sign of remorse, she continues her perverse laughter when Ellen bursts into tears, and proceeds to torment the sick girl further by tickling Ellen until she writhes hysterically (211-12).

The sheer madness and collapse of order that Nancy triggers, however, reflects more than concern with mothering as a gender-determined function; it embraces class struggle as well.²³ As the granddaughter of a poor, unemployed immigrant widow, Nancy probably does not own anything like the array of fine dresses, ruffles, hoods, and capes she discovers in Ellen's trunk, nor would she ever be likely to attain such niceties. By daring to handle, inspect, and criticize every piece of Ellen's clothing, and then carelessly toss each precious item in a heap on the floor (210-11), Nancy's chthonic nature violates Ellen's privacy, profanes property laws, challenges boundaries, and defies materialistic value systems.

The trickster figure in Warner's text thus presents a formidable danger to an unjust economic hierarchy, to a society that requires humility, patience, and obedience from the poor to maintain class distinctions. Moreover, her presence jeopardizes Warner's ability to write a text that stays neatly within the accepted margins of literature written by women in nineteenth-century America. The confrontations between Ellen and Nancy, whether we formulate their conflicts in psychological, politically aesthetic, or historical terms, represent an ongoing struggle in Warner's text between novel and society, between that which could be called novelistic (the creative, heterogeneous, revolutionary) and sanctioned social conventions. Nancy's nature must be subdued in the text for Warner to write an acceptable woman's novel, for her to privilege Ellen's traditional religious conversion to sainthood and her socialization as a woman/mother.

Ostensibly, Nancy's assimilation into the community transpires because of Ellen's charity. Despite the ill treatment she receives at Nancy's hands, Ellen wins permission for Nancy to attend the bee, and this one generous act supposedly tames Nancy's rebellious spirit (248-49). Eventually, Nancy enters Fortune's home with her permission, though not as daughter, but as hired help. This new position uproots Nancy from her ties with nature, transplanting her, rather abruptly, indoors. On the lowest rung of the domestic ladder, as a slave to the everyday drudge work involved with keeping house, Nancy obviously loses her potential to destabilize social norms. She does commit one crucial last rebellious act, however, robbing her employer of the letters Aunt Fortune had kept from Ellen. Stealing Mrs. Montgomery's letters to her daughter, Nancy uses her apron to carry them to their rightful owner, tucking the repressed communications of a silenced (because deceased) woman into the folds of the garment that most emphatically signifies her own diminished authority in the text. As Ellen surrenders herself gradually to the male logos, Nancy's power, the force of the creative, feminine unconscious, begins to recede, but it does not disappear from the text completely.

Ellen's struggle with the aspects of her unconscious that most conflict with definitions of woman conceived to please man continues in more subtle ways throughout the text. The male character Ellen most wants to please, who she must, in fact, please if she aspires to be his wife, is John Humphreys, a virile young man studying for the ministry. Humphreys' relationship with Ellen takes many shapes: he becomes Ellen's adopted brother, her religious mentor, and, eventually, her husband. Throughout the novel, however, Humphreys articulates the authoritative word that both discounts Nancy and overwhelms Ellen. He demands that Ellen “read no novels” (564). This tyranny over her reading signifies the extent to which the creative dialogic forces of novelistic discourse threaten to dismantle the monophonic, authoritative word of histories and religious texts, which John uses to train Ellen into submission. His sullen desire for the apocalyptic end of the world as foretold in Revelation places him in direct opposition to nature and all things natural. With little or no faith in humankind's capacity to amend its sinful ways, Humphreys longs morbidly for the Last Judgment, when the “heavens shall be wrapped together as a scroll,” when they “shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment;—and it and all the works that are therein shall be burned up” (312). Because of her connection with nature and the creative impulses of novelistic discourse, Nancy's personification of a feminine unconscious shares the earth's fate in John's religious philosophy and Warner's text.

Ellen must wrap up all desire to enjoy nature, must incinerate her natural instincts, and shift to a delight in the word of God as it is imparted and interpreted by John. As Humphreys guides Ellen through a study of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, dominating her reading of the text so thoroughly that he refuses her permission to pick the book up without him, that transition begins. In her biographical account of her sister, Anna Warner notes that their father conducted “evening readings” of literature to “furnish safe fuel for [Susan's] imagination,” refusing either of his daughters permission “to touch the work then in hand” (90). Warner, as author-creator, unconsciously relates Ellen's religious conversion, which occurs as a direct result of John's reading, with a suffocating patriarchal control over literature that suppresses woman's creative imagination. From the very first session John's readings from Pilgrim's Progress have a startling effect on Ellen:

Her attention was nailed; the listless, careless mood in which she sat down was changed for one of rapt delight; she devoured every word that fell from the reader's lips; indeed they were given their fullest effect by a very fine voice and singularly fine reading.

(351)

Warner emphasizes the ravenous condition of Ellen's spiritual being with this graphic image of the young girl gorging herself on the life-giving nourishment of Bunyan's allegory as it flows from John's lips. As the chief provider of her famished soul, John becomes the nurturing parent of Ellen's rebirth, the male mother of her spirit. He plays a key role in Ellen's spiritual conversion, acting as intermediary between her and God. The consequences of Ellen's complete submission to John's symbolic texts do not, however, become fully evident until the end of Warner's novel.

In her final and originally suppressed chapter, Warner divides the two discourses that have worked in complementary relationship throughout the novel into two separate pictures. Ellen and John Humphreys, now newly wed, compare two pieces of art: a “fine copy of Correggio's recumbent Magdalen” and a picture of the Madonna and Child (578). The narrative frames, and therefore contains, the seductive, capricious, and potentially destructive components of the feminine unconscious in the picture of Magdalen. The picture of the Madonna and Child, however, indicates that Ellen's function as wife will also be contained, fixed within the limited framework of the paternal law that, as Judith Butler notes, requires women to be portrayed primarily through their maternal roles (“Body Politics” 175). In response to her own first impulse, Ellen admires the engraving of the prostitute, Magdalen, for its “perfect graceful repose,” for its depiction of woman experiencing the “entire, natural abandonment of every limb.” Her critique of the picture gives voice to the wholesome desire of a new bride for a natural, total abandonment to physical pleasures, for sexual fulfillment void of embarrassingly awkward or artificial postures. Humphreys, on the other hand, favors the Virgin Mother and Jesus for its “grave maternal dignity and love,” for its “moral beauty” (578). The picture he admires does not even include woman's body, showing only the heads of mother and child. As his wife, Ellen's submission to John requires more than a renouncement of her own physical pleasure, a surrender of her body to his pleasures. She must also substitute his limited construct of woman as mother in place of natural female sexuality. Ellen's defense of the Magdalen engraving signifies the last gasp of feminine nature in Warner's text, the last gasp of Warner's dialogic creativity; Humphreys' victory in this scene, on the other hand, marks the end of Ellen's unconscious desires and, by extension, the end of Warner's novel.

Notes

1. As several critics point out, Warner's life parallels many of the circumstances she creates for Ellen in the novel. In her afterword to The Wide, Wide World, Jane Tompkins makes unmediated comparisons between Susan Warner's biography and Ellen Montgomery's fictional life: “The endlessly demanding attempt to achieve self-sacrifice that is the principle of Ellen's education in The Wide, Wide World also governed Susan Warner's life” (586). In another such reference to Warner's life, David Leverenz points out similarities between Ellen's relationship with “her God and her father” and Warner's own “intensity of submission” to these patriarchal figures (189). Neither of these perspectives permits Warner a repressed unconscious with the potential to rebel against authority. Mikhail M. Bakhtin's early work on narrative interrelationships, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” stresses that arguments that confuse the “author-creator (a constituent in a work) with the author-person (a constituent in the ethical, social event of life)” fail to comprehend the “creative principle in the author's relationship to a hero[ine]” (10).

2. As Bakhtin points out, the “artist's struggle to achieve a determinate and stable image of the hero[ine] is to a considerable extent a struggle within [her]self (“Author and Hero” 6). I do not, by any means, wish to suggest that we can psychoanalyze Susan Warner, the person, through a study of the behaviors exhibited by Nancy, Ellen, or any of the other characters in the text. On the contrary, I maintain, with Bakhtin, that a “work's author is present only in the whole of the work, not in one separate aspect of this whole, and least of all in content that is severed from the whole” (Speech Genres 160). In novelistic discourse “all characters and their speech are objects of an authorial attitude” and “dialogic relations are possible between them” (Speech Genres 116). However, I do wish to emphasize Warner's creative investment in Nancy, a point that has heretofore gone unrecognized in criticism, and I am formulating Warner's relation with both Nancy and Ellen as a dialogic element in the text.

3. Although Nancy is the focus of this study, her character is not the only manifestation of unconscious subversion in The Wide, Wide World. See Dobson's essay, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels,” for an exploration of the ways in which tyrannical authority figures in Warner's text also undercut the feminine ethos underlying Ellen's self-sacrifice.

4. In his Marxist critique of Freudianism as a bourgeois psychology, Bakhtin refers to Freud's delineation of the unconscious as the “unofficial conscious” (Freudianism: A Critical Sketch 3, original italics), a remark that suggests ideological motivation governing the unapproved, and therefore suppressed contents of the psyche.

5. In Woman's Fiction, Nina Baym claims that a “Jungian perspective” explains the typical heroine's development in women's fiction during the nineteenth century, since most of the heroines of these tales must negotiate a movement from being an “undifferentiated child through the trials of adolescence into the individuation of sound adulthood” (12). Baym does not, however, delineate any specific Jungian function of unconscious subversion at work in her section on The Wide, Wide World, nor does she discuss Nancy Vawse's role in Ellen's differentiation process (140-50).

6. In their book Mikhail Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist argue for Bakhtin as the “sole author” of Freudianism: A Critical Sketch (147). However, the text remains a disputed work since it was originally published under V. N. Volosinov's name, but we can claim with certainty that Bakhtin contributed heavily to this piece. See both the foreword and the translator's introduction to I. R. Titunik's translation of the text.

7. Although Bakhtin never mentions Jung by name, his last “Notes Made in 1970-71” begin to sketch out a way to incorporate Jung's concept of the collective unconscious into dialogics. In a short, fragmented passage, Bakhtin argues that our connectedness with the past, with the “collective unconscious,” is “fixed in the memories of languages, genres, and rituals” (Speech Genres 144). The note suggests that Bakhtin was preparing to argue for the collective unconscious as a learned cultural product rather than a psychic legacy genetically inherited by each individual. In that case, the suppression of any portion of the collective memories into the “unconscious” would be informed by an individual's dialogic relation to the culture at large. Novelistic discourse, were we to push his obviously incomplete thoughts on the subject even further, transmits what Jungians presently term the collective unconscious.

8. In Freudianism, Bakhtin suggests that any “motivation of one's behavior, any instance of self awareness … is an act of gauging oneself against some social norm. … In becoming aware of myself, I attempt to look at myself, as it were, through the eyes of another person … (86-87). Similarly, in his “Anima and Animus” piece, Jung argues that “for the purpose of individuation, or self-realization, it is essential for a [wo]man to distinguish between what [s]he is and how [s]he appears to [her]self and to others” (84).

9. My argument is partially in response to David Leverenz's assertion in Manhood and the American Renaissance that “we focus on Ellen alone” throughout the text (184).

10. Ellen's character seems to operate as a locus for what Bakhtin calls the “centripetal forces of language,” i.e., her silent submission functions as an attempt toward “ideological unification and centralization,” a desire, in this specific social situation, to ignore the heteroglossia that shapes domestic ideology. Nancy, on the other hand, brings “centrifugal” forces to bear in Warner's text, which break down any illusion of social or historical unity, emphasizing the diverse cultural stratifications permeating domestic ideology (“Discourse in the Novel” 270-72). Neither force can be privileged over the other since it is through the dialogic struggle between them that meaning emerges.

11. See Glenna Matthew's references to recipes and canning techniques in The Wide, Wide World as an example of Warner's close attention to minute details (“Just a Housewife” 15-17). In “The Hidden Hand,” Dobson points out that Warner's graphic writing style creates a “thoroughly realized New England farming community and lively believable minor characters” (229).

12. In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin covers this problem rather thoroughly: “If there is only one unitary and unique participant, there can be no aesthetic event. An absolute consciousness, a consciousness that has nothing transgredient to itself, nothing situated outside itself and capable of delimiting it from outside—such a consciousness cannot be ‘aestheticized’. … An aesthetic event can take place only when there are two participants present; it presupposes two noncoinciding consciousnesses” (22).

13. Bakhtin suggests that “aesthetic form cannot be founded and validated from within the hero[ine], out of [her] own directedness to objects and meaning, i.e., on the basis of that which has validity only for [her] own lived life.” Novelistic discourse, then, can only occur when the author “produces values that are transgredient in principle to the hero[ine] and [her] life.” To accomplish this end, Bakhtin argues that the author “must become another in relation to [her]self, must look at [her]self through the eyes of another” (“Author and Hero” 90, 15).

14. Since both Ellen's father and mother fail in their cultural assignments, Warner's text emphasizes the weaknesses, hypocrisies, and incongruities embedded within such diametrically opposed constructs. In Woman's Fiction, Baym suggests that “surrogate family” arrangements in nineteenth-century women's writing, like Ellen's adoption into the Humphreys' family circle in Warner's text, represents “allegiance to the family ideal at the same time that [they] embod[y] a bitter criticism against families as the characters (and their authors) have really known them” (149). In Bakhtin's terms, such conflicts reveal dialogic tensions between centripetal and centrifugal forces involved in personal, cultural, and textual formation.

15. These mysterious depictions of Nancy heighten a sense that she could be something either more or less than human, that she could be “both sub-human and super-human, a bestial and divine being,” as Jung says of the trickster (263). Such heterogeneous features strengthen Nancy's capacity as a dialogizing element in the text.

16. In her biography of her sister, Anna Warner points out that Susan suffered from a “nervous imagination” about coming to harm or falling, which kept her from “climbing hay mows, mounting ladders, swinging, racing” and rambling, as Anna did, along the “brook” near their home (123-25). In this scene, Ellen participates in an activity that Susan Warner avoided because of unconscious fears, marking a textual instance where the author-creator's imagination runs wild in ways that Warner, as author-person, seems not to have done.

17. The derogatory remark Ellen makes about the size and shape of Nancy's nose also implies a racial bigotry against non-English immigrants (124).

18. Ellen shares this desire to control nature through knowledge with Alice Humphreys, the devout minister's daughter who initially undertakes responsibility for Ellen's formal education. Alice owns a cabinet of curiosities that contains, among other items, “dead moths,” “empty beetle-skins,” and “butterflies' wings” (163), strong evidence of her dominance over nature. Alice's scientific knowledge of nature's laws, however, neither checks her love for nature's beauty, nor contradicts her religious tenets. Quite the contrary, this knowledge reinforces her competence as a rational, intelligent, and educated person in the text, lending further credibility to her religious teachings.

19. Michel Foucault identifies the “true discourse” of phallogocentric language as that which seeks to “base itself in nature” by sketching “out a schema of possible, observable, measurable and classifiable objects” (“The Discourse on Language” 218-19).

20. Kristeva defines the feminine semiotic as a “fragmentary” phenomenon that has been “kept in the background” of the “history of signifying systems,” as an event that both “underscore[s] the limits of socially useful discourse” while it “attest[s] to what it represses” (Revolution 16), a description that seems to correspond perfectly with Nancy's dialogic role in Warner's text.

21. In her critique of Kristeva, Judith Butler notes that the “subversive effects” of Kristeva's concept of the semiotic never amount to “more than a temporary and futile disruption of the hegemony of the paternal law” (“The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva” 164). Diane Price Herndl stresses a related concern about the efficacy of polyphonic feminist discourses when she suggests that the “space which has been opened for feminist criticism [in academic institutions] may be merely a carnival provided by institutional authority” (“The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogics” 20). However, that which is temporary need not be futile, and disruptive discourse, when considered in its historically grounded dialogical function, cannot help but have some effect on authoritative discourse. In this specific historical event, i.e., in the production of The Wide, Wide World, Nancy's disruptive force, however fleeting it may be, provides readers with a different perspective on the ideologies Warner's text seems to be reinforcing through Ellen.

22. Nancy Vawse is not the only female in the text who “fails” at mothering. Aunt Fortune, for example, performs every duty of nursing for Ellen efficiently, yet leaves out love, and more important for Warner's religious agenda, spiritual comfort. Proper mothering does not rely on gender identity in The Wide, Wide World. Rather than a natural instinct, mothering is an art one learns, and that responsibility can only be performed well by a regenerate woman married to a converted man, an ideal condition that Warner's text only hints at in the final suppressed chapter.

23. Leverenz suggests that “Ellen's kindnesses to Nancy … bear a cloying touch of noblesse oblige” (189); her fear of Nancy, however, also emanates from Ellen's higher position on the social and economic ladder.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990. 4-276.

———. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-442.

———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968.

———. “From Notes Made in 1970-71.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 132-58.

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Butler, Judith. “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva.” Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture. Ed. Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. 162-76.

Clark, Katerina and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1984.

Dobson, Joanne. Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

———. “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels.” American Quarterly 38.2 (1986): 223-42.

Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 215-37.

Herndl, Diane Price. “The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic.” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991. 7-24.

Jung, Carl G. “Anima and Animus.” Aspects of the Feminine. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Extracted from Vol. 7 of Hull's translation of The Collected Works. 1959. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. 77-100.

———. “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure.” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vol. 9, Part 1 of The Collected Works. Ed. Gerhard Adler, et al. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. 255-72.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.

Matthews, Glenna. “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

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

Volosinov, V. N./Bakhtin, M. M. Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Ed. I. R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss. Trans. I. R. Titunik. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.

Warner, Anna B. Susan Warner. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909.

Warner, Susan. The Wide, Wide World. 1850. New York: The Feminist Press, 1987.