| When the sentimental novel came to an end in the late nineteenth century, crucial fixtures of its logic, particularly as pertaining to discipline, individuality, and motherhood, found a new voice in the emerging market for juvenile fiction. But the historical context of sentimentalism no longer applied, and in a genre of novels about orphan girls from 1875--1930, the ideology of sentimentalism experienced dynamic changes. This dissertation charts those changes by beginning with Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand, extremely popular sentimental novels that sketched out the formula the later girls' novels would borrow. In these novels, we see the use of surveillance and affective discipline wielded by the loving, knowing parent. But as the girls' market emerges, novels by Louisa May Alcott, Johanna Spyri, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and L. M. Montgomery demonstrate a dawning mistrust of these markers of control. The changing history of discipline alongside histories of architecture, education, and legal representation help to explicate the slow, subtle shifts in the primary texts more fully. In the genre's late phase, novels such as The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and Emily of New Moon continue to struggle with the need to discipline children and adults, disavow the mother (whom the sentimental novel had invested with precisely the kind of authority abhorred by new models of child rearing), and accommodate the liberal subject. The answers the novels provide rely on a new model of attachment and separation. |
