For a Boston Marriage: Sarah Orne Jewett's Illustrated Deephaven

Home , Annie Adams Fields, Bedtime, Sarah Orne Jewett

“Bedtime” for a Boston Marriage: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Illustrated Deephaven

adam sonstegard Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

ARAH ORNE JEWETT first published Deephaven in 1877, S but an illustrated edition that appeared in 1893 with a text with complex, new contributions to the meaning of the work.1 Houghton Mifflin included visual art by Charles H. Woodbury and Marcia Oakes Woodbury. Among the fifty-five visual ad- ditions to Jewett’s novel of coastal Maine, an image captioned “Bedtime” adorns one story (Fig. 1). Nocturnal and shadowy, the image incorporates curved bannisters and arched windows and depicts Deephaven’s heroines, Helen Denis and Kate Lan- caster, climbing stairs toward upper-story chambers, exchang- ing conspiratorial glances across a solemn clock face. Merely putting a story about fisherman’s yarns to bed, as it were, and leaving something gleaming in the ladies’ eyes, the picture portends something other than slumber. The image appeared decades ahead of the first work scholars have identified asa

This project has been made possible by a Faculty Scholarship Initiative at Cleve- land State University, Cleveland, Ohio. Sincerest thanks to Jeff Karem, Brooke Conti, Heather Russell, Jackie LaPlante, Peter Woodbury, Wendy Pirsig, Terry Heller, Holly Jackson, and the anonymous reader reviewers of New England Quarterly. 1Jewett first published short fictions in several magazines, many of which illustrated them, and many of which are reproduced with those illustrations in The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Jack Morgan and Louis A. Renza (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). Emma Coleman prepared photographs for an illustrated edition of Deephaven in 1885; and the Woodburys’ graphically illustrated edition appeared in 1893. All images in this article reproduced from Old Berwick Historical Society edition, Peter E. Randall Publisher, South Berwick, ME, 1993 with the permission of the Old Berwick Historical Society.

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Fig. 1.—All images are reprinted with the permission of the Old Berwick Historical Society.

graphic novel.2 The illustrated edition antedates what others have called the advent of modern-day, same-sex identities, such as lesbianism. This image suggests, well ahead of these phenomena, that we read a lesbian subtext—if not in the quiet “bedtimes,” as the prose passages intimately describe them, then in the interaction between the images and the prose that the illustrated edition provides. The artists, Charles and Marcia Oakes Woodbury, were married while the author of the illustrated edition, Jewett, shared a relationship with Annie Adams Fields in what many have called a Boston Marriage. Such unions featured women like Jewett and Fields changing the names in real-life anecdotes

2“Firsts” in literary and graphic-arts history often remain contested in defining emerging demographic groups, as well as developing literary genres. For purposes of comparison, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) institute the genre of the lesbian novel. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 77 to rewrite them as romans a clef for small coteries of readers and having passionate friendships without apprehending their all-female romances as anything out of the ordinary. “Roman- tic and even passionate expressions between women were well within the bounds of nineteenth-century propriety,” Jewett’s biographer comments, as she claims, “neither of the two women nor anyone in their circle saw anything deviant in their relation- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ship.”3 They also, though, I wish to argue, manifested a need to keep up appearances. For one thing, Jewett first met Fields through her husband James, and his prominence in the publishing world, and the accumulated wealth of the Fields, supported his widow in her Boston Marriage, long after his death. An early edition of Jewett’s letters, for another thing, expurgated expressions of affection between women, perhaps because they would otherwise be too scandalous to be read. Jewett advised Willa Cather that lending her characters heterosexual disguises threatened to inhibit Cather’s fictions.4 Deephaven, Judith Fet- terley speculates, “may have facilitated Jewett’s life choice by allowing her first to imagine it in fiction.”5 If Jewett and Fields lived openly in a Boston Marriage without the sense that it was extraordinary, Jewett still treated it in her fiction and correspon- dence with veils and subterfuge—as if to hint at her affections in life but to keep them reserved from her published, perma- nent works of fiction and her professional reputation. An illustrated fiction like Deephaven is, then, a rare historical artifact, which not only propels our speculations but allows readers to visualize a veiled nineteenth-century Boston Marriage. The graphic artists’ romance, for its part, sparked when Mar- cia Oakes was Charles Woodbury’s pupil, one of many students drawn by his reputation for landscapes and seascapes driven

3Rita Gollin, Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters (Amherst: University of Mas- sachusetts Press, 2002), 223. 4Melissa J. Homestead has offered a revisionist perspective on Jewett’s “expurgated” letters and her influence in “Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality,” Cather Studies 10 (2015). 5Judith Fetterley, “Reading Deephaven as a Lesbian Text,” Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan J Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell; 1993), 165. 78 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY by his mantra, “paint in verbs, not nouns.” She became his wife in 1890. His fame began with collaborative projects like Deephaven, but her personal relationship with Jewett, rooted in their shared hometown, South Berwick, Maine, helped get the Woodburys the illustration project for Deephaven and The Tory Lover (1901). An early researcher into rare-book editions,

Babette Ann Boleman, determined that the Woodburys, as Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Jewett’s “intimate friends,” offered “the most amicable collabo- ration” possible.6 Boleman determines that Jewett left suggestions in a copy of Deephaven—including, for example, “Perhaps here the turn of our stairway at night with the clock—pointing to a very late hour!”7 Peter Woodbury, the artists’ grandson, tells me that “Marcia Oakes Woodbury and Jewett—probably in company with Charles Woodbury—sat down and decided what the illustrations should be and where to put them. Marcia penciled the notes into her copy, and after further meetings, the artists went to work. As the project unfolded,” Woodbury concludes, Jewett “wrote notes in her own copy of the book.”8 The Woodburys stayed in Marcia’s family home (not Charles’s) while they rendered the pictures. Jewett addressed her notes not to Charles, but to “Susan,” Marcia’s nickname, when suggesting locations and inhabitants they might sketch for the book.9 Rooms and corridors in Jewett’s father’s home became interior settings, and South Berwick cousins and grand- parents served as models. The Woodburys’ pictures constitute some of the late nineteenth-century’s most authorized literary imagery. They reflect both the Boston Marriage of the author and her intimate companion and the artists’ heterosexual marriage bond—especially that of “Susan” and her intimate understanding of Jewett. For the 1893 edition, Jewett added a new preface, leaving the prose stories unaltered. She authorized the Woodburys’

6Babette Ann Boleman, “Deephaven and the Woodburys,” Colophon New Graphic Series 3 (1939): n.p. 7Boleman, “Deephaven and the Woodburys.” 8Peter Woodbury, “re: Woodbury/Jewett inquiry,” email to Adam Sonstegard. Au- gust 12, 2018. 9Boleman, “Deephaven and the Woodburys.” SARAH ORNE JEWETT 79 illustrations via handwritten suggestions, revisiting and adding visual dimensions to Deephaven as a reflection of one of her earlier same-sex relationships. Fields in turn used some of her influence in publishing to help her companion to reissue the volume—even though, when Deephaven had first appeared in 1877, Fields had still been married to her publisher husband

James. The illustrated Deephaven involves multiple interper- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 sonal perspectives: visualizing Jewett’s past relationship in light of her current partnership with Fields, reissuing a book first published during Fields’s marriage to Jewett’s publisher, and engaging the Woodburys’ artistry and integrity in their depic- tions of fictional heroines resembling Jewett and Fields, in turn. It exhibits a queer point of view to the degree that this com- mercial venture and contemporary mores allowed, and as far as a sympathetic, heterosexual couple of fellow artists were able. It crosses, and enables readers to cross, lines between queer and mainstream, between the visual and verbal, and between artists and their creative works. Although readers of Deephaven have not always attended to the central role that a same-sex relationship plays in the text, recent treatments have addressed the interplay between Boston Marriages and socioeconomic class. Scholars once thought Deephaven a “puerile” book that failed to depict its heroines’ heterosexual development or their conventional marriage prospects; others saw it attempting to graft coastal, local color with New York- or Boston-based realism, “revealing the terms of Jewett’s struggle to transform linear [William Dean] How- ellsian narrative mediation into a more reader-participatory” mode.10 If coastal rhythms in Maine accorded with Bostonian social realism, Deephaven incurred troubling socio-economic politics between tourists and locals, small-town aristocrats and peasant fishermen—even between the striving, middle-class

10Paul Petrie, “‘To Make Them Acquainted with One Another’: Jewett, Howells, and the Dual Aesthetic of Deephaven,” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards (Gainesville: University Press of Florida; 1999), 100. 80 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY narrator Helen and the more comfortably patrician companion, Kate. Jessica Hausmann proposes that the heroines “‘perform’ or act out social-class roles,” and “become more than mere ob- servers or ‘tourists,’” without “fully transcend[ing] class boundaries.”11 Alison Easton “do[es] not want to argue that the subliminal lesbian romance helps obliterate class boundaries”; Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 as she deems such a conclusion a “sentimental notion,” as she sees that in Deephaven, “certain social structures are made more flexible” and remarkably often, “class boundaries are crossed.”12 Liminality or what Marjorie Pryse terms “transitivity[,] much more than tourism serves as [Pryse’s] figure for understanding Jewett’s border-crossing,” before such class- transgressions became critically fashionable, and before these critics crossed an additional threshold, into the novel’s visual, illustrative arts.13 Queer theorists working with and through some of the para- doxes of literary historiography have revised Pryse’s concept of “transitivity” into what Peter Coviello calls the untimely, J. Samaine Lockwood, the “intimate historicism,” and Valerie Rohy sees as anachronistic—the attempt, that is, not to impose a twentieth-century lesbian life onto Jewett’s nineteenth- century experience on the one hand, nor subject her to a conventional “marriage plot” that consigns her to lonely, “islanded” solitude, on the other.14 Readings that privilege The

11Jessica Hausmann, “Class as Performance in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven,” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association 77 (2015): 289. 12Alison Easton, “‘How Clearly the Gradations of Society Were Defined’: Negoti- ating Class in Sarah Orne Jewett,” Kilcup and Edwards, eds., Jewett and Her Con- temporaries, 211. While the keepsake book of illustrations described here would be a personal, sentimental object for the author and readers, I am more concerned with human-object relations than with interactions among and between various socioeconomic classes, sentimental, idealized, or otherwise. 13Marjorie Pryse, “Sex, Class, and ‘Category Crisis’: Reading Jewett’s Transitivity,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 70 (1998): 542. 14Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). J. Samaine Lockwood, Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (Chapel Hill: SARAH ORNE JEWETT 81 Country of the Pointed Firs over Deephaven, and some key stories over others, celebrate Jewett’s unattached, uncompanioned characters, while exploring a setting these readers “find remark- able not least for its being, as lived, only loosely ligatured by the imposed destinies of heterosexuality.”15 Heather Love finds there a “spinster aesthetic” that highlights “loneliness and im- possibility as lived experience,” and urges us, “rather than try- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ing to cure that loneliness, we need to incorporate it into the genealogy of queerness”—of individual “spinsters,” not solely of Boston-Marriage pairs.16 Coviello locates “queer kinship and a curious kind of extrahuman object-love”—similar to what Rohy sees as “a certain museum effect”—in Jewett’s fictive spaces, where rings fetishize a passionate romantic relationship, where “living” portraits can counteract the artist’s potential objectification of the sitter, and where keepsakes can preserve personal memories from the passage of time.17 Temporal passages most concern Rohy, who stresses that “by 1896, the ide- ology of romantic friendship in America had yielded to the taxonomic category of lesbianism; the ‘Boston Marriage’ found itself renamed as inversion”; and “Jewett’s relationship with An- nie Fields” would have felt like it “belonged to the sexual mores of an earlier day.”18 These queer theorists have not invested in visual-arts keepsakes like the graphically illustrated Deep- haven in their efforts to reconcile objectification and queer solitude with the demands of critically sensitive temporality and historiography. I propose here to get these critiques of objectification, queer theory, and visual-arts “talking” to one another.19 Deephaven’s

University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 8. Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Oth- ers: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 79. “Uncompanioned” and “islanded” are Jewett’s favorite invocations for characters’ social and geographic isolation. 15Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, 81. 16Heather Love, “Gyn/Apology: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Spinster Aesthetics.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 55 (2009): 310, 329. 17Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties, 80; Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others, 50. 18Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others, 58. 19Visual-arts aspects of the work of Jewett and her peers remain otherwise under-theorized. Adam Sonstegard, “Mary Hallock Foote: Reconfiguring The 82 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Boston Marriage, its heterosexual artists’ sympathetic points of view, human characters rendered as living portraits, objects and artifacts imbued with human emotions, not only describe and depict but enact a community that is heterogeneous, if not exclusively heterosexual. In the illustrative accompaniments added to Deephaven in 1893, we glimpse a lesbian-centered

New England community, forming ahead of its time, crossing Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 conventional social boundaries, and arresting the objectification that is otherwise inherent in an artist’s creation of portraits and landscapes. Jewett and the Woodburys invest in the visual arts to enshrine same-sex friendship, preserve a set of felt passions as they become portraits’ subjects, and produce a kind of keepsake album that effectively stops the hands of time. As visual and verbal “sister” arts complement one another, a “Bedtime” in the immediate sense of that term has a “Boston Marriage” pair share an evening only they can intimately remember while “Bedtime” in a more nostalgic, elegiac sense can mark the pass- ing of nineteenth-century “invert” and “spinster” identities into preserved, antiquated memories and the personal keepsake albums of queer yesteryears.

Visibility and Invisibility The “Bedtime” image is the Woodburys’ sole depiction of the paired protagonists alone. A handful of other images shows them amid “Deephaven Society” (also the title of a chapter): entering a market as a grocer within eyes the rainy nocturnal exterior; communing with yarn-spinning fishermen (Fig. 2); and clam-digging on shore (Fig. 3). Almost every other image depicts a character, a landscape, or an interior space, rendered in such a way as to complement the protagonists’ perspectives. The artists invite reader-viewers to inhabit Helen and Kate’s positions, act as though they are seeing Deephaven and Deep- havenders for themselves, and consider the optics, as it were, of the book as a tourist’s guide—not about Helen and Kate as

Scarlet Letter, Redrawing Hester Prynne,” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 11 (2015): unpaginated. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 83 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3. potential spectacles but taking them for granted, as fellow, cou- pled tourists. Reversing the usual optics of tourist experience gives reader-viewers innovative angles on the setting’s exclusive society. Several, subtle instances hint at two “girls” behaving intimately without being shunned or ostracized by Deephavenders 84 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for their evident affections. The two Bostonians visit Kate’s an- cestral estate Down East (that is, local, coastal Maine) during one memorable summer that Helen narrates for readers and that seems pivotal in the development of our two twenty- four-year-old protagonists. Helen and Kate as dear companions are “not sentimental” and in fact “much averse to indiscrimi- nate kissing”; Helen lacks “the adroit habit of shying in which Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Kate is proficient. It would sometimes be impolite in any one else, but she shies so affectionately” (10–11).20 The word- ing implies a great deal of previous kissing, for one partner to learn that the other means her resistance to kissing, her “shying” away, affectionately. They keep a collaborative “tragic ‘journal’ on some yellow old letter-paper we found” in Kate’s grandaunt’s desk, storing it “in the most hidden drawer by itself,” and thereby associating a “drawer” with mutual secretive- ness (26). Other drawers in the same bureau turn out to contain the grandaunt’s love letters to a female correspondent. “There was the largest sofa I ever saw opposite the fireplace” in the same chambers and though it was so large “it must have been brought in pieces,” by the movers. “It was broad enough for Kate and me to lie on together, and very high and square” (31– 32), casually indicating that these young women choose to lie together on one piece of furniture. When the pair “stopped for a few minutes” at one family’s home after some bathing onshore, the Carews “were as much surprised to see us as if we had been mermaids out of the sea” (175). It “was amus- ing,” Helen says, “to see the curiosity which we aroused. Many of the people came into Deephaven only on special occasions, and I must confess that at first we were often naughty enough to wait until we had been severely cross-questioned before we gave a definite account of ourselves” (227). They delight inthe locals’ confusion, readily occupying rare and magical forms of womanhood they imagine the native Deephavenders ascribe to them.

20Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven, illus. Charles H. Woodbury and Marcia Oakes (1893 repr., Portsmouth, ME: Old Berwick Historical Society, Peter E. Randall Pub- lisher, 1993), 10–11. (Cited parenthetically hereafter). SARAH ORNE JEWETT 85 The story “Cunner-Fishing,” which ends with the intimate “Bedtime” image, has one crucial, overlooked instance in which the fact of Helen and Kate’s coming from elsewhere overshad- ows the fact of their being together. An ocean captain tells them of psychic bonds he shares with his spouse:

My wife and me will be sitting there to home and there won’t be no Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 word between us for an hour, and then of a sudden we’ll speak up about the same thing. Now the way I view it, she either puts it into my head or I into hers. I’ve spoke up lots of times about something, when I didn’t know what I was going to say when I began, and she’ll say she was just thinking of that. (206)

He interrupts his own reveries to ask Kate and Helen, “Like as not you have noticed it sometimes?” (207). He spins his tale of psychic phenomena, but he implicitly likens the pair to a married couple, together for years, psychically attuned, able to complete one another’s sentences. The pair’s supposed foreign- ness masks their togetherness: the locals fixate on what they see as remote origins in Boston; but the “Marriage” part, they take for granted. This tension between visibility and invisibility is a defining aspect of the Boston Marriage, both in Jewett’s context and in critical attempts to understand them in queer historiography. Same-sex partnerships would have appeared indistin- guishable from the passionate friendships of single, married, or widowed ladies. Survival tactics and bias and abuse from the mainstream would have encouraged concealment, acts of blending in, verbal and visual codes for esoteric and coterie recognition—rather than explicit or public “coming out.” Late- Victorian constraints against verbally recording and graphically specifying acts of love-making leave us with stories, letters, and diaries we cannot now definitively categorize as lesbian, proto-lesbian, or bisexual within 1890s contexts. Emerging and subsequent figures, from the New Woman to the flapper, to butches and femmes, further obscure the distinctiveness of the Boston Marriage imagery queer historians work to recover. At- tempts to package and market queer antiquities—“affectionate men” calendars, for instance, or albums of tintypes showing 86 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY affectionate Edwardians—can enshrine what were chummy but heterosexual teams of athletes, prostitutes with their “trade,” or non-binary individuals making pioneering appearances. These repackaged antiques can be acts of looking back queerly, more so than factual recoveries of artifacts. They can seemingly dis- pel mysteries the original artifacts perpetuated or settle questions that might better remain open-ended. Visualizing a queer Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 past on present-day terms can mean outing those who had been concealed, even invisible, without always appreciating the depth and dimensions of their disguise. The Woodburys captured actual personalities and sketched real-life locations from within Jewett’s time and place in 1890s Maine, thereby accurately appreciating and visualizing contemporary personalities and sexual identities. Their pictures in effect grant Helen and Kate the dominant points of view on the characters of Deephaven. They allow this pair as a romantic couple to fade into the illustrated book’s background and assume a normative vantage point on locals and fellow “foreigners.” They graphically match the fisherman’s tactic of taking Helen and Kate for granted as a couple, making more of their distant Boston origins than their status as a same- sex romantic pair; they follow Kate and Helen into public but also into intimate spaces and occasions, depicting the moment of their “Bedtime”; they balance concealment with depiction, mirroring the ways the illustrated volume’s visual and verbal elements complement one another; and they recreate Helen’s and Kate’s perspectives as protagonists, and yet re- tain visual encoding for the lives of Boston Marriage couples. They leave it to historians to recuperate figures who may have been queer antecedents, with their contemporary disguises and concealments—their “beards,” as it were—left sensitively if in- conclusively intact.

Exteriors and Interiors Many of the Woodburys’ images transform Jewett’s family home into Kate’s grandaunt’s parlors and corridors populat- ing them with the unmarried characters, old and young, of SARAH ORNE JEWETT 87 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 4.

Fig. 5.

Jewett’s work. Two elderly men debate theological fine points with considerable, if septuagenarian animation (Fig. 4). Kate’s “maiden” ancestor plays piano to an otherwise empty gallery (Fig. 5). In the action of Deephaven, this aunt is recalled from earlier decades, her love letters discovered and appreciatively read, but the added image graphically revivifies her and brings her into the action of the narrative. Several images merely depict unpopulated hallways with distant, open doors, as if the viewer sees an architect’s sketches, rather than realized spaces. 88 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 6.

“Kate and Helen renovate the historical house and the history of proto-lesbian domesticity,” in Lockwood’s words; “they change the Brandon house to meet their needs, modifying the décor and choosing in which parts of the house to dwell.”21 The Woodburys’ empty interiors invite this imaginative inhabitation, without imposing what Fetterley calls “the heterosexual norm” (Fig. 6). Readers can impose “norms,” or resist the normative inclination, in the interiors of Kate’s family’s house as Helen describes them, and in the interiors of Jewett’s family home, as the Woodburys visualize them. Charles Woodbury’s exterior images recreate open spaces without intruding upon intimate or exclusive settings or occasions. They depict what could be queer groups of Deephaven- ders or Boston Marriage couples without imaginatively invading their spaces or even distinguishing them from ordinary background items or individuals in the images. Woodbury obliquely

21Lockwood, Archives of Desire, 71. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 89 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 7. renders a funeral procession without focusing any of the faces or thereby identifying any of the individual attendees. “Helen’s careful description of the funeral rites have the unintended effect,” notes Paul Petrie, “of distancing the reader from the narrated experience, leaving us with Kate and Helen on a hill- side neighboring the farmstead, uninvited guests, observing the rites from a respectful distance.”22 Woodbury’s image implies it was quite intentional to look away from a funeral; depicting it more directly would have accorded less respect to the bereaved (Fig. 7). Viewers linger in the distance, as Woodbury coaxes them away from more intrusive views. The story “In Shadow” ends with another funereal ruin, which Helen again respects from afar: I think to-day of that fireless, empty, forsaken house, where the winter sun shines in and creeps slowly along the floor; the bitter cold is in and around the house, and the snow has sifted in at every crack; outside it is untrodden by any living creature’s footstep. The wind blows and rushes and shakes the loose window-sashes in their frames, while the padlock knocks—knocks against the door. (266) With what is perhaps the loneliest ending in Jewett’s canon, a repeated, onomatopoetic “knock,” the conclusion leaves us

22Petrie, “‘To Make Them Acquainted with One Another,’” 114. 90 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 8.

outside in the cold. Fetterley reads the last few stories as He- len projecting her impending separation from Kate onto an increasingly depressing landscape, though it could also reflect the economic misfortunes of rural Maine at the time. Wood- bury’s image preserves the snowy, dim exterior in the image— though Helen, and her readers, risk projecting emotions onto it (Fig. 8). The Woodburys’ visual dimensions in effect mediate the emotional distances of the lonely coastal countryside, granting the bereaved and the solitary their respectful spaces, shrouding the ruined and bereft in backgrounds that reproduce winter’s seasonal and economic chills. Jewett’s very title shows a deep investment, as it were, in a coastal location, environment, and climate. The name Deep- haven recurs with obsessive repetition, almost incantation, in some of the chapters. As the book’s title and one of two words in the title “Deephaven Society,” the word is reiterated twenty- three times in that story alone. “My Lady Brandon and the Widow Jim” repeats it thirteen times, and so on. Did Jewett mention this haven was deep? Jewett’s preface to the 1893 edition clarifies that Deephaven “was not to be found on themap SARAH ORNE JEWETT 91 of New England under another name” but as a kind of composite of many Maine coastal towns (6). Other nearby hamlets, the preface goes on to state, “were spoken of as the originals of this fictitious village which still exists only in the mind” (7).The idealized, composite town has its name obsessively reiterated, more often than names and locations recur in other Jewett nar- ratives. We are to notice the landscape feature, and remember Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 havens as common locations. A deep haven is a suggestive, if unconscious, choice for Jew- ett, not merely in terms of setting. Joseph Church reads a “haven’s” Freudian implications in tracing Oedipal and Elec- tra complexes between fathers and daughters, arguing that Deephaven “dramatizes such transgressions” against Oedipal at- tractions, or in other words, “depicts daughters working to transcend the interdictions which delimit them.”23 When Helen and Kate exchange letters, keep a collaborative diary, or read Kate’s grandaunt’s archive of love letters, “the women’s writing material ‘between’ them and hiding it in the ‘most hidden drawer’ suggest, first, the mind’s production of meaningful material that for various social taboos, cannot be expressed directly and therefore must find indirect expression, until then remaining secret; and, second, the use of writing to effect such ends, to evade interdiction.”24 Subterfuge manifests itself not only in hints and allegations and love letters left in “drawers” but in the very landscapes, the latent curves, suggestive interiors. The same latent logic applies as with curvy landscapes or bovine pelvic bones in Georgia O’Keefe paintings; with the mo- tif of ecstatically “Rowing in Eden” while already “moored” in a loved one’s “port” in Emily Dickinson’s poetry; and with Vita Sackville West’s reply to Virginia Woolf’s inquiry about her in- spiration for writing lesbian fictions, “I brood and brood, [and] feel I am groping in a dark tunnel.”25 Psychological associations

23Joseph Church, “Transgressive Daughters in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven,” Es- says in Literature 20 (1993): 237. 24Church, “Transgressive Daughters,” 232. 25Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights!—Wild Nights!” Poem 249, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little, Brown, 1960); quoted 92 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY link the region’s landscapes, “bedtimes,” and dreamscapes with women’s bodies, feminine enclosures, pelvic contours. Several Deephavenders personify the town as feminine: “The old place held out for a good while before she let go as ye see her now” (194). An urchin who turns up in one story asks out of random curiosity if there had ever been “a huge snake in Deephaven” and then inquires if a “huge snake” would need a lengthy grave Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 (160). Kate speaks of Deephaven as her grandaunt’s shelter and refuge from the demands of the rest of the family, such as compulsory, heterosexual marriage. Several of the Woodburys’ images grant the viewer perspectives that lead “deep” into protracted corridors. Others have viewers gaze into specifically triangular prisms formed by attic roofs (Fig. 9). In a town full of people with fisherman’s poles, Helen and Kate do not glimpse phallic, but yonic symbols, a perspective underscored by the Woodburys’ illustrations of capacious, rounded corridors and secret nooks.

Individuality and Company The Woodburys’ portraits of the individual characters popu- lating the Maine landscape follow Jewett’s “sketches” of these figures, many of whom were drawn from real life. Before He- len and Kate even arrive in town, they share a stagecoach with Mrs. Kew, who will be instrumental in introducing them to others. Helen idly remarks about the amount of dust in the air as they ride; Mrs. Kew “was apparently delighted to answer that she should think everybody was sweeping, and she always felt, after being in the cars a while, as if she had been taken all to pieces and left in the different places. And this was the beginning of our friendship with Mrs. Kew” (17). The three ask one another who should face which direction as they ride, with Mrs. Kew preferring to face forward, the visitors content to look back. “The exchange signifies” for Church “that the mature Mrs. Kew need no longer return to archaic matters,

in Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 212. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 93 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 9. whereas for a time Helen must go back to work through and beyond a Deephaven.”26 For the nineteenth-century context, it also “signifies” who makes room for whom, in which respec- tive social class. For the Woodburys’ illustrated context, it gives readers the chance to look imaginatively upon Mrs. Kew: she looks forward, into the gaze of the reader, who thereby occu- pies Kate and Helen’s position, gazing back (Fig. 10). Once we

26Church, “Transgressive Daughters,” 247. 94 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 10. turn the page, we overturn her portrait in implicit mimicry of the visitors’ act of switching places with her. In an instance of what Robin Bernstein calls “scripted” behavior in response to illustrations, we have interacted with the image of Mrs. Kew in ways that reify the arriving characters’ respectful manners around her.27 The Widow Jim is described and depicted as “a prim little old woman who looked pleased and expectant, who wore a neat cap and front, and whose eyes were as bright as black beads. She wore no bonnet, and had thrown a little three-cornered shawl, with palm-leaf figures, over her shoulders; and it was

27Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). SARAH ORNE JEWETT 95 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 11. evident that she was a near neighbor” (50). As readers square the depiction with this description, another, more voluble neighbor describes her, too (Fig. 11). “‘Willin’ woman,’ said Mrs. Dockum” of the Widow Jim, “always been respected; got an uncommon facility o’ speech. I never saw such a hand to talk, but then she has something to say, which ain’t the case with everybody. Good neighbor, does according to her means always” (76). Mrs. Dockum soon waxes macabre about details only a neighbor would know: “Dreadful tough time of it with her husband, shif’less and drunk all his time. Noticed that dent in the side of her forehead, I s’pose? That’s where he liked to have killed her; slung a stone bottle at her” (76). The render- ing of the Widow Jim betrays no such “dent,” but readers have gone from casually glancing at the woman to knowing a gossip’s secrets about her, as they have apprehended an image in turn of Mrs. Dockum “oversharing” personal information. Holding 96 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 12. her garden implement but scowling at the very thought, she conspires with readers in revealing the neighborhood gossip (Fig. 12). A same-sex couple comes to occupy the same visual and physical spaces as a series of solitary, older women, who get depicted separately and reverently, even as they dwell outside the contexts of conventional marriage, sexual desirability, and one formerly abusive, heterosexual relationship. Another character “pulled a chair under the little cupboard over the fireplace, mounted it, and opened the door. Several things fell out at her, and after taking a careful survey, she went in, head and shoulders, until I thought that she would disappear altogether; but soon she came back, and reaching in took out one treasure after another, putting them on the mantel-piece or dropping them on the floor” (239). The Woodburys’ image has her just as involved in these kitchen rearrangements and near- calamities in an image that risks invoking playful, household SARAH ORNE JEWETT 97 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 13. witches from contemporary children’s animation (Fig. 13). An- other elderly woman character, incipiently senile, “was dressed in a rusty black satin gown, with scant, short skirt and huge sleeves; on her head was a great black bonnet with a high crown and a close brim, which came far out over her face” (269). Here, the artists do not exaggerate signs of dementia but accurately, respectfully recreate Jewett’s descriptions (Fig. 14). The character gestures toward a supposed portrait on her wall that is not actually there, and the visitors in the story, and the artists of the story, humor her in turn. They resist making mockery of her maladies. “Old maids resist the conventional image of the spinster,” Barbara Johns says of Jewett’s characters: “they are not angular, excessively plain, or ‘sharp-set’; they do not wear black dresses or keep their hair tied up in buns; they are not housebound or possessed of a rage for order; they are neither 98 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 14.

cruel witches nor pitifully weak, childish figures.”28 Both the portraits and the text resist stereotypes and defy the conven- tions for representing older women. If, as Rohy says of a similar figure in The Country of the Pointed Firs, “placing” her “in a group of similar ‘folks’” “strips away her freakish singularity,” the same can be said for these descriptions and their attendant portrait gallery.29

28Barbara Johns, “‘Mateless and Appealing’: Growing into Spinsterhood in Sarah Orne Jewett,” ed. Gwen L Nagel, Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett (Boston: Hall, 1984), 148. 29Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others, 56. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 99 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 15.

The fisherman Danny remains the most idiosyncratic of these characters, and the subject of the most diagrammatic visualization (Fig. 15). The angler, who Helen and Kate initially “knew least of all,” was an “odd-looking, silent sort of man, more sunburnt and weather-beaten than any of the others.” Dressed in red flannel and disabled from an accident, he isthe most remote Deephavender until they have the chance to chat. For Sandra Zagarell, Danny “accepts his situation and is ob- sequiously grateful for the attention that upper-class Kate and Helen bestow.”30 As a “younger, orphaned ex-sailor” according to Ann Romines, he “is used to illustrate the pathos of a man without a domestic anchor,” a missing wife who, unlike Danny, “may have learned to wrest some satisfaction and meaning from

30Sandra A. Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Jewett’s Deephaven,” American Literary History 10 (1998): 645. 100 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY a landlocked life.”31 Danny, orphaned and unmarried, receives treatment for his condition at a nun’s hospital, works amid lobster cages that seemed “like droll old women telling each other their secrets” (120), and speaks of his cat’s lifelong devo- tion: the feline “knew as well as could be when foul weather was coming; she would bother round and act queer; but when the sun was out she would sit round on deck as pleased as a Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 queen” (134–35). Although a man, Danny, a disabled sailor with a “queer” “queen” of a cat, is figured not just in feminine terms, but in ways that would later come to seem legibly “lesbian.” His appearance, extracted from the background and seemingly suspended with his catch, out of context, literally leaves him standing out in the Woodburys’ imagery. As raconteur and pet, he and his cat are the local, 1870s equivalents of Rita Mae and “Sneaky Pie” Brown.

Inclusivity and Exclusivity These Deephaven portraits and landscapes carry late nineteenth-century social customs and prejudices, including stereotypical preconceptions about the natives of Down East and “foreign” folk. Interestingly, we are told the village “seemed more like one of the lazy little English seaside towns than any other” and was “not in the least American” (117). “There was no excitement about anything,” the narrator elab- orates; “there were no manufactories; nobody seemed in the least hurry. The only foreigners were a few stranded sailors” (117). In this town that brands sailors “foreign” for not belong- ing to Deephaven, even if they are American-born sailors, an implicit hierarchy takes root. The visitors “were assured at least a hundred times that Governor Chantrey kept a valet, and his wife, Lady Chantrey, kept a maid, and that the governor had an uncle in England who was a baronet” (81). One prominent family’s scions prove “unworthy their noble descent and came to in- glorious ends,” says a narrator attentive to town stratifications,

31Ann Romines, “In Deephaven: Skirmishes Near the Swamp,” in Nagel, ed., Crit- ical Essays, 48. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 101 yet too delicate to detail their demise (82). The supercilious Miss Honora Carew points to Deephaven’s preindustrial origins: happy that “the tone of Deephaven society had always been very high,” she is grateful “that there had never been any manufacturing element introduced,” and she accepts “that there was no disagreeable foreign population” (84). Helen and

Kate attend to these distinctions, condescend to lower-ranked Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 locals and “foreigners” (like themselves) but also question class stratifications. “We used to take great pleasure in arraying ourselves on high days and holidays,” Helen says, “since when we went wandering on shore, or out sailing or rowing, we did not always dress as befitted our position in the town” (299). That they rebelled against the social order regulated by clothing, brings us back to the New England portrayed in The Scarlet Letter (1850), when none other than Hester Prynne notes her own transgressions of colony sumptuary laws. Keeping with an ethic of social realism, Jewett portrays Maine’s endemic exclu- siveness, but also complicates it when Kate and Helen question the town’s customs while also importing some subtle snobberies of their own.32 Deephaven also speaks directly to “you,” the reader, more often than many Jewett stories do. “These addresses are not to just any readers,” Zagarell argues; “they”—those implicitly addressed—“are either cultivated, upper-class and primary Anglo-Saxon New Englanders like Kate Lancaster and mem- bers of Jewett’s circles, whose sense of origins New England regionalist literature articulated, or, like Helen Denis, mem- bers of the newly professionalized upper-class that identified with the class and ethnic standing exemplified in the book by

32Many readers of the 1990s and 2000s saw Jewett’s stories, particularly The Coun- try of the Pointed Firs, implicated in xenophobic delineations of New England’s Anglo- Saxon and Greco-Roman families from their “foreign,” “un-American” counterparts. Sandra Zagarell, “Crosscurrents: Registers of Nordicism, Community, and Culture in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” Diversifying the Discourse: The Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship, 1990–2004, ed. Mihoko Suzuki et al. (New York: Modern Language Association of America; 2006), 142–56. See also Stephanie Foote, “‘I Feared to Find Myself a Foreigner’: Revisiting Regionalism in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 52 (1996): 37–61. 102 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Kate.”33 The second-person address brings the reader into an intimate, insider status, as “you” and the speaker share a rap- port: “I must tell you a little about the Deephaven burying- ground,” she says (74). The “must” makes her storytelling, not “your” listening, imperative. “Have you never seen faces that seemed old-fashioned?” she asks, following up with, “Many of the people in Deephaven church looked as if they must be—if Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 not supernaturally old—exact copies of their remote ancestors” (93). “I should consider my account of Deephaven society in- complete,” she tells “you,” “if I did not tell you something of the ancient mariners” (103). “You” are often spoken to in this illustrated edition, but no ethnic, national, or class signifiers mark “you” as such. As the narrator speaks to “you,” she adopts the tone of oral (rather than written) communication, as she conveys normative status onto her intimate circle of listeners (rather than readers), and by extension, onto the Woodburys’ set of privileged viewers. Several instances of “you” invoke visual “proof” that the illustrations then supply. “I should like you to see, with your own eyes,” Helen opines, “Widow Ware and Miss Exper’ence Hull, two old sisters whose personal appearance we delighted in” (90). On the way to the circus at Denby, she concedes, “I think I have not told you that we were to have the benefit of seeing a menagerie in addition to the circus, and you may be sure we went faithfully round to see everything that the cages held” (159). “You” are to imagine being guided by Helen’s hand to “see” what the 1877 Deephaven describes, which the 1893 illustrated edition depicts. “I wish you could have seen her,” she says of Mrs Bonnie, who “wore a man’s coat, cut off so that it made an odd short jacket, and a pair of men’s boots much the worse for wear; also, some short skirts, beside two or three aprons, the inner one being a dress-apron, as she took off the outer ones and threw them into a corner; and on her head was a tight cap, with strings to tie under her chin” (233–34). Apos- trophe, unusual in Jewett’s oeuvre, invites reads to share common, imagined visions, uniting, not so much the native and the

33Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism,” 647. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 103 tourist, the aristocrat and the peasant, the foreigner and the countryman, but the imaginatively seen and the verbally described. If the book’s Maine setting has its xenophobic exclusivity, it also repeatedly addresses “you,” the reader, in a kind of compensating, inclusive visualization. Jewett’s narrator con- trives to reach “you”—whether “you” are inside or outside of

Deephaven, of the same or of a different economic stratum, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 directly visualized or discreetly omitted from the edition’s very sensitive, discreet illustrations. A queer community comes into focus when “you” look where the narrator indicates “you” can see it in Deephaven. Descriptive passages, direct addresses, and depicted characters, drawn from real life, collaborate in verbal and visual mediums to help readers picture and imaginatively join a queer fictional community.

Humanization and Objectification Two individual episodes—flashpoints for many critical readings—highlight the girls’ “queering” of the town’s social or- ders, between higher and lower classes and between observer and object status. The “girls” blend in so well in one instance that a group of working-class Boston tourists, traveling as a group, mistake Kate for a native. One young woman invites her to join her in working at a Boston shop. Helen observes that she “knew by Kate’s voice that this had touched her,” and relays Kate’s response: “You are very kind; thank you heartily, but I cannot go and work with you I should like to know more about you. I live in Boston too; my friend and I are staying over in Deephaven for the summer only” (42). Kate reaches out to touch the young woman, “whose face had changed from its first expression of earnest good-humor to a very startled one; and when she noticed Kate’s hand, and a ring of hers, which had been turned round, she looked really frightened.” She catches her own error and apologizes. Kate tut-tuts, claims she was “very glad” the other had spoken. Once the other had gone, she remarks to Helen, “That was worth having!” and concludes, “She was such an honest little soul, and I mean to look for her when I get home” (43). Jessica Hausmann sees that 104 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “Kate moves beyond being a tourist” but writes, “the performance does not allow for a long-lasting crossing of class boundaries.”34 Romines deems the woman “put firmly in her place” with a “flash of social class.”35 To these readers, Kate suddenly casts a Maine disguise aside to assert patrician privileges. These readings tend to overemphasize how the young woman of Boston blanches at Kate’s verbal response while overlook- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ing the fact that she specifically notices Kate’s ring. As early as 1880—after the initial publication of Deephaven but well before the illustrated edition—Jewett was addressing poems to Fields, Josephine Donovan notes, about partnered women ex- changing rings as anniversary gifts: “Did I think of the wretched mornings / When I should kiss my ring,” laments the speaker of a love poem, “And long with all my heart to see / The girl who gave the ring to me.”36 Thus, the young woman from Boston awkwardly stops when she sees the ring, perhaps because she reads it as a sign of another’s affections, not only a marker of socioeconomic class. To Fetterley, “the incident establishes that working-class girls fall in love with each other just as middle- and upper-class girls do,” and suggests that “erotic attraction between women occurs across class lines and may indeed be stimulated by class difference.”37 Helen, aspiring to Kate’s status, notes that Kate politely but firmly spurns the woman’s affections. Kate’s manners instruct Helen on rebuffing unwanted overtures in such well-measured ways that they appear to be genteel reassertions of class-, not gender-based, social status. The ring functions as a fetishized object, a token of a loved one who is nonetheless disavowed in the story’s public setting. The ring denotes a cross-class but same-sex bond that Deephaven’s readers commonly miss amid the novel’s many conflations of class and sexual affiliations.

34Hausmann, “Class as Performance,” 294. 35Romines, “In Deephaven: Skirmishes Near the Swamp,” 47. 36Quoted in Josephine Donovan, “The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett,” in Nagel, ed., Critical Essays, 111. 37Fetterley, “Reading Deephaven,” 177. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 105 The illustrated edition lends emphasis as well to Jewett’s trope of personification in and through portraiture. Helen speaks of keepsake portraits but treats them as sympathetically as she would the human originals. She says of idiosyncratic family portraits she finds in Kate’s family home:

I used to fancy that the portraits liked our being there. There was Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 one young girl who seemed solitary and forlorn among the rest in the room, who were all middle-aged. For their part they looked amiable, but rather unhappy, as if she had come in and interrupted their con- versation. We both grew very fond of her, and it seemed, when we went in the last morning on purpose to take leave of her, as if she looked at us imploringly. She was soon afterward boxed up, and now enjoys society after her own heart in Kate’s room in Boston. (31)

It may be precious to personify a painted image, but Helen acts here as if an antique portrait can reflect or complement a living viewer’s emotions. The protagonists respond so sympathetically to “her” (not “it”), they move the portrait to curb her loneliness. The portraitists reproduce the pictured girl, as a picture, facing the reader’s “society” on the page, and text- wrapped around the paragraph that attributes to her emotional responses (Fig. 16). As a kind of meta-picture, a drawing of what is obviously a framed portrait, “she” invites our meditation on the objectification of human figures in Helen’s, Jewett’s, and the reader-viewer’s world. Initially “solitary and forlorn,” out of place amid the other portraits, she accompanies Kate out of Deephaven and back to Boston where she will presumably and emotively remain within Kate’s “society.” There, she would add company for Kate, as an object that (or whom) Kate had personified and granted a personality, even as Kate and her peers responded to the outside society’s attempts to objectify them. The portrait is a depiction in imagery of Jewett’s ekphrasis in prose, a written description of a work of visual art. As such, she reciprocates the visual and the verbal, the mediated and the immediate. According to the narrator, visual pictures can feel; according to the Woodburys as artists, Jewett’s characters can be just as feelingly pictured. Within a volume of visual keepsakes that the Woodburys have given readers to take home after an 106 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Fig. 16. imagined trip to Deephaven, the girl in the portrait is an object Kate has personified, de-objectified, and taken back home with her to Boston. Which brings us back to “Bedtime,” the image with which I began this piece. Our protagonist remarks of Deephavenders, “they live so much nearer to nature than people who are in cities, and there is a soberness about country people often- times” (224). To sobriety she adds condescending simplicity: “In their simple life they take their instincts for truths, and perhaps they are not always so far wrong as we imagine. Because SARAH ORNE JEWETT 107 they are so instinctive and unreasoning they may have a more complete sympathy with Nature, and may hear her voices when wiser ears are deaf” (225). If her generalizations infantilize rural folks, she does accord them an indigenous transcendental- ism, calling them as “natural” as plants, as instinctual and yet empathetic as “wild creatures.” Kate reinforces Helen’s Emer- sonian principles in replying that Maine’s natural sounds are Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature” (225). If they perceive those who live Down East as culturally separate, less ratioci- native than their more urban, sophisticated selves, they draw the same philosophic lessons from Maine’s coasts, “creatur’s,” and children alike. The couple then quietly “watched the fire until there were only a few sparks left in the ashes. The stars faded away and the moon came up out of the sea, and we barred the great hall door and went upstairs to bed. The lighthouse lamp burned steadily, and it was the only light that had not been blown out in all Deephaven” (225). Pretending to a subtle omniscience over every waking consciousness in town, the last sentence masks an interpersonal intimacy we still know is “blown” as well as “burned.” Ending the story with a benign prose anti-climax, the passage leads readers to the illustration. An unseen bed awaits a couple who have just expressed their sense of communion, indigeneity, and intimacy. Jewett’s biographer notes “two refer- ences in the [writer’s] 1869 diary to sharing a bed with a loved friend, but in both cases the attraction is clearly conversational, not sexual”38—which can also be said of the women in Marcia Oakes Woodbury’s image: pausing at a post- “conversational” moment, they portend a potentially sexual one (Fig. 1). Read- ers can remember the ladies’ intimacy. Viewers can read the twinkles in their eyes. Reader-viewers can draw their own con- clusions. Such images, according to Lockwood, “encourage us

38Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 1994), 54. 108 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY to wonder about what intimate acts may have occurred in the span of time and space that remains unrepresented in the images, but that is suggested by the language of distention He- len uses in the text to describe their journeys.”39 Suggestively but discreetly, the illustrated story crosses thresholds, in Jew- ett’s home, in intimate narration, in readers’ imaginations, and in queer history. The image may constitute a contribution to Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/1/75/1793769/tneq_a_00721.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 nineteenth-century queer visual art, or readers may be reading too much into the image to see it as such. An interpretive, encoded ambiguity adheres, as it were, in the period’s queer (and potentially queer) imagery. The disguises are left intact, the questions unanswered, and the questioning itself, main- tained. As readers engage visually and verbally with both mediums, they can imagine themselves optionally, commiseratively inhabiting a Deephaven of their own.

39Lockwood, Archives of Desire, 76.

Adam Sonstegard has investigated visual-arts and graphic-arts interactions with American literary realism and modernism in fifteen academic articles and is the author of Artistic Lib- erties, American Literary Realism and Graphic Illus- tration, 1880–1905. He is a professor at Cleveland State Uni- versity, a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and former lecturer in the university writing program at the Uni- versity of California, Davis.