SOURCE: White, Isabelle. “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity: Susan Warner's Contradictions in The Wide, Wide World.” American Studies 31, no. 2 (fall 1990): 31-41.

In the following essay, White places The Wide, Wide World in the ideological context of nineteenth-century America and states that the work represents the conflict between the individual and authority during a period of developing capitalism.

During the 1850s, the decade that culminated in the Civil War, competing interests struggled to shape a definition of America. Issues at stake were whether the national identity would be defined by slave states or free states, by agrarian interests or industrial-capitalist interests, and by what were coming to be perceived as men's interests or women's interests. Popular fiction, perhaps most clearly among literary texts, reflects such issues. And at least sometimes, it goes beyond simply endorsing readers' values and validating their world views to crystalize issues and to attempt to influence...