The Journey to American Womanhood: Travel and Feminist Christian Rebellion in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Martha Finley’s Elsie’s Girlhood

Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Martha Finley’s Elsie’s Girlhood (1872) contain mirrored story arcs about their young protagonists, Ellen Montgomery and Elsie Dinsmore. In both novels, the girls travel locally and globally, and their journeys portend important markers in their self-understanding as well as their relationships to others. Their adventures are grounded in an allegorical, Protestant Christian tradition that ultimately fuses with a uniquely American sense of identity when they go abroad. Via travel, Ellen and Elsie learn to invoke that fused understanding of Christianity and patriotism to thwart patriarchal confines and claim independence and control over their own lives.