When I read the first page of Wide, Wide, World, I immediately compared it to Jane Eyre. Wide, Wide World was published three years after Jane Eyre. Both are by women writers. I think both were very successful when they were first published (it says that Wide, Wide, World was a best seller and I’m pretty sure Jane Eyre sold well). Both are about orphaned or abandoned girls who are sent away from home. Both begin with the heroine sitting by a window on a rainy day. Both girls want to be educated. That’s where the similarities end, however. Ellen is polite and proper, and even though many people in the book are jerks to her, lots of other people react positively. She doesn’t ask questions unless she senses that it’s alright to do so. She is not defiant. She cries a lot. Jane is nothing like this: she’s skinny and often described as plain and even disconcerting looking, like she’s a ghost or spirit (kind of like Priscilla, but alarming instead of charming). She reads all the time and has an intense imagination. She asks so many questions she crosses the line into rude and annoying. When people are mean to her, she fights back—the novel opens with her attacking her cousin after he throws a book at her. When adults chastise Ellen for not being forgiving and for loving her mother more than God, she accepts the criticism and tries to do better. When an adult tells Jane that she could go to hell for disobeying her aunt and cruel cousins, she says she guesses she’ll go to hell, then.
I love Jane. I love everything she does in that book. I feel bad for Ellen. She and her mother are in an impossible situation. They live in a world where women don’t have much leverage. But even though I feel bad for Ellen, and even though I like her—she’s so nice, how can you not like her?—I often want to shake her. I wish she would stop crying and being such a goody-two shoes (seriously? You won’t take your shoes off to walk over a slimy log, even though it would be safer, because “Mama wouldn’t like it?” Nancy shouldn’t have pushed her, but she deserved to fall into the water). I wish she’d stop saying, “Mama! Oh, Mama!”
The more of Wide, Wide, World I read, the more I think that Jane Eyre must have been kind of radical. Ellen stands up for herself, but in very small ways. She seems to rely on the kindness of others to get through life. I know she’s only eleven, but that’s still a bad and potentially dangerous policy. I liked that Jane was so independent, so able to care for herself, so assertive. She’s fiercely on her own side and not afraid to be different. I think she’s amazing. I wish I had those qualities in bigger quantities than I do. I think that Ellen annoys me, even as I feel sympathy for her, because she seems like an instructional character rather than a rounded-out one. Jane is written to be a whole person, Ellen, to be a lesson. I think this book might have been designed to teach little girls to be good and passive under adverse circumstances. It’s amazing how much the message sent to girls has changed. Now, most people want their daughters to be Janes, smart and independent, instead of passive Ellens.
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