SOURCE: "His Sister's Keeper: Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World," in To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance, Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 76-120.

In the following essay, Goshgarian contends that the plot of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World exemplifies the structure of male authority and female submission, a structure that idealizes the incestuous relationship.

Being natural self-knowledge, knowledge of self on the basis of nature and not on that of ethical life, [the relationship of husband and wife] merely represents and typifies in a figure the life of spirit, and is not spirit itself actually realized. Figurative representation, however, has its reality in an other than it is …

The feminine element, therefore, in the form of the sister, premonizes and foreshadows most completely the nature of ethical life. She does not become conscious of it, and does not actualize it...