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

In the last chapter of Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story, Sanders trenchantly argues that American culture has failed to find a way to divorce questions of power from questions of gender. Nearly a decade after Cathy Davidson coedited a special edition of American Literature under the polemical title "No More Separate Spheres" (2002), in which the contributors called attention to the ways in which contemporary literary criticism has recapitulated the radical gender binaries of nineteenth-century culture, Sanders sees the separate spheres persisting in literary criticism. He sees them, too, in many other discourses of power, such as in definitions of what constitutes domestic violence. These continuities, he persuasively argues, are part of a cultural heritage that we can uncover through a careful examination of one of the most popular genres of children's literature: the orphan girl novel.

Sanders traces this genre in North America from the mid-nineteenth century, when Susan Warner's wildly popular The Wide, Wide World (1850) opened the floodgates. While not explicitly juvenile fiction, inasmuch as the category did not yet exist, Warner's motifs fruitfully multiplied over the next three-quarters of a century. Sanders looks at exemplary texts over this period—E. D. E. N Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins (1875), Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Emily of New Moon (1923), and Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1913)—to trace both continuity and development. Seeing in the beginning a relatively uncomplicated presentation of the belief that moral suasion through sympathy could both discipline the orphan child and the surrogate parents who became the orphan's guardian, Sanders shows how over the ensuing period various authors complicated the formula in extremely interesting ways. In particular, the sentimental formula as articulated by Warner grants the female subject influence only through self-abnegation. Over time, these writers came to see that formula as vexed, in that patriarchal structures allowed no other kind of power to girls, and that the exercise of moral suasion could be as coercive as physical power. While some authors celebrated such power as the birth of agency and individuality, others saw it as corrupting and thus sublimating individuality in inappropriate power relations. All connect the exercise of a girl's power to the republican agenda of creating autonomous "Lockean" individuals, though at the beginning of the tradition, the individuals were mostly male, and by the end, they were as often female.

Sanders's analysis works for the most part because it balances careful attention to textual detail against larger traditions, and historical background against theoretical principles. However, it is in the theory, perhaps, that the book works somewhat against itself. In depending early in the book on Michel Foucault's idea of the panopticon as metonymy for coercive social power, Sanders surrenders to a theory that is profoundly binary, one that leaves little room for ambivalence and multiplicity. By the end of the book, I sense the shadow of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of heteroglossia embraces ambivalence as fundamental to a creative frame of mind. Perhaps I am not so much criticizing as describing, revealing how Sanders leads a reader from a binary model of thinking into a vague, rich, and as yet unnamable alternative. As much as Disciplining Girls is the perfect title for the first several chapters, it is less apt for the last. The problem may be that no sufficient title is available for the book's conclusion, but, at the very least, Sanders asks us to imagine how to write the next chapter in our social history.