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A Study on Women’s Novels in American Renaissance:Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World Yi, YoungsookNumerous middle class Protestant women writers in the U. S. published huge quantities of diverse writings over the period of American Renaissance, the Victorian era. Their works were delivered to hundreds of thousands of readers at the same time. Until quite recently, however, these texts have been despised and disgraced by twentieth-century critics because of their popularity, artistic ineffectiveness, the burdensome religiosity and their trivial domesticity. Those reproaches were caused probably by some mistakes such as the critics paid no attention to the conditions of the Victorian American women’s lives and to the Victorian cultural codes in which these novels were produced.This article chooses one of the best-seller novels written by women writers at the time: Susn Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. Naturally, the primary focus of this article is not to find out its artistic merit but to get rid of its disgraces by taking its literary conventions, specially about Christanity, seriously. In the 19th century American culture which was characterized as puritanical, patriarchal and paternal women, as always have been, were subalternate and marginal beings. So, it was difficult for women to construct their intact identities psychologica1ly, culturally and biologically. And certain oppressive powers to women were exercised systematically and tactfully, which were often unconscious to both men and women. Considering all these situations, the conventional literary trait Christianity of The Wide, Wide World is revealed not a burdensome ideology but a spiritual prop upon which Victorian American women depend and construct their intact identities.
