Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story (review)

Long before the words “girl” and “power” were combined to create a phrase emblematic of this generation’s anxieties regarding young women’s behavior, North American and British children’s authors were debating, through varied representations of girl protagonists, how young women might obtain a voice and a sense of purpose in a culture resistant to the overt manifestation of female influence. In his impressive study of Gilded Age and Progressive-era girls’ fiction, Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story, Joe Sutliff Sanders examines a concept central to nineteenth-century sentimental literature: affective discipline, the practice of exerting control over others through moral suasion. Sanders demonstrates how the locus of power, derived from wielding an improving influence over others, increasingly attached itself to orphan girl characters. Using nine popular orphan-girl texts as touchstones, Sanders provides a detailed and valuable consideration of theories of gender and power that continue to shape our understanding of the sentimental mode.

Beginning with Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) as an exemplary mid-nineteenth century sentimental text, Sanders demonstrates how Warner and other authors placed the power of affective discipline with the mother. The daughters in early novels like The Wide, Wide World accepted their mothers’ moral suasion without question and, even if their mothers were physically absent due to temporary separation or death, behaved as if under their sway. Wide, Wide World heroine Ellen Montgomery become an orphan in late adolescence, but has already accepted her mother’s attitudes regarding appropriate women’s roles, evangelical Christian ideology, and the proper realization of a young woman’s sense of purpose. As Sanders notes, Ellen “becomes the prototype for the popular orphan girls of fiction that will follow at the turn of the century, but it is the heavy weight of her dead mother that structures the story, determining the girl’s formative tragedies while laying out the sentimental rules of affective discipline” (31). This state of affairs altered, Sanders argues, once “the responsibility of using the power inherent in affective discipline to rule over people [in the domestic sphere] was displaced from the mothers of the sentimental mode to the girls who followed” (162).

According to Sanders, the renegotiation of “the place of sympathy and motherhood” in sentimental fiction (142) emerged during a concomitant shift in public attitudes on child rearing. Referring to Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky’s studies of fin-de-siècle motherhood, Sanders highlights the claim that “‘while earlier generations viewed mothering principally through a religious lens . . . , middle-class families increasingly saw child nurture as a matter to be investigated, quantified, and studied by psychologists, doctors, and others’“ (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 130, qtd. in Sanders 167). Sanders notes that “this new approach to mothering did not advocate shutting mothers out of the process of mothering; rather, it indicated that mothers should remain primary but could do better if they followed the advice of professionals with scientific credentials,” typically men (Sanders 167). This philosophy of motherhood dovetailed with another late nineteenth-century anxiety, conservative social commentators’ fear that overprotective nurturing might turn healthy, hardy boys into weaklings unfit to defend and to expand the growing British and North American empires. Sanders points to Louisa May Alcott’s 1875 Eight Cousins, in which Rose Campbell—an orphan girl in the mold of Ellen Montgomery—learns self-discipline from her Uncle Alec, a physician and a fitting representative of the turn toward scientific motherhood.

Although parenting philosophies would continue to shift, the idea that a mother figure could as easily be replaced by a “manly mother” such as Uncle Alec was supplanted by a more radical proposition. “As the genre ripened,” Sanders suggests, novels by the likes of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lucy Maud Montgomery “more explicitly placed girls in the roles of mothers as they took responsibility” for themselves, their peers, and eventually adult men and women (167). Sanders makes clear...