Literary Style
In assessing Warner's style in The Wide, Wide World, there are three main aspects which created Warner's particular writing style. The first aspect is the time in which the book was written. With Webster furthering the development of the American dialect when he published the first American dictionary in 1828, America was still gaining its own literary voice in 1850 when The Wide, Wide World was published.
It is readily apparent from the first page that this novel's style is archaic with lines such as "Driven thus to her own resources, Ellen betook herself to the window and sought amusement there."
The next aspect of Warner's style is that The Wide, Wide World is also a didactic piece. Warner’s style was aimed at giving an accurate portrayal of the social limitations imposed upon nineteenth-century women, and aimed at promoting the benefits of Christian morality. The Wide, Wide World was republished in 1987 by the Feminist Press, showing the claims it holds to furthering gender equality. And one can see that Warner’s style was aimed at promoting Christian morals because one of the main themes of this novel is about finding strength in religious devotion.
The Wide, Wide World is a paradigm of sentimentalist literature. The conflict and action of this story is largely introverted within the protagonist Ellen. The lines “Dressing was sad work to Ellen today; it went on very heavily. Tears dropped into the water as she stooped her head to the basin,” are within a four page stretch within which Ellen cries on five separate occasions, displaying how sentimental Warner’s style was.
Along with being a piece of sentimentalist literature, the work is considered an example of the domestic novel. The Wide, Wide World adheres to the basic plot of most women’s fiction novels of the time, which, as Nina Baym describes the genre in Woman's Fiction, involves "the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.”
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