Family embraces: The unholy kiss and authorial relations in The Wide, Wide World

American Literature

Volumn 74, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 251-285

  Argersinger, Jana L ^a  

^a WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949437860     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-74-2-251     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. [Susan Warner], The Wide, Wide World (1850; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 578; further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text
2. John Hart, The Female Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1852), 387
3. For excerpts from responses comparable to Hart's, see Edward Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne, n.d.), 35, 47-48
4. and Anna Warner, Susan Warner (New York: Putnam's, 1909), 344, 354, 355
5. For a recent analysis of such responses, see Susan Williams, "Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship," American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): especially 569 and 573-74
6. Alexander Cowie, "The Vogue of the Domestic Novel, 1850-1870," South Atlantic Quarterly 41 (October 1942): especially 422-23
7. see also Henry Smith, "The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story," Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): especially 50-51
8. and John Frederick, "Hawthorne's 'Scribbling Women,'" New England Quarterly 48 (June 1975): 231-32, 235
9. On the wrinkling of critical noses over Warner's novel, see Jane Tompkins's overview in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 147-49
10. and Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 147-85
11. See Williams, "Widening the World"
12. and Veronica Stewart, "The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World," Legacy 11.1 (1994): 1-16
13. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty," in The Oxford Authors: Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 133
14. See Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993)
15. See G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), 76-120
16. and Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 94-125
17. Baym, Woman's Fiction, 11-12, 22
18. See Goshgarian, Chastening Rod, 114-15
19. Nancy Schnog, "Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide Wide World," Genders 4 (spring 1989): 11-25
20. and Mabel Baker, Light in the Morning: Memories of Susan and Anna Warner (West Point, N.Y.: Constitution Island Association, 1978), 44, 68
21. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 52
22. see also Baym, Woman's Fiction, 26
23. See Nicolas Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), especially 25-26, 12-13
24. See [Samuel Wells], How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette.... (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856), 91
25. see also [Eliza Farrar], The Young Lady's Friend (Boston: American Stationers' Company, 1837), 293
26. For the Baptist anecdote, see Charles C. Bombaugh, The Literature of Kissing, Gleaned from History, Poetry, Fiction, and Anecdote (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876), 89-90
27. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 101, 111-16
28. See, for instance, Mme. Celnart, The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness...., 5th American ed. (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1840), 9
29. Farrar, Young Lady's Friend, 10
30. Mrs. Manners, At Home and Abroad.... (New York: Evans and Brittan, 1853), 8
31. On the aristocratic life that Warner enjoyed well into her teens, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 56-58
32. Warner's class consciousness appears to have begun early and persisted long after the family's financial decline; see Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 109, 427-28
33. Compare Jennifer Mason, "Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World," Nineteenth-Century Literature 54 (March 2000): 503-33
34. Halttunen, Confidence Men, especially xiv-xvi
35. Perella, Kiss Sacred and Profane, 28
36. See Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 261-63, 346, 351-52
37. Mary Hiatt also notices that Ellen is "strikingly seductive" in this scene ("Susan Warner's Subtext: The Other Side of Piety," Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8 [August 1987]: 257)
38. See Manners, At Home and Abroad, 63-64
39. Celnart, Book of Politeness, 14-15
40. See Noble, Masochistic Pleasures, especially 219 n. 3
41. R. McClure Smith, "'He Asked If I Was His': The Seductions of Emily Dickinson," ESQ 40 (first quarter 1994): 49, 54, 64 n. 23
42. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978), 18 (quoting from Miller, Life of the Mind, 23)
43. Anna Warner, Susan Warner, 218-19, 237, 236 (quoting an undated journal entry and letter of Susan's)
44. On Susan's moorings in evangelical Christianity and her near-idolatrous admiration for Skinner, see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 22, 27-31, 39
45. On the revivalist movement generally, see Miller, Life of the Mind, 3-95
46. Olivia Phelps Stokes, Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1925), 9-11
47. Douglas, Feminization, 79, 86
48. Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 285-315, especially 294
49. and Elaine Showalter, Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1991), 11
50. On the conventional marriage ending, see Donna Campbell, "Sentimental Conventions and Self-Protection: Little Women and The Wide, Wide World," Legacy 11.2 (1994): 123
51. and Joanne Dobson, "The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels," American Quarterly 38 (summer 1986): 225-26
52. Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 319
53. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 40, 38
54. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth, 55
55. John Angell James, Female Piety: or, The Young Woman's Friend and Guide through Life to Immortality (London, 1852)
56. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 236, 307-8
57. See Susan Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 12-13, 20, 64, 135
58. On Eve, Satan, and the seductive "uses of rhetoric," see Smith, "Seductions of Emily Dickinson," 34-42
59. For a (disparaging) digest of such attempts, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 367, 382-86, 391
60. See Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 3, 42-53, 165
61. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (summer 1976): 887
62. and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 32-33
63. Perella, Kiss Sacred and Profane, 21-23, 38. On the danger that the mystical Christian kiss may edge into carnality, see 29-31
64. See R. McClure Smith, "Dickinson and the Masochistic Aesthetic," Emily Dickinson Journal 7 (fall 1998): 1, 8-9, 14-15
65. see also Irigaray, This Sex
66. See Susan Roberson, "Ellen Montgomery's Other Friend: Race Relations in an Expunged Episode of Warner's Wide, Wide World," ESQ 45 (first quarter 1999): 1-31
67. Williams, "Widening the World," 577
68. see Foster, Susan and Anna Warner, 48-49
69. and Dobson, "Hidden Hand," 240 n. 7