Travel Girl

Susan Warner’s 1850 bestselling transatlantic novel The Wide, Wide World presents the story of a young American girl whose robustness differentiates her from the previous generation of inadequate Scottish, American, and British female role models. Despite the commentary of women’s health advocates, medical professionals, and respected domestic advisors, such as Catherine Beecher, physical training for girls was not adopted by most nineteenth-century American parents. This chapter argues that contrary to cultural constraints that required sedate and passive behavior in girls, Warner constructs Ellen as the quintessential American child, a physically fit transatlantic girl who, literally, embodies the best of the Old and New Worlds. Warner positions Ellen as the ideal mid-nineteenth-century heroine, an unusually athletic and more interesting kind of traveling American girl whose staunch physical fitness serves as a necessary foundation for the maintenance of her national, spiritual, and moral identity.