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The Mythology of the Small Community in Eight American and Canadian Short Story Cycles Josephene Kealey Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfilment of the requirements For the PhD degree in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Josephene Kealey, Ottawa, Canada, 2011 ii Table of Contents Title Page i Table of Contents ii Abstract iii Acknowledgments v Introduction vi Chapter One: First-Person Narrators “At Home” in the Small Community: 1 Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Chapter Two: Small Community Darkness Revealed in City Lights: 51 Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio Chapter Three: Unraveling Bonds That Undo Community: 105 John Cheever’s The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and George Elliott’s The Kissing Man Chapter Four: Through the City and Back Home Again: 169 Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? and Joyce Carol Oates’ Marya: A Life Conclusion 231 Works Cited and Consulted 238 iii Abstract Scholarship has firmly established that the short story cycle is well-suited to representations of community. This study considers eight North American examples of the genre: four by Canadian authors Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, George Elliott, and Alice Munro; and four by American authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Cheever, and Joyce Carol Oates. My original idea was to discover whether there were significant differences between the Canadian and American cycles, but ultimately I became far more interested in the way that all of the cycles address community formation and disintegration. The focus of each cycle is a small community, whether a small town, a village, or a suburb. In all of the examples, the authors address the small community as the focus of anxiety, concern, criticism, and praise, with special attention to the way in which, despite its manifold failings, the small community continues to inspire longings for the ideal home and source of identity. The narrative feature that ultimately provided the critical framework for the study is the recurring presence of the metropolis in all of the eight cycles. The city, set on the horizons of these small communities, consistently provides a backdrop against which author and characters seem to measure and understand their lives. Always an influence (whether for good or bad), the city’s presence is constructed as the other against which the small community’s identity is formulated and understood. The relationship between small community and city led me to an investigation into the mythology of the small community, a mythology that sets the small community in opposition to the city, portraying the former as the keeper of virtue and the latter as the disseminator of vice. The cycles themselves, as I iv increasingly discovered, challenge the mythology by identifying how the small community depends, in large part, on the city for self-understanding. The small community, however, as an idea, and a mythic ideal, is never dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant. v Acknowledgments For my husband Michael – I cannot even begin to say And for our children, present and future: Because of you. To Janice: for lessons in maturity, graciousness, and Christian faith lived in an academic environment; for her abundant generousity, friendship, and critiques which were acts of love. With humble and thousand thanks to Michelle & Sari & Suhayla, Tanya & Katie, Bob & Madeleine, Clara & James, and the Goskis: for caring for our sons to give Mama time to work, but mostly for loving them so well. Thank you Alexandre, Mom, Hazel, Robin, Carole, and all others who gifted me selflessly with last-minute child-care, drives to campus, book runs, pick-ups and drop-offs, and many other kindnesses, all of which made the completion of this dissertation possible. Thanks as well to Tobi Kozakewich for inspiring a scholarly interest in story cycles, Martha Musgrove for the Georg Simmel essay, Linda Morra for taking the time to share her ideas with me, Lia Talia for her friendship throughout. With countless thanks to Diane Corcoran, Nadine Mayhew, Marie Tremblay-Chenier, Murielle Brazeau With humble gratitude for the privilege of my education: the Department of English, University of Ottawa, and the professors who have taught me that I have much to learn. For his personal engagement with my work, blessing the process with his kindness, humour, and charm, and whose book, The One and the Many, was the impetus for this dissertation: Gerald Lynch Thank you to everyone who prayed, cheered me on, made life easier, and shared in this project in any way. Firstly, to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. vi I am in happy debt to you all. 1 Chapter One First-Person Narrators “At Home” in the Small Community: Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Their publications separated by sixteen years and by a political border, Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (published in 1896 and set in coastal Maine) and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (published in 1912 and set in Ontario) both project awareness of times changing for the communities they invest in literarily. Their respective serious interest in representing rural communities arises from contextual realities, namely the challenges posed by urban expansion and industrialization. Jewett’s representation of Dunnet Landing, the coastal village setting of the cycle, is a prescriptive offering to the author’s metropolitan readership. Her witnessing of the growing disparities between rural and urban America at the turn of the twentieth century speaks to her concern for those residing in the cities, that they risk forgetting their rural roots—the customs, traditions, and values that are their historical inheritance. Leacock’s narrator, on the other hand, is more ambiguous about Mariposa, the setting of Sunshine Sketches. Although his narrator champions the small town over anything city life might offer (namely, money and power), and even criticizes Mariposa’s residents for attempting to grasp at metropolitan luxuries and conveniences, Mariposa’s identity is inseparable from its desires for those luxuries and conveniences. The difficulty presented to the narrator himself, it would seem, is how to lay out convincingly to his readership Mariposa’s (and that of all Canadian small towns) essential goodness and healthfulness, its transcendent value, when that same town is 2 looking elsewhere and at different goods. Wishing to obstruct Mariposa’s gaze towards the city, the narrator presents a complex picture of the small town: as he wishes it to be in conjunction with the realities of the town’s changing identity in the face of “the metropolis” on its horizon. Simply stated, where Country’s narrator wishes to remind the city of village life, a position that, arguably, presents a future-oriented narrative, Sunshine Sketches’ narrator wishes to remind the small town of itself, and thus looks in all directions, past, present, and future, simultaneously. I. Widely accepted in Jewett scholarship is the conflicted role of the narrator in The Country of the Pointed Firs. Susan Gillman describes the narrator’s relations to the book’s setting, Dunnet Landing, thus: There is on the one hand, her struggle to move from outside to ‘near to feeling like a true [villager],’ as she says she finally does at [a large village family] reunion, and, on the other hand, the conflict between her urbanized view of the village – as a retreat, mythic and timeless, but also ancient and somehow cramped [...]. (105-106) Sandra Zagarell (“Country’s Portrayal”) also explains how difference plays a role in the narrator’s presentation of the coastal village: While appearing to present Dunnet Landing on its own terms, however, the narrator repeatedly locates it in relation to contemporary urban America. Constantly subjecting her experiences to explanation and interpretation, she 3 grounds virtually all her reflections in cosmopolitan epistemological categories [...]. (49-50) Stephanie Foote similarly concludes that the narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs solidifies the meaning of Dunnet Landing not only for a nation that seems to be moving away from the kind of community the village represents, but also to solidify Dunnet Landing’s meaning to individuals who will carry it around, or at least carry around one just like it. (57) To summarize, the narrator of Jewett’s cycle finds pleasures imaginative and physical in Dunnet Landing, and she wishes to convey the experience to her intended readership: those residing in metropolitan America. Albeit herself brought up in a coastal village, Jewett is much less worried about Dunnet Landing’s upkeep than she is about the “rest” of America, that is the modern urban part, in maintaining connection with what she presents as its rural roots regarding customs, traditions, and communal values. She wishes to provide metropolitan America, as it industrializes and urbanizes at unprecedented speeds, with a means to slow down to self-recollect via her book. Necessary to the accomplishment of this project are the narrator’s utilization of her own personal affiliation with the city (she is a city-based writer) in addition to her writerly skills (as one able to convey sympathetically the different facets of Dunnet Landing and its forgotten inhabitants). The cycle establishes a tri-part relationship and line of communication— villagers to narrator to city-dwellers—which confirm the value and success of Country, the emphasis resting on reminding the city of the therapeutic usefulness of its rural roots. 4 Such interest in the narrator’s representation of Dunnet Landing works out the significance of the village to the urban world, shedding light on the narrator’s/Jewett’s intentions and meaning as well as her contemporary historical context as a writer at the turn of the twentieth century.

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