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Overview
With the details of Jewett’s free-spirited life, Roman’s book represents a solid work of literary scholarship, which traces a gender-dissolving theme throughout Jewett’s writing. Whereas previous critics have focused primarily on her best-known works, including “A White Heron,” Deephaven, A Country Doctor, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Roman encompasses within her own discussion virtually all of the stories found in the nineteen volumes Jewett published during her lifetime. And although much recent criticism has centered around Jewett’s strong female characters, Roman is the first to explore in depth Jewett’s male characters and married couples.
The book progresses through distinct phases that roughly correspond to Jewett’s psychological development as a writer. In general, the characters in her early works exhibit one of two modes of behavior. Youngsters, free as Jewett was to explore the natural world of woods and field, glimpse the possibility of escape from the confining standards that society has set, though some experience turbulent and confusing adolescences where those norms have become more pressing, more demanding. At the opposite extreme are those who have mindlessly accepted the roles in which they have been trapped since youth—greedy, selfish men, dutiful women who tend emotionally empty houses, young couples unable to communicate either between themselves or with others—in short, characters who are too alienated within their roles to function as whole human beings.
On the other hand, Jewett approaches the men and women of her later works with a higher degree of optimism, in that each person is free to live according to the dictates of his or her inherent personality—each character is able to measure life from within rather than from without. This group includes the self-confident men who are not reluctant to present a nurturing side, and the warm, giving women who are unafraid of displaying a decided inner strength. As Roman summarizes, “In her writings, Jewett attempts to shift society’s focus from a grasping power over people to the personal development of each member of society.”
Ahead of her time in many ways, Sarah Orne Jewett confronted the Victorian polarized gender system, presaging the modern view that men and women should be encouraged to develop along whatever paths are most comfortable and most natural for them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817391553 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 306 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sarah Orne Jewett
Reconstructing Gender
By Margaret Roman
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1992 University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5899-0
CHAPTER 1
Childhood Escapades
No one represents Jewett's concept of an ideal, free childhood better than Jewett herself. She first lived the life she willed to her young female characters. She did not participate in the typical girlhood activities that are scheduled to foster ladylike behavior. In his biography, Frost called Jewett "rebellious" as a young child (37). She loved to run beyond the picket fence across the fields, unmindful of discipline and reluctant to return (4–5). Always running and jumping, she was recalled by one playmate as the sort to step in a puddle if there was one (12). Harriet Spofford remembers Jewett dashing with the other children to mount the logging wagon from the woods and then riding into the town over the encrusted snow (Friends, 24). Coasting, skating, snowshoeing, fishing, rowing, diving, riding — Jewett loved sports and retained that enthusiasm all her life (Frost, 79). She was also fascinated by what would be classified then and now as boys' hobbies. Sarah collected white mice, woodchucks, crows, pigeons, and turtles (10). Not squeamish, she saw fit to display her bug collection by impaling the insects with pins to a door. At one point, she gathered a heap of mussel shells, which she had forgotten until the grownups sadly noted the odor of the decay (110).
Rigid and formal, her paternal grandmother, and doubtless other well-bred aristocratic women as well, found Sarah's conduct deplorable. In "From a Mournful Villager," Jewett herself mentions:
My grandmother was a proud and solemn woman, and she hated my mischief, and rightly thought my elder sister a much better child than I. I used to be afraid of her when I was in the house, but I shook off even her authority and forgot I was under anybody's rule when I was out of doors. I was first cousin to a caterpillar if they called me to come in, and I was own sister to a giddy-minded bobolink when I ran away across the fields, as I used to do very often. (CB, 134)
Sarah's worst offense, however, seems to be the oft-cited instance of her snapping off the bud, stemless, with its first hint of color, from a prized rosebush. Jewett never forgot the chilled response of her grandmother at the sight:
I snapped it off at once, for I had heard so many times that it was hard to make roses bloom; and I ran in through the hall and up the stairs, where I met my grandmother on the square landing. She sat down in the window-seat, and I showed her proudly what was crumpled in my warm little fist. I can see it now! — it had no stem at all and for many days afterward I was bowed down with a sense of my guilt and shame, for I was made to understand it was an awful thing to have blighted and broken a treasured flower like that. (137)
Jewett, nevertheless, provided the perfect model for her young heroines. To play sports with a boy's enthusiasm and to adopt a boy's interests was to choose freedom over enclosure. Enthusiastic boys were forgiven their indiscretions in favor of the growth that must not be thwarted. They had been traditionally encouraged not only to wonder, but also to turn that wonder into discovery, regardless of the cost in grime and bruises. Jewett was a born writer; wonder was her essence. She would not be enclosed by rules and regulations. And her nipped rosebud can be interpreted on a symbolic level, for even at an early age, Jewett valued life's essence more than any decorative purposes it might serve. She couldn't divine the ornamental value of a rose any more than she could divine the ornamental value of a passive, mannerly woman-child quietly embellishing the interior of a building.
One may puzzle then over the didacticism so prevalent in her children's stories. Despite her unhampered attitude as a child, Jewett seems to praise in her children's stories the very values she downplayed. She urges her female readers to be neat and clean and obedient. Richard Cary expresses the established critical view of Jewett's stories for children: "Immediately prominent is her flair for finger-wagging moralization. Fondly but firmly, like the maiden aunt she was, she advocates through illustrative episodes the standard virtues of honesty, respect, industry, prudence, charity, self-reliance, decorum, and humility. She tells no rattling tales. ... Little girls are incipient mothers and housekeepers with rampant maternal instincts" (Jewett, 155).
Perhaps Jewett steadily moralizes because she herself has mirrored the behavior of these unruly children. Jewett echoes the platitudes she has always heard because she continues to feel the "guilt and shame" concomitant with snapping off the rosebud and other rebellious acts, a pain resulting not from the acts themselves, but from the alienation to the adult world her unacceptable behavior produced. Yet Jewett subconsciously subverts these morals. Looking beyond the pat final lessons of her stories, the reader is able to decode a vital, adventurous world inhabited by female children who fake the act of swallowing the lessons they are being taught. Counter-instructions and warnings keep intruding into these saccharine messages. Although Jewett in 1878, the year she wrote the children's volume Play Days, still wishes for acceptance and would like to make life a bit easier for the little girls she addresses through her stories, her own nature will not allow her wholeheartedly to endorse passive patterns for young ladies so that they can exist placidly alongside adults.
Vibrant, rambling, and frequently rebellious girls figure in Play Days. Barbara in "Beyond the Toll Gate" is "always interested in everything new and strange" (201). In "The Desert Islanders," after the children read The Swiss Family Robinson, Polly germinates the plan to go and live for a while on Spring Island. "Half-Done Polly" is a remarkable dreamer who diverts the family at breakfast with astonishing adventures from the previous night, while Nelly of "The Best China Saucer" exhibits a reproachful fascination with her unsavory, dirty neighbor, Jane. Except for Barbara, none of the heroines initially does as she is told.
By the end of the story, each child appears tamed as well as somewhat diminished. All of the conclusions seem quite predictable, lauding correct, safe, and obedient behavior; yet each registers a subtle, unsettling note. Even in the case of Barbara, who has always been neat and cheerful, there is a hint that she has lost something in the course of her journey. Although the story ends with the moral that "it costs something to go through [the gate] to get to the untold surprises, Barbara could not help growing sorry; it had been better to think all those treasures were there and not to go through the gate, than it was to be here and find everything so much like what she had seen before" (209). If Barbara continues in her patterns, her adventures will be no more than she is — neat, clean, and predictable. Barbara nevertheless realizes that being "good" does not unequivocally result in what she desires, "new and strange" experiences. Each time Barbara's mother insists that Barbara will be happy wherever she is if she's "always a good girl" (213), Barbara immediately contradicts her by saying "it is a great deal pleasanter living in the new house than it ever was in the city" (213).
Barbara's story ends on a note of possibility; the other girls are not so lucky. Their enthusiasm is subdued and thwarted. In "The Desert Islanders," mosquitoes attack the children, noises alarm them, and, finally, an upcoming storm results in their having to be rescued. The children have been so terrorized carrying out Polly's plan to sneak over to Spring Island to spend the night that "nobody had the heart to scold the miserable and penitent little Desert Islanders" (104). "Half-Done Polly" is finally brought into submission when her imaginative dreams, which generally provide her with astonishing experiences, turn into a nightmare. Her irrepressible sphere has been invaded by adult reprisals in a world where tasks are left unfinished. Formerly, Polly tried to do too many things, but now she will calm down and methodically work at finishing one task before she moves on to another. Nelly of "The Best China Saucer" also conforms to her mother's wish that she avoid associating with dirty, vulgar Jane after Jane's brother breaks the creamer and saucer of the treasured tea set. She, too, experiences a nightmare of the saucer's funeral, which forces her to confess Jane's visit to her mother.
The initiation process is complete. Only Barbara escapes the terror and nightmare of adult conditioning that the others who refused to be either clean or good must suffer. Defrauded of their animated approach to life, these children must settle for confined, conditioned behavior. Jewett appears to give her stamp of approval. Yet Jewett could hardly have openly told these girls to be on their guard and to rebel in the face of adult restraint. Instead, in these and other stories from Play Days, she subconsciously provides her readers with clues and counter-instructions primarily in her disparaging remarks about dolls and in her use of naturalistic detail.
While Jewett appeared to like dolls and featured them regularly in her children's stories and in several poems, she seems aware of the limitations a doll-like existence would have for women. In playing with dolls, young girls practice adult behavior. The dolls are the women these girls will become if they continue to listen to adult women's advice. Jewett's ambivalence surfaces in the manner in which dolls function within her texts. It is a pathetic picture of dolls concerned with appearances, masking their suffering and powerlessness at any cost. Nelly's friend Alice Russell has dolls who "thought a good deal of dress" (73), and Nelly must hurry to dress her own dolls appropriately for the visit. Polly in "The Desert Islanders" notes that "the dolls sat around the house looking very happy, but then they always did that, even if one left them out in their best clothes in the rain" (94). True martyrs emerge in Jewett's 1868 poem "The Baby-House Famine," where the dolls are literally starving, yet they remain dutifully downstairs "dressed for callers." They are "very hungry, but they sat there smiling." The image of the sick, powerless doll is repeated. In the unpublished poem "The Old Doll," Rosa sits in the attic with dusty curls and her nose bitten off by a mouse. The speaker muses, "I wonder why you sit alone in the garret thrown away" (MS Am 1743.24 (3), Houghton Library, Harvard University). Nelly's pale and sickly doll, Miss Amelia, spends most of her time in "one of the rooms in the baby-house [which] was kept dark" (77). When Nelly finally brings her outside, Miss Amelia is so bundled up to keep the cold air from reaching her, she can barely move or breathe. Another constricted picture appears in "Half-Done Polly": "The dolls were left in the hot sun until they were nearly baked to death, and their clothes and faces were faded. And the one who had fallen out of the carriage was terribly frightened by the bugs that wandered over her. She was lying with her dear face just over an ant-hill, but Miss Polly forgot all her dolls and hurried away to her flower-bed" (109). Jewett's tone suggests her sympathies are with Polly, for the dolls are laughably and justifiably victims. The only doll who is not vacuous and inept is Miss Elizabeth Adora, who also appears in this story. In Polly's nightmare, it is Miss Adora who uncharacteristically suggests that she and Polly pursue entertainment by going to watch some boys "half-drown a few very nice Maltese kittens" (117). Evidently, Miss Adora's confined status has resulted in a deep-seated hostility, which, in all likelihood, duplicates Polly's.
Below the surface, Jewett, too, appears to be seething. It may be her suppressed hostility that is being expressed toward her grandmother, perhaps even her own mother, who tried to entrap her within the confines of prescribed feminine gentility. For an author who has been frequently cited as unable to present the seamier side of life, Jewett in Play Days presents an inordinate number of naturalistic details. It is doubtful that there are an equal number in the entire rest of her canon, for Jewett's depiction of rural poverty is generally realistic rather than naturalistic. Her portrayal is also characteristically imbued with sympathy. In Play Days, the pictures are graphic, grim, and unfeeling.
Miss Adora is not the only one to suggest drowning kittens. There are three more references in this thin volume to killing kittens, the ultimate domestic pet. The mother in "The Kitten's Ghost" gives the gardener's boy twenty-five cents along with "a bag of proper size," telling him "to catch Kiesie and drown her" (136). Kiesie has too much "daring and mischief" to be a house cat, and her final transgression is to break some dishes. Although Kiesie is able to escape from the bag, she steals so much meat from the storehouse one morning that she dies in a fit that afternoon. In "The Yellow Kitten," the cat's death is far more grotesque. While it isn't unusual in children's literature for inanimate objects to come to life, the thread spools in this story are vicious and vindictive. The yellow kitten of the title doesn't play with spools since he once knew of a kitten who abused spools and died "a most shocking death," for "one morning he was found dead in the hall with a little spool ... in his throat. The family supposed he had swallowed it accidentally, but the cats knew better" (174). The worst account of a cat's death is told in "The Shipwrecked Buttons" by the blue and gold button: "The boy ran down an alley, and helped two others, worse looking than he was, to hang a poor, thin old cat they had caught in the street" (165). The moral seems to be that if you are a domestic animal, being too playful or being caught by boys can result in death.
The more graphic examples of naturalistic detail can be seen in the two stories "Woodchucks" and "The Best China Saucer." In the first story, Nelly and her brother, sent by their father, go off with their dog Tiger to kill the woodchucks who will destroy the crops. A gruesome scene follows: "Joe takes the club he had brought and killed him with two good blows. Tiger ran away yelping, but soon came back; and when he found his enemy was dead he barked triumphantly, wagged his tail, and proceeded to shake the creature until nothing was left but a forlorn bunch of brown fur, torn and bloody and covered with dirt" (127). Perhaps this scene demonstrates Jewett's inner animosity toward the import of her comment at the beginning of the story: "By and by Nelly's work will be nearly all in-doors and Joe's nearly all out-of-doors, but now it is very pleasant for them to work and play together" (119). Jewett doesn't advise Nelly to fight enclosure, so she gives her a picture of what it's like to have the life's blood shaken out of her.
Jewett's most subversive message, however, appears in "The Best China Saucer," wherein she constructs a perfectly despicable child who is preferable to all the other pallid, well-behaved girls. Jewett makes Jane far more interesting than boring, squeamish Nelly, even though Nelly is the penitent heroine. By drawing Jane as such a lively, independent individual, Jewett subconsciously demonstrates her favoritism for "unfeminine" behavior. Belligerent Jane breaks all the rules. Her anger is imminent in her every action and in every word she speaks. She abandons all female qualifications as outlined by society. Instead of playing with dolls, she undresses Nelly's sick doll Agatha, who has been left in her care, and steals her petticoat. Neither is Jane maternal with the baby brother who has been left in her charge. She complains to Nelly: "'I have to lug him everywhere. Long as he couldn't talk I wasn't bothered with him, for if worst came to worst, I used to tie him to the lilac-bush and clear out, and only be sure to get back in time to unhitch him before mother came; now he goes and tells everything ...'" (76).
For the gentility and compassion generally considered a woman's province, Jane manifests a void. Defiance and impenitence mark her most outrageous act — stringing a live fly necklace. Just before Nelly notices Jane's jewelry, she has been mentally excusing her for swearing and throwing stones and other evil habits, attributing them to bad company. (Actually, Nelly is warming up to Jane because she is friendly and quiet for a change.) Then Nelly is quite horrified:
Nelly saw for the first time a most shocking and heathenish decoration. "Oh, Jane!" she cried, "what have you been doing to those poor flies, you horrid girl?"
"Want me to string you some?" said [Jane] with a grin. "I did every bit of this this morning, before I came over. I'll bring you one that will go round your neck twice, to-morrow, if you will give me two cents."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sarah Orne Jewett by Margaret Roman. Copyright © 1992 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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