ABSTRACT
In the purity of a “clear childish voice,” ten-year-old Ellen Montgomery sings hymns to her ailing mother during a Sabbath the two spend together. As she sings and “[h]ymn succeeded hymn,” the mother begins to feel “as if earth were left behind, and she and her child already standing within the walls of that city where sorrow and sighing shall be no more.” In this description of the mother’s yearning for a heavenly city beyond earthly pain, contemporary readers of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World would have heard echoes of a description of the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation.2 But despite Warner’s sympathetic depiction of the mother’s yearning for release, Ellen’s next hymn strikingly repudiates such longings for millennial consummation and escape, and counsels submission to this-worldly trouble:
With this account of generative stasis, the child’s singing brings the mother out of her vision of millennial coherence at the end of time and “back to
earth again.” And with a difference: though tears continue to fl ow, they are no longer bitter. “It is so indeed, dear Ellen,” the mother says, moved and reoriented by the hymn’s embrace of earthly misery: “Let us glorify him in the fi res, my daughter; and if earthly joys be stripped from us, and if we be parted from each other, let us cling the closer to him,—he can and he will in that case make up to us more than all we have lost” (56). Though these expressions set fairly high a reader’s expectations for the resolution of Warner’s plot, the mother’s transport in claiming the divine promises of compensation provides a more immediate irony. The mother may claim the hymn text’s promise of future coherence, but Ellen’s reaction reveals that she has no idea what she has been so earnestly singing about. Alarmed by her mother’s sudden assent to a world of pain and separation now widening between them, the girl recognizes “her utter inability to join in her mother’s expressions of confi dence and hope; to her there was no brightness on the cloud that hung over them,—it was all dark” (57; emphasis added).
