Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story by Joe Sutliff Sanders (review)

The acknowledgments that open Joe Sutliff Sanders's Disciplining Girls contain a confession and disclaimer not uncommon in the genre of scholarly acknowledgments: "In the pages that follow, I attempt to write with intellectual detachment about sentimentality. For a few paragraphs, however, I have no choice but to speak with genuine sentimentality about the people who infused this intellectual exercise with such joy" (ix). This statement raises many questions. Why must sentimentality be approached with "intellectual detachment"? How does it make us feel we have "no choice" but to express the confluence of emotions it names? Does the public performance of this "intellectual exercise" demarcate sentimentality as the realm of the private, the individual, and the authentic, or as a suspicious instance of formulaic and potentially manipulative emotion?

It may seem churlish to pose such questions to the tender text of an acknowledgments section, but I ask them because Sanders's prefatory remarks touch so trenchantly upon his book's rich discussion of sentimentality and "the public implications of private affection" in American literature and culture (15). His opening sentences perform a deep-rooted American anxiety about sentimentality's potential to void individuality and to feminize, disempower, and render us incompetent. In theorizing the affective discipline applied to and employed by girls in American domestic fiction from 1850 to 1923, Sanders contributes significantly to urgent critical conversations (led most notably by Lauren Berlant) about the force of sentimentality in shaping the politics of American public culture and in reducing such politics to an intimate and private matter.

Disciplining Girls adroitly traces the migration of the orphan girl story from women's sentimental novels of the latter half of the nineteenth century to girls' novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth. The plot common to these novels is relatively simple: "an orphan girl enters a home far from modern urban life, a home that is reluctant to accept her, and by the end of the novel she has worked her way into the hearts of the people who live there, transforming the children and adults until they love and even resemble her" (6). Particularly in the later children's novels that take up this narrative, love is transforming more for the people surrounding the orphan girl than for the girl herself. As Sanders explains, such persistent literary interest in the transformative power of love arose from a broader argument in nineteenth-century America about the proper form that discipline should take. Affective discipline, or moral suasion, gradually began to be favored over corporal punishment as a means of correction in "nearly every area of public life in the nineteenth century, including slavery, temperance, worker efficiency, and most obviously, child rearing" (28). This shift from physical to psychological discipline significantly impacted upon women, who were already ideologically associated with the private, interior spaces of emotion and domesticity and thus seemed naturally suited to use "discipline by interiority" for the betterment of children and men within the domestic realm (27). Affective discipline, moreover, offered women—particularly mothers—a covert form of political power insofar as it allowed them to shape the nation's future leaders and govern the nuclear family that was becoming the privileged unit or "heart" of national life.

However, the female authors writing a second wave of orphan girl fiction began to break away from their "literary foremothers" because they became uneasy with the coercive potential of affective discipline (161). Nineteenth-century women's sentimental novels didactically illustrated that a good girl has "permeable boundaries" of selfhood and allows herself to be reshaped in the image of her loving disciplinarian, most often embodied by the mother whose surrogate the orphan girl becomes (37). As women's suffrage grew increasingly likely around the turn of the century, the authors of orphan girl fiction championed the girl's achievement of individuality as opposed to corporate forms of identity previously endorsed by this plot. In concert with these transformations...