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During the age of gentility the most popular person in our society and in our fiction was the American girl. And her prestige in America was reinforced by her popularity abroad where she seemed to be the person best suited to speak for American values, the most convincing symbol of her culture. She was truly a New Woman.
According to common opinion, the heroine occurs in our arts mainly in order to please the only sizeable audience for literature in America, the host of novel-reading ladies who demanded that fiction be written by women, for women, about women. Accepting this opinion, we have overlooked certain especially striking achievements of the genteel imagination. For virtually all writers in the nineteenth century, even those who each month in the ladies' magazines flattered that audience, share one notable commitment. They tried to penetrate the mystery of this heroine's nature. Whatever the original motives were that first placed her in fiction, the leading purpose of writers who exploited her popularity was to discover what forces shaped her character, caused her effect, stirred her soul. Uninterested in the sheer surface of a thing, they felt compelled to uncover the sources of human motive and behavior.
This impulse, indeed, was rooted in a peculiarly national habit and was epitomized in the folk remark, “I want to know!” The expression was imprecise—it denoted awe, amazement—but it dramatized society's conviction that knowledge however unsystematic was somehow crucial: the