"And lead her to the promised land" : liberty and patriarchal containment in antebellum women's narratives

This study examines the interplay between Protestant patriarchal containment and women's struggles for liberty in five antebellum women's narratives written by evangelical women. It examines two novels and three autobiographies in the context of nineteenth-century culture: Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854); Jarena Lee’s The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee (1849); Zilpha Elaw's The Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labors of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw(1846); and Phoebe Palmer's Way of Holiness (1843). This work takes an exploratory and provisional approach to these little-known texts and places special emphasis on the spiritual dynamics of the tension between constraint and freedom in antebellum women's lives and narratives.