Sara E. Quay
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 39-58

This article focuses on Susan Warner’s popular novel of 1850, The Wide, Wide World. Rooted in Warner’s own loss when her family moved from New York City to Constitution Island, the novel reflects a broader sense of cultural dislocation in America at this time. As this essay argues, homesickness is the affective corollary to the literal and figurative longing for home that shaped so much of mid-nineteenth-century American culture as the newly established American middle class tried to develop both from a collection of nationally and geographically diverse individuals into a coherent group and from the utilitarian Age of Homespun to a consumer culture. Home stands as a metaphor for the middle-class search for its identity. Warner’s novel suggests that when an individual invests objects with affect, by imagining them as repositories of emotion connected with her home—that is, by creating keepsakes—she can overcome the pain—the nostalgia—of modern life. This paper demystifies the ways in which domestic fiction, more generally, copes with nostalgia and change: standing at the juncture between these two distinct cultural definitions of material things, keepsakes became the focus of middle-class life because they represented emotional continuity in the face of great personal and social change—keepsakes including, not least, attachment to books like Warner’s that evoked and even encouraged their readers to feel nostalgia for home.