SOURCE: Brodhead, Richard H. “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America.” Representations, no. 21 (winter 1988): 67-96.

In the following excerpt, Brodhead explores the acculturated psychodynamics of Ellen's reliance on her mother, and the effects of the latter's death.

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 lawsuit, neither the book's characters nor the book itself can...