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

In Disciplining Girls, Joe Sutliff Sanders traces the sentimental heritage of the orphan girl novels Eight Cousins, A Little Princess, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and Emily of New Moon. Sanders places these novels and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—the story of a half-orphan—in a lineage that inherits the use of "affective discipline" from Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand. The earlier two books, he argues, participate in an ongoing debate in American culture about "what can be done with girls" (4), and answer that question by advocating affection-based governance, a moral suasion that depends on the child's willing response to a person who loves her. In the children's novels about girl orphans, from Eight Cousins (1875) on, however, he finds the girl characters wielding the power of affective discipline over those they love. His roughly fifty-year history of the orphan girl novel for children traces changes in the ways moral suasion is used on and by the girl protagonists, so that by the publication of Emily of New Moon in 1923, Sanders argues, authors have come to distrust moral suasion as coercive and prize children's individualism and rights over their responsiveness to discipline rooted in the affections. Instead of being lovingly shaped by their mothers, as Ellen Montgomery is at the beginning of The Wide, Wide World, orphan girls become figures who lovingly shape their adoptive mothers, as Pollyanna, Anne, and, to some degree, Emily refashion Aunt Polly, Marilla, and Aunt Elizabeth. Simultaneously, the girl's affective power reshapes men such as Tom Carrisford in A Little Princess, Rose's boy cousins in Eight Cousins, Dr. Chilton and John Pendleton in Pollyanna, Adam Ladd in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables.

After its introduction linking "Gender, Sentiment, Individualism, [and] Discipline," the book devotes a chapter each to Warner's and Southworth's books as well as the children's novels named above. Sanders demonstrates changes across time in the novels' use of affective discipline, their treatment of the central girl character's individuality, and their eventual substitution of influential mothers with influential daughters. He sees continuities in the displacement of "masculine privilege" from the absent or dead fathers onto other male figures or, as in Pollyanna, onto the girl invoking the memory of the father. After examining the books successively in their order of publication, Sanders revisits their major themes in two additional body chapters. Chapter ten, "Spinning Sympathy," examines the ways in which sympathy operates in Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did—another story of a half-orphan—and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, then extends that logic to the seven orphan novels at the heart of the book. Chapter eleven, "Girls' Novels and the End of Mothering," examines the selected orphan tales' treatment of mothers and mother figures. The conclusion, "Affection, Manipulation, Pleasure, Abuse," views the books' "empowerment" of the girl through a contemporary lens, reporting twenty-first-century scholars' doubt that the girl characters exercise any power in relationships that, to contemporary eyes, appear emotionally abusive.

Sanders uses Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World as "the genre's foundational text," and points to Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins as "[t]he first novel clearly intended for girl readers to follow in the footsteps of Warner's novels" (6). Novels for adults stopped using the plot elements Sanders attaches to "the formula" for orphan girl fiction, "but many children's writers followed Alcott's lead and were frequently rewarded with high sales figures" (6). The formula he cites involve an orphan girl's entry into a rural home "that is reluctant to accept her" but where "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...