UNVEILING JEWETT‟S HIDDEN VOICE: DISCOVERING THE ABORTED FUTURE OF DUNNET LANDING IN THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS By Katie McClelland Approved: _____________________________________ ____________________________________ Aaron Shaheen Christopher Stuart Associate Professor of English Professor of English (Director of Thesis) (Committee Member) _____________________________________ ____________________________________ Rebecca Jones Herbert Burhenn Associate Professor of English Dean of the College of Arts and (Committee Member) Sciences _____________________________________ A. Jerald Ainsworth Dean of the Graduate School UNVEILING JEWETT‟S HIDDEN VOICE: DISCOVERING THE ABORTED FUTURE OF DUNNET LANDING IN THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS By Katie McClelland A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee December 2011 ii ABSTRACT Recent scholarship addresses a deeper significance to Jewett‟s female characters than was previously attributed in canonical history. Jewett imbues her women with complexity, but intentionally avoids portraying her females as disproportionately heroic. Indeed, a pervading recurrence of abortions and otherwise lost children among the predominately female community of Dunnet Landing creates a framework of death by which to interpret the actions and motivations of Jewett‟s characters. My thesis explores the larger metaphor Jewett establishes by juxtaposing the literal abortions of her female characters and the figurative abortion of Dunnet Landing‟s future; moreover, the aborted futures of Jewett‟s female characters mirror the decay of the town itself which has not recovered from the loss of its once-vibrant shipping economy. Jewett‟s intermingling of these two themes unveils a sense of lost innocence which is cemented by the historical context of nostalgia for something lost that was setting in all over the country during Jewett‟s era. iii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my husband, James McClelland, and my children, Brody and Kendall McClelland. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iv I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................1 A Subtle Voice amid a “Discursive Explosion” .......................................7 II. CHAPTER II ..................................................................................................12 The World of Sarah Orne Jewett ............................................................14 The Female Community of Dunnet Landing ..........................................21 III. CHAPTER III .................................................................................................34 IV. CHAPTER IV ................................................................................................50 V. EPILOGUE ....................................................................................................62 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................68 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once: The Scarlett Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely. The last book seems to me fairly to shine with the reflection of its long, joyous future. It is so tightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with the heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows old-fashioned. I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say: „A masterpiece!‟ as proudly as if he himself had made it. —Willa Cather, On Writing The critical tendency to relegate the works of Sarah Orne Jewett into that dismissive and neglected subcategory of realism known as “local color” is one that is no longer based in sound scholarship.1 Jewett did often write of her home state of Maine, which she knew and loved intimately, and it would appear that her incredibly subtle style is often mistaken for simplicity. Her stories, however, and particularly her finest work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), are anything but simple as the term “local color” might suggest, and, when read carefully, shrug off any shallow impressions of being merely quaint portraitures of New England life. Jewett was a realist author at the height of the realist movement during the late-nineteenth century. As a 1 Perhaps the best evidence of Jewett‟s relegation to the local color category is the persistence with which scholars have attempted to refute that categorization in the last few decades. More direct evidence, however, is seen in the many literature anthologies of the twentieth century which firmly locate Jewett in that camp; for instance, Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse, while certainly not criticizing Jewett‟s work, still include her in their Norton anthology, American Women Regionalists 1850-1910 (1992). For this study, I referenced June Howard‟s review of the various defenses and refutations of Sarah Orne Jewett as local color author in “Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History” (1996). 1 contemporary of influential authors and critics, such as William Dean Howells, Jewett agreed that the only way to portray beauty and truth was to reflect life accurately and honestly, but as the letter cited in the epigraph indicates, she and her contemporaries understood that honest realism, and even subtlety, did not exclude complexity.2 The world of Sarah Orne Jewett was one in which industrialization and urbanization had disrupted and transformed many of the communities which she knew and loved, thereby creating a confused atmosphere of the excitement of progress and nostalgia for something lost at the same time. 3 Her world was one in which the social role of women was transitioning from a Victorian ideal of domestic subservience and tranquility to the advent of the twentieth-century New Woman, replete with an ambition for more than motherhood and motivated by liberation from mere domesticity. Her world was not only directly impacted by various movements that sought to evolve with the times, but also by legislative action that wanted to suppress the perceived threats that accompanied such evolutions. Jewett‟s world was inevitably influenced by the issues of her time, and as a realist author, she reflected that complex world in her writing. Efforts over the last few decades to resurrect Jewett from the canonical subcategory of local color acknowledge her insightful portrayal of women and related social issues during the nineteenth century. Scholars now recognize sophistication in her work that previously had been 2 In a study of Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather, Paul R. Petrie argues that realist authors of the late nineteenth century were unavoidably shaped by their reaction either for or against Howellsian literary theory, which believed that literature “could accommodate [Howells‟s] increasing unease with the ever more divisive effects of emergent American capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration” (1). He depicts Jewett as being a close acquaintance of and adherent to Howells‟s theories. Petrie‟s study argues that realist authors believed “the use-value of the literary work for real readers in the world outside the boundaries of the text must be considered as a wholly integral part of that work‟s aesthetic worth” (14). 3 My assumptions on the existence of post-industrial nineteenth-century nostalgia ride the coattails of other historians and scholars who have documented that phenomenon. The source I rely upon most heavily for this context is T.J. Jackson Lears‟s No Place of Grace, which will be discussed in greater detail in a later chapter. 2 recognized only by a select group of peers, including Willa Cather and William Dean Howells.4 In spite of an enriched understanding of Jewett‟s work as a result of these recent efforts, the problem of how to account for The Country of the Pointed Firs persists. In their attempt to locate a unifying theme between Jewett‟s character sketches throughout the work, most critics tend to assign the primary intent of the text to one of several categorical absolutes: is it Christian or pagan? Feminist or anti-feminist? Lesbian? Racist? Classist? Imperialist?5 The debate seems endless, but the majority of modern scholars rely upon the existence of a veiled but aggressive feminist interpretation. Margaret Roman, for instance, depicts Jewett‟s female characters as heroines who have surmounted the Victorian ideal of an “angel in the house.” They have essentially made a jail break: “They have gotten through the windows, out of the houses, and hopped over the fences” (Roman 11). Sarah Sherman also argues for mostly triumphant feminist heroines asserting that Jewett‟s women experience a “transcendence paradoxically achieved through immanence” (25).6 Elizabeth Ammons and Barbara Johns offer 4 In fact, Willa Cather thought so highly of Jewett‟s work, which she deemed to be “so tightly yet so lightly built” (58), that she dedicated her novel O Pioneers! (1913) “To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.” 5 For further scholarship on these positions, see the works discussed subsequently as well as the following authors whose work was reviewed briefly for this study. Marjorie Pryse offers an evaluation of the difficulty in categorizing Jewett‟s gender and class issues in her chapter “Sex, Class, and „Category Crisis‟: Reading Jewett‟s Transitivity.” Clare Colquitt‟s “Motherlove in Two Narratives of Community” and Diane D‟Amico‟s “The Significance of The Dunnet Shepherdess to Jewett‟s Matriarchal Christianity” both offer a depiction of Jewett as an author seeking to establish a peacefully moderate and even Christian foundation for her work, while Francesca Sawaya argues for an opposite view of Jewett as politically “progressive” (509) in “Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett.” Melissa Solomon sees strains of lesbianism in her article “„The Queen‟s Twin‟: Sarah Orne Jewett and Lesbian Symmetry,” while Hyatt Waggoner sees her as simply humanistic. In a more polarized criticism, Elizabeth Ammons sees Jewett as a classist and a racist (indeed almost fascist) in her “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett‟s Country of the Pointed Firs” while Josephine Donovan refutes this theory outright in “Jewett on Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Imperialism: A Reply to Her Critics.” 6 Sherman explores in great detail the history of feminine iconography and mythology as it relates to the complex and rich allusions within Jewett‟s work. She links the idea of the matriarchal goddess 3 a less progressive feminist analysis in suggesting that Jewett‟s The Country of the Pointed Firs appropriates and redefines formerly pejorative terms such as “witch” and “spinster.”7 My contribution to Jewett scholarship will also address a deeper significance to Jewett‟s female characters, but will employ a more balanced approach. Jewett does imbue her women with complexity and sophistication, but, as Heather Love suggests in her review of Jewett‟s spinsters, she intentionally avoids portraying her females as overtly heroic.8 In fact, it is the darker strains of loss, melancholy, and regret permeating Jewett‟s Country of the Pointed Firs that provide cohesion between what can otherwise be misinterpreted as disparate chapters and tales of women in rural New England. Most significantly for the purposes of this study, a pervading recurrence of abortions and a distinct nostalgia for something lost among the predominantly female community of Dunnet Landing creates a framework of death and sorrow by which to interpret the actions and motivations of its characters. Surprisingly, the existence of allusions to abortion within the text has not been given much significant attention by scholars. Because scholars often become mired in their attempts to superficially categorize Jewett‟s within a binary of absolutes, they often miss figure to being one with nature in much the same way Mrs. Todd appears to the reader in Country of the Pointed Firs. In this way, Mrs. Todd becomes a triumphant figure for the narrator. The goddess figure achieves victory, or transcendence, through “immanence,” or “by returning to nature with conscience awareness” (Sherman 25). Sherman‟s analysis provides a wealth of useful interpretations regarding the mythological elements of Jewett‟s text, but it seems that she has missed a crucial opportunity to enrich that discussion in failing to address the potential abortion implications. 7 See Elizabeth Ammons‟s essay “Jewett‟s Witches” and Barbara Johns‟s “„Mateless and Appealing‟: Growing into Spinsterhood in Sarah Orne Jewett.” 8 Heather Love offers a more balanced review of Jewett‟s spinsters by insisting that Jewett intentionally avoids portraying her females as disproportionately heroic. Her nuanced analysis allows for the darker strains of melancholy that permeate Jewett‟s work: “Although the larger framework may be one of consolation, Jewett authors some truly devastating accounts of isolation, abandonment, and regret. She chronicles experiences that feminist, lesbian, and queer critical frameworks have not allowed us to see: the feelings of loss, disappointment, and longing that are internal to female worlds of love and ritual” (Love 313). 4 Jewett‟s carefully placed clues regarding abortion altogether. The most obvious explanation for this oversight resides in Jewett‟s necessarily subtle style, given the controversial nature of her subject. Existing federal legislation at the time, informally known as “Comstock‟s Law” (1873), did not allow Jewett to distribute or publish overt references to abortion or related matters; therefore, she encodes the text with clues meant to suggest abortions rather than stating the matter explicitly. Of those scholars who have discovered the same evidence within The Country of the Pointed Firs, many still apply that knowledge in no truly meaningful way.9 In fact, Ron Welburn‟s examination of the significance of the pennyroyal herb as “an old remedy learned from Native Americans” for aborting a fetus is one of the only other arguments that gives the matter much forthright and plausible attention (75).10 Welburn‟s examination, however, focuses more on the importance and location of pennyroyal and other symbols in the overall form of Jewett‟s text rather than on hypothesizing a meaningful purpose for their inclusion. Not only is the dismissal of Jewett‟s work as mere “local color” a gross misjudgment, but the misapplication of important content, even when correctly identified, is widespread. 9 A small handful of literary scholars have given attention to this issue, particularly regarding Jewett‟s references to the pennyroyal herb which will be discussed in more detail later in this essay, but very few, if any, have interpreted and applied that knowledge in a specific way as my argument does. George Smith asserts straightforwardly that abortions must have taken place among these women, but he then, in my own analysis, applies that knowledge a bit haphazardly in assuming that Sarah Tilley‟s broken china cup is a symbol of abortion and that Mrs. Todd seeks to include the narrator in the intimate details of her life because she harbors a lesbian desire for the narrator. Other scholars do not apply their knowledge widely enough. Elizabeth Ammons, for example, directly states that pennyroyal is an abortifacient, but only states as much to solidify her redefinition of Mrs. Todd as a cultish midwife figure rather than a “witch.” The vast majority of literary critics, however, miss the reference entirely in spite of its central location in the text. 10 In “The Braided Rug, Pennyroyal, and the Pathos of Almira Todd: A Cultural Reading of The Country of the Pointed Firs,” Ron Welburn examines Jewett‟s work as a sort of collection of “the cultural and folk histories of northern New England” that exposes “the book‟s deepest secret” (73). He explicitly interprets the function of the pennyroyal herb as an abortifacient for Almira Todd, and sees great significance in its link to early Native American cultures. 5