Regionalism in Country of the Pointed Firs by Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett - Book Report/Review Example

From an early age, Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett captivated the literary circles with her detail oriented s of New England Maine, and breathed life into characters that, to this day, remain etched in the minds of millions; but finding herself a witness to the encroachment of industrialization as well as to the inspirational hope of the advancement of Women in society, what did Jewett’s use of regionalism say about the women in her novel, The Country of The Pointed Firs, and their relationship to men as well as to each other? Jewett was born in 1849, in South Berwick, Maine. As a young girl, Jewett used to accompany her father, a well-respected medical doctor, on his patient visits. Her writing career began at the age of 19 with the publication of Mr. Bruce, a short story that was published in 1868 by the Atlantic Monthly. Sarah developed a close friendship with William Dean Howells, the magazine’s editor, who introduced her to Boston’s literary world, and thus nourished her growing writing career. Over the course of a lifetime, Jewett would focus her attention on the coastal communities of Maine, depicting the characteristics, dialects, and local color of its inhabitants, and thus, in doing so, became known as one of America’s best renowned authors of regionalist literature. Regionalism began in the Midwest in the 1880’s with stories of life on the Plaines and on the homestead farms that began to populate the rural countryside. In 1896, Jewett published what is considered her greatest work of literature, The Country of The Pointed Firs. In the novel, Jewett created a small town reminiscent of the fishing and shipbuilding villages that dotted the New England coasts, and revealed how the lives of the residents had been changed by the economic decline of their livelihood brought on by dominance of big city industrialization. Local color authors, like Jewett, relied not only on details specific to a particular area, but also sometimes seemed nostalgic for a time lost to the past. This play on nostalgia is found in The Country of The Pointed Firs as well, but Jewett’s work is considered by many to be an important transition into realism. Thus one cannot be surprised to find commentary that not only represents what the nameless Narrator in the novel saw, but that what represented what the author herself saw and felt as well. Jewett’s commentary on the role of women in The Country of The Pointed Firs is a direct representative of her own life. Jewett came from a very stable and financially sound family, was, herself, financially secure, and happily never married, choosing instead to devote herself to the friendships and relationships she formed with other women, most notably Annie Fields. The two women lived and traveled together for the next twenty-nine years, and maintained what at the time was called “a Boston marriage”, a term that was not lost to Jewett. Jewett well understood the meaning of class in society, and realized that it was economic independence that allowed both her and Annie Fields to enjoy the life that they had.1 From this liberated mind comes the commentary, both personal and literary, that we receive from the novel The Country of The Pointed Firs. The novel’s main character is Mrs. Almira Todd, a widow who is the herbalist and natural healer of the town. Mrs. Todd, though not a medical person by any means, is the equal counterpart to the village medical doctor, and Jewett’s portrayal of her lets the reader know that her position in the community is every bit as important as his, if not more so. Mrs. Todd serves as Jewett’s literary conduit in the novel, facilitating the introduction of the town’s various characters to the unnamed Narrator, who is also a character in the story. The characters that she meets are all over the age of sixty, and most of them are women and widows who survive sailors and fishermen lost at sea. At one point, Mrs. Todd shares her own story with the Narrator, telling her that the man she married, Nathan Todd, was not actually the man that she really loved. She never reveals his identity to the Narrator, and thus it remains a mystery to us, but we do learn from the Narrator that the man eventually married someone else also. Mrs. Todd, for all her strength and community standing, is a woman perceived as larger than life, but who is also filled with a great amount of sorrow and loss of her own. This binds her not only to the residents of Dunnet Landing, but to the town itself forever. Jewett reinforces the fortitude of women to survive the hardships of life, even death, by maintaining a close bond with each other, and delivers the message that, long after the men have gone, or left, or died, the women carry on. The idea of women having the strength of survivorship, even through death, is very prominent in The Country of The Pointed Firs. Women not only survive the death of men, but they also survive the death of hope for new life or prosperity in the future. Everyone here is old, and it cannot go without pointing out that Jewett’s narrator never meets a married couple in the town, because all the young people have moved to the city, leaving behind women of fortitude who, themselves, will one day fade away, but do so without a younger generation of women to carry on the art storytelling, as they had done for decades. To counteract this, in part, Jewett used regionalism to show how women keep the bonds of community and their little town alive through the art of story telling, and it is the sharing of those stories that binds them through life and after death. By passing these stories on to the reader, Jewett allows the Narrator, in effect, to continue the storytelling tradition. Jewett’s main theme is that of companionship amongst women, through thick and thin. Our first encounter of this theme is when Jewett describes Mrs. Todd as spending most of her time in her garden, picking herbs for the potions that she sells from her house. We get a sense that Mrs. Todd is more than just working in her garden; that this is not a chore for her, but that she spends a great deal of her time ”communing” with ”Mother” nature, and the two of them are very simpatico, and even synonymous of each other. “….a sage, autonomous, and complex woman who acts on and attains her interests, a healer with a special knowledge of nature, both physical and human.”2 As life passes through Mother Nature, so the town’s life story passes through Mrs. Todd. Jewett emphasizes female companionship again when Mrs. Susan Fosdick comes to visit Mrs. Todd, and is introduced to the Narrator. As the women gather, Mrs. Fosdick and tells the Narrator the story of “Poor Joanna”. Through the Narrator, we learn that Joanna, now deceased, was a woman who, years earlier, had been treated badly by a man who took advantage of her and then left. The experience so devastated Joanna, that she fled to the remote island of Shell Heap to take refuge in the isolation of nature, and never left. Later, Mrs. Todd tells the Narrator of the time she and the pastor took a boating excursion out to the island to visit Joanna. Once there, the town’s pastor fails to show empathy towards Joanna’s plight, and we are not told why…another mystery of the town that Jewett never exposes. What we are told is that because of his lack of sensitivity, “the man” is sent away to walk around the island while the two women talk. He is excused from the situation, because he has nothing to offer and therefore, does not belong. His role on the excursion is utilitarian and also incidental. While together, Joanna confesses to Mrs. Todd that she is haunted by having committed the ultimate sin, of which we later come to understand to be her wrath against God himself for allowing her suffering and isolated life. Joanna does not delve deeply into her sin, and perhaps Jewett thought that this admission was just enough to portray the devastating effects of the destructive nature of some men. Another character that crosses the Narrator’s path is Mrs. Todd’s mother, Mrs. Blackett, who is eighty-six years of age, and lives with her sixty-some year old son William on Green Island. Mrs. Blackett is spry for her age, and is described as the most popular and loved person in the town, having developed the habit of treating everyone as if she had known them for years. While Mrs. Todd and her mother, Mrs. Blackett get along brilliantly, the Narrator cannot help but notice how Mrs. Blackett treats her daughter as if she were the weaker of the two. Still her warm and inviting companionship towards others earns her the nickname Queen by the Narrator. Jewett’s depiction of men cannot be described as callous, but she does not hold back from displaying their social ineptitude. The men in town, displaced by the advent of modernization, spend most of their time reminiscing about the past because they miss their active seafaring lives, and have nothing to move on to, and because they are old. Even men such as William Blackett are portrayed with a deficit of character, even amongst his own family members, and lurk and recede to the background because they lack progressive skills. Jewett shows us this in the scene surrounding the Bowden family reunion. Female companionship is reinforced amongst Mrs. Blackett, Mrs. Todd, and the Narrator, and by the absence of William Blackett, whose shy nature kept him away. The Narrator meets Captain Littlepage one day while writing at her rented schoolhouse. She had first seen him as part of the procession for the funeral of Mrs. Begg, and having observed his gate, was instantly reminded of a grasshopper. Jewett presents a story within a story, by allowing Captain Littlepage to tell the Narrator a story told to him by an old Scottish seaman named Gaffett. The story involved coming across a mysterious land inhabited by ghostly figures that waited between this world and the next. Jewett used the story to comment on the rapidly declining state of the seafaring people and the little villages along the Maine coast. Because of the importance of the story, Captain Littlepage, in spite of his name given him by the author, becomes the novel’s most important male character. The other male character that the Narrator meets is Elijah Tilley. Elijah is a widower who still mourns the death of his wife Sarah, some eight years earlier. Jewett bestows lifelike importance upon Sarah, even after her death, through the heartfelt decision Elijah has made not to remarry. Her presence and acknowledgment is so important, that he spends the rest of his life trying to remember her back to life by enshrining to her the home that they once shared. The Country of The Pointed Firs focuses on themes of storytelling, nostalgia, community, and the binding ties of female companionship. Jewett recognized her literary forte was that of character development, and it was that realization that inspired her to let the Narrator tell us the story of Dunnet landing. Thus the story is told in the first person narrative, making the Narrator a character and gives immediacy to what she experiences. Jewett’s dedication to give literary representation to the declining fishing and shipping villages of Maine New England made her publications well received and admired. By the 1890’s, she was a literary darling, if but only for the first half of the twentieth century. As cities continued to rise, and new ideas spread their wings, local color literature and regionalist literature took a back seat to urban drama and action. Decades later, Jewett’s work was rediscovered, and again given the acknowledgement that it deserves for hailing the strengths of women to survive and to declare their worth and importance without the necessity of men, long before it was fashionable to do so. REFERENCES 1. Joseph Church, Transcendent Daughters in Jewett’s The Country of The Pointed Firs, Associated University Presses, 1994, pp4. 2. Karen L. Kilcup, Thomas S. Edwards, Jewett and Her Contemporaries Reshaping The Canon, University Press of Florida, 1999, pp54 Liz Brent, Critical Essay on The Country of The Pointed Firs, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Read More