SOURCE: Ashworth, Suzanne M. “Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Conduct Literature, and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America.” Legacy 17, no. 2 (2000): 141-64.

In the following excerpt, Ashworth explains the thematic significance of Ellen's voracious reading and finds that this characteristic is an important mechanism of identity construction in The Wide, Wide World.

“the Eyes of Her Mind”: Reading with Self-application

If [nineteenth-century] women readers were to begin with the interchangeable maxims “read with purpose” and “read no novels,” then they were supposed to end with an eye to their own betterment, translating purpose into self-application—into a regimen of self-examination and self-correction that was inspired by select texts and interpretive exercises. In archetypal terms, reading with self-application was supposed to create cultivated icons of ideal femininity. In the process, this trajectory of self-improvement quelled the threat of women's reading with the rubric of middle-class female virtue: piety...