Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century

Robin L. Cadwallader, LuElla D'Amico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000071702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection is the first of its kind to interrogate both literal and metaphorical transatlantic exchanges of culture and ideas in nineteenth-century girls' fiction. As such, it initiates conversations about how the motif of travel in literature taught nineteenth-century girl audiences to reexamine their own cultural biases by offering a fresh perspective on literature that is often studied primarily within a national context. Women and children in nineteenth-century America are often described as being tied to the home and the domestic sphere, but this collection challenges this categorization and shows that girls in particular were often expected to go abroad and to learn new cultural frames in order to enter the realm of adulthood; those who could not afford to go abroad literally could do so through the stories that traveled to them from other lands or the stories they read of others' travels. Via transatlantic exchange, then, authors, readers, and the characters in the texts covered in this collection confront the idea of what constitutes the self. Books examined in this volume include Adeline Trafton's An American Girl Abroad (1872), Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1881), and Elizabeth W. Champney's eleven-book Vassar Girl Series (1883-92), among others.

Section 1

Transatlantic Girlhood

1 Travel Girl

The Value of Physical Fitness in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World

Christiane E. Farnan

“And oh! John,” Ellen Montgomery exclaims to her erstwhile New England guardian John Humphreys in the final pages of Susan Warner’s 1850 bestselling transatlantic novel The Wide, Wide World, “order a horse and let us have one ride together; let me show you Edinburgh” (568). Ellen’s instinct, as shown here, is not to remain within a luxurious parlor for tranquil conversation with the Reverend Humphreys but to spend their few shared hours touring Scotland’s capital city. On the brink of young womanhood, Ellen is a far cry from the sedentary child who was shut inside a “dark and cheerless” New York City hotel room with her dying mother at the novel’s start (10). Now a healthy physical model of the mid-nineteenth-century American girl abroad who relishes her freedom and “rides to her heart’s content” across the Scottish countryside (538), vibrant Ellen is a marked contrast to the generation of physically imperfect women responsible for her childhood: her Scottish immigrant mother, Mrs. Montgomery; her Yankee taskmistress aunt, Fortune Emerson; and her British immigrant spiritual guardian, Alice Humphreys.

Ellen’s sole female role model until the age of ten is her mother, Mrs. Montgomery. However, Mrs. Montgomery’s zealous dedication to what Barbara Welter identifies as the “four cardinal virtues” of womanhood—“piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity”—earns her membership in the Cult of True Womanhood (152), as well as in what Martha H. Verbrugge refers to as the nineteenth-century American “cult of female frailty” (8). American “[g]irls and women seemed prone to both ordinary and peculiar ailments,” Verbrugge writes, and mainstream “medical and popular literature cultivated a stereotype of feminine delicacy and invalidism,” creating “the perception that [American] women were unusually, perhaps innately, sick.” After only ten years as an American wife and mother, Mrs. Montgomery fulfills this stereotype; she is barely able to rise from the hotel room sofa upon which she “[lies] quite still” (18). She provides a shocking contrast to her own elderly but brisk mother and equally efficient sister who remain in Scotland. Mrs. Montgomery’s deterioration reflects contemporary progressive American doctors’ and women’s health advocates’ worries “that American women were physically inferior to their English and Continental sisters,” as outlined by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg (339). Additionally, she embodies nineteenth-century social commentators’ regretful descriptions of young middle- and upper-class women who “seemed in particular less vigorous, more nervous than either their own grandmothers or European contemporaries.” Too weak to advocate effectively either for herself or for Ellen, Mrs. Montgomery feebly submits to Captain Montgomery’s decision to leave Ellen behind in America and to sail “all the way across the ocean” even as her doctor doubts “she’ll live till she gets to the other side” (Warner 19). Once abroad, Mrs. Montgomery fades and dies in Europe, regretting the absence of strength that renders her incapable of any self-determination. Rather than infusing her with self-reliance, Mrs. Montgomery’s decade in America causes her to be physically unfit to travel, let alone to raise a strong, healthy daughter.

Conservative social reformer and women’s health advocate Catharine Beecher, who despaired over the low “standard of health among American women” and the void of American “married ladies born in this century and country, who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous” (Letters 122, 129), would have identified Mrs. Montgomery as a woman likely to raise “feeble, sickly, and ugly” children through “dreadful neglect and mismanagement” (Letters 8). However, while Mrs. Montgomery suffers from any number of mid-nineteenth-century female ailments, Ellen’s next role model exudes so much womanly vigor that she cooks, cleans, preserves, churns, weaves, and launders herself into feverish prostration. Ellen’s Yankee farmer aunt, workaholic Fortune Emerson, is positioned as the equally problematic opposite of Mrs. Montgomery’s invalid True Woman. As a proponent of women’s socially prescribed submissive domestic role (Sklar 266), Beecher likely would have connected Aunt Fortune’s frenzied domestic labors to her belligerence, non-religiousness, disregard for education, and single, childless status. Arguing that it was the American woman’s responsibility to save the nation from social turmoil through strict participation in a physically fit version of the Cult of True Womanhood, Beecher likely would have deemed Ellen’s aunt just as inadequate for the “responsibility [of] rearing and educating . . . children” as Mrs. Montgomery due to her excessive physicality and extremist anti-education philosophies (Treatise 44).

Warner seems, at first, to present readers with Beecher’s ideal “perfectly healthy woman” in the character of Alice Humphreys, Ellen’s self-appointed spiritual guardian (Treatise 43). Deeply pious, genteel, and charitable, Alice participates in moderate exercise, attends to light housekeeping duties, manages her household, engages her mind in intellectual pursuits, and dedicates herself to the domestic comfort of her father and brother. According to the description of nineteenth-century American life Beecher provides, Alice fulfills a woman’s duty in effectively managing her family in a rapidly changing world, amid “high commercial, political, and religious stimulus, altogether greater than was ever known by any other nation” (Treatise 43). Primarily responsible for Ellen’s religious training, Alice also provides for Ellen’s education in domestic management, natural sciences, mathematics, and English grammar and writing, as well as arranges for the young girl to study French. Ultimately, though, British Alice proves insufficient to raise an American girl as her health also fails to support her womanly responsibilities. Ellen observes Alice slowing down until she is always on a “settee for summer” or “a sofa for winter” or “half reclining on the sofa, half in her brother’s arms” (162, 306). Just like Mrs. Montgomery and Aunt Fortune, Alice proves herself physically unfit to raise Ellen.

Much of the scholarly analysis of Warner’s novel builds upon the work of Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs, and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction, and focuses on the sympathetic process through which Ellen, “a child of very high spirit and violent passions” (Warner 63), is tamed by sorrow and trauma into a sentimental nineteenth-century Christian child who embodies the “ideology of duty, humility, and submission to circumstance” and who models the “imperative of self-sacrifice” (Tompkins, Afterword 585). However, more recent scholarship by Jessica DeSpain, Caroline Rosenthal, Sara E. Quay, LuElla D’Amico, Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, and Amy Kaplan explores the ways in which Ellen’s transatlantic travel story is peculiarly American. Kaplan’s work in particular examines how nineteenth-century domestic novel heroines such as Ellen reflect American women’s national role as the domestic “stable center in a fluctuating social world with expanding national borders” while remaining “spatially and conceptually mobile to travel to the nation’s far-flung frontiers” (193). Most interestingly, Kaplan interprets Beecher’s overview of nineteenth-century American women’s ill health as motivated by Beecher’s nationalistic concern that women were dangerously incapable of fulfilling their duty to “incorpor[ate] and [control] a threatening foreignness within the borders of the home and the nation.” Kaplan’s argument regarding nineteenth-century women’s health and women’s ability to strengthen American values at home and abroad can be used to develop a new understanding of Warner’s heroine as a physically fit American transatlantic traveler.

The Wide, Wide World presents the story of a young American girl whose robustness differentiates her from the previous generation of inadequate Scottish, American, and British female role models. The contemporary transatlantic girl reader, likely white and middle class, finds a different, new kind of American girl in Ellen, an adolescent heroine who predates the late-nineteenth-century’s golfing, swimming, and tennis-playing New Woman and still embodies culturally appropriate girl behaviors.¹ Like her weak Scottish and British immigrant role models, Ellen is feminine grace personified, and Warner consistently provides readers with affirmation from both Ellen’s American friends and the Scottish Lindsay family who recognize that Ellen is “a child of such refined and delicate feeling” (295), a “perfectly well-behaved child” (418), and “perfectly lady-like always” (548). While Ellen’s hardiness differentiates her from both her mother and Alice, it is the “grace in her politeness that can only proceed from great natural delicacy and refinement of character” that proves her to be superior to her able-bodied but rude and stubborn Aunt Fortune (417). As an American-born girl influenced by both decorous European True Women and a hardheaded no-frills Yankee woman farmer, Ellen represents the best of both the Old World and the New. Raised in a generation Smith-Rosenberg identifies as culturally transformative, Ellen enjoys a “quintessentially American identity” while “her economic resources, and her social standing [permit] her to . . . pioneer new roles, and still insist upon a rightful place within the genteel world” (245). Thus, Warner positions Ellen as the ideal mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic heroine, an unusually athletic and more interesting kind of traveling American girl whose staunch physical fitness serves as a necessary foundation for the maintenance of her national, spiritual, and moral identity.

Warner’s title, The Wide, Wide World, assures readers that Ellen’s travel trajectory follows an international route, and publishers eager to seize promising transatlantic sales capitalized on the title through illustrated volumes such as Putnam’s 1853 edition. Ten out of the fourteen Putnam illustrations “depict some form of travel and meetings between strangers. . . . Most importantly, the frontispiece to Putnams’s illustrated edition is a lone steam packet sailing eastward on a craggy sea” (DeSpain 70). However, two-thirds of the novel details Ellen’s extensive physical preparation for her ocean journey and her new life in Scotland, and readers experience Ellen’s strenuous regional American training and fitness transformation in virtual step with the heroine. American girl readers, who “from their infancy on were sheltered, supposedly to help them maintain both their health and, not surprisingly, their growing femininity” (Cogan 37), would have found dainty ten-year-old Ellen to be a familiar figure whose initial physical struggles and gradually increasing strength and health demonstrated that fitness and exciting travel opportunities were possible for any girl. British girl readers, who may have found Ellen’s adoration of George Washington to be her most foreign character trait, probably would have seen her excellent health and stamina as the cultural norm. Girls’ physical education training in the UK was frequently referenced in mid-nineteenth-century American educational journals and medical journals, such as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which put forth the following on physical fitness for girls:

The English girl spends more than one half of her waking hours in physical amusements, which tend to develop and invigorate and ripen the bodily powers. She rides, walks, drives, rows upon the water, runs, dances, plays, sings, jumps the rope, throws the ball, hurls the quoit, draws the bow, keeps up the shuttlecock—and all this without having it pressed forever upon her mind that she is thereby wasting her time. She does this every day until it becomes a habit which she will follow up through life. Her frame, as a natural consequence, is larger, her muscular system better developed, her nervous system in better subordination, her strength more enduring, and the whole tone of her mind healthier. (“Air and Exercise” 234)²

Along with Catherine Beecher, well-respected women’s educational and health activists Sarah Josepha Hale, Emma Willard, and Diocletian Lewis advocated rigorous exercise for women of all ages and opened schools that specifically included British influenced physical training for girls. While Warner ensures that Ellen does not “romp” in order to maintain her culturally prescribed American femininity, her increasing physical activities render her of interest to both American and British readers.

Ellen starts on the literal and metaphorical road to physical fitness as the inactive daughter of an immobile mother. As such, Ellen has seemingly inherited from Mrs. Montgomery a condition that post–Civil War American medical doctors would eventually diagnose as neurasthenia. Ellen’s and Mrs. Montgomery’s neurasthenia symptoms predate the usage of the “popular medical term . . . used to describe a loss of ‘nerve energy’ that could result in a host of symptoms including fatigue, vague bodily pains, melancholia, hysteria and even . . . a lack of ‘moral poise,’” which Tiffany Lee Tsang examines in her article “‘A Fair Chance for the Girls’” (139). By the age of ten, Ellen has never walked farther than a few city blocks, and she is utterly dependent upon her mother, who is unable to leave the hotel unless “there [is] no wind, there [is] no dust; the sun [is] not oppressive”; and the doctor “‘make[s] his visit first’” (Warner 28, 27). Warner emphasizes that Ellen’s lack of bodily autonomy is equal to Mrs. Montgomery’s when the child is forcibly removed from her mother’s likewise helpless arms, “carried . . . downstairs, and put . . . on the front seat of the carriage” that will take her away into the unknown (64). Incapable of processing sensory information, Ellen experiences her own loss of nerve energy and dissociates from her corporeal self: she does “not feel the touch of her father’s hand, nor hear him when he [says] good-by.” Ellen’s journey via carriage, steamboat, stagecoach, and ox-cart is psychologically traumatic, and her weak body is unable to help her to withstand the emotional anguish.

Ellen’s symptoms worsen as she unsuccessfully attempts to assume some control over her body. Disoriented and numb, Ellen disembarks the steamship in a strange river town, and her wish to avoid unpleasant traveling companions makes her decide she would “rather walk” to the hotel than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Little Women” in a Transatlantic World
• Section 1 Transatlantic Girlhood
• Section 2 American Girls Abroad
• Section 3 Girlhood, Humane Offerings, and the Transatlantic Nature of Ideas
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index