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Lauren Byler

Children's Literature, Volume 41, 2013, pp. 245-251 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/chl.2013.0021

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Reviews
Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story,
by Joe Sutliff Sanders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2011.
Reviewed by Lauren Byler
The acknowledgments that open Joe Sutliff Sanderss Disciplining Girls
contain a confession and disclaimer not uncommon in the genre of
scholarly acknowledgments: In the pages that follow, I attempt to write
with intellectual detachment about sentimentality. For a few paragraphs,
however, I have no choice but to speak with genuine sentimentality
about the people who infused this intellectual exercise with such joy
(ix). This statement raises many questions. Why must sentimentality
be approached with intellectual detachment? How does it make us
feel we have no choice but to express the confluence of emotions
it names? Does the public performance of this intellectual exercise
demarcate sentimentality as the realm of the private, the individual, and
the authentic, or as a suspicious instance of formulaic and potentially
manipulative emotion?
It may seem churlish to pose such questions to the tender text of
an acknowledgments section, but I ask them because Sanderss prefatory remarks touch so trenchantly upon his books rich discussion of
sentimentality and the public implications of private affection in
American literature and culture (15). His opening sentences perform
a deep-rooted American anxiety about sentimentalitys potential to void
individuality and to feminize, disempower, and render us incompetent.
In theorizing the affective discipline applied to and employed by girls
in American domestic fiction from 1850 to 1923, Sanders contributes
significantly to urgent critical conversations (led most notably by Lauren
Berlant) about the force of sentimentality in shaping the politics of
American public culture and in reducing such politics to an intimate
and private matter.
Disciplining Girls adroitly traces the migration of the orphan girl story
from womens sentimental novels of the latter half of the nineteenth
century to girls novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth. The
plot common to these novels is relatively simple: an orphan girl enters
a home far from modern urban life, a home that is reluctant to accept
her, and by the end of the novel she has worked her way into the hearts
2009.

Childrens Literature 41, Hollins University 2013.

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of the people who live there, transforming the children and adults
until they love and even resemble her (6). Particularly in the later
childrens novels that take up this narrative, love is transforming more
for the people surrounding the orphan girl than for the girl herself. As
Sanders explains, such persistent literary interest in the transformative
power of love arose from a broader argument in nineteenth-century
America about the proper form that discipline should take. Affective
discipline, or moral suasion, gradually began to be favored over corporal punishment as a means of correction in nearly every area of
public life in the nineteenth century, including slavery, temperance,
worker efficiency, and most obviously, child rearing (28). This shift
from physical to psychological discipline significantly impacted upon
women, who were already ideologically associated with the private,
interior spaces of emotion and domesticity and thus seemed naturally
suited to use discipline by interiority for the betterment of children
and men within the domestic realm (27). Affective discipline, moreover, offered womenparticularly mothersa covert form of political
power insofar as it allowed them to shape the nations future leaders
and govern the nuclear family that was becoming the privileged unit
or heart of national life.
However, the female authors writing a second wave of orphan girl
fiction began to break away from their literary foremothers because
they became uneasy with the coercive potential of affective discipline
(161). Nineteenth-century womens sentimental novels didactically illustrated that a good girl has permeable boundaries of selfhood and
allows herself to be reshaped in the image of her loving disciplinarian,
most often embodied by the mother whose surrogate the orphan girl
becomes (37). As womens suffrage grew increasingly likely around the
turn of the century, the authors of orphan girl fiction championed the
girls achievement of individuality as opposed to corporate forms of
identity previously endorsed by this plot. In concert with these transformations, the girl rather than the mother became the wielder of affective discipline. Although later orphan girls were more autonomous
than their predecessors, their use of affective discipline was frequently
portrayed as unconsciousa compromise formation created by authors
who remained so apprehensive about affective disciplines threat to
individualism that they eventually rejected it entirely.
In its methodology and structure, Disciplining Girls, as Sanders defines
it, is a literary history, as attentive to the rhetoric of historical events
and documents as to literary rhetoric (15). This Foucaultian-inflected

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247

study most noticeably draws on the work of Nancy Armstrong, Gillian

Brown, Claudia Nelson, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler in formulating its
claims. The book is broken into an introduction, nine chapters offering
readings of individual orphan girl novels, and three follow-up chapters
that sharpen the historical and ideological through-line for the earlier
chapters commentary on sympathy, mothering, and sentimentality.
Though many of the chapters on single novels are excellent, I would
encourage readers to begin with Sanderss introduction, which sets
out his central narrative and defines many key terms in ways not always
clearly rearticulated later on. I also think that chapter eleven, Girls
Novels and the End of Mothering, might have been more helpfully
located right after the introduction, because this late chapter begins to
answer the question that is persistent (at least for me) throughout the
middle chapters: Why did female authors, and American culture more
broadly, lose faith in mothers as affective disciplinarians, and instead
turn toward girls as ideal models of self-government and individuality?
Before recounting the arguments of individual chapters, I want to emphasize that the greatest among the many achievements of Disciplining
Girls is Sanderss careful mapping of a genealogy in American literature that connects adults and childrens fiction. He implicitly builds
an undeniable case for the necessity of including childrens literature
in scholarly and pedagogical engagements that seek to understand a
particular literary period, trend, or genre. After reading Disciplining
Girls, it appears impossible to study or write about American sentimental
literature or the American attachment to individuality without these
orphan girl stories.
Sanderss introduction, Gender, Sentiment, Individualism, Discipline, establishes the importance of understanding both sentimentalitys association with femininity in nineteenth-century American culture
and its opposition to individuality insofar as sentimentality involves
the blurring of the distinction between the people in a relationship
characterized by loving discipline (1516). Chapter one, The Wide,
Wide World and the Rules of Sentimental Engagement, points to
Susan Warners 1850 novel as the paradigm for the orphan girl story
that lays out the gendered nature of discipline: men are associated
with corporal punishment and women with more preferable and farreaching affective discipline (31). Turning to the writing of E. D. E. N.
Southworth in chapter two, The Hidden Hand and Momentary Individualism, Sanders extends a critique begun in the previous chapter
of the illusory individualism these novels produce in heroines who

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stand up against ideas and behavior imposed upon them, but only in
order to better resemble the mothers and conventional ideology that
first gave them their identity (49). In chapter three, Eight Cousins and
What Girls are Made For, we learn that girls are made for taking care
of boys specifically and everybody other than themselves generally.
Sanders sees Louisa May Alcott as the author who facilitates the transition of the orphan girl story from the womans novel to the girls novel.
Eight Cousins (1875) departs from the sentimental tradition in making
the girls volition less dependent upon her being the surrogate of her
mother, but also ties her individuality to her possession of property
that appears to own her as much as she owns it.
As the orphan girl story moves into childrens literature, the authors
working within this genre become progressively more ambivalent about
its advocacy of affective discipline. In chapter four, Kate Douglas Wiggins Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and her pedagogical writings about the
kindergarten movement evince anxiety about childrens individuality
being curbed by affective discipline that encourages children to imitate
and please a beloved teacher. The following chapter, A Little Princess
and the Accidental Power of Stories, illustrates Frances Hodgson Burnetts similar concern about the coercive nature of discipline through
love (66). If Wiggins novel places the child, not the adult, in the role
of disciplinarian, Burnett mitigates the girls capacity for emotional
manipulation by portraying Sara Crewe as unaware of the power her
storytelling has over adults (67). In chapter six, Anne of Green Gables
and the Return of Affective Discipline, L. M. Montgomerys 1908 novel
constitutes a throwback to nineteenth-century advocacy of affective discipline. But like its contemporary counterparts, this novel also portrays
the girl as a disciplinarian whose lovability causes adults to shower her
with material goods that satisfy her desires. Chapter seven, The Secret
Garden and the Rajahs Master, engages feminist frustration with the
shift of this novels narrative focus from a girls self-shaping to a boys
physical healing into a viable heir to patriarchal property. Sanders argues that Mary Lennox is not dispossessed by the novels conclusion,
but that she masters the rajah, Colin, through affective discipline that
extends her reign over Misselthwaite Manor and its material wealth. The
orphan girls dominion over others becomes even more pronounced
in chapter eight, Pollyanna and Anxious Individualism. Individualism is anxious in this novel because the title character uses affective
discipline to turn everyone in her town into a version of herself. Such
potential for affective discipline to infringe upon individuality causes

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249

L. M. Montgomery to change her former stance on this mode of discipline in Emily of New Moon (1923), which Sanders classifies as the final
orphan girl novel. Most notably in its portrayal of Emilys rightful possession of the writing she denominates my own private property, this
novel advocates for the sanctity of privacy and individuality at a time
when these properties were becoming legal possessions for women
who now had legislative rather than emotional means through which
to influence public life in North America.
The final three chapters of Disciplining Girls draw out and theorize
implicit argumentative threads woven through earlier chapters. Chapter ten, Spinning Sympathy, defines sympathy as a synchronicity of
feeling that inevitably colonizes one person in the sympathetic dyad,
eroding her individuality (145). In chapter eleven, Sanders demonstrates how emerging scientific discourse about parenting in the 1890s
began to take precedence over the natural instincts of mothers as
a trustworthy guide to child rearing. Trepidation about overprotective mothers who might overmother their childrenespecially their
boyscaused the replacement of the mother with the girl as the most
salubrious affective disciplinarian in orphan girl fiction (171). Closing
his book with a reflection on the twentieth-century backlash against
sentimentality, Sanders argues that modern readers and scholars tend
to revile orphan girl fiction and sentimentality because we see the
emotional manipulation of affective discipline as inherently abusive,
whereas nineteenth-century people saw legitimate and vital power
available to women and girls in this structure.
Throughout this study, Sanderss critical voice remains sharp, engaging, and at times delightfully conversational. He conveys nuanced ideas
with linguistic clarity that would make them accessible to advanced
undergraduates but still stimulating to professional academics. Even
in the few places where I found myself disagreeing with specific components of his argument, I thought his ideas were provocative and felt
that I was learning from grappling with his text. In particular, I would
like to have seen more rigorous interrogation of individualitys value.
Sanders briefly outlines the broken promises of individualism in his
introduction, where he recounts feminisms ambivalent relationship to
the individual as the aspirational paradigm of a citizen with legal rights
but also as the exclusionary ideological product of white, heterosexual
patriarchy. Similarly, the demonization of group politics that deprivilege the individual (also discussed in the introduction) seems a vital
but absent topic pertaining to late orphan girl fiction that depicts girls

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as laudable individuals. In these novels, the girl becomes a version of

what Lauren Berlant calls the infantile citizen; her innocence and
unconscious affective discipline stunt the political responsiveness of
the adults who must learn to love her by prioritizing her needs and
wishes over any other concerns. For example, Sanders is so successful
in delineating Eleanor H. Porters ambivalence about individuality in
Pollyanna that we are left with two very different understandings of how
Pollyanna embodies a kind of individuality that will heal the fracturing
of communities already in progress in turn-of-the-century America,
where families were becoming increasingly isolated by architecture
and automobiles (119). If Pollyanna gives her community members
from various walks of life an awareness of each other and their common concerns by sharing her glad game with them, the novel that
bears her name is indeed socially therapeutic. However, if the result
of Pollyannas individuality is homogeneity, this character could be
read not as providing connective social tissue to a diverse community,
but rather as anesthetizing and segregating these people into identical,
isolated, glad (i.e., complacent and Pollyannaish) units with little
social consciousness and efficacy (116). It is a very critical portrait of
the American investment in individuality if everyone becomes a version of the same individualand an individual who is a child at that.
Relatedly, in his compelling discussion of the mothers role in orphan girl fiction, Sanders unearths another vein of the national story
in which individuality is achieved and celebrated at the expense of
group dynamics such as those between female characters or between
two generations of women novelists. In late orphan girl fiction, a group
of proxy-mothers notably replaces the powerful biological mother
of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction (133). I wish Sanders had
teased out the punitive implications of the insight that as the orphan
girl took over the role of affective disciplinarian, she turned her corrective energies against characters (including Marilla Cuthbert, Polly
Harrington, and Elizabeth Murray) explicitly marked as nonnormative women living outside the circuits of heterosexual reproduction,
and who through this identity position control substantial financial
resources and manage family members of both sexes.
I detail my one disagreement with Disciplining Girls, and my desire
for more in this already replete text, not to suggest that I in any way
see it as flawed but rather to underscore that it is a substantial piece of
criticism that can stand up to critique and to calls for further development. Luckily for all of us, the book augurs much more to come from

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Sanders. I would especially love to learn more from him on the topic
of childrens rights, which he addresses in the introduction. Chapters
from Disciplining Girls would offer productive discussion topics for
courses on adolescent literature, American literature, or women writers. I certainly plan to assign chapters in my courses on girls books
and nineteenth-century women novelists. This book drew me into many
exciting intellectual daydreamsand those of us invested in childrens
literature are aware of the generative force of daydreams. If such a
statement sounds a bit precious, Sanders teaches us why we shouldnt
underestimate the power of precious sentiments.
Work Cited
Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship.
Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997.

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, by Jack
Zipes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012.
Reviewed by Elisabeth Rose Gruner
A new book by Jack Zipes is both an occasion to review his career to date
and an opportunity to marvel at his continued productivity. Zipes is, of
course, the undisputed dean of fairy tale studies in the US; his works
have shaped and inspired fairy tale scholars for almost forty years. In
The Irresistible Fairy Tale, Zipes draws on and extends his prior work. He
both celebrates the fairy tale as a subversive form and analyzes it as a
nearly living creature, evolving from a dim past into the multifarious
forms it takes today. While the celebration and the analysis sometimes
conflict with one another, the book as a whole helps to focus us on the
question, Why do we still read these crazy stories? while also introducing us to an ever richer, deeper, and perhaps crazier trove of tales.
Zipes outlines his goal in his preface: I have sought . . . to widen my
own sociopolitical approach to folk and fairy tales, and have explored
new developments in evolutionary psychology, cultural anthropology,
biology, memetics, cognitive philosophy, and linguistics . . . to demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of
human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing natural and social