SOURCE: Chantell, Claire. “The Limits of the Mother at Home in The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter.” Studies in American Fiction 30, no. 2 (autumn 2002): 131-54.

In the following essay, Chantell explores the way The Wide, Wide World and The Lamplighter embrace and critique conservative domestic ideologies relating to women and child-rearing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, domesticity had gained a position of prominence, if not dominance, in American culture; this discourse of home, family, and private life influenced everything from home design to social reform movements.¹ A primary feature of this ideology concerned the mother's role as child nurturer and educator, a role for which women were supposed to be divinely intended and biologically designed. As historian Mary Ryan has observed, “the feminization of child-rearing, in literature and in practice, dovetailed neatly with the gender system enshrined in the cult of domesticity. The true woman was...