SOURCE: Barnes, Elizabeth. “Corporate Individualism: The Lamplighter.” States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, pp. 74-99. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Barnes asserts that Gerty's physical return to her family, as well as her spiritual return to Christianity, are presented in uniquely modern terms in The Lamplighter. The critic focuses on how Gerty's independence is reinforced rather than reduced by her reconnection to paternal figures.

Corporate Individualism: the Lamplighter

Written more than forty years after A New-England Tale, The Lamplighter (1854) constitutes one of the last and most popular of the domestic novels. It also reveals the extent to which literary depictions of Christian individualism have facilitated the reconstruction of paternal authority in the intervening years. Whereas Sedgwick's novel assumes from the outset its heroine's “habit of self-command,” The Lamplighter traces the psychological mechanisms by which passionate individuals achieve their self-possession. What...