Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Conduct Literature, and Protocols of Female Reading in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

The title page of the 1846 edition of Harvey Newcomb’s conduct-of-life book, Newcomb’s Young Lady’s Guide, features a classical portrait of a woman reading. Her feet are bare, her hair curls around her shoulders, she half reclines against the back of a luxurious sofa, and she looks directly at the tablet before her. Her obvious interest in the text suggests that she finds a certain pleasure in her reading, but her upright posture and her feet resting firmly on the floor resist the assumption that she reads idly or passively. Indeed, she might be engaging in a regimen of self-education or self-improvement, and the words that encircle the image—“Young Lady” and “Christian Character”—contain her reading within the lexicon of ideal womanhood. ¹

      The first chapter of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) draws an equally idealized portrait of a woman reading, closing with its child protagonist, Ellen Montgomery, reading Bible passages aloud to her delicate mother before bedtime:

Ellen began it, and went through it steadily and slowly, though her voice quavered a little.

“ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want ’ ”

Long before she had finished, Ellen’s eyes were full, and her heart too. “If only I could feel these words as mamma does!” she said to herself. She did not dare look up till the traces of tears had passed away; then she saw that her mother was asleep. Those first sweet words had fallen like balm upon the sore heart; and mind and body had instantly found rest together. (14–15)

The carefully selected scripture that Ellen reads aloud to her mother quiets Mrs. Montgomery’s consumptive body and resigns her to the immanent separation from her daughter that her husband’s “authority” demands (12). Like Newcomb’s woman reader, Mrs. Montgomery uses reading to develop a “harmonious Christian character,” to make her a deferent wife and an estimable mother. Thus it follows that Ellen’s mother embodies the reading identity to which Newcomb’s young lady (and Ellen herself, for that matter) aspires: as a “true” reading woman, Mrs. Montgomery uses reading to achieve an exemplary psychosomatic state.

     The images analyzed above raise the specter of a woman reader framed by ideality. Their presence in the initiatory moments of a vastly popular novel and a typical conduct book for women illuminate two genres in which the woman reader was a primary object of concern: mid-century advice manuals and popular domestic fiction. Indeed, advice manuals and domestic fiction shared more than an interest in women’s reading, and scholars are just beginning to reckon with the fluid generic boundaries between them. Sarah Emily Newton, for example, recognizes that “[c]onduct books supplied the typology upon which an engaging fiction could be hung,” and both literatures represent “the possibilities, limits, and consequences of female behavior” (146). The woman reader often takes center stage in that representation—so much so that reading figures prominently among the many behaviors which advice manuals and domestic novels sought to regulate. In openly didactic passages, conduct and domestic literatures detailed how and what and for how long and with what objective a True Woman should read. Ironically, the solitude of Newcomb’s woman reader evokes the central issues of contention within these scenes of reading. Advice manuals and domestic novels worried over the woman reader’s vulnerability to corrupting textual influences and her tendency to neglect the duties of caretaking for the sensual pleasures of the text.

     Latent within these fears is a culture struggling to negotiate the advance of women’s literacy and an emergent mass literary marketplace. In 1850, an estimated ninety-percent of the United States adult white population could read, and women comprised an extremely visible and highly contested segment of that population...