SOURCE: "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America," in Representations, No. 21, Winter, 1988, pp. 67-96.

In the following excerpt, Brodhead provides a psychological account of internalized moral discipline by a paradigmatic sentimental character. Only those footnotes pertaining to the following excerpt have been reprinted in the "Notes" section.

Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851), which went on to become one of the four or five most widely read American novels of the whole nineteenth century, is often cited as the first of the new bestsellers. And it is Warner's book that offers the most impressive recognition of discipline through love as a culture-specific historical formation. The Wide, Wide World is a historical novel in a systematically restricted sense of the word. Throughout the book Warner poses the extradomestic world outside of her sphere, in a place unavailable to her literary knowing. Its initial harmony devastated by a...