SOURCE: Stewart, Veronica. “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World.” Legacy 11, no. 1 (spring 1994): 1-16.

In the following essay, Stewart characterizes Nancy Vawse as a subversive trickster figure in The Wide, Wide World who provides a vital commentary on the use of power as represented in the novel.

In Susan Warner's popular nineteenth-century novel, The Wide, Wide World, aged Mrs. Vawse supplies the most pertinent clue to a comprehension of her incorrigible granddaughter's role in the text when she informs us that Nancy Vawse does not return home “if there's a promise of a storm” (193). As a wild, unpredictable child of storm, aligned with nature and natural passions rather than with the dominant social conventions, Nancy escapes the cultural imperatives that require a self-willed command of all desires from the text's heroine, Ellen Montgomery. In keeping with the most articulated precepts of the “cult of domesticity,” as well...