SARAH ORNE JEWETT: GENERAL COMMENTARY

MARILYN E. MOBLEY (ESSAY DATE MARCH 1986)

SOURCE: Mobley, Marilyn E. "Rituals of Flight and Return: The Ironic Journeys of Sarah Orne Jewett's Female Characters." Colby Library Quarterly 21, no. 1 (March 1986): 36-42.

In the following essay, Mobley examines Jewett's use of flight imagery to describe her female characters, claiming that this imagery demonstrates her admiration for "self-reliant women."

In light of Sarah Orne Jewett's expressed affection for the rural villages of Maine, it might seem inconsistent that she so often uses flight imagery to describe the real and imaginative journeys of her female characters. Though seemingly contradictory, this characteristic imagery belies an ambivalence toward her native region,¹ and demonstrates an unflinching admiration for its self-reliant women. Challenging the notion that range is masculine and that confinement is feminine,² Jewett portrays women who continually contemplate and/or embark on journeys outside the confines of their rural domestic communities. While a different form of flight predominates in each text, certain patterns emerge in her numerous references to birds, holidays and excursions that signify Jewett's attempt to acquaint her readers with the range of experience available to her New England women.³ The most significant of these patterns—the flight from one's environment to the outside world and the inevitable return home—has the mythic characteristics of ritual and reveals Jewett's complex response to this region, to its women and to her own role as a regional writer. Although inevitable, the return is not a resignation to limitations or failure, but a heroic expression of the desire to remain connected to one's cultural roots; thus, like flight, it is an act of self-affirmation.

With the exception of The Country of the Pointed Firs, "A White Heron" ⁴ presents the most dramatic example of Jewett's flight motifs. Sylvia's initiatory journey occurs simultaneously on three levels: physically, as an actual adventure, imaginatively, as a "voyage" of discovery, and symbolically, as a passage from ignorance to knowledge. Although the story begins with a description of her as content and secure within her rural setting, Sylvia craves more space than her grandmother's home provides. Consistent with the pastoral resonances in her name is her grandmother's description of her as a "great wand'rer" (164) with whom wild creatures and birds easily identify.⁵ Therefore, more significant than the "dream of love" (167) that the ornithologist arouses is the "spirit of adventure" that his inquiries about the white heron inspire.

If the "dream of love" is short-lived, it is because her greater desire is to reach the vantage point where she could "see all the world" (167). Thus, Sylvia does not consider the journey up the tree as a dangerous physical feat, but as a rewarding flight to a greater range of experience, knowledge and freedom. In language customarily attributed to male characters and male quests, we learn of Sylvia's "utmost bravery" in undertaking such a "great enterprise" (168-69). Her journey culminates in two epiphanies: first—the feeling that, like the birds, "she too could go flying" (169), and second—her discovery of the heron's secret nest (169-70). Thus, the portrayal of Sylvia is not only heroic but triumphant.

The nature of her triumph—successfully making the solitary passage from ignorance to knowledge of the world—rehearses the traditional metaphor for the initiatory experience in American literature. If we understand initiation as the first existential ordeal, crisis or encounter with experience in the life of a youth, or more simply as a "viable mode of confronting adult realities,"⁶ then we might say Sylvia undergoes an initiation. Yet the traditional pattern of the initiatory journey—that of separation or departure, trial, communication of communal secrets, and return to the community⁷—is not what we have in this story. Although Sylvia returns to her home, her departure has been both real and imaginative, both complete and abortive. In realistic terms, she moves upward but not outward. Only figuratively and psychically does her journey broaden her horizons.

Indeed, if we were to focus solely on the flight or departure itself, it might seem that we have simply another character who attempts to "transcend"⁸ the conditions of her rural life. Instead, in Sylvia's return and refusal to reveal communal secrets is a departure from the traditional initiation pattern. Sylvia's refusal to reveal the location of the heron's nest confirms that the journey not only gives her knowledge of the outside world but also courage to reject that world and protect her own. Thus, just as her journey has been a heroic act, so is her decision to deny "the great world … for a bird's sake" (170-71). It is a liberating experience that empowers Sylvia to protect the "essential human values"⁹ and her harmonious relationship with nature that the hunter threatens. Her ritual of flight and return is not so much a "coming of age" as it is a growing into consciousness.¹⁰

Despite the realities and the triumphs of Sylvia's ordeal, "A White Heron" remains a highly symbolic, almost metaphysical story. Consequently, Jewett's preoccupation with the need to know the world and the village,¹¹ and the city and the country appears in oblique terms. In "The Hiltons' Holiday" and "The Flight of Betsey Lane," this same preoccupation is apparent, but it takes on less symbolic, and more explicit, realistic hues. The journeys are therefore horizontal rather than vertical, emphasizing the complimentary needs for self-affirmation and connection to others. For example, the Hilton girls' father suggests their excursion into town as a "treat" or opportunity to "know the world" and "see how other folks do things" (292-93), while their mother advocates the virtues of the country. Her less than enthusiastic response to the proposed trip is emphasized by her stasis in the rocking chair and her questioning "why folks want … to go trapesin' off to strange places when such things is happenin' right about 'em" (294). Her words invoke Jewett's own ambivalence toward this region's concomitant self-sufficiency and deprivation.¹²

The characterization of the Hilton girls illustrates how the journey can actually blur the distinctions between town and country. Before the journey, the depiction of the two sisters represents the traditional dichotomy between the female who readily accepts the confines of hearth and home and the one who does not.¹³ While Susan Ellen is described as a "complete little housekeeper" (291), Katy is described as one who ventures "out o' doors" to "hark … [to] bird[s]" (292). Ironically, the "holiday" trip to town transforms both girls. When they return, their mother perceives that both "children looked different … as if they belonged to the town as much as to the country" (304). Their transformation suggests that a woman need not deny one to enjoy the other, but that she could affirm both. But it is not that the journey itself transforms the girls, but rather that the journey as an excursion into the past changes them. It is in town that the girls learn their family history, listen to the memories of the town's elderly and have their picture taken with their father. Thus, the journey is into the past as a valuable investment in the "riches of association and remembrance" (304) from which they would continually draw on the road to self-discovery.

In short, flight and return are not mutually exclusive experiences, but are the affirmation of desire in Jewett's women. The circularity of the journey does not signify the impoverishment that some have suggested;¹⁴ instead, it signifies the ritualistic pattern of desire, expectation, fulfillment and desire that characterizes the cycle of human experience. In this sense, Jewett is very modern.¹⁵ But as a woman writer, she illustrates that the desire that accompanies a woman's return is not to subdue objects to her own purpose as a man does, but to reconnect and share with the community from which she departed.¹⁶ Accordingly, the Hilton girls, whose lives have been enriched by the day's excursion, share their experiences with their mother, and by so doing, enrich her life as well.

This leads us to "The Flight of Betsey Lane," for the expedition of this elderly spinster is somewhat similar to the excursion of the Hilton girls. But unlike their trip to town, initiated by their father's invitation, Betsey Lane's journey to Philadelphia is inspired by a long hoped for opportunity to "see something of the world before she died" (174). The By-fleet Poor-house, where she resides, has ironic undertones of being both a prison and a haven. Its inhabitants, referred to as "inmates," do not lament their situation, but actually like "the change and excitement" that their winter "residence" provides (172). Yet, as the youngest of the three spinsters, Betsey Lane seeks greater excitement than the poor-house offers. The opportunity to realize her dream comes in the form of one hundred dollars, a sum which furnishes her with a "sense of her own consequence" (179) that is much like the urgent "wish for wings" that Nina Auerbach contends is characteristic of the spinster as hero.¹⁷ Thus, we are prepared for her disappearance to be described as a discovery that she "had flown" (182), and for her departure to be termed a "flitting" (183) and an "escape" (185). In other words, flight has connotations of independent choice, unlimited potential and birdlike freedom from captivity.

While the journey of her friends to search for her is termed a "fruitless expedition" (192), her journey is thoroughly productive. In strictly personal terms, it provides her with much-desired escape from narrow circumstances, with knowledge of the world (almost literally, in that the Centennial she attends is the equivalent of the World's Fair), and with a sense of rejuvenation and fulfillment. Yet her return points to another sense in which her excursion has been productive. When she informs her friends that she has brought each of them a "little somethin'" (192), her words signify more than the material tokens of friendship she gives them. These words also suggest the greater gifts of spiritual renewal she wishes to offer by sharing her journey with them. Again, the female hero's return is characterized by the urgent desire to share and reaffirm communal ties that is almost as urgent as the previous desire to take flight. In sum, Betsey Lane's return also has powers of transformation: it transforms the three friends from mere bean-pickers into a "small elderly company … [of] triumphant" women (193). Enriched vicariously through their friend's journey, these women find it easier to endure the realities of their meager existence.

Motifs of flight and return take on their greatest complexity in The Country of the Pointed Firs. From the merging of the narrator's story with that of the other characters comes a depiction of Dunnet Landing as both "prison" and "paradise" (37). Men, such as Captain Littlepage, indict this region for its insularity and narrowness (25). But the women see it as "a complete and tiny continent and home" (40). They also provide the flux and vitality that allows the village to survive.¹⁸ Whether it is the daily expeditions of Mrs. Todd, the excursion of Mrs. Blackett to the family reunion, or the flight of Joanna Todd from the community to her self-imposed exile, the ironic journeys of these women sustain the life of this "female landscape."¹⁹ Of all the characters, however, Mrs. Todd and the narrator best illustrate the thematic and structural significances of flight and return.

Mrs. Todd embodies the spirit of the land. While others have been occupationally displaced from the land by industrialization, she survives as a folk herbalist who not only thrives on the soil for her livelihood but moves among her neighbors as one who, like them, "grew out of the soil."²⁰ Because of her multiple roles as "land-lady, herb gatherer and rustic philosopher" (35), she is more mobile than any of her neighbors. While her trips to gather herbs resemble flight as the freedom of mobility and independence, the journeys to the homes of friends and relatives seem to be flight as escape from solitude or as an excursion from routine. Yet regardless of how often she travels or how much she enjoys administering to the needs of others, she religiously returns to her solitary residence. Thus, while she is depicted as resourceful, heroic and self-reliant, she nevertheless seems tragically alone and imprisoned in "a narrow set of circumstances [which] had caged [her] … and held [her] captive" (95). On the other hand, she unselfishly shares with others as if, the narrator observes, she had "been set on this lonely island … to keep the balance true, and make up to all her … neighbors for other things which they may have lacked" (47). In that she seems to keep some mythic balance between past and present "… as if some force of Nature … gave her cousinship to … ancient deities" (137), Mrs. Todd seems larger than life. When she reminisces about her husband, she retreats into herself and seems tragically human and heroic at the same time. In fact, her grandeur inspires the narrator to compare her to "Antigone" and to view her as a "renewal of some historic soul" (49).

The existential leap from old-fashioned, rustic simplicity to the grandeur and complexity of myth is a crucial one. Myth, an inherently complex narrative that fuses the natural with the supernatural, recalls the value of ritual to give expression to unconscious desires and to affirm our faith in human potential.²¹ In the parallel to Antigone is the suggestion that Mrs. Todd heroically affirms this potential at the same time that she must tragically concede to the existence of forces she cannot control. The allusions to classical texts direct us to the universality and complexity of country people and commonplace experience that the narrator grows to comprehend and respect.

The female character who gives unifying perspective and aesthetic complexity to Pointed Firs is the narrator. In her mutual roles as visitor/observer and resident/participant, she comes to know the "world" and the "village" in the fullest sense. Her visit is actually a "Return"—as the title of the first chapter informs us—to a rural haven of simplicity or an "unspoiled place"; yet, it is also a flight from an urban prison of complexity and "unsatisfactory normality."²² In her role as visitor, she journeys from detached ignorance and superiority to involved acceptance and finally to enlightened understanding. Nowhere is this clearer than at the Bowden reunion where she shifts from first person singular "I" to first person plural "we" (90) to describe that communal celebration. In her role as narrator, she becomes the unifying device that gives thematic and structural continuity to the novel. Her recognition that she cannot remain at Dunnet Landing but must return to Boston, conveys, as does the final chapter title, "A Backward View," that the ultimate reward for the journey out is the opportunity for growth and fulfillment of desire; concurrently, the reward for the journey back is the reservoir of remembrance, self-discovery and renewed desire. Neither journey precludes the significance of the other. The narrator's writing aesthetically affirms both the journey of flight and the journey to return, and thus, preserves what Henry James refers to as "the palpable present."²³ In other words, art can continually shape and recreate the journey.

In the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett we have just that—art continually recreating the journey. By using the rituals of flight and return in carefully devised circular narrative structures,²⁴ she exposes the ironies that characterized the lives of many rural women in her time. On her own literary journey, Jewett discovered that she need not be limited by the local color medium; instead she could transform it through her essentially affirmative vision.²⁵ Indeed, she journeyed beyond the artistic confines of local color into the comprehensive landscape we associate with myth. The achievement of her fiction is that she does not deny the contradictions that emerge, but seeks instead to hold them in balance before us.

Notes

1. Rebecca Wall Nail, "'Where Every Prospect Pleases': Sarah Orne Jewett, South Berwick, and the Importance of Place," in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), pp. 185-98.
2. Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968), p. 87.
3. Annie Fields, Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 228.
4. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956). All parenthetical references in the text to "A White Heron," "The Hiltons' Holiday," "The Flight of Betsey Lane" and Pointed Firs are to this reprint edition.
5. Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope, Who Am I This Time? Female Portraits of British and American Literature (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 4-5.
6. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), p. 41.
7. Virginia Sue Brown Machann, "American Perspectives on Women's Initiations: The Mythic and Realistic Coming to Consciousness," Dissertation Abstracts International, XL (Sept. 1979), 1470A.
8. Josephine Donovan, "A Woman's View of Transcendence: A New Interpretation of the Works of Sarah Orne Jewett," Massachusetts Review, XXI (1980), 366.
9. A. M. Buchan, Our Dear Sarah: An Essay on Sarah Orne Jewett (St. Louis: Committee on Publications at Washington University, 1942), p. 45.
10. Machann, p. 1470A.
11. Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), p. 83.
12. Sarah Orne Jewett, "Preface to the 1883 Edition," in Deephaven and Other Stories, ed. Richard Cary (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), p. 31.
13. Donovan, New England Local Color: A Women's Tradition (New York: Ungar, 1983), pp. 1-10.
14. Ann Douglas Wood, "The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America 1865-1914," Women's Studies, I (1972), 3-45.
15. Steven Shaviro, "'That Which Is Always Beginning': Steven's Poetry of Affirmation," PMLA, C (March 1985), 220-33.
16. Buchan, p. 45.
17. Nina Auerbach, "Old Maids and the Wish for Wings," in Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 111-12.
18. Elmer Pry, "Folk-Literary Aesthetics in The Country of the Pointed Firs," Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, XLIV (March 1978), 9.
19. Robin Magowan, "Pastoral and the Art of Landscape in The Country of the Pointed Firs," New England Quarterly, XXXII (June 1963), 232.
20. Cather, "Preface," The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, p. 4.
21. William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, eds., A Handbook of Literature (New York: Odyssey, 1960), pp. 298-99. See also Richard Chase, The Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1949), p. 78.
22. Hyatt H. Waggoner, "The Unity of The Country of the Pointed Firs, "in The World of Dunnet Landing: Sarah Orne Jewett Collection, ed. David Bonnell Green (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 374.
23. Ferman Bishop, "Henry James Criticizes The Tory Lover," American Literature, XXVII (May 1955), 264, as cited in Richard Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett (New York: Twayne, 1962), p. 152.
24. Elizabeth Ammons, "Going in Circles: The Female Geography of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs," Studies in the Literary Imagination, XVI (Fall 1983), 83-92.
25. Louis A. Renza, "A White Heron" and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 196.

KAREN OAKES (ESSAY DATE SEPTEMBER 1990)

SOURCE: Oakes, Karen. "'All that lay deepest in her heart': Reflections on Jewett, Gender, and Genre." Colby Quarterly 26, no. 3 (September 1990): 152-60.

In the following essay, Oakes explores some of the major issues in Jewett's works and discusses how The Country of the Pointed Firs blurs the boundaries of culture, race, and gender.

In the beginning (or in 1941), God (later known as F. O. Matthiessen) created the American Renaissance.¹ Emerson and Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne and Whitman he created them. And he saw that it was good.

I give this rather whimsical introduction to my thoughts on Sarah Orne Jewett by way of suggesting how circuitous my route to her has been. Nineteenth-century American literature has, until very recently, focused primarily if not exclusively on the magnetic figures gathered around mid-century. My own education, at an excellent women's college, and later, at a radical university, foregrounded Emerson and company to the obliteration of "lesser" deities. I experienced the pleasure of Jewett—appropriately, it turns out—through the mediation of a friend, who said simply, as if of peach pie, "I think you'll like her."

And I did. The setting of her work conjured the New England of my childhood, her characters and their voices, the members of my extended family. But if my first response to reading The Country of the Pointed Firs was pure delight, my second was pure rage. I was staggered that I had never heard her name even once in the course of my elite "formal" education, though I thought I understood why. Jewett's writing has over the years been the source of much critical discord. Is The Country of the Pointed Firs a (failed) novel, a set of loosely related sketches, or something else entirely? The flurry of recent interest in her work at times evinces the same jittery quality. Those who love her often prove determined to show how she meets the standards set by American Renaissance writers—or, perhaps more accurately, by Matthiessen and his cohorts—and hence other questions arise such as how to define her main character (which of course assumes that there must be a main character) or how to describe her development (which presumes a progressive rather than an accretive model). A recent essay in the feminist journal Signs attempts to locate the book within a "new" genre, "narrative of community."² But before I focus more specifically on The Country of the Pointed Firs, I'd like to rehearse some of the larger issues to which Jewett's work speaks, hoping that you will be patient with my game of hopscotch and will accept my assurance that all the jumps will lead to "home."

Genre, to be sure, is a convenient concept not only for contemporary critics, a peg on which to hang our hats, but also for professors of literature. How else might we lasso the rambunctious variety of texts which we teach? Hence, we imagine courses in "Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry" and "Nineteenth-Century Women's Fiction," to cite two of the courses I've taught in recent years. Indeed, genre is not only convenient, but, as one contemporary critic argues, "Few concepts of literary criticism are quite as 'literary' as the concept of genre."³ Genre study is as old as Plato and Aristotle and as new as a course a friend teaches, "The Contemporary Mystery Novel." Of course, the most sophisticated genre criticism explores the overlap of genres within individual works and attempts constantly to recognize or invent new terms.

If genre figures prominently in discussion of Jewett's work, canonical texts have hardly been immune to debate. Is The Scarlet Letter a novel or a romance (I think it's a sermon, but that's another paper)? Nor has the debate been only a recent concern, for mid-nineteenth-century reviewers constantly interrogated Whitman's work according to the touchstone of lyric poetry; was Leaves of Grass, they asked, poetry, prose, or, as tastemaker Rufus Griswold asserted, trash? Even writers whose work has seemed generically reliable have encountered scrutiny; at a recent conference, one meeting I attended focused on Dickinson's poems as letters and her letters as poems.⁴

Because of the traditional, even self-defining, quality of genre in literary studies, much influential feminist criticism has explored women's relation to genre. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss in The Madwoman in the Attic the affinity of narrative to women's lives and the problematics of lyric poetry, just as Virginia Woolf before them had done.⁵ Such critics, female and male, have for some time questioned the hegemony of the traditional literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, and we can see the concrete consequences of this questioning in revised syllabi and in new anthologies. For example, many in American literature would now consider texts like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "journal," The Yellow Wall-Paper, or Harriet Jacobs' autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to be canonical; and the new Heath Anthology of American Literature includes such "non-canonical" works as Afro-American folk tales. But the larger question these transformations raise is the essentiality of genre as a lens for discussion.

Jewett, I believe, questions radically the notion of genre if we understand that concept to resonate beyond the categories of fiction, poetry, and drama to include the larger matter of boundaries. Her current reputation (or lack thereof) reflects her corseting by critics into forms and attitudes which she refuses to occupy.⁶ One of her best readers, Elizabeth Ammons, discusses the image of the circle as a metaphor for the structure of The Country of the Pointed Firs, and in so doing she de-emphasizes the norms of development, climax, and denouement which have haunted her critical predecessors, not to mention poor high-school students across the country.⁷ We do well to follow Ammons' lead and step outside the boundaries of literary theory into psychological and cultural theory. The work of sociologist Nancy Chodorow is useful here; Chodorow argues that masculine and feminine identity are differently defined, the former by an emphasis on individuation and a need for separateness and the latter by a need for relation and connection with others. Feminine identity, to use her terms, evinces "flexible or permeable ego boundaries." In spite of her focus only on white, middle-class, heterosexual individuals, Chodorow provides a helpful metaphor in connection to the matter of Jewett and genre.⁸

Indeed, the problem of genre is as intimately linked with the matter of gender in Western literature as ham and eggs. Sandra Gilbert suggests this connection in her recent article, "The American Sexual Politics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson," which is grounded in Chodorow's theory. In brief, Gilbert argues that both Whitman and Dickinson wrote something she calls "not-poetry"; but she contrasts the reliance of each on traditional genres. Whitman's poetry ultimately rehearses familiar poetic forms, suggesting a masculine impulse toward individuation, while Dickinson's elides those boundaries, suggesting a feminine impulse toward fluidity and providing a paradigm for the female artist.⁹ In a masculine-minded culture, such a model for consciousness, for artistic creation, and even for critical discourse may receive little credence. (I recall here D. H. Lawrence's abhorrence of Whitman: "Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.")¹⁰

For Jewett, the impulse to erase boundaries could not have been unambivalent. The popularity and respect accorded to her by her contemporaries was no doubt in some measure due to her apparent acceptance of some traditional boundaries. Literature, for example, should possess a reverence for the past, and The Country of the Pointed Firs gestures toward the past in several ways. The city-dwelling narrator's escape to the Maine coastal town of Dunnet Landing echoes the anxiety of an increasingly industrialized country and its desire for a simpler life. The narrator's landlady, Mrs. Todd, is a practitioner of traditional herbal medicine who initiates the former into a tradition of community and family relations. Jewett connects Mrs. Todd not only with the New England past and the American past, however, but also with the Western tradition, as in the central scene where the two characters gather pennyroyal:

She looked away from me, and presently rose and went on by herself. There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this country-woman; she seemed like a renewal of some historic soul, with her sorrows and the remoteness of a daily life busied with rustic simplicities and the scents of primeval herbs.¹¹

Jewett's allusions to myth confirm her membership in literary history, yet she simultaneously incorporates herself into a "modern" realistic tradition in her attentiveness to the important issue of humans' alienation from nature. The tone of this passage is unmistakably elegiac, with its emphasis on "places of great grief and silence," on Mrs. Todd's "lonely and solitary figure," and her "absolute, archaic grief."

If paradise is lost, it is also regained and conserved in Jewett's own writing, which she metaphorizes in the narrator's efforts at herb-gathering:

I was not incompetent at herb-gathering, and after a while, when I had sat long enough waking myself to new thoughts, and reading a page of remembrance with new pleasure, I gathered some bunches, as I was bound to do, and at last we met again higher up the shore, in the plain every-day world we had left behind when we went down to the pennyroyal plot.

(49-50)

A kind of waking dream, writing, like its sister act of reading, accomplishes a conservation of the self and its history. My interest here, however, is not to discuss how Jewett confirms some of the boundaries of her time—among them the idea that women should focus more on the domestic and private than on the public and political realms—but to suggest some of the ways in which she breaks "generic" boundaries, boundaries of kind, of definition, and in so doing commits a radical act for Western culture.¹²

Paula Gunn Allen's work provides an avenue from which we might meet Jewett. In her Introduction to Spider Woman's Granddaughters, a collection of short pieces by Native American women, Allen discusses literary convention with a particular emphasis on the convention that specifies the segregation of (for example) "long stories from short, traditional stories from contemporary." Allen's reflections on boundaries is so intense and interesting that I quote it here at length:

The dogmatism of the Western literary position has consequences that go well beyond the world of literature, which include the Western abhorrence of mixing races, classes, or genders (which is why homosexuality and lesbianism are so distressing to many Western minds). Similarly, the mixing of levels of diction, like the mixing of spiritual beliefs and attitudes, is disdained if not prohibited. This rigid need for impermeable classificatory boundaries is reflected in turn in the existence of numerous institutional, psychological, and social barriers designed to prevent mixtures from occurring. Western literary and social traditionalists are deeply purist, and today, millennia after Aristotle described the features that characterized Greek literature, his descendents proclaim and enforce purism's rules in thousands of ways large and small.

Allen goes on to assert, "Intellectual apartheid of this nature helps create and maintain political apartheid."¹³ The impulse for this apartheid, she makes quite clear, is the Western value of purity, a value which circumscribed women of Jewett's era in the dominant culture in precise and well-documented ways, from the sexual to the literary.¹⁴ It seems to me that Jewett's blurring of boundaries, both substantive and structural, in The Country of the Pointed Firs represents a dialogue with the notion of purity and a gesture toward the tribal sensibility which Allen describes. Or perhaps, in other terms, we can construct an analogy between the tribal and the psychological feminine.

My route to Jewett has so far been intentionally circuitous since one of my goals is to rehearse the writer's own freedom. Nonlinear, accretive, process-oriented, The Country of the Pointed Firs eludes interpretive certainties, refusing to stand still for dissection, yet inviting pleasure. I offer my observations up to this point and those to come less as a map for reading Jewett and more as a meditation on her world.

One important fence which Jewett dismantles is that between culture and nature. Historian Ann Leighton tells us that in early New England, one of women's jobs was to tend the gardens, a source of food and medicine; Jewett's Mrs. Todd occupies this traditional role, growing herbs and dispensing nostrums.¹⁵ But Mrs. Todd's role exceeds its boundaries, for Jewett tells us that "Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." Furthermore, the garden itself supersedes its margins, as wild and tame converge inside the pale. Easily identifiable are the "balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood," in contrast to another corner:

At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove.

(3-4)

Jewett indicates the cultural status not only of the garden itself but of its botanical inhabitants, for to the familiar and domesticated herbs she assigns names, while others more mysterious than and antecedent to the tame ones remain unspecified. Mrs. Todd distills "wild" herbs into what were once primordial elixirs but are now only "humble compounds."

Nevertheless, the residue of wildness remains in the description as we discover that Mrs. Todd dispenses her concoctions "to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled." One, however, is more significant than all the rest: "One nostrum was called the Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen cents; the whispered directions could be heard as customers passed the windows" (4). This "Indian remedy," which elicits Mrs. Todd's connection with untamed nature, is most likely a medium of woman's freedom from her cultural role as mother—namely, an abortifacient; her favorite pennyroyal has been esteemed for the same purpose since at least the mid-seventeenth century. Most of her herbs, in fact, respond to female reproductive needs; a veritable women's health center is Mrs. Todd, whose "garden" is the world.¹⁶

The mention of the Indian remedy in connection with Mrs. Todd raises an adjacent problem of purity, namely, racial and cultural purity. In an era in which the problems of Native Americans were receiving fresh attention, when Standing Bear had come to Boston to speak on the displacement of the Poncas, when missionary women headed west and the United States government was establishing boarding schools to "help" Native Americans "assimilate," when Jewett's contemporary Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman) had written a novel published in the same year as The Country of the Pointed Firs, Madelon (1896), whose female protagonist possessed Iroquois blood, and Helen Hunt Jackson had completed A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Ramona (1885), it would have been impossible for Jewett not to be aware of and, however subliminally, to respond to the notion of ethnic purity.¹⁷ Mrs. Todd, she implies, figures a person whose heritage is (at least metaphorically) mixed-blood, for she possesses the herbal skill not only of her colonial counterparts but of her Indian predecessors. Furthermore, we learn in another story, "The Foreigner," that Mrs. Todd has acquired much of her insight from a woman who parallels the figure of the Indian outsider, a French woman from Jamaica, who significantly cannot speak "Maine" and who horrifies her sober and asexual counterparts by singing and dancing in the meetinghouse vestry in a shockingly "natural" manner (170, 167). This "foreigner's" subsequent social exclusion surely speaks to the women's fears of the loss of purity.

If racial or cultural boundaries are an important, if covert, issue in The Country of the Pointed Firs and Jewett's work generally, another set of boundaries that the writer rattles is that of gender. Mrs. Todd, while she figures the community's loving mother in her position as herbal doctor, is equally capable of assuming traditional masculine power. When she and the narrator embark to visit Mrs. Todd's mother, Mrs. Todd directs their progress in images which evoke the shape and movement of the book itself: "'You better let her drift; we'll get there 'bout as quick; the tide 'll take her right out from under these old buildin's; there's plenty wind outside'" (32). As paradoxical "lawgiver," Mrs. Todd occupies the seat of power, as we see in the exchange which follows. An onlooker feels compelled to criticize her management, concluding, as some critics have of the book, "'She's lo'ded bad, your bo't is—she's heavy behind's she is now!'" but Mrs. Todd does not relinquish her captaincy: "'That you, Asa? Goodmornin',' she said politely. 'I al'ays liked the starn seat best. When'd you get back from up country?'" (33). Her verbal wit in response to this landlubber indicates her ability to assume masculine power not only in the realm of seamanship but also in the realm which defines all masculine power, language itself (Gilbert and Gubar, 3-92).

This blurring of gender boundaries emerges in any number of characters, from Mrs. Todd's shy brother William to Captain Elijah Tilley, who receives the narrator into his home with his knitting, "a blue yarn stocking," in hand (120). The narrator observes, "There was something delightful in the grasp of his hand, warm and clean, as if it never touched anything but the comfortable woolen yarn, instead of cold sea water and slippery fish" (120). After the death of his wife, Elijah has become domesticated so that his year is shared by feminine and masculine endeavors:

"No, I take stiddy to my knitting after January sets in," said the old seafarer.… "The young fellows braves it out, some on 'em; but, for me, I lay in my winter's yarn an' set here where 'tis warm, an' knit an' take my comfort. Mother learnt me once whenIwasalad.… They say our Dunnet stock-in's is gettin' to be celebrated up to Boston—good quality o' wool an' even knittin' or somethin'. I've always been called a pretty hand to do nettin', but seines is master cheap to what they used to be when they was all hand worked. I change off to nettin' long towards spring.…"

(125-26)

What strikes me most about this passage is the convergence of knitting, a traditionally feminine task, with netting, a traditionally masculine one. Even netting possesses feminine overtones in its other meaning of lace-making. Domestic and public realms mesh here in the synthesis of these activities by a single individual and even in the contiguity of the very sounds of the words. Their performer embodies their texture in his doubly-gendered self-creation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WILLA CATHER ON JEWETT AND THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS

Born within the scent of the sea but not within sight of it, in a beautiful old house full of strange and lovely things brought home from all over the globe by seafaring ancestors, she spent much of her girlhood driving about the country with her doctor father on his professional rounds among the farms. She early learned to love her country for what it was. What is quite as important, she saw it as it was. She happened to have the right nature, the right temperament, to see it so—and to understand by intuition the deeper meaning of all she saw.

She had not only the eye, she had the ear. From childhood she must have treasured up those pithy bits of local speech, of native idiom, which enrich and enliven her pages. The language her people speak to each other is a native tongue. No writer can invent it. It is made in the hard school of experience, in communities where language has been undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature and experiences of the people.…

If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, "The Scarlet Letter," "Huckleberry Finn," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs." I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely.… It is sotightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows oldfashioned.…It will be a message to the future, a message in a universal language.…

Cather, Willa. An excerpt from "Preface." In The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1925.

We can meditate at length on Jewett's other deconstructions of boundaries—such as those between humans and nature (Mrs. Todd talks of a tree as if it's a person), between the individual and the community (the narrator and the Bowdens), between life and death (Captain Littlepage's story and Joanna's synchronic presence)—but it seems most important to me to suggest briefly the loosening of the boundaries between the reader and the story itself, between life and art. While all narrative implicitly asks for some measure of our participation or identification, Jewett's hospitality to our presence and our creativity is much more intense than that of other familiar texts.¹⁸ Take, for example, the two books with which Cather grouped Country in her estimation of the most enduring works of American literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter. Both Twain and Hawthorne inscribe their simultaneous narrative presence and absence, Twain with his famous opening injunctions against interpretation and Hawthorne with his insistence that his narrator/alter ego will "keep the inmost Me behind the veil."¹⁹

In contrast, Jewett's generosity toward the reader, her feminine fluidity, is quite striking, though our acceptance of it may not be immediate. This generosity emerges in the multiple roles of the narrator and Mrs. Todd, for each is in some sense both writer and reader, artist and interpreter; and Jewett invites the book's reader to participate in these roles as well, suggesting not only their convergence but their interconnection. I haven't space to construct this argument in detail, but let me end my reflections on The Country of the Pointed Firs with an incident that is illuminating. On her arrival, the narrator quickly falls into the rhythms of Dunnet Landing and of Mrs. Todd, alternately accompanying her on her gathering forays and "acting as business partner" (6). She says:

I found the July days fly fast, and it was not until I felt myself confronted with too great pride and pleasure in the display, one night, of two dollars and twenty-seven cents which I had taken in during the day, that I remembered a long piece of writing, sadly belated now, which I was bound to do. To have been patted kindly on the shoulder and called "darlin'," to have been offered a surprise of early mushrooms for supper, to have had all the glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven cents in a single day, and then to renounce it all and withdraw from these pleasant successes, needed much resolution.

(6-7)

In spite of an undertone of irony, pleasure figures largely in the narrator's self-forgetfulness, as it does in my own reading of the book; and the effect of this passage is to render self-consciousness vivid. Yet Mrs. Todd's response is respectful of the other's needs and generous with praise; it is an intimate moment which moves toward publicity, as she affirms, "'I ain't had such a season for years, but I have never had nobody I could so trust. All you lack is a few qualities, but with time you'd gain judgment an' experience, an' be very able in the business.'" She concludes, "'I'd stand right here and say it to anybody'" (7). In spite of the narrator's masculine movement toward "withdrawal," Mrs. Todd's generosity forestalls the possibility of their "separat[ion]" or "estrange[ment]," and the narrator tells us, "on the contrary, a deeper intimacy seemed to begin" (7). It is as if, by affirming her uniqueness, the narrator (and the reader), receiving Mrs. Todd's (Jewett's) reassurance, can relinquish the boundaries of the self:

I do not know what herb of the night it was that sometimes used to send out a penetrating odor late in the evening, after the dew had fallen, and the moon was high, and the cool air came up from the sea. Then Mrs. Todd would feel that she must talk to somebody, and I was only too glad to listen. We both fell under the spell, and she either stood outside the window, or made an errand to my sittingroom, and told, it might be very commonplace news of the day, or, as happened one misty summer night, all that lay deepest in her heart. (7)

This sharing of the "deepest" confidence occurs only seven pages into the story, and it figures the connection that Jewett imagines not only between the narrator and Mrs. Todd, but between the reader and Jewett herself—a connection modeled after Jewett's own "real-life" intimacy with Annie Adams Fields.

Jewett makes me worry about the convenience of genre, like the convenience of all boundaries. Such boundaries—whether those of ethnicity, gender, class, race, age, or sexual orientation—are like convenience food. Not only do they exclude texts, writers, voices, nuances which can't be packaged into a shiny container, they also reify texts, privileging product (interpretation) over process; they enable us to remove literary voices from their social and historical contexts and place them in the stainless steel refrigeration unit of formalist literary criticism, deskinned and deboned. On a still larger scale, these boundaries enable the compartmentalization of the academy into those convenient and competing units, departments. In contrast, Jewett imagines for us the interconnection, multiplicity, and intangibility of knowledge. As one of my students once said after reading The Country of the Pointed Firs, "I can't tell you what this book means to me."

Notes

1. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941).
2. Sandra A. Zagarell, "Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (1988): 498-527. Other recent criticism of Jewett includes: Jennifer Bailey, "Female Nature and the Nature of the Female: a Re-vision of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs," Revue Française d'Études Américaines 8.17 (1983): 283-94; Marcia McClintock Folsom, "'Tact is a Kind of Mind-Reading': Empathic Style in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs," Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: Hall, 1984), 76-98; Josephine Donovan, "Sarah Orne Jewett's Critical Theory: Notes toward a Feminine Literary Mode" in Nagel, 212-25; Elizabeth Ammons, "Jewett's Witches" in Nagel, 165-84; John C. Hirsh, "The Non-Narrative Structure of The Country of the Pointed Firs," American Literary Realism 14 (1981): 286-88; Richard G. Carson, "Nature and the Circles of Initiation in The Country of the Pointed Firs," Colby Library Quarterly 21 (1985): 154-60; Sarah W. Sherman, "Victorians and the Matriarchal Mythology: A Source for Mrs. Todd," Colby Library Quarterly 22 (1986): 63-74; Marilyn E. Mobley, "Rituals of Flight and Return: The Ironic Journeys of Sarah Orne Jewett's Female Characters," Colby Library Quarterly 22 (1986): 36-42; Laurie Crum-packer, "The Art of the Healer: Women in the Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett," Colby Library Quarterly 19 (1983): 155-66; Gwen L. Nagel, "'The prim corner of land where she was queen': Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Gardens," Colby Library Quarterly 22 (1986): 43-62; Josephine Donovan, "A Woman's Vision of Transcendence: A New Interpretation of the Works of Sarah Orne Jewett," Massachusetts Review 21 (1980): 365-80.
3. Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), 1.
4. Martha Nell Smith, Chair, "Reading Dickinson's Poems in Letters, Letters in Poems," Div. on Emily Dickinson, NEMLA Convention, 7 Apr. 1990.
5. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 539-80; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), 43-81.
6. Jewett herself may have internalized the standards of the critical community; in a famous letter to Horace Scudder she writes, "But I don't believe I could write a long story.…In the first place, I have no dramatic talent. The story would have no plot. I should have to fill it out with descriptions of character and meditations. It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there is never any play!" Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1967), 29.
7. Elizabeth Ammons, "Going in Circles: The Female Geography of Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs," Studies in the Literary Imagination 16.2 (1983): 83-92.
8. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 169. Chodorow's theory is resolutely cultural in its definitions, insisting that "feminine" and "masculine" are not limited by biological sex; hence, the reader should be aware that when I use these terms, I mean psychologically feminine and masculine, unless I specify otherwise.

   Adrienne Rich, among others, has pointed out some of the limitations of Chodorow's theory. Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), 23-75.

9. Sandra M. Gilbert, "The American Sexual Politics of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson," Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 123-54.
10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951), 180.
11. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs, ed. Mary Ellen Chase (New York: Norton, 1981), 49. All subsequent references to Jewett's work cite this edition.
12. Two contemporary feminists who discuss boundary-breaking from distinctive theological perspectives are: Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon, 1986), and Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Beacon, 1986).
13. Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 2, 3.
14. See, for example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 53-76; Gilbert and Gubar, 568; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 145-294; John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 55-221.
15. Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens: "For Meate or Medicine" (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
16. See Ammons, "Jewett's Witches," 175; Crumpacker, 158; Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper's Color Herbal, ed. David Potterton (New York: Sterling, 1983), 142.
17. Jewett's explicit attitude toward racial mixing is less affirmative than we might wish. See Ferman Bishop, "Sarah Orne Jewett's Ideas of Race," New England Quarterly 30 (1957): 243-49.
18. Walter J. Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.
19. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Washington Square, 1973), n. pag.; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Sculley Bradley et al., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 6-7.