The Hidden Hand

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when the story I was reading developed into the same plot of yet another rich old man took a desperate little girl under his financial wing...but I kind of was. Perhaps it was because this little girl was disguised as a “ragamuffin” boy in ragged clothing (p 175). I guess this was Southworth’s way of emphasizing that little girls are all feeble and in need of help, even when compared to little boys their own age.

Something I noticed (that goes along with a trend we have talked about in class) was how Southworth took a unique approach in her version of the “how to be a proper little girl” manual. She first showed an extremely wrong example, being homeless and dressing up in little boys clothing. In The Lamplighter, we saw a wrong example also, Gerty was unloved and “scantily clad in garments of the poorest description” (p.79) as put Cummins in her “manual”, but Gerty wasn’t as far off and extreme as Capitola; her clothes were at least of the right gender. Ellen in The Wide Wide World was doing a little better than “Cap” and Gerty. Ellen was proper and could even make toast, but she didn’t have God as her number one priority, which is something Warner included in her version of the manual.