The style's particular characteristics are: • "Plot focuses on a heroine who embodies one of two types of exemplar: the angel and the practical woman (Reynolds) who sometimes exist in the same work. Baym says that this heroine is contrasted with the passive woman (incompetent, cowardly, ignorant; often the heroine's mother is this type) and the "belle," who is deprived of a proper education. • The heroine struggles for self-mastery, learning the pain of conquering her own passions (Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 172). • The heroine learns to balance society's demands for self-denial with her own desire for autonomy, a struggle often addressed in terms of religion. • She suffers at the hands of
abusers of power before establishing a network of surrogate kin. • The plots "repeatedly identify immersion in feeling as one of the great temptations and dangers for a developing woman. They show that feeling must be controlled. . . " (Baym 25). Frances Cogan notes that the heroines thus undergo a full education within which to realize feminine obligations (The All-American Girl). • The tales generally end with marriage, usually one of two possible kinds: • Reforming the bad or "wild" male, as in
Augusta Evans's
St. Elmo (1867) • Marrying the solid male who already meets her qualifications. Examples:
Maria Cummins,
The Lamplighter (1854) and
Susan Warner,
The Wide, Wide World (1850) • The novels may use a "language of tears" that evokes sympathy from the readers. •
Richard Brodhead (Cultures of Letters) sees class as an important issue, as the ideal family or heroine is poised between a lower-class family exemplifying poverty and domestic disorganization and upper-class characters exemplifying an idle, frivolous existence (94)." ==Examples==