The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction Read online

  1902 A carriage accident on her birthday injures Jewett’s neck and causes a concussion. She suffers from pain, memory loss, and other symptoms, and for the rest of her life her literary abilities are limited, though she maintains correspondences with friends and visits with them as much as her health allows. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is published.

  1908 When Jewett visits Fields in Boston, the two are introduced to writer Willa Cather. Jewett and Cather become friends, and Jewett inspires Cather to write honestly about the ways of the American prairie, where the younger woman was raised.

  1909 In March, while visiting Annie Fields in Boston, Jewett is partially paralyzed by a stroke; she dies in her Berwick home of a second stroke on June 24. She is buried in the Portland Street Cemetery in South Berwick.

  1910 The Atlantic Monthly publishes “William’s Wedding,” the last of the Dunnet Landing stories.

  INTRODUCTION

  Sarah Orne Jewett was born on September 3, 1849, in the small town of South Berwick, Maine. Located in southern Maine near the Atlantic Ocean and not far from that state’s border with New Hampshire, South Berwick by the last half of the nineteenth century had already amassed a fascinating history, which inspired Jewett throughout her life. Founded in the 1620s when English emigrants bartered with indigenous peoples for land between the Salmon Falls River and Great Works River, South Berwick was settled primarily by comparatively well-to-do people who in general were not seeking to escape the Old World to attain religious freedom in the New World, but rather were interested in improving their own business prospects. Hence, the community around South Berwick did not share the strongly Puritanical character of many New England towns (such as those in eastern Massachusetts).

  The author’s formal baptismal name was Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett, though she rarely used her first name when an adult. Her parents were Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, a physician, and Caroline Frances Perry, whose own father, Dr. William Perry, had been a physician. The second of three children—all daughters—born to Caroline and Theodore Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett entered an independent elementary school in 1855, though she was frequently ill as a youth and often missed classes; she showed talent in writing but was otherwise an unexceptional student. In 1861, Jewett’s parents enrolled young Sarah in another private school, Berwick Academy, which proved to be her final stint in formal education. Graduating from Berwick Academy in 1865, she considered training to become a doctor, then chose not to pursue that goal because of frail health—she was a lifelong sufferer of intermittent rheumatism. About this time, she received an inheritance from her grandfather that freed her from having to pursue a conventional career or having to get married for economic security.

  Years later, Sarah Orne Jewett confessed to an interviewer that her most essential learning experiences when young came while she accompanied her father on his service calls in and around South Berwick: “The best of my education was received in my father’s buggy and the places to which it carried me. . . . Now, as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see” (Cary, Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, p. 21; see “For Further Reading”). Strongly influenced by her father’s scientifically trained eye and mind, young Sarah learned how to “read” the natural landscape and how to evaluate the behavior of humans living within that landscape.

  Dr. Jewett also introduced his daughter to the world of literature, including European classics by such authors as Cervantes, Fielding, and Sterne. On her own, Sarah discovered works by authors from a number of literary traditions—initially, Austen, George Eliot, Emerson, and Thackeray, and, eventually, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, George Sand, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. According to scholar Josephine Donovan, who investigated Sarah Orne Jewett’s unpublished diaries, Jewett by 1869 was reading writings by various female authors of the American “local color” school (Sara Orne Jewett, p. 9). “Local color” writing—a literary subgenre that dominated the most prestigious periodicals published in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century—comprised short stories and nonfiction sketches that attempted to depict the lives of people possessing distinctive regional identities. Local color works tended to feature representations of character types from various American regions (though such representations were often replete with stereotypes); other local color stylistic qualities included romanticized regional settings and literary interpretations of regional dialectical speech. While many local color works did not succeed either as aesthetically memorable creative writing or as ethnographically accurate accounts of specific American regional cultures, several authors associated with this subgenre wrote material of lasting interest, and at least four of those authors caught Jewett’s attention during this period, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. During the mid-1860s, Jewett had read Stowe’s 1862 book, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, an early local color classic that portrays life along the coast of Maine with empathy and considerable accuracy. Jewett continued to value Stowe’s book into the 1870s, as it inspired the younger author to attempt to depict—with a commitment to the accurate representation of that region and its culture—the rhythms of everyday life in her section of coastal Maine. While the local color movement in American literature would produce many nonfiction sketches, short stories, and novels that were arguably less than successful at capturing in prose the essence of American regions and their cultures, Jewett’s work convincingly transcends the usual limitations of the genre by virtue of her direct yet graceful prose style and her intimate familiarity with her subjects—the people and places she had known all her life—which she renders believable through a knowing selection of salient details.

  In addition to having physicians in her family lineage, Jewett descended from people who owed their livelihoods to the sea—such as her paternal grandfather Theodore Furber Jewett, a captain of whaling ships. Sarah Orne Jewett grew up profoundly aware of the historical ties between the sea and the human communities situated adjacent to it. As a small New England coastal town, South Berwick was both picturesque and stagnant during the mid-nineteenth century, owing to the steadily declining role of Maine in the national economy. This decline was a result of several factors: the collapse of the whaling industry; the shifting of the center of American shipping from the coast of Maine southward to New York City; Maine’s slow recovery from the Embargo Act of 1807, which mandated the freezing of all shipping trade between the United States and England and between the United States and France; and the concurrent western expansion of the United States.

  These historical forces may have stunted economic growth along the coast of Maine, yet they also spawned the cultural conditions portrayed in Jewett’s writings. Only rarely would Jewett set her fiction outside her native section of Maine, though it was not for lack of travel to other places. By the age of twenty, Jewett had frequently visited Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; and New York City, and she had spent several months in Cincinnati visiting her maternal uncle, a newspaper editorial writer, and his family. By age thirty, Jewett had visited Philadelphia and Chicago, and in 1882 she took her first of four trips to Europe. Jewett’s early fascination with the people and places of coastal Maine led her to focus her fiction on that region’s wealth of traditional culture. Most of her short stories and novels—set in an environment relatively unchanged by industrialization—contained vivid descriptions of people maintaining traditional lives that relied upon the natural by-products of the land and the sea. The unnamed narrator of Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, a woman from the city who is nonetheless an astute observer of small-town culture, describes in considerable detail the occupational folkways practiced by the people she meets during a protracted stay in the fictional town of Dunnet Landing, located on the coast of Maine. For example, the narrator’s friend Almira Todd maintains an herb garden and brews “old-fashioned spruce beer” for
local customers. Also, while visiting Almira’s birthplace on Green Island, the narrator witnesses that the Todd family depends upon small-scale agriculture (practiced by Almira Todd’s mother) and herring fishing (a job of Almira’s brother William Todd).

  Jewett’s representation of Maine in her fictional works does not fully reflect that she was well aware her childhood home place had been dramatically changed by economic and social forces wrought by the post-Civil War prosperity. By the late 1870s, while Jewett was gaining national attention through her publications, South Berwick was, as the author stated in a letter, “growing and flourishing in a way that breaks my heart” (Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work, p. 43). The changes in South Berwick were the result of several factors: the reduced role of the sea-related trades in a rapidly industrializing nation; dramatic postwar population growth in the United States, which led to a rise in tourism and second-home development along the Maine coast; the construction of new houses that were architecturally incompatible with the town’s older buildings; and the cutting down of trees and the plowing up of fields to accommodate that growth. In 1894, Jewett looked back on the changes in Maine since the Civil War, and lamented that

  tradition and time-honored custom were to be swept away together by the irresistible current. Character and architecture seemed to lose individuality and distinction. The new riches of the country were seldom very well spent in those days; the money that the tourist or summer citizen left behind him was apt to be used to sweep away the quaint houses, the roadside thicket, the shady woodland, that had lured him first. . . . It will remain for later generations to make amends for the sad use of riches after the war, for our injury of what we inherited, for the irreparable loss of certain ancient buildings which would have been twice as interesting in the next century as we are just beginning to be wise enough to think them in this (quoted in Blanchard, p. 82).

  That in her fiction Jewett tended to overlook—and to condemn in her letters and diaries—this “progress” suggests that the author possessed a powerful psychological connection to her own childhood—manifested in her fascination with preindustrial Maine and its traditional culture. According to biographer Paula Blanchard, Jewett retained her sense of wonder well into her adulthood:

  The sense of seeing everyone and everything with a fresh eye, the playfulness, the absolute honesty and lack of pretense that we associate with the characteristic Jewett style, all belong to her childhood self and are typical of the voice heard in the earliest available letters and diaries. Simplicity is the very essence of the Jewett persona; and while she matured intellectually and deepened emotionally in the normal course of events, her ability always to remain surprised by the world around her was inseparable from her ability to re-create it (Blanchard, p. 45).

  One possible biographical explanation for Jewett’s idealization of her childhood world during her early adulthood is that her beloved father was ill through much of the 1870s (he died in 1878). In all probability, her memory of her father was integrally associated with the less chaotic (if economically marginal) prewar era when “poor but proud” rural Maine folk—from her romanticized perspective—maintained a hardscrabble yet affirming existence in an ongoing communion with the land and with the sea. Such an attitude, of course, reflected the literary and philosophical influence of early-nineteenth-century English Romantics as reinterpreted by mid-nineteenth-century New England Transcendentalists. Certainly, some of Jewett’s work (most memorably in The Country of the Pointed Firs) evinces a mystical bond between humans and nature—a bond that Jewett herself deeply felt. In an undated letter written after a nighttime walk through South Berwick, Jewett confessed that she had witnessed

  a great grey cloud in the west but all the rest of the sky was clear and it was very beautiful—When one goes out of doors and wanders about alone at such a time, how wonderfully one becomes part of nature—like an atom of quicksilver against a great mass—I hardly keep my separate consciousness but go on and on until the mood has spent itself (Blanchard, p. 187).

  Jewett’s first published work of fiction, the short story “Jenny Garrow’s Lovers,” appeared under a pseudonym in the January 18, 1868, edition of the widely distributed weekly periodical Flag of Our Union. Jewett had previously composed poems, several of which had been published in the local Berwick paper, again under pseudonyms, and a few of her poems appeared in print after “Jenny Garrow’s Lovers” brought her work to a readership outside South Berwick ( Jewett’s poetry was posthumously collected in a 1916 book entitled Verses).

  Although she later disowned “Jenny Garrow’s Lovers,” Jewett gravitated to fiction as her primary genre of literary expression. The next year brought her first publication in a major national periodical—the short story “Mr. Bruce,” which appeared in the December 1869 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Sending new stories to the editors of leading literary magazines and journals, Jewett by the mid-1870s had developed a circle of supporters who would prove crucial to her career, including the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, James T. Fields and William Dean Howells.

  Howells—who was a leading promoter of the Emersonian vision for a distinctly American literature—played a major role in the evolution of Jewett’s fiction by encouraging her to accentuate in her work her own uniquely American experience. From Howells’s mentorship, Jewett wrote a variety of pieces that either were overtly autobiographical sketches or were fictional narratives modeled on her own experience of growing up in Maine. Most of her writings reflect the mood of optimism that infused New England society after the Civil War. Affiliated with Congregationalist and Episcopalian churches as a child, Jewett as an adult rejected the more pessimistic Calvinistic religious stances associated with rural and small-town New England in favor of a positivistic humanism influenced by her strong interest in Swedenborgian doctrine (popularized for Jewett’s generation by Harvard professor Theophilus Parsons), which advo cated belief in the cosmic interplay between seemingly diametrically opposed entities (body/soul, material/spiritual, life/death, etc.).

  Before long, Jewett’s short stories and nonfiction sketches—virtually all depicting rural Maine social life—were appearing in the Atlantic Monthly as well as in Harper’s and Scribner’s. By 1877, encouraged by Howells, Jewett revised some of her sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly and mixed them with unpublished writings to create her first book, Deephaven. Lacking thematic unity yet balancing insightful realism and unsentimental empathy toward its characters, Deephaven sold comparatively well nationally and drew the attention of prominent authors across the United States. Ultimately, however, Jewett’s growing success as an author led to her feeling alienated from neighbors and friends in South Berwick. Hence, the 1870s were increasingly lonely for Jewett. She refused to marry, feeling repulsed at the limitations that the institution imposed upon women of her era. And though she greatly valued relationships with other women (in the idealized and intimate yet nonsexual way of many late-nineteenth-century upper-middle-class New England women, according to the speculation of biographer Paula Blanchard), Jewett could find few female companions, beyond her beloved sisters, in South Berwick. During the last half of that decade, she traveled frequently from Maine to visit new friends in other states, which only increased her frustration with her hometown’s seeming insularity.

  Jewett’s mood brightened by the early 1880s when she developed a friendship with Annie Adams Fields, the wife of former publisher and Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields. Jewett had met Annie Fields sometime in the mid-1870s, at one of many social functions they mutually attended, yet it would be several years before they became friends. In her role as wife to James Fields, Annie hosted innumerable social events for the New England literary establishment, both at the Fields’s house on Charles Street in Boston and at their summer residence in the small community of Manchester-by-the-Sea, located north of Boston along the Massachusetts coast. At one Boston literary gathering in 1879, Jewett—who was then an initiate in New Engla
nd literary circles—impressed Annie Fields, and the latter subsequently invited Jewett to spend a few days in Manchester the following summer. The friendship between the two women deepened after James Fields’s death from a heart attack in the spring of 1881; later that year, knowing that Annie Fields was still deeply grieving, Jewett traveled to Boston to look after her friend. Indeed, both women were taking care of each other, since Jewett had been suffering from a recent bout of rheumatism. Thus began one of the most renowned of the so-called “Boston marriages,” which were rather common domestic arrangements among late-nineteenth-century New England women, in which two women would choose to live together—constantly or frequently—in mutually symbiotic partnerships. Over the next three decades, Jewett regularly visited Annie at the elder woman’s two residences, and the two women often traveled together to various U.S. destinations and to Europe on four separate occasions.

  In the early 1880s, while having found fulfilling companionship with Annie, Jewett felt profound sadness at the recent loss of her father. In fact, she dedicated two books to him: her 1881 collection compiling nonfiction sketches of the Maine coast, Country By-Ways , and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor (essentially a fictional ized portrait of her father). These books were therapeutic, helping the author convert grief to inspiration. Indeed, while Annie remained a pillar of support for Jewett during her successful years as an author as well as during her last years of illness and injury, the memory of Theodore Herman Jewett continued to serve as a catalyst for Sarah Orne Jewett’s creativity during the decade of her greatest productivity and achievement: 1886-1896. Her printed dedication in the earlier of the aforementioned two books suggests the depth of Dr. Jewett’s impact upon her: “My dear father; my dear friend; the best and wisest man I ever knew; who taught me many lessons and showed me many things as we went together along the country by-ways.” Inevitably, the author’s evocations of Maine in her finest nonfiction sketches, short stories, and novels were largely drawn from the well of her memory, which had been filled during a childhood spent traveling around South Berwick with her father, the country doctor. Adoration for Dr. Jewett likely contributed to Sarah Orne Jewett’s avoidance of relationships—particularly a marital relationship—with men. Not surprisingly, her fictional depictions of male-female marriage relationships were less passionate and less psychologically and spiritually transformational than her representations of female-female friendships.