Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Sentimental novels are filled with communication gone awry. This observation applies to the written word, as well as the spoken. For example, in The Wide, Wide World, Ellen Montgomery’s Aunt Fortune withholds a treasured letter written to Ellen by her mother and, in doing so, reveals Aunt Fortune’s arbitrary disciplinary regime (which is ultimately reversed by Alice Humphreys’s intercession). Likewise, much of the plot of Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood hinges on a misreading of a “marriage certificate” in which “the difference between the names of Henry Gabriel and Gabriel Henry St. James” goes unnoticed (440). E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Unloved Wolf depends upon Lilith Wyvil’s reading a “fatal letter” that first helps to destroy her marriage and then requires hundreds of pages to reconstitute it (91).
Author: Cindy Weinstein
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1576003937